Losing someone close to the holidays is always difficult. The same is true for the loss of my beloved websites. Oink was always so giving around this time of year. You could download as much as you wanted and it was no problem. Oink didn’t even want anything back. But the worst part about losing friends like these if you have to go back and start hanging with friends you ditched when you met you better and cooler friends. The first phone call is always awkward as you reach out to those old friends who are slow and unreliable. Those old friends like to pull stupid pranks too. Like just when you think you’re downloading a movie that hasn’t been released in theatres yet, it turns out this friend renamed the most depraved porn you can imagine Juno or I’m Not There.

I just want to have every album, movie and television program I can think of at a moment’s notice and I don’t want to pay anything. But lawyers keep shitting on my party and shutting down sites that help me achieve this dream. Though it may feel like they’re winning a few battles, the war is ultimately a futile one. Okay, they want to make money, fair enough. Rather than fighting the most powerful marketing tool ever invented they should get with start rolling with the punches and realize there are plenty of lucrative ways to make money outside of selling CDs and tickets to movies. It’s old school thinking and it’s going to be dead soon. Companies can either smarten up or risk perishing themselves. If that mostly unfounded proclamation doesn’t change anyone’s mind, could you just change your ways out of pity for me? I’m running out of friends fast and I’m starting to get lonely. My hard drive won’t fill itself.

Who wants to leave the house anyways? Outside is overrated. It’s cold, it’s wet, it’s gray and it’s depressing out there. Inside is warm, dry and I have a TV that’s capable of reproducing 29 billion colours, which makes me happy (if for some reason I want to see gray, the television can show 3000 different shades of it). On those sad days when I do leave the house, I spend most of my time trying to impress people with how many lines of resolution my TV has—1080 if you were wondering—as this is important stuff that people want to know. I’d invite these people to come over and watch Batman Begins in HD but I’d rather leave them in awe with the hard numbers. I know what the women are thinking. “Oh sure, you can go over to the guy’s place and his plasma screen measures 60 inches diagonally and people’s pores are the size of your fist. And the surround sound system… Oh the surround sound. It’s like being surrounded by a choir of angels. But we all know he only got all that shit because he’s lousy in the sack.”

Speaking of sack, I moved my bed into the living room. The rationale behind this is simple. You have to bolt the TV to the wall while beds are comparatively mobile. Now that my bed is in front of the TV, I’ve found that I don’t ever need to leave it, save the occasional bathroom or snack break. I have wireless internet and a cell phone so I don’t even need to go to work. I can get food delivered. I can even pay a nurse to come over to sponge bath me and change the sheets so I don’t get bedsores. Sure I’ve gained 30 pounds and the only phone calls I get are from collection agencies but it’s worth it. These HBO box sets won’t watch themselves.

So I’m watching wrestling and they have a promo on for an upcoming Pay Per View event, which is like the lifeline of professional wrestling. It started out with just Wrestlemania, but they were so successful they have one every month now. In a Pay Per View event you get to see all the big matches where titles change hands and new legends of sports entertainment are born. This particular event they were plugging was called Cyber Sunday.

The premise of Cyber Sunday is that it’s fully interactive. Fans of wrestling can vote online to decide what type of match their wrestlers will compete in, who their opponents will be, who their partners will be and who will referee the match. What a great idea I’m thinking. It only took 2000 years but finally someone got democracy right. And then I start to think about it a little more and come to a horrible realization: rednecks have officially discovered the internet.

Sure the warning signs were there: Jeff Foxworthy routines on Youtube, a Kid Rock MySpace profile and an all too thorough entry for Larry the Cable Guy on Wikipedia. But I didn’t think anything of it until I heard of Cyber Sunday, which is like the coming out party for the rednecks discovering the internet.

Let’s think about the ramifications of this for a second. It’s tough enough to find an apartment or a job as is. If white trash discover Craigslist, which is already over populated with over caffeinated people hitting the refresh button every 20 seconds, then we’re fucked. Because we’re all equals behind a computer screen.

It’s not just that. Basically, there’s three ways to make money on the internet: porno, gambling and information mining. Every time you sign up for a site they’ll ask you a little information about yourself in a questionnaire: reply, give us feedback, let us know your income and how much you drink. This information is accumulated, then sold off to another company who is trying to come up with the perfect energy drink advertising campaign that speaks to you. I used to resist this and lied on every answer and said I lived in Burkina Faso. But then I figured my outrageous lies told them more about me than the boring truth.

Shortly after 9/11, all the major phone companies handed over their records to the NSA to create the largest database of information ever assembled. Ignore their Orwellian methods and intentions for a second. They have names, home numbers, records of every call made over the past five years and how long that call was. Just think of what an awesome cell phone package they could crank out with all that information.

So there are all these rednecks out there, presumably on computers made of wood with rotary dialup connections tainting this pool of information that is used to come up with new products for us. There are a lot of them too—enough to sway the results of an entire election—and their opinion matters just as much as yours. Malt Liquor flavored chew for pregnant teens surely can’t be far off. Be afraid because consumerism as we know it is about to be ruined.

Was it because you wanted to sell one of your books to someone who didn’t know who you were?
No no no. I stayed hidden the whole time. I tried to be invisible. What surprised me was on Sundays we would sell three or four copies of What to Name the Baby and three to four copies of How to Get the Baby to Sleep. Like in any bookstore there’s always a pile of the current hardcover fiction and I don’t think I ever sold one copy of those. Yet you look at the bestseller list and this doesn’t seem to click with my experience from working in a bookstore. I can’t figure out why How to Get the Baby to Sleep isn’t like Pink Floyd’s Darkside of the Moon, the longest number one book in history.

I also heard that you collect used needles from the downtown eastside.
That was for a specific project. Part of the project was looking for DNA from the early 21st century, like ‘found DNA.’ Part of it was we went to a school and collected gum from underneath desks. The thinking was we wanted to encase the stuff in amber so that in the future they could go into the gum and extract dental DNA…

Like Jurassic Park?
Yeah, like Jurassic 2005. So we went on a needle drag. The criteria was that it had to be publicly accessible DNA. On the Internet I ordered a neodymium boron super magnet. It’s maybe about the size of a domino. Imagine a domino surrounded by a huge halo of bubble wrap in a box that’s like 18×18x18. That’s so it doesn’t de-magnetize any of the equipment at Fed Ex. Magnets are measured by how many pounds they can hold. This one was a 320-pound magnet that you could hold up two people with one tiny little magnet. So, we took a broom pole and taped it with packing tape on the end. Then we went down to the alleys. We parked the car on Cordova near Oppenheimer Park, we put on gloves and dressed very scientifically and brought buckets and everything. There were surprisingly few needles there. I used to live at the corner of Powell and Columbia for a few years and I just know that there are gazillions of these things. There was all sorts of cans of Boost or Ensure or meal replacement type things. It’s really weird poetry. Junkies are the last people in our culture who still write on paper. They just crank it out and it’s everywhere. So we saved a lot of that. We began to notice that every time you’d smell piss you’d also find needles. Because the exact amount of privacy it takes to take a leak it takes to shoot up. The further we got away from the car, the more needles we’d find until about three blocks away we came back to the snowdrifts of needles that I remember from living down there. Then it was just like an embarrassment of riches. I filled up a bucket and then we got back to the car and realize we parked in front of the needle exchange, which is why there were no needles there. So what we also figured out is if you’re a junkie and you’re two blocks away from a needle exchange you’re all ‘Yeah I’ll go get a new needle’ but if it’s three or four block way it’s like ‘Naw.’ So for them work mathematically you have to have one every four blocks or else I don’t think you’ll fix the problem. That’s why I like doing art projects, because you find out all this accidental shit along the way that you never would have learned otherwise.

Well, I have a gift for you. [This is where I presented him with the used needle]
Oh that’s so thoughtful. Where did you find it?

In the lane on Powell and Carrall next to the East Indian restaurant underneath a dumpster.
Oh that place is a goldmine. I remember that alley… I can’t believe we’re having this conversation.

At this point we discussed fun things like what junkies write on scraps of paper, font serifs and why people love Helvetica and hate Arial for about seven minutes. It was fascinating, but only if you’re a nerd.

But should we talk about the movie?
Yeah, they’ll get pissed off if we don’t. If they come in here and we’re talking about Helvetica…

So from the books of yours that I’ve read and talking to my friends I’ve always gathered that you’re a private man.
Not really. I’m not even sure anymore. Maybe I am I just think I’m not. I don’t know. My policy has always been there are people in my life who have asked me not to talk about them. And there are some people who don’t mind. My parents don’t mind so that’s why they’re in the movie. Whereas you don’t see my little brother. So what’s your question?

Well why did you want to do this?
Because when you’re reading a book it’s supposed to be a quiet conversation, the author’s voice whispering over you shoulder. But with this movie you’re there and you’re in front of the camera. They had to talk me into it. I don’t like getting photographed. I love great pictures of me, who doesn’t? Great pictures of yourself, rather, whoever you are. The actual process of having that lens, it just really fucks me up. I really don’t like it. It’s been 15 years now and I’m never going to like it.

Maybe that’s why I say I think you’re private because I don’t see that many pictures of you floating around.
I love to have great pictures of me floating around but it means having the brown-black thing in your face and it just really fucks me up. And also, digital cameras at book signings… and afterwards people take your picture. Digital cameras, those flashes on those fuckers are just brutal.

And there you are with red eyes all over the Internet the next day.
You get three in a row and you get a headache and can’t see properly. Now, I have to say no because frankly I don’t want the headache and I want to be able to see for the rest of the night. That can come across as being sort of… you know. It’s a strange thing. For me to be in the documentary like that, it was really hard for me. I did it cuz I trusted Rob and Robin. When you’re doing anything creative especially with film and theatre you have to trust them completely or not at all. You can’t trust them 62 percent.

Did you enjoy the collaborative process? Because you think of books as just one guy.
Film is small “c” corporate or communal. So many people are involved. With books I can do exactly what I want to do, exactly the way I want to do it and I have veto power. It’s great. I didn’t have that in this project. I could just say whatever I had to say. Also, Rob Cohen [the film’s producer] he’s a dialectician so he coached me. The way we’re talking right now, this is the way I really talk. Of course, I talk completely different in the documentary. Rob, painfully, line by line made me get it right. So, that I don’t like, and I hope that’s not disrespectful.

That’s what I like about your writing. It seems very unscripted… if that makes sense. But this movie is scripted.
It was scripted. I think the funniest parts of the movie are the parts where I’m just yakking. But it’s not that kind of documentary, so c’est la vie.

How did you like adapting your work?
Oh, I didn’t adapt it. I just showed up and read my lines. They did all the work. I just showed up and was probably a pain in the butt to deal with. I don’t like cameras and that brings out all my weird phobias. Freaky shit. They did all the work. Everything. It was all them and I get credit for it. It’s like, “Sick, sorry Robin.”

You seem to enjoy collecting tacky touristy cultural artifacts.
No, not really tacky. They’re things that you never quite realize that unify, but they actually do. I just saw the poster today for the first time with the stubby on the loonie. That’s fantastic.

Do you think it’s safe to call you an intellectual?
No, cuz I never got a degree. Only a diploma. I have a diploma in sculpture. It’s like having a diploma in finger painting.

Well, you’ve written more books than I’ve read since I finished school four years ago so I’m going to call you an intellectual.
Okay.

Do you think being a patriotic intellectual is a contradiction? Because you think of being patriotic and you associate it with jingoism, which is lowbrow.
There’s a long form answer to that which is in the 60s when Canada broke away from its British colonial roots, there was this ten-year period that was financed with heaps of money. I say this is the movie, if it says Canada, here’s a million bucks. Then the money ran out in the 80s. For two no one explored what happened in the 20 years after the money ran out. In that 20 years you had a lot of strange and unexpected things, like the stubby bottle, Kraft products, and bad game shows. Who wants to be a jingoist? Not me. It was nice for me to identify myself with these things but also to develop something that unifies. How old are you?

Twenty-six.
You might be too young. But we were really hard on ourselves. We could only ever define ourselves as being non-U.S. Now, you don’t even hear that anymore. We define ourselves in terms of who we are and what we do and what we think and feel and what we’ve done. That is just a galactic shift that I don’t think anyone, especially in the late 80s or early 90s, would ever have imagined happening. I was raised in the late 70s to believe that by 2006, we’d be a state. I was also raised to believe that by 2006 there would be no birds left on the earth and that the oceans would all be tar. That never happened either. It sounds like so dumb and self-reflective, but the thing with the future is it always surprises you.

Why aren’t there more Douglas Coupland movies?
There is one, Everything’s Gone Green, which is at Cannes.

Are you going to Cannes?
I’m not going to go. I don’t like going to continental Europe. I’m working on two projects, but books are what I do.

Before I go any further, this sentence right here is the one where I give the obligatory disclaimer that I don’t watch porn. I’m not one of “those guys” and I was only doing this so you don’t have to. The film in question was a reality-television inspired work that revolved around a girl with an oversized posterior. Spoiler alert: There’s no parade. So we’re talking about a fetish porno for the guy who’s so into porn he needs to have it on his iPod. So we’re looking at a doubly small audience here, right?

Not so. To give you an idea of how popular it was, at the time I was downloading Ass Parade along with 20 other people, which isn’t a lot. But a mere eight people were downloading the video iPod version of King Kong. So this is either a raging endorsement to the popularity of iPod porno or a total condemnation of Peter Jackson’s latest cinematic effort. So get ready. The private will become public. Stuff that should be kept in the home office, at the bottom of your stack of DVDs or in the third drawer of your dresser underneath the sweatshirt that my grandmother got me for my birthday is about to burst into the streets.

The coolest thing you can do with technology is stuff that you’re not supposed to do with it. I think it’s safe to say that Steve Jobs probably didn’t have this in mind when he unleashed this product on an unsuspecting public. After millions of years of evolution we’ve finally reached the apex: the ability to watch a 30-minute porno while riding the bus to work. So enjoy. But please, not when you’re anywhere near me, degenerate.

Kenny Hotz and Spencer Rice have been getting a lot of attention lately. And rightfully so, their show that airs in a timeslot known as “after Trailer Park Boys” is quickly becoming known in its own right and is winning audiences in Canada and around the world. Kenny vs Spenny is a reality television show with a simple premise: Spenny, a neurotic nice guy, and Kenny, an arrogant asshole, compete in mundane competitions. The winner of the challenge gets to pick a humiliation that the loser must perform. For example, on the “Who is Funnier?” episode the winners were going to be judged based on how well they can do standup. To psyche out his opponent, Kenny sends Spenny a carefully forged letter from the Ministry of Health informing him that one of his former sexual partners has tested HIV positive. Spenny got so depressed he couldn’t finish his stand up routine and Kenny was proclaimed the winner. Spenny is then forced to fellate a cucumber. The end. I had an opportunity to chat with Kenny and Spenny on separate occasions at their homes in Los Angeles and they had a lot of nice things to say about each other.

SPENNY

How do you explain the show’s popularity?
I think the way that Kenny and I’s relationship breaks down in terms of a scumbug versus a “trying to be nice guy,” which is me. I think people relate to one of us. I think it’s funny which always helps. There’s a winner at the end, which I think helps. People love to watch competitions.

How do you come up with the challenges?
We basically come up with ideas that we think would be funny competitions. Otherwise they’d be golf and tennis and those wouldn’t necessarily be funny. We brainstorm on those together and then we separate and decide how we’re going to approach the competition. And then we submit our plans separately to the production and go from there.

Well, what makes you a good victim?
Well a few reasons, I don’t consider myself a victim. I like to see the show as good versus evil. I’m the kind of person who is not going to become like Kenny to win a competition cuz then I’d really be a loser. I have my heroes and the people I admire and the way I wanna live my life and conduct myself and I’m not going to change that. There’s a philosophical truth about our show: cheaters prosper. And I think it’s a sad reality and I’m not going to become a cheater to prosper.

How real is the show? I know a lot of people have become skeptical of reality television.
It’s real. It’s a comedy show too. And that’s where most people might be suspicious because most reality shows aren’t comic driven. The most I can say is that it’s in the interest of comedy for me to remain steadfast in my good guy role. And that works fine for me, as that’s who I’d be anyway. So that’s very real to who I am. Alternatively, I think it’s very good for Kenny to be a scumbag and a liar and a cheat. So we both stick to who we really are. Otherwise, you’d end up with a show where I’d lock myself in a room as soon as the competition started so he couldn’t get to me.

Well did you really believe you were HIV positive for a while?
Yeah. Fuck, yeah.

Maybe I could get you to speak about that for a bit as that seems to be the high point of the season so far.
Well we have all engaged in acts that weren’t as safe as we thought they were. The actual letter I got looked quite legitimate so I didn’t really suspect that it was a hoax. There you go. He always finds a way to fuck me.

How do you go about picking a fitting humiliation?
I’m looking for two things. One, it’s gotta be something he doesn’t want to do. And I’m sure he thinks the same thing. We both try to think of something that’s thematically connected to the show. It’s just embarrassing. As great as it is that you have a TV show you don’t want to do a humiliation, they suck. When you’re actually doing it, it just sucks. Because Kenny is much more in your face and gregarious I have to really think of things that he’s going to hate doing. Because his whole thing is he doesn’t like it when I win because I get more airtime. Which is a pretty ridiculous way of thinking about it.

KENNY

How has being after the Trailer Park Boys been? It’s been a big boost for you guys?
I think it’s a big boost for those guys.

Aren’t you a smart ass.
I’d be happy being on fucking al-Jazeera. Honestly, no shit, Showcase is Canada’s HBO. They’re the best broadcaster in Canada. Trailer Park Boys? It’s one of the biggest shows. It’s our audience, but I think we have a pretty broad audience. Old ladies are watching the show and really young girls too.

Really young girls huh?
REALLY young pubescent hotties.

Okay, well what makes Spenny such a great mark for you to be a bastard to?
Spenny is a stressed out, lanky, neurotic, pedophile who’s honest, he’s a moralist, he’s an adult, he’s everything that we all hate. He’s your principal. He’s the uncle that molested you. He’s your asshole camp counsellor. And he’s that bitchy girl who wouldn’t let you take her to the prom. He’s all of that rolled up into one.

Well what makes you such a good bad guy?
Because I get so much pleasure out of his pain. You know, I love to destroy him and I love entertaining my audience. For me, the show is really Kenny vs Kenny. I try to out do myself diabolically every episode. Spenny’s secondary. He doesn’t even matter to me it’s just like ‘what can I do to blow people’s fucking minds?’ and ‘ how can I up the ante within my own game play?’

Well how do you top your self after tricking Spenny into believing he was HIV positive?
Hmmm. Maybe burying him alive.

You’d have to drug him.
Honestly, tricking Spenny into believing he’s HIV positive is 10% of what I’m capable of doing. I’m scared to top it cuz if Spenny quits, the show is over. I have to be careful as his mind is very fragile. So I can’t break his psyche. It’s like skating on thin ice. I gotta be very careful.

How do you think the viewers perceive you? Are you more popular?
Totally. Chicks dig me cuz I’m the bad guy. But I’m not really bad. The first episode or two you root for Spenny and you’re all “Oh Kenny, he’s a bastard.” After watching a few episodes you realize I’m the good guy and Spenny is the psychopath. What are his good traits? Neurosis? Paranoia? These aren’t good traits. Good traits are enjoying life, being a cordial fun loving person, having fun, being cool, being hip. That’s me. I won the likeability factor on this show.

You’ve got a background in documentary film making, so you know that merely putting a camera in front of someone affects their behavior. So how real is this show?
Well there are two shows. One’s a voyeuristic look at this dysfunctional guy Spenny. That’s true, real, cinema verite documentary. Me? My stuff’s hammed up. I gotta create comedy out of nothing. Spenny is funny because he reacts to what I do to him. That’s natural. Spenny is real. Me, I gotta prepare things. Not that it’s fake but I ham it up on camera .I do my shtick to make people laugh.

Have you folks got a third season in mind?
Yeah, it’s 99% gonna happen. I’m hoping they’re going to let me do “who can do more acid?”

I understand you’ve been writing episodes of South Park.
Yeah.

How has that been for you?
Fucking wicked. I see our shows and Matt and Trey are very similar to us. There are very few shows in the world that are viral and go around. We’re in this group of shows that has this very cool cultish audience. South Park was unbelievably wicked for me to get the credit and sit in a room working with those guys. But the reality of it is, I’m not a staff writer, I’m not an employee. I want my own South Park. I can’t work for anybody. It was my first job ever and you know what? I was bouncing off the walls. I think they’re fucking geniuses and they’re the only show in the world that does not need my help.

Kenny Vs Spenny website

Your brain says, “Oh, it’s getting late you should go to bed.”

Then the lonely little spider that is trying to build a home and has just connected his first strand of silk between your shoulder and earlobe whispers, “let’s do one more episode. Your body can take it, you don’t have to work tomorrow, and don’t you want to see what happens next?”

This all happened when I was watching the first season of 24 on DVD. I’d never seen the show but I had heard great things. I know it’s in its fourth season but I’m about three years behind society when it comes to what’s on TV. That’s not meant to be some pretentious raising-my-nose at low culture jab. As far as I’m concerned, the lower the better. The reason I hadn’t seen 24 is because I was too busy watching dudes competitively break dancing head to head where the winner is selected by an applause-o-meter or dudes competitively jumping around on trampolines to try and slam dunk a basketball.

So I’m watching the first season of 24 and there’s a terrorist plot to kill the would-be president. I have no idea what happens in season two, three and four but I’m guessing terrorist plots to waste the president are a recurring theme. Through a long and complicated series of events, Kiefer Sutherland has a thing in his ear where the terrorists are giving him instructions to assist in the assassination of David Palmer, the man who could become the first black president. If he doesn’t help waste the guy, Kiefer’s family, whom the terrorists are holding hostage, will get shot in the head. I get kind of bored if someone is whining about something and it takes more than 10 seconds for them to explain and me to comprehend. I bet Kiefer Sutherland would get a lot more sympathy from his coworkers if he showed up at work with a black eye and told them that someone punched him in the face than if he told the whole “A terrorist organization is holding my family hostage in an attempt to exploit my security clearance that allows me to get near this guy who could be president with a firearm. Oh yeah, and I think there are moles at my work who might be involved” story.

So I’m watching this highly complicated but totally believable scenario unfold and I scream at my TV: “Fuck your personal life CTU special agent Kiefer Sutherland, just save David Palmer’s life!” It’s when I found myself yelling this at my television that I realized it was time to quit this minimum wage night job I was working at for some time for two reasons. 1) Shift work prevents me from being able to watch more 24. 2) I didn’t want to be like Kiefer. Although he is dreamy and can kill with his bare hands his job destroys his personal life and his relationships with the people around him. If I wrote 24, the show would be a lot less engaging but Kiefer and all the people around him would be a lot happier. In my version of 24 Kiefer would have been all “screw this guy. Jobs aren’t that hard to get. You’re on your own David Palmer. I’m off to go spend time with my family and friends.” If television can bring me to a noble truth such as that, I think we can all safely dismiss the pretentious notion that if something is meant for mass consumption or is, God forbid, popular it’s devoid of any merit. Man, I can’t wait to rent the second season.