I have a confession to make.

I find the Jonas Brothers interesting. Hannah Montana is fascinating. Britney Spears's daily actions intrigue me to no end.

What's unconventional about those three points, and the overall absurdity of a 21 year old male expending time considering those subjects, is that I'm not actually desiring to know anything about the Jonas Brothers, Hannah Montana or Britney Spears. The truth is, these pop-culture icons captivate my attention not because of they themselves, but because of how they reflect on everyone else and what their existence really means.

Fortunately, I'm not the only insane guy out there; ever hear of Chuck Klosterman?

He's there to make sense of all the nonsense, to explain what exactly drives Hannah Montana to stardom and why or why not Britney Spears removes all her hair.

His theories on just about everything are sure to interest at least one of you out there, so here's a collection of my ten favorite Klosterman articles with a little description of each. Enjoy!

10. Invention's New Mother
Everything necessary already exists. Which means a golden age of invention is about to begin.

I love how he explains texting and Tivo so precisely. The best quote is probably, "In retrospect, the wheel was an obvious solution to a problem everyone was aware of--yet it still took thousands of years. Text messaging is precisely the opposite: It's the solution to a desire I never even knew I had, and it came into existence long before anyone was demanding it."

9. McDiculous
A new film that blames fast food for America's weight problem is clever, entertaining, and totally misguided.

He wrote a piece on the week he spent eating nothing but McDonald's chicken mcnuggets several years back, perhaps the funniest writing of his to date. Morgan Spurlock later filmed a documentary of himself eating nothing but Mickey D's for a month and the degradation of his health (and potential death). I don't want to ruin this Klosterman article for you, but the best treatment of "Supersize Me" came in this paragraph;

"Here is where the second problem with Super Size Me--the larger philosophical problem--comes into focus. This is a movie about alleged victimization. But the biggest problem with America is not faceless corporate forces. The biggest problem with America is people who blame faceless corporate forces instead of accepting accountability for their own lives."

8. You Say You Want a Revolution
Well, you know, it ain't gonna happen. Not here.

Chuck raises some simple questions about the possibility (or impossibility) of overthrowing government. This leads to some interesting thoughts on American complacency and the evolution of American government to an "unoverthrowable" entity. My favorite part includes this funny/sad obvservation;

"There are now roughly two hundred million guns in America, and that's only counting the NBA's Eastern Conference. We have enough privately owned firepower to instantly kill a billion grizzly bears, plus a few dozen prostitutes. But it's hard to imagine these weapons employed in any kind of popular uprising, even if a majority of American adults unilaterally agreed that such an event was necessary. Whom would they presumably shoot? Probably no one, and possibly one another."

7. On Friendstership tied with Myspace.com/Doppleganger
We can understand people more effectively through the fake world of Friendster than we can through the tangible world of reality, which is why we needed the Internet in the first place.

Friendster proceeded the popularity of both Myspace and Facebook, with several million devotees back in 2004. Klosterman opined on this unmistakable cultural phenomenon that year and noticed things that are true even today. Replace 'Friendster' with 'Facebook' or 'Myspace' in 2008, and you'll see how dead on he is:

"True signposts of self-identity--especially for anyone born after 1970--tend to be the most trivial things we adore, which is why Friendster is so popular. It allows us to build two-dimensional personalities in which we can eradicate the things that matter to others (our looks, our sincerity, our intelligence, et cetera) while accentuating the things that matter only to us (whether or not we can quote Glengarry Glen Ross, whether or not we can communicate telepathically with our cat, whether or not we want to pretend that we read Finnegans Wake, et cetera). Our entire corporeality is dictated by what we think is interesting about ourselves."

Four years later, he invokes social networking again to explain the Hannah Montana phenomenon:

"Teenage superstar Hannah Montana would be nothing without the Internet. In fact, she is the Internet."

6. All Too Perfect
Chuck Klosterman explains why losing the Superbowl would make the Patriots immortal.

One of the truly prophetic columns he takes up, this time before the Patriots and Giants clashed in February for the Superbowl. He opines on a seemingly innocent photo of Tom Brady and Gisele, extending his thoughts on them to why the Patriot's loss would be for the better. The portion of his writing I remember best:

"This is the function of photography: It takes something ephemeral and makes it concrete. This is also the goal of perfection: If the Patriots complete their run undefeated, they will have mastered the seemingly impossible undertaking of being better than everyone, all of the time, within every framework that counts. Any phrase that begins "On any given Sunday ..." still will be intuitively true, but not technically accurate. The Patriots are the best team. It would be a shame if they did not win.

Yet we would care so much more if they lost."

5. Death by Harry Potter
Ignoring a cultural phenomenon today may render you completely irrelevant in a few years. Just so you know.

This particular article finds a place in my favorites since I relate with Klosterman on the exact subject and purpose of what he's attempting to accomplish; never reading or watching Harry Potter. At first, this was a law in my house, that I was to never, ever, under any circumstance, read or view a Harry Potter-involved book or movie. Yes, my mother is (or was) one of those parents who complained to the school about her children being exposed to wizardry (oh, and forgetting 95% of Lord of the Rings). I continued this tradition into my adulthood, choosing independently to abstain from anything Harry Potter. Perhaps this was an experiment, a naturally easy task for me to do or I really wanted to go contrarian on the masses. Nonetheless, Klosterman ponders the ramifications of such an action or inaction:

"I cannot even pretend to predict what the social impact of 325 million books will eventually embody. As the years pass, the influence of these teenage-wizard stories will be so vast that it will become invisible. In two decades, I will not be alienated or confused by passing references to Harry Potter; very often, I will be unaware that any reference has even been made. I will not know what I am missing. I'll just feel bored, and I won't know why."

4. Anyone Seen My $4.2 Billion?
There's a lot of money out there in the economy that people used to spend on CDs. The question is, where, exactly, did it go?

Chuck cuts through all the junk the media tells us about where all the money has gone from the major music industry. Most want to say that it's Itunes' fault or that it's illegal downloads, but he thinks otherwise:

"A lot of the money not spent on music in the twenty-first century is being used to pay off credit-card debt that was incurred during the nineties. In other words, not paying for In Rainbows today is helping people eliminate the balance they still owe for buying Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness when they were broke in 1995."

3. What We Have Here Is a Failure To Communicate
Chaos is coming to Madison Avenue

Some of my favorite times Klosterman writes is when he interprets what's occuring in media or what will occur in media sometime in the future. He begins this piece with one of his best hypotheticals to date, involving the immediate solution to world hunger and the inevitable collapse of everything because of it. Chuck elaborates by introducing us to "Chaos Theory" and what exactly we'll be seeing from marketers just a few years from now (if not right now!):

"In other words, we have one medium that's collapsing posthaste, and its replacement is still under construction. So what happens during the gap in between? What happens when marketers realize that advertising on network TV is a waste of money, but there isn't any clear alternative? According to Garfield, the answer is chaos: a jarring media universe in which traditional forms of mass entertainment swiftly disappear and advertisers are left in the lurch. And this universe is closer than you might imagine."

2. Tenacious TV
Lost may be the best drama in television history, but it's nowhere near as important as that other desert-island classic.

The premise, that Lost is the best drama in television history, I agree with wholly. There's no show I can imagine being more thought-provoking, enjoyable or intimately involving. Klosterman eruditely explains why the show Survivor, though being mediocre to Lost in every way possible, continues to compete and obtain generally superb ratings. His entire theory is worth reading, but can be summed up as such:

"And this is why Survivor still has a place in society: It rewards the practice of getting to the top by dragging everyone else to the middle."

1. Loving the NBA, warts and all
Basketball season hasn't even started, and the NBA is already in trouble. You know this. Everyone knows this. Everyone knows this because this is always true. The NBA is always in trouble.

This was the first Klosterman piece I ever read, and when I finished, I couldn't help but remain seated for a few more minutes enjoying his commentary and then checking the comments section which inevitably confirmed my awe of the brilliance of the author ("This is one of the most insightful articles about the dilemma facing the NBA that I have ever come across", etc). You don't necessarily have to consider yourself an NBA fan to understand or be impressed by his thoughts on why the NBA remains behind Baseball and Football in American sports, but it helps. There's no single part of the Page 2 exclusive I can properly quote without full context, so I'll just leave the list at that.

Well, I can't say I expect anyone to read all of these. But I couldn't imagine any of my friends seeing a link and the italicized subtext underneath and not wanting to read at least one complete article.

If you're able to check out any of these pages let me know which ones and what you thought!

(And if you REALLY like him, check out the book I've nearly finished of his, Chuck Klosterman IV)

Hi everyone! I fell in to peer pressure and joined Xanga, again. This Xanga will probably contain both random and structured thoughts, depending on the day. My interests are religion, politics, sports, technology, psychology and bright red sombreros.

Come by at least once a week to see which crazy subject I'll be tackling :)