I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: RA RA RIOT-Live at the Black Cat, Washington DC,  October 12, 2008 (2008).

I really like Ra Ra Riot’s album The Rhumb Line, and this concert is basically a showcase for that album.  There’ s an interview at the end of the show (all downloadable from NPR), in which the  band says that critics raved about their live show as much as their album.

I don’t really hear that the show is more energetic than the album (maybe visually they are wild), but it did sound fantastic.  It’s amazing to hear a rock band that is dominated by strings–the cello and violin are often louder than the guitar (but not in a competing/drown you out kind of way,  more of a strings do the melodies and the guitar adds bulk to the sound).

I always enjoy hearing a band that is grateful to their audience for showing up (this is most evident in young bands, who seem so much more genuine about their love of the audience) and Ra Ra Riot are certainly that .  They seem genuinely surprised at the turn out, and they play a great set accordingly.

There are two songs that aren’t on the album here “A Manner to Act” and the encore “Everest.”  They both feel like they came off the album, which bodes well for their second album, Orchard, which just came out in May.  Ra Ra Riot also do a great cover of the obscure Kate Bush song “Suspended in Gaffa.”  At the end of the show they tack on a cover of “Hounds of Love.”  Lead singer Wesley Miles has a wonderfully strong voice and he can reach some pretty high notes–not soprano or anything like that, just strong enough to be able to pull off a Kate Bush cover.

This is a great show.  And when you read about the tragedy they suffered just as they were starting to take off, their obsession with death may not be so surprising.  I’m looking forward to Orchard.

[READ: 1995 and August 18, 2011] Microserfs

After reading Life After God and thinking about Microserfs, I looked up Coupland’s bibliography and saw that indeed Microserfs came next.  And I was really excited to read it.  I have recently watched the JPod TV show and I knew that JPod was a kind of follow-up to Microserfs, so I wanted to see how much of it rang true.  And I’ve got to say that I really rather enjoyed this book.

While I was reading this, I started taking notes about what was happening in the book.  Not the plot, which is fairly straightforward, but about the zeitgeisty elements in the book.  And, since I’m a big fan of David Foster Wallace, I was also noting how many zeitgeisty things this book had in common with Infinite Jest.  I’m thinking of tying it all together in a separate post, maybe next week.  But I’ll mention a few things here.

My son also loved the cover of this book because it has a Lego dude on it and he has been really getting into Lego lately.

So Microserfs is the story of a bunch of underpaid, overworked coders who work for Microsoft.  The book is written as the journal of Daniel Underwood (Coupland still hadn’t really branched out of the first person narrative style, but the journal does allow for some interesting insights).  The story begins in Fall 1993.  I felt compelled to look up some ancient history to see what was happening in the computer world circa 1993 just for context.  In 1991, Apple released System 7.   In 1993, Windows introduced Windows NT, Intel released the first Pentium chip, Myst was released and Wired magazine launched.  In 1994, Al Gore coined the term Information Superhighway.  Yahoo is created.  The Netscape browser is introduced.  So we’re still in computer infancy here.  It’s pretty far-seeing of DC to write about this.

Daniel works at Microsoft with several friends.  Daniel is a bug tester, Michael (who has an office, not a cube) is a coder, Todd (a bodybuilder) is a bug tester.  There’s also Susan (smart and independent), Abe (secret millionaire) and Bug Barbecue (an old man–he’s like 35).  The five of them live in a house on “campus.”  There’s also Karla (a type A bossyboots who doesn’t like seeing time wasted) who works with them but lives up the street.

As the story opens, Michael has just received a flame email from Bill Gates himself and has locked himself in his office.  This leads to a very funny scene and ongoing joke in which the office mates feed slide two-dimensional food under his door and he vows to eat only things that are flat.

Coupland uses some very fun ways to introduce his characters–pop culture shortcuts that are surprisingly effective.  In this book, they each get to pick their dream Jeopardy! board; he also surrounds the characters with enough disposable culture so you can really get a feel for what their place is like (they all watch Melrose Place! remember when people did that?) .  If you were culturally hip in 1993, your house may have looked like this.  (IKEA arrived in the US in 1985, and by 1993, it was have been a touchstone for college aged kids).  And the characters are fleshed out quite fully.

It has to be mentioned at some point, so why not now?  For a writer concerned with the environment, Coupland is a huge paper-waster.  It’s more prominent in JPod, but in Microserfs we get several pages of crazy typographical experiments that are, for the most part unreadable: There’s a full page of encrypted code, a full page of the book that is written in the style of a Prince title (“She sed th@ we rEly have no identiT uv our own”), there’s two pages of the word “money” written over and over and there’s the typographically interesting stream of consciousness journal that he keeps where  most of the time the words in it are in 64 point type!  (Dan speculates that random words should generate an interesting file).

As the story opens, several things happen.  First Dan’s father loses his job at IBM (lots of IBM bashing) and Dan and Karla start dating.  This part about Dan and Karla dating is pretty big for Coupland.  It’s the first time one of his books goes beyond deep introspection and into the status of relationships.  And he writes the burgeoning romance with a sense of wonder and awe that really captures the feeling of first love.  It really bring s a wholeness to the story that his other stories were missing.

But as with other DC stories, there is a real sense of tragedy underpinning the story. Dan’s younger (and arguably smarter brother) Jed died several years ago.  His ghost haunts the story (not literally, it’s nothing like that) but his father can’t seem to let go and Dan himself uses the phrase hellojed as his password.  And of course, there is the constant talk of twenty-somethings who are unsure about their lot in life or if they even have a life.

As chapter two opens, we get to the meat of the story.  The chapter is called Oop.  And a little computer history is in order, because Oop stands for Object Oriented Programming.  And in what I think is a stroke of genius, Coupland uses the metaphor of Lego as a way of describing Oop: hat you can form programs out of blocks, like Legos.  To quote Wikipedia: “OOP’s dominance was further enhanced by the rising popularity of graphical user interfaces, which rely heavily upon object-oriented programming techniques.”  The story is techie but it’s not indebted to techiness (just techie culture).  But I must say, seventeen or so years of computer work has certainly makes the techie part of this story more understandable (and funnier).

The reason Oop is relevant is because Michael, fed up with his treatment at the hands of Bill Gates, decides to start his own company.  First he hires Dan’s dad (who works on a secret project that has a wonderful reveal near the end of the book) and then he offers all of the former housemates (and Karla ) a job working as coders for his new project (called Oop!).  They all leave the (relative) security of Microsoft (Susan’s stock has just vested!) for the new start up, which is in California (and will be based out of Dan’s family home).

New characters are added throughout the story like Ethan, Oop!’s smamry president who has lost several fortunes already, and Dusty, a bodybuilder who eventually falls for Todd.  Personal revelations are reached (Bug has a major epiphany) and lives are examined and reexamined.  Coupland’s whole basis for writing seems to be examining lives and asking “what are we doing in this world?” and so Karla and Dan spend a lot of time asking grand questions of each other (and performing shiatsu–there’s a wonderful idea of the body as a memory chip that pervades the story).

And from there, the plot is that the group struggles to get their company off the ground—all the while working literally from home, twenty-some hours a day for literally no pay.  It’s an incredible bonding experiment.  And even though there are one or two coincidences that help save the story, they are not egregious and are indeed built in (Abe is a millionaire, but still codes).

The pulling-the- rug-out-from-under-us moment comes very near the end when suddenly the story is overcome by pathos.  Dan’s mother, who had been something of a rock throughout the whole story suddenly gets very sick (after recently taking up exercise and even winning a swim meet).  It’s very emotional, especially as the story gets darker and a little weirder and the computers come in to play in her health.  The story suddenly gains a bittersweet quality to it.  It’s just disconcerting that it all happens so fast.

I really enjoyed this book a lot.  It felt a little long (I mean, geez, DC’s books are short and fast), especially the last 2/3 before the exciting end.  That section gets bogged down with a lot of health talk–everyone starts going to the gym and it kind of slows down the plot.  But there’s usually enough pop culture fun (and Silicon Valley gossip) to drag you out of the doldrums.

I liked the story enough that I ‘m going to reread JPod right now.

Earlier, I mentioned pop culture and DFW.  I’m going to include some of the fun pop culture references that I noted in part because they were quite prescient.

•”[we drove] to one of the Simpsons bars in the city…where they play The Simpsons every Thursday night.”  I remember Thursday night Simpsons (the whole Bart vs Bill Cosby ratings war).  And I wonder if bars did actually play The Simpsons back then?

• “I think that in the future clocks won’t say three o’clock anymore.  They’ll just get right to the point and call three o’clock ‘Pepsi.'”  This line seems directly related to Infinite Jest, very zeitgeisty.  Given that IJ came out in 1996, I wonder what was culturally going on that subsidized time seems to invade them both.

• There’s a very proto-Twitter idea here which was true: that Apple had “a thing called RumorMonger that allowed employees to anonymously input up to one hundred ASCII characters wroth of gossip into the system.”  Obviously Twitter isn’t anonymous (what would be the point of THAT) but its an interesting insight.  Especially since, “It got way out of control almost immediately.”

• Another possible nod to DFW (although not really–it’s more of a zeitgeist thing) is Coupland’s use of Gilligan’s Island as a cultural touchstone. Gilligan is a pretty undeniable item in any Gen X’s life, but it’s interesting that in Broom of the System (published 1987) DFW put in a Gilligan’s Island themed bar, and in Microserfs, DC writes “The Tonga Room is filled with rich dentists from Düsseldorf watching this Gilligan’s Island fake Tiki raft float across an old swimming pool while fake thunder and rain roar”

• I also enjoyed this riff on products that clone themselves into different version of themselves–I keep seeing all of these nonsense products that are spawned from one good idea (why are there so many Cheerios?).  Coupland writes: “For example, old Coke, new Coke, diet Coke, old Coke without caffeine, new Coke without caffeine, Coke with pulpy bits, Coke with cheese.”

The final two instances are delightful for two separate reasons.

The first is listed as a “Thought: one day the word gigabyte is going to seem as small as the word ‘dozen.'”  I don’t know if that’s exactly true, but since you can buy a TB hard drive for about $100, that time may be rapidly approaching.

The second is that Susan plays a joke on Ethan as he flies from the US to Canada.  As he enters customs, “a whole whack of Iraqi banknotes tumbled onto the carpet in a dervish of cash–Susan had bought them at a San Francisco stamp store and stashed them in his passport as a prank.  It was great.”  Ethan is then whisked off to cavity search room.  My god, can you imagine doing that now?  I miss the 90s.

The final nod to DFW is actually more of a nod from DFW to DC (although, again, not really).  The characters all go to las Vegas and they watch the AVNs, the (Adult Video News) Awards (The Stiffies!).  Fans of DFW know that he wrote an essay about the AVN Awards in 1998 for Premiere (later published in Consider the Lobster).  There’s no genuine connection between these two things and they were five years apart, but I feel like there is some kind of connection that they are both interested in them.  

This was a lot of fun.  Thanks DC, especially for the insight that kids who loved playing with Legos eventually went on to be programmers.