In All Families are Psychotic, author Douglas Coupland creates a sort of funhouse mirror of what family life is like. Sure, it’s often distorted and even frightening, perhaps, but there remains an element of our own truth staring back at us.
Not all documentaries are created equal. Some are out to prove a point, others hope to make you think, and even more are out to entertain, uncover, or educate. Music documentaries do a lot of those things, except they obviously tend to have music.
In having said music, the talking heads are commonly musicians or fans, and even the most serious music documentary has some light moments of laughter.
Winter: A Novel of a Berlin Family by Len Deighton is a familial masterpiece. Starting with Harald Winter and focusing on his two sons, Peter and Paul Winter, this novel follows the family’s journey as their spouses and friends are all intertwined in chaotic and random events as history unfolds with World War I and World War II.
There’s been a lot of talk about the naming conventions of a certain generation of late. I am one of those unfortunate souls stuck in between, particularly of the newly coined “geriatric millennials,” but it did come with some benefits. We were adaptable to the technological advances of our time, but we also got to experience the joy of the mundane as did our predecessors in Generation X.
Two of those things I came across while cleaning out some old boxes that highlight the mundane were Newfield Publications’ Sports Pages and Edito-Service Military Aviation Airplane Cards.
Every major city in the world has a talented writer. Every city in the world has a travel guide of some sort, but what City of Glass: Douglas Coupland’s Vancouver does is marry the talented writer with the travel guide glued together with a passion for one’s own hometown, to create not just a travel guide, but a glimpse into local life.
I read the 2006 Revised Edition, but originally published in 2000, this book is Vancouver’s ABCs, a local tourism perspective, the likes of which you’d need to find a very good local blogger to get from anywhere else.