signal to them through an open door between his office and theirs. >> you'll also hear some blunt talk. >> jim. >> yes, sir. >> i want a report of the number of people assigned to kennedy on me the day he died, the number assigned to me now, and if mine are not less i want them less right quick. if i can't ever go to the bathroom, i won't go, i promise i won't go anywhere, i'll stay right behind these black gates. >> "presidential recordings." find it on the c-span now mobile app or wherever you get your podcasts. 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 books 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 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 rise of the internet, pre-9/11 politics, and 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

no one'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 -- i was 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 young adulthood during this period. but this is not a memoir. everything thinks it might be, sorry to 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. for the most part it 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 seems 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 about 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 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. it's become common to say the '90s began 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 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 counterculture 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 based on his concerns about the growth of technology. 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 mae been right about some things about the culture. you should obviously not be sending bombs to professors you never met. look at him as mentally ill or if not, that's even worse in a way, but the one thing he was right about in many ways was the internet. if you go back and read like the manifesto he published iz describing the internet in a way that seems amazingly press i want especially since he he never used t living in a cabin in montana since like '73, with no running water, not like he

was using aol but his assumption about what it would do with the internet was bizarrely accurate. does this mean i sympathize with him? no, i don't want to be on a federal watch list, i'm not telling people, the unibomber had great ideas, just saying, people who are bad can also be right sometimes. and the '90s might well be the last decade as we always understood, how do you think we will be describing era after that? >> so this person is saying that i'm asserting the '90s are kind of the last decade what are we going to call time after that? well, okay, you know what the safe wr is? the safe answer is that time is going to move forward and suddenly the first ten yearsives 21st century will seem to have some kind of shared characteristics and if you move further still, maybe the second 10-year period will suddenly seem, i'm sure it will be into trump in some way but seem the

ideas from that period are, you know, easier to classify. we'll probably project things back on to that period. i guess what i'm saying is i think those projections are going to be entirely personal. and i knowman is going to say well your assumption of the '90s that's personal. you're a person. you can't get outside of your own mind, like, i know, that's true, i am the way i am, i think the way i think, but there are ideas about objectivity that used to exist in the past and still sort of inform the way i think about journalism, i know it is unpopular to be a fan of objectivity which is crazy to me, just the idea that, because people will say is like well objectivity is a waste of time because you're not a robot, no one can be perfectly objective, well it's true no one can be

perfectly objective but the idea is you try to recognize your biases constantly and the biases you know you have the main way you pursue an idea so you won't be perfectly objective but you try to get close. it certainly makes no sense to say well it's impossible to have perfect objectivity so therefore everything needs to be subjective. that makes no sense. like saying well, it's impossible to get rid of all the guns in america so let's just end all gun laws because, you know, we can't perfectly do it so let's just give up, like that's crazy. so i'm sure probably there is some way to describe the decades but i might disagree with it. okay. only a few chapters in, says steven, but there's already an effort made to bookend the 90s with a beginning and end, when we look back on the last two

years, do you think there will be a beginning so very similar question to before. i realize i have raised this sort is have problem by saying that because this is the last decades how are we going to deal with the idea that time at least on the calendar is going to keep moving? here's somebody is asking me about like why is there not more hip hop in this book? you know, there is a section on tupac shakur, i talk about arrested development, i talk about eminem, but here is like the main reason there's not more hip hop in this book. okay. i wrote about grunge music and sort of the effect it had on the larger zeitgeist, then i talk about liz fair here and there,

music throughout the book. i didn't talk about brick pop for example, brick pop was a significant part of musical culture during that decade but i was like well, i could either do it totally in passing or i have to write an entire section on grip hop and if i write about grip hop, i need to then write about indy rock because in some ways that was just as essential and a really flourishing at the same time, like indy rock is a weird way to call it now, but i think the band pavement is mentioned in two sentences in this book. seemingly, could have written an entire chapter on pavement but i had to make a choice and there's teen pop and britney spears and that at the end, if i wrote about all of t would have had to write about that so now all these chapters about music and now either the book is mostly about music or i have to do the exact same thing with every other thing i write about so i

have to talk about every possible sport that had significance and every political event that matters and all of these maybe architecture, maybe digital arts. i had to make some choices so i tried to do the pick the things that would put me in a position to talk about the ideas i can't really wanted to get to and also, oning within the premise that, like, it was, you know, still a monoculture. so the things that were most popular are the things that kind of need to be addressed. okay. someone asking me what side i have between motley crew and pearl jam. seems bizarre that battle is still being waged. how carefully have you cultivated your background for this event, understanding of

course the, so asking me how much can i curate for this zoom event and because you're like a gen x er you won't get t i guess the poster i put up, i didn't put it in a place that would be stupid, like on the floor, i guess it's curated, i mean i -- i did move some things around just before the event started, was like a golf club, i don't play golf, but have golf clubs, had one in a weird spot so i moved that i guess that's some curation. what's your favorite '90s movie, it is the movie slacker which i did not write about much in this book i just mentioned a few times for a couple reasons, one the director, i interviewed for a book so seemed odd to talk about him in a different book.

my wife did a book on oral history of dazed and confused and, his publicist, plus slacker was a small thing, many i'm sure watching this never heard of that film so i was looking for things that were like, i mean like i wrote about titanic. titanic and slacker are very different movies. okay. somebody wants to know if 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. predates that show degrassi. there is not, i do 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 player can see choose and transfer in ways never before. i'll give a short answer, things like the transfer portal and the name and likeness stuff for college sports, it's very hard to take a like ethical or moral stance against that. like it seems weird to say like players should not have the freedom to go the to the school they want, 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 being able to have freedom of mobility? it's because there is a sense of could only college sport and see people like me who generally

prefer college sport to see pro sport, are things we see in college football we can't see at the pro level and my fear is these things that are ethically proper to do are going to change that product, so it's a weird thing. it's like, we were kind of shifting our minds as consumers of sport to see this idea that we need to look at anning at reet the same way we look at a coal miner and need a union, to be protected from, you know, these unfair capitalist forces and all these things, of course it sounds good when you say it but if these things change college football in a way that makes people less interested, less interested in michigan, ohio state, they don't want to watch games on tuesday, something changes about the sport, the interact that we gave

them these benefits going to end up being to their detriment. i mean i just think this is something that is just not considered enough in the player empowerment era, that these things are supposed to inherently exist, that making a lot of money from pro football is something supposed to happen that if you're a pro basketball player, all these things you can expect, where you play, what you make, who you play with all these things, it's fine in the short term but if 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 know 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 oatput, noah or gallagher, i think the best moments would be like don't look back at anger or the chorus on aquiesce, when he sings i prefer and he's also the song write sore easy side for me to take. okay. somebody asked me, did i work in acrin, ohio in the 90 and see what are some of my memories there, i did i worked at the acrin journal from '98 to 2002. you know, i have mine friends there and was kind of an interesting middle period of my life, when i wrote rock city and sex, drugs and cocoa puffs was

in this apartment in the valley of acrin, ohio, one thing i really remember is going to a chinese restaurant called the platinum dragon was so bizarre to move to new york, i moved after i lived in acrin, lived in new york 15 years, i'm in portland now but new york will always be my favorite city in a lot of ways, just no experience like it. new york is so unlike the rest of america. it's like, i really underrated how different new york was from the rest of the country, but here's the crazy thing. why was the chinese food better in acrin, ohio, i'll never understand that. also this place out by summit maul where you could get these pot stickers, i can't remember what the place was called, best pot stickers i've ever had in my life, how could this be? like what happened in the prehistory of acrin that brought these wonderful chinese chefs to town? i just, i don't -- i watched

that documentary on general tso's chicken in some way explains it, if you want to watch a film that will explain the way culture actually works as opposed to the way it is described through most kind of entertainment media, watch this documentary on general tso's chicken, really illustrates the way that ideas and specifically, like ideas that are ancillary become collective but i mean bottom line is worked out great for akrin, at least in this that specific world of eating general tso's chicken. >> okay, spent a lot of time reflecting on your discussions, many reflections 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 that 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 acrin, still exist, in my 28-year-old version of me that i have no relationship to now. like, i think almost everything

about me might be different, maybe. people that 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, have completely shifted. so sometimes somebody will come to me and just read rock city which came out in 2001, like just read it a week ago and ask me a question like you said cinderella, this hair style or whatever, you believe, it's like, you know, they're 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 to this other person that i used to know or maybe and like i totally lost touch with. so there is a ton in those first two or three books that if i could rewrite would be totally different. and in fact, this is going to

sound arrogant but like if i wrote rock city now, it would be very good. like i could really do a good job on this book now because after i wrote it, ended up talking about it 20 years or whatever and learned these other things but, you know, it wouldn't be the same book and i don't think people would like it as much, probably seem kind of clinical and sterile, not nearly emotional, definitely wouldn't talk about my own life as much, that's the craziest thing when i look back on things i've done, like that book "killing yourself to live" i guess was my third book, i cannot believe how casually i talked about myself and people i knew and women i had relationships w like i'll just do it. not they was like i shouldn't be doing this but i'll do it anyways, i just did it 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, it's like the silk worm has a song, don't look back and boston has a song, don't look back. both making a good point. in your 20s most of the 90s, if you could have experienced the time period of a different age when would it be? exactly when i did. i'm very glad my young adult hood happened in the '90s. that was the perfect time to be that age. i feel so fortunate that i was at college when sort of music changed and, you know, like in 91 or whatever, i coax appearance it in real time this idea that we were all into like, you know, guns n roses and stuff and all of a sudden, you know, it was the very clear, you could see like now we like liz fair, all these things, could feel it happening, see it happening, i'm glade was there for that.

one thing, i got two kids, my son is eight and daughter is six and i do worry about the world that they're going to live in, i mean, and people are like oh, climate change -- yeah, sort of. just because things are weirder now. i don't -- i'm sure people in the 90s felt that way, people in the 90s who were my age are like i'm glad i grew up in the '70s but there's been kind of a weird acceleration of weirdness. somebody says you don't hear much about pcp anymore. do you have a guess of why that is? well, i mean, asking me why angel dust is less in the news. it was in the news a lot when i was younger. often part of after school specials and often this built-in idea that if you took pcp you might have like super human strength. i think there was an episode on

that show cops, which of course now you can't even talk about it, cop-aganda or whatever, but one of the episodes like 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 it was almost like would shoot you into this different sort of existence where you were like the incredible hulk or whatever. i think it must have just become less popular. for a while, people like would sprinkle pcp on to marijuana and then would sell marijuana for a very high price, say it's really, you know, great marijuana when it was really very cheap marijuana with pcp on it so if you smoke it you'd hallucinate, faces change and stuff and you would chase that high for the rest of your life, but maybe they should bring pcp back, i don't know, 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 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, when i started, i would have seen maybe off limits, could that be? i don't know. any plans to make more episodes of "music exists" that was a podcast i do with my friend chris ryan, no plan to see do it again which it was fun, but i find podcasting kind of

stressful. when i write, i can really sculpt the thing into what i want it to be and go over it over and over again like i mentioned i haven't read fud rock city since i wrote t that the true, read it a thousand times when i was writing it because i was obsessive about going over sentences, also trying to make sentences more straight, like i want the sentences to be entertaining and interesting and clear and all three of those things i think are equally important so the type i spent editing always to make it simplify, simplify, make it straighter, make it straighter, so like i can't remember what the question was now -- sorry. do you think the '90s seemed more innocent at the time because we were younger and it was pre9/11 or they just were or perhaps you disagree?

i don't think the '90s as an innocent time. i mean it really wasn't 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 a modern parent 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? like, you know, they're seven or whatever, like why -- and that kind of keeps changing so i don't really know about innocence.

interesting question. okay. almost 6:00 here in portland so here's a question, one last guy. hey, got three questions. answer as many as you want. what would 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, like i moved to portland, beautiful city, the weather to me is great because i love when it rains, have a steel roof on my house, love hearing it rain, easy to get the kids in school all these things and last couple of years portland become a completely different place and now it seems stranger than new york seemed when i moved there. you know when i moved to new york from acrin they said it's going to take you six month to see get used to it. took like six days because i just suddenly found so many people who were exactly like me, i had never had an experience where i met so many people who

seemed to kind of talk and think the way i did and now in portland, it's almost very difficult to find. i mean, portland is stranger than i thought it would be as it turns out. like, i like living here, love raising my kids here but in some ways you watch like fox news and have this image of america and it's a completely distorted, unrealistic of what america is like, like they talk about america like it's this place that every person is like, that's not how it is. it's kind of that way in portland, though. like portland actually is in some ways this incredible like almost like dystopian vision of what can happen to a community. it's very strange. that said, i like living in portland, i'm staying here. like it's crazy here now, but i still like it. how did you decide what 90s pop culture elements to include, we

talked about that quite a bit. did you read the francis, about the kind of end of history? that is mentioned in the book, the end of history as a popular idea in the, you know, very early '90s, this idea that sort of neoliberalism succeeded and the way that america functioned and the way we constructed our government and society would be the way it would always be, and i don't think anyone believes that now. even though, you know, i had mentioned earlier there seems to be this stasis, how it seems that, you know, after all those years of culture accelerating, like during the '90s whenever i wrote stories for news papers was always talking below acceleration of culture and then the internet happens and seems like the internet is going to be the ultimate accident sell aren't of culture and yet it has become a decelerant in some ways

that we're in this kind of mu lasses period where it is hard to get back on that kind of march through time and it seems like humanity is supposed to experience, but with that, i think i will end my talk, i really appreciate everybody 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, thanks for joining us tonight and thanks to all of you out there joining us. great questions and all that kind of stuff. please, consider purchasing a copy of "the '90s" currently have around 100 signed copies so just if you order through powells.com now, you will get

one of the signed copies so, as long as they supplies last. and while you're there, be sure to check out our line-up of upcoming virtual events and look forward to seeing you at another one of our events very soon, have an excellent evening, everyone, thanks again, chuck. >> saturday night, april 30th, the daily show host trevor no he ah headlines white house correspondents dinner since 2018, president biden expected to attend, first time since 2016, sitting president made an appearance, coverage begins 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span saturday, we'll have dinners ahead of the speaking program, coverage on c-span.org and video app begins 6:00 p.m. eastern where you can watch celebrities and other guests walk the red carpet as they arrive for the

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