There are points in any life when people burrow. I know I’m in one when I’m reading almost nothing but essays about art with murder mysteries on my I-Pod, the latter to guarantee that as I engage in humdrum tasks, the voice in my head is not my own.
I surfaced into a (slightly) larger world this weekend when I looked up an old friend online and found her writing for Dwell. I don’t care about Dwell, which appears to be fetishistic about the finer points of gracious living, but I do care about leads. My friend, Deborah Baldwin, writes them as well as anybody.
Here she is on getting fired:
When someone gets fired from a French kitchen, the chef de cuisine says simply, “Take your knives.” To a chef, the knife is like an extra appendage, and its dismissal cuts deeper than the standard American “It’s just not working out.”
And on the lost pleasure of coffee shops:
I love coffee. It’s coffee shops I have a problem with. Whenever someone suggests we “grab coffee and catch up,” I instinctively shudder and suggest instead a nice cocktail or root canal.
Once havens for intellectual inquiry and quiet perusal of newspapers, coffee shops are now basically retail outlets and free office space.
Nursing a cappuccino the other day, I observed a frantic businessman conducting a conference call on speakerphone, a woman toting a hysterically yapping Labradoodle, and two frosty socialites loudly debating the relative appeal of the spray-on tan. Kerouac would never have got anything done.
As in art, it’s not the tale but the teller.
Update: Even though the Deborah Baldwin I know writes about food and wry lifestyle, I’m quoting another Deborah Baldwin. Everything’s accurate about this post, except that I don’t know this Deborah Baldwin from Adam. Or Eve.
Thank you for including Deborah Baldwin’s notes on the lost pleasures of coffee shops. This quote really got me thinking: “Once havens for intellectual inquiry and quiet perusal of newspapers, coffee shops are now basically retail outlets and free office space.”
I do think the issue is more complicated, however. The office is becoming less necessary; more people are working remotely. There’s still a need for “co-workers,” or just other people around who are working or reading. The up side of this new coffeeshop-turned-office is that as a freelancer, you can meet a wide variety of people who you otherwise wouldn’t run into at the office. When I was freelancing, I went to my neighborhood coffee shop everyday; I met a developer for Motorola, a fiction writer, a green architecture advocate, and university students. It’s true that coffee shops aren’t what they used to be, but that doesn’t mean they’ve turned into spaces devoid of any meaningful conversations or ideas.
Which brings me to the question: If coffee shops were the bastion of intellectual knowledge exchange, where do all these intellectuals go now to converse? They’re still around, but they’re navigating a fragmented landscape. They’re still at the coffee shops, at bars, same places–there’s just a different variety of people surrounding them.
The beatnik-era coffeeshop is over, but intellectuals will always find spaces to exchange ideas.
That new space has expanded to include blogs like this one, and social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter.
I’m worried that your readers may mix up with the person who wrote those great ledes. The real Deborah Baldwin (that’s me, right?) wrote an essay for Dwell on fondue pots: http://www.dwell.com/articles/fond-of-you.html. For my more recent ruminations, check out This Old House magazine and one of its blogs, the Hardware Aisle: http://hardwareaisle.thisoldhouse.com/
Cheers,
D.B.