August 3, 2008
can i have jimmies and carpet sweepin's on mine
8/3/08
God knows making fun of conservatives is so easy, it should be disqualified – which reminds me, why was anybody shooting fish in a barrel anyway? To eat them? To let off steam?
Anyway, just to say, I'm as self-aware as the next parallelist Gen-Xer and can appreciate a buffoonish liberal caricature when I see one. Take, for instance, the Stuff White People Like site I linked on Friday. The entire site is two things at once: amazingly dead-on, and the cruel-spirited apotheosis of snark. It can be very funny (#4 – "Assists"), arbitrarily obscure (#68 – Michel Gondry), non-trenchantly obvious (#15 – Yoga, #42 – Sushi), and occasionally a laundry list of everything I love (Plays, Apple Products, the Toyota Prius, T-Shirts, the NYTimes and Multilingual Children).
"Stuff White People Like" has a brilliance that lies in everyone's desire to be pegged, and then taking personal pride in being pegged, thus freeing them to continue drinking chamomile and playing kickball as they did before. I particularly admire entries like Appearing Empathetic With Personal Anecdotes of "Poverty", especially after I wrote entries like this. The site is slightly misnamed, however: it should really be "Stuff Liberals With Discretionary Income Like".
Occasionally, snark imitates life, and last week was a doozy. On several sites I frequent, the bold type came out and the frenzy began:
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I mean... yes, I have bought a grande soy latté with almond syrup a time or two thousand. And I do enjoy their new DoubleShot on Ice. And it's nice to always be within 400 yards of a hazelnut frappuccino. But COME ON!
love that site. it's not cruel. just funny. we *are* so easy to make fun of. and Gondry is a great one. painfully true!
Not a Starbucks person, but several friends are addicts. Fortunately (?), in Rhode Island Starbucks is adding new stores (two within a half-mile of each other in my small city alone) and not closing any.
But I am really commenting just to say that your headlines are brilliant, always. Sometimes in my haste to read the blog content, I skip right over them. I always go back, though, to better appreciate the titles in light of the posts. Bravo!
There was a really strange report (on NPR, naturally) about how having a Starbucks move in actually improved business for local coffee shops. I hope that a bunch of closing Starbucks doesn't paradoxically hurt the local shops.
I've never been a Starbucks fan per se -- I like a lighter roast than their standard, which seems rather bitter and over the top strong to me. So if they retreat a bit from ubiquity I don't think it will be a bad thing. Maybe Lucas will no longer be able to stand south of Union Square and see three Starbucks at once.
I will say this, though -- if you're in Berlin, or Paris, or Florence, all jetlagged and hung over, Starbucks is the only place you can get a proper American bucketful of drip coffee. In Berlin, it's a block from the Brandenburg Gate on Unter Den Linden!
I think Stuff White People like is pretty much the perfect blog title for what, in my opinion, the guy's trying to do--which is to capture the central contradiction of this whole white-liberals-with-discretionary-income mindset: namely that, although this is a culture which celebrates diversity (actually a subset of its main preoccupation, authenticity narrowly construed), its membership is as blindingly white as that of any North American subculture.
Longest. Sentence. Ever.
Y'know, I've never been into Starbucks before, but I seem unable to find coffee that I like anywhere in New York except at Balthazar. I know that sounds awful and pretentious, but it's not that I'm some coffee snob connoisseur. I just like coffee that doesn't taste burned to me, and everywhere, even the fabled Gorilla Coffee, tastes like it's been spit-roasted for three days before getting to me. And I don't drink coffee that often, but sometimes it's just the right kick in my day. So one day I went to the Starbucks in my neighborhood, and I really quite enjoyed it. So now, once in a while, I use Starbucks for their coffee, and not just their toilet. Which leads me to my point. If they close a bunch of stores, I really hope they don't close the one in the Financial District near the Staten Island Ferry. I've been going to see Playing the Building every weekend, and that Starbucks is the only place in the whole damn place to go to a restroom. How white am I???