Den här boken är SÅ bekant; formatet, färgerna. Har jag eller någon i min närhet ägt den och haft den framme synligt? Kanske bläddrade jag i den på något bibliotek på 90-talet för att läsa brevet till Kurt Cobain?

Känner mig inte nostalgisk över det årtiondet och inget annat heller, förutom 60-talet - som jag missade, så hoppar nu över många texter och fokuserar på det Vancouverrelaterade. Den om Lions Gate Bridge finns även publicerad här. Två världar kolliderar när jag nu noterar att Coupland gillade att "haroldera" i sena tonåren, d.v.s. hänga på kyrkogårdar, som Harold i filmen. Särskilt Capilano View Cemetery och vi styrde genast hyrbilen upp dit.

Just like how he writes and because I guess its about me and a little older.

This from pre-1996:

"Up until recently, no matter where or when one was born on earth, one's culture provided one with all components essential for the forging of identity. These components included: religion, family, ideology, class strata, a geography, politics and a sense of living within a historic continuum.

Suddenly, around ten years ago, with the deluge of electronic and information media into our lives, these stencils within which we trace our lives began to vanish, almost overnight, particularly on the West Coast. It became possible to be alive yet have no religion, no family connections, no ideology, no sense of class location, no politics and no sense of history. Denarrated.

In a low-information environment, pre-TV, etc., relationships were the only form of entertainment available. Now we have methods of information linkage and control ranging from phone answering machines to the Internet that mediate relationships to the extent that corporeal interaction is now beside the point. As a result, the internal dialogue has been accelerated to whole new planes as regularized daily contact has become an obsolete indulgence."

Sound familiar? Like anybody you know? Seems prophetic...

If you want to understand the tenuous transition with which western culture entered the 90s, read this book.
it is excellent.

Pretty good I liked the one with the journalist and the Brentwood story.

Short stories and articles. Good stuff, but far from J-Pod.

Essays, some of them quite good, all of them with the same Gen X asceticism that is sometimes mistaken for pure irony.

Although some of the pieces in this book are mediocre, others are among Coupland's finest and most beautiful work, especially "The German Reporter."

I believe Polaroids from the Dead was Coupland's fifth book, but I'm glad I never read it until now. It's a real treat for a long-time fan! A mix of essays, "Microstories," letters, memories, and travel writing, this book is visual (typically) and personal and very revealing.

Young Douglas discovers James Rosenquist at age 8, and making his own "Rosenquists" becomes his new hobby. Years later he is driving through Washington State, crying for Kurt Cobain in a coma. A middle-aged Deadhead-turned-software-millionaire attends a Dead concert with his surgeon pal, and mourns the evaporation of the middle class; meanwhile the Shampoo Planet-esque kids flee the Dead concert to listen to "songs about robots - written by cash registers." In Brentwood, Los Angeles (a real place that does not technically exist), lives of people are "denarrated," and history is as irrelevant as morality. The lack of storyline is static, no matter what Marilyn Monroe, Lisa Marie Presley, or O.J. Simpson might be up to. In contrast, Palo Alto is a charming and gracious "dreamscape."

We all know D.C. is a master of perfectly capturing moments in history (a blurb on the jacket calls him a "zeitgeist chaser") but in this case, he takes the early years of the 1990s and shows how their stories repeat themselves, through the past and into the future. That being said, don't read this book until you're ready to return fully to 1994 for a day or two. The nostalgia may overwhelm you.

Couldn’t really get into it. The last part of about Brentwood was interesting but his writing style just wasn’t for me

This book has a very interesting format, as it consists of a series of short stories centred around Grateful Dead concerts as well as a collection of essays on generational change, societal norms and Douglas Coupland's experiences. I found the stories had an interesting depth to them, as they made the reader consider the ephemerality of every moment. It was also nice to see the different perspectives and experiences of all the characters. The naivety of the young people and the depravity of the old. The essays were a little bit boring overall. Somewhat fun short read, but not one that I would particularly recommend to others. Fun fact: the term "Generation X" comes from this book.

Polaroids from the Dead by Douglas Coupland (Reagan Books 1996) (818) is an interesting little art book. The "Polaroids" referred to in the title are not photographs (though a few snapshots from the Grateful Dead parking lot are included)but are instead essays that capture moments in time or timeless moments of Deadheads on the road with the band. The book is divided into sections; the first section contains the aforementioned road tales. This section left me feeling all warm and fuzzy. However, the author apparently either ran out of Dead tales or forgot the topic of his book, for the rest of the essays which make up the volume have little or nothing to do with the Dead.

This book is a worthy addition to any collector's library of books about the Grateful Dead or other collection of Dead arcana. However, if you are a reader just beginning to bone up on the Dead or the Sixties, this is not a volume to start with. My rating: 6/10, finished 1/24/14.

"Like most consultants profiting from the burgeoning world of political technology, Tim worships the database. He knows how to narrowcast information into persuadable sectors of what he calls the "simian population base;" he can merge TV-viewing databases with voting databases. He is proud not to be just another twenty-eight-year-old burnout case from the Hill."

At first glance, this has the feel of a collection quickly cobbled together on the heels of the author's wildly successful first outing (and I suppose it most likely was), but on reading it in 2020, some of Coupland's observations and the book's Instagram-sans-Polaroid size (and Sharon Tate cover) feel eerily prescient. While a few of the essays are less than compelling, the essay on Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge remains a timeless stunner. Less so is the last section on Brentwood and OJ Simpson. What do you do with Coupland? Where do you place him? He's a little bit Warhol, a little bit Wolfe, and in true Gen X fashion, never had any intention to be a spokesperson for anyone or anything. But yet here he is, calling it in 1996, almost a quarter-century before a lot of other people.