Quotes from Chuck Klosterman

And I'm probably wrong. Maybe not completely, but partially. And maybe not today, but eventually.

This conclusion invented a political perspective that's become omnipresent in any two-person race but still felt original in 2000: Again and again, Bush was described as the candidate voters 'would rather have a beer with.' It was a very nineties way to think about a problem.

Before the 1975 fight in Manila, Ali bragged about attending a Ku Klux Klan meeting; he met with the KKK's leadership because they agreed on the issue of interracial marriage (both sides saw it as an atrocity). The

If you can't empathize with Charlie Brown, you likely lack an ability to empathize with any fictional character. Here is a child continually humiliated for desiring nothing more than normalcy - the opportunity to kick a football, the aptitude to fly a kite, the freedom to walk down the sidewalk without having a random acquaintance compare his skull to a block of lumber.

Within any generation, there are always two distinct classes: a handful who accept and embody the assigned caricature, and many more others who are caricatured against their will, simply because they happened to be born in a particular year. It was no different for Generation X. The only dissimilarity is that it bothered them less.

It did not feel outrageous, for example, that Pauly Shore spent much of the nineties as a bankable movie star, regardless of how baffling that notion strikes anyone who missed it entirely.

His talent was appearing to understand obvious realities that other people could not see, expressed with the kind of self-assurance that can only come from extreme wealth.

I'm sure I could have read the entire four-thousand-page plot summarized in four hundred words on Wikipedia, or I could simply walk into any high school and ask a few questions of the first kid I find who isn't smoking crystal meth.

There's even an 1892 novel called Golf in the Year 2000 that (somewhat incredibly) predicts the advent of televised sports.

Many long-term relationships begin with a physical attraction that evolves into a state of mutual appreciation; it's not impossible to imagine that process happening in reverse.

Necessity used to be the mother of invention, but then we ran out of things that were necessary.

the slow cancellation of the future and the fast homogenization of the past]

Dazed and Confused

However, I suppose VH1 *is* selling me something; they're selling nostalgia, which means they're selling my own memories back to me, which means they're selling me to me.

The Brady Bunch Movie, released in February of 1995

I am not under any orders to make the world a better place.

The two most durable joke constructions were (a) casually dismissing something new that would later become extremely common, and (b) referring to some forgotten triviality as if it were destined to be timeless.

Once people decide they want you to do something, they don't really care what your qualifications are. However you describe yourself becomes proof that you're the ideal candidate. This is true in journalism, and in life.

People will look at the world without seeing anything beyond their unconscious expectation.

It was not nostalgia for a time that was more wholesome. It was nostalgia for a time when you could relax and care less.

In other words, people who don't know better are often wrong by accident, and people who do know better are sometimes wrong on purpose—and whenever a modern news story explodes, everyone recognizes that possibility. But we question this far less when the information comes from the past. It's so hard to get viable info about pre-twentieth-century life that any nugget is reflexively taken at face value.

this is how media devolution works: It creates an archetype that eventually dwarfs its origin.

What Tarantino could express, more explicitly than any of his peers, was the intensity of his own perspective.

What you find out fairly quickly in Hollywood," Tarantino told the BBC in 1994, "is that this is a community where hardly anybody trusts their own opinion. People want people to tell them what is good. What to like, what not to like. But here I come. I'm a film geek. My opinion is everything. You can all disagree with me. I don't care.