Beck had the day off, and I still feel cold crappy, so we both stayed home this dreary Tuesday. After I edited a student article and read five more neuroscience articles and Beck facebooked quite a bit this AM, we trekked over to Luxe, a hipster indie coffee shop not too far from our house.
Luxe has that nice, abandoned warehouse aesthetic combined with enough Mac computers, black turtlenecks and unnatural hair dye colors to give it that so-hip-it-hurts vibe. The parking lot houses high mpg vehicles with Obama bumper stickers. A guy in the corner wears a shirt proclaiming "Enjoying My Coffee," smacking of concert-going being-that-guy. (Did his wire-rimmed glasses twinkle a little more than usual as he pulled that shirt off the floor? Don't know). Cool kids behind the counter deal lattes below sharpe-ed glass door menus; a stray marker remark asks if we are "real." Local art adorns the walls. There are tables and lounging chairs and couches. People in rugged sweaters greet one another as regulars. Beck asks if they have real jobs. All of this is meant to signify that Luxe is a cool, liberal-minded kid typical kind of a place. An archetype. Perfect setting to sip 500 calories of coffee goodness and read up on chimpanzee / human comparative neuroscience.
Except that this FRIGGIN HIPSTER COFFEEHOUSE found it necessary to blare an Everything But the Girl mix instead of perhaps more appropriate, certainly more desired light guitar strumming Baezian offerings. This would have been annoying enough, except that said mix featured at least four different versions of "Missing," that big club hit that you've undoubtledly heard before with the chorus "I miss you, like the deserts miss the rain." And it was on repeat.
Okay, i get it, you hipster ironists, it's pouring today in the desert. Your musical selection is quite jokily apt.
But they didn't want to just tell the joke once, they wanted everyone who entered in an hour-long period to hear the joke. Hence the repeat. They stopped eventually, but not before this tune had bored into my consciousness. Dammit.
Problem: not so much the tune that was reverberating between my ears. But something that I'm sure has been pointed out before: deserts don't miss rain. Deserts fare remarkably well without it (with the possible exception of those rare natural Arizona phenomena known as "golf courses," which are truly an ecological miracle). They are in fact kinda defined by their non-missing of rain. "I miss you... not at all because I by my very nature don't really need you all that regularly." Or even if you want to get all technical, the deserts here do get hit pretty reliably with a big dose of rain every monsoon season and again in the winter. So even if we grant that yeah, they miss their rain lover a bit, they still know it's coming back before too long. "I miss you... like other predictable cyclical events, for example, Arbor Day."
This is all trite of course, but my weird observation here is that Luxe managed to get not a song stuck in my head, but an irritation at a dumb metaphor. One that may not bother you all that much, but go listen to the song eight times in a row in marginally different forms at loud volume, and let's see how you feel about casually dropped incoherent metaphors that rose to #2 on the charts.
The other source of repeated entertainment at Luxe was the entranceway. I recently read this article by Bruno Latour about mechanical agency; one of my two or three favorite pieces from the entire semester. Highly recommended if you get a moment. A big part of it is dedicated to the human labor that gets replaced by placing a pneumatic hinge and an automatic latch on a door. (Latour refers to doorways as "wall holes" in the article, something that cracks me up for no obvious reason). Luxe's door decidedly lacked anything pneumatic about its hinge - Luxe being a decrepit converted warehouse and all - and the latch was hardly functioning at all. It was 45 degrees and raining outside, so this was somewhat noticeable for those of us sitting near the entrance. And when I say noticeable, I mean, "chilled our souls."
What was fascinating was the incompetence with which Luxe customers attempted to solve the door problem. I'd say it was about a 1 for 50 success rate while we were there (excluding the Beck, who thanks perhaps to being biased by my observation and generally being a considerate human who cares for the comfort of others, closed the door with aplomb). Some assumed pneumaticness and just let go of the door after they traversed the wall hole; one lady waltzed through the door, refusing to deign to touch it; others gave it a perfunctory shove as they went on their way. But the vast majority did a four step dance: 1, walk through assuming the pneumatic; 2, shuffle step in surprise as the door did not close; 3, push it closed, but not all the way, leaving it unlatched and one foot agape; 4, shrug and leave. You know, denying the door its "doorness." An utter failure to secure the wall hole or keep out the wind and rain. Wasting electricity isnide of Luxe and making all of our carbon footprints that much EEEer. Seeing this exact same pattern of failure and apathy quickly made me question the resolve of our hipster slick community. I mean, if they can't even shut a friggin' door, how can we expect them to sort their recyclables? And these are the conscientious folks? I miss that door's functioning hinge like the desert misses the time before human reign!
Now, this may seem like the mindless minutiae of a cold Tuesday morning. And it is. But had you even thought about door hinges and their implications for the future of mankind before now? Or the evils of stupid club hit metaphors, and the think-they're-clever barristas who blare them? On repeat? This is annoying, important stuff, people!
All of that said, the coffee was mad yummy, and yeah I am like totally going back tomorrow, mainly to be seen. And I'll be the guy wearing the t-shirt that says "t-shirt."
----------------
Now playing: Beck - Missing... a hipster lack of consideration for people sitting next to the door.
No comments:
Post a Comment