Last week in this space, we invited you to share your pop culture “cold spot” — the thing that everyone, it seems, loves but you. Come to find out, boy oh boy did a lot of you want to get that little nugget off your chest; the comments were voluminous, as previously-closeted detractors of Harry Potter, Indiana Jones, Star Wars, the Grateful Dead, Buffy, Bjork, Twilight, the Black Keys, Mad Men, 30 Rock, Lady Gaga, Dylan, and The Wire (okay, c’mon, seriously?) proclaimed their distaste for the tastemakers’ faves. For this week, we thought we’d turn the idea on its head. There’s plenty of stuff out there that you’re supposed to dislike; which of those trends do you buck?
1. After Katy Perry ripped off their album title, Beach House is threatening to record a song called “I Kissed a Girl.” [via Vulture]
2. Some news that will make our prepubescent male readers happy: Playboy plans to unveil a 3D centerfold in their June issue. [via AP]
3. In the wake of Gang Starr rapper Guru’s death, someone has hacked into his former partner Solar’s email account. What they found suggests that he is just as evil as some people have always suspected. [via Sound of the City]
4. Coming soon to a theater near you, a Beatles zombie movie, Paul Is Undead: The British Zombie Invasion, based on an illustrated novel by Alan Goldsher. We look forward to finding out who gets cast as the band’s arch nemesis — a zombie-killing Mick Jagger. [via Spinner]
5. Chuck Klosterman’s upcoming release isn’t a new book. It’s a set of 50 cards intended to inspire debate and conversation among friends. [via Paste]
With Inventory, the Onion‘s pop-cultural critics at the A.V. Club provide a hilarious compendium of their ultra-specific weekly lists.
From a dozen songs about how much public transportation sucks and ten movie franchises that never were to 25 sure signs that a sitcom is terrible, Inventory provides an exhaustive collection of esoteric knowledge. It also includes special book-only sections and lists penned by non-Onion funny people like John Hodgman and Amy Sedaris.
Additionally, there’s an intro by the always engaging Chuck Klosterman (who recently revealed to us his own list of albums to beat writer’s block). The best part: The book’s full of recommendations and forgotten titles that will send you to Amazon or Netflix with a quickness.
Considering Chuck Klosterman kicks off his new book of essays, Eating the Dinosaur, with a piece about the inherent lack of truth in interviews, especially his own, it only makes sense to skirt the straight-up Q&A and angle for something the man might not want to lie about. Sure, there’s a risk Klosterman might not take the bait (“I don’t feel it’s my obligation to respond to anything…”), yet 99 times out of 99, he probably will (“still, I provide answers to every question I encounter, even if I don’t know what I should say”). So, instead of asking him to answer questions, per se, and risk a variable truthiness, we thought we’d get a better bead on the word-worker at work if he told us what music he plays while he’s reading and writing.
If anyone other than Chuck Klosterman had attempted to get Eating the Dinosaur published, they would have failed. This inevitable rejection would not be the fault of the writer, but of two distinct realities that solidify Klosterman’s place in the cultural canon: the continued existence of Chuck Klosterman himself, and of the multitude of people a) who blog for free about whatever they want and b) who blog for money about whatever their editors want. It is because Klosterman doesn’t blog, and because everyone else does, that he got this book published. He established his persona pre-blog and remains that way, possibly making him the only living young writer who maintains that kind of purity.
They may not look it, but few know rock and roll like Chuck Klosterman and Craig Finn. This in mind, we are reassured to know that the pair, along with Tom Ruprecht, a long time Letterman writer, will be joining task to produce the coming-of-age with rock-and-roll film Fargo Rock City. The movie will find inspiration in Klosterman’s 2001 memoir of the same title, which explores Klosterman’s experience growing up as a heavy metal fan in a North Dakota, and how music helped him to transcend. Or as the subtitle reads, his “Heavy Metal Odyssey in North Dakota.”
Perhaps the most anticipated album of our age, Guns ‘N Roses’ long-brewing Chinese Democracy broke its 15-year gestation period with a bit of a whimper. While the media’s incredulous exhortations of the album were unrelenting in the weeks before its release, sales and radio response have been somewhat less stunning. The critical reaction is similarly mixed: Paste called the record “a bottomless pit dug by disposable income, a persecution complex, and egomania,” while Rolling Stone maintained that it was an “audacious, unhinged and uncompromising hard-rock record.”
While his guest review for the Onion addressed a number of shortcomings, best-selling author, acclaimed music critic, and general Axl enthusiast Chuck Klosterman ultimately came out in heavy defense of the album. After the jump, Klosterman goes one-on-one with Flavorwire’s resident hair-metal hater and Unpopular Opinions aficionado, The Beard, on the album itself, the reasons for its muted reception, and the underpinnings and larger implications of his outlook.
When we heard that Chuck Klosterman’s road-trip memoir Killing Yourself To Live would be coming to the big screen soon, we were careful not to get too excited. Sure, some of our favorite journalist narratives have been successfully adapted into masterpieces, like Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, which became Adaptation, or even Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. But others, like this year’s How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, get Hollywood-ized with characters that never existed and none of the first-person drivel we liked about them in the first place.
Which brings us back to Klosterman — he’s no Hunter S. Tompson, but his account of his magical music mystery tour is complicated and dark, and we’d hate to see it transformed into a crappy buddy-road-trip comedy.
After the jump, we make casting suggestions for Killing Yourself to Live and suggest other non-fiction classics we’d like to see turned into good movies. Read More »
, with a piece about the inherent lack of truth in interviews, especially his own, it only makes sense to skirt the straight-up Q&A and angle for something the man might not want to lie about. Sure, there’s a risk Klosterman might not take the bait (“I don’t feel it’s my obligation to respond to anything…”), yet 99 times out of 99, he probably will (“still, I provide answers to every question I encounter, even if I don’t know what I should say”). So, instead of asking him to answer questions, per se, and risk a variable truthiness, we thought we’d get a better bead on the word-worker at work if he told us what music he plays while he’s reading and writing.
