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Call of the Weird by Louis Theroux
Travels in American Subcultures
No, it doesn't get much weirder than this: Thor Templar, Lord Commander of the Earth Protectorate, who claims to have killed ten aliens. Or April, the Neo-Nazi bringing up her twin daughters Lamb and Lynx (who have just formed a white-power folk group for kids called Prussian Blue), and her youngest daughter, Dresden. For a decade now, Louis Theroux has been making programs about offbeat characters on the fringes of U.S. society. Now he revisits the people who have most intrigued him to try to discover what motivates them, and why they believe the things they believe. From his Las Vegas base (where else?), Theroux calls on these assorted dreamers, schemers, and outlaws--and in the process finds out a little about the workings of his own mind. What does it mean, after all, to be weird, or "to be yourself"? Do we choose our beliefs or do our beliefs choose us? And is there something particularly weird about Americans? America, prepare yourself for a hilarious look in the mirror that has already taken the rest of the English-speaking world by storm: I compiled a rough list of the people I hoped to see, including a prostitute named Hayley; a UFO cult in San Diego; a neo-Nazi children's folk group; a militiaman named Mike Cain; an elusive self-help guru named Marshall Sylver; and, as a wild card, the turbulent bandleader Ike Turner. I marked them on a large map of the U.S. that I pinned to the wall of my study, taking pains to cut out little labels which I glued to the map, like a general preparing for a campaign. After an hour or so of work, I'd managed to demonstrate that most of my subjects were in the west of the U.S., a fact I'd been aware of before I started the exercise. Then, in abid to add some seriousness to my approach, I tried looking for common themes among my subjects. I drew up a Venn diagram showing the "Four Main Sources of Weirdness" as interlocking circles, which I identified as "Sexual," "Racial," "Religious," and "Narcissistic." Thought there were some areas of overlap, I was more struck by the variety of the motivations. What, in fact, was "weirdness"? The more I thought about it, the less clear it became. |
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| Author(s) : Louis Theroux | Format : Hardback Book |
| ISBN-10 : 0306815036 | ISBN-13 : 9780306815034 |
| RRP : £13.99 | Best available price : £ / $ |
| Prices as of : BST check live prices | |
Product Details:
Country Publication : United States
Publication Date : 09/01/2007
Publisher : The Perseus Books Group
Page Length : 288mm
Page Size : 235mm