what a wonderful, fascinating panel. and i think jeff was the one who said we could have gone on for hours more, i know that we could have. let's just plan to get together soon and talk about bakelite again. thank you all for being here, and thank you to our audience for your participation and your great questions. weekends on c-span2 are an intellectual feast. every saturday american history tv documents america's story. on sundays, book tv brings you the latest on nonfiction books and authors. brought to you by television providers including comcast. >> comcast is partnering with a thousand community centers so students from low income families can get the tools they need to be ready for anything. >> comcast along with these television companies support c-span2 as a public service.

thank you, everyone, for joining us for this evening's event. my name is nick, i'm one of the event hosts here at powell's book in portland, oregon. check out our upcoming events by visiting powells.com. follow us on our social media handles on twitter, instagram, facebook and youtube. tonight we are so thrilled to welcome chuck klosterman talking about his new release, "the '90s: a book." he is the author of eight nonfiction books, two no-fly list -- two novels and a short story collection. the '90s brought about a revolution in the human condition that we're still groping to understand, beyond phenomena like "cop killer,"

"titanic," there were shifts in how society was perceived, the belief that nothing was more humiliating than trying too hard. pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything generating an odd comfort in never being certain about anything. in the '90s, a book, chuck klosterman makes a home in all of it, the film, the music, the sports, the tv, the politics, the changes regarding race, class, and sexuality and the yin and yang of oprah and alan greenspan. this evening will include an audience q&a so please use the q&a button at the bottom of your screen if you would like to ask a question as well as if someone asks a question you would like to know the answer to, uptick that question. a link to buy "the '90s" will be shared a couple of times tonight. we currently have over 100

actual signed copies, you can see right here. so order yours while supplies last. thanks so much, chuck, for joining us, we're excited to have you. >> this is the beginning? okay. well, you know, this is normally the part in the event where i would say like, boy, it's great to be here. but, you know, it's really not great to be here because i'm not there. i am literally here, like out behind my house. this book could have come out last fall, probably, we probably could have pushed it and had it come out in the fall but we thought, well, if we wait until february, everything about the pandemic will be over and we will all be back to life. it sure seemed that way when this decision was made. but as you can see, this is not powell's behind me. if it was, it would be a very

unpopular store with an extremely limited inventory. the weird thing about this is, to me, is that it should be better to do it this way. it really should. like, i don't have to travel, that's great. when i'm done with this i'll just walk up to my house, you know, and talk to my kids, that will be it, no travel at all, no hotel. there can be more people at the event, in theory. they told me there was like 600 people signed up for this. it's very rare to get 600 people into a bookstore. you know, i can get people from like all over the country coming to this. there may be people from other countries, at least canada. it actually, in a way, i suppose, should replicate the experience of writing a book, because when you write a book, you are by yourself. so here i am, talking about my book in the same place and kind of in the same atmosphere that i

wrote it in. so it seems like this should be better. but it's not. it's bizarre and, you know, it makes me feel like i'm a totally insane person to be doing events like this, because i'm talking and i'm looking at a picture of myself, and it seems like i'm acting or actually putting together like a videotape to send out for auditions for acting or maybe even in a way it seems like i'm in a really bad movie where there's a bunch of exposition they have to get into it so they've created this narrative conceit where a guy talks to himself on his computer to explain what's going on. i just feel crazy. also, if there were actually -- the people who are watching this now, if you were in a room together, you know, i'm not really saying anything that hilarious but a few of you might be titterring and chuckling, it

would sound like it's going great. right now it feels like it's going terrible because i'm just talking to a picture of myself. but you know, that's how life is, temporarily, hopefully temporarily, hopefully not forever. i'm going to do this as best i can and i hope the technology doesn't break down. in a normal event, you worry known's going to show up. in a virtual event, you spend the whole time worrying that the computer is going to freeze. it might freeze when i'm doing something weird, talking with my hands and i'm suddenly like this for a real long time and then someone captures that and the next thing i know, my entire life is built around this time i did this by accident. so i may not be happy to be doing it in this way, i am happy you came to this, i appreciate powell's setting this up for me and i hope that this kind of strange conversation to no one is interesting to you.

also, as the guy said, there's this q&a button down at the bottom of the zoom. i really hope you ask a lot of questions because i enjoy answering them or at least making up an answer to them. and just so you know, i always say this, you don't have to ask me questions about this book. i know this book is called "the '90s," there will be questions about the '90s, it will be like, oh, what's your third favorite oasis song or whatever, that's totally fine, i'll take those questions, but you can also ask me anything you want. if you want to ask me the weirdest possible question and see if you can confuse me and throw me off, i say go ahead, try to out-weird me, i would love to see it. i don't really feel like that's happened before, but if somebody can do it, i'll be impressed. okay. so why did i write a book about the '90s? well, a lot of reasons. there's never a real easy way to answer a question like that.

it's the main question people ask you when you write a book, why did you do it. if you gave a real answer you would just say, i don't know rivers compelled to do so, because that is my real answer. i don't know why i am compelled to do what i do. i -- just -- i can't not do it. it's not that writing makes me feel so good. i find that writing stops me from feeling bad. like, if i don't do any writing, i feel weird. i assume what it must be like is somebody who is really addicted to cigarettes and that when they started smoking cigarettes it was fun and cool and they liked doing it, it made them feel good, but at the end all the cigarette does is stop them from like feeling uncomfortable. that's kind of how it is for me. i kind of write books because i'm forced to do it by my body, against my will, in a way that's not even necessarily great. but for a job, it's a very good

job. and, you know, the publishing of these books is a complicated process. but they go together. if you want to make a living writing, you've got to put the books out. so the '90s to me were interesting in a lot of different ways. i graduated from high school in 1990. and then i was 28 when the decade ended, 27, 28. so i really did experience adulthood during this period. but this is not a memoir. everything thinks it might be, sorry it disappoint you. this is not about my life. i wrote a book 20 years ago called "sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs," about all the things i did and my very specific interests at the time.

this is not like that, this is more detached, because i do think that there are some aspects about the '90s that are significant. and i wanted to have them kind of quantified before a lot of other people decide to revise what the period was like. what i mean by that is, i know how this works, this process of kind of contemporary history operates in this way where people consistently go back to a period and they say, well, okay, we all thought this at the time, but actually it was the complete opposite, or we viewed this thing as significant so obviously it couldn't have been, it was this obscure thing. like, this is the process that's going to happen, the way people work through history is sort of by going back and changing their memory of it based on the way they think about the world in the present tense. they think about the past the same way they think about the world they're living in right

now. so what i really wanted to try to do is write a book that is not how the '90s seem to us now but how they seemed as they were actually unspooling. sort of like the texture and feeling of the time as it was happening, that that wasn't that i was trying to go back and find things about the '90s that explain the world the way it is now, although sometimes that happens. the most important part was, why did this period of time sort of create the way people understood reality. in other words, the culture, the politics, the sports and all these things were happening, how did those things sort of manifest themselves in a way that made people feel like, this is how i'm supposed to view the world, or this is how the world feels to me. so it's not an attempt to transform the way people currently think about the '90s. it's not supposed to be this

thing were you believe one thing when you read the book but when you finish it, you believe something completely contradictory. what i was trying to do is just sort of capture the actual way it seemed at the time. like, to kind of get away from the idea that the way things might appear to us now or what things mean now was how they were then. i don't think that's how it works. i think it's a very natural process for all people, myself included. you look back on your life or you look back on the past, and unconsciously you imagine yourself as the person you are now but just like, younger and maybe thinner, perhaps shorter. but you somehow believe that the way you view the world and the way your mind operates was the static thing, and that the experiences you had in the past were experienced by a version of

you. but they were experienced by a version of you that's actually an alien, at least to the person you are now. so that was sort of my goal. i also think it's sort of consequential that the '90s were the last decade of the 20th century but in a sense it feels like it might be the last decade where that term makes sense, where you can frame a period of time and say there were these sort of immutable values and shared characteristics and sort of culture built into the time period that even those people who didn't enjoy it or saw themselves as against it or saw themselves as ideologically adversarial with what was going on at the time, they still had a full understanding that this was the kind of shared experience that maybe was invisible at the

time but teams very clear now. one thing i wanted to talk about, because, you know, i'm promoting this book, so i give a lot of interviews, do a lot of podcasts, some guy from a magazine interviewed me and he talked about this idea, well, i talked about the idea, i guess, and he illustrated it to other people, about how it feels as though the movement of time is changing and that there's this palpable sense that we're not moving through time the linear way we had in the past. he did quote me correctly when i said this but he left out a lot of parts that have caused a lot of other people to sort of look at this statement and assume that i'm just somebody who got old and i'm like, oh, used to be things changed and now things don't change. they almost willfully misinterpreted it. so i kind of want to describe part of the thinking that went into this book and really, i think, informed a lot of the ways i thought about the '90s.

it's a theory, it's not even my theory, it's a theory by a guy named mark fischer who was kind of a british cultural critic, i died really young, he's not alive anymore, a brilliant person. he was kind of an anticapitalist sort of theorist. in my view the most interesting ideas tend to be related to culture. and the idea he kind of forwarded near the end of his life was something called the slow cancellation of the future. and what this means in simplest terms is that as we've sort of built up this massive collective body of content, really starting after world war ii, it really accelerates after world war ii, and we're kind of moving through history and things become popular and then they fade from popularity and something replaces them or ideas exist and a new artist or a new writer or

however -- a new politician sees these preexisting ideas, perhaps even a new economist, sees these preexisting ideas and sort of builds something new beyond that, almost using the previous idea as like the jumping-off point. but something strange has happened with the advent of the internet which is that it doesn't seem as though time is moving in this linear way because we now have instant access to all content that exists. so if in the past, if time was like a road, and somebody was walking down that road, the scenery would change along the way, and perhaps what they saw a few miles back would be gone entirely unless they turned around and walked back in a very conscious manner to see it again. it was like time was this road. because of the internet, and a lot of other things, but the internet primarily, culture is now more like a real shallow

ocean, like it's very vast, it's very wide, but it's not very deep. and you can go to any part of it. you can get in your little theoretical rowboat, go to any part of this ocean you want with a bucket and scoop up the past. and it creates this sense that we're living in a perpetual now, that we're not moving through time as much as we are just making everything new to some degree, partially retro. the example this guy used, this is his example, not mine, he covered a genre of music called post punk in the '80s, one day he's watching television in 2011 or whatever, and he sees this band. and he is certain that this must have been a band from the '80s he missed. they're not only playing the style of post punk, they're dressed like people from the '80s. and it's not just that they're dressed that way, there's no sort of ironic value to this,

this is actually just the way they're presenting themselves. the video is being shot through a lens that looks exactly as it would have in the '80s. like, everything about it is exactly the way the '80s would have captured this genre of music. but then he finds out, you know, that it's not some band that he just somehow did not realize existed. it was the art of monkeys, a new band. yet everything about their identity was built through the past. and it wasn't their attempt to pay like an homage to the past. they weren't saying like, oh, it's very funny, we're doing this because it shows like our sense of history. it actually is how the band operates. there's many examples of this. you look at television, for example. if you take footage, say, like 15 seconds of tv footage from some obscure show from 1969, and

then you take some obscure footage from a show in 1979, so you have little bits from these two shows ten years apart and you show them to a child, the child will know which one came first. like, a child will be able to deduce both visually and in the way the whole thing is presented, that one came before the other, in this ten-year window. i don't think that would happen now with a television show, say, from 2003 and a television show from now. i think they would be indistinguishable for someone who is not familiar with either thing, both in the way that people talk, the way it looks, like the tonality of how ideas are expressed, the language. something seems to be happening where we are no longer moving forward through time in this way where certain ideas from the

past are lost or consciously sort of upended. it's as if all this time is occurring simultaneously. and this is why i say it kind of creates this sense of perpetual now. things change in politics, that's one aspect that does seem different. but the presentation of those politics, and the way they are described by the media, the expectation of the person following the news, it seems as though it's slowed down. and it's not just the fact that i've gotten older. this really hadn't occurred to me until i heard someone -- and i'm not so much arguing that this is a terrible thing. it's just strange.

and i think for somebody who follows art or whatever, this could be a problem. and what is interesting about the '90s is that this had not yet happened. the '90s were still progressing in the same trajectory previous decades had done. so when we look at this period of time, we can sort of see the way time operated in the 20th century, but through these things that are not that distant. the '90s feel further away than they actually are. and that's like i think a common experience. i'm sure people in the 1970s felt like, the '50s are distant now, we watch "happy days," we watch "laverne and shirley," we watch "grease," it seems like this forgotten thing. but there's some second layer here of strangeness that is creating the sense that the '90s

were different in both sort of cultural but also like mechanical ways. and that's really kind of what prompted me to the to do this book. i wanted to try to capture the way this was in some ways before someone else did it and started shifting a lot of the caricatures and cliches because, you know, it seems real reductionist to say that and i think people might not like hearing this, but in some ways, it's like the characters and cliches of the period are what become the historical memory. we're not really remembering the actual events as we are the projection of it from versions of satire or someone doing the simplest version of a complex idea. those are the things that seem to make us recall like the 1920s as being this certain way or the

1950s as being this certain way. it's not the literal things as much as sort of the interpreted things. i kind of wanted to dig in and do the literal reading of the period before those other interpretations sort of emerge. okay. so it is -- now we're 25 minutes in. i see down in the q&a section, there's already 68 questions. i don't know how many of them will be interesting and how many might just be, you know, i don't know. so i was considering, you know, reading a little bit from this book and talking about it. i think i'm going to read for two minutes, just the very beginning, the introduction. the '90s began on january 1st of

1990 except for the fact that of course they did not. decades are about cultural perception and culture can't read a clock. the 1950s started in the 1940s. the '60s began when john kennedy demanded we go to the moon in 1962 and ended with the shooting at kent state in may of 1970. the '70s were conceived the morning after altamonte in 1969 and expired during the opening credits of "american gigolo" which means there were five months when the '60s and the '70s were happening at the same time. it felt like the '80s might live forever when the berlin wall fell in 1989 but that was the onset of the euthanasia although it took two years for the patient to die. i start the book in this way because i do think that what is perhaps most interesting about any period of time is when it actually begins and when it

feels like it begins. when the berlin wall fell in '89, and it ends on september 11th, 2001. in this book i do assert 9/11 is the end of the '90s. i don't see the fall of the berlin wall, though, as the at the beginning of this period. and the reason i don't is because the 1990s, particularly the year 1990, was sort of like the '80s on auto pilot. if you look back to what was happening in 1990, it's like, well, you know, "twin peaks" is on television, right, but "cheers" is the most popular show so this thing from the '80s is still the dominant kind of icon of television. joe montana is still the best player in the nfl. people were still ordering things for, like, christmas.

new kids on the block had a huge tour. a lot of these vestiges of the '80s were still really alive and in some ways flourishing. and it wasn't until the release of "never mind" by nirvana in '91 that the '90s sort of take on the characteristics that we now sort of offhandedly associate with that period. and it wasn't that this album was so much better than any record that had come before, or that, like, you know, it just -- you know, everyone who heard it suddenly became a different person, you know, moved their mind mentally through this work, it wasn't that, it was that because it was a good record and because it seemed to be the perfect manifestation of mainstreaming cultural ideas, like taking these aspects and

sort of creating this really kind of glossy, metal-sounding record in a lot of ways, gave people this artifact where -- the way he dresses, the way he acts, his view about success, his view about fame, this is the way we can now understand what a young person in 1991 is like. and it kind of rippled through the culture in many nonmusical ways. i mean, i write in this book, there was a subaru ad, they're talking about punk rock in this ad and talking about how this car, a subaru impreza, is a way to sort of find what's really good about a car in the same way punk rock really, you know, broke through all the limitations of, like, progressive rock in the '70s. what they're really talking about is nirvana, it's just that

you couldn't talk directly about nirvana in a commercial because one, they wouldn't have participated, and two, it would have been self-defeating. if you adopt the things nirvana seemed to be alleging or expressing, and that became this kind of perception we have about, you know, in the '90s, nobody wanted to sell out, that was a huge thing to -- almost everyone i knew, that this idea that you didn't want to try to be beloved by people who weren't like you. there was something desperate and pathetic about that. it's different now, social media, the idea is to collect as many people as you can, the largest possible audience is the best audience. but in the 1990s, in pretty much every genre of everything, there was this concept that was really entrenched, that you did not

want to in any way compromise your integrity, and what integrity meant at this time was amorphous. it was this idea that your desire to be an artist, to be a creative person, was incredibly specific and individual. and if it easily and kind of rapidly could be accessed by people who were unlike you, it was seen as like a very sad thing. it was a damaging thing in some ways. i mean, you know, i think it's kind of funny, i'm promoting this book on the '90s so i'm thinking about the '90s, i wrote this book on the '90s a year or whatever, during the pandemic, i was constantly thinking about these '90s principles and the idea of selling out which is something i hadn't really thought about in over a decade in any kind of real way, i was thinking about it all the time. now when i promote this book,

and that's what i'm doing right now, i mean, i enjoy doing this but this is a promotional thing, i'm trying to sell this book, i feel incredibly embarrassed by it. and i have this desire to sort of undercut the book at every possibility, because i'm back in this mindset that there's something like really desperate and kind of artistically unsophisticated about trying to do something that people just like, that you're just giving people something they like. even though that's the whole idea. why am i here, why am i doing this if i don't want people to buy this book? and i have to admit, part of me wants to try to convince you not to because somehow i think it would make the book better? it makes no sense at all. i have still been kind of messed up by what happened in the '90s because in some ways i'm still that person. okay. so i've read one paragraph of my book. that counts as a reading to me.

i'm going to go now to the q&a here and see what these questions are. okay. first question is, chuck -- that's me -- what is your favorite book or books, boy, that's a big question to begin with. you know, i really believe that the biggest books in anyone's life are the books that they read between, like, sixth and tenth grade. i know that seems odd to people. if you tell someone, it's like, oh, i read your book, it seemed a little bit like ya or whatever, that's a real insult. sometimes people criticize my books or they attempt to by telling me that they kind of seem like the thing, you know, like a 12th grader who thinks he's smart reads. you know what? that, those are the books i remember, in a real profound way. i mean, i read "animal farm" in seventh grade. that was a big deal to me. i still remember parts of that

book in a way, with a vivid sort of just like clarity that i don't feel about books i read two days ago. you know? i've read that big book, "sapiens," this big book about the history of mankind, i loved it, okay? it was such a fun reading expedience, it was so informative, it was so interesting, the guy did a really good job of sort of looking at the evolution of culture in a way that didn't seem like kind of prehistory, it just sort of seemed like someone describing the way the world works at a different time. as i was reading that book i was constantly saying to myself, remember this, remember this thing you just read, like this line you just read, remember this. and i could feel it just evaporating. the way it is when you wake up in the morning, you had a dream and you want to tell someone this dream and you can feel it dissolve in your mind?

this happens to me all the time now. but the books i read in junior high, "animal farm," "back boy," that was a big one, the book about the hoosiers, i read that book probably five times in high school. i never read books twice now. so if you ask me like, what are my favorite books, i'm actually going to tell you books that, you know, i haven't probably looked at in 40 years. okay. a guy named christopher bower, you've said you think of 9/11 as the end of the '90s. is there any point, other than the obvious, of course, that you think of as the beginning? i guess i did answer that, i use "never mind" as when i think of the immutable culture of the '90s began. i think it's -- you could pick other things here. i mean, i do -- like, somebody was arguing that they think the end of the '90s was actually

when facebook starts. and i guess i could see that sort of contention. in terms of the internet, that is kind of true, because when we talk about the internet of the '90s, we all understand that's when it began and we think about the early internet as this transformative device, yet when people talk about the early internet they use arguments that only really apply to social media. if you ask anybody you know, what don't you like about the internet, they'll list a bunch of stuff, okay, and they're almost always going to be connected to the experience of being on twitter or the experience of being on facebook or what tiktok does or instagram. no one is going to say, you know what i hate about the internet, it makes getting driving directions real easy, i hate that. or like, i was looking for a recipe for chicken parmesan, i found it instantly. nobody complains about these

things, everybody looks at them, oh, yeah, the things of the early internet, are still the things we like about it. it's what became of the internet that people don't like. okay. a guy asks me, eating the dinosaur, he kind of sympathize with the unabomber, do you feel that sympathy has grown or abated or why. i don't know if i was ever sympathetic to him. i just sort of made an argument that people don't want to hear which is that this crazy murderer may have been right about some things about the culture. i mean, you obviously should not be sending bombs to professors you've never met. you know, you can look at him as either mentally ill or if not mentally ill, that's even worse in a way. but the one thing that he was right about in many ways was the internet. if you go back and read like the

manifesto he published, he is describing the internet in a way that seems amazingly prescient, particularly since he obviously had never used it. he was living in a cabin in montana since like 1973 with no electricity or running water. so it wasn't like he was going on aol. yet his assumption of what technology would do and how it would manifest itself through the internet is bizarrely accurate. so do i sympathize with him? no. i don't want to get on any federal watch list. i'm not telling people that the unabomber had some great ideas. i'm just saying people who are bad can be right sometimes. the '90s may be the last decade, it's understood, how will we be describing eras after that. okay. this person is saying, if i'm asserting the '90s are the last

decade, what will we call time after that? okay. you know what the safe answer is? the safe answer is time is going to move forward and suddenly the first ten years in the 21st century will seem to have some kind of shared characteristics. and if you move further still, maybe, you know, that second ten-year period will suddenly seem, i'm sure it will relate to trump in some way but it will seem like the ideas from that period are, you know, easier to classify. we will probably project things back onto that period. i guess what i'm saying is, i think that those projections are going to be entirely personal. now, i know someone is going to say, your assumption of the '90s, that's personal, you're a person, you can't get outside of your own mind. yeah, i know, it's true, i am who i am, i think the way i think. but there are ideas about objectivity that used to be exist in the past and i guess

still sort of inform the way i think about journalism. i know it is now unpopular to be a fan of objectivity. which is crazy to me. the idea that -- people will say, they're like, objectivity is a waste of time because you're not a robot, no one can be perfectly objective. it's true, nobody can be perfectly objective. but the idea is that you try to recognize your biases constantly and that the biases you know you have are the main things that inform the way you pursue an idea. so you're not going to be perfectly objective but you're trying to get close. it certainly makes no sense to say, well, it's impossible to have, you know, perfect objectivity so therefore everything needs to be subjective. that makes no sense. that would be like saying, it's impossible to get rid of all the guns in america so let's end all gun laws. we can't do it, we can't perfectly do it, so let's give up. that's crazy. you know, so i guess my answer

to your question is, it probably will come up with something to describe the decades, but i might disagree with it. okay. i'm only a few chapters in, says steven, but there's already an effort made to bookend the '90s with a beginning and an end. when we look back on the last two years do you think there will be a beginning -- so a very similar question as before. i realize that i raised this sort of problem by saying, because this is the last decade, how are we going to deal with the idea that time, at least on the calendar, is going to keep moving? okay. here's somebody asking me about why is there not more hip-hop in this book. there is a section on tupac shakur, i do talk about arrested development, 2 live crew and

their trial, not their music so much. i talk about eminem. the main reason there's not more hip-hop in this book, okay, i wrote about grunge music and sort of the effect that i felt it had on the larger zeitgeist. then i talk about liz phair here and there,alal alanis morissett. hip-hop was a significant part of musical culture during that decade. i can either do it totally in passing or i have to write an entire section on hip-hop. if i'm going to write about hip-hop then i also need to write about indie rock because in some ways that was just as essential and kind of really flourishing at the same time. like pavement, the band pavement, i think is mentioned in two sentences in this book.

seemingly you could have written an entire chapter about pavement but i had to make a choice. there's also teen pop, britney spears and all that stuff at the end. if i had written about grunge and hip-hop and indie rock, i would have had to write about that. now we have all these chapters about music and now the whole book is about music, or i have to do the exact same thing about every other thing i write about. so i have to talk about every possible sport that had significance and every political event that mattered and all of these, maybe write about architecture, maybe write about visual arts. i had to make choices. i had to write about things that put me in the position to talk about ideas i really wanted to get to and also working within the premise that, like, it was, you know, still a mono culture. so the things that were most popular are the things that kind of need to be addressed.

okay. someone is asking what side i have, motley crue and pearl jam, seems bizarre that battle is still being waged. how carefully have you cultivated your background for this event? understanding of course that the gen xers in your -- okay. so they're asking me how much did i curate the background for this zoom event and then they throw in, because you're like a gen xer, you won't admit it. i guess, i mean, optimism the -- obviously the poster i put up, i didn't put it in place that would be stupid, like i didn't put it on the floor. i guess it's curated. i did move some things around just before the event started. it was like a golf club, i don't play golf but i have golf clubs,

i had a golf club in a weird spot so i moved that, guess that's some curation. what's your favorite '90s movie? it's the movie "slacker" which i did not write about much in this book, i just mentioned for a few times, for a couple of reasons. one, the director, richard linklater, i interviewed for a book called "what if you're wrong" so it seemed odd to talk about him again in a different book. my wife did an oral history of "dazed and confused" and it would seem like we're the family publicist if i wrote about "slacker." and i'm sure a lot of people never heard that have film. i was looking to things that were like -- i mean, i write about "titanic," "titanic" and "slacker" are very different movies. somebody wants to know if there's anything about the show "15" in the book.

"15" was a very popular canadian teen show that it was like a soap opera of 15-year-old kids in canada, it predates that show "de grassi." there is not, i do i'm afraid, i did not discuss 15 in this book. as a football fan, do you have an opinion on the nca transfer portal and its impact on the overall games as players can choose and transfer in ways never before? i'll give a shoort answer to this. things like the transfer portal and name and likeness stuff for college sports, it's very hard to take like an ethical or moral stance against that. like, you know, it seems weird to say like players should not have the freedom to go to the school they want and if they can make money, seems crazy to say that, but here's the other thing. why do we care about these

things? why do we care about the players making money? why do we care about the players having freedom of mobility? it's because they're obsessed with college sports and people with me who generally prefer college sports to pro sports in a lot of ways, there are things we see in college football that we can't see at the pro level and my fear is these things that are ethical and proper to do are going to change that product. so it's a weird thing, it's like we're shifting our minds as consumers of sports to this idea that we need to look at an athlete the same way we look at a coal miner and really, they need to be in a union, need to be protected by these unfair things -- i get that, it takes

sense, sounds good when you say it, but if these things change college football in a way that makes people less interested in auburn, alabama, michigan, ohio state, they don't want to watch games on tuesday, something changes about the sport, the fact that we give them these benefits are knowing, going to end up being a detriment. i think this is just something that isn't enough in the player era, which is that we can't operate from the position that these things are supposed to inherently exist, that, you know, that to make a lot of money playing pro football is just something that's supposed to happen, that if you're a pro basketball player, have all these things you can expect, where you play, what you make, all these things, they're fine

in the shortterm, but in the long term, if it changes the way people feel about the sports, the sports themselves will collapse. you have to have some part of you that says okay, we need to be thinking about how these laws, rules, however you look at them, how these aspects change or complicate the sport itself as opposed to what would be most beneficial to somebody currently involved with it. who is a better post oasis musical output, noel or gallagher, i would say noel, i think the best moments of oasis, i love, when he sings the chorus on aquiesce, i prefer when he sings and goes with the songwriter so it's an easy side

for me to take. did i work in akrin ohio and when are some of my memories? i d i worked for the akrin journal 1998 to 2002, have many friends there and, you know, kind of an interesting middle period, when i wrote for rock city, and sex, drugs and cocoa puffs in this apartment in akrin, ohio, one thing i remember going to this chinese restaurant called the platinum dragon. so odd to move to new york, after i lived in akrin, i lived in new york 15 years, i'm in portland now, but norcomb will be my fair city in so many ways. new york is so unlike the rest of america, i really under rated how different new york is from the rest of the country.

but here is the thing, why do the chinese do better in akrin, ohio, i'll never understand, also this place by summit mall you can get pot stickers, the best potstickers i had in my life, like what happened in the history of akrin that brought these wonderful chinese chefs to town? i don't -- i watched that documentary, i guess in some ways explains it, if you want to watch a film that will explain the way culture actually works instead of the way it's described through most entertainment media, watch the documentary on general tso's chicken, it really goes on the ideas that things that are ancillary become collective, but i mean, bottom line is worked out great for akrin at least in

that specific world of eating general tso's chicken. okay, i first discovered you, sex drugs and cocoa puffs, over the last 18 years, spent time reflecting on discussions, many things changed over the years. what perspective did you discuss then that you want to revisit? well, that's an interesting question. all these questions are interesting to me, at least. you know, when you write a book, you think the hardest part should be the typing or the research or sort of the emotional investment you have to put into that book, you know, that should be the hardest part. but in some ways, the hardest part is the fact that you have to remain the person who wrote

that book and the book will never change and you will. you know, like the book is frozen in amber. those early books i wrote in akrin, it's like, they still exist, they were written by a 28-year-old, a version of me that i have no relation to, like i think almost everything about me might be different, maybe. people who know me, might be better at describing if that's true or not but like in so many ways, the way i think, especially about culture. so sometimes someone comes to me and just read rock city, came out in 2001, and like they read it a week ago and ask me a question like you said cinderella, this hair style whatever, you believe and telling me stuff and i'm like it

sounds like something i could have said or written but i haven't read that book since i wrote it and it's like i'm talking about this other person that i used to know or maybe, you know, and totally lost touch with so there is, in those first two or three books, a ton that if i could rewrite would be totally different and in fact, i mean, this is going to sound arrogant, but like if i wrote it now it would be really good. i could really do a good job on it now because after i wrote it i end up talking about it for 20 years and these other things but it wouldn't be the same book and people probably wouldn't like it as much, would seem clinical, sterile, not as emotional, i mean that's -- to me, the craziest thing about what i just look back on things that i've done. like that book, "killing yourself to live," my third book, i can't believe how

casually i talk about myself and people i knew, women i had relationships with, i just did t i didn't, it's not that i was like, oh i shouldn't be doing this but i'll do it anyways, i just did it, you know, and i would never do that now. i would never write about myself that, you know, candidly, never talk about other people so casually. it's, you know, you hate, it's like the silk worm has a song, don't look back, and boston has a song, don't look back. both bands making a good point. you and your 20s or most of the '90s if you could experience a different time period or age when would it be? exactly when i did, i'm glad my adult hood happened in the 90s, i feel so fortunate i was at college when sort of music

changes and in '91 i could experience it in real time, the period we were all into like, you know, guns and roses and rap and all of a sudden, it's this, it was very clear, now we like liz cramer, and all these things, could see it happening, i'm glad i was there for that my son is eight, my daughter is six and i do worry about the world they live in, and people are like because of climate change? sort of, just because things are weirder now. i don't -- i'm sure people in the '90s felt that way, i'm sure people in the '90s who were my age are like i'm glad i grew up in the 70s but there's been a weird acceleration of weirdness. someone says you don't hear much

about pcp anymore, do you have a guess why that is? he's asking me why angel dust is less in the news. it was in the news a lot when i was younger, and there was often this built in idea that if you do pcp you might have superhuman strength, i think an episode of that show cops which of course, you can't even talk about it, copaganda or whatever, but those early episodes, a guy on pcp fights with a canine dog, one of those german shepherds, so there was this idea that somehow pcp was not just a drug but almost like would shoot you into that different sort of existence where you were like incredible hulk or whatever, must have just become less popular, for a while people would sprinkle pcp on to marijuana and sell marijuana for

a very high price, say it's really great marijuana when it's actually very cheap marijuana that just had pcp on it so you smoked it you would hallucinate, faces change and stuff and you chase that high for the rest of your life, but i don't know, maybe someone should bring pcp back, maybe there's an opening for the market. okay what do you expect to happen to hollywood over the next decade? i think they're going to probably go through some sort of fiscal transformation that's going to result in films that seem pretty much identical to the films we're seeing now. were you ever approached to write about sports for the athletic? the website the athletic? i don't know if i was. i think, it may have been that way i started, i would have been maybe seeing off limits, is that

right? could that be? i don't know. any plans to make more episode of music exists, that was a podcast i do with my friend chris ryan, no plans to do it again. it was fun to do but, you know, i find podcasting kind of stressful. when i write, i can really sculpt the thing into what i want it to be and i can go over it over and over and over again, like i mentioned, i haven't read further rock city since i wrote it and that's true, but there were times, because i'm very sensitive, trying to make sentences more straight. just, i want the sentences to be entertaining and interesting and clear and all three of those things i think are equally important so the time i spent editing the work is always to simplify it, make it straighter, make it straighter, make it

straighter. so like i can't even remember what the question was now, it was -- sorry. i think the '90s seemed more innocent at the time because we were younger and pre 9/11 or they just were or perhaps you disagree? i don't think of the '90s as an innocent time. i mean it wasn't really how it was. i don't -- i'm not so sure about the loss of innocence in general over time as much as maybe the changing view of what constitutes innocence. like, you know, i think the modern era almost feels this obligation to have conversations with their kids now which in the

'90s would have been perceived as like damaging. like why are you forcing a kid to confront these ideas now? and that kind of keeps changing, so i don't know about innocence. interesting question. okay. almost 6 here in portland, one last guy. hey chuck, one last guy, answer as many as you want. what was the adjustment from new york city to portland, oregon like? well at first when i moved here in 2017 it was like boy, it's easier to live here, i move to portland, this beautiful city, the weather is great because i love when it rains, i have a steal roof on my house so i love hearing it rain at night, summers are beautiful, easy to have kids in school all these things and in the last couple of

years portland has become a completely different place. and now it seems stranger than new york seemed when i moved there. when i moved new york from akrin they say it will take six months to get used to t it took like six days. never before had i met so many people who talked and think the way i did, now in portland, it's almost very difficult to find. portland is stranger than i thought it would be, as it turns out. in some cases, it's like fox new and see they have this image of america and it's completely distorted, unrealistic of what america is like, talk about america like it's this place, that's how it is, it's kind of that way in portland though. portland is in some ways this

incredible, like, almost like dystopian vision of what could happen, it's very strange. i mean that's it, i like living in portland. i'm staying here, it's crazy here now, but i still like it. how did you decide what 90 pop culture elements to include, i talked about that quite a bit, did you read about the argument about the end of history? that is mentioned in the book, the idea of the end of history, a popular idea in the early '90s, this idea that neoliberalism succeeded and the way america functioned and the way we structured government and society was the way it will always be. i don't think anyone believes that now. even though, you know, i mentioned earlier how there seems to be this stasis, how it

seems that, you know, after all those years of culture accelerating like during the '90s when i wrote stories for news papers, the acceleration of culture, and then the internet happens, and it seems it will be the ultimate accelerant of culture and yet it's become a decellerant in some ways, in this molasses period, it's weird, this march through time. it seems like humanity is supposed to experience, but with that, i think i will end my talk. i really appreciate everyone who sat through this and i hope it wasn't boring and if it was, write me a letter and tell me you were bored and i will probably throw it away but maybe it will change my view of the world.

so thanks. >> thanks so much chuck for joining us tonight, and thank you to all of you out there joining us, great question and see all that kind of stuff. please consider purchasing a copy of "the '90s" currently around 100 signed copies if you order through powells.com now, you will get one of the signed copies. as long as they supplies last. while you're there, be sure to check out our upcoming virtual events and look forward to seeing you at another one of our events very soon. have an excellent evening, everyone. thanks at 8:00 p.m. eastern, founder and director of the danish think tank and host of

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