klosterman at it again!

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/04/books/review/Meehan-t.html

Wait. A high school kid in a decidedly unliterary North Dakota town is nicknamed after a beast from “Beowulf”?

stfu nyt. That's right up there with Klosterman letting his jaw hang agape after some Cracker Barrel waitress namechecked Kafka.

When Klosterman says that Mitch, skulking down a school hallway, “slouched toward Bethlehem,” I put down the book, read the Yeats poem and flipped through my copy of Joan Didion before slouching back to “Downtown Owl,” realizing the line wasn’t meant as an allusion so much as a knowing turn of phrase.

Including literary allusions that don't mean anything is the kind of thing that signals Klosterman isn't just a mediocre author, but a horrific one.

I thought that said "waitress named Kafka" and I will admit that the thought occurred to me: ".....would smash."

And yes NYT, I would smash without knowing anything about her inner life but knowing everything about the people who named her so fuk u

that "her mind sounded like 'metal machine music', which she'd never heard" line is so, so terrible.

yeah it fuckin is

Yes, he ends that sentence with a preposition.

I don't hate Klosterman but the thing about him - as well as his spiritual brother, ESPN writer Bill Simmons - is that all of his writing, though sometimes very funny, is built on the rock of pop culture. Almost everything he says is an attempted wink to the hipster-geek cognoscenti and after so long that just depresses me. The fact that so many young, aspiring writers have copied that sort of Family Guy-prose makes me groan.

I am sensing a bit of klosterphobia on this thread ppls.

Results 1 - 10 of about 153 for klosterphobia. (0.12 seconds)

Hm, OK. Guess it wasn't that genius original.

This also reminds me of the point I made in a previous thread that self-conscious obscure pop-culture references and hipsterisms function the same way that needless high-culture references used to in Woody Allen movies. Just replace Strindberg with Sonic Youth.

http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/06/06/who-does-the-ethicist-think-he-is

As for what my “credentials” for this job are … that’s always a strange question. The idea that I would need a degree in ethics to do this job is extremely strange. Is the assumption that all the film critics for The New York Times have film degrees? Do all the music critics have degrees in musicology? Would The Times not hire a business reporter because she didn’t have a J-school degree and an entrepreneurial background? You’re the public editor, and you seem good at your job — but do you have a degree in public policy? Perhaps you do, but I don’t see how that would be essential. The wonderful thing about the Ethicist position is that no one is truly qualified and everyone is partly qualified. The experience of living, the experience of considering life’s problems, the ongoing experience of trying to place an objective reality into an inherently subjective world — these are as close to “credentials” as I possess. It’s the same reason this column generates so much response: It’s not distant from anyone’s life. When someone asks, “Well, what are your credentials for this position?” it’s no different than if I responded to that question by saying, “Well, what are your credentials for asking that question?” Neither sentiment is meaningful. I’m not claiming to be more ethical than other people. I’m just a guy considering problems. (And if it matters, I have a degree in journalism.)

lonley guy just thinking baout ethics

Granted, renaming the column “Just a Guy Considering Problems” is probably not quite catchy enough.

Do it

http://i.imgur.com/v2ILUlX.jpg

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/05/29/magazine/which-rock-star-will-historians-of-the-future-remember.html

In which Klosterman considers the Beatles, Dylan and Elvis - and ultimately settles on Chuck Berry.

As he should. As anyone with ears should (and I fucking love Elvis).

https://s-media-cache-ak0.pinimg.com/736x/27/96/81/2796815ed820cba3d2c405070e14c827.jpg

Damn chuck at it again

When I posted that image a few minutes ago, I hadn't read the article yet and therefore did not know that Chuck the K was referring to the same thing that gag in the image was based on.

few things worse than "smart" writing for dull people

I dunno, he kinda makes you think.

I'm going to write a book about what books about books will exist in the year 10,000, and how to use them to light your campfire and bring your food substitute up to a safe temperature.

he makes me think about how many better writers there are out there who didn't get the zoo animal "ooh exotically real Midwestern dude" from New York's provincial publishing elite

he also makes me think about how Ratt sucks.

Ratt totally sucks. I remember reading that their guitar wiz is some sort of Zappa savant, so every time Ratt comes on I listen very carefully to the guitar player, to check him out, and I'm not sure I ever make it to the end because Ratt sucks, even "Round and Round."

yeah chuck burst onto the scene with some pretty tired contrarian-populist ideas but america fell for it

i remember reading one piece by him where he said that he and his roommate in college never went in their kitchen but just threw garbage in there from the living area. so it was just a giant trash pit. the worst part of this story was that i didn't believe it; it was clearly part of his branding

examining how punk and disco have swapped in terms of their cultural and political impact could've made for a pretty interesting piece, instead of burying that point in a dumb thought experiment.

no wonder he and Bill Simmons get on so well, I could totally see Simmons drawing out this kind of tortured thinking to conclude that in 300 years the only basketball player anyone will remember is Bill Russell.

ha yeah and the way they largely populated Grantland with their "intellectual" heirs...

this is the dullest story I've read all year. When I got to reading the Beatles portion the grass outside the building started to die.

Did I daydream it, or is there a point where he claims the same people who were claiming "disco sucks" were into Daft Punk?

Lol, Alfred.

disco has almost totally been rehabilitated.

Klosterman's a typist, not a writer.

Man, Chuck and SFJ both back in the "New Answers" queue. Now we just need a reason to revive the DeRo thread.

https://api.wbez.org/v2/images/a2fcd4ee-e9bc-4a22-b661-cc884121ad86.jpg?width=206&height=206&mode=FILL&threshold=0

"Let's do this!"

i remember reading one piece by him where he said that he and his roommate in college never went in their kitchen but just threw garbage in there from the living area. so it was just a giant trash pit. the worst part of this story was that i didn't believe it; it was clearly part of his branding

― Treeship, Tuesday, May 24, 2016 8:38 AM (52 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

"the kitchen" here is a metaphor for chuck k's critical lens

“Right now, electronic dance music probably outsells hip‑hop. This is identical to the punk‑versus‑disco trade‑off of the 1970s. My prediction: edgy hip‑hop music will win the fame game in the long run, while E.D.M. will be seen as another mindless dance craze.”

What.

probably, not sure if there's a way to tell

The fact that Dylan does not have a conventionally “good” singing voice becomes retrospective proof that rock audiences prioritized substance over style

yes what could be less stylish than bob dylan's singing voice, a put-on of a put-on in which every other syllable is emphasized into a wail

also you could (probably) cut any fuck klusterman piece in half by just excising all the places where he (might) concede that everything he's saying (may be) unsupported bullshit

ok, it's a weakness of mine. i had to know: is there anyone who really thinks that sousa's ubiquity comes at the expense of lesser known, greater talents? is anybody out there championing any of the other american march composers?

and of course there is! jeff yaeger would like to tell you ALL ABOUT how james m. fulton has been unfairly forgotten by history, and to rectify this oversight he's put together a band and recorded NINE VOLUMES of his marches, all sight-read with no rehearsal, for the sake of "authenticity". you can listen to them all on his website at www.forgottenamericanmusic.com! he should start hanging out with klosterman. i think they'd get along great.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GsTZ0eFJMLY

haha, Brad. I was tempted to post the exact same clip.

Mind numbing. It reads like a prison letter from the guy who no one wants to be pen pals with.

well reading this was incredibly satisfying:

http://mobile.nytimes.com/2016/07/03/books/review/chuck-klosterman-but-what-if-were-wrong.html

say what you will about his nonexistent intellect and awful prose, klosterman writing a book posited on the theory that everyone is a dumbass is an incredibly canny move

Nice kicker at the end of that.

so this is like an expanded version of that horrible thing he wrote about tune-yards, where he was weirdly concerned with how our future selves would feel about the music?

lol :(

chuck is so bad that, if someone wants me to explain why he's terrible, i'd just rather not

in a certain way, he reminds me of alain de botton

The Facebook algorithm is advertising Klosterman’s new novel to me. It says the book is “wise and funny,” and I’m like, are we talking about the same guy?

He could arguably be funny now and then, but the "wise" part clearly has him confused with another Klosterman.

Gotta say, love him or hate him, ol Klosty's house style is key to surviving as a culture writer in 2021.

What would you even call it? Kind of a folksy Gen X Ted Talk vibe?