I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: SILVERSUN PICKUPS-Live at KEXP October 27, 2006 (2006).

I liked Silversun Pickups’ album Swoon quite a bit.  True, the singer sounds uncannily like Billy Corgan, but the shoegazer swirls of music were so sonically interesting that I couldn’t resist.

The lead singer/frontman is very funny and very engaging–he has great patter, and it’s clear that they all feel comfortable at KEXP (who were major promoters of the band).  This set comes from their first album, which I don’t know at all.  And I found it a little samey.

The production–washes and layers of music kind of flattened it out a bit.  It’s true that the melodies are good and his voice is compelling in the way that Billy Corgan’s is, but this set just never sticks with me.  I don’t know if that’s to do with the songs from the first album or if maybe live they’re not that interesting, but I didn’t love this set as much as I wanted to.

You can hear it here and a bunch more sets from them here.

[READ: October, 10, 2012] “Fire at the Ativan Factory”

Now that I’ve finished with Vonnegut for a while, I was planning on turning my attention to some new books, and then I stumbled upon this short story by Douglas Coupland–another author whose oeuvre I plan to read (I’ve actually read most of his books already, but they were over a decade ago so I’m going to go through them again).

Douglas Coupland is not one for short stories.  As far as I can tell this is one of the few stories he has published.  (this is going by Wikipedia, because his own homepage, which one would assume would celebrate all things Coupland, leaves out quite a lot of things).  This short story was published in a U.K. released fin de siècle  compilation called Disco 2000.  I’ve never heard of the collection.  And I certainly wasn’t going to hunt too hard to track it down, even if there are a bunch of interesting writers in it (end of the century malaise is so twelve years ago).  But fortunately and somewhat inexplicably to me, Barcelona Review has a full text copy (in English and Spanish(!)) on their site.

It’s interesting to read this story on the heels of Vonnegut’s Timequake because Vonnegut and Coupland share a feeling that the future and technology in particular are ruining our humanity   Now, Vonnegut is something of a luddite, working only on a typewriter and hating TV, while Coupland embraces the technology in all of its forms and he celebrates it even as he denounces it (Marshall McLuhan must be at the bottom of this divide).  But they both feel that modern society is ruining our humanity (and are both compelling in their arguments).

As for this story itself, Wyatt works in a latex factory making aliens for scifi movies (I can appreciate this story, and how thorough it is) now having watched episodes of Face-Off on SyFy.  Wyatt and his wife Kathleen have no children  and he can’t help but wonder if it’s because of all the chemicals that he works with.  Of course, he took the job in the latex factory because it paid better than his previous job–making miniatures for movies.  And he worries that the very thing that he did so they could have children is now preventing them from having children.

In what I thought was a very cool idea, Coupland has Wyatt create his alien creatures and spaceships not from insects but from molecular structures–the molecular structure of Wellbutrin became an awesome space ship.  Coupland has always been interested in young people and drugs, so this use of drugs is a nice twist.  Of course, it also ties into Wyatt and Kathleen who both take their own drugs for stability–antidepressants and anti-anxiety medication.

By the end Wyatt realizes that it is neither his nor Kathleen’s lifestyle that is making them infertile  it is the whole century.  He believes that once 1999 is gone, everything will be better.  And speaking of New Year’s Eve, the whole world will be celebrating the change from 1999 to the big 2000.  [I myself was in Vancouver for that very New Year’s Eve!  And while I didn’t do anything especially memorable there, it was a great trip].  I love this comment about Wyatt: “Donny and Christine’s New Year’s party was not the place where he had always envisioned himself at century’s end… 60 per cent drunk on a microbrew-of-the-week, remembering to take his meds shortly after the stroke of twelve, and ringing in the New Year with U2’s ‘New Year’s Day’….”

And so he chooses to rectify things, in an impetuous way (not by setting fire to anything, that’s a metaphorical title). I’m curious to know how things worked out for him.

This story feels a lot like an episode in one of Coupland books.  Since his books are episodic by nature, this could easily just be a slice from one of them.  And I think his slices are always very compelling.