(LBF reviews book written by rock critic!)
Long KYTL passage follows:
“We all have the potential to fall in love a thousand times in a lifetime. It’s easy. The first girl I ever loved was someone I knew in the sixth grade. Her name was Missy; we talked about horses. The last girl I love will be someone I haven’t even met yet, probably. They all count. But there are certain people you love who do something else; they define how you classify what love is supposed to feel like. These are the most important people in your life, and you’ll meet maybe four or five of these people over the span of 80 years. But there’s still one more tier to all this; there is always one person you love who becomes that definition. It usually happens retrospectively, but it always happens eventually. This is the person who unknowingly sets the template for what you will always love about other people, even if some of those lovable qualities are self-destructive and unreasonable. You will remember having conversations with this person that never actually happened. You will recall sexual trysts with this person that never technically occurred. This is because this individual who embodies your personal definition of love does not really exist. The person is real, and the feelings are real, but you create the context. And context is everything. The person who defines your understanding of love is not inherently different than anyone else, and they're often just the persons you happen to meet the first time you really, really want to love someone. But that person still wins. They win, and you lose. Because for the rest of your life, they will control how you feel about everyone else.”
-Chuck Klosterman "Killing Yourself to Live"
“...I pretty much agree with everything he says.”
-Bret Easton Ellis
I put Ellis' blurb from the back cover to the test, and this is what I found:
Chuck on punk rock (pg.5): “...could not do something correctly--yet still do it significantly--is all anyone needs to know about punk rock. That notion is punk rock, completely defined in one sentence.”
Me: Yeah like taking out the garbage but then snagging it on the door frame on the way to the garage. So punk rock.
Chuck on Cotard’s syndrome (pg. 23): “...is a mental disorder where the victim concludes that he or she is dead.”
Me: I feel this way after every break up at the moment I realize I will not be having sex for awhile.
Chuck on cheating (pg. 26): “...you won’t enjoy it. No matter which person you’re with, you’ll always be thinking of the other one. You will never be in the romantic present tense; your mind will solely exist in the past and the future.... The only thing infidelity does is remind you of the people you’re not having sex with, which is something you can just as easily think about when you are completely alone."
Me: Yeah, but isn't that mental role playing, which can totally spice things up!
Chuck on intelligence (pg. 30): “...knew what to do without being told; this struck me as one of the most insightful definitions of true intelligence I’d ever heard.”
Me: Hell, I do stuff without being told. I wish my bosses saw that as intelligent.
Chuck on cocaine (pg. 39): “...but you can certainly enjoy it recreationally, assuming you have disposable income and you hate yourself.... When you snort cocaine, you consciously allow yourself to become foolish in the hope of seeming cool, and that’s the worst choice any smart person can make.”
Me: Unless you're a hooker, and it helps numb the joy.
Chuck on pop culture (pg. 61): “But this is how popular culture works: You allow yourself to be convinced you’re sharing a reality that doesn’t exist.
Me: When is the new issue of Us Weekly out?
Chuck on dreams (pg. 84): “When someone wants to talk about a dream you can never say, “I don’t care.” You have to care. You just have to stand there and listen, because people who talk about their dreams are actually trying to tell you things about themselves they’d never admit in normal conversation.”
Me: I hate it when people tell me about their dreams, but that’s just a complex I got from an ex-girlfriend. I love dream catchers.
Chuck on genius v. visionary (pg. 89): “A genius can be a genius by trying to be a genius; a visionary can only have a vision by accident.”
Me: Within context of the book, this makes total fucking sense. Believe me.
Chuck on rock criticism (pg. 91): “The former lead singer of Soul Coughing once disregarded the entire career of [a Village Voice rock critic] by saying, ‘Let’s face facts here, what [so and so] does is write about his mail.’ And this is completely true; as a rock critic, you make a living reviewing your mail...”
Me: That sounds cool.
Chuck on dying (pg. 112): “We are always dying all the time. That’s what living is; living is dying, little by little.”
Me: Birth. School. Work. Death. Yeah, The Godfathers wrote that song.
Chuck on rock n’ roll (pg. 124): “Rock ‘n’ Roll is only superficially about guitar chords; it’s really about myth.”
Me: Satan has had a lot to do with rock n' roll.
Chuck on nostalgia (pg. 129): “There is a certain emotion we all have the potential to experience, and it is an emotion that can only be described as ‘terrifying nostalgia.’
“When you start thinking about what your life was like 10 years ago--and not in general terms, but in highly specific detail--it’s disturbing to realize how certain elements of your being are completely dead. They die long before you do. Or maybe it seems like they just happened to someone else. To someone you don’t really know. To someone you just hung out with for one night, and now you can’t even remember her name.”
Me: Is it Lisa, or Laura? I know not her real name. But I’m sure it’s beautiful just the same.
Chuck on Body Integrity Identity Disorder (pg. 187): “...an extremely rare psychological disorder that makes otherwise sane people amputate their own limbs for no apparent reason.”
Me: Like when I walked through some woods in Connecticut and a leach was on my arm. Or was I just imagining that.
Chuck on Led Zeppelin (pg. 198): “They sound like a warm-blooded brachiosaur. They sound like Hannibal’s assault across the Alps. They sound sexy and sexist and sexless. They sound dark but stoned; they sound smart but dumb; they seem older than you, but just barely.... And the experience this creates is unique to Led Zeppelin because its manifestation is entirely sonic: There is a point in your life when you hear The Ocean and Out On The Tiles and Kashmir, and you suddenly find yourself feeling like these songs are actively making you into the person you want to be.”
Me: There was a point in my life, when I thought Led Zeppelin was the perfect music to have sex to. I’m still at that point.
Chuck on marijuana (pg. 208): “It will destroy your ambition, and make you fat. And if you smoke it all the time, you’ll eventually stop dreaming at night, so you’ll always wake up tired.”
Me: So that’s where all my dreams went. To pot.
Chuck on the NYC blackout of 2003 (pg. 209): “I always miss the desirable disasters.”
Me: Yeah, Chuck, you were in Montana. I was stuck in New Jersey.
