Banknotables: a holiday conversation starter

By Colby Cosh - Friday, December 23, 2011 at 8:14 AM - 0 Comments

Hilarity! Both of the metropolitan broadsheets in Alberta are throwing a tantrum about the Mint’s plans to dump the Famous Five feminists of the 1920s from the $50 bill and replace them with a picture of an icebreaker. Like most pundits who take a thwack at the occasional issue of personages and emblems on our currency, the authors of these editorials act like they have never been east of Flin Flon.

I ask you to sincerely disregard the epic loathsomeness of the Famous Five—that quintet of unsmiling prohibitionists, pacifists, and white supremacists, at least three of whom bear direct personal responsibility for a four-decade regime of sexual sterilization of the “unfit” in Alberta. Leave aside, too, the fact that women would obviously have been admitted to the Senate soon enough if there had never been a Persons Case. No, I ask you merely to look at the people other countries put on their paper currency. With the exception of Australia, which shares our fetish for early female politicians utterly unknown elsewhere, you’ll find they mostly like to put world-historical figures on there. Japan honours Noguchi, who discovered the syphilis spirochete. England honours Darwin and Adam Smith. Sweden remembers Linnaeus and Jenny Lind. New Zealand commemorates Edmund Hillary and Ernest Rutherford. Continue…

How General Idea predicted the future

By Sara Angel - Thursday, July 28, 2011 at 3:05 PM - 5 Comments

Photograph by Jessica Darmanin

Among the many reasons to celebrate this week’s centenary of media guru Marshall McLuhan’s birth is that he gave life to General Idea (GI), one of the world’s most subversive art practices. Next week, Haute Culture: General Idea, the first comprehensive retrospective of the three-man Canadian cultural collective, opens at the Art Gallery of Ontario. It’s the 25-year-long story of A.A. Bronson, Felix Partz, and Jorge Zontal, who came together in 1969 as roommates in a Toronto house that had once been a store. “We were unemployed and bored,” says Bronson, 65, explaining how the group began their art career by dreaming up fictitious retail identities for their home’s large storefront window. “One day we turned the place into a romance bookshop with boxes of Harlequins we found in the trash. The door to the house was always locked and there was always a sign that said ‘Back in 5 minutes.’ ”

Quickly the three earned a reputation as a gang that was redefining the role of the artist. “For GI, he was no longer someone who made things to hang on walls,” says Frédéric Bonnet, Haute Culture’s curator, “but a commentator on society.” They attended parties in matching outfits, obsessively documented themselves as real and fictionalized characters, and lived together as a threesome. “They introduced the idea that a relationship can be a triangle,” Bonnet says, “and not just a couple with two kids.”

The group chose the name “General Idea” to describe their practice, which was media omnivorous and favoured intellect over technical virtuosity. GI demonstrated this to the world in 1971, when they staged the Miss General Idea Beauty Pageant at the Art Gallery of Ontario, where contestants were both men and women. With this piece of performance art, Bronson, Partz, and Zontal imitated popular culture to plug themselves into one of the most important dialogues of the day: the questioning of gender stereotypes.

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Rachel wants a baby

By Kate Fillion - Thursday, October 7, 2010 at 12:40 PM - 0 Comments

Adrianna Williams/Corbis/ Photograph by Brian Howell

Douglas Coupland—clothing and furniture designer, biographer, artist and sculptor, screenwriter, landscape architect and, oh yeah, author of Generation X and 12 other novels—insists he is not a Renaissance man but “just someone who went to art school. It makes you perpetually curious and you learn there’s always some new way of looking at an object or situation.”

Case in point: his five-hour-long Massey Lectures, which begin on Oct. 12, will take the form of a real-time, five-hour story—a novel, in other words. Player One is set in an airport cocktail lounge, where apocalypse and romance are on the agenda along with the Big Ideas you’d expect from a lecture series that has previously been helmed by the likes of Northrop Frye and Charles Taylor.

Coupland says he “wanted to take everything I’ve been doing since 1990 and to put it in Superman’s hand and have him crush it into a diamond.” Accordingly, Player One revisits quintessential Coupland themes, chiefly, how the speed of change, both technologically and socially driven, is altering the world, our own sense of self and our souls. “The future is happening so fast and furious right now, there’s no language to describe all these new sensations, so we have to begin inventing one,” says Coupland, who in Player One delivers a glossary for the future with such terms as “Bell’s law of telephony: no matter what technology is used, your monthly phone bill magically remains about the same size.”

For someone who’s been avant-garde for almost 20 years, Coupland is surprisingly down-to-earth, with a deep, jolly laugh that sounds too sincere for a hipster. Comments on his versatility are deflected with oh-but-you-could-do-it-too charm. “Look, even on the best day of writing you’re ever going to have in your life, it’s only going to be about 2½ hours of actual, ‘Wow, this is really shooting out of my brain’ time,” he says. “And then there’s the rest of the day. What are you going to do, go ride in a boat? No way. You’re here to feel and experience and interpret life.”

And, apparently, express those interpretations in every medium possible, with a minimum of artistic angst. “When something feels like homework, I’m out of there,” says Coupland. That can’t happen too often, judging by his output over the past 12 months: a biography of Marshall McLuhan, the opening of a Toronto park he helped design, a commission to create a monument in Ottawa honouring firefighters, the launch of a new clothing line for Roots, the unveiling of a new sculpture at the Vancouver Convention Centre, and now, Player One, which is already on the long list for the Giller Prize.

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Marshall McLuhan vs. Peter Robertson

By macleans.ca - Friday, September 24, 2010 at 10:05 AM - 0 Comments

Marshall McLuhan

Why he’s famous: Most of all, for his famously misunderstood phrase, “the medium is the message.”

Why he deserves to win: As the the father of modern mass media theory and an early philosopher of the electronic age, McLuhan changed the way people relate to information. Best known for coining the expressions “global village” and “the medium is the message” (which meant that the way we acquire information shapes us more than the information itself), his two major books—The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media—still have a cult following. Though he died before the advent of the Internet, McLuhan seemed to see it coming: he theorized electronic media was creating a global village by exposing people to events on the opposite side of the world which would render books obsolete. Ask Barnes and Noble if he was right.

Peter Robertson

Why he’s famous: He’s the inventor of the Robertson screwdriver—you know, the square-shaped one in your toolbox.

Why he deserves to win: Before Robertson’s invention in 1908, we were stuck with the slip-prone flat bladed driver and slotted-head screw, a combo notorious for causing injuries. Later, when the cross-shaped Phillips screw and driver were invented, Consumer Reports magazine declared the Robertson superior because Phillips’ screws are easily stripped and degrade with wear. As writer Witold Rybcynski put it, “no matter how old, rusty, or painted over, a Robertson screw can always be unscrewed. [It’s] the biggest little invention of the 20th century.”

Next: Guy Laliberté vs. Norman Bethune

Return to the bracket

Marshall McLuhan vs. Jane Jacobs

By macleans.ca - Thursday, September 16, 2010 at 10:12 AM - 0 Comments

Marshall McLuhan

Why he’s famous: Most of all, for his famously misunderstood phrase, “the medium is the message.”

Why he deserves to win: As the the father of modern mass media theory and an early philosopher of the electronic age, McLuhan changed the way people relate to information. Best known for coining the expressions “global village” and “the medium is the message” (which meant that the way we acquire information shapes us more than the information itself), his two major books—The Gutenberg Galaxy and Understanding Media—still have a cult following. Though he died before the advent of the Internet, McLuhan seemed to see it coming: he theorized electronic media was creating a global village by exposing people to events on the opposite side of the world which would render books obsolete. Ask Barnes and Noble if he was right.

Jane Jacobs

Why she’s famous: Her groundbreaking tome, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, is still considered a bible by architects and city planners.

Why she deserves to win: Just as McLuhan changed the way we relate to information, Jacobs revolutionized the way we think about our cities. A lifelong social activist, Jacobs was a vehement critic of urban renewal projects that called for the razing and rebuilding of neighbourhoods. Instead, Jacobs proposed abolishing zoning laws to create dense, mixed-use neighborhoods.

Next: Peter Robertson vs. James Cameron

Inside McLuhan’s head

By macleans.ca - Wednesday, March 17, 2010 at 9:00 AM - 10 Comments

Photograph by P.J. Salkovitch/ Canadian Press

“I knew going into it that this wasn’t going to be a straight biography,” says Douglas Coupland about his new study of Marshall McLuhan. What the Vancouver-based author has concocted instead is a historical mosaic that borrows heavily from McLuhan’s inimitable riffing style—that is, to dance non-linearly around ideas as a means of forming a distinct theory. Coupland also adds a healthy dose of his own literary signature to the mix—asides, like copies of online user-reviews of McLuhan’s works that appear in between chapters, seem at first glance peripheral to the subject at hand but later turn out to speak a distinct truth about it.

To be sure, this is still a biographical work. It’s just that, for Coupland, the things people already know about McLuhan—his famous phrases “global village” and “the medium is the message,” plus his cameo in Annie Hall—aren’t as interesting as, say, the great thinker’s biological and genetic makeup. And so, instead of analyzing McLuhan’s 1962 masterwork The Gutenberg Galaxy, Coupland investigates the brain that composed it.

Marshall McLuhan’s brain was fuelled by fresh blood from the heart through not one but two arteries at the base of his skull, a trait in the mammalian world found mostly in cats and rarely in human beings. As well, people in Marshall’s family tended to die of strokes. Marshall himself had countless small strokes during his lifetime—sometimes in front of a classroom of students, where he’d suddenly gap out for a few minutes and then return to the world.

Continue…

How about "Somewhat benign, but sort of an a-hole"?

By Colby Cosh - Thursday, December 31, 2009 at 8:16 PM - 89 Comments

Historian Michael Behiels commences his Citizen op-ed on the present constitutional emergency by describing the prime minister as “our not-so-benign dictator”. Kind of a remarkable rhetorical ploy, that. I’m from the tribe of Westerners who used to gripe about the Liberal “benign dictatorship”, but I realized how and silly overwrought this sort of language was on the day the B.D. Himself was ousted by his own caucus without so much as a “Thanks for the customized golf balls”. Ever since then, my Zen answer to every kerfuffle, foofaraw, and flibberty-floo about Parliament and its powers has been the same, no matter who was in power. Parliament has just as much power as its members care to take. No more, no less.

But little did I realize what a favour I was doing the dictator of old by consenting to describe him as “benign”, despite actual ethical misgivings about several of his policies! The Tom Flanagans of the world felt the need to throw that word “benign” in there as a pre-emptive apology for their own excessiveness. But now Behiels–unashamed! Unflinching!–has upped the ante: Stephen Harper’s not just a dictator, he’s one of those evil dictators. McLuhan would weep to behold such mastery of figure-ground effects.

The Interview: Douglas Coupland

By Kate Lunau - Thursday, September 10, 2009 at 3:00 PM - 3 Comments

Douglas Coupland’s latest novel, Generation A, is set in the not-too-distant future, when bees have all but vanished from the planet—until five individuals around the world are suddenly stung. The acclaimed Canadian author talks to Macleans.ca about how the novel compares to Generation X, published nearly twenty years ago, his first-ever laptop, and why, with the rise of digital media, books still matter.

Q: Generation X is one of your best-known novels. Beyond its similar title, Generation A revisits some of its themes: reading, storytelling, the digitalization of culture. How would you describe the relationship between these two novels?

A: X was written in ’89-90. Compared to the ’70s or early ’80s, it felt like things were speeding up a bit; it felt like culture was speeding up. That’s where the subtitle, Tales for an Accelerated Culture, came from. In the last five or six years, we were absorbed by Google, and eBay, and social networking, and BlackBerries, iPods, iPhones, the digitization of the financial world. We’ve absorbed this insane amount of change-inducing technology in our life, so how does that affect people? If you took a group of people to a remote space, and had them talk [as the characters do in Generation A], what sort of different things would come out of them, now that they’ve been through what Marshall McLuhan would call a “retribalization,” a moving away from the printed story? Thematically, that’s what [these books] have in common.

Q: Generation A is set in the near future, when bees have vanished from the planet. Why are bees the insect you chose to eradicate?

A: I think because it’s grounded in reality. I was having a spirited discussion about two hours ago: we were trying to remember when we first heard about colony collapse disorder. I remember I was with my parents, and [news of colony collapse disorder] was on the radio, and I had a spontaneous vomit on the spot thinking, ‘Oh god,’ because at the time, they thought it was cellphones [causing it]. If you ask humanity, ‘Would you be willing to give up cellphones in order to keep the bees?’, there’s a part of me that goes, ‘Uh oh, we’re not very good as a species.’ With the bees gone, it was like an absence of hope; and when they come back, even to a limited level, it’s like hope returns.

Q: How does that relate to reading and storytelling, two major themes in both books?

A: Putting it through the big metaphorical compression machine, I suppose, there is still hope for the books. For book culture. For long form narrative. I was over in Edinburgh, and all anyone’s been talking about in England is, ‘Is the book dead, is the book dead, is the book dead?’ They were asking the same question in the early ’90s too, except back then they were saying it because all the independent bookstores were vanishing, and because the online stores were going to kill books, period. [Now we have the Kindle], and the Sony Reader and everything. If I was in newspapers or magazines, I’d be wondering, ‘Uh oh.’ But with books, I think that for the time being, until the irresistible app comes along, there’s still paper. I tried the Sony Reader, and it was kind of awkward. The Kindle seems to work for people doing office work, like no one has to haul a manuscript home on the subway anymore.

Q: Should we care if the book is dead?

A: Until you had the etched-in-stone story, people didn’t have what you and I have; people didn’t have that sense of interior voice that guided them through the day. They would just be pure experience machines. Occasionally, if voices did come through their heads, they’d think it was the gods; they wouldn’t even think of that as being themselves. So, our notion of the self, and our notion of the story and our relationship to it, is a recent invention. And it may be on the way out, which is a spooky thought. I’m not sure it’s vanishing, but I do think it’s something that merits a really stringent investigation. Generation A was just sort of a poetic way of looking at it obliquely.

There’s an examination of the need that one’s life has to be a story: that it begins with birth, ends with death, but the story part, whatever it is, happens somewhere in the middle. Is there really a reason that we’re here, or are we just insects? Instead of a story, maybe you have your existence on Google or Wikipedia. How do define yourself? [Today, with the digitalization of media], everything is archived. Within that, where do you find the self? I think the characters in Generation A are figuring out which metaphors are important, what themes are important, and they’re that much further down the information road than we are. Does that represent some kind of Lord of the Flies-like retribalization, or the end of the printed word as a civilizing influence?

Q: It’s interesting that you talk about how books and stories help develop our internal voice, because in both books, they also help your characters develop a community. In Generation X, for example, one of the characters says you need to hear about other people’s lives, to make your own life less scary. Are books and stories a way to build society, in your mind?

A: Well, to build further on that, in order to sustain continuity of culture, you have to have intellectual succession. You hand what you have down to new people, and you’ve added what you can to it, and they’re going to add what they have. We have to make sure that what we have is transmittable down the ages. So much information today [lacks] a good way to store it, especially when it’s all digital; sometimes it requires old technology to go back and retrieve it. I’ve got all my old laptops going back to my first, which was so fancy at the time, in ’93 or ’94, but now it’s just like a doorstop. One day I said, ‘I’ll go in and get all my old documents in there.’ The cords and the wires are all gone, the discettes you need are gone. Meanwhile the little electrons are starting to wither away. What you’d archived brilliantly just becomes unreachable in the end.

I was down at Shoppers Drugmart in Vancouver, and I had to buy an alarm clock. I looked over at the photo department. There used to be this big line-up there, people getting their prints back, but now it’s, like, gone. Even as early as September 11, there’s no cellphone imagery of the attacks. There’s very little digital imagery of it, the way people gather it now. It seems like yesterday, but it’s far away from the other standpoint.

Q: Do you personally use a social networking tools?

A: I’ve never gone on Facebook or MySpace.

Q: Do you avoid them?

A: It seems like there’s too much information; there’s a ceratin level of porosity I wasn’t really interested in. However, Twitter’s actually kind of fun. I do think they gave it a really stupid name. If they gave it a cooler name, it would have a cooler image. I don’t like telephones: I don’t like when they ring. Just because it rings, you have to pick it up. I don’t even like opening mail, I’m weird. I really really really really really—have I said really enough?—I really do force myself to not be fully engaged with all the technology at once, just because I have an addictive personality and I get too into it. At the same time, I like the present. I’m always interested in new ideas, and what’s happening now. I’m not that nostalgic. When the world throws you too much information, the only way you can stay sane or survive is to look for pattern recognition. Amidst all the blurs, is there a constellation that emerges, is there a straight line that’s emerging. I think as long as you keep your mind in the palce where you’re actively looking for patterns, you may not be safe, but you’re going to feel safe, I think.

Q: Generation A is set in a dystopian future, yet the title is very hopeful-sounding. Your characters talk about the importance of happy endings. Does this book have a happy ending?

A: I’m sitting here with a little exclamation mark in a balloon above my head going, ‘This is the first person who’s ever called it a happy ending.’ Usually people are like, ‘Oooh, bummer!’ At the ending, whether you see it as a plus or a minus, it should leave a reader meditating on the notion of, how important are books in establishing what you call ‘yourself,’ and are you moving away from that? And if you are, what are you moving towards? In the future, does everyone work at some great cosmic call centre for Abercrombie & Fitch? Why are we even here, what’s our human nature? It’s precipitating a real philosophical crisis that I find quite fascinating.