Pop culture writer shares quirky views at WKU

Published 12:00 am Wednesday, April 20, 2011

For years, Chuck Klosterman didn’t sleep in a bed. Currently, his favorite band is a British group called Yuck. He has attracted acid users to a bookstore literary lecture, and his favorite town is Austin, Texas, because “their town is just filled with weirdos.”

Klosterman, a pop culture writer who has been compared to Hunter S. Thompson, spoke Tuesday to hundreds of Western Kentucky University students, offering his quirky views on contemporary lifestyles.

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Students, such as Emily Gillespie, knew of Klosterman’s reputation and wanted to get his opinion on current events.

“I think he obviously has a vast knowledge of culture,” said Gillespie, a senior from Roanoke, Va. “It was kind of enlightening.”

His lecture kicked off with a few playful jabs at the university, particularly its mascot.

“I always knew your nickname was the Hilltoppers, but until yesterday I didn’t know it’s really about the top of a hill. It’s kind of weird when you think about it,” he said. “I bet you have really strong calves.”

It’s that offbeat sense of humor and deep knowledge of pop culture that launched Klosterman to fame, prompting Time magazine to dub him “one of America’s foremost authorities on pop culture.”

As a journalist, magazine columnist and author, Klosterman has written about topics that range from sports to hipsters, and he’s traveled the nation, finding peculiar people almost everywhere he ventures.

While in Austin, he met a cab driver who was convinced she was the reincarnation of Fleetwood Mac singer Stevie Nicks, even though Nicks is alive and well.

He stumbled upon a performance art group that, on Valentine’s Day, paired about 15 men and women and placed each duo on a different downtown block. The group practiced a synchronized argument, so passers-by heard the same argument as they made their way downtown.

After working as a journalist – and other gigs, including teaching at a college in Germany – Klosterman was able to make a living as a literary author after his book, “Killing Yourself to Live,” was published. Still, he continues to research and write pieces for different publications. After all, he’s been writing as long as he can remember.

“I started writing before I could actually write,” he said.

He shared with students an unfinished piece about the culture of watching sporting events. The blurb he read focused on the dissatisfaction of pre-recorded sporting events – why watching a recorded game is less pleasurable than watching the same game live.

He believes there are some rational reasons. First, it eliminates commercials, which create drama. During a ballgame, suspense builds during the commercial break. However, if the game is recorded, most people would never purposely sit through commercials when they can fast-forward past them.

“That would be like volunteering for a DUI,” he said.

Also, when people distance themselves from the actual event, it’s more difficult to have a connection with the event and the players. And recording a game gives people too much control – because the outcome of the game is already decided, they must decide whether it’s worth an investment of their time. It must be more entertaining “than every other life option you have at that moment,” he said.

There also are some irrational reasons why watching a recorded sporting event isn’t satisfactory. Some people believe that their personal involvement with the game determines the outcome – that if they watch the game or root for a certain team, it will make a difference. But that “perverse” dream is killed by a prerecorded event, Klosterman said.

Also, if anything mind-blowing happened during the game, everyone probably already knows about it. So for those who recorded the game, it’s now just an average game.

Seven years ago, when the Pacers-Pistons brawl led to the NBA suspending various players for a total of 146 games, Klosterman was in a tiny bar in Brooklyn celebrating a birthday party with no access to the Internet or a television. When late party guests arrived, the brawl was the first thing they gabbed about.

“It was like they had to tell us,” he said. “I’ve come to accept that for the rest of my life, I will never not instantly know about any insane event.”

That instant availability has been exaggerated by social networks, such as Facebook and Twitter. Klosterman doesn’t know what the next step in social media will be, but he knows that it has changed people.

“People constantly complain about Facebook. That’s not because it hasn’t changed them,” he said. “It has changed them, and they know it. They feel it.”

But is the experience of being alive still the same? That’s a question Klosterman doesn’t have an answer to. Still, he knows how technology has modified some experiences, specifically music.

Before the era of iTunes and MP3 players, people invested in albums for one song. It created a subculture among young people – if a teenager in the 1980s bought a Motley Crue album and loved it, his next purchase might be a similar genre of music, integrating him into that culture.

Now, people simply purchase individual songs because they like them – their music collection may span from Slayer to Faith Hill. They don’t associate with a certain type of music. It’s also becoming more apparent that people don’t like the physical aspect of music – owning albums and looking at album covers. They enjoy the sound, the beat.

Klosterman should know. When he got married, his wife didn’t want his nearly 4,000 CDs in the house. So, he transferred his music to iTunes. Now he doesn’t miss his albums.

Marriage has changed his lifestyle in other ways. For example, he now sleeps in a bed. Before, he slept in a “sleeping machine” made of pillows, blankets and foam. He simply didn’t think he needed a bed.

But he’s still engrossed in popular culture, and he spends his time commenting on it through lectures, interviews and especially, his writings.

“It’s the only thing in my life that’s natural,” he said about writing. “If I really knew why I was a writer, I probably wouldn’t write.”