Tea with Larry...

It's a no-news Saturday, the day after the day after Christmas.

"'Hookahs and music were banned from the beginning, said Yahia Naeme, the owner of the cafe..."

"... who said the ban had lost him business because many people used to come to his cafe specifically to smoke hookahs. 'If we can’t offer it, they’ll get bored and go elsewhere,' he said. Other cafes in Idlib have skirted the law by offering hookahs in speakeasy-type environments behind closed doors. But Mr. Naeme did not want to risk running afoul of the area’s rulers...."

From "Cafes Can’t Play Music, but the Water Taps Work: Life Under Syria’s Rebels/The Islamists who now lead Syria have ruled the city of Idlib for years. Residents say they imposed some strict laws, but also heeded some complaints and improved public services" (NYT).

At the Bookstore Café...

... you can talk all afternoon.

Bonus points if you can identify this excellent place.

"'F*** the rich. F*** the police. F*** the state. F*** the colonial death camp we call 'Canada.'"

Wrote Gabriel Sims-Fewer, owner of pay-whatever-you-want café, The Anarchist, quoted in "Go woke, go broke: Toronto 'anti-capitalist' anarchist café where customers 'pay what you can' shutters after a year after failing to make enough money. Owner slammed cops as 'pigs' and late Queen as a 'parasite'/The Anarchist in Toronto, Canada has shuddered after a year in business/The cafe had a 'pay what you can' model and was 'anti-capitalist/Shop's owner cited 'lack of generational wealth/capital seed' as the reason" (Daily Mail).

I love the notion that the café had such depth of feeling that it "shuddered." When capitalist-pig owned places go out of business, they merely shutter.

That's the only reason I'm blogging that too-predictable news. Well, that and the fascinating phrase "the colonial death camp we call 'Canada.'" Canada normally flies under the radar, following the strategy of inconspicuousness that works all too well in this crazy world.

10 days ago on this blog, we looked at the question "Why wouldn't most people decide the best way to live is to be as inconspicuous as possible?" 

Do pay attention to inconspicuous things. And when you see them, don't be afraid to offset their inconspicuousness by using hyperbole. Phrases like "the colonial death camp we call 'Canada'" can help people think more deeply about things.

Or would you rather bray at obvious things like the way pay-whatever-you-want cafés go out of business?

"It feels gross that someone could say to a computer, 'I want a portrait of Alex Jones in the style of Frida Kahlo'..."

"... and the computer would do it without moral judgment. These systems roll scenes, territories, cultures—things people thought of as 'theirs,' 'their living,' and 'their craft'—into a 4-gigabyte, open source tarball that you can download onto a Mac in order to make a baseball-playing penguin in the style of Hayao Miyazaki. The people who can use the new tools will have new power. The people who were great at the old tools (paintbrushes, cameras, Adobe Illustrator) will be thanked for their service and rendered into Soylent. It’s as if a guy wearing Allbirds has stumbled into a residential neighborhood where everyone is just barely holding on and says, 'I love this place, it’s so quirky! Siri, play my Quirky playlist. And open a Blue Bottle on the corner!'... Prominent bloggers who experimented with having an AI illustrate their writing have been chastened on Twitter and have promised not to do it again. AI companies are talking a lot about ethics, which always makes me suspicious, and certain words are banned from the image generator’s interface, which is sad because I wanted to ask the bot to paint a 'busty' cottage in the style of Thomas Kinkade...."

 Writes Paul Ford in "Dear Artists: Do Not Fear AI Image Generators /True, new systems devalue craft, shift power, and wreck cultures and scenes. But didn’t the piano do that to the harpsichord?" (Wired).

A Blue Bottle is this type of coffee shop — spookily corporately minimalistic. In their own insanely empty words:

Our cafes are designed to be spaces that pair with your coffee. Just like any food or scent, the aesthetics around you should heighten your experience. Whether you’re gathering with friends or searching for solitude, stepping into a Blue Bottle cafe turns each coffee into a meaningful moment.

I was wondering which blogger used AI to "illustrate their writing" and got "chastened on Twitter" — chastened on Twitter, there's a category of pain for you to contemplate — so I did a Google search. And look. I didn't find what I was looking for, but I had to laugh:

"Bob, he's a genius. He's like Picasso. He sees the angles and planes in what, for you, is ovoid."

I wrote, discussing Bob Dylan's analysis of "Gypsies, Tramps & Thieves." 

And then I saw something my son Chris sent me from across the sea, from the coast of Barcelona — a photo:

Are the baristas trying to clear this café?

I love Frank Sinatra, but it's been Frank Sinatra since I sat down — with a brief assist from Nancy Sinatra — and not only are the songs repeating — I'm coming flying with him again and we've already been to Peru — but when "My Way" came on again, they cranked up the volume.

"One man brought in his own box of Cinnamon Toast Crunch, a carton of milk and some Entenmann’s mini crumb cakes before passing out face down on a table."

"Afterward, he rolled spliffs as nearby, paying customers tried to enjoy their lattes and Frappuccinos. A mentally disturbed man in a black trench coat talked to himself and screamed obscenities at the communal mirror near the bathrooms for 30 minutes. 'There’s a guy over by the bathrooms making people really uncomfortable,' one customer told an employee behind the counter."

From "'Woke' NYC Starbucks now a haven for junkies, drunks and homeless" (NY Post).

"The Trump faithful also accused us of trying to get rich on our Never Trump status. Yes, the founders of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project are now taking in lots of donations..."

"... but that was after burning personal and financial bridges to the Republican Party that sustained them and built their handsome homes over the years. (For the record, I have received zero compensation for my association with the Lincoln Project, but I hope the owners of the organization get plenty rich. They’ve earned it.) For most of us, media appearances came only with a ride to the studio and free coffee. (At 30 Rock in New York, at least it was Starbucks.)... If we’d been in it for our own enrichment, we’d have made the smart play and signed on with Trump, because that’s where the money was right from the start.... Now that it looks like Trump is headed for defeat, some Republicans feel safe to criticize him again. But courage exercised only when the coast is clear is not courage; it is opportunism...." 

From "My Never Trump Elegy/Courage exercised only when the coast is clear is not courage; it is opportunism" by  Tom Nichols (The Atlantic).

How is it that NYC is supposed to be the greatest city in the world, but people there say "at least it was Starbucks"? In Madison, you'd never say that. It would be more like "The other cafés were closed so I was stuck going to Starbucks. Sorry. Had to do it...."

As for the Never Trumpers... did they do it for their own self-interest? 

At the Curbside Pickup Café...

... you can leave your drive-by comments.

"The feelings that hurt most, the emotions that sting most, are those that are absurd - The longing for impossible things, precisely because..."

"... they are impossible; nostalgia for what never was; the desire for what could have been; regret over not being someone else; dissatisfaction with the world’s existence. All these half-tones of the soul’s consciousness create in us a painful landscape, an eternal sunset of what we are."

Wrote Fernando Pessoa, the Portuguese poet.

Here's a statue of him at a café in Lisbon — seated, with his own table, like another customer.


cc — Nol Aders

A fascinating character!

Pessoa was a prolific writer, and not only under his own name, for he created approximately seventy-five others, of which three stand out, Alberto Caeiro, Álvaro de Campos and Ricardo Reis. He did not call them pseudonyms because he felt that they did not capture their true independent intellectual life and instead called them heteronyms. These imaginary figures sometimes held unpopular or extreme views....

At the Kind of Buzz Café...

... you can talk all night.

(And let me remind you of the Althouse Portal to Amazon, where you can buy what you might happen to need.)

"One day in early June, Kamala Harris, the junior senator from California, tapped the glass of the bakery case at a Blue Bottle coffee shop on a non-iconic block in Beverly Hills."

"No one seemed to know who she was—another polished professional woman, grabbing an afternoon coffee—which was fine by her. She had chosen the spot, presumably for the anonymity. A few minutes later, her body woman delivered her a cookie: caramel chocolate chip, covered in a light snowfall of flaky salt. As Harris broke off small pieces and popped them in her mouth, we talked about her early life, rummaging through the layers for identifying details. The child of immigrant academics who divorced when she was young—her mother, a cancer researcher, came from India, and her father, an economist, from Jamaica—Harris grew up between Oakland and the Berkeley flats, but also spent time in college towns in the Midwest and a few years in Montreal, where her mother was teaching. 'A very vivid memory of my childhood was the Mayflower truck,' she told me. 'We moved a lot.' She speaks some French. She loves to cook and enjoys dancing, puns. She tells her own story uneasily. 'It’s like extracting stuff from me,' she apologized. 'I’m not good at talking about myself.'"

The inauspicious beginning of "Kamala Harris Makes Her Case/The Presidential candidate has been criticized as a defender of the status quo/Can she prove that she’s a force for change?" by Dana Goodyear (The New Yorker).

Here's my screen shot of one of the 2 Blue Bottle coffee shops in Beverly Hills (from Google Maps):



Where do you go when you want to look like just another polished professional and you want to pop a light snowfall of flaky salt and talk about yourself without talking about yourself?

Did I read the rest of the article? Okay, I'll force myself to skim, but I take that opening to mean that Goodyear got nothing out of her. Let's see...

Harris, who is fifty-four, has a billboard smile, and brown eyes that soften easily but just as readily turn skeptical.

At the Tiny Lawn Café...

... you can run free.

I made it back home from New York City, where I stayed at the Arthouse Hotel... not Althouse, Arthouse.

"Listening bars — cafes with high-end audio equipment, where patrons listen to vinyl records, carefully selected by a bartender, from a record library behind the bar..."

"... have been an institution in Japan since the 1950s. They are a subset of the kissaten, the small and idiosyncratic coffeehouses dotting side-streets in Tokyo. Only recently have several emerged in New York City, Los Angeles and a few other places. Shakily, a culture and a lore are growing, of connoisseurship and grace and obsession. At this early stage, the American listening bar (sometimes called a hi-fi bar) remains a social experiment, because a bar is still generally understood as a place to talk, not listen.... At best, the listening bar raises good questions about whether there might be an unrealized public-listening or group-listening ideal in a ritual as familiar as going out for a drink.... 'Please keep your conversations below the music,' read a small folded card on each table. 'To hear more, say less.' The coffee was good, and the music was fully present but not exactly loud. The vibe felt like a lunar tidal pull in there.... I did not experience the usual American cafe-feeling of needing to be productive. In fact, I wondered whether this represented the best possible use for cafes: a total break in your waking hours. A cleaned window. An open window!"

Writes Ben Ratliff in the NYT.

When you're reading the newspaper and you see something that makes you say, "Hey, I thought that was my idea!"

I'm reading "Rat-infested pop-up bar to open in San Francisco" in the San Francisco Chronicle.

The project comes from the folks behind the San Francisco Dungeon at Fisherman’s Wharf, a haunted house-like venture specializing in theatrical recreations of historical events. The pop-up is slated to run from June 13 to 15 at 145 Jefferson St. In 2017, this same group brought a similarly styled rodent spot to the city called the Black Rat Cafe.

The pop-up is a ticketed event at $49.99 per person.... After the show, patrons will have 30 minutes to spend touching and picking up the rats before heading to an upstairs cash bar...

Supplying the event’s rats will be nonprofit Ratical Rodent Rescue...

The Black Rat Cafe?! Isn't that one of my old posts? And don't tell me they had the Black Rat Café back in 2017. This new SF rat café is not the first one. I see that. But my rat cafés go back to 2016, beginning with:

October 6, 2016

At the Rat Café...

... you can talk about anything you want.

(All rats were drawn by me, in quick succession, using my fingertip in the new iPhone messaging software which lets you send drawings instead of typed words. I started drawing rats after Meade incorrectly identified some squiggle I'd sent as a rat.)

At the State Street Café...

... you can bring the weekend in for a landing.

At the Open Mic Café...

... it's your turn.

At the Late Morning Café...

... settle in.

Free rider.

As I spend a third hour in this coffee shop without buying anything (brought a sandwich with me, in fact) and listening to a killer playlist for free, I'm reminded that capitalism's genius is supporting so many free riders, not squeezing efficiency out of us all the time.

— Nick Gillespie (@nickgillespie) April 1, 2019