I don't review anything - I moan. And by god, do I have to moan about this. Yesterday Friday Sometime, I went to see Hunger Games, and what a complete waste of my time and capital it was. Colossally boring, plot somewhere between Twilight and Star Wars, appeal of All the Pretty Horses. I vowed at some point earlier in my life, never to pay again for bad movies. And there was I, next to a couple who could have done with a private room, with a partial hangover, watching flawless Americans and one Australian run through a forest. Plus Donald Sutherland, who is neither British nor American, but sort of Canadian, and then again not.
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| Boots, the mother of vouchering |
No I don't review. Unless it's absolutely necessary. Recently, I haven't seen that much, there weren't just any free tickets - my new obsession - and I was writing essays, so culturally, it was bleak. Much like the weather at the moment, an appalling mix of rain and wind, with a little hail thrown in, and that's just lunch hour. But I return to my newest obsession that is oh so very pas chic, and oh so very unsexy. Vouchering. I had to adapt this from the American 'Couponing', which sounds a little bit like an actual activity, whereas vouchering sounds like something your 65 year-old neighbour does on a rainy Sunday afternoon. In reality (that is this weird space-time thing outside the matrix), I am searching for vouchers and freebies on a rainy Sunday afternoon, to find a different way of financing my life, once I graduate into unemployment. The very addictive source of this obsession is a television show that came only recently to my attention,
Extreme Couponing, a TLC outcome, posted on Facebook by a Maple syrup-country national that you, dear inexistent reader, better not try. It is instantly addictive. Like heroin. The show follows overweight and overanxious, but underfucked Americans in their daily life as unemployed couponers, who spend up to 60 hours of their lives clipping coupons to buy 77 bottles of mustard they don't eat, or simply store in their epic larders, that are infinitely better stocked than the corner shop around the, errr, corner. Stocking up on nappies when you don't have any children, stocking up on 1000 tubes of toothpaste, when you already have about 5000 at home. Or stocking up on 67 packets of cream cheese, when any human being, no matter how much they love cream cheese, cannot eat more than one a week. At most. But they freeze well, apparently. Only they can't freeze them because there is no space in their freezers, (note the s), because they've buries a whole cow there. 12 pound of steak. 12 POUND of steak. and that is just the steak. Pizzas and other varieties of frozen food are 'a staple of the extreme couponer' because they last forever. The most appalling part of the show is that nobody seems to want to decrease their stockpile, i.e. eat all that shit, and use the toilet paper and the 1000 disposable razors. No - they all just continue buying the stuff, until their toddler has to sleep in toilet paper and kitchen towels, because there is no other space. I wonder whether this phenomenon would catch on in the UK, since the consumers here have a tendency to, hmmm, not voucher. Even the nectar cards, or their Tesco equivalent are not that popular because it takes an effort to use it, and effort is not something people like to put into their weekly shop. I include myself. I think that efficiency is key in London shopping. Rarely do I see people handing over their 4000 vouchers after a gruelling 3 hours at the till, to then break the till and make the poor Tesco guy call his manager to fix the problem. At my local supermarket, one of the cashiers is so effective that she doesn't even bother with the formalities: no look at the customer, no hi, no goodbye, no thanks - she is the epitome of the fuzz-free shopping (some people call her rude, but I see beyond that, I think she must have seen
Extreme Couponing).
So how come that in the land of the triple pasteurised, filtered and plasticised cheese, people prefer to spend time cutting out stuff in the paper, than earning money with whatever skills coupon-cutting involves? Is this the American dream? Has the coupon trend replaced the dishwasher-to-millionaire story, where anybody could raise to have as much money as they'd wished to, as long as they put enough effort and dedication into it? Or is this just part of the growing addiction or obsession, at the very least, with shopping, the compulsion to substitute meaningless lives with consumer goods and the accumulation thereof? I don't really like to quote here, so I don't, but it does remind me of the theories of two grumpy, dead Germans, who wrote in a German town not too far from where I come from. And of course of various very grumpy, bald French people.
The real sadness of the program lies in the portrayal of the subjects, who are almost invariably portrayed as the heroes of the show; it is a glorification of the compulsive tendencies of these people, for the entertainment of the viewer. In an episode where little more happens that people buying groceries, real time is so minced and patched together that reel time appears as an action-packed 10-minute trip to the supermarket. However, these people spend 6 hours or more in the supermarket, and to do this, you must be desperate or very lonely. Otherwise, could or would you want to spend 6 hours pushing a trolley around in a cold supermarket, on an almost daily basis?
