Confessions of a Coffee Snob

This is my beautiful latte from Star Lounge on Chicago Avenue. They serve Dark Matter Coffee which they roast themselves at their small facility on the West side of the city (right by my apartment!).

Living in Chicago has launched my coffee snobbery into the stratosphere. And I have no shame about that. 

Alright, sometimes I'm a little ashamed. 

I feel bad bugging the servers in all the restaurants about where they get their coffee beans. But I'm curious. And I know what I like. When we live in a city that has no fewer than five local coffee roasters, why would you get your coffee beans shipped in from anywhere else? It only makes sense to support your local economy and get the freshest product available for your customers.

I recently had some family come to stay with me and while we were downtown, we happened upon this little bakery on State Street. Their sign said "Magnolia Bakery, New York City" so, naturally, they got their coffee beans from the Big Apple. While I understand that they are going for a theme, here, I still walked the block and a half to Intelligentsia to get my local Chicago coffee fix. Partly because I know that I love their product, and partly because their storefront at Randolph and Wabash is so hip it hurts.

There are a few other local roasters that I have yet to explore:

Big Shoulders

A new, no-nonsense roaster in the River West neighborhood as of June 2012

Passion House

Another new roaster that popped up this spring. They don't have a storefront, but have made their way into many local cafes and bakeries already.

Ipsento 

Local cafe and small roaster on N. Western Ave. that has been around for a while but I have yet to become acquainted with.

Before your write me off as irredeemable, there's an exception to my coffee snobbery! 

Dive diners. They get a free pass.

I still have a special place in my heart for crappy diner coffee. It really doesn't matter where those beans come from, they always tend to taste like they've been filtered twice through an old gym sock. And that's the way I like it. It makes me feel connected to the generations of impoverished artists and travelers who have gone before me.

Hats Off to Love

Generally I have felt fairly neutral about Valentine's Day. As a child I had a strong aversion to the color pink (even at a young age I felt that "girls like pink" was sexist and unfair. My favorite color was blue. I would now say that it's purple. Maybe this means I'm learning about compromise). However, I had a strong attraction to sugary treats. So this particular holiday was pretty much a toss-up.

Then jr. high and high school came along and we were no longer required to send Valentine's to every kid in class. So it turned into a numbers game. A stressful sort of contest to see who was the most adored and who was the most avoided. And I think that stinks.

Now, navigating holidays as adults, the beast of capitalism can tend to have the same effect on our hearts as a high school hallway. We feel pressure to put forth extravagant displays of love, or feel inadequate or slighted if we do not receive any such displays. Valentine's Day has a way of saying that "alone" is synonymous with "lonely." And that's just nonsense.

This year I am making it a point to broaden the focus of Valentine's Day. I believe it should simply be a celebration of love. Family, friends, significant others--even ourselves! Why shouldn't we use today as a reminder to love ourselves and be less critical? It is a day to acknowledge the affection we should feel toward all humankind simply because we are all ambling through this life together.

(A card that I made and liked quite a bit. It's for you! Yes, all of you. :) )

To avoid sounding any more like an episode of Mr. Rogers than I already do, I am going to leave you with a poem--because I am also infusing this Valentine's Day with as much poetry as I can manage. Poetry, much more than flowers, jewelry, and well-planned dinner reservations, tries to get at the real stuff of love. The intangibles that we can't slice with a knife and fork or watch wither on our kitchen tables.

This particular poem so beautifully expresses my love of humanity. I hope you all feel hugged.

To A Stranger

by Walt Whitman

Passing stranger! you do not know

How longingly I look upon you,

You must be he I was seeking,

Or she I was seeking

(It comes to me as a dream)

I have somewhere surely

Lived a life of joy with you,

All is recall'd as we flit by each other,

Fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me,

Were a boy or a girl with me,

I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become

not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes,

face, flesh as we pass,

You take of my beard, breast, hands,

in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you

when I sit alone or wake at night, alone

I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again

I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Some Thoughts on Mediocre Literature

So, I just finished reading The Bridges of Madison County (don't judge me) because I read it in high school and have been thinking about it a lot and remembered it fondly. So, a couple weeks ago I meandered around the thrift store where I found at least 3 copies of it. (Don't worry, I only bought one) And a few days ago, I read the entire thing in 4 hours. I was hoping that reading something so small would kick-start my need to read. And it has. Because I refuse for the most recent book that I have read to be this one. I need some good literature! My thirst has been awakened!

It was so interesting reading this because it's been a long time since I've read anything this...easy. He rarely uses uncommon vocab--every few pages. And when he does, it feels like he's adding it for intelligence factor. And he seems to have his characters occasionally explain away inconsistencies in his descriptions of them. Or uses their speech and their correspondences to spell things out that he either couldn't figure out how to accomplish subtly, or believes would be lost on a mass audience with lack of knowledge of subtlety.

He had the main guy (photographer, Robert Kincaid) express his artistic frustrations to the main woman (farm wife, Francesca Johnson) saying "mass markets are designed to suit average tastes." And I find it hilariously ironic since that's pretty much what this book is. I wonder if that was his little aside to the audience saying "I really can do better, but I knew this would sell." Or if he just had no idea what mediocrity he had accomplished.

There's a description of Francesca watching Kincaid and noticing the care he took w/his camera equipment and how everything had its place. And later, Kincaid goes on a little rant about the state of the country and how everything is getting too organized for him and that he's one of the last cowboys and then makes some comment like "well, my camera equipment is pretty well organized, I admit, but I'm talking about something more than that." Cheesy! Lazy!

And just when I thought my rage had subsided, and I was prepared to face the end of the story...

At the end, Francesca leaves a letter that her children find when she's dead (sorry, spoiler, I know you're going to rush right out and read it lol). Here are my problems with this letter:

1) It is WAY more sexually descriptive/ revealing than a mother (especially this particular character he attempted to sculpt) would be with her children.

2) It is a serious guilt trip. She tells the kids that if it hadn't been for them and their father, she would have run off with this man that she was so desperately in love with. Then tries to make it all better by saying if it hadn't been for her tryst with him, she couldn't have stayed on the farm all these years because "in four days, he gave me a lifetime, a universe, and made the separate parts of me into a whole." And then snatches back any good feelings they might have had by saying that she's not sure she made the right choice and maybe she should have gone off with him. And the letter closes with "I hope you understand and don't think ill of me. If you love me, then you must love what I have done."

Um, no they musn't! I mean, I really don't think I have a problem with what she did in a romantic, personal fulfillment sense. But that is some serious bullshit to write to your kids. Even if they are 30 or 40 or whatever age at this point.

3) It is painfully didactic and repetitive. She recounts (often nearly verbatim) the events of the entire story we just read. And acts as a vehicle for the author to make sure we know precisely what the word "peregrine" means. Which was part of his one line that he had the main character say that was sickeningly sentimental and a blatant, desperate attempt for his book to become quotable. So, I'll make his dreams come true as I share this line with you:

Francesca has just finished whispering to him that she is in awe of his sheer emotional and physical power. He responds:

"I am the highway and a peregrine and all the sails that ever went to sea."

This could almost be poetic and beautiful if it weren't so reeeeaaaching! And if the character had the cojones to support a line like that. It is my assertion that he does not. The author went to great lengths to make sure we knew that Kincaid named his truck, Harry. I don't think the guy who names his truck Harry is the picture of peregrine.

In the letter to her kids at the end, she quotes the aforementioned line from him (so as not to let the readers forget its obvious quotability) and proceeds to write:

"I checked the dictionary later. The first thing people think of when they hear the word 'peregrine' is a falcon. But there are other meanings of the word, and he would have been aware of that. One is 'foreigner, alien.' A second is 'roving or wandering, migratory.' The Latin peregrinus, which is one root of the word, means a stranger. He was all of those things--a stranger, a foreigner in the more general sense of the word, a wanderer, and he also was falconlike, now that I think of it."

Um, no Robert James Waller. You don't just get to do that. That is dirty rotten cheating and I can tell! What a lazy and moronic way to get that information across! If you want your readers to know synonyms, you need to find a more inventive way to share them.

AND in the dialogue after they read the letter, the daughter gives ANOTHER mini-summary (you know, because apparently his audience is a tree full of monkeys who have no idea how to follow plot, let alone read between the lines) and concludes with "God, we're so innocent and immature compared to her." Seriously, Waller?

I guess it must have impressed me in high school because I thought it was sexy and scandalous? Who knows... I'm not sure how this got made into a movie, and I have never seen it, but I can assure you that the character Waller penned is not half as strong as Clint Eastwood, the man who portrayed him in the film.

Phew! Ok, I'm done now. I will leave you with one of the few moments that I found authentically beautiful. Waller interviewed an old Jazz musician in the Seattle area in order to learn more about Kincaid, who he claims is a real person. And though some of the interview sounds like Waller made it up, I'm giving credit to the musician for this line:

"He cried big tears, the kind it takes an old man to cry, the kind it takes a saxophone to play."