Thanks to Peter Kafka's Recode Media [Local Backup], I have just discovered that former New York Times Magazine Ethicist, Sex, Drugs, and Cocoa Puffs author, and longtime sports/pop culture writer Chuck Klosterman pronounces his surname kloa-ster-men instead of klaw-ster-men, as I have for a good while. Unfortunately, I’ll probably continue to do so barring tremendous effort, alternating with Cuck Klusterfuck, but only when he gives in to his terrible habit of ending (spoken) statements with “or whatever.” A good friend of mine claims to have been a fan of his since she happened to pick up a few of his novels from a bulk book sale at 13 years old, but I've only just read his work this year (thanks to two borrowed volumes from her.)

This podcast is one of only three shows with which I make an effort to maintain 100% prevalence, so I did catch this episode when it aired late last August. Thanks to my friend, I did recognize his name and was swiftly entrapped in his intuition about publishing as I realized how keenly I identified with his perils, striding two seemingly irreconcilable cultures.

“I’m not fully accredited by either side of the professional equation (sportswriters think I’m too pretentious and music writers don’t think I’m pretentious enough,) but I’m able to write about whatever I want, as long as it actually happened.”

He speaks with keywords that should dismiss him immediately as a nostalgic, out-of-time pikey, but somehow end up communicating reasonable insight. In exploring his works since, I have continued to hinge on a single essential thought: Chuck Klosterman is the only white, 46-year-old bearded Portland Dad you should be reading. Of course, you should receive this suggestion in the knowledge that I am a newly-minted white Portland man myself, but I believe it's worthwhile to examine whether or not Klosterman's various fiction and non-fiction work should be relevant to young people right now, so I'm going to cite three relatively fresh expressions: the aforementioned interview, its subject - last year's collected anthology X: A Highly Specific, Defiantly Incomplete History of the Early 21st Century, and his 2011 novel The Visible Man.

In the continued interest of full disclosure, I should emphasize just how highly I regard Peter Kafka as an editor and interviewer on the Media beat - capable of hitting consistently hard on both novel and old guard industry personalities with refined, seemingly unimpeachable skepticism, but in this instance he is much more subdued - a tad bit bewitched, even, suggesting he regards Klosterman greatly. In fact, he introduces X with an outright confession: "It’s great. I bought it. I bought a signed copy," which, he says, "happens very rarely." It's more significant than it may appear - good ole' Chuck really is that comfortable and talented in the one-on-one, on-the-record environment, which is why the generous accumulation of his interviews in the anthology with a healthy span of athletes and musicians are so compelling, no matter how disinterested the reader may be in the particular wheelhouses for which the individuals are notorious. (American football.)

The only reason I’m able to ask you these questions is because I’m a reporter and I can ask you questions now that I probably wouldn’t feel comfortable asking you if we were friends, so I’m not going to pretend that we are and I’m not going to create some fake thing where we’re going to have a relationship beyond this conversation. I’m just going to ask you the things I want to know about and I hope that you respect the fact that I’m just being straight with you.” I find that that works much better.

From the broadest possible pop cultural lens, Chuck's most spectacular and widely-circulated work, demographically (I assume) is his 2015 interview and cover story for GQ with Taylor Swift, then "the most popular human alive." Yes, it really is worth dwelling on the image: this guy... this very Dorky Dad, hanging out with the most highly-demanded teen idol who's ever lived, sitting awkwardly next to her in the backseat of her car as she excitedly accepts a call from Justin Timberlake. When one Chucks such a distinguished contrast upon such a high-profile contemporary medium, the weight of the potential scrutiny becomes palpable, but Klosterman anticipates and braces for this (very risky) business in the only manner he can: acknowledging it over and over and over again in the second paragraph of his every interview appearance. From his own preface in X:

Something you may notice in the following 2015 feature on Taylor Swift is that I never describe what she looks like or how she was dressed, even though I almost always do that with any celebrity I cover... If I did, it would be reframed as creepy misogyny and proof that I didn't take the woman seriously as an artist. It would derail everything else about the story. It would become the story.

And we compare with another excerpt from Peter Kafka’s interview:

It doesn’t matter if it was complimentary or insulting necessarily. It would seem as though I wasn’t taking her seriously as a musical artist, and the idea is that I do. That’s why I’m writing about her is because I do think she’s a meaningful, significant artist. It’s not worth the risk of having the story then get shifted by other people who perhaps just perceive themselves as somebody who’s a watchdog for certain signifiers or certain elements of the culture and that their job is to be on the watch for this. If your story then gets moved into that silo, that’s all it’s going to be remembered for... It’s a touchier thing now. It’s a more dangerous thing.

Notice how very close this argument comes to falling into standard white guy whining about societal changes and modern feminism without actually doing so. (I declare so definitively not because of my authority, alone, but because I know - as does Klosterman - that if it had, his ass would've been entirely grass, long ago.) More than any other writer of his demographic, Chuck Klosterman has a close, wary relationship with the everchanging contextual boundaries of public expression. He knows when to be transparent with his feelings on progression, and he's careful to avoid what could be "problematic" for the sake of functioning better as a writer, according to him. For Slate's I Have to Ask, he managed to speak extensively on the subject for nearly an hour without bellowing anything definitively cringey.

I can’t say it’s better or worse. It’s just different, and because it’s different, it makes me feel uncomfortable, but there’s actually like an adversarial relationship with the history of anything, and that somehow that history is seen as oppressive. And you shouldn’t even know about it. It’s better to live in now.

Granted, it's not as if his persistent acknowledgement of this position has miraculously washed all systematic patriarchal traces away from his high-profile feature of a young woman on the cover of a magazine which seeks most to speak to "all sides of the male equation," (are you sure about that, Condé Nast?) especially considering how unlikely it would've been for me to read anything about Taylor Swift outside of this very white man's anthology.

Here we see Swift’s circuitous dilemma: Any attempt to appear less calculating scans as even more calculated. Because Swift’s professional career has unspooled with such precision, it’s assumed that her social life is no less premeditated.

As in Klosterman's work, I've found a very fundamental pillar in my own writing in control: how we attain more of it, how we lose it, and how to use it, which is the defining, permeating orbit of the Taylor Swift piece, as I’d imagine it should be, given how deep her internal wrenching over being perceived as insincere eventually proved to go.

It’s somehow different when the hub of the wheel is Swift. People get skeptical. Her famous friends are marginalized as acquisitions, selected to occupy specific roles, almost like members of the Justice League (“the ectomorph model,” “the inventive indie artist,” “the informed third-wave feminist,” etc.). Such perceptions perplex Swift, who is genuinely obsessed with these attachments.

No, it’s not only worthwhile as an exercise in superbly athletic self-awareness – the Taylor profile is profound. I’d recommend reading it, especially if the subject matter is outside your wheelhouse.

Short, sharp, and occasionally somewhat petty notions are what Chuck Klosterman does best and most originally. Thanks to a digression of Kafka’s beginning with “you and I are about the same age…,” he arrives (by way of REM, believe it or not) at a significant statement about youth and identity.

“It seems strange to me to be into music for its coolness outside of high school. That seems like that’s the only time when you’re a young person and you’re using art basically to create a personality because you don’t have a real personality yet.”