Images that Make Me Want to Cry: 3 – Great Coffee, Great Friends
Look, we all hate ourselves. You. Me. The postman. The elderly woman you sat beside on the bus this morning. We all sob ourselves to fitful sleep (wallowing in our pits of self-loathing). And no wonder. Life is brutish, short and (mostly) boring. If you don't hate yourself you're a cloddish moron. Or a robot.
But advertising – that great omnipresent, satanic force – hardly helps. It knows we're down. It counts on and thrives on it. While we lie groaning in the gutter trying (desperately) to have a peak at distant stars, advertising's gaping, squatting, spangled arse obscures our vision.
It obscures it with images of shiny demigods, aglow with their own self-love. Livin' & lovin' life in sun-drenched IKEA apartments. Always up to kooky antics. Roller-blading indoors! Bouncing impishly on their beds! Pillow fights! DJs in the corner!! They're making the most of now. 24/7.
While the below couple are not quite as achingly hip, they're certainly no less odious (or shiny).
She? Default, middle-of-the-road dazzler. He? Wearing the open-necked blue shirt uniform of (conservative) youthful-ish affluence. Slacks and deck shoes unseen but implied.
A hard copy of the image was "liberated" (by me) from a coffee shop in the University of Limerick. Every table had (and continues to have) one – staring the assembled punters in the face and helpfully decoding the true meaning of the coffee-drinking experience for them. It's about friends,,,and life…and love…and coffee…or something.
Yet, on the face of it, nothing concrete or specific is being advertised here. It's not pushing a particular brand. It's not promoting a particular restaurant. It's selling some sort of abstract aspirational dream. A vision of a world chock full of smug, self-satisfied, "successful" cunts.
Has the global financial apocalypse softened their coughs or dampened their self-regard? Not a bit of it. They've simply popped on pairs of wellies, started growing their own organic veg, and lent their shiny faces to ads (disingenuously) pushing nouveau-frugal consumerism. If anything, they're more in love with themselves than before. And now they've seized the moral high ground, we – who sit scratching out holes, scarfing down Taytos, and wanking furiously in a bid to temporarily escape the dull awfulness of life – are made to feel shitter than ever.
September 26, 2009
10 responses to Images that Make Me Want to Cry: 3 – Great Coffee, Great Friends
To me, it looks like they’re eyeing the out-of-focus guy up for a threesome, and I can’t tell which of them is more excited about it. Maybe that’s why they chose “great friends” – the ASA shot down “Dogging? Poppers and Coffee.”
It looks to me like their “friend” with the back of his “business cut” haircut to camera has just sold them some financial planning advice.
Now they’re relaxing with some fair trade organic.
Hey, I resent this. I’m the guy in the blue shirt & I assure you that my life is nothing less than a rollercoaster of bland perfection.
And so is my wife.
Once upon a time, going into a coffee shop meant having a conversation with Dr Samuel Johnson. Nowadays it means having to talk with these tossers.
‘Sir, when a man is tired of Starbucks he is tired of life,’ (raises revolver to forehead).
The guy in the foreground does (blurrily) appear somewhat enigmatic. Or, as suggested, a (rather less enigmatic) seller of “financial planning advice”.
Don’t dare dis this trio, if it weren’t for them I wouldn’t be able to enjoy the true meaning of what it is to have a cup of coffee
Blurry man is probably telling the other two ” You will now find that you can’t stop smiling. I’m afraid that I laced your coffee with strychnine. Have a nice day.’
It actually looks like they’re on a different table to the blurry man altogether, and are smugly laughing at him behind his back. Or right in front of his face, the bastards.
I haven’t mentioned Vodafone, who are serial offenders in this area. I can’t (though I’ve tried really hard)) shake an image from one of their puke-inducing campaigns. A “quirky”-lookin’ guy lies back on a sun-drenched bed. Two lady friends cheekily apply make-up to him. Laughing uproariously. They may also – in Spice Girls-esque feisty “attitude” mode – be punching the camera. I can’t (and won’t) remember.
Needless to say, after seeing it I instantly went out and bought a shitload of phones and 10,000 Euro of credit.
I am so robbing ‘noveau-frugal consumerism’
Let’s do coffee sometime.