Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

by Chuck Klosterman

Overview

Over half a million copies sold!

From the author of the highly acclaimed heavy metal memoir, Fargo Rock City, comes another hilarious and discerning take on massively popular culture—set in Chuck Klosterman’s den and your own—covering everything from the effect of John Cusack flicks to the crucial role of breakfast cereal to the awesome power of the Dixie Chicks.

Countless writers and artists have spoken for a generation, but no one has done it quite like Chuck Klosterman. With an exhaustive knowledge of popular culture and an almost effortless ability to spin brilliant prose out of unlikely subject matter, Klosterman attacks the entire spectrum of postmodern America: reality TV, Internet porn, Pamela Anderson, literary Jesus freaks, and the real difference between apples and oranges (of which there is none). And don’t even get him started on his love life and the whole Harry-Met-Sally situation.

Whether deconstructing Saved by the Bell episodes or the artistic legacy of Billy Joel, the symbolic importance of The Empire Strikes Back or the Celtics/Lakers rivalry, Chuck will make you think, he’ll make you laugh, and he’ll drive you insane—usually all at once. Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is ostensibly about art, entertainment, infotainment, sports, politics, and kittens, but—really—it’s about us. All of us. As Klosterman realizes late at night, in the moment before he falls asleep, “In and of itself, nothing really matters. What matters is that nothing is ever ‘in and of itself.’” Read to believe.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780743236010
Publisher:	Scribner
Publication date:	07/02/2004
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	272
Sales rank:	136,855
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.44(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Chuck Klosterman is the bestselling author of many books of nonfiction (including The Nineties, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, I Wear the Black Hat, and But What If We're Wrong?) and fiction (Downtown Owl, The Visible Man, and Raised in Captivity). He has written for The New York Times, The Washington Post, GQ, Esquire, Spin, The Guardian, The Believer, Billboard, The A.V. Club, and ESPN. Klosterman served as the Ethicist for The New York Times Magazine for three years, and was an original founder of the website Grantland with Bill Simmons.

Hometown:

New York, New York

Date of Birth:

June 5, 1972

Place of Birth:

Wyndmere, North Dakota

Education:

Degree in Journalism, University of North Dakota, 1994

Table of Contents

Contents

1 This Is Emo

(carnivore interlude)

2 Billy Sim

(reality interlude)

3 What Happens When People Stop Being Polite

(Pat Benatar interlude)

4 Every Dog Must Have His Every Day, Every Drunk Must Have His Drink

(Monkees = Monkees interlude)

5 Appetite for Replication

(an interlude to be named later)

6 Ten Seconds to Love

(metaphorical fruit interlude)

7 George Will vs. Nick Hornby

(Ralph Nader interlude)

8 33

(Fonzie recalibration interlude)

9 Porn

("kitty cat as terrorist" interlude)

10 The Lady or the Tiger

(hypothetical interlude)

11 Being Zack Morris

(50-50 interlude)

12 Sulking with Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth

(anti-homeless interlude)

13 The Awe-Inspiring Beauty of Tom Cruise's Shattered, Troll-like Face

(punk interlude)

14 Toby over Moby

(Johnny Cash interlude)

15 This Is Zodiac Speaking

(Timothy McVeigh interlude)

16 All I Know Is What I Read in the Papers

(boom!)

17 I, Rock Chump

(waiting to die interlude)

18 How to Disappear Completely and Never Be Found

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Gary Shteyngart author of The Russian Debutante's Handbook The funniest thing I've read in an ice age...Chuck Klosterman is a Gulliver among the cult-crit Lilliputians. America should wrap her freckled arms around Klosterman's scrawny neck and press him to her bosom. He may be the last true patriot among us.

Bob Odenkirk of Mr. Show Chuck Klosterman has the time and inclination to think through the issues that you didn't even know were issues. Laugh at him, or with him, or both...but you will laugh, dammit, you will laugh.

Editorial Reviews

The Onion a.v. club One of the brightest pieces of pop analysis to appear this century.

GQ Quintessential Klosterman — sometimes exasperating but almost always engaging.

San Francisco Chronicle The reigning Kasparov of pop culture wits-matching.

The Washington Post Maddeningly smart and funny...[Klosterman's] good humor, compassion, and raw associative powers put him in the same league as Nick Hornby and Douglas Coupland, though he's a more tenacious critic than either.

From the Publisher

The proper subject of smack talk is what's cool, what's not cool and why. But if intellectuals such as Thomas Frank or David Brooks cover this same turf like electric weed-whackers, Klosterman is a lawn-tractor with flames painted on the hood. He's the maddeningly smart and funny armchair critic from North Dakota who's right 90 percent of the time -- and the other 10 percent of the time, he's just so lunatic that the funny bone preempts the thinking bone. — Hans Eisenbeis

The Washington Post

There's a lot more cold cereal than sex or drugs in Klosterman's nostalgic, patchy collection of pop cultural essays, which, despite sparks of brilliance, fails to cohere. Having graduated from the University of North Dakota in 1994, Klosterman (Fargo Rock City) seems never to have left that time or place behind. He is an ironically self-aware, trivia-theorizing, unreconstructed slacker: "I'm a `Gen Xer,' okay? And I buy shit marketed to `Gen Xers.' And I use air quotes when I talk.... Get over it." The essay topics speak for themselves: the Sims, The Real World, Say Anything, Pamela Anderson, Billy Joel, the Lakers/Celtics rivalry, etc. The closest Klosterman gets to the 21st century is Internet porn and the Dixie Chicks. This is a shame, because he's is a skilled prose stylist with a witty, twisted brain, a photo-perfect memory for entertainment trivia and has real chops as a memoirist. The book's best moments arrive when he eschews argumentation for personal history. In "George Will vs. Nick Hornby," a tired screed against soccer suddenly comes to life when Klosterman tells the story of how he was fired from his high school summer job as a Little League baseball coach. The mothers wanted their sons to have equal playing time; Klosterman wanted "a run-manufacturing offensive philosophy modeled after Whitey Herzog's St. Louis Cardinals." In a chapter on relationships, Klosterman semi-jokes that he only has "three and a half dates worth of material." Remove all the dated pop culture analyses, and Klosterman's book has enough material for about half a really great memoir. Agent, Daniel Greenberg. (Aug. 26) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.

Publishers Weekly

Cultural arguments for people fascinated by the implications of their sugar-cereal dependencies. Spin magazine senior writer Klosterman (Fargo Rock City, 2001) prefers to "figure out what it means to be alive," he explains, in the context of "Pamela Anderson and The Real World and Frosted Flakes." Generally speaking, his m.o. is to explore what a "trivial" or purportedly overlooked mass-cultural element tells us about the presumably insight-hobbled greater American populace (e.g., that racial or cultural differences as exploited in popular media can be clarified via the eternal Lakers-Celtics debate). It's a strategy reminiscent of Joe Queenan's superior Red Lobster, White Trash, and the Blue Lagoon (1998), although Klosterman's shrill advocacy of junk culture lies closer to Quentin Tarantino's. The author is certainly democratic in his obsessions, yet they all tend toward lowest common denominators: many of his long argumentative riffs, such as those regarding John Cusack's appeal, the Pamela Anderson-Tommy Lee video, the enduring celebrity cult around serial killers like J.W. Gacy, and the righteousness of Reality Bites and the Gen-X stereotype, seem dated and unprovocative. The occasional piece rises above this minor-key white noise: a sharp, affecting portrait of life on the road with a Guns 'n' Roses cover band (written for the New York Times Magazine); a provocative exploration of how the befuddling world of online porn actually serves as metaphor for the Internet's promise generally; and a genuinely cynical chapter on media realities that reads like Muckraker Lite. Klosterman's literary strength seemingly lies in an ability to salvage discussion of the genuinely trivial via anoften charming, ramshackle voice; yet elsewhere, he takes tedious, unconvincing swipes at the usual array of "elite" cultural tropes, including Seattle's Experience Music Project, punk rock, indie rock, rock journalists, Björk, "postmodern" writers like poet Robert Pinsky, Lucinda Williams, alt-country, and so forth. He seems unaware that Jim Goad, Donna Gaines, and Ian Christe have already beaten the ersatz-populism thing to death. Humorous, slick, aggressively forgettable. Agent: Daniel Greenberg/Levine Greenberg

Kirkus Reviews

In his latest audiobook Klosterman narrates his own work with mixed results. His reading is passable but not up to professional standards. Audiobooks magnify tiny speech impediments, so Klosterman's tendency to add a "sch" to "s" words becomes annoying. But it's never enough to detract from the overall enjoyment of a funny book. You’ve gotta love his glorification of the mundane. Is he right that kids who watched the Trix Rabbit being denied his beloved cereal by smart-ass cartoon brats have an inflated sense of entitlement? Are we a nation obsessed with minutiae, forever engaged in trivial pursuits? Yep. A more disturbing question is why Klosterman spends so much time talking about the TV show “Saved by the Bell.” M.S. © AudioFile 2007, Portland, Maine

JUN/JUL 07 - AudioFile