At times amazing!!! At others I found myself drifting and bored like I was given the book as homework to read

I think it affected me more because of where I am in life & where I was when I first read it.

a stop-off in my amblings through Gen X lit; fascinating to see the beginnings of irony-monoculture documented and commented on as though anomalous; one story, about a Deadhead young mother raised by hippies, charts the failures of Boomers to commit to a new way of life and our failures to understand how close they came. most of all, this is a barbed and at the same time loving examination of the West Coast, “land without history”

I believe this is a book that is made better with age. I didn't expect to enjoy it, and so I've put off reading it for 15 years since it originally came out. I'm actually glad that I did, because I think it's a much better book now than it was 15 years ago.

Polaroids from the Dead is a collection of essays that Coupland wrote in the early 90’s and that appeared in various magazines and publications. Published in 1996, he collected the pieces into a single volume and illustrated them with photographs to try to capture the essence of the first half of the decade.

In 1996, this would have seemed tedious. The early 90s had just passed. How can you feel nostalgic about events that occurred only two or three years before?

One of Coupland’s suppositions is that the early 90s lacked an identity. The world was changing, but it hadn’t clearly redefined itself yet. The 90s would become the decade when people became wired and overnight millionaires were made and unmade in the dot-com waves. However, in the first years of the decade, the millionaires were still few and the internet was still developing. The time was defined by its very lack of definition.

When Polaroids came out, I was a starry-eyed, forward-looking high schooler, busy planning my future and expecting the best. A book looking backward with an intensely introspective tone would have bored me to tears. Now, with a few more life experiences under my belt and twenty years from 1990, the book makes some sense. It’s like a little literary time capsule, preserving a period in time that was otherwise quite forgettable.

En novellsamling med tio korta noveller. Gemensamt för dem är att de alla utspelas på en och samma Grateful Dead-konsert i Kalifornien, någon gång under 80- eller 90-talet. Här får vi samma upplevelse skildrad ur olika perspektiv: de unga som aldrig fick uppleva 60-talet men som antingen fascineras eller vämjes av den tiden, de äldre som var med som tycker att allt har gått nedåt sedan ungdomsåren och en rad andra.

I dessa skildringar ges uttryck för ett antal tankar om svunna tiders ideal kontrasterade mot det som är berättelsens nutid. Som ofta när det gäller Coupland är generationskonflikterna ständigt närvarande, och Grateful Dead-konserten utgör en bra projektionsyta för dessa.

Boken bör läsas från pärm till pärm eftersom historierna förstärker varandra.

La manera de escribir se me hizo demasiado rebuscada, puede que mi nivel de inglés no sea el ideal para este tipo de lecturas pero no pensé que fuera a ser tan tedioso. La verdad no me gustó y no lo recomendaría.

Cuando me prestaron el libro pensé que se centraría en la fotografía pero no es así.

Whatchoo Talkin' 'bout, Bruce Willis?

"What's with all these hippies kissing my girl, why don't they ever wash? What did we ever do to that cult that made them so violent? Whoo-hoo, I look just like Charlie Manson, oh-whoah, and you're Sharon Tate...I don't care what they grok about us anyway, I don't care about that!" - Weezer

Those MTV Buzz Bin friendly lyrics from the 90s are what I remember most about the 90s. That, and the couch potato friendly, Beavis and Butthead target-marketed, hit MTV video wherein rising auteur Spike Jonez integrated video of the band into the Eyes Wide Shut orgy scene.

Yeah. Okay. I'm just poking fun, extrapolating from a quote in this book wherein a character states out loud that all the females at the day-glow rock show look like Tate, all the males look like Manson. But, seriously, I do congratulate myself on the fact that this mish-mosh of images, parody, irony, timeslip, timeslap, etcetera is what we all took out of the 20th century and left orphaned (and/or partial-birth abortioned) at the doorstep of the First Days of the Last Days of the Church of the Twenty First Century once this communal Rosemary's Baby began to cry, beg, talk, stare silently, claw, foam at the mouth, etcetera. A state of mind that we're only now starting to reclaim, feverishly waving our rain-soiled ticket stubs at the confused lady behind the counter at the Overly Socially Mediated Chinese Laundromat and Internet Cafe Sex Robot Emporium and Dollar Store.

Anyways. This is a pleasant collection of essays by Douglas Coupland, wherein he remembers the 90s as a series of Grateful Dead concert short stories, Kurt Cobain's death, half-hearted backstage political involvements and intrigues (circa 1992), Vancouver bridges, post-Wall fall German tourism, and O.J. Simpson. Needless to say, Coupland's experience of the 90s is not mine (and probably not yours) but exactly what you'd expect from a razor's edge, upper middle-class white-privilege art-major Baby Boomer. Nothing here about Austin Powers, Stone Temple Pilots, rap or Ross Perot. Lollapalooza and Zooropa. Fuckin' Phish and Blues Traveler and the forever-spiral of porn site pop-up windows that no amount of corner-X clicking would terminate, eradicate. Indeed, that clicking? That would only accelerate the bombardment of come-ons. Nothing. Nothing here about these more common experiences of the...of the 90s.

Maybe I'm just being cranky. ...Yeah, I'm just being cranky. I'm being cranky and a jerk. But, Coupland? I put off reading this for years because it looked like a picture book, not a book proper. Sorry I did, because it's actually pretty darn good once you realize the whole "spotlight on the 90s" angle was a publisher's demand, a joke.

It was a gift. It was terrible.

This si a book about Coupland's ruminations on contemporary 1990s culture, such as the Grateful Dead, life in California and his native Vancouver, Canada. The peices on the Greateful Dead were fun to read, I can relate to that experience vicariously though my firends and the Greensoboro shows where I went to school.

The long-winded piece at the end on Bentwood, in Los Angeles was less to my liking, but interesting in Couplan's ruminations on fame, post-fame, and the need to continuously reinvent yourself to stay in the media. The result is what he calls "denarration" which strips most of one's sense of self and of history.

another piece was about travelling around Vancouver with a German reporter. I don't understand why he had a week to spend with this guy and show him around.

I'd love to see a book by Coupland on how things are today. In the mid 1990's the potential of the internet was recognized, but certinly didn't idenitfy social networking, instant messaging, and so forth. I wonder what Coupland would say bout these developements.

I also wish he had written about the rave scene. That was a truly 1990's phenomena, but then again, I think it might have been for a slightly younger crowd than his.

I also wonder if there is a like-minded voice who can fill Coupland's shoes, to continue cultural commentary for a younger generation.

Inspired by a collection of Polaroids he found in a drawer, the auther Douglas Coupland provides a variety of short stories that reveals his life and the changing culture seen during the early 90's. The book starts off with two fictional characters at a "Grateful Dead Concert". The two characters take on the stereotypical role of 1970's hippies, as they pop acid to entertwine themselves with the music and people surrounding them. Each picture shown in the book has a story behind it to reveal it's meaning. Diana, the hipster turned real estate agent who embraces her hairy legs and armpits or Stacey a college fresh man who think she looks similar to 1960's photographs of girls like Twiggy dressed up as mod or in flower printed ensembles.Coupland incorporates his own experiences living in the 90's as he travels the world and lives through big events like the death of Kurt Cobain.

Looking through all the photos it's errie to see how pop and rock culture have transformed over the years. Polaroids from The Dead is an artifact dug up to reveal a life style and culture which thrived during the 1960's to the late 90's, a culture which is still some what present in today's society. This book was good but I was more drawn to it because of it's pictures rather than the writing.

Polaroids From The Dead remains as a time capsule stuffed from the era and author that defined my generation. But is it a true time capsule of the nineties and generation x as it was and remains thirty years in the past in 2022? I have read many of Coupland’s other books and enjoyed them somewhere in my late teens, but somewhere around there I stopped after discovering Dave Eggers, David Foster Wallace, Joshua Cohen, and even more recently, Karl Ove Knausgaard... Arguably a group of postmodern writers managed to take the same thing and the same time and do it astronomically better. Recently at a book sale, I picked up Polaroids and JPod – the copy of Polaroids I purchased for a dollar was even a signed first printing – and decided to dive into nostalgia under Coupland’s capable pen.

I guess the question I asked myself not one paragraph in, is it a time capsule or a relic? And how well does it capture the atmosphere we all experienced?

Rambling on the subject of sprawl as it begins to take its toll on the American identity seems to be the method to Coupland’s observations, in a world that is seemingly more and more overrun by money-making schemes piled one on top of another in the monoculture of shopping centers that contribute to our rapidly deteriorating world. It’s almost quaint to look at this nihilism in hindsight when the world was once so bright and the future wasn’t concerned with global warming, 9/11 hadn’t happened, and even the direst of observations now seem beautifully optimistic.

My favorite piece in the collection was a meditation on Harold and Maude that I didn’t even know existed. My favorite film of all time and a cornerstone to my philosophy, Coupland does an impressive job reflecting on the meaning of life and death, the differences between that culture and ours, and the ways in which true loss vibrates through time. I also liked the piece on Cobain. One funny thing about the collection is Coupland’s attachment to California and the decidedly Canadian lens through which everything is experienced regardless of having moved here full time.

I think this collection manages to be all of these things at the same time... For better or worse... Of course, reading it provided some slanted and dizzying nostalgia, but somewhat of a strange foreignness as well. Was it time? Coupland’s prose? Who knows what it is, but it is a book that was fun to make my way through like an old polaroid wondering what exactly that fuzzy thing was in the corner... I am not sure; however, this will be remembered. Maybe that’s the point.

Rätt dumt.