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Spike | 15 YEARS OF BOOKS, MUSIC, ART, IDEAS | www.spikemagazine.com Coast in the 1970s, which is to say that life was steeped in bad pot and magic mushrooms for most of my high school years. I get paranoid on pot, so that was that. Mushrooms – well, they grow on the front lawns here, but I’m not sure. I’m really not. I’m somewhat suspicious of anything mind-altering. I avoid coke and acid and all sorts of stuff just because I don’t think we’d agree (or perhaps we’d agree too much). I know many people who’ve had their lives saved thanks to some of the newer meds like Prozac and Zoloft. I overreact to most pharmaceuticals and can only really tolerate old standbys like erythromycin or ativan when required. Someone wrote once that I don’t drink or anything, and this one article, wherever it appeared, has haunted me ever since. People always make goggle-eyes when I have a scotch. I see their reaction and I think, “Ahh, they’ve read THE ARTICLE.” Do you have any words of advice for young people? Yes. It’s pissing rain out. We’ve just had the rainiest October and November in recorded history. The X-Files studio is ten minutes away from where I live. People sometimes comment on the calculated use of rain on the set to create a supernatural effect. They wish! It’s because it never stops raining here. Now you know. Care to add anything else, you lovable harbinger of doom? I am not a doom harbinger (oh, it’s all in the eye of the beholder) but I’ll greedily accept the lovable bit. Bye, Chris. It’s been much fun. Post me a copy of how it all gels in the end. Yours here in Vancouver, Doug � BUY Douglas Coupland books online from and 180 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 Review [published November 1998] Douglas Coupland: Lara’s Book Chris Mitchell Well, it had to happen. Lara Croft, star of the Tomb Raider videogames, gets the coffee table treatment in her own glossy picture book. In an attempt to give this tome some literary gravitas, Generation X author Douglas Coupland has been drafted in to provides thoughts about the Lara phenomenon and a story too. Lara’s Book feels like a mish-mash of various marketing ploys. There’s lots of new pictures of Lara herself to appeal to fevered adolescents, strategic walkthroughs of the various Tomb Raider games to help those who’ve got stuck somewhere along the line, interviews with the games’ developers about how Tomb Raider came into being, all topped off with Coupland’s prose to maintain Lara’s cool quotient with the lifestyle crowd. It’s easy to see why Coupland agreed to be involved with what is essentially another form of the Tomb Raider franchise. Lara Croft is the perfect representation of his love for pop culture and technology, with her movie-star status as a cultural icon throwing up various questions about the blurring of realities, both virtual and normal. Coupland’s disappointingly brief prose moves in the same territory as his novels, taking something as inconsequential as a videogame and expanding it into nothing less than a metaphor for life. His skill as a writer has always been in making such assertions seem strangely appropriate rather than asinine, but here Coupland’s meditations only serve to make the vacuity at the heart of the Tomb Raider phenomenon even more apparent. There’s a distinct sense that there’s actually precious little to say about Lara. This is indicated by the fact that far more space is given over to the game-solving tips than to Coupland’s writing, despite his name being flagged prominently on the front cover. Once you get past the idea she’s a female character in a video game that’s sold lots of copies, there’s not much left. Even the game developers can offer up little else beyond the observations that they wanted people to identify with Lara and for her to be “almost a fantasy object”, which is hardly the stuff of profundity. Among the book’s hyperactive layout there is a spread of various fan letters that have been sent to Tomb Raider’s creators Eidos. It’s virtually impossible to read what’s written in the letters, which is a pity, be- BUY Douglas Coupland books online from and 181 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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