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INSIDE_THE_BARISTA

                                             April 1, 2014


Molly Osberg's "Inside the Barista Class" (via Delong):

  http://www.theawl.com/2014/03/the-service-economy-trap-inside-brooklyns-barista-class#comment-reply

A long, somewhat unfocused piece, but not bad.
It's interesting to read something from the
coffee house scene of the generation (or two?)
after mine.

It's conclusion-- a feint toward labor politics--
seemed tacked-on to me, and I was left with the     She knows the world
general feeling that she hasn't really thought      she lived through,
through the material.                               but her insights into
                                                    gentrification seem
The actual subject seems to                         fairly conventional.
be about cultural authenticity:
                                                             (Still, she
The author works with a sense of irony about how             does better
low-wage service industry workers at coffee houses           than someone
get treated as gate-keepers of cool.                         blinded by
                                                             the market.)
    Many of the hostile comments the article     
    attracted seem to be motivated by a sense                MARKET_BLIND
    of outrage at the sudden suspicion that all    
    those years feeding the tip-jar weren't    
    actually buying anyone a card as an        
    insider-- the john suddenly worries that    
    the whores don't *really* love him.        
                                        

There was a time (some decades before Osberg
got into the game) when coffee houses really
did make some sense as community centers,
and the baristas could be assumed to be
living a more authentic existence pursuing
their dreams as artists and writers, because
that's what a lot of them were really
doing... but that's a world gone with the         Or at least, it's a world
low-rents that made it possible to pay the        gone from San Francisco...
bills with a part-time day job.                   I sometimes wonder if the
                                                  real action might be in
    That time, in retrospect, seems like          the second string cities,
    a phenomena specific to a particular          places built after WWII
    moment in history:                            that haven't yet become
                                                  gentrification targets.
    The middle class abandoned the cities
    after world war two, and sprawled out
    into the suburbs, leaving a lot of
    space in the older high density cities
    for people to play with new ideas.

    Now, "New Urbanism" has essentially won,
    the suburbs are all but over (though some
    still haven't gotten the word); and the
    pioneers (ethnic or artistic) are grumbling
    that they haven't gotten anything out of
    their urban homesteading.



One question:

 o  Doesn't the feeling of irony that gets the piece to work depend
    on the idea that income and status naturally go together?

         If you don't, uh, buy into the capitalist ideal,
         then according respect to someone who works a
         slacker job doesn't seem so funny, does it?


Another question:

 o  If Starbucks has co-opted and contaminated the idea of coffee
    houses as a secular Third Place, then what will fill that need?

                                                    THE_NEXT_THIRD


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