Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs

Chuck Klosterman was in town this past Monday to promote his newest book, Killing Yourself to Live, which I plowed through earlier this summer. Klosterman is a pop culture writer for Spin, Esquire, Rolling Stone, NYT, etc. His earlier works include Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs, which is next on my list.

Killing Yourself is based on a 3 week cross country road trip that Klosterman embarked upon for a Spin magazine article. The idea was to visit the spots where various well-known musicians met their death (i.e. Kurt Cobain, members of the Allman Brothers Band and Lynard Skynard, etc.). Klosterman tries to explore why the greatest career move any musician can make is to stop breathing (Jeff Buckley is one example that immediately comes to mind. Elvis is arguably another.) The author uses these little visits to create a prism from which a wild spectrum of pop culture musings are spewed forth.

In person, Klosterman is geky, spindly and wildly animated … hands flailing about wildly. He’s incredibly witty, but sometimes only because he’s stating the obvious, which can be funny in and of itself. During the Q&A after the reading, a young woman asked Klosterman what he’s reading (because she really liked his diction). Great question. If you care, he’s currently in the middle of Under the Banner of Heaven (Krakauer) and some Phillip K. Dick sci-fi book, among others. Anyway, if you’re a pop culture fan or even an ardent reader of The Sports Guy, you’ll really dig this read.