Gawker
Chuck Klosterman, whose ample frame is caged in the world's thinnest skin, is angry at the Internets, perhaps because its denizens have begun to call bullshit on his increasingly tiresome shtick in ever-growing numbers. Dispatched to Atlanta to cover the Final Four, the man who makes a living telling you that, no, really, Stryper's To Hell With the Devil is the album that best captured the zeitgeist of the eighties, takes a few shots at the web.
During his assignment,
I will reciprocate by writing sporadic e-mail posts throughout the entire weekend. This is a very popular art form among affluent American young people, especially those who are fans of James Walcott and/or profoundly interested in unauthorized photographs of Nicole Richie's rib cage. I believe there is even a name for this journalistic practice, but I can't remember what it is; normally, I use the Internet only to discuss math principles via CompuServe.It's called mailing it in, Chuck, we're pretty sure you're familiar with it. Also, James Wolcott spells his surname without the 'a,' but, hey, we all make mistakes when we're tossing off crap and shooting it out the web-chute. But wait, there's more!
I have noticed that many Internet people share a specific writing style: They tend to be bombastic and ironically detached at the same time. They really love certain things and they really hate certain things, but they always manage to remain outside the emotional investment that normally accompanies strong feelings.Well, you know, totally: We can't all pretend that Ratt was one of history's greatest bands with the same degree of humble Midwestern authenticity as those whose bombasticity is surely deeply felt and not in any way some sort of repetitive device wielded to ensure that the money that purchases those Radiohead posters keeps rolling in.
But also, we see Chuck's complaint here as chronic misreading. Sarcasm seems to baffle a certain set of readers. They see it as a form of detachment or removal, instead of what it really is: An expression of hostility, rage and scorn.
Still, how much emotional investment is required to point out that certain designated cultural arbiters have been working the same routine for nearly a decade now without ever offering anything that smacks of original insight? A close look at the man's oeuvre makes it pretty clear: Chuck Klosterman hates the Internet because Chuck Klosterman is the Internet. He's just the Omega Man of crappy cultural observations on the printed page.
Liveblogging the NCAA finals is a good first step to admitting that you're as full of it as the rest of the folks you so despise. Let's be honest, what's more lowbrow than a blog? Welcome to our world, Chuck! Sit on the good couch! We're putting Warrant's "You're the Only Hell Your Mama Ever Raised" on the hi-fi just for you!
Klosterman: Final Four prep [WJRT.com]
Earlier: Asshole Whose Entire Career Based On Appreciating The Lowbrow Wants To Pull Up The Ladder
Comments
I never knew those pix of Nicole Richie's rib cage were unauthorized! I appreciate them so much more now!
Even back in his wide-eyed bloaty days, he was painfully full of himself. Just after his hire at SPIN, another young female music journalist and I joined him for a friendly drink at a conference, and he quickly launched into questioning us about how we lost our virginity. Then he kept bragging about how he got a job at SPIN without knowing anything about music. I was grossed out and left quickly. Next thing you know, I find myself characterized in his piece for Esquire as a "mildly attractive" music-journalist groupie. Picking on a 22-year-old indy weekly intern cause she wasn't impressed with your "eighty thousand dollar salary, car and apartment"? Or because she knew her shit and you didn't? Turd!
There, bile spewed, Upchuck Klusterfuck. Thanks, internet!
I feel like a douchebag deconstructing douchebags for deconstructing a douchebag.
When are we going to start "building a mystery" again?
Fuck, I am just so detached I guess. So does this hipster irony combined with emotional investment make Klosterman the literary equivalent of Lilith Fair?
He already the glasses for it.
What's more lowbrow than a blog?
A sports blog? A Chuck Klosterman sports blog? A Chuck Klosterman sports blog for a fucking local ABC affiliate?
Chuck needs a new career. He's no longer relevant in the literary world as a writer, maybe he could be a publisher or marketeer, but he doesn't add much to the written word anymore. I enjoyed his books, but hey, he's turning into John Cusack with his unoriginality.
Naturally, Klosterchuck's blog begins with a rambling, pointless anecdote about himself. Being self-referential on a blog is sort of the whole point, but since Klosterman is one of the few who can get his self-aggrandizing navel-gazing musings published in real books and stuff, why is he even bothering with this? For the prestige?
I've never managed to process the fact that he now writes about sports. I guess he's like, "I'm so ironic, I'm Chuck Klosterman writing about sports."
I've never undsertood this guy's popularity. I read he was good so I bought some godawful thing called "Sex, Drugs and Popcorn." If that's the best thing his generation's writers are capable of we might as well convert the Library of Congress into a multiplex.
I can pinpoint my seething hatred of Chuck Klosterman to one passage in "KIlling Yourself to Live" (excerted in Spin, no WAY I was gonna buy THAT piece of shit). Klosterman goes to the house where Bob Stinson from the Replacements died, gets up to the front porch and pussies out on ringing the doorbell because he never really "got" the Replacements anyway. DOUCHE!!!
There. Now I admitted that I'm still emotionally invested in hating Chuck Klosterman AND that I read Spin. Let the banning commence.
I'd really really like to see a half dozen Junior Samples lookalikes perform Poison's 'Open Up And Say. . .Ahh!' upon Chuck in the parking lot of a Waffle House off I-85 in Lithia Springs.
@oovy: OMG yes oovy, it's like the superior detached way that Dennis Miller deigns to report on sports.
Yeah, because sports journalism is in desperate need of a Middle America nebbish whose mock sincerity tries to force you to believe that their mundane observations about middlebrow american life are anything but that.
And even if it did, I'd rather get it from that homophobe Garrison Keillor.
looks like that local abc affiliate just gets to copy off the mothership espn site. his blog is on espn.com's page 2.
You know, I've always enjoyed Chuck Klosterman's books because they're funny. But I've never labored under the illusion that they were important. Evidently, Chucky Boy seems to have a wildly different view of his own product.
@Clevertrousers:
bob stinson died in his apartment that was located in a building that housed retail on the ground level. There was no porch for him to go [not] ring the bell. This is the best he could make up for his book?
minor, yes, but still, kinda douchey.
@citizen_shame:
My bad - I misremembered the passage, but I dug it up and it's even MORE douchey than my faulty memory allowed:
"I knock on the apartment door. No answer. I knock again. Again, no answer. This is strange, because I know for certain that somebody is in there. While outside, I saw a pudgy white arm ashing a cigarette out of the window. Granted, I don't really have a plan here. I'm not exactly sure what I should ask this person if and when he or she opens the door. But I feel like I should at least see the inside of this apartment (or something), so I keep knocking. And knocking. I knock for ten minutes. No one ever comes out. I try to peep into the window where I witnessed "the cigarette incident," but now the shade is down, and I'm starting to feel like a stalker. I decide to walk away, having learned zero about a dead musician I knew practically nothing about to begin with."
DOUCHE!
If Mr. Klosterman questions my commitment to hating him, he is welcome to come over to my house and let me demonstrate it in person.
I believe a spirited tongue-lashing followed by a vigorous beating about the head and shoulders with the "Cham-Creeky" volume of the Oxford English Dictionary (the curmudgeon's favorite for douche-bashing) may convince him that I really, really, really hate him. A lot.
And if there is a scintilla of doubt left in the bloated pus sac he so lovingly calls is "mind", a fusillade of ass-kicking from the size-9.5 Pluvius stillettos on his way out the door will no doubt dispell it.
This would not give me as much pleasure as the dream I have mentioned here before (strangling Neal Pollack with Ned Vizzini's intestines, then bludgeoning Klosterman to death with Pollack's bloody skull--note the Biblical resonance of slaying a Goliath of self-importance with the jawbone of an unmitigated ass), but I think it would help me maintain. A methadone for murder, if you will.
Continuing my self-obliterating quest for execution by commenting on a post a day late (that's like, what, 90 days in Gawker years?) and referencing a subject that is both distasteful and so very January 2007: Eric Schaeffer. But while I'm as happy as the next guy to see a successful author from my generation get a Grade-A beatdown, isn't saying that Chuck Klosterman hates the Internet because Chuck Klosterman is the internet akin to Schaeffer saying that Gawker hates Eric Schaeffer because Gawker is Eric Schaeffer?
@Barker: Yes.
Start a discussion:
Login with your username and password below. Or comment on this post via email.
Forgot your username or password? New User?