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Summary
Summary
Chuck Klosterman has walked into the darkness. As a boy, he related to the cultural figures who represented goodness-but as an adult, he found himself unconsciously aligning with their enemies. This was not because he necessarily liked what they were doing; it was because they were doing it on purpose (and they were doing it better). They wanted to be evil. And what, exactly, was that supposed to mean? When we classify someone as a bad person, what are we really saying (and why are we so obsessed with saying it)? In I Wear the Black Hat , Klosterman questions the very nature of how modern people understand the concept of villainy. What was so Machiavellian about Machiavelli? Why don't we see Batman the same way we see Bernhard Goetz? Who's more worthy of our vitriol-Bill Clinton or Don Henley? What was O.J. Simpson's second-worst decision? And why is Klosterman still obsessed with some kid he knew for one week in 1985?
Masterfully blending cultural analysis with self-interrogation and limitless imagination, I Wear the Black Hat delivers perceptive observations on the complexity of the anti-hero (seemingly the only kind of hero America still creates). I Wear the Black Hat is the rare example of serious criticism that's instantly accessible and really, really funny. Klosterman is the only writer doing whatever it is he's doing.
Author Notes
Chuck Klosterman, currently a music, film, & culture critic for Ohio's "Akron Beacon Journal", began his career with "The Forum" in Fargo, North Dakota. He lives in Akron, Ohio, where he once consumed nothing but McDonald's Chicken McNuggets for seven straight days.
(Publisher Provided)
Reviews (5)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Klosterman's latest exercise in pop-culture-infused philosophical acrobatics is an exploration of villainy, or rather, "the presentation of material" on the subject. Basically, the premise gives the veteran author (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) and current "Ethicist" for the New York Times Magazine an excuse to tackle an array of subjects ranging from Machiavelli (whose biggest crime was turning "an autocratic template into entertainment") to 1980s N.Y.C. subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, who could have been a superhero if he had just kept his mouth shut. "Every forthcoming detail about his life-even the positive ones-made his actions on the subway seem too personal," Klosterman writes. His circuitous arguments are occasionally self-indulgent and too reminiscent of David Foster Wallace, but the writing is always intellectually vigorous and entertaining. According to Klosterman, being the villain is about knowing the most but caring the least, which has as much to do with self-awareness and public perception as the act itself. Agent: Daniel Greenbert, Levine Greenberg Agency. (July) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Booklist Review
With characteristically infuriating insight and wit, Klosterman (The Visible Man, 2011) takes on our fascination and often, indeed, our identification with villainy. He covers a lot of territory: the antiheroes he discusses include airplane hijacker D. B. Cooper, subway vigilante Bernhard Goetz, rappers NWA, the Oakland Raiders football team, Bill Clinton, and O. J. Simpson. Very much a product of his generation and as plugged into the popular culture as Mencken was antagonistic to it, Klosterman is in that same direct line of cultural critics as Bierce, Mencken, and more recently, P. J. O'Rourke, and his posture is similarly arch and iconoclastic, if more analytical. He is not for everybody (icons clearly have their supporters), and his targets often seem small, which may say as much about our culture as it does about Klosterman. But this collection of related essays, though uneven for example, his take on Muhammad Ali is particularly strong, but on Chevy Chase, Howard Cosell, or the Eagles, it is inconsequential will amuse and/or outrage but, either way, it should enlarge his audience.--Levine, Mark Copyright 2010 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
REVIEWING Edmund Wilson's "Apologies to the Iroquois," W.H. Auden suggested that "one of the ways in which an Intellectual Dandy can be recognized is by the unpredictability of his work." With this in mind, we can certainly.... But this is not how one begins a review of a Chuck Klosterman book. One begins a review of a Chuck Klosterman book like this: If Chuck Klosterman were murdered tomorrow by the lead singer of Limp Bizkit - a man he has characterized in print as "rock's sleaziest baboon" - then "I Wear the Black Hat" would be remembered as his fifth-greatest book. Better? The truth is Klosterman is an Intellectual Dandy. He bloweth where he listeth, he writes his own ticket, the envy of every culture critic who ever tottered home from a Starbucks laptop session with his clothes smelling of caffeine and cremated ideas. Klosterman has speculated with wild brilliance on the occult relation of David Koresh to Nirvana's "In Utero." He knows why "Survivor" is a more interesting show than "Lost." (It reveals "the mendacity of the desperately average") His first book, "Fargo Rock City," was about loving hair metal in North Dakota in the 1980s - we've grown used to this sort of thing by now, but in 2001 it was practically outsider art Since then he has published two novels, a road trip memoir and three collections of playful, amphibious essays and profiles. He writes the Ethicist column for The New York Times Magazine. His next book could be a work of untethered philosophy or a history of the drum machine. Or both at once, which is more his style. "The goal of being alive is to figure out what it means to be alive," he declared in the preface to 2003's "Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs," "and there is a myriad of ways to deduce that answer; I just happen to prefer examining the question through the context of Pamela Anderson and 'The Real World' and Frosted Flakes." So here he is now with "I Wear the Black Hat," a loopy essay sequence or series of riffs on the theme of villainy: demonic villainy (Aleister Crowley), celebrity gossip villainy (Perez Hilton), villainy theory (Machiavelli), heroic villainy (Bernhard Goetz), pop villainy (N.W.A.) and rock bands that are villainously bad (the Eagles, I think, although we're also told the Eagles "don't exist," or exist only "as a way to think about 'the Eagles'"). Bill Clinton is in there too, and Batman, and Joe Paterno, and the additional possibility that Klosterman himself, or some parts of him, might be villainous. It doesn't quite work, although to demand of a Klosterman book that it "work" - that it cohere, that it have some kind of function - feels a little ungrateful. If he's comfortable living on the near edge of nonsense, why shouldn't we be? It all begins Klostermanically enough, with the author as a 15-year-old, in North Dakota presumably, hearing for the first time Diamond Head's "Am I Evil?" (as performed by Metallica) and being "deeply disturbed": "The lyrics," he writes, "described bottomless vitriol toward the songwriter's mother and a desire to burn her alive." But wait a minute. Surely "Am I Evil?" is about a witch's son seeking vengeance for the immolation of his mother - not burning her himself. "As I watched my mother die, I lost my head/Revenge now I sought, to break with my bread...." Right? Mere quibbles, you may say. Heavy metal nit-picking. Who cares? But Klosterman is like this, with his free-floating connectivity - he arouses the pedant in a reviewer. I feel obliged also to point out that elsewhere in "I Wear the Black Hat" he writes "reticent" when he means "reluctant." This is a book that deals with - or touches on, at least - terrible acts. Terrible acts are serious. Can Chuck Klosterman be serious? What about his style, with its fierce commitment to flippancy and offhandedness, its sense of continually building toward a single, supremely offensive punch line that will end the universe if it ever gets uttered? Is it appropriate to write about, say, the O.J. Simpson case in this style? The answer, of course, is no, but that doesn't bother Klosterman at all. The first laugh in "I Wear the Black Hat" comes around Page 20, and it concerns the behavior and aspect of Gov. Rick Perry during the 2012 Republican primaries. "Perry didn't scare anyone; sure, he might sentence you to lethal injection, but he also might confuse the potassium chloride with Diet Dr Pepper." Adolf Hitler and Taylor Swift are both in this book, with Swift getting the more rigorous treatment. Here's Klosterman, for example, on the media backlash suffered by Swift after her 2010 album "Speak Now." "What really happened is this: People who liked Taylor Swift's music reverse-engineered a scenario in which they could appreciate her for nonmusical reasons; two years later, different people who loathed that construction had to find a way to pre-explain why they weren't going to enjoy her material (so they infused their prefab distaste of her persona back into her work)." The tribe has spoken. In the end, the most interesting thing about "I Wear the Black Hat" is Chuck Klosterman - or the alienated authorial presence that he conjures for himself in the course of the book. "I care about strangers when they're abstractions," he writes in the preface, "but I feel almost nothing when they're literally in front of me. They seem like unnamed characters in a poorly written novel about myself, which was written poorly by me." Later he claims to recognize himself in the more outlandish mendacities of Newt Gingrich: "It's like looking into a mirror I do not possess the capacity to smash." And the book's peroration, which I won't spoil, is a tour de force of nihilist confession. Really. This Michel Houellebecq side of Klosterman has been stewing for a while: I encourage the interested reader to seek out his 2011 novel "The Visible Man," in which a man in an invisibility suit (tiny mirrors, some kind of ointment) crouches in the apartments of lonely people and watches them as they check their e-mails, hit their bongs, check their e-mails, do their abdominal crunches, check their e-mails again and generally rotate in dull vortices of appetite and compulsion. It's funny and creepy and penetrating, even strangely wise, like a de-libidinized "Fermata." Chuck Klosterman understands modernity, laments modernity (while enjoying its products enormously) and is acutely aware of himself as a remote and sparkling consciousness that keeps itself busy thinking complicated thoughts about Taylor Swift. There is a flavor of the abyss in his work that keeps even its trivialities piquant. "I Wear the Black Hat" is not his best book, but in considering it we should remember the young person, probably not a reader of The New York Times, to whom its haphazardness, its occasional pointlessness and above all its difficulty keeping a straight face will come as sweet, sweet relief. Adolf Hitler and Taylor Swift are both in this book, with Swift getting the more rigorous treatment. James Parker is a contributing editor at The Atlantic
Kirkus Review
Of John Rawls and Keith Richards: Klosterman (The Visible Man, 2011, etc.) returns with a pop-cultureladen meditation on the bad guys of the world and what they mean. Philosophers call it the "problem of evil." Though he holds down the lofty post of ethicist for the New York Times Magazine, Klosterman's take is guided less by the wisdom of the ages than his own gut feeling. In the linked essays here, he's grappling less with supervillains such as Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot (though both figure) than with such less-fraught specimens as Snidely Whiplash, of Dudley Doo-Right fame, and Morris Day, who dared oppose Prince for the love of a righteous woman and top stakes in the battle of the bands. That most of his subjects are from the pop-culture realm, whether Andrew Dice Clay or Chevy Chase or the Eagles, does not diminish the underlying sophistication of Klosterman's guiding questions: Why is it that grown-ups are more comfortable with the grays of a black-and-white world while being drawn to the dark side of the force? Which is to say, why do kids love Luke Skywalker while adults secretly cheer for Darth Vader? Well, not all adults do, of course--just as not all adults will forgive Klosterman his roundabout defense of Newt Gingrich as a Very Bad Guy who doesn't give a monkey's backside for what other people think of him. Still, there are some fruitful exercises in the author's brand of such forgiveness: quantifying, say, who was to blame in the Monica Lewinsky affair ("The larger vilification was ultimately split five ways. Mr. Clinton, of course, was first against the wall") and running through the moral calculus to determine whether, la Jeffrey Lebowski, we should not all deem the Eagles the most evil band in history--as, it seems, we should. A fine return to form for Klosterman, blending Big Ideas with heavy metal, The Wire, Batman and much more.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Library Journal Review
Klosterman's (Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs) first work of nonfiction since 2009 focuses on the cultural concept of villainy, but the topic serves only as a loose thread through a typical series of accessible yet insightful essays. The book examines who our culture chooses to hate by examining reputed folk villains like the Eagles, the Oakland Raiders, and Monica Lewinsky. Klosterman narrates this audio edition himself, and his casual performance straddles the line between audiobook and podcast. Still, hearing him read his own words helps lighten and contextualize the book. Klosterman fans will not be disappointed, and die-hards will want this audio edition. VERDICT Strongly recommended.-Mark John Swails, Johnson Cty. Community Coll., Overland Park, KS. (c) Copyright 2013. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Excerpts
Excerpts
I Wear the Black Hat One should judge a man mainly from his depravities. Virtues can be faked. Depravities are real. -- Klaus Kinski, super nihilist. I'm gonna quote a line from Yeats, I think it is: "The best lack all conviction, while the best are filled" . . . oh, no. It's the other way around. "The best lack all conviction, and the worst are filled with a passionate intensity." Now, you figure out where I am. -- Lou Reed, super high. I'm not a good guy. I mean, I don't hurt anybody. But I don't help, either. -- Louis C.K., super real. Excerpted from I Wear the Black Hat: Grappling with Villains (Real and Imagined) by Chuck Klosterman All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
| Preface | p. 1 |
| What You Say About His Company Is What You Say About Society | p. 9 |
| Another Thing That Interests Me About the Eagles Is That I [Am Contractually Obligated to] Hate Them | p. 23 |
| Villains Who Are Not Villains | p. 39 |
| Easier Than Typing | p. 59 |
| Human Clay | p. 77 |
| Without a Gun They Can't Get None | p. 89 |
| Arrested for Smoking | p. 107 |
| Electric Funeral | p. 131 |
| "I Am Perplexed" [This Is Why, This Is Why, This Is Why They Hate You] | p. 149 |
| Crime and Punishment (or the Lack Thereof) | p. 165 |
| Hider Is in the Book | p. 183 |
| The Problem of Overrated Ideas | p. 195 |
| Acknowledgments | p. 201 |
| Index | p. 2030 |
