June 2008 Archives

Zooming in to a smaller scale, I experienced a similar quizzical sensation, happening across a Northwest-style coffee shop in the middle of the most godforsaken corner of Hyde Park and Woodlawn, between train tracks and a giant steam plant.  Run by a sort of quasi-socialist co-operative, the Backstory Cafe not only sells coffee brewed in some kind of fashionable method using ceramic filters, but loose leaf tea, mango lasses, and fine pastries.  

In the cities of the Northwest it is almost inconceivable that a respectable neighborhood not have a coffee shop--that is, a coffee shop that is not merely a Starbucks to which people drive to pick up their drinks and immediately leave.  Rather, these places are where one can go to pleasantly sit, read, study, or chat for awhile, having a tea or a coffee and maybe a scone, late into the night.  And I mean good tea, good coffee, and good scones.  There are places in Hyde Park that are crude approximations of this cultural phenomenon, but none of them are really satisfying.  The best of the shops at the University is undoubtedly in the Reynolds Club, but its tea selection is anemic, and its potentially lovely ambiance is frequently corrupted by unfortunate alternative "noise" of hipster appeal.  The tea is all Twinings tea bags, which are far worse than popular opinion always seems to judge: being from England and having pretty labels simply cannot salvage mediocre tea bags.  The only other extant competition is the Hookah Lounge.  But even the (idiotic) cultural cachet of shisha again cannot rectify mediocre food and second-hand smoke.  In short, nowhere in Hyde Park is good, and while a couple places are vaguely fashionable, fashion is stupid and can't make the deficient sufficient.

So with high hopes and this reservoir of gastronomic frustration, I trekked over to the Backstory Cafe to try it out. Despite being the most bizarre location, the place was quite nice and bright.  I decided to put them to the true test by ditching the tea (which looked very good), and ordering a mango lassi for $3.  Unlike many mango lassis these days which use syrups and bastardized ingredients, this one used nothing but yogurt, a little milk, fresh mango, and ice.  It was theoretically the perfect solution to a hot day.  And it was pretty good, not outstanding, but enjoyable.  The real problem, as I learned when I bought a couple of mangos last week, is that one can't buy good ripe mangoes in Chicago at this time of year (or perhaps ever?).  There are cheap, underripe ones, which have a nice tart flavor, but it's no substitute for the real thing--particularly in a lassi.  So we can give them maybe a B+ for effort and a B or B- in actuality.  Good, but not superlative.  It is certainly an improvement and a step in the right direction, but it is no Intelligentsia or Tea Gschwendner.

"Here Adam, you should have some."  He offered me the cigarette.

"No Ben, I don't smoke."

"Neither do I," he retorted.

"Then what are you doing now?"

He sighed.  "Adam, having a cigarette every few weeks does not make me a smoker."

"And yet you are smoking now."

He sighed again, shaking his head at my uncultured substitution of rigid definitions for socially constructed ones.

While Ben's subsequent critique of my nonsmoker status was predictably specious, some of the other pages in his blueprint for my intellectual and moral modification have been better-founded.  His criticisms of my historical ignorance and anti-social binges are probably legitimate.  Even his 4 AM existential critique of my faith in absolute truth might not have been completely farcical.

But there is one realm in which I decided to given the Ben Field approach a try. I have long harbored a weird sort of instinctual elitist objection to popular culture.  But wandering around Hyde Park apartments late at night with the likes of Ben, I have noticed that the same people who argue about Hegel and Hume and Heisenberg segue freely between these giants and the tabloid gossip of tween stardom and Hollywood rumors.  It is not so good to have to whisper into the ear of an astonished friend, "Who is Jamie-Lynn Spears?" in the middle of a lighthearted debate round.

So popular culture matters because one needs it to participate in the social discourse, and one needs to be able to debate.  That much is certain.  But does it have any other value?  After conceding to Ben's analysis, I though about this for a long time.  I thought there might be hope.  Smart people would not mistake nothingness for somethingness.  I read some Vanity Fair and thought about it a bit longer.  Then I looked back to Frankfurt's seminal essay in the study of bullshit.  While popular culture is neither concerned with persuasion nor any sense of truth-seeking, its blatant superfluousness and lack of any objective except perhaps self-propagation suggests that it is some class of bullshit.

So popular culture is not important.  But one ought to know it.

And here I am, reduced by Ben Field to consume bullshit.

Someone convince me that I'm wrong.

--Marcel Proust, Swann's Way

--Adolph Hitler, Mein Kampf

Writing a paper on Mein Kampf turns out to be one of the most difficult assignments I have ever had.  It's not the rhetoric of obscene racism or anti-Semitism that's bothersome--I'm around enough Singaporeans and self-deprecating Jews for that to both me.  Quite simply it is that nothing actually makes any sense.  It's a pastiche of almost-arguments that flounder in a contradictory morass.  Once realized in this light, it is difficult to decode from the text what the motivations or justifications for this doctrine of racism were.  It's so absurd that one frequently comes across a line like the one above, which caused me to burst out into hysterical laughter.  Of course in context that was terribly inappropriate, but I think the world would be much better off if people demanded a bit more rigor from others and took things a lot less seriously.

Notice that if you substitute dog breeds for the word "German", "Nordic-Germanic", etc. in the above sentence, the sentence becomes indistinguishable from a normal statement made by a somewhat zealous dog-breeder.  No one should be capable of taking such sentences seriously.

The more interesting question, however, is how such a feature would change the social dynamic of Facebook.  One could envision the mere act of visiting a person's profile assuming a social significance similar to the wallpost.  Or perhaps the feature would be relegated to the same level of social triviality as becoming another user's friend on Facebook.  At any event, it would almost certainly increase the level of paranoia, which would probably be healthy for most users--and extremely entertaining for me.

--Alec Brandon, on our walk back from the Pierce Tower at 4:30am.