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For Schultz, this mainstream customer base was both a boon and a curse. In Pour Your Heart Into It, his 1997 account of Starbucks’ rise to global behemoth, he reveals a preoccupation with authenticity that echoed Kurt Cobain’s. In 1989, he initially balked at providing non-fat milk for customers—it wasn’t how the Italians did it. When word trickled up to him that rival stores in Santa Monica were doing big business in the summer months selling blended iced coffee drinks, he initially dismissed the idea as something that “sounded more like a fast-food shake than something a true coffee lover would enjoy.”
Eventually, Schultz relented. And really, what greater punk-rock middle finger is there to purist prescriptions about what constitutes a true coffee drink than a blended ice beverage flavored with Pumpkin Spice powder? . . .
In reality, the chain’s customers have played a substantial role in determining the Starbucks experience. They asked for non-fat milk, and they got it. They asked for Frappuccino, and they got it. What they haven’t been so interested in is Starbucks’ efforts to carry on the European coffeehouse tradition of creative interaction and spirited public discourse.
Over the years, Starbucks has tried various ways to foster an intellectual environment. In 1996 it tried selling a paper version of Slate and failed. In 1999 it introduced its own magazine, Joe. “Life is interesting. Discuss,” its tagline encouraged, but whatever discussions Joe prompted could sustain only three issues. In 2000 Starbucks opened Circadia, an upscale venue in San Francisco that Fortune described as an attempt to “resurrect the feel of the 1960s coffee shops of Greenwich Village.” The poetry readings didn’t work because customers weren’t sure if they were allowed to chat during the proceedings. The majority of Starbucks patrons, it seems, are happy to leave the European coffeehouse tradition to other retailers.
Duerfahrd recently brought his 29 students to the Music Box Theatre in Chicago for a special screening of the 2003 film "The Room," widely reviled as the "Citizen Kane" of bad cinema.
"Everyone was talking during the movie and throwing things at it and chanting things at it and responding to it," Duerfahrd said. "It was a beautiful event."
Tommy Wiseau, director of the now cult-classic movie, was even on hand.
"The students all wanted to meet the man to blame for the movie," Duerfahrd said. "It was more like a pilgrimage. Twenty-nine students wouldn't have gone to see Spielberg or a successful director. They wanted to see Wiseau, this guy who made this horrible film."
And that's the heart of the professor's respect for rotten movie making. It's easy for us to watch and be entertained by a high-quality film. It's a passive experience. Deriving enjoyment from a bad movie takes work, imagination and creativity – all the skills the bad movie's creators failed to utilize.
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"Most of the things that go on in our own life look like they're out of a bad movie," Duerfahrd said. "Forgotten lines, dropped engagement rings, poor acting. That's what makes the bad movies so much like the life we lead."
About the same time that Ibnale was handing out umbrellas, Brett Lockspeiser took $100 worth of dollar bills to the 16th Street Mission BART Station and held up a sign.
"I will give you $1 for you to give to someone else," the sign said. Throughout the evening rush, Lockspeiser stood in the station, trying to give away dollar bills.
"Everyone though I was trying to scam them," he said. "They wanted to know what I was up to. I told them they just had to promise to give the $1 to someone else."
After three hours, Lockspeiser had managed to give away only $52. One passer-by did not take the $1 but, suspecting that Lockspeiser was down and out, handed him a pair of socks.
The police fired water cannons and tear gas to disperse hundreds of people who forced their way into shuttered shops in the southern city of Concepción, which was devastated. But law enforcement authorities, heeding the cries of residents that they lacked food and water, eventually settled on a system that allowed staples to be taken but not televisions and other electronic goods.
WARNING: This introduction was written while watching an Argentinean soccer game, with a French newscast running in another browser window, “The Only Living Boy in New York” playing on iTunes, and an IM conversation with a friend in Kansas re:lunch happening on the side.
Multitasking seems inexorably tied to modern technologies of communication, information, work and entertainment, but is really really that novel? If you define it as paying (and dividing) attention between multiple information sources, then it might be argued that multitasking has always been in us. A hunter in the forest, a woman running a household, a farmer in the field, all multitask—paying attention to a multitude of sounds, smells, tactile and visual cues, always ready to notice significant changes in any one of them. Priests and shamans and ascetics have always had to take extraordinary efforts to mediate and minimize certain streams of input for the sake of others.
But modern multitasking, centered around electronic devices, can make what came before seem subtle and focused in comparison. Is it because the information and interaction no longer seem connected to our present environment? (But that’s only half true; staring at our screens, tapping out our alphabets, we’re still responding and reacting in the real world of light and sound and touch.) Maybe it’s the rates of change in the available technology, and our human ways of responding, interacting, creating and destroying in relation to it, that robs us of the accumulated wisdom involved in the multitasking of old.
Critiques of present-day multitasking are that it is both unwise (driving while texting) and ineffective (never focusing on one thing long enough to come up with a coherent thought). What do you think? What do today’s (and tomorrow’s) multitasking make of the world?
—Nate Barksdale
Read comments and add your own » ]]>I've just launched my latest passion project, A graphical analysis of national anthem lyrics, with attention to religious expression, Olympic performance, and general bloodthirstiness.
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There’s something exquisite about boredom. Like melancholy and its darker cousin sadness, boredom is related to emptiness and meaninglessness, but in a perfectly enjoyable way. It’s like wandering though the National Gallery, being surrounded by all those great works of art, and deciding not to look at them because it’s a pleasure just walking from room to room enjoying the squeak of your soles on the polished floor. Boredom is the no-signal sound on a blank television, the closed-down monotone of a radio in the middle of the night. It’s an uninterrupted straight line.
Actually, my idea of boredom has little to do with wealthy surroundings. It’s about a certain mindset. Perfect boredom is the enjoyment of the moment of stasis that comes between slowing down and speeding up – like sitting at a traffic light for a particularly long time. It’s at the cusp of action, because however enjoyable it may be, boredom is really not a long-term aspiration. It’s for an afternoon before a sociable evening. It marks that point in a holiday when you’ve shrugged off all the concerns of work and home, explored the hotel and got used to the swimming pool, and everything has become totally familiar. ‘I’m bored’ just pops into your mind one morning as you’re laying your towel over the sunlounger before breakfast, and then you think ‘How lovely.’ It’s about the stillness and familiarity of that precise moment before the inevitable anxiety about packing up and heading back to God-knows-what.