Generation Crap

Since I watch TV, the advertisements for "Jacobs Kaffee" (a traditional German coffee brand that is now part of Kraft Foods) have always been a reason to switch channels. I still remember the extremely corny spots for their main brand "Jacobs Krönung" (coronation) from the 1970s through the 1990s - the only thing that used to change were the hairdos and the table decorations of ecstatic coffee-drinkers.

Of course, in recent years the brand tried to refresh its "granny-image" by telling mini-stories involving teenagers and semi-risque sujets without alienating their older clientele.
Some of these clips were as horrible as the idea sounds in the first place. But last year this very funny and clever ad began to air and now -after a brief pause- it´s back again.

It´s about an "intimate" moment shared between a grey-haired but still sort-of-young grandmother and her nice, but thinly characterized grand-daughter.

Below the clip is a word for word translation of their conversation as it might be in English - if people who don´t know youth-talk would have written the script:

Girl: "Wow, granny, the concert was like totally rad! - We totally danced in the mud! In the MUD!!! - My clothes are like, totally ruined now."
(They both smell the coffee and granny remembers)
Granny: "I used to go to a rock-concert too. ´67 Hendrix!"
Girl: "You?! At a rock-concert???"
Granny: "Yeah. We´d also dance in the mud, but my clothes weren´t ruined."
Girl: "Why not?"
Granny: "WE DIDN`T WEAR ANY!

Perfect! Although I doubt that this ad will pull the kids out of Starfuxxs to buy Jacobs pads for their Senseo-machines, it most certainly tries to cater to people of my age. You know, the ones in between, who are too old to see dancing in the mud as anything funny and cool, but still too young to get nostalgic over a past that has turned into a sad cliché.

"It must have been art, but it´s over now"

Since I am not "on the market" for a very long time, I am not exactly up-to-date with all the dating- and hook-up sites that are out there.
In the summer I came across this astonishingly bizarre collection of mostly German exhibits which were handpicked from the net.

A few weeks later I was re-blogged (on a different subject) by Justinspace who has actually published a book about this very subject. His Obscene Interiors gracefully whites out all the pictured cave dwellers. This way, the pictures look more like unpaid Diane Arbus photographs. Interestingly, the white outlines of the erased subjects are still giving away a lot about the person without distracting too much from the interiors.


All in all the shocks in "Obscene Interiors" are mild compared to the next purveyor of interior decline: Lurid Digs!


Be warned before you click on the link: This website goes to places where you hopefully never have to go yourself! There is nothing hidden or pixelled. If you have a job that doesn´t have you sitting all alone with your back to the wall in a basement room, you probably shouldn´t go there during office hours.

The pics I chose to show here are actually the only ones that appear to be relatively harmless (minus one). Some of the others will have you rolling and gagging on the floor (like this one):

Watch closely if you can. The devil is in the details (and Detail dons a ratty blond wig)

Each picture is cleverly discussed by the staff and tagged with great titles. A bunch of regulars add some funny and bitchy comments. But where to start with material like this?

The camouflage couch. Click to see it


This one is really interesting! The colour, the motive, the strangeness. Many of the commenters are wondering if the room is in America or in Europe. My first association was the "Bowman room" from "2001" and two comments share this idea. One even claims its from the perspective of the monolith!


Of course it is a bit questionable to re-distribute these pictures without blurring (at least) the faces, even if the owner put them up on a hook-up site in the first place. I am also against "watermarking" pictures which are not your own and posting them on a clearly commercial site. But anyway you look at it: Some of these photos are the funniest you might have seen and they are an amazing display of life, honesty, loneliness and horniness.

The kitchen floor

Somehow I had these two songs in my head today which both had its protagonists lying and/or crying on the kitchen floor.

One is the prophetic You know I´m no good by Amy Winehouse. Her kitchen drama, which is also depicted as the closing scene of the video states:
"There´ll be none of him no more
I cry for you on the kitchen floor."
Shortly after we see her cowering with her back against the sink and later curling up in fetal position with a drink as her only friend. And all this on the kitchen floor.

The other, heartbreaking kitchen-floor moment that somehow sneaked into my mind is the climax of "Heart" by Stars. This very Prefab-Sprout-like popdrama has its self-delusional singer reclining with the words:

"You get back on the latest flight to paradise.
I found out from a note taped to the door.
I think I saw your airplane in the sky tonight
through my window lying on the kitchen floor."

I am pretty sure there are many more referrences to the mundane use of kitchen floors (and kitchens in itself) in pop-history. After all it seems that, besides finding moldy pieces of potato peels in unreachable places, the kitchen-floor is Pop-Esperanto for self-pity, inward reflection and heartache combined with early states of delirium tremens.

Photo "Untitled (lying on kitchen floor)", 1976 by Laurie Simmons

Typical German Lunch