Order I WEAR THE BLACK HAT here
(also reviewed)
Order FARGO ROCK CITY here
Order SEX, DRUGS AND COCOA PUFFS here
Order KILLING YOURSELF TO LIVE here
Order IV here
Order DOWNTOWN OWL here
Order EATING THE DINOSAUR here
Order THE VISIBLE MAN here
''Nobody ever talks about building a time machine in order to go back and kill Judas.''
I work on social media. My official title is Content Editor, but I do a lot of things from developing strategies to answer questions on my clients' Facebook pages. It's a cool gig, one that several people would like to have, but sometimes it makes me insecure about my own feelings. See, social media platforms are an abstract multiverse where one user's ethics dictates his entire experience, because he's enabled to control the entirety of it (well, the large majority of it). So, if you don't agree with someone's views on Facebook or on Twitter you are deemed an asshole.
But in the immortal words of Raylan Givens: ''You run into an asshole in the morning, you run into an asshole in the morning. You run into assholes all day; you're the asshole.'' Am I an asshole for thinking social media are full of assholes? Iconic pop culture thinker and major influence on Dead End Follies Chuck Klosterman is seemingly as fascinated with bad guys as I am. His latest essay collection I WEAR THE BLACK HAT (which I am obscenely late in reviewing) is discussing villains and their relevance in our culture and might've unwittingly had a hint or two to give me about my own existential situation with social media.
The obvious stance here is to claim that villainy is in the eye of the beholder and that everybody has his own villains, depending on his own personal ethics. There is a little bit of that going on in I WEAR THE BLACK HAT, but it often questions beloved figures, pop culture icons, people like D.B Cooper and Muhammad Ali, whom other people actually aim to be like. It's a surefire way to get people angry at you for irrational reasons and you'll find a couple scathing, outraged reviews of I WEAR THE BLACK HAT peppered all over the internet, but Klosterman made his homework in these essays and backs his claims with fact about his subjects' lives and taught me a couple things about icons I thought I know (especially Ali).
But these essays are really just appetizers for the second part of I WEAR THE BLACK HAT, where Klosterman grows increasingly personal with his essays and this is where I think he takes all his relevance as a pop culture thinker: he begins to write about processing information and storing public figures himself into good/evil category. This exercise culminates at the very end of I WEAR THE BLACK HAT with an essay on the most unassailable figure of villainy of our times : Adolf Hitler (and yes, the essay works wonderflly well). I don't know about you, but I take confort in Chuck Klosterman's good natured contempt of both objectivity and Academic form. I think his purpose is higher than both of these concepts. I perceive growing involvement in his own essays to be selfless, using himself as an example to help any willing reader to better understand the world he's surrounded by.
Apparently I'm not the only person who gains analytical superpowers for a short time after reading Chuck Klosterman.
The ideas and the intellect of Chuck Klosterman might not have the same sex appeal than David Foster Wallace's for the masses, but goddamn. No other thinker makes me feel less alone than him. Knowing that there is this intellectual eminence who watches the same think that I watch on television, who worries about the same things I worry and (as I'm slowly entering ''the middle age'' era of my life), goes through the things I'm going through. I WEAR THE BLACK HAT is right up there with the best Chuck Klosterman book. Maybe it is his very best. His most mature and intellectually tangible book yet. I don't know, they are so hard to rank.
Am I the villain on social media? I may be, but I've got no control over it.
BADASS
The obvious stance here is to claim that villainy is in the eye of the beholder and that everybody has his own villains, depending on his own personal ethics. There is a little bit of that going on in I WEAR THE BLACK HAT, but it often questions beloved figures, pop culture icons, people like D.B Cooper and Muhammad Ali, whom other people actually aim to be like. It's a surefire way to get people angry at you for irrational reasons and you'll find a couple scathing, outraged reviews of I WEAR THE BLACK HAT peppered all over the internet, but Klosterman made his homework in these essays and backs his claims with fact about his subjects' lives and taught me a couple things about icons I thought I know (especially Ali).
But these essays are really just appetizers for the second part of I WEAR THE BLACK HAT, where Klosterman grows increasingly personal with his essays and this is where I think he takes all his relevance as a pop culture thinker: he begins to write about processing information and storing public figures himself into good/evil category. This exercise culminates at the very end of I WEAR THE BLACK HAT with an essay on the most unassailable figure of villainy of our times : Adolf Hitler (and yes, the essay works wonderflly well). I don't know about you, but I take confort in Chuck Klosterman's good natured contempt of both objectivity and Academic form. I think his purpose is higher than both of these concepts. I perceive growing involvement in his own essays to be selfless, using himself as an example to help any willing reader to better understand the world he's surrounded by.
Apparently I'm not the only person who gains analytical superpowers for a short time after reading Chuck Klosterman.
If somebody wants to be perceived as a bad person, it's immediatly assumed to have a wider ulterior purpose. Decency is its own reward, but purposeful depravity requires an upside. Moreover, the authenticity of every self-constructed villain is always up for debate, particularly when their specific brand of villainy represents the bedrock of their identity; since we assume normal people would always prefer to be seen as good, those who seem proud of their badness are immediately suspect. They come across as contrived, and that bothers people more than whatever wickedness they assert.
That leads me to the last essay of I WEAR THE BLACK HAT called The Problem of Overrated Ideas, and more precisely the last page where Chuck Klosterman does something extremely courageous for any contemporary public intellectual to do and I believe it's the very source of 90% of the bad reviews this book ever had: he challenges the conclusion of David Foster Wallace's most accessible and most sacrosanct essay THIS IS WATER. He makes a villain out of himself, by not buying into something every rational people seem to want to buy into, but does it a way that'll leave you to decide what to make of him. The conspiracy theorist in me thinks the last page was planned all along, that it was the first thing written in I WEAR THE BLACK HAT.
The ideas and the intellect of Chuck Klosterman might not have the same sex appeal than David Foster Wallace's for the masses, but goddamn. No other thinker makes me feel less alone than him. Knowing that there is this intellectual eminence who watches the same think that I watch on television, who worries about the same things I worry and (as I'm slowly entering ''the middle age'' era of my life), goes through the things I'm going through. I WEAR THE BLACK HAT is right up there with the best Chuck Klosterman book. Maybe it is his very best. His most mature and intellectually tangible book yet. I don't know, they are so hard to rank.
Am I the villain on social media? I may be, but I've got no control over it.
BADASS
