disrupted. thank you everyone for joining us. this evening's event. my name is nick and i'm one of

the events hosts here at al's books in portland, oregon before we begin i want to encourage you to check out our l thank you everyone for joinig us for this evening's event. my name is nick. we are at powell books in portland, oregon. for began, i want you to check out the lineup of upcoming events by visiting our website. if you don't already do so, please follow our social media handles. follow us our twitter, instagram, facebook, and youtube. tonight we are so thrilled to welcome chuck klosterman. he is talking about his new release, the nineties. he is the best selling author of eight nonfiction books, two novels, and a story short story collection. he has written for the new york times, washington post, gq, esquire, the guardian, global, and many others. the 90s brought around a revolution in human conditions that we are still going to understand. there are phenomena like cop killer, titanic, and zima.

there were hostile shift in how society was perceived. there was the rise of the internet. there was pre-9/11 politics. nothing was more humiliating than trying to -- pop culture accelerated without the aid of a machine that remembered everything. it generated comfort. we were never certain about anything. in the 90s, chuck klosterman makes a home of all of it. the films, the music, the sports, the tv, the politics, the changes regarding race, blacks, and sexuality. he discusses the ying and yang of oprah and alan greenspan. there is a q&a. please use the queue and a bottom button at the bottom of the screen if you would like to ask a question. please upload your question by clicking the thumbs up button. lastly, support chuck by purging purchasing a copy of his book from us. chalk graciously stopped by the

store. we currently have over 100 side copies. they are right here. or do yours while supplies last. all right, thanks so much for joining us. we are excited to have you. >> is this the beginning? okay. you know, this is normally the part in the event where i would say, boy, it is great to be here. it is really not great to be here. i am not there. i am literally here. i am out behind my house. this book could have come out last fall. we probably could have pushed it and have it come out in the fall. we thought, well, if we wait to february, everything will be over for the pandemic. we will all be back to life. it sure seemed that way when this decision was made. as you can see, this is not powell's bookstore behind me.

if it was, it would be a very unpopular store with an extremely limited inventory. it is weird. the weird thing about this is, to me, it should be better to do it this way. it really should be. i don't have to travel, great. when i am done with this, i will just walk up to my house. i will talk to my kids. 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 is very rare that you get 600 people into a bookstore. i can get people from all over the country coming to this. there might be people from other countries, at least canada. in a way, i suppose that it should replicate the experience of writing a book. when you write a book, you are by yourself. here i am talking about my book. i am in the same place or in.

i am in the same atmosphere that i wrote it in. it seems like this should be better. it is not. it is bizarre. it makes me feel like i am a totally insane person to be doing events like this. i am talking, i am looking at a picture of myself. it seems like i am acting. it seems like i am putting together a video tape to put additions for acting. either way, it seems like i am in a very bad movie. there is a bunch of exposition that i have to get into. they have created this narrative conceit. a guy talks to himself on his computer to explain what is going on. i just feel crazy. also, if there were actually people who are watching this right now, if you are in a room together, i am not releasing anything that hilarious. a few of you might be chuckling.

there would be a bunch of you. it would sound like it is going great. right now, it feels like it is going terrible. i am just talking to a picture of myself. you know, that is how life is temporarily. hopefully temporarily, hopefully not forever. i am going to do this the best i can. i hope the technology doesn't breakdown. it is interesting. in a normal event, you worry that nobody is going to show up. in a virtual event, you spent a little bit of time worrying that the computer is going to freeze. it might freeze when i am doing something weird. i might talk with my hands. i might be stuck like this for a real long time. someone captures that. the next thing i know, my entire life is built around doing this by accident. while i may not be happy to be doing it in this way, i am happy that poll set this up for me. i hope that is strange

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

the main question i want to ask you when someone writes a blood, why did you do it? if you gave a real answer, you just say that you didn't know, you are compelled to do so. that is my real answer. that is -- i don't know why i am compelled to do what i do. i just can't not do it. it is not that riding makes me feel so good, but i find that writing stops me from feeling bad. if i don't do any writing, i feel weird. what it must be like is when somebody who is really addicted to cigarettes, they started smoking cigarettes and it was fun, cool, they liked doing it, it made them feel good. any and, all the cigarette does is stop them from feeling uncomfortable. that is how it is for me. i kind of write books because i am forced to do it. my body, against my will, it does it in a way that is not

necessarily great. for a job, it is a very good job. the publishing of these books is a complicated process. they go together. if you want to make a living in writing, you have to put the books out. the 90 is were interesting to me in a lot of different ways. i graduated from high school in 1990. i was 28 when the decade ended haiti. 27, 28. i really did experience young adulthood during this period. this is not a memoir. if anyone thinks that it might be, i am sorry to disappoint you, but this is not about my life. i wrote a book 20 years ago called sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs. that was a memoir about experiencing the 90s. it was about how this period felt during the prism of my own experience. it was about the things i did,

my interests of a time. this is not like that. this is more detached. i do think that there are some aspects about the 90s that are significant. i wanted to have them quantified before a lot of other people decide to revise where the period was like. what i mean by that is that i know how this works. there is this process of connecting temporary history. it often operates in this way. people go back to a period. they say, well, we offer this at the time, but it was actually the complete opposite. we viewed this thing as significant, so it could not have been, it was this obscure thing. this is the process that is going to happen. this is the way the people work through history. it is done by going back and changing their memory of it based on the way that they think about the world on the present tense. they think about the past the

same way they think about the world they are living in right now. whatever really wanted to try and do was write a book that was not how the 90s seemed to us now. it is about how they seemed as they were accident actually in progress. it is the feeling of the time as it happened. that does happenit was not thato go back and find things about the 90s that explain how the world is now. although that sometimes did happen. for the most part, why did this period of time create the way people understood why audi? in other words, the culture, the politics, the sports, all of these things that were happening. how did those things manifest themselves in a way that made people feel like this is how they were supposed to view the world? this is how the world feels to me. this is not an attempt to transform the way the people currently think about the 90s.

it is not supposed to be this thing where we believed one thing when we read the book, by then you finish it and believe something completely contradictory. what i was trying to do, i was trying to sort of capture the actual way that it seemed at the time. i was trying to get away from the idea that the way things might appear to us now, what things mean now, that was not how they were then. i don't think that is how it works. that is an interesting process for my p -- you imagine yourself as the person you are right now, you imagine yourself as younger, thinner, perhaps shorter. you somehow believe that the way you view the world, the way your mind operates, you believe that it was a static thing.

you believe that the things you experienced in the past were experienced by aversion of you. they were experienced by a version of you that is an alien to the person that you are now. that was my goal. i also think it was sort of consequential that the 90s was the last decade of the 20th century. in a sense, it feels like it might be the last decade where that term makes sense. you can frame a period of time. there were these values and shared characteristics. there were these cultural aspects built into the time period. even if you didn't enjoy it, even if you saw yourself as against it, even if you saw yourself as an adversary with what was going on at the time, you still had a full understanding that this was the shared experience. it was maybe invisible at the

time. it might seem very clear now. one thing that i wanted to talk about, i am promoting this book, i do a lot of interviews and podcasts, i was with a person that talked about the idea of how it feels as though the movement of time is changing. there is a palpable sense that we are not moving through time in a linear way that we have in the past. he did quote me correctly when i said this. he left out a lot of parts that have caused a lot of other people to sort of look at this statement. they assume that i am just somebody who got old. things changed, now things don't change. they almost willfully misinterpreted. i kind of want to describe part of the thinking that went into this blurred. i think it really informed a lot of the ways that i thought

about it. it is a theory, it is not even my theory. it is a three by a guy named mark fischer. he was a british cultural critic. he died really young. he is not alive anymore. he is a very brilliant person. he was kind of an anti capitalist sort of theorist. in my view, his most interesting ideas are related to culture. the idea that he forwarded near the end of his life was something called the slow cancellation of the future. what this is means, in the simplest terms, is that as we sort of build up this massive collective body of content, we really started doing this after world war ii. it started before world war ii, but it accelerated after world war ii. we are kind of moving through history, things become popular. they fade from popularity. something replaces them.

ideas exists. a new artist, a new writer, a new politician sees these pre-existing ideas. they build something beyond that. they are using the previous idea as a jumping point. something strange has happened with the invention of the internet. it does not seem as though time is still moving in this linear way because we now have in stint access to all content that exists. in the past, if time was like a road and somebody was walking down that road, the scenery would change along the raw way. what we saw a few miles back would be gone entirely. it was like time was this road. the internet was the primary

factor in this. culture is now like a shallow ocean. it is very fast, very wide. it is not very deep. you can go to any part of it. you can get in your theoretical robo. you can go to any part of the ocean you want with a bucket. you can scoop up the past. it creates this sense that we are living in a perpetual now. we are not moving through time as much as we are just making everything new to some degree partially retro. a colleague of mine adam covered postponed in the 80s. he was watching television in like 2011. he saw this band. he is certain that this must have been a ban from the 80s that he missed. they are playing in a style of post punk. they are dressed like people from the 80s. it is not just that they are

dressed that way, but there is no ironic value to it, that is how they are presenting themselves. the video is being shot through a lens that looks exactly like it would have in the 80s. everything about it is exactly the way that the 80s would have captured this genre of music. he finds out, you know, that this is not some band that he somehow did not realize. it was the arctic monkeys. they were a new band. everything about their identity was built through the past. it was not their attempt to pay an homage to the past. they were not saying, wow, it is very funny, we are doing this because it shows our sense of history. it actually is how the band operates. there is many examples of this. look at television. if you take footage, say you take 15 seconds of tv footage from some obscure show from

1969. if you take some obscure footage from a show in 1979 attack, if you have the little bits of these two shows from ten years apart, show them to a child. the child will know which one came first. a child will be able to deduce both visually and in the way the thing is presented that one of them came before the other. there is that ten-year window. i don't think that would happen now with a television show from 2003 and a television show from now. i think they would be indistinguishable for someone who is not familiar with either thing. it is in the way that people talk, the way it looks, 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. they are not consciously upended. it is as if all of this time is occurring simultaneously. this is why i say creates this sense of perpetual now. things change in politics, that's one aspect of it does seem different. the presentation of those politics, the way that they are described by the media, the expectation of the person following the news seems as if it has slowed down. it is not just the fact that i have gotten older. this really hadn't occurred to me. -- i am not so much arguing that this is a terrible thing.

it is just strange. for somebody who really follows art or whatever, you know, this could be a problem. what is interesting about the 90s is that this had not yet happened. the 90s were still progressing on the same trajectory that previous decades had done so. when we look at this period of time, we can sort of see the way that time operated in the 20th century. we can do so through these things that are not that distant. the 90s feel further away than they actually are. that is a common experience. i am sure that people in the 1970s felt like the 50s were distant. watch happy days, watch greece, it seems like a forgotten thing. there is a second layer of

strangers here. it is creating the sense that the 90s were different in cultural and mechanical ways. that is what kind of prompted me to do this book. i wanted to try to capture the way that this was before someone else did it. they could start shifting the character caricature's and clichés. i think people might not like hearing this. in some ways, it is like the characters and clichés of the period are wet become historical memory. we are not remembering the actual events as much as the sort of projections of it. there are versions of satire's, there are simple versions of complex ideas. those are the things that make

us recall the 1920s as being a certain way. the 19 50s were a certain way. it is not the literal things as much as the interpretive things. i kind of wanted to get in and do the literal reading of this period before all of these other interpretation started to emerge. okay. we are 25 minutes in. i see down in the question and answer section there are already 68 questions. i don't know how many of them will be interesting. i don't know how many of them might just be -- [inaudible] i was considering reading a little bit from this book. i wanted to talk a bit about it. i think i am going to maybe read for two minutes. this is just the very beginning of the book. it is the introduction. notthe 90s began on january 1sf

1990, except for the fact that they did not. decades about cultural perception. culture can't read o'clock. the 1950s started in the 1940s. the 60s began when john kennedy demanded that we go to the moon in 1962. the ended with the shooting at can't state in may of 1970. the 70s were conceived in 1969. they expire during the opening credits of american gigolo. there were five months when the 60s and the 70s happened at the same time. it felt like the 80s might be forever when the berlin wall wall fell in november of 89. that was the onset of the euthanasia. it took another two years for the patient to die. i started the book in this way because i think that what is most interesting about any period of time is that when it actually begins versus when it

feels like it began's. it has become common to say that the 90s began when the berlin wall fell in the fall of 1989. it ends on september 11th of 2001. in this book, i do assert that 9/11 is the end of the 90s. i don't see the fall of the berlin wall as the beginning of this period. the reason that i don't is because the 1990s, particularly the year 1990, it was sort of like the 80s on autopilot. look back to what was happening in 1990. twin peaks was on television, right? cheers was the most popular show. this thing from the 80s was still the dominant icon of television. joe montana was still the best player in the nfl. people were still ordering

things for christmas. the new kids on the block had a huge tour. there were vestiges of the 80s that were still really alive. in some ways, they were even flourishing. it was not until the release of never mind by nirvana in 1991 that the 90s sort of take on the characteristics that we now offhandedly associate with that period. it was not that this album was so much better than any record that had come before it, it was not that everybody who heard it suddenly became a different person and move their mind mentally, it was not that. because it was a good record, because it seemed to be the perfect manifestation of mainstreaming counterculture ideas, they took these aspects

of music and sort of created this glossy metal sounding record but. it gave people an artifact. look at the way he dresses, the way he acts, look at his view about success, his view about fame. this is the way that we can now understand what a young person in 1891 is like. it kind of rippled through the culture in non musical ways. i read this book about a subaru ad. they were talking about punk rock in this ad. they were describing how this new subaru in present it is a way to find what is really good about a car in the same way that punk rock broke through all of the limitations of progressive rock in the 70s. they were talking about nirvana.

they could not talk directly about nirvana in a commercial. one, they would have never participated. two, that will be self defeating. you had to actually adopt the things that nirvana seemed to be expressing. that became this kind of perception that we have about the 90s. nobody wanted to sell out, that was a huge thing to almost everyone i knew. there was this idea that you did not want to try to be beloved by people who are not like you. there is something desperate and pathetic about that. it is different now with social media. the idea is to collect as many people as you can. you want the largest possible audience, that is the best audience. in the 1990s, in pretty much every genre of everything, there was this concept that was really entrenched.

you did not want to, in any way, compromise your integrity. what integrity meant at this time was -- it was the idea that your desire to be an artist, to be a creative person was incredibly specific and individual. if it easily and rapidly could be accessed by people who were unlike you, it was seen as a very sad thing. it was a damaging thing in some ways. >>on the 90s i think it is kind of funny. i am promoting this book from the 90s. i am thinking about the 90s. i just wrote this book on the 90s. i wrote it during the pandemic. i was constantly thinking about these 90s principles. the idea is selling out is something that i had not really thought about. i was thinking about it all the

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

that counts as a reading to me. i'm going to look at the questions here. i am going to see what the questions are. okay, first question. chuck, that's me, what is your favorite book or books? >> boy, that is a big question to begin with. i really believe that the biggest books in anyone's life are the books that they read between sixth and tenth grade. i know that seems odd to people. if you tell someone, wow, i read your book. that is a real insult. sometimes people criticize my books. they tell me that it seems like a book that a 12th grader that think he is smart reads. those are the books that i remember in a profound way. i read a book in the seventh grade, it was a big deal to me.

i remember parts in that book. there is a vivid clarity that i don't feel about books. i read some books two days ago. i read that big book, say peons, i am sure that many people are familiar with it. it is a big book about the history of mankind. i loved it. it was such a fine reading experience. it was informative. the guy did a very good job at looking at the evolution of culture in a way that did not seem like pre-history. it seemed like somebody describing the way the world worked. as i was reading the book, i was cautiously saying to myself, remember this, remember what you just read. this land you just read, remember it. i could feel it evaporating. you wake up in the morning and had a dream. you want to tell somebody this dream. you can feel it is all. that happens to me all the time

now. those books that i read when i was in junior high, animal farm, season on the brink, the book about the indiana hoosiers, i read some of those books five times in high school. i never read books twice now. if you ask me, one of my favorite books? i am going to tell you books that i probably have not looked at in 40 years. >> okay. you said that you think of 9/11 as the end of the 90s, is there any point other than the obvious that you think of as the beginning? i used never mind as my example of when the culture of the 90s began. you could take other things here.

somebody was arguing that they think the end of the 90s was actually when facebook starts. i guess i could see that sort of contention. i mean, in terms of the internet, that is kind of true. when we talk about the internet of the 90s, we all understand that is when it began. we think about the early internet as this transformative device. however, when people talk about the early internet, they often used language and arguments that really only apply to social media. if you ask anybody you know, why don't you like about the internet? you are going to list a bunch of stuff. they are almost all going to be connected to the experience of being on twitter, the experience of being on facebook. there is what tiktok does, instagram. nobody is going to say, you know what i hate about the internet, getting driving directions really easily. i hate that. i was looking at a recipe for chicken parmesan, i found it

instantly. nobody complains about these things. everybody looks at it like, yeah, the things of the early internet are still the things we like about it. it is what became the internet that people don't like. someone is asking me i, do you sympathize with the unabomber due to his concerns about the exponential growth of technology based on a 14 year -- has that sympathy grown? why? >> i don't know if i've ever sympathetic to him. i just made an argument that people don't want to hear. this crazy murderer may have been right about some things about culture. you obviously should not be sending bombs to professors that you have never met. you can look at him as mentally ill. if he is not mentally ill, that is even worse in a way. the one thing that he was right about in many ways was the

internet. go back and read the manifesto that he published. he is describing the internet in a way that seems amazing. he obviously had never even used it. he was living in a cabin in montana since 1973. he had no electricity or running water. it was not like he was going -- this was his assumption of what technology would do, how would manifest itself through the internet. it is bizarrely accurate. ice -- do i sympathize with him? no. i don't want to get on any federal watchlists. i am not telling people that the unabomber had some great ideas. i am just saying the people that are bad can also be right sometimes. the 90s might well be the last decade where that was understood. how do you think we will be describing errors after that? if i am asserting that the 90s were the last decade, what are

we going to call time after that? do you know at the safe answer is? the safe answer is that time is going to move forward. suddenly, the first ten years of the 21st century will seem to have shared characteristics. if you move further still, that second tenure period will suddenly seem, and i'm sure it will be really into trump, it will seem as though the ideas from that period are easier to classify. we will probably project things back on to that period. what i am saying, i think those projections are going to be entirely personal. i know that someone is going to say, well, your of submission of the 90s's personal. you are a person. you can't get outside of your own mind. yeah, i know. that is true. i am who i am, i think the way that i think. there are ideas about objectivity that used to exist

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

my answer to your question is that it probably will come up with something to describe the decades. i might disagree with it. i am only a few chapter in, says stephen, but there is already an effort to book and the 90s with a beginning have and an end. this is a similar question to before. i may have raised this sort of problem. 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? somebody is asking me why there is not more hip-hop in this book. there is a section on tupac shakur. i do talk about the crew and

their trial. i talk about eminem. here is the main reason there is not more hip-hop in his book, i wrote about grinds music and the fact that i felt it had on people. i talk about other things here and there. i talked about atlanta's more set and her music throughout the book. there is a lot of music i didn't talk about. i didn't talk about britney. her pop was a significant part of culture during that decade. i can either do it totally in passing, or i have to write an entire section on pop. if i am going to write about brit pop, i need to write about indie rock. in some ways, that was just as essential. they really flourished at the same time. in the rock is kind of a weird thing to call it now. i'm talking about a band like pavement. the band pavement is mentioned

in two sentences in this book. you could have written an entire chapter about pavement. i had to make a choice. there is also britney spears and other stuff at the end. if i wrote about grunge, hit pop, in iraq, i have to write about all of that. we have all of these chapters about music. either the book is mostly about music, or have to do the exact same thing with every other thing i read about. i had to talk about every possible sport that had significance, every political event that mattered. i might read about architecture, visual arts. i had to make some choices, right? i tried to make the -- i wanted to pick the things that put me in a position to talk about the things i wanted to get about. it was still a mono culture. the things that were most popular are the things that can be addressed.

uh seems bizarre that that battle still being okay, somebody is asking what side i half between motley crew and pearl jam. it seems bizarre that battle is still being waged. >> how carefully have you cultivated your background for this event? you need to understand that the gen x -- okay. they asked me, how much did i curate the background for this zoom event? they also throw in that i am a gen xer, i won't admit it. i put up the poster. i put it in a place that would be -- i did not put it on the floor. i guess it is curated. i did move some things around before the event started.

there was a golf club. i don't play golf, but i have golf clubs. i had a golf club in a weird spot. i moved that. i guess that is some curation. >> what is your favorite 90s movie? >> it is the movie slacker. i did not much right much about it in the book. i mentioned it a few times. i interviewed the director. it seemed odd to talk about it again in a different book. my wife did an oral history in dazed and confused. slacker was a small thing. it was -- there were many people i that have never heard of that film. i was looking for things hung -- titanic and slacker are very different movies. >> somebody wants to know if there is anything about the

show 15 in the book. 15 was a very popular canadian teen show. it was a law soap opera of canadian kids. it predates the grassy. i did not discuss 15 in this book. >> as a football fan, do you have an opinion on the transfer portal? players can transfer in ways they couldn't before. >> i will give a short answer to this, things like the transfer portal and name and likeness, it is very hard to take an ethical and moral stance against that. it seems weird to say that players should have the freedom -- it seems crazy to say that. here is the other thing, why do we care about these things?

[inaudible] why do we care about the players making money? why do we care about the players being able to have freedom of mobility? it is because there is a concept of college sports. people like me prefer college sports to pro sports and a lot of ways. there are things that we see in college football that we can't see at the pro level. my fear is that these things that are ethically proper to do are going to change the product. it is a weird thing. we are kind of shifting our minds as consumers of sports to this idea that we need to look at an athlete at the same way we need to look at a coal miner. they need to be protected. they need a union. they need to be protected from these unfair forces.

i get that. of course it sounds good when you say it. if these things change college football in a way that makes people less interested in alabama, less interested in michigan and ohio state, they might not want to watch games on tuesday. if something changed about the sport, the fact that we gave them these benefits is going to end up being to their detriment. i think this is something that is not considered an off in the player empowerment era. we can't operate from the position that the things are supposed to inherently exist. there is the idea that to make a lot of money playing pro football, that is something that is supposed to happen. there are all these things that you can expect as a pro baseball player. how much you make, where you play, all of these things.

that is all fine in the short term. in the long term, if it changes the way people feel about the sport, the sport itself will collapse. you have to have some part of you that says, okay, we need to be thinking about how these laws, rules, and other aspects are going to change or complicate the sport itself. that is opposed to what would be most beneficial to somebody currently involved with it. who has a better musical output noël or liam gallagher? >> no will. i think the best moments of oasis tend to be don't look back and anger, he sings the chorus. when noelle sings, i prefer it. he is also the songwriter. it is a very easy sound for me. worked atsomebody asks, did i n

akron, ohio in the 90s? what are some of my memories of akron? >> i did. i worked at the journal from 19 98 to 2002. i have many friends there. it was an interesting middle period of my life. that is when i wrote one of my novels. it was in the apartment in the valley of akron, ohio. one thing that i really remember is going to a chinese restaurant called the platinum dragon. it was so bizarre to move to new york. i moved to new york after i lived in akron. i lived in new york for 15 years. i am in portland now. it will always be my favorite cities in a lot of ways. new york is so unlike the rest of america. i really underrated how different new york was from the rest of the country. here is the crazy thing, why

was the chinese food better in akron, ohio? i will never understand that. there was also this plays out by summit mall where you could get these potstickers. i can't remember what the place was called. they were the best potstickers i ever had in my life. how could this be? what happened in the pre history of akron that brought these wonderful chinese chefs to town? i just don't know. >> i watch the documentary on general tso's chicken. it kind of explains it. if you want to watch a film that will explain the way that cultural actually works as opposed to the way it is described in most entertainment media, watch this documentary about the chicken. it really illustrates the way that ideas and specific insular ideas become collective. the bottom line is that it worked out great for akron, at least in that specific world of

eating general tso's chicken. okay, i first discovered you in sex, drugs, and cocoa puffs. over 18 years, you have spent a lot of time reflecting on discussions. many of my reflections have changed over the years. what perspective did you discuss then that you now want to revisit? that is an interesting question. i -- all of these questions have been interesting to me. when you write a book, you think that the hardest part should be the typing, the research. it should be the emotional investment that you have to put into that book. that should be the hardest part. in some ways, the hardest part is the fact that you have to

remain the person that wrote that book. the book will never change, but you will. the book it is frozen in amber. those early books that i wrote in akron, they still exist. they were written by a 28 year old. it was a version of me that i have no relationship to now. i think almost everything about me might be different. maybe. people who know me might be better i'm not describing if that is true or not. there are so many ways that i think about culture. i have completely shifted. sometimes people come to me and had just read my book that came out in 2001. they just read it a week or two ago. they will ask me a question. you said that cinderella had this style -- they are telling me stuff. it sounds like something i could have said, i could have

written. i have not read that book since i wrote it. it's like i am talking about this other person that i used to know. i have totally lost touch with them. there is a ton in those first two or three books that if i could rewrite it, it would be totally different. in fact, and this is going to sound arrogant, but if i wrote rock city now, it would be very good. i could really do a good job on this book now. after i wrote it, i talked about it for 20 years. i learned all of these other things. it would not be the same book. i don't think people like it as much. it would seem clinical, sterile, it would not be nearly as emotional. i would definitely not talk about my own life as much. that is the craziest thing about it when i look back on things that i have done. the book called killing yourself to live, i guess that was my third book, i cannot

believe how casually i talked about myself and people i knew. i talked about women i had relationships with. i just did it. just do it. it is not like i thought, i shouldn't be doing this, but i will do it anyways. i just did it. i would never do that now. i would never write about myself that candidly. i would never talk about other people so casually. the silkworm has a song called don't look back. boston has a song called don't look back. both bands make a good point. >> you are in your 20's for most of your 90s, if you could've experienced that time period at a different age, what age would it be? >> the exact one i did. exactly when i did. i am very glad that my young adulthood happened in the 90s. it was the perfect time to be that age. i feel so fortunate that i was at college when music changed.

in 1991 or whatever, i could experience it in realtime. there is this idea that we were all into, you know, guns and roses, wrap. no, now it was this. it was very clear. you could see it. we like liz fair. you could see it happening. you could feel it happening. i am glad that i was there for it. my son is eight, my daughter is six. i do worry about the world that they are going to live in. things are we are now. i am sure the people in the 90s fault that way. people in the 90s who were my age we are probably glad they grew up in the 70s. there has been and acceleration of weird. somebody says that you don't

hear much about pcp anymore, why is that? >> he is asking me why angel dust is not in the news as much. it was in the news. it was a part of an after school special. there was an idea that if you took pcp, you might have superhuman strength. there was an episode of the show comps. you can't even talk about it without talking about propaganda. the show comps, one of the early episodes had a guy on pcp. he fights with a canine dog, one of those big german shepherds. there is this idea that somehow pcp was not just a drug. it would shoot you into this different sort of existence. you are like the incredible hulk or whatever. it must have just become less popular. for a while, you would sprinkle pcp onto marijuana.

they would sell marijuana for a very high price and say that it was really great marijuana. it was actually very cheap marijuana with pcp. if you smoked it you would hallucinate. faces would change. you would kind of change that high for the rest of your life. somebody should bring him pcp back. i don't know. maybe there is an opening on the market. >> okay. what do you expect to happen to hollywood over the next decade? >> i think they are probably going to go through some sort of fiscal transformation that is going to result in films identical to the films we are seeing now. >> were you ever approached to write about sports for the athletic? >> the website? i don't know. i don't know if i was. when it started, i might have been seen as off limits.

is that right? could not be? i don't know. >> any plans to make more episodes of music exists? >> that is a podcast i make with my friend chris ryan. no plans to do it again. i find podcasting kind of stressful. when i write, i can really sculpt the thing into what i wanted to be. i can go it over and over again. i read it 1000 times when i was writing my book. i am obsessive about going over sentences. i am always trying to make sentences more straight. i want these sentences to be entertaining, interesting, and clear. i think all three of those things are equally important. the time i spend editing my work is to simplify it. i want to make it straighter,

straighter, straighter. i can't even remember what the question was now. it was something -- sorry. >> do you think the 90s seemed more innocent at the time because we were younger? it was pre-9/11. maybe they were. perhaps you disagree. >> i don't think of the 90s as an innocent time. that is not really how it was. i am not so sure about the loss of innocence in general over time as much as the changing view of what constitutes things in a sense. i think that a modern parent feels this obligation to have

conversations with their kids now. in and ideas, that would have been perceived as damaging. why are you forcing a kid to confront these ideas now? they are seven. that kind of keeps changing. i don't really know about innocence. that is an interesting question. okay, almost six here. we have one last guy. >> chuck, i have three questions, answer is money as you want, what was the adjustment from the new york city to portland, oregon? >> it was easy to live here. i moved to portland, a beautiful city. the weather is great. i love when it rains. i have a steel roof on my house. i love hearing it rain on night. the summers are beautiful. it is easy to get the kids to

school. the last couple of years, portland has become a completely different place. now it seems stranger than new york seemed when i moved there. when i moved to new york from akron, they said it would take me six months to get used to it. it took me like six days. i found so many people who are like me. i had never had an experience where i met so many people who seemed to talk and think the way that i did. in portland, it is very difficult to find. portland is stranger than i thought it would be as it turns out. i like living here, i love raising my kids here. in some ways, you watch fox news and they have this image of america. it is a completely distorted and unrealistic view of america. they talk about america like it is this place where every person is like, that's not how it is. it is kind of that way in portland. in some ways, portland is this

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

seems to be this idea that after all of those years of culture accelerating, that during the 90s i was always talking about the acceleration of culture. the internet happens. the internet is going to be the ultimate accelerant of culture. however, it has become a d celery and in some ways. we are now in this molasses period. it is hard to get back on that march through time. will e>> that is the one that t seems like humanity is supposed to experience. with that, i think i will and. i really appreciate everybody who sat through this. i hope that it was not boring. if it was, write me a letter. tell me that you were bored. i will probably throw it away.

maybe it will change my view. thank you. >> thank you so much. thank you for joining us. thanks to all of you out there for joining us. great questions and all of that stuff. please consider purchasing a copy of the 90s. we currently have around 100 assigned copies. if you order through powell's website right now, you will get one of the signed copies. this is for as long as supplies last. while you are there, make sure to check out our lineup of upcoming virtual events. we look forward to seeing you had another one of our events very soon. have an excellent evening to everyone. thanks again. after months of closed-door investigation, the house is set to go public. starting on june 9th, tune in his committee members questioned key witnesses about

what transpired and why. they discussed what happened during the assault on the u.s. capitol. watch our live coverage beginning on thursday, june 9th on c-span. c-span is our free mobile video app. you can watch anytime online at c-span.org. c-span, your unfiltered view of government. good evening everyone again. welcome to atlanta history center's virtual author talk series. my name is claire haley and i'm the vice president of public relations and programs