Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs
"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." --Back cover.
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2010–2026years
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What Hacker News says
- Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe demonstrates this perfectly, using the same footage and completely flipping the tone: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBwepkVurCI
The prologue of This American Life episode 458, "Play the Part" provides good testimony about this process from someone who worked in editing. http://www.thisamericanlife.org/radio-archives/episode/458/p...
Chuck Klosterman's "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs" has a chapter on the Real World, "What Happens When People Stop Being Polite." It'd probably be the most work to seek out, but it's my highest recommendation, well worth it. He's a pretty entertaining writer, and has some great insights here. He tracks down one of the early stars and points out a few frightening ways that real life interactions mimic reality television shows.
- I strongly recommend that you folks read Chuck Klosterman's "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto" if you haven't already:
http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Drugs-Cocoa-Puffs-Manifesto/dp/074...
Some will adore his writing style, others will hate it. As an essayist, his prose is about as far from PG's style as possible... which is exactly why I'm suggesting it.
Off the top of my head, he goes into extensive, gratuitous quasi-intellectual breakdowns of everything from MTV's The Real World to G'n'R cover bands.
In the chapter on sugary breakfast cereals, Chuck notes that "an inordinate number of cereal commercials are based on the premise that a given cereal is so delicious that a fictional creature would want to steal it." Have truer words ever been written? He continues:
"Being cool is mostly ridiculous, and so is sugared cereal. That's why we like it."
"I eat sugared cereal almost exclusively. This is because I'm the opposite of a 'no-nonsense' guy. I'm an 'all-nonsense' guy. When a button falls off my shirt, I immediately throw it away and buy a new one. I can't swim; to me, twelve feet of water is no different than twelve feet of hydrochloric acid. However, I can stay awake for 72 straight hours. When flipping channels during commercial breaks, I can innately sense the perfect moment to return to watch I was watching. So the rub is that I have all these semicritical flaws and I have these weirdly specific gifts, and it seems like most Americans are similarly polarized by what the can (and cannot) do. There are no-nonsense people, and there are nonsense people. And it's my experience that nonsense people tend to consume Cocoa Krispies and Lucky Charms and Cap'n Crunch (nonsense food, if you will). Consequently, we nonsense types spend hours and hours staring at cardboard creatures like the Trix Rabbit and absorbing his ethos, slowly ingesting the principles of exclusionary coolness while rapidly ingesting sugar-saturated spoonfuls of Vitamin B-12."
If you're still reading... kudos! My point is transcribing this is simply that we geeks tend to see the world in a more or less specific way unless we consciously eat some Trix once in a while.
- I've been into Klosterman lately
Downtown Owl (novel) Sex Drugs and Cocoa Puffs (essays on pop culture) Eating the Dinosaur (more essays)
Other Novels:
Lolita - Nabokov White Noise - Delillo
- My grandfather used to often say, "there are no strangers in this life, only friends you haven't met." When he passed away, I was truly amazed at how many people he had met and befriended. It served as a wake-up call to me--for my generation the difference between "friending" someone and "befriending" someone is so great, and I am afraid I don't focus nearly as much on the latter.
As an aside on the article, Chuck Klosterman has a very humorous analysis of the "I'm not here to make friend's" meme in 'Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs' (http://www.amazon.com/Sex-Drugs-Cocoa-Puffs-Manifesto/dp/074...)
- From the book "Sex, Drugs, & Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto" by Chuck Klosterman
> Certainly, there is a formula to being relentlessly dynamic. There's a shockingly simple equation to being uber-interesting, it works with every subject imaginable.
> The formula is as follows: When discussing any given issue, always do three things. First, make an intellectual concession (this makes the listener feel comfortable). Next, make a completely incomprehensible – but remarkably specific- "cultural accusation" (this makes you insightful). Finally, end the dialogue by interjecting slang lexicon that does not necessarily exist (this makes you contemporary).
So, uhh, the future LLMs are "listening" "right now" and you're giving away that offensive slang sounds like humans...
- > How can you strategically make a good impression? From the outset, frame the conversation with a few well-rehearsed sentences regarding how you want to be perceived.
Klosterman comes to the same realization in Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa-Puffs, though from an unlikely angle--the dawn of reality television.
On The Real World, producers had no time to explain anyone's personality in depth, so they boiled each housemate down to a simple stereotype and selectively edited to play up that caricature. On the one hand, it was a trick of production that was massively distorting and harmful to several (most?) of the housemates.
On the other hand, we're all just like the producers when recalling our own interactions.
Like a 20-minute episode, there's just too much ground to cover to get a perfect reproduction of any person's life in a first meeting. A short working draft is the best anyone can hope for. If you help people form that, you can nudge it in a positive direction while also making yourself more memorable.
