A Book of All-New Pop Culture Pieces by Chuck
KlostermanChuck Klosterman has chronicled rock music, film,
and sports for almost fifteen years. He's covered extreme
metal, extreme nostalgia, disposable art, disposable heroes,
life on the road, life through the television, urban
uncertainty and small-town weirdness. Through a variety of
mediums and with a multitude of motives, he's written about
everything he can think of (and a lot that he's forgotten).
The world keeps accelerating, but the pop ideas keep coming.
In Eating the Dinosaur, Klosterman is more entertaining and
incisive than ever. Whether he's dissecting the boredom of
voyeurism, the reason why music fan's inevitably hate their
favorite band's latest album, or why we love watching
can't-miss superstars fail spectacularly, Klosterman remains
obsessed with the relationship between expectation, reality,
and living history. It's amateur anthropology for the
present tense, and sometimes it's incredibly funny.Q: What
is this book about?A: Well, that's difficult to say. I
haven't read it yet - I've just clicked on it and casually
glanced at this webpage. There clearly isn't a plot. I've
heard there's a lot of stuff about time travel in this book,
and quite a bit about violence and Garth Brooks and why
Germans don't laugh when they're inside grocery stores.
Ralph Nader and Ralph Sampson play significant roles. I
think there are several pages about Rear Window and football
and Mad Men and why Rivers Cuomo prefers having sex with
Asian women. Supposedly there's a chapter outlining all the
things the Unabomber was right about, but perhaps I'm
misinformed.Q: Is there a larger theme?A: Oh, something
about reality. "What is reality," maybe? No, that's not it.
Not exactly. I get the sense that most of the core questions
dwell on the way media perception constructs a fake reality
that ends up becoming more meaningful than whatever actually
happened.Q: Should I read this book?A: Probably. Do you see
a clear relationship between the Branch Davidian disaster
and the recording of Nirvana's In Utero? Does Barack Obama
make you want to drink Pepsi? Does ABBA remind you of AC/DC?
If so, you probably don't need to read this book. You
probably wrote this book. But I suspect everybody else will
totally love it, except for the ones who absolutely hate it.