Polaroids From The Dead
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Polaroids From The Dead
''Polaroids from the Dead'' is a collection of short stories and essays by Douglas Coupland. The theme is that each story is written from a collection of old Polaroid photographs that Coupland found in a drawer. It is an attempt to describe the 1990s, a decade that "seemed to be living in a 1980s hangover". Topics of the stories include a Grateful Dead concert (source of "The Dead" in title), a post-mortem letter to Kurt Cobain, Vancouver's Lions Gate Bridge, and an homage to James Rosenquist's painting ''F-111''. The book's ends with a longer essay on Brentwood, California, home to Marilyn Monroe's grave, and the O. J. Simpson murder case. The essay is in part a collage of menus, scraps of conversation, and postings from bulletin boards. Synopsis The book is split into three parts. The first part is Polaroids from the Dead, which is a collection of short stories inspired by a series of Grateful Dead concerts. The second is Portraits of People and Places, which is a collection of ...
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Douglas Coupland
Douglas Coupland (born 30 December 1961) is a Canadian novelist, designer, and visual artist. His first novel, the 1991 international bestseller '' Generation X: Tales for an Accelerated Culture'', popularized the terms ''Generation X'' and ''McJob''. He has published thirteen novels, two collections of short stories, seven non-fiction books, and a number of dramatic works and screenplays for film and television. He is a columnist for the ''Financial Times'' and a frequent contributor to ''The New York Times'', '' e-flux journal'', ''DIS Magazine'', and ''Vice''. His art exhibits include ''Everywhere Is Anywhere Is Anything Is Everything'' which was exhibited at the Vancouver Art Gallery, and the Royal Ontario Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Canadian Art, (now the Museum of Contemporary Art Toronto) and ''Bit Rot'' at Rotterdam's Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art and the Villa Stuck. Coupland is an Officer of the Order of Canada, and a member of the Order of Britis ...
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Lions Gate Bridge
The Lions Gate Bridge, opened in 1938 and officially known as the First Narrows Bridge, is a suspension bridge that crosses the first narrows of Burrard Inlet and connects the City of Vancouver, British Columbia, to the North Shore municipalities of the District of North Vancouver, the City of North Vancouver, and West Vancouver. The term "Lions Gate" refers to the Lions, a pair of mountain peaks north of Vancouver. Northbound traffic on the bridge heads in their general direction. A pair of cast concrete lions, designed by sculptor Charles Marega, were placed on either side of the south approach to the bridge in January 1939. The total length of the bridge including the north viaduct is . The length including approach spans is , the main span alone is , the tower height is , and it has a ship's clearance of . Prospect Point in Stanley Park offered a good high south end to the bridge, but the low flat delta land to the north required construction of the extensive North Via ...
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1996 Short Story Collections
File:1996 Events Collage.png, From left, clockwise: A bomb explodes at Centennial Olympic Park in Atlanta, set off by a radical anti-abortionist; The center fuel tank explodes on TWA Flight 800, causing the plane to crash and killing everyone on board; Eight people die in a blizzard on Mount Everest; Dolly the Sheep becomes the first mammal to have been cloned from an adult somatic cell; The Port Arthur Massacre occurs on Tasmania, and leads to major changes in Australia's gun laws; Macarena, sung by Los del Río and remixed by The Bayside Boys, becomes a major dance craze and cultural phenomenon; Ethiopian Airlines Flight 961 crash-ditches off of the Comoros Islands after the plane was hijacked; the 1996 Summer Olympics are held in Atlanta, marking the Centennial (100th Anniversary) of the modern Olympic Games., 300x300px, thumb rect 0 0 200 200 Centennial Olympic Park bombing rect 200 0 400 200 TWA FLight 800 rect 400 0 600 200 1996 Mount Everest disaster rect 0 200 300 400 19 ...
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Brentwood, Los Angeles
Brentwood is a suburban neighborhood in the Los Angeles Westside, Westside region of Los Angeles. History General Modern development began after the establishment of the Sawtelle Veterans Home, Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Soldiers and Sailors in the 1880s. A small community sprang up outside that facility's west gate, taking on the name ''Westgate''. Annexed by the City of Los Angeles on June 14, 1916, Westgate's included large parts of what is now the Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, Pacific Palisades and a small portion of today's Bel-Air, Los Angeles, Bel-Air. Westgate Avenue is one of the last reminders of that namesake. Local traditions include a Maypole erected each year on the lawn of the Archer School for Girls, carrying on that set by the Order of the Eastern Star, Eastern Star Home previously housed there. This building was the exterior establishing shot for the "Mar Vista Rest Home" that provided a key scene in the 1974 film ''Chinatown (197 ...
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Collage
Collage (, from the french: coller, "to glue" or "to stick together";) is a technique of art creation, primarily used in the visual arts, but in music too, by which art results from an assemblage of different forms, thus creating a new whole. (Compare with pastiche, which is a "pasting" together.) A collage may sometimes include magazine and newspaper clippings, ribbons, paint, bits of colored or handmade papers, portions of other artwork or texts, photographs and other found objects, glued to a piece of paper or canvas. The origins of collage can be traced back hundreds of years, but this technique made a dramatic reappearance in the early 20th century as an art form of novelty. The term ''Papier collé'' was coined by both Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso in the beginning of the 20th century when collage became a distinctive part of modern art. History Early precedents Techniques of collage were first used at the time of the invention of paper in China, around 20 ...
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Marilyn Monroe
Marilyn Monroe (; born Norma Jeane Mortenson; 1 June 1926 4 August 1962) was an American actress. Famous for playing comedic " blonde bombshell" characters, she became one of the most popular sex symbols of the 1950s and early 1960s, as well as an emblem of the era's sexual revolution. She was a top-billed actress for a decade, and her films grossed $200 million (equivalent to $ billion in ) by the time of her death in 1962. Long after her death, Monroe remains a major icon of pop culture. In 1999, the American Film Institute ranked her sixth on their list of the greatest female screen legends from the Golden Age of Hollywood. Multiple film critics and media outlets have cited Monroe as one of the best actors never to have received an Academy Award nomination. Born and raised in Los Angeles, Monroe spent most of her childhood in a total of 12 foster homes and an orphanage; she married at age sixteen. She was working in a factory during World War II when she met a ...
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Brentwood, Los Angeles, California
Brentwood is a suburban neighborhood in the Westside region of Los Angeles. History General Modern development began after the establishment of the Pacific Branch of the National Home for Disabled Soldiers and Sailors in the 1880s. A small community sprang up outside that facility's west gate, taking on the name ''Westgate''. Annexed by the City of Los Angeles on June 14, 1916, Westgate's included large parts of what is now the Pacific Palisades and a small portion of today's Bel-Air. Westgate Avenue is one of the last reminders of that namesake. Local traditions include a Maypole erected each year on the lawn of the Archer School for Girls, carrying on that set by the Eastern Star Home previously housed there. This building was the exterior establishing shot for the "Mar Vista Rest Home" that provided a key scene in the 1974 film '' Chinatown''. Very High Fire Hazard Severity Zone designation The State Cal-Fire Authority officially designated Brentwood, from Mul ...
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F-111
The General Dynamics F-111 Aardvark is a retired supersonic, medium-range, multirole combat aircraft. Production variants of the F-111 had roles that included ground attack (e.g. interdiction), strategic bombing (including nuclear weapons capabilities), reconnaissance and electronic warfare. Developed in the 1960s by General Dynamics, the F-111 entered service in 1967 with the United States Air Force (USAF). The Royal Australian Air Force (RAAF) also ordered the type and began operating the F-111C variant in 1973. The F-111 pioneered several technologies for production aircraft, including variable-sweep wings, afterburning turbofan engines, and automated terrain-following radar for low-level, high-speed flight. Its design influenced later variable-sweep wing aircraft, and some of its advanced features have since become commonplace. The F-111 suffered a variety of problems during initial development. A fighter variant, the F-111B, was not accepted for production. The F-1 ...
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James Rosenquist
James Rosenquist (November 29, 1933 – March 31, 2017) was an American artist and one of the proponents of the pop art movement. Drawing from his background working in sign painting, Rosenquist's pieces often explored the role of advertising and consumer culture in art and society, utilizing techniques he learned making commercial art to depict popular cultural icons and mundane everyday objects. While his works have often been compared to those from other key figures of the pop art movement, such as Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein, Rosenquist's pieces were unique in the way that they often employed elements of surrealism using fragments of advertisements and cultural imagery to emphasize the overwhelming nature of ads. He was a 2001 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Early life Rosenquist was born on November 29, 1933, in Grand Forks, North Dakota, the only child of Louis and Ruth Rosenquist. His parents were amateur pilots of Swedish descent who moved from tow ...
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Vancouver
Vancouver ( ) is a major city in western Canada, located in the Lower Mainland region of British Columbia. As the List of cities in British Columbia, most populous city in the province, the 2021 Canadian census recorded 662,248 people in the city, up from 631,486 in 2016. The Greater Vancouver, Greater Vancouver area had a population of 2.6million in 2021, making it the List of census metropolitan areas and agglomerations in Canada#List, third-largest metropolitan area in Canada. Greater Vancouver, along with the Fraser Valley Regional District, Fraser Valley, comprises the Lower Mainland with a regional population of over 3 million. Vancouver has the highest population density in Canada, with over 5,700 people per square kilometre, and fourth highest in North America (after New York City, San Francisco, and Mexico City). Vancouver is one of the most Ethnic origins of people in Canada, ethnically and Languages of Canada, linguistically diverse cities in Canada: 49.3 percent of ...
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HarperCollins Canada
HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News Corp. The name is a combination of several publishing firm names: Harper & Row, an American publishing company acquired in 1987—whose own name was the result of an earlier merger of Harper & Brothers (founded in 1817) and Row, Peterson & Company—together with Scottish publishing company William Collins, Sons (founded in 1819), acquired in 1989. The worldwide CEO of HarperCollins is Brian Murray. HarperCollins has publishing groups in the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, India, and China. The company publishes many different imprints, both former independent publishing houses and new imprints. History Collins Harper Mergers and acquisitions Collins was bought by Rupert Murdoch's News Corp ...
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Kurt Cobain
Kurt Donald Cobain (February 20, 1967 – April 5, 1994) was an American musician who served as the lead vocalist, guitarist and primary songwriter of the rock band Nirvana. Through his angst-fueled songwriting and anti-establishment persona, Cobain's compositions widened the thematic conventions of mainstream rock. He was heralded as a spokesman of Generation X and is considered one of the most influential musicians in the history of alternative rock. Cobain formed Nirvana with Krist Novoselic and Aaron Burckhard in 1987 and established it as part of the Seattle music scene that later became known as grunge. After signing with major label DGC Records, Nirvana found global success with "Smells Like Teen Spirit" from their critically acclaimed second album ''Nevermind'' (1991). Although Cobain was hailed as the voice of his generation following Nirvana's sudden success, he resented this, believing his message and artistic vision had been misinterpreted by the public. In add ...
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