Coffee

My friend K.R. and I recently got into a conversation about coffee. She loves a good cup, and always brews good beans at home, as do I. The year before last, she gave me a Christmas present of delicious freshly-roasted beans from a boutique roaster in, of all places, Bisbee, AZ. So I asked her where she got her beans these days. “Murky,” she replied without hesitation. “I didn’t know they roasted,” I said. “It’s Counter Culture beans,” she replied, fully expecting me to know who these people were. I had a vague recollection of reading about them in the WaPo, and, generally trusting my friend in matters of food and drink, resolved to stop in for some beans the next time I was in the neighborhood.

See, I was a coffee snob before I was any other kind. Since childhood, in fact. I grew up in a tea-drinking part of the world. In the capital where I lived at least, coffee was invariably instant, always imported, and was such a hot commodity that it almost never made it to store shelves, having been skimmed along the way by those with access, like distributors and store managers. So much so that the urban folklore of the time featured a satirical two-liner on the topic, untranslatable, but culminating in a pun along the lines of instant coffee instantly dissolving. I have my mother and her circumstances to thank for my love of the stuff. Her parents, while instilling in their daughter a love of reading and learning and the patience of a stoic, were not necessarily great parent material when it came to the pragmatics of life, so from a relatively early age my mother spent very little time at home, bouncing around instead from friend to friend and relative to relative. In her late teens, she was fortunate to have been befriended and semi-adopted by a couple of transplanted Armenians, great lovers of food, brandy and, of course, coffee. Real coffee – ground powder-fine and brewed slowly in a small copper pot with an almost equal proportion of sugar until it foamed up and rose to the surface. Suspend your vigilance for a moment, and it would be all over your stove – “runaway coffee” it was called. Served in small cups, it was dark, syrupy and sweet. In the US, when it is mentioned at all, it is usually referred to as Turkish coffee, to the Armenian diaspora’s great consternation. My mother has been drinking it ever since. When I was young, she would pour a bit into the bottom of a cup and fill the rest with warm milk. As I got older, the ratio of coffee to milk increased. By the time my family was a year or so away from moving to New York, I could drink the stuff straight.

In the bagel shops of 1980s Queens coffee was something else entirely. Sold in 8-oz. Styrofoam cups, it cost around 50 cents. Today that sounds refreshingly no-frills, but in reality the stuff was foul. Luke-warm, sour and stale, no amount of sugar and Mini-Moos could redeem it. I hardly ever drank it, preferring to go home to mom’s tarry goodness. There was cappuccino to be had, but not easily. I first tried it in Italy in 1987, where you could get one anywhere for about 1,000 lire (around 85 cents in those days), and a virtually identical cappuccino, minus the marble counter, could be had for only twice that at any number of Greenwich Village Italian cafes, but for a clueless kid from Queens, that wasn’t exactly a daily occurrence. We had a place in the neighborhood that served them, but those were Kappucinos – squirted noisily from a machine fully formed, like Botticelli’s Venus from seafoam, into a stemmed glass mug of the type you’re likely to get if you ask for an Irish Coffee at a neighborhood bar, topped with Cool Whip from an aerosol can.

My exposure to “modern” American West Coast-style coffee came when I was in college in Rochester, NY. It was the nineties, all things Seattle were the rage, and quality brewed coffee was beginning to spread into second- and third-tier American cities, especially those, like Rochester, that had enough students to support a coffeehouse culture. The place to be was Java Joe’s downtown (still in business, apparently) – it was located on the same block as the main building of the Eastman school, and on weekends turned into a jazz club featuring student bands. The only guitar teacher I have ever had played there. I spent my fair share of time there, but my regular spot became Moonbeans, now sadly defunct, at the corner of Unversity and Atlantic, a few blocks from where I lived for the last couple of years of school. Atlantic hit Univeristy at a sharp angle, and Moonbeans occupied the first floor of the cool old building on the corner. It was the sort of place that was briefly in vogue but, sadly, is already starting to disappear – mismatched old couches, bookshelves with actual books on them, some board games and a chess set for use by patrons. When I didn’t have a pile of philosophy reading to get through, I would bring my friend S.L. and we’d sit at the bar, making lame attempts to chat with Jill the barista, on whom we both had an enormous crush. Moonbeans’ house brew was Sumatra – the first time I encountered a varietal coffee. It had a flavor I had never experienced before – intensely smoky and strangely compelling despite its bitterness. Doctored up with a fair amount of sugar (because I was weaned on Turkish coffee, to this day I drink all coffee sweeter than most people), it became the defining flavor of my college days, thanks, no doubt, to lazy afternoons reading Kierkegaard at Moonbeans as much as to the drink itself.

From there, it was coffee, coffee and more coffee. When I moved to Phoenix after graduation to be with J., we made a point of exploring every coffeehouse in the area. I read Korby Cummer’s seminal The Joy of Coffee and, on its recommendation, bought a French press – still my preferred method of brewing. I sought out a local source of quality beans. When I moved to DC in 1998, I lived a couple of blocks away from Java House, a café that roasted its own beans, at 17th & Q, and quickly became a regular there. Come to my house today, and, as much as I love the Asian tradition of automatically serving tea, you will not be able to avoid being offered a cup of coffee. Which brings me to the present day and Murky.

On a Saturday morning a couple of weeks after my conversation with K.R., I found myself heading West on Wilson Blvd., so I swung in. I picked up a bag from the shelf, and my heart sank – it was instantly obvious that they have outsnobbed the snob. Being from a specific part of the world or a certain country was no longer enough. The beans I ended up buying had the precise location specified. Not just Papua New Guinea, but the Waghi Valley of that country. Below, the label listed the specific varieties of cofea arabica (the coffee plant) – Bourbon, Typica and Arusha. Then came the description, or should I say tasting notes, worth quoting in full:

Wonderfully complex, this coffee has a rich, syrupy body with notes of thick chocolate, vanilla, and dark honey, with a savory note throughout. A classically balanced cup from a fascinating coffee growing region.

I love coffee, it’s great. It tastes delicious and helps me to get going in the morning. I can tell the difference between fresh and stale beans, and I’ve been known to mope for an hour if the coffee I was served was too weak. But coffee is not wine, people! One of the best things about coffee is that it helps you clear your mind so you can discuss other things, not coffee itself! What happened to just sitting down with a cup of coffee and enjoying it without having to think about it? There is a reason meeting for coffee is still a valid activity even in our age of Facebook tyranny – it helps friends socialize. Must I analyze everything in order to enjoy it? By the way, the 12-oz. bag cost almost 14 dollars – obscene even in our culture of paying prices for artisan products that would have seemed outrageous a decade ago.

I must admit that the coffee was absolutely delicious. Some of the best I have ever had. Rich, flavorful and complex, it lived up fully to its promise of chocolate notes. I cannot fault Murky and Counter Culture for the quality of their product. But the combination of the description, price, and heightened expectation made it something more than just a cup of coffee while making it difficult to relax while drinking it. It demanded to be noticed. It was the narcissist of beverages. I have not been back. I prefer to keep the pleasure of sinking into my reading chair with a good book and a steaming cup of coffee, or catching up with a dear friend over a café table, without being distracted by High Coffeeness.

AIG

The fact that AIG decided to use $165M of government bailout money to pay bonuses is infuriating. Now, those who know me might be surprised to hear me say this. But there are a couple of things at play. There should not have been a government bailout in the first place. We would not even be dealing with this question. But given that there was a bailout, and that we did pay for it, a properly managed company should have stopped paying bonuses long before it needed a government bailout. AIG says that they are contractually obligated to pay these bonuses. Well, someone didn't do their job and wrote a lousy contract. Any contract worth the paper it's written on ought to have a clause that says if business is in the toilet, bonuses go out the window, end of story. I guess it's the whole bubble thing -- if they tried to write it into the contract, the people getting the bonuses would have hightailed down the road to BJH or some such. And who is paying for this nonsense now? We are. Which brings me back to my first point -- there shouldn't have been a bailout in the first place.

Tindersticks

Went to see Tindersticks at the 9:30 club Thursday night. My friend C.S., who originally introduced me to the band a few years ago, came up with the idea. I can’t say I was a huge fan before – C.S. burned some CDs for me, a couple of compilations of what he thought were the best songs – and I enjoyed listening to them now and then, but I never took the time to learn more about the band or explore other recordings. So I didn’t actually have a burning desire to go on Thursday, but I’m sure glad I did; the concert proved to be excellent.

Tindersticks are virtually unknown in the US. They got a lot of critical acclaim for their early records in the mid- and late-1990s, but it remained confined largely to the UK. They went on a hiatus over the last couple of years, but did release a new record in 2008, which is what prompted this tour, mostly around Europe with a few dates in the US.

What drew me to the band originally was their sound – far more distinctive than just about all of their contemporaries, not that I really have a good idea of what those sound like, not having followed the British rock and pop scene in any meaningful way since Catherine Wheel and Ride in the early nineties. First, there is lead singer Stuart Staples’ baritone – deep, clear, and far lower-pitched than a typical, or even an atypical, rock singer, it has some Jim Morrison in it, maybe a little Steve Kilbey of the Church, but is really all his own. Occasionally, Staples sings falsetto, but because his voice is so low to begin with, the falsetto takes on an immediately recognizable quality. His voice draws you in instantly – I remember getting into C.S.’s car one night several years ago and hearing it on the car stereo. My reaction was, “who is THIS?”

Then there is the band itself. I stand by my claim that nothing in rock and pop is ever truly original, but a few bands do come closer than the rest once in a great while, and Tindersticks definitely fall into that category. I guess they’ve absorbed so many influences, and digested them so thoroughly, that something approaching uniqueness emerged. There is some lounge in there, a little progressive pretense, some folksy songwriting, all sprinkled with just a dash of sixties’ psychedelia and postmodern jam-band sound. In addition to traditional rock instruments, played with admirable restraint I should point out, the band frequently uses a vibraphone, strings and a variety of horns, though they rarely get truly orchestral. Above all, their sound is beautifully clear – Tindersticks are the anti-noise, anti-Radiohead wing of British rock.

The most amazing thing was that all of this came across when they played live. They sounded phenomenal on stage. They were never loud or bombastic. Every instrument, and Staples’ voice, was crystal-clear. They played, I am shocked to say, with something I did not think was possible in rock – taste. The acoustic instruments were there, too – the keyboardist doubled on vibraphone and another high-pitched tuned percussion instrument I couldn’t quite see – some sort of miniature glockenspiel perhaps – and a trumpeter, a saxophonist (baritone!) and a cellist occupied stage right, appearing and disappearing as the tunes required.

The entire concert was a brand-new experience for me. I did not recognize a single tune. But that is perhaps the greatest testament to the show’s success – I was drawn in instantly and stayed focused the entire time. It was almost like going back to the days before recording existed, when listening to music at all meant listening live. Not all songs were great as songs – in fact, some were quite monotonous when stripped of their arrangements, but of course the arrangements were an integral part, and if nothing else, Staples’ voice kept me listening. They played a few instrumentals, something they are known for, and those sounded good as well, though for once, I wish the instrumentalists soloed more, especially the horns. The trumpeter took a couple of solos, but the sax player, who turned out to be the fairly well-known Terry Edwards, stuck mostly to playing counterpoint to the rest of the band, and the cellist’s job, aside from a beautifully minimalist, Steve Reich-like intro, was to provide color.

I did wonder about the economics of the concert. There were eight musicians on stage, plus roadies, but the tickets were only $25, a bargain in this day and age, and the club, admittedly fairly large, was maybe one-third full. 250 people at the most, by my very imprecise estimate. The audience was refreshingly tame and polite, clapping enthusiastically, and letting out a few quiet whistles between songs, but otherwise listening attentively. The whole thing had kind of an MTV Unplugged air about it. The concession stand, in another pleasant surprise, was selling the new record on LP, as well as colored vinyl 7-inch of one of Terry Edwards' side projects, which turned out to be a revival of the eighties ska band Department S. I bought both, but have not heard either yet, my turntable being in need of some attention.

Anyway, great show. Very un-rock-n-roll, and that’s precisely why I enjoyed it so much.

Midnight Oil (not the band)

I feel young again, coming home around midnight after a show at the 9:30 club, eating a bowl of instant noodles, firing up the laptop and doing some late night work. I'll pay for it in the morning, no doubt.

David Remnick

Finished David Remnick's Lenin's Tomb: The Last Days of the Soviet Empire a few days ago. Excellent. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Remnick, now at the New Yorker magazine, was the Washington Post's Moscow correspondent from the fall of 1987 until the fall of 1991, and though he did not originally bargain for it, ended up witnessing the dissolution of the Soviet Union first-hand.

Remnick is first and foremost a journalist, and the book is written that way - quick pacing, lots of direct quotations, personal observations - but his chief accomplishment is that he does not neglect history. On the contrary, Lenin's Tomb is an excellent primer on Soviet history. Any reader who wants not just the basics but a hefty dose of historical analysis, compellingly written, could do a lot worse than this book. Though his focus is, obviously, on the Gorbachev years, he really leaves no period untouched, especially the Stalin era. In fact, the major conclusion of the book that will still be worth something generations from now is that Gorbachev's first, and greatest, accomplishment, was that he allowed ordinary Russians to regain their history. As George Orwell, among many others, has pointed out a long time ago, any totalitarian regime could survive only as long as it had complete control of the society's historical knowledge. Once people really learned what happened and why, it was all over. So in that sense, as Remnick is keenly aware, Gorbachev was bound to lose control over the transformations he himself had started, which, of course, was exactly what happened.

Another of Remnick's achievements is the attention he pays to the reactionary elements in Soviet sociaety and the Communist Party, first and foremost of which was, of course, the KGB. Many Westerners still think of the KGB as Russia's equivalent of the CIA, but it was far more than that. It was the CIA, the FBI and something that no modern democracy has (a recent blip in Maryland notwithstanding) - honest to goodness secret police, in the sense of internal espionage - rolled into one. I am grateful to Remnick for making that abundantly clear.

Remnick's faults are few. In the introduction, he expresses hope for the continued democratization of Russia, and in that he has been proven wrong already. And though I am tempted to ask how someone with as deep an understanding of the Soviet system and Russian society as he is could do that, I will chalk it up to his inherently American sense of optimism. He does include something darkly prophetic in the book, perhaps without realizing entirely just how significant it is. In the city of Perm, the former site of a large Gulag camp, he interviews the mayor:

"There will be a dictatorship soon," he said with a certain relish in his voice. "It won't be the Communist Party organs, it will be the real organs - the KGB. They will try to develop the economy, but there will be a strict discipline." (p. 276)

My only other complaint, irrelevant to the general reader, is his rendering into English of certain Russian words and phrases. His Russian is obviously fluent, idiomatic even, but I've seen this elsewhere -- perhaps there is an unwritten imperative among scholars of Russia to use the closest cognate when translating certain words where a much more common and sensible English word would not only work, but actually make more sense. Thus, he translates the common salutation "Uvazhayemy" (sorry, I have no good way to quote Cyrillic at the moment) as "Respected," which is literally correct, but wouldn't you use "Esteemed" to address someone? Similarly, and more misleadingly, "rayon" becomes "region" instead of "district." It is true that sometimes the problem is intractable. He renders the extremely evocative, strong and sharp "avanteurist" as "adventurer." Not even close, but my Oxford Concise Russian Dictionary agrees, and I suppose there is no better solution short of resorting to a third language.