I FINISHED reading Chuck Klosterman’s Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs: A Low Culture Manifesto weeks (or months?) ago. It was interesting, although there were parts that I couldn’t fully appreciate because I wasn’t very familiar with the topic (e.g. MTV’s The Real World).
Sometimes when people go nostalgic about the 90s, I feel out of place for reasons like 1) I was literally a kid back then and was therefore too young to appreciate grunge, 2) I’m not from a rich family so those game consoles and polly pockets were unheard of by my purita promdi self, and 3) I wasn’t raised in the US or in Manila so I find some of these pop culture 90s trademark a tad too alienating. But I digress.
Here are some lines that I highlighted while reading the book:
“Within the reality of one specific fiction, how do other fictions exist?”
“Without a soundtrack, human interaction is meaningless.”
Re: tribute bands in the 80s:
“They’re totally willing to become other people, as long as those people party all the time, live like gypsies, and have pretty girls dancing on their amplifiers. This is precisely why guys create rock bands; Paradise City just created somebody else’s.”
Re: Marilyn Monroe:
“So many people have retrospectively declared her acting to be “underrated” that she’s become overrated, simply because she didn’t make enough important films to vindicate her advocates’ claims.”
“It’s almost like desiring Pam Anderson is like admitting that—sexually—you have no creativity.”
“Trying to picture Norma Jean (ahem) ‘getting her freak on’ is like trying to imagine Bruce Lee getting into a bar fight: Even in my mind, I can’t conceive anything that doesn’t seem like cinema.”
“Men in the fifties wanted Monroe because she made love to the men they respected; modern men want Anderson because she makes love to the concept of celebrity.”
“Do you know people who insist they like ‘all kinds of music’? That actually means they like no kinds of music.”
“What’s most disturbing is the amount of Internet porn that has absolutely nothing to do with sexual desire and everything to do with cartoonish misogyny, most notably the endless sites showing men ejaculating on women’s faces while the recipients pretend to enjoy it; this has about as much to do with sex as hitting someone in the face with a frying pan.”
“The desire to be cool is—ultimately—the desire to be rescued. It’s the desire to be pulled from the unwashed masses of society.”
Re: the Tori Paradox in Saved by the Bell:
“Coming and going is more normal than it should be.”
“The elitist belief is that hearing what an artist is saying is either (a) totally irrelevant, or (b) only relevant when difficult. ”
The featured image is from Scribd.
sure. wait. what? 
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