Bit Rot

by Douglas Coupland

  The collecting of stuff—slightly out of the ordinary stuff—is different now than it was in the twentieth century. Craigslist, eBay and Etsy have gutted thrift and antique stores across North America of all their good stuff, and in Paris, the Marché aux Puces de Saint-Ouen is but a shadow of its former self. Once groaning with low-hanging fruit being sold by the clueless, eBay is now a suburban shopping centre with the occasional semi-okay vintage thingy still floating around. This same sense of sparseness is felt in the museum world, where programming budget slashing remains the norm. As well, too much globalized money and not enough places to stash it has made pretty much anything genuinely good far too pricey for the 99 percent. The good stuff is always gone, and all the stuff that’s left is shit. You don’t stand a chance against moneyed, technologically advanced collectors who have some magic software that allows them to buy that Jean Prouvé stool three-millionths of a second ahead of you. Thank you, Internet.

  Interestingly, on YouTube you’ll find anti-hoarding videos that coach over-collectors seeking to de-hoard their lives to get rid of any object that doesn’t bring them joy, but I don’t know if that’s human nature. In Australia last month I asked if I could visit that secret stone alcove where the last three remaining specimens of the world’s rarest tree are being kept hidden.

  “Why would you want to do that?”

  “I want to get one before someone else gets it.”

  That’s human collecting behaviour.

  I sometimes wonder if there’s a way to collect stuff without tapping into collecting’s dark, hoardy side. I got to thinking that if visual art is largely about space, then writing is largely about time—so then maybe people collect books differently than they do art.

  Do they?

  No, they don’t. Book hoarding tends to be just as intense as art hoarding, if not worse. It’s called bibliomania and, like generic hoarding, is also a recognized psychological issue. Enter Wikipedia once again (and thank you, Jimmy Wales [1966–]): “Bibliomania is a disorder involving the collecting or hoarding of books to the point where social relations or health are damaged. It is one of several psychological disorders associated with books, such as bibliophagy (book eating) or bibliokleptomania (book thievery).”

  Bibliomania, though, is almost universally viewed as quirky and cute, the way kunstmania (my coinage) is seen as glamorous and cool in a Bond villain kind of way. Oh those booksellers sure are nutty! And they are nutty—pretty much all bookstore owners recognize that the profession brings with it a unique form of squirrelliness. The best booksellers, the antiquarian sellers especially, are those sellers who genuinely don’t actually want to sell you the book. You have to audition for its ownership, and should they sell you the book, you can see the pain on their face as the cash machine bleeps.

  I once worked weekends in a bookstore. There was this guy who’d been coming in for years, and all the other sellers made cooing noises whenever he showed up for three hours every Sunday for some passionate browsing. “Now there’s someone who really loves books—a real book lover.” And then one Sunday afternoon, a New York Times Atlas fell out of his raincoat as he was exiting the store. Police later found thousands of stolen books in the bibliokleptomaniac’s apartment.

  As for bibliophagy, I chuckled when I learned of the term while writing this and then was chilled when I realized I’m a bibliophagist myself.

  Coupland’s 1991 novel, Generation X, chewed up by Coupland and spun into a hornet’s nest form.

  Back in the early 2000s, my then agent, Eric, in New York, was one of the first people I knew to harvest music into an iTunes playlist. In 2002 it seemed amazing that a person could have 1.92 days (!) of music on their playlist. These days it’s not uncommon to find people with almost a solid year’s worth of playlisted music, if not far more.

  In high school everybody used plastic Dairyland milk crates to store their records. They were just the right size for 33 ⅓ LPs, and Dairyland was able to have their logo inside everyone’s house in the most wonderful way—attached to music loved by the owner. And then Dairyland changed the dimensions of the crates so that they’d no longer hold vinyl. I’m still mad at them, not because I wanted crates myself (I’ve never been a big vinyl aficionado) but rather because they took such a major plus and turned it into a big minus. Idiots. Vinyl collectors are among the most reverent of all collecting communities. Those milk crates would have lasted peoples’ entire lives.

  Music is weird because it’s not really space, but it’s not quite time either. But what about film, which is a space-time hybrid? So then, do people hoard film? Actually, they do. My sister-in-law’s cousin is a movie hoarder who has possibly millions of hours of torrented movies snoozing on his hard drives, movies he could never watch in ten lifetimes. “Don, let me get this straight: You speak no German and yet you have five German-language screening versions of Sister Act 2, starring Whoopi Goldberg (1955–)?”

  “Yes. Yes, I do.”

  I think the human relationship with time has altered quite a bit since 2000, and film seems to be one venue where this is fully evidenced. The Internet has a tendency to shred attention spans while it firehoses insane amounts of film at humanity, making film hoarding as easy as newspaper hoarding was back in the 1950s. Even easier.

  In the art world our collectively morphing sense of time became truly noticeable back in 2010 with The Clock by Christian Marclay (1955–), which in many peoples’ minds should have won the best picture Oscar for that year. At the 2015 Oscars, the only two real contenders for best picture were Boyhood by Richard Linklater (1960–) and Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) by Alejandro González Iñárritu (1963–). In both films the star was, as Linklater put it, time. In Boyhood we saw the magic of a dozen years of continuous time. In Birdman we saw the magic of one continuous take. As a species we seem to have now fetishized continuity. We’re nostalgic for real time’s flow, and we’re hoarding movies and videos and GIFs and clips and anything else that moves and has sound, knowing they’re never ever going to be touched. In a weird way it’s like the minimalist apartment of, say, curator Klaus Biesenbach (1967–), where no objects are visible, and what is present is virtual—in the case of Biesenbach, ideas. In the case of my sister-in-law’s cousin Don, twenty-nine million hours of crap film.

  In Men in Black Tommy Lee Jones (1946–) learns of an alien technology and says, “Great. Now I’m going to have to buy the White Album again.” In my case, it’s The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, which I’ve now bought twice on vinyl, once on cassette, once on CD and twice on iTunes. It’s guaranteed there’s some geek in California dreaming up some new way of making me buy it all over again. By now don’t I get some kind of metadata tag attached to me saying, “This guy’s already paid his dues on this one”?

  There is one genuine way of stopping hoarding other than death, which is the actual approach of one’s own death and the thanatophobia that often accompanies it. One is forced to contemplate what’s written on one’s gravestone.

  BORN

  ACCUMULATED A BUNCH OF COOL STUFF

  DIED

  The above epitaph isn’t creepy—it’s just boring. So how, then, do you manipulate your loot meaningfully while the clock ticks and ticks and ticks? For artists, dealing with stuff at the end of life becomes complicated. I find it interesting that, say, Constantin Brancusi (1876–1957) didn’t want to sell his work in his final years. He could afford not to, and he wanted to be surrounded by his own stuff. He wanted to live inside it. It’s no coincidence that when he died, he wanted his studio to be frozen in time at that moment. Reece Mews, the studio of Francis Bacon (1909–1992), with its tens of thousands of paint tubes was one of the world’s most glamorous toxic heavy metals waste dumps. And one can’t help but always wonder about Andy Warhol with his townhouse stuffed with unopened bags of candy, cookie jars, jewels and Duane Reade concealer. Did he ever open the doors of his townhouse’s rooms once they were full? Did he st
op and stare at the doors, shiver and then walk away?

  In December of 2013 I saw a magnificent show at Stockholm’s Moderna Museet, Turner Monet Twombly: Later Paintings. It featured works done in the final decade of the lives of John Turner (1873–1938), Claude Monet (1840–1926) and Cy Twombly (1928–2011.) The show focused on these artists’ (this is from the museum’s website) “later work, examining not only the art historical links and affinities between them, but also the common characteristics of and motivations underlying their late style.”

  The paintings in the show were remarkable in and of themselves, yet what they collectively foregrounded was a sense of whiteness, a sense of glowing—an undeniable sense of the light that comes at the end of the tunnel. Overt content became less important, and the act of cognitive disassociation from the everyday world was palpable. As the museum catalogue further states, “Their late work has a looseness and an intensity that comes from the confidence of age, when notions of finish and completion are modified.” A delicate way of phrasing things.

  The Museet show’s works depicted, in their way, anti-hoarding–a surrendering of life’s material trappings. It was a liberating show that gave viewers peace. It let you know that maybe you should let go of many things in your life before your life is nearly over, when suddenly your stuff isn’t as all important as it was cracked up to be. (Guaranteed, if you ask anyone over fifty which would they rather have, more time or more money, they’ll almost always say more time.)

  An obvious question here at the end is: Wait—have art super-collectors, as well as bibliomaniacs, also experienced losses of a scope so great that they defy processing? Are these collectors merely sublimating grief via over-collecting? Reasonable enough, but why just limit it to collecting art or books? People collect anything and everything.

  Back in the days of caves, if someone close to you died or got killed, chances are your life was going to be much more difficult for the foreseeable future, so you’d better start gathering as many roots and berries as you could. Collecting as a response to sudden loss makes total sense. But also back then, if you lived to thirty-five, you were the grand old man or dame of the cave, with very little time left on the clock. Divvying up your arrowheads and pelts made a lot of sense—best do it before your cave-mate descendants abandoned you on an ice floe.

  Collecting and hoarding seem to be about the loss of others, while philanthropy and de-accessioning are more about the impending loss of self. (Whoever dies with the most toys actually loses.)

  Maybe collecting isn’t a sickness, and maybe hoarding is actually a valid impulse that, when viewed differently, might be fixable through redirection tactics. Humanity must be doing something right, because we’re still here—which means there’s obviously a sensible way to collect berries and roots. There’s probably also a sensible way to collect art and books (and owl figurines and unicycles and dildos and Beanie Babies and…). The people who freak me out the most are the people who don’t collect anything at all. Huh? I don’t mean minimalists. I mean people who simply don’t collect anything. You go to their houses or apartments, and they have furniture and so forth, but there’s nothing visible in aggregate: no bookshelves, no wall of framed family photos—there’s just one of everything. It’s shocking.

  “You mean you don’t collect anything?”

  “No.”

  “There must be something. Sugar packets? Hotel soaps? Fridge magnets? Pipe cleaners?”

  “No.”

  “Internet porn? Kitten videos?”

  “No.”

  “What the hell is wrong with you!”

  “What do you mean?”

  “If this was ten thousand years ago and we all lived in a cave, you’d be an absolutely terrible cave mate. You’d be useless at foraging for roots and berries, and if you went hunting you’d only have one arrowhead, so if you lost it, you’d starve.”

  “Where is this coming from, Doug?”

  “Forget it. Let’s go gallery hopping right now.”

  Superman and the Kryptonite Martinis

  One sunny afternoon in the near future, Superman was at the beach and got tar all over the soles of his feet. He went to his car and removed a Clark Kent shirt from the back seat, and then he popped the gas cap and dipped his shirt in just far enough to soak the tail. He pulled it out and began to wipe the tar from his feet and was promptly nailed by the Carbon Squad patrolling the lot. They gave him a $200 ticket for using gasoline frivolously and a $150 ticket for destroying a shirt that had 30 percent synthetic fibre content.

  Meanwhile, a group of fellow beachgoers surrounded the car and began heckling him. “Ooh, look at me, I’m Superman. I can leap tall buildings and make time go backwards, but nooooo, instead I waste gasoline and destroy permanent press clothing.”

  “Gee,” said another, “I think I’ll go fight crime—whoops, my footsies are dirty! Looks like I’ll just have to eat shit like everyone else in this world.”

  Superman asked, “What is wrong with you people?” He threw his shirt into the back seat and got in his car and put it in reverse, narrowly missing a quintet of snarling beach bunnies. As he drove away he rolled down the window to shout, “You make me really happy I left my home planet to come and fight crime for you ungrateful fucks!”

  Someone threw a Frisbee at the car, and it bounced off the roof and landed in a ditch.

  Superman turned on the radio and was tuned to easy-listening music when he passed a bar whose sign read “Tasty Cocktails for Those Bearing a Heavy Load.”

  “Man, I could use a drink right now,” he said. Right there in traffic he did a U-ie and pulled up in front of the bar.

  The bartender, who happened to look and sound a lot like Yoda, said, “Ah, Superman. I think I for you have a terrific drink.”

  Superman said, “Bring it on.” The air inside the bar was cool, and he readjusted his cape and looked around. There were a few barflies in the back, but otherwise the place was dead. The jukebox was playing “The Logical Song” by Supertramp; it brought the superhero a flood of memories. As Yoda arrived with his drink, Superman said, “This song was in my first colour movie ever.”

  “That be the one with Christopher Reeve?”

  “That’s the one.”

  “Ever meet him did you?”

  “Once, at a Golden Globes after-party. We were both kind of wasted. I don’t remember much of it.”

  “On me is your drink, Mr. Caped Crusader.”

  “I don’t know about that caped crusader stuff anymore. Today it’s all I can do not to blast this planet to smithereens. But thanks.”

  Superman looked at his frosty martini, dew dripping down the sides. He took a sip…Ahhh…and then his mouth turned to fire. “You dirty little shit, what the hell is in this thing?”

  Yoda, wiser than Superman, said, “The first time you tried wasabi you remember?”

  “Yeah. In Osaka, when I was helping Sailor Moon during her Asian fragrance launch.”

  “But at first did it not? Aflame did your nostrils not feel?”

  “Why…yes, it did.”

  “So finish your drink you will. And enjoy it you will.”

  Yoda went to the other side of the bar, and Superman sipped a little more of his martini. He yelled to Yoda, “This thing kicks like a bound and gagged hitchhiker! Very tasty—mmmm.” The burn was like a new spice, and Superman became an instant addict. “Yoda, hustle with the next one.”

  “Yes, Mr. Caped Crusader.”

  As Superman awaited his next martini, he wondered why he bothered fighting crime anymore. He still had all his superpowers, but people just didn’t seem to want him to use them. He’d recently received a condescending letter from the United Nations:

  Dear Mr. Superman,

  We appreciate your willingness to fight crime, but at the moment what we really need is a superhero who can separate out transuranium isotopes in the soil of northern Germany—or perhaps a superhero who can distill Pacific waters to render them free of plasti
c particles larger than two hundred microns. We at the UN acknowledge that everyday crime and everyday criminals are on the rise, but please also remember, Mr. Superman, that evil super-villains have all been eradicated, with your help. (Note: you left your thank-you plaque and goodie bag at the dinner table after the presentation ceremony. I can ask my assistant, Tara, to forward it to you if you pass along your home address.)

  In any event, we want you to know that we appreciate and support your drive to be as super as you can possibly be, and we look forward to convening in the near future!

  Yours,

  Mbutu Ntonga, Secretary General

  United Nations Temporary Headquarters, St. Louis, Missouri

  Prick.

  Superman downed his third martini in one gulp. A barfly near a keno machine clapped at this, and Superman roared, “I am a fucking superhero, you know!” He turned to Yoda. “What’s in these things, anyway?”