Whew! That's a relief! This is an excellent piece. Which is good--because I don't think even I could whine and complain about a piece written by the guy who invented this opportunity for me to whine and complain.

Coupland's driven alright, just as I suspected--and I figured that school remembrance project would be exhausting for at least some of those stand- alone artists.

And most tantalizing:

"...the ingenious way in which Vancouver taps wealth from some of the world's ugliest veins, while becoming more healthy and pretty every day."

As a description of Vancouver this is as real as it gets, but I doubt if the travel industry and Chambers of Commerce will adopt it anytime soon. Can't quite imagine that sentence on 2010 adverts--or even on the ceiling of sky trains.

But really true!

I love it when white upper class guys get together for a circle jerk! Great work!

Apropos of dude's note above,

I just heard Coupland holding forth on CBC Radio One's book club.

HOW Interesting! How STIMULATING!

How very VANCOUVER!

One can hear the balance of the performance next weekend from 8 till 9 am – on Saturday I think.

I didn’t make a note of it.

"I love it when white upper class guys get together for a circle jerk! Great work!"

What difference does it make if they're white? A circle jerk is a circle jerk.

oooh...nasty comments. Jealousy rearing it's ugly head? Reminds me of the advertisement so many years ago "Don't hate me because I am beautiful"...it could be redirected to "Don't hate me because i am endlessly talented"...

Coupland is amazingly talented. His portrayal of a generation (mine, of course) was so "bang on" in his book "Generation X "that it almost scared me...as if someone had hacked into my brain and put my life on paper. He still gets it...

Dunno Mkitty,
I think Coupland may have jumped the shark. Have you seen his latest extended self-aggrandizing feature in the New York Times?

I'd post a link but it is behind subscription at Times Select so it'd do you no good.
Suffice to say it includes a number of photos of the contents of the 'great' man's garage along with an account of insect interference while performing Shakespeare in the park. Check it out if you have a friend who subscribes.

Spare me!

Doug has always needed a huge amount ot reassurance, both of his work and himself personally. With 'aclaim bait' tomes such as "Souvenir of Canada" and "Terry" it's difficult to not hear Doug's pleading for an OC ...

"... it will come Doug, don't lose heart, it will come". After all there are only a gazillion more Canadian Rock Stars (contradiction in terms I fear), political hacks and University Presidents before you.

Maybe when you begin wearing that lapel pin you can cease publishing the 'witty bastard at the end of the bar' material and do some serious writing for a change.

BTW David, has your soul re-emerged from DC's fundiment yet?

Doug prides himself on never having had to work -well-duh! raised in the Biritish Properties the silver spoon doesn't fall far from the tree. The absence of real life experience, working, struggling to make the rent are what I find missing from his work -it is all so affected and shallow. The absence of any critical commentary in Vancouver Press John Biurns on bended knee, now Beers is probably what has provoked some of the response here.

Today in the New York Times (subscribers only, sorry) Doug has a tale to tell about how he 'named' dresses for some high-rent fashion designers in 2002 complete with full colour design illustrations - though not of the dresses of course.

The things this guy is into these days - hardly a moment left for writing! Whew!
Wow! Shazam! Poof! Piffle!

Here's just a little sample for you poor ‘fashionistas’ and culture mavens who don't subscribe to Times Select - eat your hearts out.

"In 2002, Dutch designers Viktor & Rolf asked me to come up with names for 13 dresses they had designed for their fall collection. I decided to do names that were as weird and improbable as the era that was emerging. Viktor and Rolf are stunning designers and they occupy and define that wonderful and improbable yet deeply necessary territory of fashion where complex yet ephemeral ideas emerge and vanish and mutate and re-emerge. People like to think that fashion is silly or frivolous, but people like these are never, well …very fashionable, and they don’t quite understand that culture plays itself out loudly and colorfully and wonderfully on so many other levels than those that finally end up in textbooks 30 years after the fact. Naomi Klein and I disagreed on this point in an essay that appeared in BlackBook Magazine in 2004....."

....don't you wish you knew what else he had to say?

... 'wonderful and improbable yet deeply necessary territory of fashion...'

One couldn't, certainly wouldn’t, make this stuff up.

"they don’t quite understand that culture plays itself out loudly and colorfully and wonderfully on so many other levels than those that finally end up in textbooks 30 years after the fact."

You quoted a perfect rebuttal to your own critique. I thought the notion that fashion (or popular culture generally) can say interesting, even profound things, was no longer controversial.

A great profile of one of our most interesting artists.

The comments are interesting too:

Doug Coupland seems to inspire a lot of jealousy.

Well, we'll have to disagree on that, Roger Evan Larry, I think all of the material of mr coupland's I posted above is a pile of self-absorbed tendentious crap. I can pick up the great style and 'culture' books of the past quarter century at my local flea market for 2c on the dollar any time I want - rem koolhaas, bruce mau and the back issues of wallpaper magazine included. In 50 years they may, along with mr coupland's collections of garage garbage kitsch, be of interest to some effete collector in Greenwich Village but to students of real history, they'll never be anything more than a footnote.

Here's another little bit of disjointed and meaningless stuff from his epistolary effusions in today’s Times:

“In 2000, I was writer in residence at the Atlantic Center for the Arts in New Smyrna Beach, Fla. It was a record-breakingly hot summer, and on the nightly news they had a map that showed exactly how much of the state was in flames. It was gripping.

The visual artist in residence was David Carson, someone whose work I’d admired for years. When we met, it turned out we were both children of air force jet pilots who drove silver Audi TTs, and it was slightly creepy. In any event, Florida, for me, was an exotic locale, whereas David grew up just down the Space Coast … which explains his design work in the best kind of way.

I kept a small notepad diary of my three weeks there – quick jots into a Word file using Helvetica bold – it was too hot to write properly. It was also too hot to eat during the daytime. All I ate for three weeks was Lucky Charms and Vitamin D milk around 10:30 each night. I lost eight pounds while I was there. It turns out that the flight school just down the road was where the Sept. 11 bombers trained. It was a strange little interregnum.”

You really care whether this guy uses Helvetica bold in his word files and drives an Audi TT - you must be joking? I'll take ann frank's reality to doug coupland's pretense any day, and so, I wager, would anyone who doesn’t think the world revolves around his own navel.

This is about as timeless as the Vancouver Province or that little piece of free fluff from CanWest that died a quiet death a month or so ago. Now what did they call that paper?

No jealousy here, only sadness that a culture could possibly become so breathtakingly shallow that Doug Coupland might become any kind of hero or avatar for its citizens.

Coupland, just above - in the bit quoted from the Times - sounds about as breathless as Peter McKay did when he met Condi Rice in person for the first time.
What a revelation.

"In 50 years they may, along with Mr coupland's collections of garage garbage kitsch, be of interest to some effete collector in Greenwich Village but to students of real history, they'll never be anything more than a footnote."

Perhaps Coupland will be forgotten by historians, but serious historians and cultural studies types won't forget fashion and popular culture. Try using google scholar and searching "fashion cultural history" - 132,000 responses come up. Oxford University press even published a volume called Fashion as part of their Oxford History of Art (by Christopher Breward, 2003).

Coupland lacks the veneer of seriousness and high-mindness you seem to associate with significant culture, a lot of important artists from Warhol to Hammet have faced the same problem, but time proved their significance, it may do the same for Coupland. Regardless, you don’t like Coupland fine, but can’t you muster a better argument than”high culture deep, pop culture shallow”?

Roger Evan Larry, you must be joking. If you want to have a debate about the relative merits of high and low culture that's one thing - but at least pick an exemplar with some merit.

All I did, and very simple was it to do, is post a few bits of Coupland's own writing as evidence that:
a) he's a lightweight, in my opinion, and;
b) the current fuss about what he has to say about anything is much ado about nothing.

I'd certainly agree that Warhol along with Roy Lichtenstein, Jasper Johns, Alexander Calder and a number of other modernists (perhaps even including Jackson Pollack) will more than stand the test of time - that's the point precisely - they've actually created art. And that ‘art’, qua art, has a life of its own independent of the artist. Coupland, on the other hand just plays at being an artist and then comments, very shallowly, about the 'process'. He’s his own piece of insubstantial kitsch and he has to keep re-inventing himself and re-imagining a semi-relevant role or he’ll fade quickly into the background to be replaced by whoever happens to be defining ‘taste’ for the next generation.

He’s far more invested in his fame than his work – it’s obvious from everything he says and does. The medium is clearly the message, as Marshall McLuhan would put it – but it fades very fast when you turn the cathode ray tube off.

Hammet is a great writer - in my view, Coupland's not. The product an artist produces is the key to the question, not the way he or she lives life nor the attention that reflects briefly from the self-generated sparks kicked up along the way.

In the end, he’s less harmful than Paris Hilton but I suppose that too is damning with faint praise.

'Circus' is a good metaphor although I doubt Beers meant it quite the way I do. Lots of noise and high spirits and candy floss but not much else...a pleasant an childish entertainment.

In the words of Paris Hilton " Whatever".

A little more of Coupland's self-absorbed navel gazing from the New York Times:

These two excerpts bring the breathless reader up to date on Doug's atristic enterprises and his consternation with the fact that he's no longer allowed to have scissors to play with on airplanes; enjoy:

"American pop artist James Rosenquist has always been one of my favorite
painters. So when I really got into Photoshop in 1998, I used his
visual techniques as my training guide on how to use this new
software. Using pop imagery from all over the place I was able to
learn about layering and gradation and cutting and pasting and … in the
end I came to the conclusion that the 1960’s pop artists were merely
dry runs for year 2000 imaging software. For example, Andy Warhol’s work was about cutting, pasting and cloning, while that of Robert Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns was about opacity, layering and filtering.
Included here are some early examples of how I used pop to learn Photoshop.
Before Sept. 11, my favorite method of making hours melt away on transcontinental flights was to use a pair of terrifyingly sharp German scissors and a few Pritt glue sticks to collage together bits of junk left over from that particular trip — receipts, gum wrappers, flight tags — all the usual detritus of travel. I’d use the resulting collages as cards over the next few months (this was before jpegs, remember) and I now have no idea where most of them are. I did, however save the collages I made in November 1999 on a trip to Japan, and to look at them is to remember the trip in intimate detail. Funny how receipts can do that — shopping for pine bark at Tokyu Hands in Shibuya (easily my favorite place on earth), the ridiculous drive in and out of the city to Narita, or the Guided by Voices song I heard at the Virgin superstore in Shinjuku.

One of the great, sad little haiku moments for most travelers after Sept. 11 was when the cutlery would arrive during a flight and you got a spoon, a fork and … a plastic knife. Two months ago on British Airways in coach class I got a real knife and almost wept. It felt like something — I’m not quite sure what — had healed. It was lovely."

Now wasn't that thrillingly breathlessly relevant.

should be 'artistic' enterprises in line 4 - guess I'm going to have to post in a WP program and paste in here too; ridiculous!

And from yesterday, again in Times Select so not generally available to the culture challenged, we have Doug's justification for the way he writes. I know not one of the 2 or 3 possible readers of this fast-disappearing thread will want to miss it (it’s a bit too big to post in one comment so I’ll split it in two):

August 14, 2006, 10:30 pm
Why Write Modern Fiction?
Many people think of me as being Mr. High Technology Guy, which I find odd since I’m a fiction writer, possibly one of the lowest-tech jobs going. I’m asked why I don’t get into movies or TV — why should I? I enjoy writing fiction. Without fiction we run the risk of losing forever the possibility of certain kinds of stories being told a certain way. And fiction allows for a time to reflect and savor speech and the gift of language.

And yet there’s something weird with me. My existence annoys the hell out of traditional fiction writers. I get all sorts of corny damnations along the lines of, “All he’s doing is ruthlessly exploiting experimental fiction just to make truckloads of money.” Yes, that’s always been my plan all along. Yessiree, there’s no more surefire way of making a living than by exploiting society’s bottomless craving for experimental fiction. I’m sure if you go to any high school career counseling office, at the absolute bottom of a list of 9,472 possible career options, right below morris dancing and poultry sexing, you’ll find experimental fiction writing. My most recent novel features 24 pages of random numbers. Ka-ching! Ka-ching! I was certainly thinking of the jackpot when I put that in. And yet in it went, and it seems the more experimental my work gets, the more people respond to it.

So the fact is that I do write, and I am a writer, and I can’t be wished out of existence by those aging crustysomethings who’ve been trying to do just this for 15 years. I also note that these folks are usually the same folks who are always passionately arguing for society to offer new platforms for new and different voices to be heard. Rich nutritious irony, if ever there was: as long as those voices end up sounding like their own voices in the end.

And here's the balance of Doug's musings about the value of his work as a writer, among other things:

I find a stifling homogeneity in most fiction. I walk into a bookstore and look at the shelves filled with thousands of doubtless worthy novels — beautifully crafted, nicely honed and all of that — novels of love, loss and redemption and … in my head I feel as if I’ve walked into a Broyhill furniture showroom. I feel like I’m looking at countless dark-stained colonial-style bedroom suites, and endless arrays of pickled-maple empire dining sets, with no spindle left unturned, every buffed surface dreaming of a shot of Pledge. What I’m seeing is undoubtedly fine furniture. It’s just not …new furniture. And I’m not saying that the bulk of novels out there aren’t art — they are — they’re just not modern art. They don’t point out anything new or the possibility of anything new. I mean, it’s also pretty hard to imagine a beautifully rendered canvas of mallard ducks in the Museum of Modern Art. Or a watercolor portrait of Anne Hathaway.

And the truth is that most people want to live in “old fashioned”-styled houses. It’s the way people are. But to be outraged and upset by the fact that someone might want to live in a modernist house seems medieval. No! My taste is absolute! Install Italianate decorative mantelpieces immediately! My ongoing joke is that most new subdivisions resemble microwave ovens with crown molding. If there’s anything new or modern to be seen, smother it with doohickeys.

I began writing because I fell in love with Pop Art at the age of 10. I’ve always thought that words are sexy. Words are art objects even by themselves, even without being inserted into a narrative. I discovered Jenny Holzer’s text work in art school in the early 1980’s. After that, it now seems, a lifetime spent working with words was unavoidable.

And given everything I’ve just said, yes, I continue to write fiction. I continue to write fiction set in a modern world that has never been weirder or richer or more charged with options, a world inhabited with modern people who hoard Tamiflu, compare the advantage of one credit card over another, and, shamefully or not, wonder which tastes better, Coke or Pepsi. Or Royal Crown.

These modern people have TVs and watch them. They shop on eBay. They question the regime in power. They have repetitive stress disorders. They downloaded porn last weekend. And yet in spite of this — maybe even because of this — they possess the qualities to become myths. That’s where art lies.

I tried to read some Coupland a few years back and couldn't make it into the second paragraph. But this time I was forced to and I harbour a bit of resentment against you, G. West and Alcibiades for putting me through this.

I don't get it, either. Coupland not only has nothing to say, he's also sensation intellectual lightweight.

But hey, look at Margaraet Atwood. Okay, think fast, can you come up with one single Atwood idea that sticks in your mind? (not counting those chimeric animals she invented) Didn't think so--and she's supposedly our number one writer.

"They possess the quality to become myths. That's where art lies," eh!

"I've always thought that words are sexy," eh!

I'll get you guys for this! I coulda been looking for fake scanning tunneling micrographs of hiv attacking CD4s on Photosearch!

Okay, I just read it all again. Come on, this is a grade ten student writing notes to his grade eight girlfriend. You guys can't fool me, eh.

Seriously though, who would ever read this kind of stuff?

Game, set and match! No hard feelings eh? – for the wasted time.

Well done Truman, I'll take Malcolm Lowry over Margaret Atwood any day but I must admit I do like Alistair MacLeod. Have you read any of his stuff? But I think I recall your not being a Lowry fan, no?

As to your final question, I can only think Coupland would be a great cure for insomnia.

I did enjoy the review of Schama's book, Rough Crossings. I’ve been a fan of his since I read his treatment of the French Revolution, what was it called? … ‘Citizens’ I think.

Haven't read McLeod or Shama, Alcibiades, but I should. I got into 'Under the Volcano' many years ago and didn't grasp what was happening in Lowry's mind, (I didn't finish it) although, to be honest, I always thought that was my failing, not his.

Someday, I'm going to read it again. I saw the film about his life in Mexico before he got to Dollarton. It was excellent. I think there's probably something very worthwhile about "Volcano," though--something I need to learn.