Saturday Coffee
Coffee & Things
A zillion things to catch up on today…let’s start with coffee and poetry. I had no idea such an animal exists, but it does and you might want to check it out. In fact, there a many poems about coffee…you might also want to check this out. Ofcourse, the poetry is only as good as the coffee…
A reader of mine, Michael Bacon, sent me the following poem by the Irish poet Anne Higgins (b.1955) called STRONG COFFEE; read by Garrison Keiller on the Writer’s Almanac yesterday. Enjoy!
Strong coffee smells like a current of warm southerly air in the climate of dawn. Strong coffee gets stronger when poured back through the grounds. Opaque, thick, hot, bitter for waking up, the caffeine pumps through your center, stains your mouth with morning, with going to work, surprises you with your own breath.
Coffee and StarBucks
Ten-dollar coffee?! I had earlier written about StarBuck’s interest in getting into higher-end coffee bars. The other day Bloomberg carried an indepth article on this theme.
Apparently this is no gimmick. Nor is it that StarBucks is merely trying to profit on its already lucrative world-wide franchise. Instead, it is an entirely new business enterprise, separate from the usual StarBucks’ restauranting Starbucks Reserve and Roastery stores…writes Bloomberg: “They are more wine bar than coffeehouse, replete with tastings, mixologists and educated baristas. They’re a place to take a date, to sit at the bar and experience the tastes and smells, as you’d do at a wine bar or craft brewery.”
Howard Schultz is actually stepping down as CEO of StarBucks to dedicate his entire time to the new enterprise. Bloomberg wonders whether the new venture will pan out or not and whether it is worth the risk. I suspect that it does not really matter much to Schultz: StarBucks has already made him a billionaire several times over.
Coffee and Donald Trump
You have to hand it to Trump for his unorthodox style! Very different from the Obama-ish ‘attack first, talk later’ party line, Trump is actually going to try to mend fences with Filipino maverick Duterte. And he might just succeed doing so over a cup of coffee! Good luck!
A cute spin on Duchamp
TALKING TO DUCHAMP
“I started my career at early age of thirteen years old. For more than fifteen years I’ve always been working with subjects related to the past. The past few years I’ve been dedicating myself to the use of an image and its importance to art history, picking up artists from the great masters to contemporary art, like Marcel Duchamp. In 2011 I was awarded with an honorable mention in the Lumen Ex Prize from the Meic Museum, in Badajoz, Spain, for the Talking to Duchamp’s video. In this video, Duchamp playing chess with a woman that shows up and then disappear a number of times, we have as a backdrop something that at first glance might seem odd – this is not an exception at all for the ready-mades, talking with a tradition.”–Gabriela Noujaim