I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: RHEOSTATICS-Static Box (complete) (2008).

I’ve decided not to review all of the volumes of this fabulous free box set.  Rather, since I have now finished it, I’ll sum up and say that it is a fantastic collection from start to finish.

The final disc has a series of great cover tunes.  And of course, there’s the final songs from the final Massey Hall show which are quite emotional, even all these years later.

There’s one or two songs that I probably would have left off for sound quality reasons (although usually they’re pretty interesting/essential for what they are).  There’s one 8 minute song, “Monkeys Will Come” that has quite poor sound quality.  However, it is a recording of the song that the Canadian government asked them to record for Canada Day in 2000.  And I assume there are no better recordings of it, so it’s nice to have.

The best part of this collection is that it allowed me to see which concerts were worth downloading in their entirety (the site has a ton of concerts for downloading…a ton!).  It also got me to track down the two Violet Archers CDs, which I’m quite excited to be getting soon.

And, while I’m in a Rheos mood.  Martin Tielli’s final CDs in his subscription collection just made their way to my house and they are weird and wonderful.  And, I just learned that Dave Bidini put out a solo record a few months back, so that’s worth tracking down too.  Go Rheos!  You are all very star.

[READ: January 12, 2010] Generation A

I was quite excited when this book finally came out.  I had been dipping into the Douglas Coupland back catalog (including watching JPod the TVseries), so this book is a treat.

Strangely, when I started reading the book I realized I had no idea what it was about.  At all.  So, the first thing to note is that it is not in any way a sequel to Generation X.  None of the characters are the same, the setting is not the same, there’s no connection whatsoever (or if there is I didn’t see it).  The premise of the title comes from a Kurt Vonnegut address.  It is quoted on the book jacket and in the book itself, so I won’t quote it here, but the gist is that young people were dismissed unfairly when labelled “Generation X,” so they should insist that they be called “Generation A,” the beginning of the alphabet, and the start of it all.

But when the book starts, it’s hard to understand what that has to do with anything.  Because, as we learn right away, the book is all about bees (which explains the yellow and black cover design).

At the time of the novel, all the bees have disappeared.  Gone.  And with it, comes the virtual end of fresh fruit (aside from self and hand pollination).  Until, that is, the five characters in the book, who live all over the world, are independently stung by bees.

Of course, these bee stings are a media sensation.  The near future is even more media saturated than our own, so it takes only moments for videos of these bee stings to go viral.  The five protagonists are each captured by their government and whisked to a neutral (as in completely neutral: no logos, no colors, no nothing) location.  Each young person (for indeed, they are all in their 20s) is studied and monitored for a certain amount of time.  And then, just as suddenly, they are set free.

And then the action really starts happening.

The book is told from each person’s point of view in alternating chapters.  So, first we hear from Harj, a call center employee for Abercrombie & Fitch based in Sri Lanka; next is Zack, who lives in the Iowa cornfields and whose father died when his meth lab blew up; Samantha is a New Zealander who is trying to make an earth sandwich (this was the first indication that Coupland was back to his old tricks of creating really cool, technologically savvy yet environmentally aware ideas); Julien, a French college drop out who has been up for 26 hours playing a World of Warcraft type game; and Diana, the only Canadian.  She is a Christian who suffers from Tourette’s syndrome, which obviously leads to the funniest and most outrageous dialogue.

Each character reacts very differently to the sting and to the incarceration.  And the drama comes from the way the teens interact with people before and after the incident.

Unavoidably, the kids all wind up in the same location.  And once they do the book kicks into high gear.

The book jacket says that the book is all about story telling.  But that doesn’t seem to be the case until the kids all get together.  Once they are together, stories take a very important role in the story and in the future of the planet.  The reason behind this is mysterious and well guarded until the end of the book.

There are a lot of different things going on in the story, and it’s hard to talk about many of them without giving anything big away.  So, I’ll refrain as best I can.  I will say that the story telling section is fascinating.  There are so many different stories with different angles, even if they all have similar themes and convergences.  And I wonder just how Coupland came up with the various stories that get told.

The only problem with the book is that Coupland not only puts, but forces his characters into a corner.  And once all the characters are in a corner, it’s hard to successfully evacuate them.  And so the book goes in a direction I wasn’t really expecting (although as I say, it was sort of inevitable).

And, there’s one sentence near the end that seems so over-the-top it is laughable, and yet I think it is meant to be a serious assertion.  It seems so out of character for a Douglas Coupland book.  And I understand that in context it sort of works, I think it’s just hard to read it seriously.  It is redeemed nicely in the section after that, but it did leave kind of a weird taste for me.

It’s doubtful that this book will “define a generation” as Generation X supposedly did.  However, it is forward-looking, and in that respect it takes on a taste of science fiction (even if the future world is only the not too distant future).  It also sounds a serious alarm for the next generation.

I enjoy Coupland’s storytelling, and this book is no exception.