tonight we are so thrilled to welcome chuck klosterman talking about his new release the 90s a book. he is the best-selling author of eight nonfiction books two novels and short story collection raised in captivity. he has written for the new york times the washington post gq esquire spin the guardian and billboard among others. the 90s brought about a revolution in the human condition that we're still groping to understand beyond. epiphenomena like like cop killer titanic and zema. there are wholesale shifts in how society was perceived the rise of the internet 3 9 11 politics and the paradoxical belief that nothing was more humility humiliating than trying to hard. pop pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything generating an odd comfort it never being certain about anything. in the 90s a book took close to men makes a home in all of it the film the music the sports the tv the politics the changes regarding race and class and sexuality and then yin and yang oprah and alan greenspan. so this evening's event will include an audience q&a. so please use the q&a button at the bottom of your screen if you'd like to ask a question as well if someone has typed a question, you're all select to know the answer to please upvote that particular question by clicking the thumbs up button. lastly support chuck and pals by purchasing a copy of his book from us a link to buy the 90s will be shared in the chat a couple of times tonight since chuck price graciously stopped by the store. we currently have over a hundred actual signed copies. see right here. i'm right there. so order yours while supplies last. all right. thanks so much chuck for joining us and we're excited to have you. this is the beginning. okay. well, i you know, this is normally the part in the in the event where i would boy i would say like boy, you know, it's it's great to be here. um, but you know, it's really not great to be here because i'm not there. i am literally here like out behind my house, you know. all this book could have come out last fall. probably we probably could have pushed it and had it come out in the fall, but we thought well if we wake up february everything about the pandemic will be over and we will all be back to life. it's just seen that way when this decision was made but as you can see this is not powers behind me if it was it would be a very unpopular store with an extremely limited inventory. um now, you know when it's weird, but the weird thing about this is to me is that it should be better to do it this way. it really should. like i don't have to travel. that's great when i'm done with this. i'll just walk up to my house, you know, and talk to my kids. that'll be it, you know, no travel at all. no hotel. um, there can be more people at the event in theory. they told me there was like 600 people signed up for this. it's very rare to get 600 people into a bookstore. um, you know it they i can get people from like all over the country coming to this there may be people from other countries at least canada. um, you know, they actually in a way i suppose should replicate the experience of writing the book because when you write a book, you know, you are by yourself. so here i am talking about my book in the same place and kind of in the same atmosphere that i wrote it in. so it seems like this should be better but it's not it's just it's it's bizarre and you know, it makes me feel like i'm a totally insane person to be doing events like this. just i'm talking and i'm looking at a picture of myself and it seems like i'm acting or actually putting together like a video tape to send out to get additions for acting or even maybe in a way. it seems like i'm in a really bad movie where there's a bunch of exposition they have to get into it. so they've created this narrative conceit where a guy talks to himself on his computer to explain what's going on. i just feel crazy. also if there were actually the people who are watching this now if you were in a room together, you know, i'm not really saying anything that hilarious but a few you might just kind of beittering and chuckling but there'd be a bunch of you right so would sound like it's going great right now. it feels like it's going terrible because i've just talking to a picture of myself, but you know, that's all life is temporarily hopefully temporarily hopefully not forever. um, so i'm just gonna do this as best i can and i hope the technology doesn't break down. it is interesting in a normal event. you worry no one's gonna show up but in a virtual event you spend the whole time worrying the computer's gonna freeze and like it might freeze when i'm doing something weird, like i'm talking with my hands all the sudden like this. for a real long time and then someone captures that in the next thing. i know my entire life is built around this time. i did this by accident. so while i may not be happy to be doing it in this way. i am happy you came to this. i appreciate paul setting this up for me and i hope that this kind of strange conversation to no one is interesting view also as the guy said there's this q&a button down at the bottom of the zoom. i really hope you ask a lot of questions because i enjoy answering them or at least making up an answer to them and just so you know, i always say this you don't have to ask me questions about this book and i know this book is called the 90s will probably be questions about the 90s, you know, it'll be like, oh, what's your third favorite oasis song or whatever. that's totally fine. i'll take those questions, but you can also ask me about anything you want. if you want to try to ask me the weirdest possible question. and see if you can confuse me or throw me off. i say go ahead try to out weird me. i would i would love to see it. i don't really feel like that's happened before but if somebody can do it, i'll be impressed. okay, so why did i write a book about the knights? well a lot of reasons there's never a real easy way to answer a question like that. it's it's the the main questions that want to ask you when you write a book. like why did you do it and if you gave a real answer you would just say i don't know i was compelled to do so because that is my real answer. i don't know why i am compelled to do what i do. i i just just i can't not do it and it's not that writing makes me feel so good. i find that writing. uh stops me from feeling bad like if i don't do any writing i feel weird. i assume what it must be like is somebody who is really addicted to cigarettes. and that when they started smoking cigarettes, it was fun and cool and they like doing it and made him feel good. but then at the end all the cigarette does stop them from like feeling uncomfortable. that's kind of how it is for me. like i just i kind of write books because i've just forced to do it by my body against my will in a way that's not even necessarily great, but for a job, it's a very good job and you know the publishing of these books is a complicated process, but they go together if you want to make a living writing you gotta put the books out, so the 90s to me were interesting in a lot of different ways right? i graduated from high school in 1990 and then you know, i was you 28 when the decade ended. 27 28 and so i really did experience young adult during this period but this is not a memoir and everybody thinks that it might be. i'm sorry to disappoint you this is not about my life. i wrote a book 20 years ago called sex drugs and cocoa puffs. that was kind of a memoir about experiencing the 90s. it was sort of how this period felt through the prism of my own experience and all the things i did and my very specific interests at the time. this is not like that. this is more detached. because i do think that there are some aspects about the 90s that are significant and i wanted to have them. a quantified before a lot of other people decide to revise what the period was like and what i mean by that is i i know how this works this process of kind of contemporary history operates in this way where people consistently go back to a period and they say well, okay we all thought this at the time but actually it was the complete opposite or we viewed this thing as significant. so obviously it couldn't have been it was this obscure thing. you know, like this is the process that's going to happen the way people work through history is sort of by going back and changing their memory of it based on the way. they think about the world and the present tense they think about the past the same way. they think about the world they're living in right now. so what i really wanted to try to do was write a book that is not how the 90s seem to us now, but how they seemed as they were actually unspoing sort of like the texture and feeling of the time as it was happening that that it wasn't that i was trying to go back and find things about the 90s that explain the way the world is now although sometimes that does happen for the most part it was why did this? period of time sort of create the way people understood reality. in other words like the culture and the politics and the sports and all these things that were happening. how did those things sort of manifest themselves in a way that made people feel like this is how i'm supposed to view the world or this is how the world feels to me. so it's not an attempt to transform the way people currently think about the 90s. post to be this thing where you believed one thing when you read the book and but when you finish it, you believe something, you know completely contradictory what i was trying to do is just sort of capture the actual way it seemed at the time like the to kind of get away from the idea that the way things might. appear to us now or what things mean now was how they were then i don't think that's how it works. i think it's a very natural process for all people myself included you look back on your life or you look back on the past and unconsciously you imagine yourself as the person you are now, but just like younger and maybe thinner perhaps shorter, but you somehow believe that the way you view the world and the way your mind operates was the static thing and that the experiences you had in the past were experienced by a version of you. but they were experienced by a version of you. that's actually an alien at least to the person you are now. so that was sort of my goal. i also think it's sort of consequential that the 90s were the last decade of the 20th century. but in a sense, it feels like it might be the last decade where that term makes sense where you can frame a period of time and say there were these sort of immutable values and shared characteristics and sort of culture built into the time period that even those people who didn't enjoy it or some themselves as against it, you know or stop themselves as ideologically adversarial with what was going on at the time. they still had a full understanding that this was this kind of shared experience that maybe was invisible at the time but seems very clear now. one thing i want to talk about because you know, i'm promoting this book, so i give a lot of interviews do a lot of podcasts some guy from magazine interviewed me and he talked about this idea. well, i talked about the idea i guess and he illustrated to other people about how it feels as though. the movement of time is changing. and that there's just palpable sense that we are not moving through time in the linear way. we had in the past now. he did quote me correctly what when i said this, but he left out a lot of parts that have caused a lot of other people to sort of look at this statement and assume that i'm just somebody who got old and i'm like, oh it's been used to be things changed now things don't change. they almost like willfully misinterpreted, so i kind of want to describe part of the thinking that went into this book and really i think informed a lot of the ways that i thought about the 90s. okay. it's a theory and it's not even my theory. it's a theory by a guy named mark fisher who was a kind of a british cultural critic. he died really young. he's not alive anymore a very brilliant person. he was a kind of an anti-capitalist sort of theorist but in my view, he's like his most interesting ideas tend to be related to culture. and the idea that he kind of forwarded, uh near the end of his life was something called the slow cancellation of the future. and what this means in simplest terms is that as we've sort of built up this massive collective body of content really starting after world war two before that tube really it accelerates after world war two. um and you know we were kind of moving through history and and things become popular and then they fade from popularity and something replaces them or ideas exist and a new artist or a new writer or however, you want a new politician sees these pre-existing ideas. perhaps even like a new economist see these preexisting ideas and sort of build something new beyond that almost using the previous idea as like the jumping off point. something strange has happened with the advent of the internet. which is that it doesn't seem as though time is still moving in this linear way because we now have instant access to all content that exists. so if in the past if time was like a road and somebody was walking down that road the scenery would change your along the way and perhaps what they saw a few miles back would be gone entirely unless they turned around and walked back in a very conscious manner to see it again. it was like time was this road. because of the internet and a lot of other things, uh, but the internet primarily culture is now more a real shallow ocean. like it's very fast. it's very wide, but it's not very deep. and you can go to any part of it you can get in your little theoretical rowboat go to any part of this ocean you want with the bucket and scoop up. the past and it creates this sense that we're living in a perpetual now. that we're not moving through time as much as we are just making everything new to some degree partially retro. um the example this guy used and i'm just this is history example, not mine, but he was he covered a genre of music called postpunk in the 80s. one day he's watching television and like, you know, 20 whatever 2011 or whatever and he sees this band and he is certain that this must have been a band from the 80s. he missed they're not only playing the style of postpunk. they're dressed like people from the 80s and it's not just that they're dressed that way. there's no sort of ironic value to this. this is actually just the way they're presenting themselves the videos being shot through a lens that that looks exactly as it would have been as it would have in the 80s like everything about it is exactly the way the 80s would have captured this genre of music, but then he finds out you know that it's not some band that he just somehow did not realize existed. it was the arctic monkeys which were a new baby. and yet everything about their identity was built through the past. and it wasn't their attempt to pay like an online like homage to the past. they weren't like saying like, oh, it's very funny. we're we're doing this because it shows like our sense of history. it actually is how the band operates there's many examples of this. you look at television for example if you take a footage say like 15 seconds of tv footage from some obscure show. from 1969 and then you take some obscure footage from a show in 1979. so you have little bits from these two shows 10 years apart. and you shown you a child. the child will know which one came first. like a child will be able to deduce both visually and in the way the whole thing is presented. that one came before the other this 10 year window. don't think that would happen now with a television show say from 2003 and a television show from now. i think they would be indistinguishable for someone for someone who is not familiar with either thing both in the way that people talk. the way it looks like that the tonality of how ideas are expressed the language. something seems to be happening where we are no longer moving forward through time in this way where certain ideas from the past are lost or a consciously sort of upended. it says if all this time is occurring simultaneously and this is why i say it kind of creates this sense of perpetual now, i mean things change in politics, that's one aspect that does seem different but the presentation of those politics and the way they are described by the media the expectation of person following the news. he needs as though. is slowed down and is not just the fact that i've gotten older it's really ahead and occurred to me and i felt. but until i heard someone here. and you know there. and that's so much arguing that this is a terrible thing. it's just strange and i think from for somebody really follows, you know, art or whatever, you know, um, this could be a problem and what is interesting about the 90s is that had not yet happened? the 90s were still progressing in the same trajectory previous decades had done. so when we look at this period of time we can sort of see the way time operated in the 20th century but through these things that i'm not that just the 90s feel further away than they actually are and that that's a that's like i think a common experience. i i wouldn't i'm sure people in the 1970s felt like well, the 50s are distant now, you know we watch happy days when we watched laverne & shirley and we watch greece and seems like this forgotten thing, but there's a some second layers here of strangeness that is creating the sense that the 90s were different in both sort of cultural but also like mechanical ways. and that's really kind of what prompted me to want to do this book because like i wanted to try to capture the way this was in some ways before someone else did it and started shifting a lot of the characters and the cliches because you know, it seems real reductionist to say that and i think people might not like hearing this but in some ways it's like the characters and cliches of a period are what become the historical memory that you know, we were not really remembering the actual events as much as sort of that kind of like the projection of it from you know versions of satire or someone doing the simplest version of a you know, a complex idea. those are the things that seem to make us recall like you the 1920s as being this certain way or the 1950s is being the certain way. it's not the literal things as much as sort of the interpretive things and i kind of wanted to get in and do the literal reading of this period before all the other interpretations sort of emerge. um, okay, so it is now we're 25 minutes in i see down in the q&a section. there's already create questions uh, i don't know how many of them. will be interesting and how many might just be, you know, i know is that i think that's or whatever. so i was considering, you know reading a little bit about this book from this book and talking about it. i think i'm gonna maybe read for two minutes. okay? um, just the very beginning of book the introduction, you know. the 90s began on january 1st of 1990 except for the fact that of course, they did not decades are about cultural perception and culture can't read a clock. the 1950s started in the 1940s the 60s began when john kennedy demanded we go to the moon in 1962 and ended with the shooting at kent state in may of 1970. the 70s were conceived the morning after altamont in 1969 and expired during the opening credits of american gigolo, which means there were five months when the 60s and the 70s were happening at the same time. it felt like the 80s might live forever when the berlin wall fell in november of 89, but that was actually the onset of the euthanasia though. it took another two years for the patient to die. i bring i start the book in this way because i do think that what is perhaps most interesting about any period of time is when it actually begins and when it feels like it begins, okay, it's become common to say the 90s begin when the berlin wall fell in the fall early winter of 89 and then ends on september 11th of 2001 and in this book, i do sort of cert that 9/11 is the end of the 90s. i don't see the fall of the berlin wall though as the beginning of this period and the reason i don't is because the 1990s and particularly like the year 1990. but sort of like the 80s on autopilot if you look back to what was happening in 1990, you know, it's like well, you know twin peaks is on television, right? but cheers is the most popular show so like this thing from the 80s is still the dominant kind of icon of television, you know, joe montana still the best player in the you know, up people were still ordering things from like christmas like, you know the new kids on the block had a huge tour a lot of these vestiges of the 80s were still, you know, really alive and and and in some ways flourishing, um, and it wasn't until the release of never mind by nirvana in 1991. that the 90s sort of take on the characteristics that we now sort of offhandedly associate with that period and it wasn't that that this album was so much better than any record that had come before or that like that. you know it just you know, everybody who heard it suddenly became a different person, you know move their mind mentally through this portal it wasn't that it was that because it was a good record and because it seemed to be the perfect. manifestation of a streaming our culture ideas like taking these aspects of you and and sort of creating this this really kind of glossy. really, but the middle sounding record in a lot of ways. um gave people this artifact where they could the way he dresses the way he acts his view about success his view about fame. this is the way we can now understand. what a young person in 1991 is like and it kind of rippled through the culture in many non-musical ways. i mean, i i write in this book about like a it was a subaru ad where you know, they're talking about punk rock in this ad describing how this car this this new superman presa is like a way to to sort of find what's really good about a car in the same way punk rock really, you know broke through all the limitations of like progressive rock and the 70s, but they're really talking though is about nirvana. it's just that you couldn't talk directly about nirvana in a commercial one because they would have never participated and two that would be self-defeating you had you actually adopt the things that nirvana seemed or alleged to be expressing and that became these this kind of you know, this this perception we have about you know in the 90s like, you know, nobody wanted to sell out that was a huge thing to almost everyone. i knew that this idea that that you wouldn't you didn't want to try to be beloved by people who weren't like you. there was something desperate and pathetic about that. different now with social media the idea is to sort of collect as many people as you can the largest possible audience is always the best audience. but in the 1990s in pretty much every genre of everything there was this concept that was really entrenched. that you did not want to in any way compromise your integrity and what integrity meant at this time was amorphous it was this idea that your desire to be an artist to be a creative person. with incredibly specific in individual and if it easily and kind of rapidly could be accessed by people who were unlike you. it was seen as like this like a very sad thing and it was a damaging thing in some ways. i mean is a you know, i think it's kind of funny. i'm promoting this book on the 90s. so i'm thinking about the 90s. i just wrote this book on the 90s a year or whatever during the pandemic. i was constantly thinking about these 90s principles and the idea of selling out which is something hadn't really thought about it, you know. over a decade in any kind of real way. i was thinking about it all the time again, and now when i promote this book and that's what i'm doing right now. i mean, you know, i enjoy doing this but this is a promotional thing. i'm trying to sell this book. i feel incredibly embarrassed by it and i have this desire to sort of undercut the book at every possibility because i'm back in this mindset that there is something like i really desperate and and kind of artistically unsophisticated about trying to do something that people just like that you just giving people something they like even though that's the whole idea like, why am i here? why am i doing this if i don't want people to buy this book and i have to admit part of me wants to try to convince you not to because somehow i think it would make the book better. it makes no sense at all. i've still been kind of messed up by what happened in the 90s because in some ways, i'm still that person. um, okay, so i've read one paragraph of my book that counts as a reading to me. i'm gonna go good q&a here. i'm gonna see what these questions are. okay. first question is chuck. that's me. what is your favorite book or books? uh boy, that's a big question to begin with? uh, you know, i i really believe that the biggest books anyone's life are books that they read. between like sixth and 10th grade and i told that seems odd to people if you tell someone's like oh i read your book seemed a little bit like ya or whatever that's a real insult, you know, sometimes people criticize my books and tell me that or they attempt to by telling me that they kind of seem like the thing like, you know, like a 12th grader who thinks he's smart reads, but you know what? that are those are the books. i remember it in a real profound way. i mean i read animal farm in seventh grade. that was a big deal to me. i still remember parts of that book in a way that with a kind with a vivid sort of just like clarity that i don't feel about books. yeah, i read two days ago, you know, like i i read that big book sapiens, you know, i'm sure many people out here are familiar with this. is this big book about the history of mankind. i loved it. okay. i just i was such a fun reading experience. it was still informative. it was so interesting. the guy did a really good job of sort of looking at a yeah evolution of culture in a way that that didn't seem like kind of pre history just sort of seemed like someone describing the way the world works in a different time and as that was reading that book i was constantly saying to myself remember this remember this thing you just read like this long. you just read remember this and feel it just evaporating the way it is when like you wake up in the morning and you had a dream and you want to tell someone this dream and you can feel it dissolve almost yelling your mind. it's happening that happens to me all the time now, but those books i read when i was in junior high, you know like animal farm which threats black boy. that was a big one season on the brink the john feinstein book about the indiana hoosiers, man. i read that book probably five times in high school, you know, i never read books twice now, you know, but so so if you ask me like what are my favorite books? i'm actually gonna tell you books that, you know, i haven't probably looked at in 40 years. okay, kind of christopher bauer. you said you think of 9/11 as the end of the 90s? is there any point other than the obvious of course that you think of as the beginning? well, i guess i guess i did answer that like i use nevermind sort of as my example of when i think the immutable culture of the 90s began. um, i i think it's it you could pick other things here. i mean, i i do like i somebody was arguing that they think that end of the 90s was actually when facebook starts. and i guess i could see that that sort of contention mean in terms of the internet that is kind of true because you know when we talk about the internet of the 90s, we all understand that that's when it began and we think about the early internet as this transformative device. and yet when people talk about the early internet they often use language and arguments that really only apply to social media like if you ask anybody, you know, like what don't you like about the internet? they're gonna list a bunch of stuff. okay, and they're almost all gonna be connected to the experience of being on twitter or the experience of being on facebook or what tiktok does or instagram like no one's gonna say, you know what? i hate about the internet it makes getting driving directions really easy. i hate that or it's like i was looking for a recipe for like chicken parmesan. i found it instantly, you know, like nobody complains about these things. everyone looks at them is like, oh, yeah. yeah the things of the early internet are still the things we like about it. it's it's what became the internet that people don't like. um okay guys asked me he says an eating the dinosaur he goes he's kind of sympathize with the unabomber ted kaczynski mainly due to his concerns about the exponential growth of technology based on the 14-year sense. then do you feel that sympathy has grown or abated and why i don't know if i was ever sympathetic to him. um, i just sort of made an argument that people don't want to hear which is that this crazy murderer may have been right about some things about the culture. i mean you obviously should not be sending bombs to professors. you've never met. he's he's, you know, you can look at him as either mentally ill or if he's not mentally ill that's even worse in a way but the one thing that he was right about in many ways was the internet if you go back and read like that the manifesto he published he's describing the internet in a way that seems amazingly pressing it particularly sense. he obviously had never used it. he was living in a cabin in montana since like 1973 with no electricity or running water. so it wasn't like he was going on aol get his assumption of what technology would do and how would manifest itself through the internet is bizarrely accurate, you know, so this is me i sympathize with him. no, you know, i don't want to get any federal watch list because i said, you know, it's like i am not telling people that you know, the unabomber has some great ideas just saying that people who are bad can be right sometimes. in the 90s might well be the last decade as we always understood and using the scribe. how do you think we will be describing errors after that? okay, so this person is saying that if i'm asserting that the 90s are kind of the last decade. what are we going to call time after that? well, okay, you know what the safe answer is the safe answer is that time is gonna move forward and suddenly the first 10 years of the 21st century will seem to have some kind of shared characteristics and if you move further still maybe the you know that second ten year period well suddenly seeing you know, i'm sure it'll be related to trump and some way but like it will seem as though the ideas from that period are you know easier to classify we will probably project the things back on to that period i guess when i'm saying is i think that those projections are gonna be entirely personal now, i know someone is going to stay well your assumption of the 90s. that's personal. you're a person, you know, you can't get outside of your own mind like yeah. i know that's true. i am who i am. i think the the way i think but their ideas about objectivity that used to exist in the past and i guess still sort of inform the way i think about journalism. i know it is now unpopular to be a fan of objectivity, which is crazy to me. i just the idea that that be careful people will say is they're like, well, i'm activities a waste of time because you're not a robot. no one can be perfectly objective. well, it's true. nobody can be perfectly objective, but the idea is that you try to recognize your biases constantly and that the biases you know, you have are the main things that inform the way you pursue an idea, so you're not going to be perfectly objective, but you're trying to get close. it's certainly makes no sense to say well, it's impossible to have, you know, perfect objectivity. so therefore everything needs to be subjective. that makes no sense. that would be like someone saying like, well, you know, it's impossible to get rid of all the guns in america. so let's just end all gun laws. it's like, you know, it's like we can't do it. we can't perfectly do it. so let's just give up. it's like that's crazy. um, you know, so i guess my answer to your question is they probably will come up with something to describe the decades, but might disagree with it. okay. i'm only a future chapters in says steven gernak, but there's already an effort made to book in the 90s with the beginning and an end. when we look back on that last two years do you think there will be a beginning? okay, so very similar question before um, i realized and raised this this sort of problem by saying. because this is the last decade, how are we going to deal with the idea that time at least on the calendar is going to keep moving? okay, here's somebody is is asking me about like why is there not more in this book? um now there is a section on tupac shakur i do talk about a rest development. i do talk about two live crew in their trial not really their music so much talk about eminem. i'm but here's he's like here's the main reason there's not more hip hop in this book. okay? i wrote about grunge music and sort of the effect that i felt it had on a larger side guys and then i talked about, you know, liz phair here and there i talked about alanis morissette his music throughout the book. there's a lot of music i didn't talk about i didn't talk about britpop. for example, rick pop was a incredibly significant part of musical culture during that decade, but i was like, well, i'm not gonna you know, i'm not like i can't even do it totally in passing or i have to write an entire section on britpop. and if i'm gonna write about ripop then i also need to write about any rock. because in some ways that was just as essential and kind of really flourishing at the same time like like into rocks kind of a weird way to column now, but like, okay like pavement the man pavement i think is mentioned in two sentences in this book. um, seemingly you could have written entire chapter about pavement, but i just had to make a choice then there's also teen pop and like britney spears now that stuff at the end. well if i were written about grunge and hip hop and indie rocket would have ever read about that. so now it's like we've got all these chapters about music and now either the book is mostly about music or i have to do the exact same thing with every other thing i write about so i have to talk about every possible sport that had significance and every political event that mattered and all of these, you know, maybe right about architecture maybe right about visual arts. i had to make some choices, right? so what i tried to do was pick the things that i thought would put me in a position to talk about the ideas. i really wanted to get to and also working within the premise that like it was, you know still a monoculture so the things that were most popular are the things that kind of need to be addressed. okay. okay. somebody asked me about what side i have between motley crue and pearl jam, uh seems bizarre that that battle still being waged. how carefully have you cultivated your background for this event understanding? of course that the gen xers in your was it? okay, so, okay, so they asked me how much did i did i curate the background for this zoom event, and then they throw in because you're like a gen x or like you won't admit it. i guess that i mean obviously like the poster i put up. i didn't put it in a place. that would be stupid like i didn't put it on the floor are i guess it's curated. i mean, i i did move some things around just before the the event started there was like a golf club. i don't play golf, but i've golf clubs. i had a golf club that was kind of in a weird spot. so i moved that i guess that's some curation. what's your favorite 90s movie? it is the movie slacker, which i did not write much about in this book. i just mentioned a few times for a couple of reasons one the director richard linklater. i interviewed for a book called that whatever wrong so she can kind of odd to talk about him again in a different book. my wife did a book on an oral history of days and confused was she then a lot and i was like, it's gonna seem like our families his publicist if i keep reading about slacker plus slacker was a small thing like they're there. it's yeah, it wasn't like there are many people. i'm sure watching this who have never heard of that film. so it's like i i was looking for things that were like, i mean like i read about titanic, you know titanic and slacker are very different movies. okay? somebody wants to know if there's anything about the show 15 in the book 15 was a very popular canadian teen show that it was like a soap opera of 15 year old kids in canada. it's predates that show degrassi there is not i am afraid to admit there. i just do not discuss 15 in this in this book. okay, i'd say as a football fan. do you have an opinion on the ncaa transfer portal and it's impact on the overall games as players can choose and transfer in ways never before up. okay, i'm gonna give a short answer to this like things like the transfer portal and like the name and likeness stuff for college sports. it's very hard to take a like an ethical or moral stance against that. like, you know, it seems weird to say like players should not have the freedom to go to the school they want and if they can make money they shouldn't be able to it seems crazy to say that but here's the other thing. why do we care about these things? we care about the players making money. why we care about the players being able to have freedom of mobility. it's because there is sept of college sports and people like me who generally prefer college sports to pro sports a lot of ways. there are things that we see in college football that we can't see at the pro level. and my fear is that these things that are ethically probably proper to do are going to change that product. um, so it's very it's it's a weird thing. it's like we were kind of shifting our minds as consumers of sports to this idea that need to look at. an athlete the same way we look at a coal miner and we need to be really they need a union they need to be protected. um from like, you know, all these you know, these these unfair capitalist forces are all these things. you know, it's like i get there that makes sense. of course, it sounds good when you it, but if these things change college football in a way that makes people less interested in auburn, alabama unless interested in michigan, ohio state that they don't want to watch mac games on tuesday, you know, they all the something changes about the sport. um the fact that we gave them these benefits are gonna end up being to their detriments. i mean, i i just i think this is something that that is just not considered enough in the player empowerment era. which is that we can't operate from the position that these things. are supposed to inherently exist. that that you know that that to make a lot of money playing pro football is just something that's supposed to happen that you that if you're a pro basketball player, you've all these things that you can kind of expect where you play what you make who you play with all these things. that's all fine in the short term but in the long term if it changes the way people feel above these sports the sports themselves will collapse you have to have some part of you that says, okay we need to be thinking about how these laws rules. however, you look at them how these aspects change or complicate the sport itself as opposed to what would be most beneficial to somebody currently involved with it. it's who is a better post oasis musical output noel or liam gallagher. i would say no, but i thought no i'd better output when it oasis was together. i think the best moments of oasis and who i love tend to be like like don't look back in anger or when he sings the chorus on acquiesce like a lot like when no things i preferred and he's also the songwriter and so so it's really easy sad for me to take um okay. somebody asked me did i work in akron, ohio in the 90s and what are some of my memories of akron i did i worked at the akron beacon journal from 1998 to 2002 the you know, i have many, you know many friends there and and you know kind of interesting middle period of my life that's when i wrote farther rock city and a lot of sex drugs and cocoa puffs was in this apartment in in the the merriman valley of akron ohio one thing i really remember is going to a chinese restaurant called the platinum dragon. it was so bizarre to move to new york's i moved to new york after i lived in akron and you know, i lived in new york for 15 years, you know, i'm in portland now, but like, you know, new york will always be my favorite city in a lot of ways, you know, and it's just there's no experience like it. i mean, it's new york is so unlike the rest of america. it's like i really underrated how different new york was from the rest. entry but he's the crazy thing. why was the chinese food better in akron, ohio. i'll never understand that there was also this place out kind of by summit mall where you could get these pot stickers. i can't remember what the place was called. the best potstickers i've ever had in my life. now. how could this be? like what happened in the prehistory of akron that brought these wonderful chinese chefs to town. i just i don't i mean, i you know, i watched that documentary on generals those chicken and i guess in some ways it kind of explains it, you know, if you if you want to watch a film that will explain the way culture actually works as opposed to the weights described through most kind of like entertainment media watch this documentary about generals those chicken and it really sort of illustrates the way that that ideas and specifically like ids that are insular kind of become collective but i mean bottom line is worked out great for akron at least in that in that specific world of of eating general those chicken. okay. i first discovered you sex drugs and cocoa puffs over the 18 year if you spend a lot of time reflecting on your discussions blah blah many of my reflections have changed over the years. what perspective did you discuss then that you'd want to revisit well, that's an interesting question. all these questions have been interesting to me at least. you know. it's just when you write a book. you think the hardest part should be? the typing or the easter or sort of the emotional investment that you have to put into that book. you know, that should be the hardest part. but in some ways the hardest part is the fact that you have to remain the person who wrote that book. and the book will never change and you will. you know like the book is frozen in amber. you know, i when i was early books, i wrote in akron. it's like they you know, they still exist. they're written by a 28 year old. a version of me that i have no relationship to now like i i think almost everything about me might be different maybe. people who know me might be better at describing if that's true or not, but like in so many ways the way i think especially about culture have completely shifted. so sometimes somebody will come to me and they just read fiber rock city which came out in 2001 like they just read it a week ago and they'll ask me a question like oh you said cinderella, you know like, you know this hairstyle or whatever. do you believe you know, it's like and they're telling me stuff and i'm like, it sounds like something i could have said or could have written but i haven't read that book since i wrote it and it's like i'm talking about this other person that that i know that he's i used to know maybe you know, and like i've totally lost touch with so there is a ton in those first two or three books. that if i could rewrite would be totally different in fact, i mean, i just not this is gonna start arrogant, but like if i wrote frogger rock city now, it would be very good like i could really do good job on this book now because after i wrote it i ended up talking about it for 20 years or whatever and i've learned all these other things. um, but you know, it wouldn't be the same book and i don't think people would like it as much you're probably seen kind of clinical and sterile wouldn't be nearly as emotional. i definitely wouldn't talk about my own life as much. i mean, that's the to me craziest thing about when i just look back on things that i've done like like that book killing yourself to live. i guess that was my third book. i cannot believe how casually i talked about myself and people i knew and women i had relationships with i didn't even i just did it. i just do it. i didn't it's not that i was like how this i shouldn't be doing this, but i'll do it. anyways, i just did it, you know, and i would never do that now, i would never write about myself that. you know candidly i would never talk about other people so casually it it's you know. you hate it's like that. you know that that silkworm as a song don't look back, you know, and i guess boston has a song don't look back both bands are a good point. okay, you and your 20s for most of the 90s if you could have experienced that time period of the different age what age would it be exactly when i did exactly when i did i'm very glad that my young adults would happen in the 90s that way it was the perfect time to be that age. i feel so fortunate that i was at college when sort of music changed and you like like in 91 or whatever like i could experience it in real time this idea that we were all into like you know. guns n' roses and rats and stuff and then all of a sudden, you know, it's like now now it's this and you know, it's like it was very it was very clear. you could see like i'm weird now we like liz fair now we like, you know, we're in the tori amos and all these things they can feel it happening and see it happening. i am glad i was there for that. i one thing i got two kids. my son is eight. my daughter is six and i do worry about the world that they're didn't live it i mean and and people are like, oh, you know because the climate change is like yes sort of but just because things are weirder now, i don't i i i'm sure people in the 90s felt that way. i'm sure people in the 90s who were my age where like, i'm glad i grew up in the 70s, but there's a there's been kind of a weird acceleration of weirdness. oh, somebody says you don't hear much about pcp anymore. do you have a guess of why that is well, i mean, he's asked me why angel dust is less in the news. it was in the news a lot when i was younger. it was often like part of after school specials and there was often this building idea that like if you took pcp you might you might have like super human strength. i think there is an episode of that. she'll cops which of course now is like we can't we should even talk about it. it's like, you know copaganda or whatever that show cops one of the early episodes like a guy on pcp like fights with a canine dog like of those german shepherds. you know, so there was this idea that that somehow that that pcp was not just a drug, but was almost like would shoot you into this different sort of existence where you were like a you were like, you know, the incredible hulk or whatever. it must have just been i mean for a while it was people would like they would put little sprinkle pcp onto marijuana and then they would you know, they would sell marijuana for a very high price. they would say it's really, you know, great marijuana when it was actually very cheap marijuana that just had pcp on it. so you smoked it, you know you to hallucinate like faces would change and stuff and then you kind of chase that high for the rest of your life, but i go maybe somebody should bring pc babe back. maybe i don't know. maybe maybe there's a opening for the market, okay. what do you expect to happen to hollywood over the next decade? i think that they're gonna probably go go through some sort of. a fiscal transformation that's going to result in films that seem pretty much identical the films. we're seeing now. will you ever approach to write about sports for the athletic? the website the athletic i don't know. i don't know. i don't know if i was i think when it may have been that when it started i was at grandma so then i would have been seeing as maybe off limits. is that right? could that be i don't know. um well any plans to make more episodes of music exist, that was a podcast i do with my friend chris ryan no plans to do it again. it was fun to you, but you know, it's i find podcasting kind of stressful. i mean when i write i can really sculpt the thing into what i wanted to be. you know i can go over it over and over and over again. like, you know, i mentioned i haven't read, you know further rock city since i wrote it. that's true. i better read it a thousand times while i was writing it because i'm very obsessive about going over senses. i'm always trying to make sentences more straight. like i i just i want the senses to be entertaining and interesting and clear and all three of those things. i think are equally important. so the time i spend editing my work. it's always to like simplify it simplified simplify it make it straight or make it straight or make it straight or make it straighter. so like a it can't remember what the question was now it was something of those regarding around. sorry. you think the 90s seemed more innocent at the time because we were younger and it was pre-911, or they just were or perhaps you disagree. i don't think of the 90s as an innocent time. i mean, they wasn't really how it was. um, i don't and not so sure about. the loss of innocence in general over time as much as maybe the changing view of what constitutes innocence. like, you know, i think a modern parent almost feels this obligation to have conversations with their kids now which in the 90s would have been perceived as like a damaging like like why are you forcing a kid to confront these ideas now like, you know, there's seven or whatever like white. yeah, and that kind of keeps changing. so i really know about innocence. it's an interesting question. okay, almost six here in portland. so here's a question one last guy. hey chuck. i've got three questions answer as many as you want. what was the adjustment from new york city to portland oregon like um, you know at first when i moved here in in 2017, it was like boys easier to live here. like i moved to portland. it's beautiful city the weather to me is great because i love when it rains i have a steel rough on my house. so i love hearing it rain at night summers are beautiful. so easy to get the kids in school all these things and then the last couple of years portland. it's just become a completely different place and now it seems stranger than new york scene when i move there, you know when i moved to new york from akron, um, they said like, oh it's gonna take you six months to get used to it. give me like six days because i just suddenly found so many people who were exactly like me. i had never had an experience for i mean so many people who seem to kind of talk and think the way i did and now in portland that's very difficult to find i mean, portland is stranger than i thought it would be as it turns out like i like living here. i love raising my kids here. but in some ways, you know, like the what's like fox news and they have this image of america and it's a completely distorted unrealistic of what america is like like they talk about america like it's this place that every person is like that's not how it is. it's kind of that way in portland. no like portland actually is in some ways like this this incredible like like almost like dystopian vision of what could happen you it's it's very strange. how did you decide maybe that said i like living in portland. i'm staying here like it's crazy here now, but i still like it. how did you decide what 90s pop culture elements to include i've talked about that quite a bit. did you read francis fukuyama, but the argument about kind of the the end of history that is mentioned in the book the idea of the end of history, which was a popular idea in the you know, very early 90s this idea that sort of like i know neoliberalism had succeeded and that the the way that america functioned and sort of the way we had constructed our government in society would just be the way it would always be i don't think anyone believes that now even though you know, i i mentioned earlier how there seems to be this stasis. so it seems that that you know after all those years of culture accelerating like during the 90s whenever i wrote stories for newspapers, i was always talking about the acceleration of culture and then the internet happens, it seems like the internet is gonna be be the ultimate excellent of culture. and yet has become a deceller into some ways that. we are now kind of in this kind of molasses period where it is hard to get back on that. then that kind of marched through time. it seems like humanities supposed to experience but but with that. um, i think i will end my talk. i really appreciate everybody who set through this and i hope it wasn't boring and if it was write me a letter and tell me you were bored and i will probably throw it away, but maybe it will change my view of the world. so thanks. yeah. thanks so much chuck. thanks for joining us tonight. and thanks to all of you out there for joining us. it's great questions and all that kind of stuff. please consider purchasing a the copy of the 90s. we have currently currently have around a hundred sign copies. so just if you order through the through the if you order through pals.com now, you will get one of the signed copies. so it's as long as they supplies last so and while you're there be sure to check out our lineup of upcoming virtual events, and we look forward to seeing you at another one of our events very soon. so have good evening everyone again. welcome to atlanta history center's virtual author talk series. my name is claire haley and i'm the
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