myspace: like espresso pods for your blog!
September 13, 2006 – 10:33 pmwho knew the tattooed, usbc-finalist, spuma-master stumptownian billy wilson held to a reformed theological position? (see “heroes.”)
also: myspace, billy? MYSPACE?! what happened to artistic originality? a blank slate? an unfiltered look at a leading barista’s mind? shucks, mecca-proximal name-dropping? i want to know what billy wilson’s scace device has taught him about the hairbender, doggone it, not that “LaChelle” has a friend who babysits some kid of some dude who says he went to school with you “back in the day”!!!
*sigh*
wait, calexico? you were listening to calexico yesterday? did you see them with iron and wine, man? it SO rocked. like, serious introspective jam-folk. dude. chyyeah.
yeah, myspace…
like i said, my thing is not computers or sitting down to read a book on html to really make my blog come to life.
Every time I sat down to update the greenbean blog, I just got up and did something else. It just wasn’t condusive to bloggin. If you have a better idea… let me know.
Besides “words is words”, and wether you read them at the old blog or my new myspace blog, you still read what I’m up to.
About the theology… some things are best discussed in person not online.
it’s all good, billy. i agree about the nature of the beast being able to impede the words — which is one reason i own a mac. the words flow better when the aesthetic surroundings are optimized (heck, when my ROOM is clean).
as far as better ideas — check out jon lewis’ new blog. saweet honkin’ action.
>About the theology… some things are best discussed in person not online.
agreed. and since you most definitely have no reason to visit s.c., i will have to find some way to hit up the west coast.
was just kidding about the actual theology, though — one is certainly able to appreciate mother teresa without being catholic.
yeah, saw jon’s
i just don’t know if I have time to learn to do all that… maybe I do. You have a sweet blog… how much work was it to put together?
no work whatsoever. well, aside from what i felt like doing. giant globs of crema to the right, exhaustive links to cool blogs, etc. (make that FORMERLY cool blogs.)
kidding.
jon may be doing some of his own coding, but i don’t know any of that. just picked a template and ran. the window where i post gives me buttons for links and stuff. no html knowledge necessary.
i’ve heard movable type is a good blogging program. but you may not want to pay…
also: you can blog wherever you want, billy. i was just doing what i do, you know. spouting snark.
yeah, i know.
you’re kinda like the tabloid of coffee blogs huh?
tabloid. now THAT is a depressing thought (for a journalist).
it’s interesting, actually. i used to spout off because it was just my friends reading. and then i suddenly discovered i had an audience — generated, presumably, by the humor/snark/outsider’s perspective — and i was forced to become very conscious of who was reading.
result: the very thing that (i assume) entertains people also has the ability to REALLY tick them off when i’m talking about them. so both having fun and keeping friends — not to mention remaining accessible to the original readers of this blog — becomes this kind of tightrope walk.
blah blah, poor me.
You two are both doing amazing things with coffee and with words. There is a certain correlation between the current coffee movement and the access to information online. But I think it’s more than mere information – there’s a story being scripted – we’re all somehow part of it – but like the characters picking up pens to become authors.
Ben, I’m still working on trying to piece together some sort of response to your Esmerelda article, but I think your writing is filling a huge void in the world of coffee… and there’s a little room left in the void for me and Billy to hack some verbage as well.
My blog is utter cheese at the moment – free WordPress – many themes to choose… just a way to get words and images out.
But I agree – words, images, aesthetic … and thinking of your audiance… kind of like being a barista.
whew, jon. thanks. i am still somewhat shocked that there is room in this sphere for the words of a home junkie in south carolina.
the esmeralda article just happened. it was a classic case of a transcendent coffee grabbing your brain and yanking out a string of words. rereading it recently, i thought, “hmmm, i didn’t mean to be so critical of jon,” and i hope you didn’t take the one reference that way. but the idea, the big idea, just had to be expressed and grabbed at anything i could think of as a vehicle. in retrospect, it could use some editing.
i do realize we’re actually on the same team. and i do realize that it’s awfully easy to sit in the stands, having never worked a full-time bar or endured the competition lights, pull a single phrase from a professional’s presentation … and use it for your own ends!
on the one hand, that was sloppy. on the other hand, it’s a legitimate version of journalism. i do little of that here on the blog — it’s my day job — but that piece was actually a serious stab at weaving together some ideas that esmeralda brought to the fore: that a focus on the barista himself can be good. but a focus on the coffee is better.
to be insufferably broad.
That’s exactly what I’m saying – as a journalist, you have to reckon with words; as a barista, I have to reckon with coffee. Yet you have ‘discovered’ this coffee and through competitions, as much as I’d like for the coffee to speak for itself, I have to use words to ‘express the coffee.’
I’m so glad that your take on Esmerelda was not a handful of abstract cupping notes, but a personal rendering of the aesthetic experience – are the words truer when we’re drunk or when we sober up? The first time you said I was overwrought I was a bit miffed, but the second time I knew you were on to something. Two of my competition judges didn’t like the overall performance – ‘too rehearsed’ … I penned the ‘dream’ speech in my head the night before. I guess I just come across that way… the coffee, however, was well-rehearsed.
I didn’t do a great job of explaining this in my few words, but I was trying to make a parallel between the different processes that coffee goes through and the great Metaphor of nature that has been evident throughout my life. Green coffee is like a seed – full of potential. Coffee roasting is growth, transformation – the leafing. And coffee in the hands of the barista is like that ripe cherry ready to be picked… or is it vice versa? If a coffee cherry remains unpicked, does it hold the same value as the beans that complete their destined process… would you have discovered, tasted and experienced that Esmerelda in such a way?
Maybe I do have a person-centered approach toward preparing coffee, but I try to recognize the dignity of those who put the coffee in my hands… and then focus on the person who will receive the coffee – sometimes a judge – more often my wife, my friends, my customers. I see the role of the barista in this context too – not as central but as necessary – the competition puts a barista in an artificial and literal spotlight.
And lest we commodify coffee in our minds and businesses, I delight in its ‘metaphysical elusiveness.’ “Baristas, ask not what your coffee can do for you, but what you can do for your coffee.” When I read your Esmerelda piece, I immediately thought of ‘The Botany of Desire’ by Michael Pollan. A quote from the intro:
“By the same token, we’re prone to overestimate our own agency in nature. Many of the activities human like to think they undertake for their own good purposes- inventing agriculture, outlawing certain plants, writing books in praise of others- are mere contingencies as far as nature is concerned. Our desires are simply more gist for evolution’s mill, no different from a change in the weather: a peril for some species, an opportunity for others. Our grammar might teach us to divide the world into subjects and passive objects, but in a coevolutionary relationship every subject is also an object, every object a subject.”
I don’t see you in the stands – I see your journalism and your blogging as much a part of our influence on coffee (I’ll have to tell you my Esmeerelda story) as its influence on us. The focus is most definitely on the coffee… but who’s doing the focusing?
very lucid. very convincing. my (very small) point was only that, despite the “artificial” and person-centered nature of a (yes, “barista”) competition, the performance of the man himself could speak for itself — without words. the speech could have focused on the coffee. that’s the only reason i even dared call it what i did.
still, i’m almost embarrassed to be critical of your performance. seriously, the more i reflected on it, the more i liked it. it only seemed overwrought because so many others seem so staid! an impressive soliloquy, especially for being penned the night before.
besides, let’s be frank. the REAL barista-centric people, the monster egos and the it’s-all-about-me types are the ones that really irritate me, as an outsider who just loves coffee. i don’t mention them a whole lot because i don’t want a real fight on my hands. but they obviously distract far more from the coffee — contradicting the tenets of the third wave they claim to herald.
i guess i’m saying they’re the low-hanging fruit i’ve bypassed to pick on you, jon! not fair.
i will wholeheartedly agree with your nut graf:
“I try to recognize the dignity of those who put the coffee in my hands… and then focus on the person who will receive the coffee – sometimes a judge – more often my wife, my friends, my customers. I see the role of the barista in this context too – not as central but as necessary – the competition puts a barista in an artificial and literal spotlight.”