Thought For The Day: Douglas Coupland

I know a few drag queens, and the thing about drag queens and the Queen is that they’re both very much about power. It always amazes me how people misconstrue drag identities for transvestism. Transvestism is an almost entirely straight thing, where guys want to dress like women yet still have straight sex. Drag queens, on the other hand, are largely about power and creating a vivid powerful persona. A drag persona elevates you out of a world that marginalised you, and hooking up isn’t the end game. Some of the toughest people I know are drag queens, and I’d love to see the Queen having tea with them. She’d have a great time, I think: I see you have a very good tuck. Lemon or cream?

Douglas Coupland, dreaming of the Queen in his always great column in FT Weekend magazine.

PS Fascinating UK media fact: The Financial Times is the only newspaper that has a special two-day weekend edition, along with... the Morning Star.

Douglas Coupland: Wonkr

I look at apps like Grindr and Tinder and see how they’ve rewritten sex culture — by creating a sexual landscape filled with vast amounts of incredibly graphic site-specific data — and I can’t help but wonder why there isn’t an app out there that rewrites political culture in the same manner. I don’t think there is. Therefore I’m inventing an app to do so and I’m calling it Wonkr — which somehow seems appropriate for a politically geared app. I dropped the “e” to make it feel more appy.

What does Wonkr do? Primarily, you put Wonkr on your phone and it asks you a quick set of questions about your beliefs. Then, the moment there are more than a few people around you (who also have Wonkr), it tells you about the people you’re sharing the room with. You’ll be in a crowded restaurant in Nashville and you can tell that 73 per cent of the room is Republican. Go into the kitchen and you’ll see that it’s 84 per cent Democrat...

Doug, FT Weekend.

Hilarious piece on online data-grabbing - which Pink News thinks is a Daily Mail conspiracy...

Headline Of The Day: The Independent's On Sunday

And to think only yesterday, Fagburn called The Independent 'ever illiterate'...

Good job this article isn't about good writing.

And to run a dull interview with the ever fascinating Douglas Coupland to boot!

Thought For The Day: Douglas Coupland

A few months ago someone online (where else?) was discussing various religions including Scientology. In the comments section at the article’s end, a woman wrote, “I don’t like Scientology because it’s a made-up religion,” to which another reader replied, “As opposed to…?” He has a point. More recent religions entered the game late, and thus have yet to generate the market share that can only accrue with millennia. In 2,000 years, Game of Thrones could be a religion – who’s to say?

Douglas Coupland, FT Weekend.

The only columnist Fagburn wakes up and looks forward to reading, but... dunno, think she's coasting now.

PS Sisyphus gives up. Laters. x

Thought For The Day: Douglas Coupland

I wonder if the need for individualism may, in fact, be a form of brain mutation spread lightly throughout a population. I wonder if most human beings were cut out to cope with the psychic vacuum that freedom can create. I get the impression from the daily news that there are a lot of people out there, possibly a majority, who don’t actually want progress – or the freedom progress brings. I also get the impression that most people are happy to belong to a group – any kind of group – and they mistrust someone who doesn’t feel similarly. And I also get the impression there are a lot of people out there who perceive chaos as freedom – which is somehow embarrassing. Sometimes I even wonder if feeling unique is an indication of actually being unique – even though it is the feeling of uniqueness that convinces us we have souls and are individuals.

FT Weekend.

PS Fagburn is still away, by the way... 

Douglas Coupland: On Drugs

The arguments that swirled around new drugs in the late 1980s were electric and stormy and vicious. You mean to say I can tailor my personality into something better than what I was born with? That’s an affront to all that’s decent in this universe! You don’t hear much of that any more. The only thing you get is when you bump into someone you haven’t seen for a while, and you come away from the encounter thinking, “Well, So-And-So certainly seemed a bit medsy today. I wonder what they’re taking?” It’s like the radioactively white teeth everybody in North America now sports. One day you woke up and everyone had teeth like game show hosts. And then one day you woke up and everyone seemed a bit medsy.

Douglas Coupland, FT Weekend.

If there were a Fagburn Media Awards, our Doug would win best columnist.

Is he single?

x

Thought For The Day: Douglas Coupland

I think that because of the internet, straight people are now having the same amount of sex as gay guys were always supposed to be having. There’s a weird look I can see on the face of people who are getting too much sex delivered to them via hooking up online: wait, is this as good as it gets?

From a lovely, funny series of notes on 21st century relationships in FT Weekend.

David Hockney: "I Like Bums!"

Hockney, however, is reluctant to be seen as a symbol of anything, and seems almost insouciant about his influence. He doesn’t see himself as remarkable for being openly gay in the early 1960s, when it was still illegal. “No, because I lived in bohemia and I thought I would always live in bohemia. And bohemia was separate from suburbia and the rest was suburban and stuff.

“At the RCA, Quentin Crisp was a model and I got to know him a bit. I noticed he was the only model who’d go around looking at the drawings and comment on them. He’d make some funny comments. He was one of the first homosexuals I met, who was just gay, accepted what he was and he lived in a bohemian way. That’s what I did and I never thought much of it.”

Hockney may have enjoyed celebrity in London but it wasn’t enough to keep him. He was drawn to LA as his idealised version of America. “I was brought up in Bradford and Hollywood – because Hollywood was the cinema,” he told his biographer Christopher Simon Sykes. He was also in search of sun, sex and space. “I’d say one of the reasons I came here was sex. I knew all these Physique Pictorial [magazine] photographers were based here. I first came in 1964 and it was sexy, it was.”

Above a large pink bucket of paintbrushes in his studio, I notice a calendar of naked rugby stars on the wall. I point it out as Hockney is being photographed. “They’re nice bums,” he bellows, cheerfully from across the room. “I like bums.”

Caroline Daniel interviews David Hockney for FT Weekend.

All this and Grayson Perry and Douglas Coupland, too, in Britain's most gay-friendly weekend supplement.

See also David Hockney: A portrait of the artist as a gay man by Mark Brown in The Guardian on the exhibition of his early work at Liverpool's Walker gallery.

Hockney in the 1960s was making work on subjects he knew and cared about – primarily being a young gay man when you really couldn't shout about it. He wanted to propagandise homosexuality.

Some of the earliest paintings, heavily codified, reflect his desire for the singer Cliff Richard. Also in the show is the important We Two Boys Together Clinging, inspired by a work by the 19th-century poet Walt Whitman. The painting references a newspaper clipping detailing a climbing accident – "Two Boys Cling to Cliff All Night".

PS BBC Vision On-type gallery of your actual David Hockney homosexual art.

Douglas Coupland: Regeneration X

While I was writing the book, I thought there would be, at most, a few people who I attended school with in Vancouver who might kind of get what I was writing about – or maybe a few people down in Seattle, which was a little bit like Vancouver back then. I was surprised, and remain surprised to this day, that so many people clicked with X – or with any of the books I’ve written – because it always seems, in the end, that writing is such a desolate, lonely profession and it never gets less lonely. In fact, as I sit here a few days before turning 50, it feels so lonely that I wonder if I can visit the place of writing any more – which, in a backward way, tells me that’s exactly why I should go forward. The things worth writing about, and the things worth reading about, are the things that feel almost beyond description at the start and are, because of that, frightening.

Douglas Coupland writes on turning 50, on the loneliness of the long-distance writer, and the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Generation X.