♪ >> Valerie: Welcome to Canada Files.

I'm Valerie Pringle.

My guest today is Douglas Coupland.

Writer, designer and visual artist.

His first novel was Generation X .

He has since written 21 more works of fiction & non-fiction.

He has created innumerable works of art exhibited around the world.

He has invented slogans and words.

Coupland is incredibly prolific.

And has been called a cultural guru .

The heir apparent to Marshall McLuhan.

Oh, and he's written a book about him too.

>> Valerie: Hello Douglas.

>> Douglas: Hello Valerie.

>> How is it possible, as your friend wrote about you, that you actually think that you are under-productive?

>> Oh boy.

My father-- he was an action hero.

He put his way through medical school testing fighter jets for the air force.

When he went civilian, he'd go up the coast in a Beaver.

In a float plane.

And he did all these things.

Because he did so many things, I have no excuse to not do things too.

And I mean, life on earth is so transient and so fast.

I mean, why not do what you can while you can still do it?

People talk about retiring.

Why would you?

What, you're gonna go out and live on a boat or something?

I mean, you wake up and your brain is still active.

You can have ideas still.

And not every idea you do is going to work.

Like 1 out of 10 is like fantastic.

2 are going to be really great.

Sometimes you get the flaming mess first.

So you're psyched out, you don't do things.

But you just have to make the flaming mess first.

Do another thing and you might get the 10 out of 10 so... >> How do you spend your time?

Do you have a sense of time running out?

>> Uh, great question.

Three years ago, for various reasons, I realized there's no actual evidence of my brain via muscles, bones, brush, tip, paint on a surface.

There's no real record of that.

So I decided that I was going to paint.

I was going to become a painter.

I was doing this at 59 or 60.

So I had to invent a style and figure out what I am, gesturely .

>> Valerie: What prompted this?

>> Douglas: What happens when you lose someone very important in your life very quickly is that you wait 12-14 months, and you are going to change.

You don't know how you're going to change but you will change .

And there's nothing you can do about it.

...watch what happens around the one-year mark.

And that's what caused me to become a painter.

And I don't want to travel.

>> Who did you lose?

>> It was my mother.

We were very close.

But my days are now-- I don't want to jinx them but they're wonderful.

I wake up.

I stopped travelling.

I have someone who does all the boring stuff in life.

And I live in the studio.

é It's a wonderful existence.

Which I started doing 20 years before.

But every painting is an experiment.

If you know what it's going to look like when you start it, then you shouldn't be doing it.

Then you learn from the mistakes.

And you create something that I would hope is beautiful.

>> So in your 60s now, this is something new.

You've been an artist your whole life.

>> Okay, the other thing and it may just be a cool incidence, but I'm not in any way political about this.

But after my first COVID shot, I've never been able to write a word-- I can't write anymore.

I've tried and I can barely write an email.

I don't know if it's cause-and-effect.

But I cannot write any more.

>> Valerie: So now you have to paint.

>> Douglas: Oh, I'm glad that didn't get wrecked.

>> You were born in West Germany.

Your dad was on the base there.

Grew up in Vancouver.

A pretty conventional 60s' childhood that you had.

>> Well, if you were growing up in Canada in the latter half of the 20th century, you won the geographical, medical, cultural lottery prize of all time.

I cannot think of a better place to have lived and grown up in what period of history as 1961 up to 2000.

>> You went to art school.

You said those were the best years of your life.

So what spoke to you?

What did you think you were going to do?

Who did you think you were going to become?

>> Well, I think it was F.Scott Fitzgerald who said, "You don't go to school to learn information.

You go there to learn your style."

This was 1980, 1984-- a million years ago.

Okay, everyone slept with everyone.

You could say anything and there was like yawn.

There was punk, post-punk blitz and new wave.

Everyone was like, who are you and this is who I am.

And it was this incredible freedom.

And in 3rd year art school, which I now model my life after, had the woodworking studio.

I did the school paper, was on the school student society.

And it worked.

And it still works, I think.

>> You wrote Generation X, Gen X when you were 30!

You know.

And it was partly you said, "I'm not a baby boomer."

You didn't want to be identified as a baby boomer.

>> I tried.

>> Tell me that story.

>> Growing up, I was always taught you must have been really sad about the JFK assassination.

>And like, "No, I have no memory of it whatsoever.

How could I?"

>> You were two!

>> Everyone was telling me I had these memories, I simply didn't have.

There's that expression, like the kids now use, Hey Boomer .

Like I was the first one to say, "Hey Boomer".

And I do invent my way out of it.

Because I just didn't like being told something I wasn't.

Hence Gen X .

When I wrote it, I honestly didn't think-- there'd be 11 different people I went to high school with who would get it , and it worked out.

>> What nerve did it hit, do you think?

>> Marshall McLuhan, who I've thought about a lot.

And I've written about him-- he had this expression.

That the over-simplification of anything is always exciting.

And I think created this really amazing over-simplification .

Of hundreds of millions and billions of people, but there you go.

I'm still amazed that it worked, so to speak.

>> Well, then it spawned.

There was Gen X, Gen Y and Gen Z.

You did a book, Gen A .

But it really sort of captures people's idea of how we delineate young people.

>> Yeah.

>> Which you say is often very negative.

Oh, they're lazy.

They don't want to work.

>> With Generation X, there's really not your slackers .

They don't want to work-- they don't want to do anything.

And of course, now we're running the planet.

Yay...but then-- well in China, they went from an agrarian-ruled society to high-tech, like overnight.

You had, instead of having generations there, they say born in the 80s, 90s, 2000s.

And their brains are so different because of the technologies they used to mold them.

That they literally cannot communicate with each other.

I think a version of that is what's happening right now in North American culture, for sure.

People barely read books anymore.

People--they want it fast, want it now, any down moment.

I love it, Instagram .

Like oh, it's a dog rescue.

I feel good.

>> You lived for awhile in Palo Alto.

You were writing for Wired .

You were there for the birth of the Internet .

>> Tell me about those days.

What... >> It was so much fun!

(laughter) Oh my god, it was fun.

>> What did you think was going to happen with this?

It was all going to be great?

>> I was lucky to work with some really great minds at Wired .

The Internet hadn't turned evil yet.

I'm surprised it took so long to do so.

Information wants to be free.

No, no.

It wants to be archived and strip-mined for data.

But we knew that it was a really great historical moment.

That doesn't come along that often.

And then you also had the music scene which is exploding then with the grunge.

With the grunge -- sounds like your grandparents.

It was a wonderful time.

Again, to be alive in N.America in the latter half of the 20th century, bonanza !

>> When you did a book about Marshall McLuhan, but it was so interesting that he foresaw the Internet.

>> Douglas: Oh.

>> That he foresaw the bad stuff.

>> I know the McLuhan family gets really angry if you say that he predicted something.

Or that he was a seer .

I don't know quite why, because he was.

He saw everything!

He got shopping and commerce right.

The interface was a bit clunky.

The fact that he was able to have these ideas and perceptions not based in futurology .

But instead looking back to like, Norse sagas and early 20th-century poets, and it worked.

Probably one of the most interesting mysteries of all time.

>> Is how McLuhan's brain figured this stuff out.

And saw it.

>> Yeah.

I wish I could go back and re-do that book.

But I can't write anymore so... instead, zeroing in on the things he got right.

And that would... it wouldn't make a good book-- it would be a good website because...who wants a book?

>> But...then what would you focus on?

>> Oh, the way the Internet erodes democracy and the political process.

The way that it facilitates lies of any kind, really.

The way that it makes people unipolar.

That there's no longer--say swing votes no longer exist.

To put it mildly.

He was a highly-religious man.

He believed in heaven and hell.

And everyone thought like, oh he loves modern culture.

He did not at all.

He just like, get me to heaven.

I'll be happy.

>> Well, you seem to be extremely observant.

You say you take a lot of notes, when you're out in the world.

>> It all goes up here now.

>> It does?

I thought you put them in a jar.

>> I did.

I saved them all.

Thank God.

I look back at them-- the seeds of so many things, I now do everyday of my life.

They're always present there.

Here's the thing about ideas.

If you stop looking for them or stop being aware that they exist and can be found, the universe stops sending them to you.

And so you always-- I always have to be looking for some kind of newness, new way of thinking, being or creating.

>> But you're also looking at what do people say What are they eating and doing?

I mean, your descriptions were always dead funny.

>> Well, I'm terrible at being funny on command.

Uumm.

(laughing) >> Most people are.

>> I have spent the last 35 years living in hotels.

And after awhile, hotels stopped doing room service.

Because it was just not economically viable.

Now you have Uber Eats .

Last night at one in the morning, had these dumplings that came within 10 minutes of me pushing a button.

And that's everything.

I can't believe how much cardboard I go through in a week from Amazon.

I remember, like every year the phonebooks came out.

Anthropologists and garbologists-- they can always tell what date landfill was by this one layer of telephone books.

Now I feel like an eco-criminal .

Yet there are these Amazon vans everywhere.

Cardboard, cardboard -- the age of cardboard.

>> It is the age of cardboard.

Now you gave up your visual art when you started writing.

It was almost as if you felt you couldn't do both.

Then you started making art again awhile ago.

Doing a lot of pop art, using barcodes, Lego and trash.

>> Douglas: Yeah.

>> Valerie: Using the world.

>> Douglas: I remember around 1999, that it felt like I was completely ignoring a whole lobe of my brain.

So the visual cortex, colour, plein air , volume, that trick, thinking.

The only way to really get back to that was through making things.

At the time, there were a lot of really exciting technologies.

Which we now take for granted.

But you know--scanning, memes .

Taking these things that are new in the world and what can be done with them.

>> So it's like pop art in that way.

>> Oh yeah.

>> See them differently.

>> Andy Warhol and Marshall McLuhan are probably the two biggest influences in my life.

I'll be very open about that.

And also in the 1990s, the world had not turned dark yet.

It was possibly, if we call it the last good decade .

Where communism was more or less over.

There's no 911 .

Things were abundant.

There were very few bogeymen in the closet.

Now it's so radically different.

So it's nice to have had a decade of creativity where it was more meditative than political and necessary.

>> One of the major things you've worked on are public installations.

Obviously you get pleasure from that.

Are there any that stand out to you?

>> Public art is to studio art what non-fiction is to fiction.

It's art that's somehow grounded in an external reality.

The pieces that seem that people love-- there's one in Vancouver, the Digital Orca .

Which, I don't know-- you do things, some things are a hit, some aren't.

There's a Terry Fox monument also in Vancouver.

There's the Golden Tree in Vancouver.

Here in Toronto, at Fleet and Bathurst, there's the monument to the War of 1812.

>> People love that.

>> The two soldiers.

>> Yeah.

>> Toy soldiers.

>> The English one's standing up and the American one's toppled over.

To my credit, I had to work with military fascia.

To get all the buttons and everything just period-specific and accurate.

>> And lights on a Gordie Howe bridge.

>> Okay, uhm...

There's a Danish architect named Bjarke Ingels.

He did a building in Calgary called Telus Sky .

He asked if I would do the lighting for it.

Because he's a fan, I guess?

That was nine years ago.

It's finally in and looks great.

So the Gordie Howe bridge which is linking Detroit to Windsor.

It's a beautiful bridge.

I mean it really is.

It's got 5,000 really powerful LED lights.

They can be dimmable, warm or cold.

You can get them motionned .

So I wanted to have, if you are two miles away looking at it, it looks like the bridge is like a living entity.

And it's going to take a lot of nerds at the programming desk to do it.

But I think it's going to be terrific.

>> Yeah, a wonderful link too, between Canada and the US.

How did COVID affect you?

>> COVID made me quite happy to stay at home and work.

That's a very wonderful thing that came out of it.

But what did happen, did put a lot of, especially younger people, into a permanent state of anxiety.

When I try to explain the anxiety, because I talked to my friends with kids.

It's--go back in your own life, my life.

Well, what was that movie that you shouldn't have seen?

That you saw anyway, that really made you not sleep for like two weeks or so.

Mine was Lord of the Flies and a few others.

So to be a young person nowadays--50 and under, it's not just that two-week window.

Your entire life is spent in that anxiety that can't be quelled or turned off.

So I tried two nights ago, friends have a 13-year-old daughter.

You know, okay what is it freaking you out?

It was something she'd seen.

Someone showed her on a website, a picture.

I won't go into it.

That's all it took.

And back to full-on anxiety.

I can't find any historical incident of permanent anxiety.

That happens in a time of abundance.

I mean, if you're in a concentration camp, you have every right to be anxious 24 hours a day.

But if you're middle-class, living in North America, you don't have to be that anxious.

But it's out there.

And it's making them very different than you or I were at the same age.

>> Well, the world feels different.

Obviously does.

Even if you're older.

And I'm thinking of your works now, the paintings.

The New Ice Age.

You say, it's almost like there's a hex on things.

Even these beautiful icebergs that you're painting.

They're beautiful but they're melting.

>> Douglas: It's true.

My father who, when he went civilian, he also leased air floatplanes up and down the west coast.

My younger brother and I-- we'd always go up in these flights to Alaska and the Yukon.

A wonderful thing.

So I got to see icebergs before they became-- before a hex was put on them.

Then I went to Munich and back during COVID, and was flying over Greenland for, I don't know, the 50th or 60th time.

I looked at the icebergs and oh, oh... they weren't classic icebergs anymore.

They had the spell, a hex put on them.

And so I tried to capture that sense of haunted , or without being over...they're not melting or what have you.

But something's going on.

It's not right.

>> Yet you call yourself an optimist.

You still feel that way?

>> I am.

Okay, here's something.

I was at this dinner in New York-- December before COVID.

It's about 16 art world people.

So these are well-educated probably all liberal.

Starting at about 15, right up to 85.

We're talking about the environment.

I said, "When I grew up, there was this thing called acid rain .

And that kept me awake for quite a few weeks.

Then you don't hear about it anymore because it was fixed!

Then the ozone hole , that was the next thing that was going to make us all die.

And I didn't sleep for weeks and you don't hear about it anymore because it was fixed.

And so this leads me to think that in my lifetime, having seen two things be fixed-- that we can actually fix this.

Oh my God, Valerie, the table just turned on me.

How dare you think it's fixable!

What's going on here?

>> To remove the carbon.

>> Well, uh, it's almost like hope is a thought crime at the moment.

That if you think that there's hope, then you won't be fierce enough in your fight against the enemy, whatever it is.

You know, that was a shocker.

But I do find a variation of that for young kids who are anxious.

You can say that it does kind of bring them off the ledge a bit.

>> Since 2010, the University of British Columbia has been collecting your archives.

(laughing) You would call yourself what?

A collector, hoarder, a dumpster-diver.

What would someone make of Douglas Coupland when they finally start sorting through this?

>> I remember from art school.

This is, if you don't want to go out dumpster-diving, then I'm probably not going to be able to be your friend much longer.

...That ideas are everywhere.

They really are!

There are all kinds of hierarchies.

Some information is more important.

Some, maybe academic, what have you.

But it is filter-able .

And here's something I really shouldn't say.

Sometimes you just have to go for a month without looking at news.

Then you go back to it and your brain feels a bit Swift-ered.

You feel better.

Yah.

>> I think probably a very good idea.

But your archives will be something deep and dense.

>> They're really good archives.

>> Are they?

>> I put everything in them and... >> What do you think is your greatest talent?

>> Um, I think I'm really good at finding things that are so large as to be invisible.

>> Patterns?

>> Patterns, I think.

Gen X is a good example.

Something again that is so in-your-face and so there that people don't even think to notice it.

In a theoretical world, it's called a hyper-object .

That's a word for everyone to look up on Wikipaedia .

It's hyper-object.

Also the world really is a beautiful place at the end of the day.

It is beautiful.

And things that seem irksome now, you know, will become graceful.

Just never lose that sense of finding beauty anywhere.

Yeah.

>> What does being Canadian mean to you?

>> Earlier, I was talking about this dinner party in Manhattan, December before COVID.

At that same dinner party, this one artist, Nick-- he was long-boarding down Madison Avenue.

Which is not something I recommend doing.

He got hit by a taxi.

He got an ambulance to some hospital.

It's like 2.5 blocks away.

The ambulance was $1,200 and I'm like, "What?"

Then the woman across the table says, "Oh my God, my ambulance cost $1,400!"

I went wait, wait... to make sure.

Your taxi...ambulance cost $1,200?

Yeah.

They go, "Well, what was your cost in Canada?"

I'm like, "$25.

Free?"

They're like, "Well, you're socialist!"

I think we have this parallel universe up here.

Which in many ways, I think most ways, ...has a wonderful quality of life that is not so combative.

That is more reflective.

There was a period, in the late 80s, early 90s when it felt like we were this close to being absorbed by the United States.

It was pretty scary.

Now we've individuated so far apart now, that obviously we're a different culture.

And I like that.

>> You feel we're very different from the Americans.

>> Yeah, and it didn't used to be like that.

>> In ways that you can describe?

>> I think to a much larger extent, we're a nation of swing voters.

We don't self-polarize.

That if we're going to vote, show me what you've got.

Show me what you've got.

Okay, I'll make up my mind.

It's not my mind's made up already.

Our minds haven't already been made up.

I think that's a really important thing in a democracy.

Was that like too cheer-leader ?

>> No,no.

That's really interesting--very interesting!

Well, like everything coming out of your brain.

Not necessarily what you'd expect but super-interesting anyways.

Thank you Douglas.

>> Thank you Valerie.

Pleasure to be here.

> Pleasure to talk with you.

We'll be back again next week with Canada Files .

♪