I Wear The Black Hat: grappling with villains (real and imagined) by Chuck Klosterman

I was strolling through the used bookstore on 40th street. The aisles were jam-packed with books precisely, but not prettily. I chose a random book and found myself with this amazing piece by Klosterman.

"I Wear The Black Hat: grappling with villains (real and imagined)" reads more like multiple essays and distillations that relate a few central theses on villainy to pop-culture events. I don't usually bother with much pop-culture, especially sports, but Klosterman shows the extent of his writing abilities and managed to captivate me.

As my friend Jun said, I manage to take any interesting points I've heard in a day and weave them into any conversation later. Safe to say, we've had a couple of convo's on this book : D.

Messy notes:

• The veil of ignorance - John Rawl

• "The villain is the person who knows the most but cares the least."

  • Machiavelli and Joe Paterno from Penn State

• “Avoiding villainy is not that different from avoiding loneliness. First, you must love yourself. And if you do that convincingly enough, others will love you too much.”

• The core question is always some version of “Why are actions unacceptable in life somehow acceptable in fiction?" But this seems like the wrong thing to worry about. That answer seems self-evident. I more often wonder about the reverse: Why are the qualities we value in the unreal somehow verboten in reality?”

• N.W.A

• Von Trier

  • Melancholia, The Idiots; Dancer in the Dark;

• The Raiders

  • "The raiders were not villains because everyone on the team was a reprobate; the Raiders were villains because everyone on their team was intellectually free."

• Basic Instinct

  • "Basic Instinct is better to remember than to rewatch. The film you imagine is closer to its original intent than the film that actually exists"

  • Attractive people are treated differently from normal people.

  • "Love is significant-ally less crazy than lust. Love is a mildly irrational combination of complex feelings; lust is a totally irrational experience that ignores complexity on purpose."

    • "People make terrible decisions when they are in love, but they usually know  those decisions are bad; they make those decisions anyway, only to look back later with predictable regret. They just react. It's neither emotional nor intellectual; it's physical and unmanageable. It is, I suppose, the most basic instinct there is."

  • Relating to Sharon Stone -- "It's a one-dimensional compulsion that informs every aspect of her life. And that makes her seem more human than she actually is."

• Bill Clinton

  • The presidency is not an honest job. When people claimed "It's not the sex. It's the lying" -- they were bullshitting. POTUS is obviously going to lie about cheating on his wife. It was about the sex.

  • "Either by accident or to his credit, he understood the awkward paradox of human sexuality: Everyone's obsessed with it, but no one wants to hear about it. All it does it make them hate you."

• Technocrats

  • "The future makes the rules... so there's no point in being mad when the future wins. In fact, the easiest way for any cutthroat person to succeed is to instinctively (and relentlessly) side with the technology of tomorrow, even if that technology is distasteful. Time will eventually validate that position"

    • "The future will retire undefeated, but it always makes a terrible argument"

    • People hate being dragged into the futures and they hate technocrats because they are the cultural architects doing it but not particularly caring about whether those changes make people better or worse off

  • "The reason Perez Hilton became a villain was the intersection of two qualities: It wasn't just  the content, and it wasn't just the success. It was the creeping fear that this type of content would become the only way any future person could be successful."

    • "Desire-based technology drives mass culture towards primitive impulses"