Home > Work > Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century
1 " 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. "
― Chuck Klosterman , Chuck Klosterman X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century
2 " Once people decide they want you to do something, they don't really care what your qualifications are. "
3 " Now hitting on all sixteen cylinders, the Beatles bolted back to the woodshed for The Beatles, a blandly designed masterwork that could inspire any reasonable California citizen to launch a race war. "
4 " I have a colleague who feels anyone over the age of twenty-one caught reading a Harry Potter novel should be executed without trial, but that strikes me as unreasonable; the fact that they're written for British thirteen-year-olds probably means they're the right speed for 90 percent of American adults. "
5 " But part of me knows there’s an intangible downside to having complete intellectual detachment from whatever most Americans consider to be common knowledge. "
6 " The possibility of parents and children sharing the same cultural interests has increased dramatically over the past twenty-five years; today, the central bifurcation is how that communal culture is accessed and interpreted and experienced. "
7 " 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. "
8 " 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. "
9 " If you like harmonies or guitar overdubs or the sun or Norwegian lesbians or taking drugs during funerals or the invention of sound, you will probably enjoy these records. Rubber Soul gets an A- because I don't speak French. "
10 " The so-called Rad Four donned comedic Technicolor dream coats, consumed seven hundred sheets of mediocre acid on the roof of the studio, and proceeded to make Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, a ground breaking record no one actually likes. "
11 " I will live forever, or at least until I'm forty-five. "
12 " Roughly 5.3 million people watched the first episode of "The Walking Dead" on AMC, a stunning 83 percent more than the 2.9 million who watched the season four premiere of "Mad Men." This means there are at least 2.4 million cable-ready Americans who would prefer watching Christina Hendricks if she were an animated corpse. "