Mule, the coffee bar where I worked on grad school applications, is featured in a City section article in the Times about the "graduate students and artistic types" who have unwittingly made posh yet another once-industrial section of Brooklyn. Of all places for gentrification to have spread, it is certainly shocking that the next avenue over in Park Slope (not to mention one that's the site of three convenient subway stops) was the latest to fall. It's clear that when the article's author, Saki Knafo, quotes an "unshaven barista" on his fears of neighborhood development, there's more than a bit of irony involved.
Sunday, December 02, 2007
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2 comments:
Just as the French revolutionaries wanted both the rights of man and the French nation-state, the noble barista of today's independent coffee shop wants both to be amid true poverty, and to have the impoverished pay $5 for a cup of hot milk and espresso. Many and tragic are the contradictory ideals of modernity.
Can't argue with that. Next, coincidentally enough, off to write a paper on that very contradiction, fueled by that very same overpriced combination.
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