SOUNDTRACK: THE NEW PORNOGRAPHERS-Live at Massey Hall (October 1, 2017).
I’ve been a fan of the The New Pornographers for years. Their first single, “Letter from an Occupant” was one of my favorite songs of 2000. For nearly twenty years, they’ve been releasing super catchy fun poppy alt rock.
I was really excited to see them last week. And then almost equally excited to see that they had a show on Live at Massey Hall.
This show did not have Neko Case singing and while she is not the crux of the band, I’m glad she was at my show, because her voice is great and having three women singing was more fun than having just two.
Before the set, singer and songwriter AC Newman says, “I’m nervous because I realize this is what I do … people paid to come see you.” His niece, keyboardist Kathryn Calder is with him. She says she loves having the momentum of 7 people on stage. It’s a very in the moment feeling shared by all of them.
The show starts with an older song “The Jenny Numbers.” There’s a wild ripping guitar solo from Todd Fancey in the middle of this otherwise poppy song. Calder and violinist Simi Stone sound great with their backing vocals–so full and complete. And excellent compliment to the songs.
Up next is “Whiteout Conditions” which starts with a ripping violin melody from Stone. I happen to know their newer songs a lot better than their middle period songs and I really like this song a lot.
The full setlist for this show is available online. They played 22 songs at he show, so it’s a shame to truncate it to 35 minutes. How did they decide what to cut? They cut “Dancehall Domine.”
Up next is one of the great songs from the Together album, “Moves.” The opening riff and persistent use of violin is perfect.
Between songs, Newman says to the audience, “you’ve got to promise not to sit down because it’ll be like a dagger in my heart.”
In the interview clip he says he always love the compartmentalized songs of Pixies. They influenced the way he wrote music. So did The Beach Boys for harmonies. He says it’s hard to know what seeps through, but there’s a ton of it. Sometimes I’ll hear an old song I used to love and realize I totally stole a part from that song and I didn’t know it.
The show skips “Colosseums” and moves on to “The Laws Have Changed.” I loved seeing this live because of the amazing high notes that AC Newman hits in the end of the song. This is also a chance for Kathryn to shine a bit. “High Ticket Attractions” comes next in the show and here. It’s such an insanely catchy song. From the call and response vocals to the overall melody. It’s one of my favorites of theirs.
The show skips three songs, “Champions of Red Wine,” “Adventures in Solitude,” and “All the Old Showstoppers.” So up next is “This is the World of the Theater.” I’m glad they chose this because Kathryn Calder sings lead vocals and she sounds fantastic. The middle section of the song also includes some hocketing where Newman, Calder, Stone and maybe some others sing individual notes alternately to create a lovely melody.
I noticed that drummer Joe Seiders sings quite a bit as well. And a shout out to bassist John Collins because he gets some great sounds out of that instrument.
Newman tells the audience that Massey Hall is an intimidating venue, but one you get here it feel welcoming and warm. The crowd applauds and he says, “soooo, I’m not sweating it.”
Up next comes the poppy and wonderful “Sing Me Spanish Techno.” It has a constant simple harmonica part played by Blaine Thurier who also plays keyboards. It’s such a wonderfully fun song.
They skip pretty much the rest of the show to play the big encore song, “Brill Bruisers.” [Skipped: “Backstairs,” “Play Money,” “Testament to Youth in Verse,” “Sweet Talk, Sweet Talk,” “Avalanche Alley,” “Use It,” “Mass Romantic” )that’s a surprise!) and “The Slow Descent Into Alcoholism”].
“Brill Bruisers” is from the then-new album. The first time I heard it I was blown away. Those “boh bah boh bah bah bohs” in the beginning are so arresting. The harmonies that run through the song are sensational and the “ooh” part in the verses just knocks me out. Its a great great song.
“The Bleeding Heart Show” closed the show and it is played over the closing credits.
This is a terrific example of how good this band is live, but nothing compares to actually seeing them.
[READ: August 1, 2019] Bit Rot
A few years ago I had caught up with Douglas Coupland’s publications. I guess it’s no surprise to see that he has published more since then. But I am always surprised when I don’t hear about a book at all. I just happened to stumble upon this collection of essays.
Coupland’s general outlook hasn’t changed much over the years. He is still fascinated by “the future,” but he looks at technology and future ideas in a somewhat different way. He tends to mourn the loss of some things while often embracing what has replaced it.
As my son is now a teenager, I wondered what his take on some of these essays would be–if he would think that Coupland is an old fuddy duddy, or if he was right on. Or, more likely, that he had never looked at some of these ideas that way at all. Coupland is quite cognizant that young people are growing up in a very different world than ours. And that they don’t have any problem with that. They don’t “miss cursive” because it never meant anything to them in the first place. They can’t imagine not having Google and hence all of the world’s information at their fingertips. Of course they assume that technology will continue to get smaller and faster. We older folks may not be prepared for that (or maybe we are), but that’s what younger people expect and can’t wait for
This was a very long, rather thick book that was just full of interesting, funny, thoughtful essays and short stories. I really enjoyed it from start to finish, even if I’d read some of the pieces before.
Before We Begin …
This is an introduction to the book about why he called this Bit Rot and how some of the pieces in it come from his novel Generation A.
The pieces in this book also, to me, evince a shedding of all my twentieth-century notions of what the future is and could be. By 2007, I realized that the future that was once this far-off thing on the horizon was coming closer quite quickly, and then somewhere around 2011 or 2012, the future and the present merged and became the same thing–and it’s now always going to be this way, and we are now always going to be living in the future.
“Vietnam”*
This is a short piece of fiction written from the point of a 19 year-old boy who died in Vietnam. Mostly he wants it acknowledged that the whole thing–and wars in general are pretty pointless.
“Black Goo” [published in Vice]
Opens with a paragraph he wrote in 1992 imagining a tsunami after a nuclear warhead test. He now believes that “the nuclear threat was a bogeyman was constructed largely to terrifying citizens into okaying massive defense budgets without debate.” Very true. He says that in 1973 he and a bunch of his class mates were sent to “help” clean up an oil spill. Young people were well intentioned but had no idea what to do. The kids were even blamed for the spill because they lived in the suburbs. He then details the many other spills in the waters and in pipelines. Here’s an aphorism to think about:
The best time to plant a tree is twenty years ago. The second-best time is right now.
“The Short, Brutal Life of the Channel Three News Team” ∀
I recalled this part of Generation A in which a girls’s parents decide to go on mass killing sprees: Kill the famous people and you snuff out the core of disease culture.”
“Nine Readers” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
Coupland learned that 1 in 10 Icelanders will write a novel in their lifetime. It’s impressive, but the downside is that each writer gets only nine readers. The world is very similar if you substitute blog or vlog for novel. In Japan, there are people who experience the anxiety of leaving their parents’ house. I was unaware of a trend he calls “normcore” “A trend so stupid that it’s more famous for being a stupid trend than it is for being a trend itself.” it “celebrates the ordinary with it reliance on brazenly bland stales such as stonewashed denim, label-less shirts and pool sandals that bear a distracting resemblance to Crocs.” It’s about dressing to be invisible.
“Nine Point Zero” ∀
I remembered this excerpt a bit too. A king is in his hot air balloon floating around his kingdom when a 9.0 earthquake hits the kingdom. He can only watch everything crumble underneath him. When he finally lands, he learns that people can no longer read.
“Smells” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
His gym is a fragrance-free zone. Perfume in a gym would be like smelling cooking bacon while trying to fall asleep. When a guy walked by wearing body spray, nostrils flared. A teacher had once told him that body sprays were the worst thing to happen to education since the 1960s, “They think it makes then God’s gift to women and they have no idea ho bad it is. They don’t shower after gym anymore so they arrive in the classroom and its like pepper spray in your face.” He then jumps to another horrible smell–when a tenant died in his building. Turns out he odor fighter for a dead body is cinnamon candy.
We all have smells that bring us back to something. For him artificial peaches smells like Japan (the hotel he was in used a cleaner that smelled like artificial peaches). Other smells he likes: freshly sharpened pencil (c’mon Philosophy get on that,) a bag of Halloween candy, car exhaust in the 1960s (when they put lead in it). Another interesting fact, the smell of bread is the one smell that makes people buy more food than they set out to buy. According to surveys the best small of all is he vanilla plasticity smell of Play-Doh.
“Coffee & Cigarettes” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
He remembers the first time he had coffee it was High Point, a powdered coffee he’d only seen ads for (starring Lauren Bacall who surely must have been cash starved) “It burnt out my coffee taste buds forever and desensitized me to all coffee nuances for the rest of my life.” He started smoking around the same time. And he loved it. He quit smoking on Halloween 1988 but still believes he is a smoker at heart. He misses it. He talks of the craziness of Starbucks and cigarettes packs now (with a photo of a diseased lung on it). In France, they smoke indoors, which feels illicit now. He wonders about Nepsresso a kind of Kuerig that I didn’t know about. For the same amount of electricity it takes to make the aluminium in one capsule you cold probably fuel a suburban household for a week. In China everyone smokes, which is just sad. They should have a motto: “China The Land Where the Air Does Your Smoking for You.”
“Public Speaking” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
The first time he spoke publicly was in March 1991 at a Waterstones in Copley Square in Boston. [Which I have been to but which I believe is now closed]. He thought to himself that people assume you’re going to do a good job so do a good job. People want everyone to do well on stage. And at the worst Spielberg said “People will sit through twenty minutes of anything.” Remeber though, 200 people in a room is still one audience. You control everything about that audience. Things always go wrong though–cappuccino machines make noise, crying babies. He had one event with a fly on his face and another where his laptop didn’t work. One form of public speaking is teaching. “Having to speak to college students is like having to address a crowd of work-shirking entitlement robots whose only passion, aside from making excuses as to why they didn’t do their assignments, is lying in wait ready to pounce on the tiniest of PC infractions. You can’t pay teachers enough for what they do. Double all teachers salaries now.”
“Shiny” [published by e-flux]
Shiny is youth, fertility, uncorrupted. Shiny also means that there’s likely something rotten nearby. The public face and the private face–like the Japanese notion of honne and tatemae. He fondly recalls the video for “Shiny Shiny” by Haysi Fantayzee. In the video the singer, Kate Garner dances in a high tech outfit. In 1995, Kate Garner was the photographer on a photo shoot of him. He was thrilled, but she didn’t want to talk about the band–she had moved on.
He talks about going to Japan and buying about 100 Japanese cleaning products because of their colors and display–an optical field effect of baby blues.
- Factoid: if you place two or more objects in a display case, people will always read the object on the left as being the most valuable.
- Art is distrustful of the shiny. Shiny art is usually art-fair art. And art professors are always distrustful of shiny.
“Notes on Relationships in the Twenty-first Century” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
These are indeed notes. On the Mary Tyler Moore Show Lou Grant asked her how many times a woman could be with a guy before she became “that kind of girl.” After thinking, she says six. Six now gets used up quickly in the information age. Fort McMurray, Alberta is an oil extraction complex in the middle of the prairie and has the most disproportionately male demographic in North America. It also has the highest video streaming of anywhere in North America.
He maintains that being on device is not a sign of isolation. It is visible proof that people need and want to be with other people. We are more connected than we’ve ever been before–except we’ve been tricked into thinking that we’re more isolated than ever. How did this happen?
“Fear of Windows” ∀
I didn’t remember this excerpt. A girl is watching a horror movie where something comes in through the window and she becomes afraid of windows for many years. Being outside was okay though. How can she conquer this fear?
“Creep” [published by DIS Magazine]
This is a look at MakerFaire, largely 3-D printed items–it closely resemble the look and feel of the actual Internet. He also talks about drones and the newest consumer dynamic: creep. Creep is getting droned on your roof. Creep is someone wearing Google glasses. De-creeping Google Glass seems like it would be difficult but he thinks it’s a numbers game. People in 1990 on cell phones looked like assholes. But when the numerical tipping point came (around 2002) and everyone looked like an asshole, they all cancelled each other out,
So when will drones reach the level of surveillance–like passenger pigeons blacking out the sky?
“Stamped” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
Douglas collected stamps as a kid but no young people are interested in stamp collecting anymore because no one uses stamps anymore. Also, “Twentysomething is a word you simple never, ever saw or heard until the early 1990s with the Gen X explosions (sorry about that).”
The biggest lie about millennials is that they don’t vote. They are the most informed generation around. But Coupland believes millennials look at voting as archaic: every four years I go into a plywood booth and use a graphics-based stylus to “fill in a box” beside my choice for who is best for the job? What century are we in ?” Millennials must look at hanging chads and even re-counts and wonder how no-online voting still manages to exist.
Interestingly Coupland gets one thing very wrong: “If Joseph Kennedy were alive today, he’d certainly have a team of hackers on salary to win his sons’ elections fro him, but we’re pretty much beyond that level of hackability by now.” Or maybe Coupland was right. If we had been proactive, our current debacle might never have happened.
“Future Blips” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
He says he was reading a newspaper and looked to the to of the page to see what time it was. He seemed to have crossed some new sort of line with technology. He was also looking around his house for newspapers to use as packing material and he had none.
We are collectively rebuilding the way we process information. When people tell us things we don’t focus on the idea so much as the search terms we can later use. We are also getting much better at knowing what we don’t need to know. Is nostalgia for the twentieth century brain a waste of time? “While I sometimes miss my pre-Internet brain, I certainly don’t want it back.”
We also simply consume more and more than ever before.
“Futurosity” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
Coupland spent much of his life waiting for the future to happen yet it never really felt like we were here. And then, in this past year its almost instantly become impossible to deny that we are now all, magically and collectively, living in the far-off place once called the future. What is it? Apps costing 99 cents and eliminating hundreds of jobs, or texting all the time? A two-second lag time for most things. Is this feeling of futurosity only temporary?
“Worcestershistershire” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
He says when he was in Chile, the food disintegrated very quickly. He wondered what was wrong. What was wrong was the the food was fresh and unprocessed. Later, in his studio he found a month old sandwich that had barely decomposed. How can a body process something that doesn’t decompose? The title comes from a bottle of “pre 9/11 Worcestershire sauce” that he found.
“Bulk Memory” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
Memory is more than whats’ in your head (in fact, I would argue now that the first definition of memory is technological and the second is organic). Speed and memory are irreversibly addictive.
He says that everyone is using technology all the time, but he’s not being negative about that, “it’s actually for the better that [6.5 billion people are] inside Youtubing Russian dashcam compilations instead of wrecking the physical environment.
Then he talks about the unintended side effects of technology. Like when the car was invented, who would have thought dogs would like sticking their heads out the window? Never in human history has nostalgia been as useless and uncomforting as it is now.
The Mell [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
Malls used to be cool. They were the internet of 1968. The Mall of America opened in 1992. He went and says felt it was like being in an era that we thought had vanished. In 1997 he went to an upscale mall in London. Most of the stores were closed for the night but there were a lot of people hanging out in the air conditioning. In 2008 he drove to a mall in Arizona. It was a huge mall but his was the only car there. He found the glue gun he needed in the craft store. Back home it would have cost $13 but here it was $1.29, which is basically free. Was it worth staying open for that?
“The Anti-ghosts” ∀
One day the souls of average people rebelled and there was no going back. The souls weren’t ghosts because the bodies were still alive. They weren’t undead or alive either. They raged and challenged their bodies to deserve them.
“Little Black Ghost” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
He took an antibiotic following a dental procedure and it reacted very badly with him. He felt clinically that he wanted to kill himself. Earlier, it took him twenty five years to figure out he was suffering from seasonal depression. Depression is weird. If you don’t get it, then you don’t get it. But if you do, then you do. And if you do, you know how it can strip life of all color. All kinds of drugs didn’t help him. Then he bought a light box for $199 at a local drug store. After three seconds, poof the depression was gone and has yet to return.
But he wonders, which is really him? The depressed person or the not depressed person?
“New Moods” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
Prozac was like science had invented a new mood. And the arguments were vicious. It’s an affront to all that decent in the universe to be able to tailor your personality to something better than what you were born with.
His father is a doctor. His father’s father died in 1936 of a heart inflammation that by 1956 could have been fixed with a few pills. So he was raised on pills and he likes them. But he doesn’t take them because in kindergarten they brought in an anti-drug person come in and tell them about a person who took acid and developed locked-in syndrome–there’s no way to communicate and it goes on for ever and ever. It worked. He has never taken recreational drugs. He is scared straight.
The most successful pill would be one that makes you unaddicted to what ever you are addicted to.
“Beef Rock” ∀
Aliens come to Earth to feed on humans. The fed well until people created digital communication and it changed the flavor of everyone.
“Globalization Is Fun!” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
He talks of duty free and heraldry (nonsense, but comforting nonsense). Then he talks about China. How everything you buy in China is fake. He collected Chinese cigarette packs because of how beautiful they were and how authentic.
It’s faster and cheaper to go to your own Chinatown and you’d probably get what you wanted anyway. In Vancouver there are different Chinatown depending on what type of Chinese person you are.
“Unclassy” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
This piece looks at the lack of class structure in China. They simply don’t understand the concept. So he came up with new terms. A few include: aclassification: the process wherein one is stripped of class without being assigned a new class. ebulliophobia: the fear of bubbles. ebullioholilsm an addiction to bubbles
“Wonkr” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
A proposed app that lets you see what political beliefs the other people in the room have. It tells you the political mood of a busy space. It’s a free app but for 99 cents it allows you to link to other people who think just like you. This would have been impossible 20 years ago but now so much data is generated it would be very easy.
We all generate so much data that it would be hard to disappear. Hard to be like Ted Kaczynski. Machine intelligence would now have identified his writing style in a tenth of a second. Could he vanish in 2015?
Everyone wants to mine this data. The question is what are they going to do with it?
The head of the airline loyalty program said “the one thing you never ever use points for is flying. Only a loser uses their miles on trips. It costs the company essentially nothing with it burns off vast swaths of points. Use your points to buy stuff, and if there isn’t any stuff to buy, then redeem miles for gift cards…But for God’s sake don’t use them to fly. You might as well flush those points down the toilet.”
“Yield: A Story About Cornfields” ∀
In this excerpt, everything is mysteriously turning into cartoon versions of itself.
“The 2 1/2 th Dimension” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
Selfies are mirrors we can freeze. Other people’s selfies allow us to see how others look at themselves. Selfies are the second cousin of the air guitar Selfies are the proud parents of the dick pic.
The only thing surprising about them is the number o years it took us to isolate and name the phenomenon.
But the next selfie is going to be the 3-D selfie. Scan yourself and print out a 3-D effigy. Once they get really cheap its inevitable. Its like photography posing as sculpture–a 2 1/2 dimension.
“Living Big” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
You read it on the internet? Then it must be true.
His 14 year old niece had to find the item with the most ingredients at the local Safeway. The winner was chocolate layer cake. When he asked her about the overarching smell in a Safeway she said that’s the smell of GMO. Everything gets GMOd these days.
The Biggest Loser is a show about people losing weight but the show doesn’t address GMOs or anything like that. Nor food stamps or advertising or pesticides. As a general rule: healthy people are bad for capitalism.
“The End of the Golden Age of Payphones” ∀
I didn’t remember this story but it was pretty dark. Stella and her mom used to scam men at payphones (a devious trick). Stella went to juvie. Her mother, Jessica, went to trail and met a lawyer. She ran of with the lawyer. Stella’s life in institutions was pretty terrible and she wound up on the street. Whereas her mother passed her and didn’t even recognize her. Damn.
“The Ones That Got Away” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
In 1985, Coupland was introduced to a fax machine in Tokyo. Three years later they had one in Toronto. He started the “celebrity fax of the month.” Back in 1985 he also noticed that coffee shops were very big in Tokyo. He tried to imagine them in North America. But he said no, people in North America socialize at home. He also says that in 2000 he told a film producer that the future of films and TV was zombies–easy and cheap to make. Those are ones that got away.
“666!” ∀
This is about the reunion of a late 1990s heavy metal band called SpëllChek. But en route to the show, they suddenly forget what numbers are. It didn’t really affect them until they got to their biggest hit “UNICEF is a Whore” with its chorus of “666.” They couldn’t remember how to say the numbers.
“Dueling Duals” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
He wonders about dual citizenship and how its kind of a cop out. And yet what is citizenship really? Until recently one could purchase Canadian citizenship for about C$100,000–this was kept under the radar for a long time and people were furious when they found out.
“George Washington’s Extreme Makeover” ∀
Coupland was thinking about the chronic discomfort George Washington felt and yet all he still managed to accomplish. Imagine how amazing he would have been with delousing, a fitness regime and real teeth.
“George Washington’s Extreme Makeover” [Pilot Script]*
Puts the above idea as a screenplay. It’s pretty darn funny, but I can’t imagine it as more than one episode.
“Pot” [published in Vice]
The first time Douglas smoked pot in 1978, he stood up, blacked out and cut open his face. He went to the hospital where his father was on call. The look of disappointment on his dad’s face was tough to take. He hasn’t smoked much since, but the experience did inspire part of his novel in JPod. He fleshes out the story of the scared straight woman and the story of the friend who took acid and had locked in syndrome.
Pot is everywhere in Vancouver. His mother didn’t believe him so he drove hear around the suburbs to show her all the places it was growing.
He then gives some amusing tales of when he has dabbled with pot over the years. Including a pot syrup that keeps people happy all day.
He thinks people are helped by pot but not necessarily improved. Legal drugs seem to alter peoples states–not like they are stoned or high, just medicated.
In 1997 a friend gave him three pot seeds He tried to grow them in pots but eventually gave up and dumped them down by a creek near his house. A few months later they were dense shaggy THC monsters. He found that he couldn’t even give it away because his friends all stopped doing it. He assumes as we all do that soon enough it will become an even more regular commodity.
“Got a Life” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
The most boring thing on You Tube is elevators–there are elevator spotters juts like trainspotters.
Boredom is different than it used to be. The boredom of walking down the street not doing anything is pretty much gone. New boredom is that we have very little downtime. Reboot your computer and sit there waiting for it to do its thing, and within seventeen seconds you experience a small existential implosion when you remember that fifteen years ago life was nothing but this kind of moment.
“Peace” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
The real reason libraries are quiet is because “irregularly protruding book spines are terrific for dispersing sound and creating environments that are mildly free of echoes. But it has nothing on the quietest place on earth–the Bell Laboratories Murray Hill anechoic chamber. It absorbs over 99.995 percent of the incidental acoustic energy above two hundred hertz. The lab staff popped a balloon in his face and it made no sound.
He ties it to a time when he sneezed in 1988. Something came out of him and since then he has not been able to focus sound. So he avoids places where sound comes from all directions–they cancel each other out. People put up with far more noise than they need to.
“iF-iW eerF” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
Hotel lobbies and coffee areas are colonized by twenty something people with laptops and earbuds. It’s social but no one is talking to anyone else. It dawned on him that he never uses the TV or the phone in hotels–he just uses his laptop for everything. Good Wi-Fi is good business. Overcharging for speed is simply stupid. Remember paying $13.95 for a day of internet usage?
“Stuffed” [published by e-flux]
Douglas looks at hoarders. It’s easy to mock those who freak out over throwing away a twenty-seven year old jar of peanut butter. But how different is hoarding and collecting. Andy Warhol collected medium-good art instead of getting one tor two great works. Curators don’t collect.
There’s a funny/sad anecdote of a a friend who bought a John Chamberlain sculpture. Douglas was horrified to hear that the man’s maid Windexed it!
Craigslist and eBay make it easier and harder to collect. All the good stuff is gone and all the stuff that’s left is shit (thanks George Carlin). The only thing weirder than the strange things you collect is the person who doesn’t collect anything,
“Superman and the Kryptonite Martinis” ∀
Superman goes to a bar and his arch enemy starts putting tiny bits of kryptonite in his drinks. He finds it strangely delicious.
“McWage” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
When he wanted to write about a McJob for a novel, he applied for the jobs but his CV set off too many alarm bells. He eventually had to set a novel in Staples which is basically fast food but with photocopier paper instead of burgers. To earn such a wage past a certain age in life casts a spell of doom upon your days.
This is so true:
Minimum wage has gone from being a drop-dead minimum salary that, if nothing else, protected the young, the weak and the less able form being exploited into an idea implying that if you can’t get by on a minimum wage–rent, food, transport, life–then tough luck sucker, you don’t deserve anything at all, and its all your fault by the way.
“Lotto” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
I recalled this essay from somewhere else. His Aunt had lost a winning lottery ticket. But when they finally found it, it turned out she had written down the numbers that were on her ticket NOT the winning numbers.
He came up with the idea of “birthday people” for lotteries. People who win the big lottery jackpots are people who feel pity for birthday people. Big winner use numbers from 32 to 40 thus lowering the chance of having to share it.
Frugal” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
In art school he was known as Dougal which rhymes with frugal because he was so cheap.
We all know perpetually late people: they found this controlling mechanism ages ago. Its annoying and uncute. We all know super clean freaks and don’t like visiting their places. Then there are cheap people. How is cheapness going to make anybody think better of you? Would Richard Branson order the cheaper snack tray?
When you meet self-made rich people who are cheap, possibly its the cheapness that got them there but maybe they could relax a bit and make it look like a blast. Its way weirder when you meet cheap rich people who inherited their money. Then it gets psychological and taps into low self worth and family drama. Really the only person you’re trying to impress by being cheap is a younger version of yourself.
“Zoë Hears the Truth” ∀
Princess Zoe learns on her fathers death bed that he never believed in anything. Neither did her mother. They believed in literally nothing. Zoe was appalled and called her father a fraud But perhaps he might convince her of the logic of this attitude.
“IQ” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
In the 1970s IQs were a big deal and things were created to cater to the kind of person who like to take IQ tests. He survived school by being smart. But when he got to university he realized he didn’t have to be smart anymore. He also accepts that he’s not smart enough to operate his TV.
“My TV” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
In 1995, Doug bought he first adult TV set. That was when people “watched TV.” People asked, “Gee I wonder whats on?” By the early 2000s big boxy TVs were doomed. In 2008 he had powerful wifi installed and that was the end of regular TV watching.
People stopped watching TV and yet the medium has evolved since then. It’s what McLuhan predicted “When a new technology obsolesces an old one, it frees the newly obsolete medium to become an art form.” Hence great shows that are basically movies which run for fifty hours.
“The Preacher and His Mistress” ∀
The story of a couple who meet for–SWNS sex with no strings. But soon they learn about each other and they fall in some kind of love. I really liked the end of this story.
“5,149 Days Ago: Air Travel Post-9/11” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
I love that this story opens with him needing a nail clipper in the airport post 9/11. He asked the guard if he might have something to cut it so he doesn’t bleed all over the place. The guard smiles and then opens a 44 gallon trash bin that was full of tens of thousands of nail clippers. He felt like it was the ark in Raiders of the Lost Ark. He imagines a alien culture discovering this treasure “their miniature hooves must have grown at eccentric rates of speed.”
Fifteen years on from 9/11 and there are more planes in the air than ever. Even though right after 9/11, he was usually one of the only people on a plane.
“Glide” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
watch the movie Airport from 1970 and feel how different it is from now. The biggest change for airport design in the last few decades is wheeled luggage. Which has meant that every surface must be smooth with gaps eliminated.
Women in industrialized countries tend to fall and break their hips more than women in less industrialized countries. Many reasons were given for this, but the real reason is that we in the western world tend to walk on entirely smooth surfaces and the stabilizer muscles in the lower legs remain largely underdeveloped–people have a hard time coping with inconsistencies.
“Klass Warfare” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
Douglas booked a flight on Ryanair business plus. The back of the plane was packed but he was the only one in Business plus and he endured a 30 minute parade of hate from all the people who walked past and envied his six feet of leg room.
“3.14159265358” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
What is a word? 100,000 is a word, but is 100,001? If you memorize the digits of pi three point one four one five is that a word? Worrying about money is a terrible worry because you start thinking about money in terms of time. If you ask people over fifty which they would rather have more time or more money, almost every person will choose time over money.
“The Great Money Flush of 2016” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
Would the government punish you if you destroyed a dollar boll? Probably not. A dollar bill destroyed is a dollar bill the government no longer needs to back. The treasury department would be thrilled if people set fire to boxes full of money. So he came up with this idea:
What if the Treasury said that as of January 1, 2017, it would no loner honor any hundred dollar bills printed before December 31, 2013. People would have two years to spend the cash quickly. The average person tends to not have suitcases full of hundreds floating around. But those who do would have two years to convert the money into serviceable goods–People would start living it up for two years.
Of course there would be rules. You couldn’t trade in hundreds for 5 twenties. And each bill would be used up in one go so paying for a pack of gum with a $100 bill would give you gum and no change. Lots of money would go unredeemed. Flush out the zombie money and give the economy a boost.
Sounds great to me.
“Ick” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
Money is disgusting if you think about it. You don’t know where it has been. Canada recently got rid of pennies. People didn’t miss them. When he went to the US and got pennies in change it was like time travel. They exist solely to perpetuate their own existence.
In 1987 Canada replaced the dollar bill with the loonie. He thinks the US attempt at a dollar coin failed because of Susan B Anthony herself. No one knew who she was. Why not replace her with a popular person Marilyn Monroe, Joan Jett Wilma Flintsone?
“Grexit” [published in Vice]
We are now so infused with Brexit that I totally forgot about Greece and the failure of that country.
If you look at the Greek economy it turns out that Greece doesn’t really do anything. No manufacturing or agribusiness on a large scale. It’s just islands and hotels and people with pensions. Its mostly people doing nothing all day. Life in Greece isn’t even Utopia it’s heaven. If Greece left the eurozone what would it do? Riot for more money? There is no more money? More respect? You’ve got respect, you just don’t have any money. Put the whole country up on eBay?
Doing nothing sounds simple but few people do nothing anymore.
“World War $” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
I have read this one before and enjoyed it a lot.
Nobody actually wins Monopoly. The game just ends
He talks about latency-where a few millionths of a second can change who gets which stock order in first. It can mean trillions of dollars
Remember the crash of 2008 when the Dow went below 7000? It seemed like money was over. Like a Monopoly game that ended.
“The Man Who Lost His Story” ∀
A man lost his story and tried to do anything he could to make one.
“The Valley” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
When asked where Silicon Valley is most people point just a little north of Los Angeles. They’re often surprised that it’s up near San Francisco. It’s the money that makes the Valley sexy because there’s not much sexy about what goes on there. Tech is tech. Cables are cables. Routers are routers. People are a bit afraid of it all. Is it good or evil? Since 2016 it seems more evil.
“3 1/2 Fingers” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
When Jack Lew was made secretary of the treasure his signature was so goofy (right) that he had to come up with a new one. Douglas’ was as bad as Lews’ because like most people he invented it in his teens and is now stuck with it [I have been slowly modifying my decades old one and hope that I never get in trouble for doing so]. But Douglas has beautiful handwriting and is a poor typist–he’s a three and a half-fingered typist. Because he taught himself. [I myself am a six-fingered typist at best]. Kids today don’t learn cursive. We lost handwriting and got Comic Sans in return
“An Excerpt of Search” [Search is a book produced during the author’s residency at the Google Cultural Institute in Paris]
Imagine if twenty years ago someone said in two decades you’ll be able to know the answer to just about any question anywhere, anytime, for free in less than one tenth of a second. You’d have been very impressed right? Yet here we are taking it all for granted.
This is mostly a compendium of the most searched for phrases at the time of collecting. Things people searched for using the words who, what, where, when, why, how. I’m not sure I believe it exactly–there are too many similar phrases about nonsense. But whatever.
“Bit Rot” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
The biggest trouble with archiving things made after 1990 is that most things aren’t on paper anymore. They don’t exist exactly–they are on a 1995ish laptop–and those files suffer from bit rot. They have a half life of about fifteen years. Older archivists also don’t want to deal with digital archiving. But even if you find an old laptop–how many versions of a novel are worth keeping? Does anyone want to look at 400 versions of novel from first drat to completion?
“Bartholomew Is Right There at the Dawn of Language” ∀
Bartholomew hates the way language has devolved. So when Karen writes him a message W|-|3|\| I g37 70 7|-|3 0ffi(3 2d4y, 137‘5 m4k3 p455i0|\|473 10v3 0v3r70py0ur 14rg3 he thinks language has devolved entirely. Its pretty funny.
“Temp” [published by Metro International]
I really enjoyed this lengthy short story about a temp in a failing business, Over ten section, we see the temp initially hate her coworkers then grow to like one of them. And also start to fall for a Chinese business man. The whole story has lots of funny, all-too-real ideas in it.
“Retail” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
He grew up in a remote area with the nearest store five miles away. So now when he travels he likes to experience retail. He goes to the hardware store. He loves finding a tool that has a specific use and you don’t know what it could be. It’s like shopping in a parallel universe. Japanese stores are fully immersive lifestyle experience They’re so well put together you feel you should dress up to go there.
He was once nabbed for shoplifting–except that he had the receipt. He never went back to that store again,.
He also jokes: “Right now I like these new hipster stores that each sell exactly four and a half things and feel like the Great Depression when you walk in.”
“Trivial” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
There used to be a thing called trivia. What was a trivia night like in 2015? ( I actually was at one on vacation recently– no cell phones allowed). We used to have all this stuff stored in our heads now we don’t. What happened? It’s still there, just reclassified. We also had a larger attention span.
“Über That Red Dot” [published in FT Weekend Magazine and edited for this book]
Following the black Uber dot on a screen is like a cat with a red laser pointer. When people say you could get raped by an Uber driver he responds that you could get raped by any driver, really. So why are you focusing on Uber? There’s no real argument top not have Uber drivers.
“361”*
The story of a teacher in 1975 who deals with a student whose body is occasionally hijacked by a spirit who can tell her the future. But it seems that 361, the spirit, may have something in mind for her body.
“My Name”*
Hayley is one of the surplus Chinese babies that everyone began adopting in the 1990s. She lives in white suburbia. Some people say her some racist stuff is said but every one recognizes her. This is great story with a some satisfying threads that tie together. Like the lost dog Henry and a car in Molasses Pond that everyone assumes belonged to a boy who disappeared.
“Mrs. McCarthy and Mrs. Brown”*
The story of how Andy Warhol found the pictures of Mrs McCarthy and Mrs Brown, two women killed by bad tuna fish. But they notice that there is review about his art a few pages down from their story… is that where he got the idea to do a painting about them? Was he reading a review of his own work?
“An App Called Yoo” [published by Monopol magazine in Germany]
This app offers a fantastically personal experience viewed only by you. It’s not meant to be shared. It uses all of your data and creates a uniquely personal experience. The proposal is a lengthy fantasy about an app that will no doubt come to pass in the next five years. The last line is the best. This document was created in Microsoft Word, which in the year 2014 is pathetic.
Afterword by Samuel Saelemakers: Filtered by Experience: An algorithm called “Me”:
He explains that it was an exhibition of Coupland’s work called Bit Rit which prompted this publication. It was made up of disparate images by Coupland and others. He says the app called yoo uses logarithmic technology to create something that resembles the exhibition this book was named for.
*appearing for the first time in this book.
∀ appeared in Generation A.
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