your essay crystallizes so much about the "Torched and Sterile" spaces we associate with hyper-gentrified neighborhoods. There's this weird effect created - you might be in North Oakland, or in parts of SF, or parts of Manhattan, or in Seattle, or east London, or [fill in blank] or you might be nowhere at all. I think you guys already know all about this, but one of the beautiful things about the old "kissaten," the cafes of pre-specialty-coffee Japan, is that they're often heavily customized by the owners, with Viennese lamps, or teddy bears, or Oscar Wilde-esque velvet everywhere. Blue Bottle's Nestle turn (the aesthetic aspects involving James Freeman's fondness for Apple Stores and Shake Shack) is totally case in point - as you say, some of the early BBs, like Linden St., are totally unique. I hesitate to drop my own work in here, but I tried to write about what we miss, when we miss cafes, in a recent essay in the coffee magazine Standart (pleasingly not online content but traced here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CWBKj9BNrSV/).
This is a perfect articulation of something that's been bugging me for years. I live in the suburbs of DC, which has never had any particular charm but tended to have a wealth of decaying mid- and lateish 20th century strip malls in which people could set up shop and hawk coffee, used books, exotic plants, Asian groceries, or what have you. Now a lot of that has been demolished or renovated into pretty but sterile spaces, and rents have become unaffordable. Now, some of this overhauling has created multi-use communities near transit that James Howard Kunstler would probably approve of, so I feel like I'm being a NIMBY if I criticize that. But it's harder and harder to find the kind of funky and disordered places that make you feel like hanging out a while.
Feb 16, 2022·edited Feb 16, 2022Liked by Blackbird Spyplane
i think about this a lot, and about how circumstantial aesthetic value can be. like, i genuinely like the minimalist, blue bottle aesthetic but now can't separate it from the algorithmic urban millennial branding you write about. it feels tired and overly corporatized for sure, but i think this has more to do than blue bottle et. al's early success and everyone copping it than it does with the aesthetic itself. as an ~urban millennial~ this vibe feels kinda like one of those cartoon traps with the string attached to a stick holding up a box.
the thing is i don't know where else to go, because i feel like i'm larping/being cultural tourist when i hang it in dive bars of whatever in places like the valley. hard to find a middle ground, but i think maybe i'm too concerned with individualism and not being pandered to and should just give in and hang out in blue bottle. idk man!
woww huge come up for mike at jump'n java, holding down the neighborhood for decades and doing it almost entirely while working solo! hope he's back soon
Apt excerpt from James Howard Kunstler's "Geography of Nowhere" given the pizza shop example:
“Community is not something you have, like pizza. Nor is it something you can buy. It’s a living organism based on a web of interdependencies – which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.” #WOODWIDEWEB
From the same book, replace TV with the 'gram and and house with business/shopping locale this quote still bangs:
"The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls. At the same time, the television is the family's chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it. The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning."
VERY pertinent: stumbled across a web development company last year that specializes in drive-in movie theaters: http://www.driveinwebs.com/
Found it thru a local drive-in whose web presence I became obsessed with, and the company's site has been sitting in my bookmarks bar ever since. Def has some visual cacophony going on, but one must admire the true-to-self vibiness of all the different sites and the personal touch each has received.
Also reminds me of my local coffee shop, Willow Tree in Johnson City, TN, which fell victim to the pandemic early on and has been sitting empty :( gone but never forgotten, the decor was U.G.H.Z. to the T.
it’s much much more difficult these days to create and maintain the internet version of this than it is to just use a template from your hosting provider, so new sites with this aesthetic are an artifice that feels inevitably corny to me. (no disrespect to the webmasters who have been holding down their <table> layouts since the 90s)
Nobody does U.G.H.Z. like New Orleans!
Prophetic.
Check out Thank You For Coming next time you’re in Atwater
Sam’s Log Cabin (:
your essay crystallizes so much about the "Torched and Sterile" spaces we associate with hyper-gentrified neighborhoods. There's this weird effect created - you might be in North Oakland, or in parts of SF, or parts of Manhattan, or in Seattle, or east London, or [fill in blank] or you might be nowhere at all. I think you guys already know all about this, but one of the beautiful things about the old "kissaten," the cafes of pre-specialty-coffee Japan, is that they're often heavily customized by the owners, with Viennese lamps, or teddy bears, or Oscar Wilde-esque velvet everywhere. Blue Bottle's Nestle turn (the aesthetic aspects involving James Freeman's fondness for Apple Stores and Shake Shack) is totally case in point - as you say, some of the early BBs, like Linden St., are totally unique. I hesitate to drop my own work in here, but I tried to write about what we miss, when we miss cafes, in a recent essay in the coffee magazine Standart (pleasingly not online content but traced here: https://www.instagram.com/p/CWBKj9BNrSV/).
I need you to experience this provocative chaos that I stumbled upon when I was tryna find a locksmith near me recently
https://www.northlondonlocksmithsltd.com/
This is a perfect articulation of something that's been bugging me for years. I live in the suburbs of DC, which has never had any particular charm but tended to have a wealth of decaying mid- and lateish 20th century strip malls in which people could set up shop and hawk coffee, used books, exotic plants, Asian groceries, or what have you. Now a lot of that has been demolished or renovated into pretty but sterile spaces, and rents have become unaffordable. Now, some of this overhauling has created multi-use communities near transit that James Howard Kunstler would probably approve of, so I feel like I'm being a NIMBY if I criticize that. But it's harder and harder to find the kind of funky and disordered places that make you feel like hanging out a while.
Soma Coffee in Bloomington, Indiana = U.G.H.Z. 🖤
i think about this a lot, and about how circumstantial aesthetic value can be. like, i genuinely like the minimalist, blue bottle aesthetic but now can't separate it from the algorithmic urban millennial branding you write about. it feels tired and overly corporatized for sure, but i think this has more to do than blue bottle et. al's early success and everyone copping it than it does with the aesthetic itself. as an ~urban millennial~ this vibe feels kinda like one of those cartoon traps with the string attached to a stick holding up a box.
the thing is i don't know where else to go, because i feel like i'm larping/being cultural tourist when i hang it in dive bars of whatever in places like the valley. hard to find a middle ground, but i think maybe i'm too concerned with individualism and not being pandered to and should just give in and hang out in blue bottle. idk man!
Where does Wendy Carlos’s wonderful website (http://www.wendycarlos.com/) fit into this framework?
woww huge come up for mike at jump'n java, holding down the neighborhood for decades and doing it almost entirely while working solo! hope he's back soon
Apt excerpt from James Howard Kunstler's "Geography of Nowhere" given the pizza shop example:
“Community is not something you have, like pizza. Nor is it something you can buy. It’s a living organism based on a web of interdependencies – which is to say, a local economy. It expresses itself physically as connectedness, as buildings actively relating to each other, and to whatever public space exists, be it the street, or the courthouse or the village green.” #WOODWIDEWEB
From the same book, replace TV with the 'gram and and house with business/shopping locale this quote still bangs:
"The American house has been TV-centered for three generations. It is the focus of family life, and the life of the house correspondingly turns inward, away from whatever corresponds beyond its four walls. At the same time, the television is the family's chief connection to the world. The physical envelope of the house itself no longer connects their lives to the outside in any active way; rather it seals them from it. The outside world has become an abstraction filtered through television, just as the weather is an abstraction filtered through air conditioning."
VERY pertinent: stumbled across a web development company last year that specializes in drive-in movie theaters: http://www.driveinwebs.com/
Found it thru a local drive-in whose web presence I became obsessed with, and the company's site has been sitting in my bookmarks bar ever since. Def has some visual cacophony going on, but one must admire the true-to-self vibiness of all the different sites and the personal touch each has received.
Also reminds me of my local coffee shop, Willow Tree in Johnson City, TN, which fell victim to the pandemic early on and has been sitting empty :( gone but never forgotten, the decor was U.G.H.Z. to the T.
Also 89 flavors of Torani syrup collecting dust behind the bar
https://cactus.store/ embodies the more contemporary side of UGHZ perfectly!!
it’s much much more difficult these days to create and maintain the internet version of this than it is to just use a template from your hosting provider, so new sites with this aesthetic are an artifice that feels inevitably corny to me. (no disrespect to the webmasters who have been holding down their <table> layouts since the 90s)