Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto

by Frank Halperin

Chuck Klosterman sings the body of accelerated culture electric. The prolific and quite often prophetic Spin senior writer and author of the magnificent balls-to-the-wall opus Fargo Rock City possesses an uncanny media enlightenment that fortifies the vigor of his prose. His pop-cult ken is so expansive, in fact, that his power to morph random trivial pursuits into transcendent philosophical truths is sensational. Whether heís discussing serial killers and the acquaintances who knew them, Billy Joelís greatness in spite of his cool deficiency, the fact that practically every galís Mr. Right paradigm is John Cusack as Lloyd Dobler in Say Anything… or the primal life lessons to be learned as a self-styled Sims video game character, Klostermanís critical poetics make him a postmodern Aristotle of the information age.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs is a high-octane sampler of impressionistic meditations on contemporary culture's saturated fat that will no doubt be a welcome perusal for an audience weaned on Schoolhouse Rock and formatively clad in Underoos. There isn't one dud to be found among the 18 essays presented within: Regardless of the topic, Klosterman prevails in driving home his arguments and conclusions with brazen, indefatigable vim and insight. "Being Zack Morris" demonstrates how something as cloyingly hackneyed and disposable as Saved By the Bell nonetheless reinforces collectively important sensibilities. Both "What Happens When People Stop Being Polite" and "The Awe-Inspiring Beauty of Tom Cruise's Shattered, Troll-like Face" examines how our understanding of reality -- more precisely, what we perceive and accept as reality -- is refracted through the prisms The Real World and Vanilla Sky, respectively. "Sulking with Lisa Loeb on the Ice Planet Hoth" is arguably the most convincing selection of them all, in which the reader is persuaded to believe that The Empire Strikes Back is a direct catalyst for the ethos of Generation X, a demographic that Klosterman, not so coincidentally, is a proud member of ("I'm a 'Gen-Xer,' OK?" he writes in a footnote to this article. "And I buy shit marketed to Gen-Xers. And I use air quotes when I talk, and I sigh a lot and I own a Human League cassette. Get over it.").

Conceptually packaged as a literary CD with each chapter deemed a track (replete with timed track cuts serving as content page numbers) and a continuous stream of provocative "interludes" (mini-essays that buffer each piece), Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs proves that Klosterman is an unparalleled chronicler of the Zeitgeist -- not to mention his obvious awareness for what is truly a well-balanced breakfast.

Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto By Chuck Klosterman Scribner, 244 pp., $23

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