Agent Palmer

If you are a regular viewer of this blog, you may be thinking to yourself, “Palmer reviewing a Coupland book about Marshall McLuhan? Hasn’t this already been done before?”

It has! Back in February of 2024, I reviewed Extraordinary Canadians: Marshall McLuhan by Douglas Coupland. But the thing about reading through an author’s biography is that sometimes they cover a subject more than once.

Beatles ‘64 is a solid documentary. Like many documentaries before it, it frames itself with more stories than just its subject matter.

However, what occurred to me during my viewing was just how rare the footage was, which led to thoughts about how common footage is today.

I can’t recall if I’ve discussed them here before, but I’m the proud owner of a few animation cels in my personal art collection. They’re pieces of a whole and reflections of the things I loved as a kid. Their existence on my walls grows even more special with each year as cels are part of a dying art.

Cel is short for celluloid, which is the transparent sheet on which the “animated” drawings were once painted or drawn on.

The cover reads “You’re holding a book about a company you’ve most likely never heard of. This company has no Steve Jobs, nor does it have a CEO who jet-skis with starlets. It’s only the 461st largest company on earth, but were it to vanish tomorrow our modern world would immediately be the worse for its absence.”

The book in question is Kitten Clone by Douglas Coupland as part of a series of authors in residence, this particular edition focusing on being “Inside Alcatel-Lucent.”

For those unaware, A Complete Unknown is a 2024 film based on the 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald. They both focus on the events leading up to the evening of July 25, 1965, when Bob Dylan took the stage at the Newport Folk Festival backed by an electric band. If you don’t know why that seems worthy of an entire movie or book, then it’s likely you are under the age of 50. The good news is…