read Chuck Klosterman’s new book Eating the Dinosaur, took some notes

p8
on therapy and interviews:
“Most people are not articulate about everything in their life, but they are articulate about the things they’re still figuring out”

p71
“I do not know how much money Britney Spears earned last year.  However, I do know that it’s not enough for me to want her life, were I given the option to have it.  Every day, random people use Britney’s existence as currency; they talk about her public failures and her lack of talent as a way to fill the emptiness of their own normalcy.. ..[She allows] Americans to understand who they are and who they are not; [she allows] Americans to unilaterally agree on something they never needed to consciously consider.  A person like Britney Spears surrenders her privacy and her integrity and the rights to her own persona, and in exchange we give her huge sums of money.  But she still doesn’t earn a fraction of what she warrants in a free-trade cultural economy.”

p130-33
on an amazing chapter describing football as the most progressive sport masquerading as a protector of conservative ideals..
-passing in football did not appear the first decade of the 20th century.  in 1909, thirty-three football players (college, pro) died from playing football
“Size mattered less [with the advent of the passing game] but it was still a game where blocking and tackling appeared to be the quintessence of what it was about.”

on the NFL network..
“Every other sport tries to fool us.  Baseball sells itself as some kind of timeless historical pastime that acts as a bridge to a better era of American life, an argument that now seems beyond preposterous.  The NBA tries to create synergy with anything that might engage youth culture (hip-hop, abstract primordial competition, nostalgia for the 1980s, the word “amazing,” Hurricane Katrina, etc.).  NASCAR connects itself to red state contrarianism.  Soccer aligns itself with forward-thinking globalists who enjoy fandom more than sports.  But football only uses football.  They are the product they sell.”

“Pete Rozelle - the greatest sports commissioner in world history - … convinced America that football was conservative… …while simultaneously convincing all the league’s owners to adopt revenue sharing, arguably the most successful form of socialism in U.S. history.”

p165
on laughter and German culture
“Germans don’t fake-laugh.  If someone in Germany is laughing, it’s because he or she physically cant help themselves; they are laughing because they’re authentically amused.  Nobody there laughs out of politeness.  Nobody laughs out of obligation.  And what this made me really recognize is how much American laughter is purely conditioned.”

p168
on the use of laugh tracks in sitcoms
“The reason a handful of very popular sitcoms still use canned laughter… is due to a specific assumption about human nature.. ..Normal people don’t have enough confidence to know what they think is funny.”   !!!!

p172
on laughing into his own TV
“I did not think laugh tracks were idiotic when I was five.  In fact, when I was five, I thought I was partially responsible for the existence of laugh tracks.  I thought we all were.  At the time, my assumption was that the speaker on my parents’ Zenith television was a two-way system - I thought it was like a telephone… …As a consequence, I would sometimes sit very close to the television and laugh as hard as I could, directly into the TV’s speaker.  I would laugh into my own television.  My family thought I just really, really appreciated Howard Hesseman.  And I did.  But I mostly wanted to contribute to society.”

p174
on the use of exclamation points on the internet
“Canned laughter is a lucid manifestation of an anxious culture that doesn’t know what is (and isn’t) funny.  If you’ve spent any time trolling the blogosphere, you’ve probably noticed a peculiar literary trend: the pervasive habit of writers inexplicably placing exclamation points at the end of otherwise unremarkable sentences.  Sort of like this!  This is done to suggest an ironic detachment from the writing of an expository sentence!  It’s supposed to signify that the writer is self-aware!  And this is idiotic.  It’s the saddest kind of failure.  F. Scott Fitzgerald believed inserting exclamation points was the literary equivalent of an author laughing at his own jokes, but that’s not the case in the modern age; now, the exclamation point signifies creative confusion.  All it illustrates is that even the writer can’t tell if what they’re creating is supposed to be meaningful, frivolous, or cruel.. ..They represent the “form of funny,” which is more easily understood (and more easily constructed) than authentic funniness.”

p185
on advertising and its relationship to the public
When people were outraged that Tropicana changed the picture on their orange juice carton without changing the juice itself, it revealed that people do not buy the product just because of the advertising, but that “they feel like they are buying the advertising itself.”

“Pepsi is not really trying to market soda pop to optimistic people.  That’s impossible and nonsensical.  What they’re hoping is that when consumers recognize that Pepsi is trying to amorphously tie soda to optimism, a segment of that audience will decide, ‘That’s a good idea.  It’s ridiculous, but I see what they’re doing.  I’m willing to associate myself with this gimmick.’  It’s the difference between a magician performing a trick to impress his audience and a magician trying to sell that trick to other magicians.  There’s nobody left for advertisers to fool.  We’re all magicians.”

p195
on Weezer and emo
“Weezer defines what emo music is supposed to do-if Sunny Day Real Estate’s ‘Seven’ is the emo ‘Rock Around the Clock,’ then Weezer’s 1996 sophomore effort Pinkerton is the emo Sgt. Pepper.”