Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs

by Chuck Klosterman

c. 2003

Scribner: New York

246 pages

Another Andrew contribution to Maggie's incessant reading. This is a book of essays written from the perspective of a pop culture buff and talking about everything from how Lloyd Dobler has left him unable to ever satisfy a woman to how the Lakers vs. Celtics rivalry in the 80's represents not just the racial tension in America, but everything.

Important note: Andrew bought me this book, but he also had the audio book, and we listened to the first few essays in the car driving around this past weekend. I highly recommend listening to at least part of the audio book for this particular selection, and I am usually not an advocate of audio books. Klosterman reads the book himself, and clearly many of these essays were written with that 'read aloud' mentality. (I would bet that he edits by reading aloud almost performance style to make sure that things flow.) His voice and his delivery really drive home his points, and are rather funny. Even if you don't have the patience to listen to the whole thing (I didn't.) Listening to the first two will give you a good idea of the way in which the others are meant to be read. This really increased my enjoyment of this book, which is already really entertaining.

As I said before, this is a series of essays. All are amusing and entertaining as is, although I feel like I would have found them even more so if I was five or six years older. Klosterman is writing from the perspective of someone who watched his two straight hours of Saved By The Bell every afternoon (USA and TBS) in his college dorm room, and while I pretty devotedly watched that same programming, it was sitting in my kitchen afternoons after elementary and middle school. As he says "temporality is part of the truth," and our different perspectives made that experience very different in some ways.

I believe that I read a spin off of this first essay, which in the book is titled "This is Emo." (If other people read the Lloyd Dobler article, I think that it was in a newspaper, and it definitely had a large picture of the boom box moment that we all know and love, I would be very happy to find it because I want to know if it really is the same author.) The essay here discusses the fact that the musical and cinematic representation of love is fake and too perfect, and that the tendency of people in our culture to embrace that and allow it to shape how they imagine love to be has left us unable to be satisfied with real relationships.

The essay that I read before was focused on the Lloyd Dobler complex. This is the point that every woman (Klosterman says born between '65 and '78, but here I think that he is not giving us youngings credit) is in love with John Cusack. Of course, not really him, the character he played in Say Anything, Lloyd Dobler. And it's funny, and vaguely true. (Although I saw the intrinsic fabulousness of Johnny before I saw Say Anything, I still have to admit that some idea of this fabulousness comes from the fact that he comes off like the kind of person that Lloyd Dobler seems to be in that movie.) Klosterman's point in this essay is that we all aspire to something that's not real, and so we'll never be happy.

I don't see it quite as hopelessly as that, but then again, I have a happy, though long distance, relationship with someone who keeps buying me good books. But I can see his point, most particularly when he talks about silences. It seems that we as people feel that silence has two forms: profound and awkward. And while I think that there is a place somewhere in there for the idea of "comfortable silence" in the "I like having you here and don't really feel like I need to fill every one of these moments with worthless drivel" sort of way, I do find myself sometimes wondering if I should SAY SOMETHING whenever things get quiet on a long car ride with Andrew. Reading the essay kind of made me see how freaking silly that is, as Klosterman puts it,

"There's not a lot to say during breakfast. I mean, you just woke up, you know? Nothing has happened. If neither person had an especially weird dream and nobody burned the toast, breakfast is just the time for chewing Cocoa Puffs and/or wishing you were still asleep. But we've been convinced not to think like that." page 7

Good news Chuck, I think that you might have just convinced me to think exactly like that sometimes. Good work.

Some of the other essays didn't ring as true for me. I still don't feel like I understand cover bands or internet porn, but maybe I never will, but I still enjoyed his essays about them. And in spite of his assertions, I do still believe that the probability of events is frequently something other that 50/50.

But other essays had shining moments of "oh how true!" His comparison of Pamela Anderson to Marilyn Monroe to America was interestingly reminiscent of the passage that I talked about in my entry about A Prayer For Own Meaney. And his commentary on how it became cool to be depressed sometime in the 80s seemed to connect to my thesis (but I'm obsessed, so those connections happen a lot.) I enjoyed his analysis of why country music is so damn catchy, and I found his explanation of the Tori paradox from the final season of Saved By The Bell outright enlightening ("So THAT'S where she came from!")

And I would be interested to hear what other people came up with as answers to "The 23 questions I ask everybody I meet in order to decide if I can ever really love them" on pages 126-134. (Andrew and I have decided that we can make it, even thought I think that Einstein is interesting...)

I'll close with the quote that popped up in Jack's facebook profile, thus further proving that he and I will, at least sometimes, focus in on the same exact sets of 15 or so words out of all the words in a 200 page book. This one pretty much sums up the point that seems central to Klosterman, everything is connected, even the most random things, the trivialities of pop culture, are really examples of more complex ideas.

"In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever really 'in and of itself.'"