Football

Football by Chuck Klosterman

Football is the most popular sport in the United States. It dominates the TV ratings. The USA vs. Belgium world cup soccer game was the top rated non-NFL sports broadcast, and didn't come close to NFL playoff ratings. It was even behind two Thanksgiving day broadcasts. The Super bowl is always the most popular TV broadcast. Even Canadians are more likely to watch the super bowl than the Canadian Football Grey Cup Championship. The "defects" of football work to its advantage. There is intense action and then a lot of time to figure out what happened. The full game cannot be played casually. The "casual" versions like flag football are fundamentally different.

Football's great popularity is sowing the seeds of its downfall. College football is professionalizing, reducing the strong attachments that students would have to their team. At the lower levels, the dangers are driving parents away from letting their kids play. Outside the south, high school football has become less important. Football is dominating casual fans, but not producing new die hards. It is a conservative bastion in a liberalizing world. People will eventually lose interest and move on to something else. Horse racing was once an extremely popular spectator sport. Today, it is shadow of itself with a few niche events remaining. In the past horses were part of everyone's regular life. Not so anymore. Other dangers could impact football. A death on the field remains a possibility. Sports gambling is helping to increase interest now, but could also create issues. Professional football only surpassed baseball in the 1960s as the most popular American sport. Today, soccer is closing the gap among youth. How much longer will football dominate?

Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction

Raised in Captivity: Fictional Nonfiction by Chuck Klosterman

These are random stories that almost appear true, but are not quite. There is a puma in a first class bathroom. There is a coach that has no experience in football, yet takes over a team. They have one play they run on offense. They get totally beat down in their first game. Things get a little better with each following game until they are totally beating other teams. The players go on to greatness. Somebody struggles when their significant other is diagnosed as "fake woke". Somebody tries to hire a hitman to take out their spouse. The hitman proposes a 4 year plan that would drive him to suicide. There are a number of other stories with a bit of a macabre twist or a "wait is this real?" plausibility? 

Chuck Klosterman X: The Audio Companion to a Highly Specific and Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century

Chuck Klosterman X: The Audio Companion to a Highly Specific and Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century by Chuck Klosterman

Columnist Chuck Klosterman summarizes some of his writings from the early 21st century. This work really is his recap and analysis of things that he thought were important. There are discussions of various rock star interviews as well as other works. He goes in depth talking about the band Kiss. It is better to have a few people love and hate you than to have people just think you are ok. He includes an anecdote about a satire he wrote for a Beatles box set review that ended up getting taken seriously. He also mentions that he has not read Harry Potter and may be missing out on pop culture references. The audiobook is a good quick reference to the mind of a pop columnist.

The Visible Man: A Novel

A therapist sees a very unique patient. The patient wants to talk, but is also guarded in what he says. At first he only wants to be seen over telephone. He doesn't reveal his real name or any detailed personal information. He does gradually unfold his history. He was a precocious kid who was very interested in studying people when they are alone. He would observe people in the bushes just to see what they would do when they were not pretending to be something for other people.

He was later part of a project to design an invisibility suit. This would absorb and reflect light in such a way that the wearer could not easily be seen by others. He would use this suit to observe people. He would enter their houses and sit and observe. He trained his body to require minimal inputs or outputs in order to maximize his experience.

In most cases he did just observe. However, he had a few interactions. One woman he observed smoked huge amounts of pot, and ate excessively. Then she exercised excessively to burn off the excess wait. He convinced himself he could help her by lacing her marijuana with some of his stimulants to reduce her appetite. Her appetite was lessened, but her body did not respond well to the cocktail. He called 911 for her and she recovered. In another case, he accidentally killed a man who he thought was being cruel to a man he was observing. He seemed to show no remorse for the death, though did seem to have a little emotion towards the man who was charged with murder.

The therapist and the not-fully-visible man did slowly warm up to each other. He visited her in person and even at times invisible. They gradually got to have some relationship. She would also hide this experience from others. Her husband caught on. Eventually, things culminated with the patient appearing in their house one night. They tried to attack him, but he ended up throwing her husband, causing him to be paralyzed.

The story is framed as a manuscript for a book to be published by the therapist. Was this invisible patient real? Are there other people running around unobserved?  Or was this a delusion from the therapist to attempt to escape from her banal experience?  Was she involved in some of the things she reported him doing? She acknowledged ethical lapses. Was there more? 

But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present as If It Were the Past

If you ask people if anything that we believe in today could be considered wrong in the future, they would likely say yes. However, if you ask about a specific thing (such as gravity), you are likely to get an answer that it would never be considered wrong. That is a conundrum that we run into when looking at the present. We know that past accepted truths are no longer believed today, yet we have trouble imagining specific truths of today no longer being accepted.

With his experience as an art critic, he pays special interest to how music and art will be remembered. The 78 era is defined by those who have collected these records. Their tastes are different than the general population that purchased records and thus tend to show a more quirky taste than the general public. Moby Dick was a commercial failure when written, but become well regarded later. At the turn of 19th to 20th century there were a large number of march composers. However, Sousa is pretty much the only one remembered today. Centuries from now, the "rock" era may be consolidated to a single person or group. Perhaps the Beatles or Bop Dylan will be remembered. Or perhaps some obscure artist that we don't think of much today will be used to signify the era. The past works that are acclaimed are often more a reflection of the current day than the time they were written. There is a great deal of subjectiveness in the matter. 

There is also a "merging" of years from the past. Julius Caesar and Constantine are lumped together as "leaders of Rome". Yet they were much further apart than George Washington and Joe Biden. Roman history may be summarized as "Julias Caesar was assassinated, Augustus became emperor, Constantine became Christianity. How would our history be summarized?

Science and technology are also evolving. We scoff at "flat earth" beliefs of those of the part. It is difficult to see that some of our beliefs are just wrong. Yet, we have seen accepted scientific truths change before our eyes. Einstein ripped apart details of Newtonian physics. New work has lead to different understandings of basic physics. Our knowledge of biological science is constantly evolving. Germ theory seems second nature. Fields like epigenetics seem to take us back to understandings that were disregarded before. The slow evolution of science causes us to miss some of the big changes that have occurred. When we look back at a long view, they may become much more apparent.

I liked the premise of the book, but did feel it dragged on a bit. The pop-culture analysis seemed to be the author's forte. There were some great chapters, though there were also areas that seemed to ramble on without building up the central thesis. It is a great topic to explore, yet also a difficult one to get your brain around. It feels we are "stuck" in our current view, and our brains extrapolate forward from where we are today rather than expect turns and detours.

The Nineties: A Book

In the 90s, the Internet made great headways in culture. Before the internet, it was normal to just not know things. You couldn't easily look something up, especially if it happened relatively recently. There could be a communal remembrance of the "wrong" fact. With the internet it became much easier to find obscure facts. 

Growth in technology also allowed for a move from a populist culture to more niches. Blockbuster and video rental stores allowed for even the most obscure foreign movies to be watched in small towns. Compact discs helped enable independent music to have a more widespread footprint. Online music stores made it easy to find almost any music. Then Napster came around and made it easy to get a desired song for free,

Decades don't necessarily fit into their chronological time period. The 90s pretty much started with Nirvana's Nevermind, and ended with the twin towers. Nevermind was not the most popular album (Many other albums by artists such as Shania Twain, Metallica and Backstreet Boys sold more copies.) However, it espoused the ethos of the 1990s. Being "real" was important. You could be famous as long as you didn't want to be famous. The pop culture mentality of the 90s took on personal responsibility for your condition but didn't do anything about it. The world is falling apart and you are miserable. Oh well. You will not do anything about it. Even the best-selling artist of the decade, Garth Brooks, expressed this "authenticity". He was himself and made music that he liked - it just happened to be very popular.

The books is a series of interrelated essays about the 90s and the "Generation-X" that inhabited them. (Included is a discussion of the book Generation-X and how it came to signify an entire group.) The generation is smaller than the one before and after it. There are many parts of the "mythos" of the 90s that don't match the lived experience. That is all part of how our "remembrance" of things in the past is colored by our future experiences.