Bit Rot

by Douglas Coupland

  In the summer some guests stayed over at the house, so I tried to be a perfect host and asked if I could get them some cigarettes. I went to a local grocery and, after being shamed over the loudspeaker system, a staffer came to a special zone beside the firewood pile and opened a black door and gave me a box with a photo of a diseased lung on it. “That’ll be fifty dollars” (or some other insane price). At some point you have to see that the writing’s on the wall for smokers.

  I’m not sure if those warning labels make smoking even one tiny notch less desirable. Sex and death are the deepest emotional pairing we have as a species. Maybe those pictures of diseased lungs are, in some filthy, perverse, highly human way…cool. You’re not supposed to say it, but smoking really is cool. It’s a fact, and how you choose to not believe it is possibly the last thing that stands between where you are in life now and becoming a full adult.

  I once worked with a girl named Anne-Marie, who was allergic to any chemical that ended in aine, which meant benzocaine, novocaine and cocaine. That always seemed like the sexiest allergy possible, like being allergic to glitter balls and to orgies where all the women have crimped hair and the guys have zodiac medallions.

  Smoking in France is a real eye-opener. All the decisions seem to get made by smokers during their cigarette breaks. I think that in France, smoking is a social filter, and if you don’t smoke you’ll only ever make it to two rungs from the top, never the top. A very strong memory of France for me is of being in people’s apartments and hearing Carla Bruni’s music, and playing with bowls of Ai Weiwei’s ceramic sunflower seeds stolen from the Tate’s Turbine Hall, within a miasma of indoor smoking. Smoking indoors—it feels like listening to smuggled Beatles records in Kiev in 1965. It feels stolen.

  When did Nespresso conquer the planet—three years ago? I woke up one morning and every hotel I went to on Earth magically had Nespresso machines. The capsules are so seductive and druggie looking—how can you resist? For the same amount of electricity it takes to make the aluminum in one capsule you could probably fuel a suburban household for a week. In a thousand years we’ll look back on right now as the Era of Squandered Metals, but our descendants will never know the joy of a custom single hit of coffee that you also didn’t have to stand in some ridiculous Starbucks lineup to get.

  In China everyone smokes, which is just sad. They should have a motto: “China: the Land Where the Air Does Your Smoking for You.”

  My grade seven gym teacher told us that if you quit smoking, it took your body seven years to fully quit, so in my mind I wasn’t over the hump until Halloween 1995. Since then the only anniversary that really registers in my brain is Halloween every seven years: 2002, 2009, and this year’s a biggie for me. I framed the last cigarette I ever smoked. I knew it was the last as I smoked it. If the house is ever on fire, it’s the first thing I’m saving.

  Public Speaking

  The first time I ever spoke publicly was in March 1991, at a chain bookstore beside Copley Square in Boston. I hadn’t given the event much thought beforehand, and then suddenly I was in the backroom, surrounded by cartons and paperwork and being told, “You’re on in thirty seconds.”

  Oh, I thought. I peeked through the door, saw a healthy-sized crowd and had one of those rare epiphanies: Well, Doug, those people out there just assume you’re going to do a good job, so just do a good job. It was that simple, but it is all I—or anyone else—need to know about public speaking, and it has been saving my bacon for twenty-five years. People generally want everyone to do well on a stage—they really do. And, at the very, very worst, remember what Steven Spielberg once said, which is that people will sit through twenty minutes of anything. Another good piece of advice is that two hundred people sitting in a room together isn’t really two hundred people sitting in a room together—it’s one audience, and it will have its own temperature and texture, and it is also your audience. Being onstage talking is one of the few moments in your life where you control absolutely everything, and it can be its own high. I remember seeing something online about Pete Townshend of The Who yelling at someone from the front row who had climbed on stage: “F*** off! F*** off my f***ing stage.” Words of truth.

  Something will always go wrong during a public speaking event. Mine used to almost exclusively take place in bookstores, where, at any moment, one can encounter cappuccino machines, PA systems, crying babies, outside traffic, dead microphones—the list goes on. It was good training because it made me think on the fly. Speaking of flies, I once did a reading event in Ontario, Canada, in a professional theatre with flawless acoustics, and I thought to myself, “Yessiree, nothing could possibly go wrong in a magical stage environment such as this.” The first minute on stage, a fly landed on my face. And then another. I swatted them away and the audience giggled, not knowing why I was doing this, and basically I had to speak for fifty minutes with flies crawling all over me. It was probably the worst speaking gig ever.

  But wait, there was another one that was worse. It was in Quebec, and I’d done a huge amount of work preparing a properly synchronized presentation on I no longer even remember what. But I remember plugging my laptop into the venue’s AV system shortly before the event began and watching my desktop scramble, randomize and then fry. Vzzzzzzzt! Both the track pad and the mouse stopped working. The venue filled up, and having to speak that day felt like I’d had a stroke in public. It was a terrible, ghastly event, and I’m glad it was about a year before smartphones came out or else video evidence of my shame would live for eternity in the cloud.

  One form of public speaking not usually recognized as such is teaching. I’ve had a few experiences in educational situations and they’ve been worse than flies crawling over my face. I don’t know if it’s me or what, but having to speak to college students is like having to address a crowd of work-shirking entitlement robots whose only passion, aside from making excuses as to why they didn’t do their assignments, is lying in wait, ready to pounce upon the tiniest of PC infractions. You can’t pay teachers enough to do what they do. Having been in their shoes, even briefly, has converted me into an education advocate. Double all teaching salaries now.

  In recent years there’s been TED, which everyone seems to have a theory about. It usually has to do with the way TED creates pressure for speakers to make their message nothing less than transformative, while insisting that the passing forward of this wisdom fits into TED’s twenty-minute meme delivery system. TED speakers are almost always terrific, but one wonders what they might do with more breathing room, more time for reflection, and without a need to include an orgasm at the talk’s end.

  Sometimes, if you’re feeling lazy, instead of a speech or lecture, you can do an on-stage discussion—which is a little bit like getting away with something. But it’s a workaround that also has the potential for disaster. I have learned the hard way that not everybody is comfy with winging it on a stage, and what was supposed to have been a fifty-minute cake walk can sometimes turn into fifty minutes of torture as you try to minimize someone else’s paralyzing unease, for you, them and the audience. The only thing worse than this? Q & A. Why do we still do this? Ugh. I was hoping the Internet would somehow kill Q & A, but apparently not. The first question is a softball, the second question is “the hostage taker,” which holds the audience captive while articulating often irksome points of view, and question three is the “therapy question,” when a needy person forces two hundred people to witness the deficiencies of their id. Basically, talks should be forty-five to fifty minutes with no Q & A, and if too many people start coughing around minutes thirty-five to forty, it’s nature’s signal to you to wrap things up quickly. It’s your audience, but not for much longer.

  Shiny

  A friend of mine sells hotels in California. If he’s having a slow time moving a property, he has a three-point program to speed up a sale. First, he surrounds the property with a planted mixture of annual flowers—petunias work best—in a one-to-one colour proportion of whit
e-to-colour. They make a property look both lived in and loved. Second, he has a tow truck drop off one or two Rolls-Royces. These are dead Rolls-Royces, sold for a few thousand bucks by Los Angeles car-hire companies. Basically, they’re husks, but if you park one out front, they become real estate and the property’s price instantly rises. Third, he invents affairs between movie stars that took place on the property. A room is a room is a room, but not if Grace Kelly and William Holden spent a lost week there in 1955. It’s a strange trait we human beings have, but we seem to love imagining celebrity ghosts having sex.

  I remember being in an airport lounge this past February 21, watching CNN footage of Dubai’s seventy-four-storey Torch skyscraper in flames. Bits of burning debris from the fiftieth floor drifted down and set other floors on fire. Like most fires, the burning Torch made for gripping TV, and I remember the guy at the table behind me saying, “It’s going to take more than just a pressure washer to get that thing looking brand new again.”

  A favourite video of mine from 1983 was for a song called “Shiny Shiny” by the now long-defunct group Haysi Fantayzee. One of its vocalists, Kate Garner, sang and danced in a high-tech Barbarella-style outfit. The video is on YouTube; give it a look. In 1995 I was living in Palo Alto and a photographer showed up to do some shots, and the photographer was Kate Garner (!), which was a fan moment for me but not for her. She’d moved into photography and was now a serious person and really didn’t want to discuss her former life as a new wave pop star. She had glasses on and was dressed down, and I guess I can see her point, but I did keep waiting for that moment when she would take off her glasses, unbundle her hair and shake it loose—at which point everyone would say, “By God, Kate Garner…you’re beautiful!”

  A friend of mine does window displays for Cartier in North America, and he told me this interesting fact: if you place two or more objects in a display case, people will always read the object on the left as being the most valuable, even if it isn’t. I would have thought the centre object would be perceived as the most valuable, but apparently not. If anybody knows the laws and rules of luxury and desire, it’s Cartier.

  What all these snippets have in common is that in some form, they help us decode the notions of value and beauty that seem to be hardwired into our DNA. Shiny is youth. Shiny is fertility. Shiny is uncorrupted. Shiny smells like the interior of a new car. Shiny is sixty-five golf courses in Palm Springs in the middle of the worst drought in a century. I love shiny because the moment you see something shiny, you know there’s going to be something rotten or scary nearby—like the Japanese notion of honne and tatemae: the public face and the private face. I don’t like it when people show me something rotten without first giving me something shiny to compare it to. It’s like people who deconstruct music without learning how to play it in the first place.

  In the mid-1980s I attended a Japanese institute on the Hawaiian island of Oahu, where the temperature was seventy-five degrees and slightly breezy pretty much every day of the year. But I was in my mild goth phase and with a few similarly minded locals, we were the only people in Hawaii wearing black sweaters while we cursed the sun. Evil, evil sun.

  In 2000 I was in a Daiei department store in Tokyo and I had an epiphany in the cleaning-products aisle. Fifty brands of bleach and toilet-bowl cleaners and window sprays were all duking it out for my attention, but of course they all cancelled each other out, creating an optical-field effect. The sensation of standing in the aisle and soaking in these bright Japanese pinks and turquoises and baby blues and reds, with all of their noisy katakana labels, was sort of like an experience you might have in front of an Olafur Eliasson piece. It transcended culture and became a biology project. Similarly, aisle seventeen in my local Michaels craft store is a ribbon aisle, with shelves on both sides filled with shiny, blingy ribbon spools. The floor is white. To stand there in the middle of the aisle is not unlike staring at white and coloured petunias planted together in a one-to-one ratio. It makes me feel like I’m engaged in some sort of universal constant, like pi or Avogadro’s number.

  In any event, I bought around one hundred of the Japanese cleaning-product bottles and took them back to the hotel room and flushed their contents down the toilet, an act that horrifies most people but, if you think about it, it was all going there anyway. And what’s the difference if there’s a bit of hand dirt or spaghetti sauce residue mixed in with it? That gets you off the ecological hook, morally? These emptied bottles all came back home and went into a dedicated shelving unit, and it became an installation I titled Tokyo Harbour. To look at Tokyo Harbour is to be seduced by its candy-coloured cheerfulness, except suddenly you start thinking about what was inside the bottles, and cheerfulness becomes toxicity.

  In 2011 Japan had the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. Millions of tons of debris were swept off the eastern coast of Honshu and into the Pacific, where, years later, the refuse began washing up on a remote beach off northern British Columbia’s coast: the north tip of the northernmost island of the Queen Charlotte Islands, now known in British Columbia by the name Haida Gwaii. This spit of land is the one place on earth I head to every year to recharge and escape from technology and homogenized time, and now it had become (and still remains) a graveyard for plastic Japanese products. For the past two summers, my quiet retreats have turned into debris cleanup missions. On one of my first afternoons there, I found a turquoise and pink bottle of Japanese cleaning product and my mind was blown. I felt like the villain on the receiving end of an ecological folk tale about the dangers of engaging with seductive sheen.

  The art world is largely mistrustful of shiny things and, on some level, even fearful of them. But if sophistication is the ability to put a smile on one’s existential desperation, then the fear of a glossy sheen is actually the fear that the surface is the content. Fear of sheen is the fear that surface equals depth, that banality equals beauty, that shiny objects are merely transient concretizations of the image economy, and proof that Warhol was correct—a fact that still seems to enrage a surprising number of theoreticians.

  Fear of shine explains why so much of today’s art looks so much like art of today. You have art-fair art, which is very shiny; it is diminished with the label “crapstraction,” and it looks like it all could have been made by one person on a really nice drug. And then you have the nearby alternative art fair, where no shininess is found, and where most of the art looks like it was also made by one person, albeit one who changes meds every two weeks. In a sense, the existence of art fairs and their independent parallels, anti-fairs, seems to be a precipitation of the ongoing chilly standoff between artists, dealers and institutions. There’s mistrust on all flanks. Everyone wants to attend the other person’s party—and they often do—but nobody feels comfortable no matter where they go. Everyone gets art’ed out and exhausted and feels like they’ve just walked across ten miles of non-stop casino noise and bling. Everyone just wants to go back to the hotel and sleep and strip their brains of shininess. But instead they freshen up their look and go out for cocktails. And then they do it all over again the next day.

  Do you buy dented cans of food? Do you buy the vegetables and fruits with bird pecks in them? Do you buy misfit produce that doesn’t look like clip art? And what’s your policy on expired dairy products? Would you feel awkward buying art from a dealer whose space didn’t at least aspire to some dimension of New York neutrality? Does it slightly weird you out when you walk from the outside world into a gallery where the inside mood is blank and white to the point of feeling outer-spacey? Have you ever bought a designer garment you thought was real but turned out to be fake? Have you ever tried to fob off a fake as the real thing? Do you collect art? Do you make art? Do you feel like a nimble outsider free to pass judgment on everything? If you do, does it depress you to not actually be in the game itself? Are you a minimalist? Do you take pride in a reductive life? Minimalists are actually extreme hoarders: they hoard space, and they’re just as odd as those people with seven
rooms filled with newspapers, dead cats and margarine tubs. Are you into fashion? Fashion and the art world have always coexisted. Fashion memes are simply faster and you get to do figurative work without having to defend yourself to the 400-level art instructor who lives in your head and judges everything harshly and frequently. Who is this art instructor who lives inside your head? Where did he or she come from? Is their tone invariably mocking and snippy? Do they transmit their biases onto you to the point where you no longer trust your own judgment? Why is this tone always angry? Why does its point of view reflect that of someone a generation older than you, who, to be honest, you really don’t agree with much of the time. Can you kill the internalized art instructor who lives in your head? That would be liberating, but would it destabilize you? Would you still know how to discuss art without sounding small-town? But then, maybe using your own voice instead of the internal professor’s voice would make you sound authentic instead of like just another art-world person with the same internalized 400-level professor clouding and poisoning your experiences in the aesthetic realm. Do you think that being quick to judge, and being quick to pre-emptively please your internal 400-level professor, means you ignore or dismiss things that might actually be interesting? Is it better to be safe than wrong? Do you sometimes see people talking and you can tell it’s not even them doing the talking—they’re merely channelling their internal professor? Does this activate your own internal professor? Do you call them on it? No, you don’t. Nobody ever does. It’s why things largely don’t change. It’s really boring to listen to two people channelling their internal professors. Inside their heads they’re getting an A+ on a nonexistent essay. It’s beyond predictable.