THE MASTER OF OUR DOMAIN

By: B -- 11/13/05

Chuck Klosterman is my hero.

No kidding; the writer for Spin and Esquire, and author of three books (including the recently released Killing Yourself To Live), is living a life I’d kill for. Klosterman is a reigning authority in Pop Culture Land, and has been since his refreshingly quirky 2003 book Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs, in which he wrote opuses on such inane topics as Zack Morris, the Sims and his theory that Pam Anderson is this generation’s Marilyn Monroe. It was long-winded and funny, trivial and topical; and in an I Love the 80s, Gawker, media-obsessed world, Klosterman is the movement’s Marshall Applebaum. He has made a career out of doing what everyone else does for fun; discuss trivial entertainment and pop culture issues. He should be everyone’s hero.

Klosterman’s new book, Killing Yourself To Live (“85% of a true story,” according to the author), is written in the same vein as his other work. It’s just as rambling and meticulous, but where Cocoa Puffs was a deliberately jumbled collection of idiosyncratic essays, Killing Yourself is an actual novel, with an actual theme, that serves as the book’s backbone. The premise is Klosterman driving cross country to visit the locations of the deaths of many famous rock stars, an assignment set forth by his Spin editors. Klosterman visits the death sites of Buddy Holly, Lynyrd Skynyrd, Bob Stinson, Kurt Cobain and more. His signature theories and opines, all very painstaking and funny, are woven into that storyline and make up most of the book’s pages. There are so many pop culture references that the book includes a damn index. Swear to God.

Killing Yourself is essentially about Klosterman alone with his thoughts, and the book finds him at his most personal and enlightening. He jumps from his views on relationships (many pages are devoted to Klosterman’s hand-wringing over the fact that he’s in love with two women), to waxing theoretical on silly pop culture thoughts, to more serious subjects like drugs, family and mortality. The book reads exactly how it should; like a witty, confused geek driving alone in his car.

One of my favorite aspects of the book was Klosterman’s report of his foray into the drug world, describing the effects of each substance. For those keeping score, he details the effects of alcohol (makes you better at arguing, but dehydrated), pot (makes you chill out), cocaine (makes you feel dynamic and attractive, but depressed soon after), Dexedrine (wakes you up, makes you have to pee), Ritalin (ditto) and Ecstasy (doesn’t do much of anything). According to Klosterman, this combination makes you go mildly insane, which may be the least shocking thing ever written. Interesting stuff, though.

I loved the book, and ripped through the 235 pages in just a few hours. It’s not a landmark effort by any means, but consistently funny, oddly insightful, and highly personal.

I’ll end this review with my two favorite excerpts:

From page 141: “We wasted a lot of time debating the song “Go Your Own Way,” specifically over who had the moral high ground in the lyrical argument between Buckingham and Nicks. Predictably, Q always took Stevie Nicks’s side in this debate, and I always aligned myself with the control freak Lindsey. “The fact that Lindsey Buckingham even wrote a song like this proves he’s a jackass,” Q would say. “What kind of asshole forces his ex-girlfriend to sing backing vocals on a song that accuses her of being a slut?” In retrospect, this does seem egocentrically vindictive. Still, I think Stevie Nicks totally had it coming, especially in like of the fact that she later shacked up with Don Henley.”

From page 195: “Steve Miller keeps calling me “baby” and insists that I should keep rocking him, which seems completely reasonable. I insist on taking rock lyrics literally. For example, it occurs to me that whoever organized tour itineraries for the Steve Miller Band must have been a dolt: Miller says he went from Phoenix, Arizona, all the way to Tacoma, and then to Philadelphia, down to Atlanta, and then crossed back to L.A. (before finally concluding with some one-off dates in Northern California, where the girls were said to be “warm”). This is terribly inefficient. It seems that even Space Cowboys need travel agents.”

TAKE ME TO THE TOP