I Wear the Black Hat bounces around the topic of villainy with a collection of deftly written essays by American writer and essayist Chuck Klosterman. The reading flies by thanks to Klosterman's fresh prose. He's at his best when musing over the finer points of individuals and pop culture references; one of the best passages in I Wear the Black Hat finds Klosterman articulating the nuances of his (and many others') intolerance for the classic rock band The Eagles.But, unfortunately, Klosterman too easily gives in to the temptation to sound profound, and the result is a handful of hasty generalizations; a prime example from this book is when he attempts to extrapolate a larger cultural lesson from the decline of 1980's flash-in-the-pan comedian Andrew Dice Clay.* This kind of fallacy is pervasive in the pop culture-centric variety of writing commonly found in sources like The New Yorker, Gawker, and Deadspin among others. Nevertheless, I Wear the Black Hat is an overall agreeable read by an astute observer and talented writer.
Notes:
* There have been so, so many Andrew Dice Clays--performers and artists who seem to suddenly appear but then disappear--that putting any single one of them under a microscope should attract a good measure of skepticism. In the case of the "Diceman," maybe interest in him waned simply because he only had one joke.
