If you’re a fan of Boing Boing, chances are you dig Douglas Coupland. His literary, visual, and technological interests are highly compatible with the brand of weirdness for which this blog is known.
Coupland’s work appeals to me, so I’ve kept up with his oeuvre from his early zeitgeist-shaping novels like Generation X and Microserfs. I also enjoy his nonfiction work on subjects like his native Canada, and his hometown of Vancouver where he set the too-little-seen movie Everything’s Gone Green. His more recent books on the likes of Marshall MacLuhan and Alcatel-Lucent are also among my favorites.
Douglas Coupland
Most of us know Coupland as a writer, but he began his career as a visual artist. He has to some extent returned there. On my most recent pilgrimage to Powell’s City of Books in Portland last week, I purchased only one thing: his recent art monograph everywhere is anywhere is anything is everything, which reveals not only the vividness of his body of work. There is a fascinatingly mundane strangeness of the ideas not within it, and it provokes similar ideas in others.
If this interests you, you’ll want to watch the 1996 profile of Coupland as a thinker of these mundane-strange thoughts, Close Personal Friend. Directed by Jennifer Cowan, the half-hour film renders a conversation with the writer/artist/thought-thinker in the aesthetic of an MTV music video of the day, albeit one processed through a more Couplandian sensibility. It examines just what humankind was becoming in that decade of unprecedented technological acceleration, the time of “FedEx, Prozac, microwave ovens, and fax machines.” Laugh if you must, but like those of any worthwhile thinker, Coupland’s observations remain compelling — and relevant — today.