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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com and then a few weeks later I was doing a reading at the University of Iowa and they were driving through and heckled me from the back and it was great fun. They’d just done this chocolate rating system on Canadian chocolate bars (essentially identical to England’s – Kit Kat, Aero… ) and they gave the bars really low ratings, which sucked because have you ever tried US chocolate? Hork! They had just come back from Devil’s Tower monument (Close Encounters Of The Third Kind) where, after they finished a chocolate bar, they tossed it out to the prairie dogs. If the dogs ate it, the bar got an extra point. If they wouldn’t eat it, the bar lost a point. I decided that I had to defend my nation’s chocolate’s honour, so I bought about 12 US bars at the Circle-K Mart and then we went to my hotel room and had a Tasting Session. I’d take a bite of a bar, make comments, spit it out into a waste paper basket and take a drink of water and move on to the next bar. I described the Three Musketeers bar as having a definite log-in-the-toilet aspect. They printed this in the chart in their magazine and the company that makes Three Musketeers bars went ballistic and pulled their ads and the magazine folded shortly thereafter. Whew! What a long story. So, hi. Americans are obsessed with putting peanut butter in virtually every chocolate bar – why? It smells like dog doo. You have to watch it because Americans go nuts if you slander their chocolate. They really do. I guess it’s because it’s such a gratifying signal that goes in early and deep into the child’s mind. I wasn’t quite sure about this email interview business. I had this vision of you sitting there with stock answers ready to paste in… Not at all. That would be a fax interview (which this is not) or an interview with Duran Duran (or rather, their people). My large problem with interviews (and I do have many problems) is that my brain won’t allow me to do serial interviews. Once a question’s been asked, then my brain rebels against having to answer the same question again. This makes me appear grouchy. I’m hoping the WWW will allay some of this repetition. I’m always amazed at actors and how they can charmingly spew forth studio agendas. But then that’s what they do for a living – they’re actors. Did you travel a lot when younger? Probably too much. I lived in too many places in the 1980s (in no order: Vancouver, Toronto, Sapporo, Tokyo, Milan, Los Angeles, Montreal, Stuttgart).Then in my 30s I visited too many cities with work but was frustrated because I’d ‘be’ in a city just aching to tour around, but instead I was stuck in a hotel room. I don’t know how sports teams don’t go mad travelling around as much as they do. I suppose it’s okay because they’ve plenty of company. BUY Douglas Coupland books online from and 176 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com I’m 24… Oh, then you’re due for your mid-20s crisis any day now. Beware … nobody escapes. Your 20s are muck and shit and pain and loneliness and horror. I think I have a headline for this interview… Indeed! I wish somebody had warned me. I might have changed a few things. (like what, Doug?) I wouldn’t have worried so much. And I would have quit smoking at 20 instead of 26, for starters. Did you admire any writers at 24? I read many writers but I never really admired written craftsmanship until around 28 or 29. I admired visual artists (all of the Pop artists) and the usual assortment of 1980s New Order/OMD performers. And would you have wanted to have communicated with them? Actually, no. I learned rather quickly in art school that someone’s personality is often a million miles away from their work. I’ve been lucky over the past few years and have met many people I’ve wondered about and it’s been good fun. But it’s always been accidental–never seeking out. For what it’s worth, I was driving up the coast yesterday listening to Phillip Glass’ Powaquaatsi, the sequel to Koyanisquaatsi … are you familiar with them? Wonderful movies both. I met the director by chance in New Mexico and I told him how much I liked them and he snarled at me, so now I try and look at the films and not think of him. Thanks to your art college training, you seem to enjoy messing around with the format of your books; the photos in Polaroids, the pages of repeated words in Microserfs, the comic strip panels in Generation X. Do you read any comic books? Not really. Some of the stuff out of Toronto is great: Palookaville and Yummy Fur spring to mind. And Tintin when I was younger. But I think I will be exploring more stuff in this direction. Did you do all of your website’s graphics etc? The horizontal panels, yes. They’re a homage to US Pop artist James Rosenquist. There are so many artists I admire. Warhol, Jenny Holzer (obviously), Damien Hirst (he’s cool), Lichtenstein, Barbara Hepworth, Isamu Noguchi … I could name dozens. It’s my big influence. What do you think of the impact of visual art on culture? Art in the 20th-century Modernist context is consumed by both design and by industry almost as quickly as it is made. There’s no lagtime any longer. Don’t you think the most exciting visual art isn’t found in the gallery any longer anyway? True. Damien Hirst brings organic things into the sterility of the gallery, like the shark and the sheep… Again, true, but I suspect there’s a bit more to it than just that one dimension. BUY Douglas Coupland books online from and 177 More Spike email RSS Facebook Twitter A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z
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