The Wisdom of Chuck Klosterman

I always feel like somebody’s watching me. Unlike Rockwell, however, I know who that somebody is.
It’s Chuck Klosterman.
Klosterman (you may know him as Kris Kringle’s understudy in Santa Claus is Comin’ to Town) is that most wonderful kind of essayist, journalist, and critic, who can take the gobbledygook that’s hiding in the recesses of your brain and turn it into easily digestible, bite-sized witticisms. Hence the feeling that he’s always looking over my shoulder, articulating the things that I’m thinking. Today marks the release of his latest, I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling With Villains (Real and Imagined), and to celebrate, I present some of his best Klostervations (™), on Facebook, on music, and on everything in between.
On rich people (The Visible Man):
“They don’t need to cook, so cooking becomes this gratuitous, exotic activity. Poor people hate cooking.”
On evaluating guitarists (Eating the Dinosaur):
“Clapton and Page are both good, but I think we’ve taken the blues as far as they can go. The blues get in the way now. I don’t see the need for any new blues.”
On the fundamental flaws of social media (The Visible Man):
“This is why Facebook caught on with adults: It’s designed for people who want to publicize their children without our consent.”
On finding meaning (Eating the Dinosaur):
“If you stare long enough at anything, you will start to find similarities. The word ‘coincidence’ exists in order to stop people from seeing meaning where none exists.”
On acoustic-related invisibility (Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story):
“I love the way music inside a car makes you feel invisible; if you play the stereo at max volume, it’s almost like the other people can’t see into your vehicle. It tints your windows, somehow.”
On voyeurism (Eating the Dinosaur):
“It’s closer to a narrative that ignores all the conventional rules of storytelling; it’s more Lynchian than Hitchcockian. If we could fully comprehend what was happening through a stranger’s living room window, it would not be thrilling in the same way—it would feel more like reality TV. You’d think we’d care more, but we’d probably care less.
On aging (Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story):
“When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago—and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail—it’s disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. It’s astonishing to consider all the things from your past that used to happen all the time but (a) never happen anymore, and (b) never even cross your mind. It’s almost like those things didn’t happen. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don’t really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can’t even remember her name.”
On relationships (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto):
“Every relationship is fundamentally a power struggle, and the individual in power is whoever likes the other person less.”
On people, always on people (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto):
“Do you know people who insist they like ‘all kinds of music’? That actually means they like no kinds of music.”
And finally, on beds and the meaning of life (Downtown Owl):
“Why do we get out of bed? Is there any feeling better than being in bed? What is going to happen in the course of my day that will be an improvement over lying on something very soft, underneath something very warm, wearing only underwear, doing absolutely nothing, all by myself?”
Do you have a favorite piece of Klosterman wisdom?