douglas coupland - september 10
Posted by Brian Draper Fri, 15/10/2004 - 9:09am
Last night I had the pleasure of seeing Douglas Coupland's one-man 'play', September 10, which is running for three nights only in Stratford-upon-Avon.
It was held in the tiny, 170-seater Other Place theatre, so provided an intimate atmosphere in which the best-selling author could perform. While there were a few stage props (such as an oversize coffin for him to sit on, and a few bottles of mineral water which stood, like miniature high-rise towers, in blocks of four around the stage), this evening was a combination of things - part story, part performance, part lecture on culture, part reflection on his landmark books.
Coupland (or "Doug", as he referred to himself throughout) is not really an actor. His dialogue, packed with beautiful, characteristic word plays and observations, was delivered fast and quietly. But it didn't matter; it was amazing how, for 85 minutes, he maintained the flow ceaselessly and without prompts. His humour and references occasionally seemed too North American for Stratford ("Oops, that one tanked, Doug" he'd say if we didn't get the joke), but again, it didn't hurt. It was him.
The play was divided into three, essentially. He was thinking about time, and decades - and in particular, the Nineties - his decade. The decade before the millennium, which somehow got lost in all the hype and was never seen again.
The Nineties, he said, were split into "two and a bit halves". The first 'half' was characterised by grunge music - by the bands such as Mudhoney, Dinasaur Jnr, Pearl Jam and Nirvana, who wore lumber-jack plaid shirts and changed music for good.
The real icon of the first part of the decade was Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana. Coupland was lucky enough to get a ticket for the possibly epoch-defining MTV show 'Nirvana Unplugged'. "You could tell it was the end of something, but you didn't know quite what..." he said. Within months, Cobain was dead, and the author found himself shocked by the power of emotion that he, and so many others, felt at the loss of this singer.
That first stage of the Nineties was also defined by Coupland himself, whose debut novel Generation X captured the spirit of the age. He spoke of his excitement at gaining his first press review; and of how, ever since, people have expected him to face the world with some kind of "cultural geiger counter". In a moment of candour, he dismissed the idea that Gen X was ever meant to be some definitive take on a culture or a generation - the implication being that perhaps we have all read far too much into one story ever since. After all, you can't bottle the spirit, or capture the wind.
The second phase of the Nineties saw another icon appear on the desktop of our consciousness. Coupland used to pop into the Microsoft offices when you could get right through to Bill Gates' glass-fronted office. Back then, IBM were the powerhouse. Coupland wrote Microserfs at this time - about geeky programmers who were set to change the world from their unassuming offices in Silicon Valley. The traditional borders of time and space were about to be redrawn for ever, with the Internet ("hands up who's Googled more than five times today?"), mobile phones ("who doesn't own one?" - his own hand raised) and the Gap (Coupland awarded a prize to the audience member wearing the most Gap items). In our quest for individual identity, we all rushed out and bought Gap. And now we all look like we're in the commercial.
He remembers the tech-bubble bursting through a phone call. Microserfs was being made into a film. But the film company rang to say no one was interested in a tech-company which was making money any more.
Around the time, he became depressed. "There are better anti-depressants on the market now, Doug", his doctor told him, but when he tried one, it made him suicidal. Pills were a recurring theme of the night - from his father's pill box when he was young, to the idea that we might need to take pills to simulate shopping (because we're all addicted, but we'll run out of resources soon to make new goods) or prison (because we'll run out of space, so we'll have to put people in prison, but then we'll run out of prisons, so we'll have to simulate them in our minds...). Or pills for deja vu: "Haven't I taken this one before?"
The third "bit" of the decade led, of course, to the crisp autumnal September day in New York, 2001. And this, for Coupland, was a much bigger end than we might ever realise. It was the end, somehow, of modernity (of which he declared himself a fan - debunking another assumption that the man is postmodernism personified).
Modernity had been so beautifully enshrined in the Word Trade Centre, built by Minoru Yamasaki as a monument to commerce (and cloaked with Islamic architerctural references, according to Coupland). Coupland had a conspiracy theory to consider - that Yamasaki almost certainly dined with the bin Laden family while working as an architect in Saudi Arabia from 1973 to 1982. The young Osama will have heard him talk of his next great project - the World Trade Centre - and all that it represented. And he will have been incensed when the architect borrowed from Islamic art and architecture to help shape the rising towers.
But the conspiracy wasn't the point. The point is that the great western project is over, and we have to decide - as we must have all thought about many times since the towers fell - whether we choose to burn, along with the photocopier which has just been vapourised in the flaming office, or jump into the clear Manhattan sky to join the flock of sparrows flying by. We're all caught, he says, on the 94th floor. We're all waving table cloths from the Windows on the World restaurant.
Coupland has sometimes considered the difference between eternity and the future in his writing. Religions offer eternity - which effectively stops time dead. He doesn't seem to buy it. Instead, he is left holding to the future, peering in, not knowing what's left after the collapse of everything we've worked towards.
In the cartoons, characters can pull out a cartoon 'black hole' from their pockets when they think there's no way out, and jump down it - taking the hole with them. At this point, that's what we're left with, he seemed to be saying. At which, he took out a cartoon hole from his pocket, threw it on the ground, and stared into it. Stared into the future, post-9-11.
One day, we might all need pills to take us back to September 10, to simulate the world before everything changed. As he poured pills onto the stage in a powerful moment of stripped back theatre, they shone, like stars in the night sky. We all need help. We all need healing. We all need to get beyond this event, or to a time before it. But for now, we're left staring into the void which we call the future.
There's much you miss when a man such as this talks fast and furious for so long. Unlike a book, you can't dwell on a passage, take it all in, go back over it and search for meaning. It is, instead, an experience, one that works its way into your head and provides snatches of memory, moments of clarity. Coupland spoke less about God in this play than in his most recent novels; there was, perhaps, less of an urgency about our sense of mission than in, say, Girlfriend in a Coma. It almost felt, this time around, that things were somehow beyond our control. That we have to wait and see.
But this play signals an end, somehow. The end, in fact. He'd gone to a library and photocopied the endings of a hundred books, and it was amazing, he said, how many of them ended with a character walking from light to dark, or dark to light.
The question is, peering into the hole, which way are we going?
It was held in the tiny, 170-seater Other Place theatre, so provided an intimate atmosphere in which the best-selling author could perform. While there were a few stage props (such as an oversize coffin for him to sit on, and a few bottles of mineral water which stood, like miniature high-rise towers, in blocks of four around the stage), this evening was a combination of things - part story, part performance, part lecture on culture, part reflection on his landmark books.
Coupland (or "Doug", as he referred to himself throughout) is not really an actor. His dialogue, packed with beautiful, characteristic word plays and observations, was delivered fast and quietly. But it didn't matter; it was amazing how, for 85 minutes, he maintained the flow ceaselessly and without prompts. His humour and references occasionally seemed too North American for Stratford ("Oops, that one tanked, Doug" he'd say if we didn't get the joke), but again, it didn't hurt. It was him.
The play was divided into three, essentially. He was thinking about time, and decades - and in particular, the Nineties - his decade. The decade before the millennium, which somehow got lost in all the hype and was never seen again.
The Nineties, he said, were split into "two and a bit halves". The first 'half' was characterised by grunge music - by the bands such as Mudhoney, Dinasaur Jnr, Pearl Jam and Nirvana, who wore lumber-jack plaid shirts and changed music for good.
The real icon of the first part of the decade was Kurt Cobain, lead singer of Nirvana. Coupland was lucky enough to get a ticket for the possibly epoch-defining MTV show 'Nirvana Unplugged'. "You could tell it was the end of something, but you didn't know quite what..." he said. Within months, Cobain was dead, and the author found himself shocked by the power of emotion that he, and so many others, felt at the loss of this singer.
That first stage of the Nineties was also defined by Coupland himself, whose debut novel Generation X captured the spirit of the age. He spoke of his excitement at gaining his first press review; and of how, ever since, people have expected him to face the world with some kind of "cultural geiger counter". In a moment of candour, he dismissed the idea that Gen X was ever meant to be some definitive take on a culture or a generation - the implication being that perhaps we have all read far too much into one story ever since. After all, you can't bottle the spirit, or capture the wind.
The second phase of the Nineties saw another icon appear on the desktop of our consciousness. Coupland used to pop into the Microsoft offices when you could get right through to Bill Gates' glass-fronted office. Back then, IBM were the powerhouse. Coupland wrote Microserfs at this time - about geeky programmers who were set to change the world from their unassuming offices in Silicon Valley. The traditional borders of time and space were about to be redrawn for ever, with the Internet ("hands up who's Googled more than five times today?"), mobile phones ("who doesn't own one?" - his own hand raised) and the Gap (Coupland awarded a prize to the audience member wearing the most Gap items). In our quest for individual identity, we all rushed out and bought Gap. And now we all look like we're in the commercial.
He remembers the tech-bubble bursting through a phone call. Microserfs was being made into a film. But the film company rang to say no one was interested in a tech-company which was making money any more.
Around the time, he became depressed. "There are better anti-depressants on the market now, Doug", his doctor told him, but when he tried one, it made him suicidal. Pills were a recurring theme of the night - from his father's pill box when he was young, to the idea that we might need to take pills to simulate shopping (because we're all addicted, but we'll run out of resources soon to make new goods) or prison (because we'll run out of space, so we'll have to put people in prison, but then we'll run out of prisons, so we'll have to simulate them in our minds...). Or pills for deja vu: "Haven't I taken this one before?"
The third "bit" of the decade led, of course, to the crisp autumnal September day in New York, 2001. And this, for Coupland, was a much bigger end than we might ever realise. It was the end, somehow, of modernity (of which he declared himself a fan - debunking another assumption that the man is postmodernism personified).
Modernity had been so beautifully enshrined in the Word Trade Centre, built by Minoru Yamasaki as a monument to commerce (and cloaked with Islamic architerctural references, according to Coupland). Coupland had a conspiracy theory to consider - that Yamasaki almost certainly dined with the bin Laden family while working as an architect in Saudi Arabia from 1973 to 1982. The young Osama will have heard him talk of his next great project - the World Trade Centre - and all that it represented. And he will have been incensed when the architect borrowed from Islamic art and architecture to help shape the rising towers.
But the conspiracy wasn't the point. The point is that the great western project is over, and we have to decide - as we must have all thought about many times since the towers fell - whether we choose to burn, along with the photocopier which has just been vapourised in the flaming office, or jump into the clear Manhattan sky to join the flock of sparrows flying by. We're all caught, he says, on the 94th floor. We're all waving table cloths from the Windows on the World restaurant.
Coupland has sometimes considered the difference between eternity and the future in his writing. Religions offer eternity - which effectively stops time dead. He doesn't seem to buy it. Instead, he is left holding to the future, peering in, not knowing what's left after the collapse of everything we've worked towards.
In the cartoons, characters can pull out a cartoon 'black hole' from their pockets when they think there's no way out, and jump down it - taking the hole with them. At this point, that's what we're left with, he seemed to be saying. At which, he took out a cartoon hole from his pocket, threw it on the ground, and stared into it. Stared into the future, post-9-11.
One day, we might all need pills to take us back to September 10, to simulate the world before everything changed. As he poured pills onto the stage in a powerful moment of stripped back theatre, they shone, like stars in the night sky. We all need help. We all need healing. We all need to get beyond this event, or to a time before it. But for now, we're left staring into the void which we call the future.
There's much you miss when a man such as this talks fast and furious for so long. Unlike a book, you can't dwell on a passage, take it all in, go back over it and search for meaning. It is, instead, an experience, one that works its way into your head and provides snatches of memory, moments of clarity. Coupland spoke less about God in this play than in his most recent novels; there was, perhaps, less of an urgency about our sense of mission than in, say, Girlfriend in a Coma. It almost felt, this time around, that things were somehow beyond our control. That we have to wait and see.
But this play signals an end, somehow. The end, in fact. He'd gone to a library and photocopied the endings of a hundred books, and it was amazing, he said, how many of them ended with a character walking from light to dark, or dark to light.
The question is, peering into the hole, which way are we going?
