Best Espresso Shot!

The Bay Area Latte Art Competition is a series of contests held in San Francisco and Oakland, the only places in the Bay where people actually drink their coffee with art in their steamed milk. The most recent gathering of baristas and beret wearing latte artists was held at Contraband Coffee in Nob Hill, just a stones throw away from the Tenderloin, the difference being that in the former the crack you can acquire is from a hipster bending over in too tight of pants where as the latter is crack cocaine... Huzzah!

Look at all these fucking dorks spectating on who can be the best low paid artist

Having taken some serious steps in my artistic life I decided to join the competition. I arrived promptly at 6pm and was the second person to sign up, which I thought was odd, wouldn't caffeinated people be on time or at least anxious about it? The contest itself didn't start for an hour so I spent the next sixty minutes doing what everyone else was doing, engaging in small talk, indulging in paralyzing self doubt, harboring self esteem issues, and eating the free food.

Eventually I was called up to the barista station. A large contraption stood before me. My latte experience being limited to second rate machines I wasn't quite prepared for the technological device that would exude such pure capitalist devil juice. I stood next to a bearded man named Kevin as the two previous contestants waged battle. The contestants made their drinks and then displayed them before the judges whom decided on pure subjectivity whose was better. Kevin and I made some small chat while we waited for the judges' verdict on the previous bout. He worked at Contraband as a barista, yet didn't deem himself that skilled as a barista.

These are the machines of espresso weaponry. They make pure unadulterated capitalist devil juice.

Kevin was nervous. I was relaxed. I knew I had nothing to lose. Half the battle of a competition is showing up to compete. The official asked us what we'd like to use. I chose a cappuccino cup. Kevin did as well.  I filled up my metal tin with milk and used a long needle of a steamer to steam my milk. The milk whirled around and I worried that it wasn't getting enough air, I pulled up on it and gave it a little more air. I stamped the milk down. It looked good. I began to pour. The coffee was too milky as I poured. I pulled out and attempted to make a design in the cappuccino. There was too much milk in my twin. I leaked out a squiggle into a milky mess.

Yeah mine is on the left. So what!? Fuck you and your mom!

Kevin was done. I was done. We set our cups in front of the judges. I let them know that mine was the Japanese Kanji for failure. They pursed their lips and picked Kevin as winner. I shook his hand. It felt swampy from nerves. I walked off my head held high, after all I'd given it my best espresso shot.

Situationist Cred

The room when I entered with a friend was full of empty chairs, the fold out pieces of metal were arranged in three rows with a small platform in the middle. The stage would be filled with Donald Nicholson Smith, a short, portly main with a stringy bush of brown hair and a full white beard. He was soft spoken, and seemed benign. The seats would be filled with poorly dressed whites, mainly men ranging from their early thirties to sixties. A few depraved women had come to see a species of men more hollow than them.

I had come to the event at 518 Valencia, part of their ongoing SF talks series, to see the former situationist and translator of Revolution of Every Day Life speak. Not only as Nicholson-Smith translated Raoul Vaneigem, but he has also translated Jean Patrick Manchette's noir novels; Fatale, 3 to Kill, and The Prone Gunman. He has also translated Mygale by Thierry Jonquet, a noir horror.

Having originally translated Vaneigem's book in 1982 into english from the original french, he felt a need, spurred by the people at PM Press to update the translation. He commented that he wanted to give way to a more literary rather than colloquial feeling of the book. In the 60s and 70s there were lots of attempts to translate the book, in total and excerpts, due to the popularity of the S.I.  These translations were quite ugly to the french at the time. During his translations both in the early days and more recently Nicholson Smith was, however able to speak with Vaneigem about his points and to clear up, as best he could the translation. After a few more comments Nicholson Smith began a long, long reading of his translation from Chapter 15:  (Note to reader, if the below bores you, by all means skip ahead)

Our efforts, our boredom, our defeats, the absurdity of our actions all stem most of the time from the imperious necessity in our present situation of playing hybrid parts, parts which appear to answer our desires, but which are really antagonistic to them. "We would live," says Pascal, "according to the ideas of others; we would live an imaginary life, and to this end we cultivate appearances. Yet in striving to beautify and preserve this imaginary being we neglect everything authentic." This was an original thought in the seventeenth century; at a time when the system of appearances was still hale, its coming crisis was apprehended only in the inhibitive flashes of the most lucid. Today, amidst the decomposition of all values, Pascal's observation states only what is obvious to everyone. By what magic do we attribute the liveliness of human passions to lifeless forms? Why do we succumb to the seduction of borrowed attitudes? What are roles?

...
The role is a consumption of power. It locates one in the representational hierarchy, and hence in the spectacle: at the top, at the bottom, in the middle but never outside the hierarchy, whether this side of it or beyond it. The role is thus the means of access to the mechanism of culture: a form of initiation. It is also the medium of exchange of individual sacrifice, and in this sense performs a compensatory function. And lastly, as a residue of separation, it strives to construct a behavioural unity; in this aspect it depends on identification.

After his long and pointless reading, I could tell no difference between the current and past translations and the talk was beginning to bore me. Revolution of Every Day Life and its companion book Society of the Spectacle had a huge influence on me in my early twenties, and still exert a heavy weight on my weltanschung currently. The former encouraged a pragmatic hedonism and gave a coherent critique of life within capital, the latter offers a total critique of capitalist society especially with its tendency to reduce every relationship to be that of commodities and their images.

The floor was opened for questions and people asked about revolutionary violence, particularly as Vaneigem had changed his position. Nicholson Smith didn't note how Vaneigem had changed, he just stated he had. Indeed most of the speakers answers were a little off base, as if he wasn't really listening. That was fortunate for him when an audience member, embarrassingly for the rest of the crowd, began to read a critique he and his companions had wrote. After ten minutes of boredom, truncated by the moderator, he ended with a desire to engage with the other audience members. While that was one of the more painful questions the other audience participation was equally banal. One young man stumbled incoherently into a sentence that more or less said "these are big ideas, what do they mean?"

Another man historically situated the book by talking the 60s, when the book was written, specifically in Britain, which still had a strong welfare state. Nicholson Smith noted that while the book was very perceptive in many ways, it was at times completely off base. Vaneigem did not see the fall of the welfare state at all. 

The moderator asked an interesting question in that he felt that the S.I. had felt that all political projects were cup de sacs of failure, of reformism, and to what extent did that influence the future. Nicholson Smith noted that they (the SI) totally thought that political projects were indeed a cul de sac of failure and thus dissolved.

With that the talk closed after an hour and a half of quotes being read and boring questions being asked. I stuck around for a few minutes and then left. For all the excitement that the situationists had caused in my life I had just left a rather dull encounter. I walked down into the mission and wondered what I should do, one thing was clear to me, inebriation was in order, a prescription to forget my wasted, dead time. 

Notes on Luther

Cinema has replaced literature in terms of broad appeal. Far more people view television, watch movies, or stream vids on the internet than read novels, short stories, or even magazine articles. This is no news. While cinema has replaced literature there are still similarities such as the emergence of the serialized televised novel, or visual novel. Similar to the victorian era which introduced the serialized novel due to innovations in printing technologies, the rise of literacy, and improved economics of distribution in the modern era we have new technologies such as netflix, hulu, hbo go, that allow us easier access to televised series. In addition our culture, global culture, has become more obsessed with the moving image, and with the easy, inexpensive ways of paying (or not) television series we can look at many television series as the modern era's answer to the victorian era nickelbacks and pulps.

British Television for monetary reasons, cultural reasons, and or reasons unbeknownst to me has more short term series. One recent pulp serial is the show "Luther." Opening with a James Bondesque sequence that is underscored by Massive Attack's "Paradise City." The dark number is laid with images of the city and a man in shadows. It is a classic noir motif and points towards a common narrative within the noir/detective genre. That of a lead protagonist who must navigate through an urban landscape much like Theseus threads through the labyrinth.



Akin to Theseus's minotaur, Luther has to defeat half men/ half beasts. Yet his dark encounters with him shade his soul and he is represented as a man who is continually self conflicted. The first series of possible 3 (the second was produced, the third series may be in the works) focuses on Luther's conflict with his ex wife, a human rights lawyer. Luther is also haunted by the ghostly pale, Alice, whom he suspects, using his Holmes' like insight into others' psyches, is a murderer. It is his delving into the others' psyches that darkens him, or at least that is what we are to believe. He is violent, short tempered, and prone to breaking rules if it suits him.

Paradise Circus

It's unfortunate that when we feel a storm,
we can roll ourselves over 'cause we're uncomfortable
Oh well the devil makes us sin
But we like it when we're spinning, in his grin.
Love is like a sin my love
For the ones that feels it the most
Look at her with her eyes like a flame
She will love you like a fly will never love you, again
Oh, ho..
It's unfortunate that when we feel a storm,
we can roll ourselves over when we're uncomfortable
Oh well the devil makes us sin
But we like it when we're spinning, in his grin.
Oh, ho,..
Love is like a sin my love
For the one that feels it the most
Look at her with her smile like a flame
She will love you like a fly will never love you, again

An Anarchist Makes A Latte

My father drank a lot of coffee growing up. The morning would begin with a brewing pot. The cheap, lightly browned beans were preground and would sink, flushed by water further into the paper thin filter of the automatic coffee machine. A pot would be gone by the end of the morning, before we left for school. I didn't think much of it and I just enjoyed the smell of the brewed product, my father's consumption was a mere drop compared to the 2.25 billion cups drunk each day.

Chinese character for failure

Over a decade later I've found myself surrounded by coffee, the devil juice of capitalism. Originating from the Arab world, the first recorded writings of people consuming the caffeinated beverage hail from the Sufi monasteries in Southern Arabia. Sufis would keep themselves alert for their devotions through drinking coffee. Despite having the first coffeehouse in the 16th Century, Constantinople, wasn't considered hip at the time, but perhaps that is because the past wasn't presented with the presence of hipsters.

With continual trade occuring between Europe and Northern Africa, England got a hold of the morning time drug. The British East India Company and the Dutch East India Company were able to secure regular shipments for the country and in the latter part of the 16th century coffeehouses began to open in England. The houses were centralizing points for discussions over politics, religion and other stately, manly matters.

Coffee first came to the Americas in the 1700s and after the Tea Party dumped the shipment of tea into the Boston Harbor in 1773, coffee drinking came to be a sign of independence.

Drink Coffee and Remember to Vote Often

During WWII in an effort to give factory workers a brief respite, the coffee break was invented. General Eisenhower during his presidential campaign used the "coffee break" as a time for socializing with voters. Since that time the United States has become the world's largest coffee consumer, while the  South American countries of Brazil and Columbia have been the main producers.

In the 1970s the mega corporation Starbucks was created. With the emergence of the large coffee company there was a shift from cheap lightly roasted coffee which was less expensive to produce to more qualitative less acidic darker roasted beans. This shift in quality over quanitity has also coincided with the "foodie" movement and other food movements; slow food, organic, free range meat, etc.

In the last ten years coffee consumption has become increasingly specialized, as consumers want not just coffee but coffee from certain areas, of certain varietials; Arabica and Robusta, shade grown, bird safe, free trade etc.

Now most restaurants, bars, and coffee shops will have some qualitative bean variety, at least here in the bay area. Despite the growth of coffee culture I've remained happily ignorant. It was only recently when I went to a friend's coffee shop that I cared at all. It wasn't because of the taste of the latte that got me, but because of the swirling pattern he made with the steamed soy milk.

The perfectly steamed milk
masks the terrible flavor

Latte art is a relatively new phenomenon. In making a latte, an espresso drink composed of eight to ten ounces of steamed milk and one or more shots of espresso, the barista pours steamed milk over the espresso. Correctly steaming the milk allows the barista to pour a design into the coffee. Notable designs are the rosetta, the heart, and the tulip.

When I first saw my friend's rosetta design I decided that I would try to do the same. In the past I'd made shitty espresso drinks. I never drank coffee, and never cared about making someone else a very good looking coffee drink. Its taken me about two weeks to make decent looking coffee drinks.

I am not sure why I became interested in latte art. It serves me no purpose, as stated before I don't give a fuck about coffee, it is just waste. At work, where I am making these lattes, those that aren't consumed by customers are dumped.

 "I am pretty sure Matt has wasted an entire cow's yearly production of milk," one of my coworkers said to me after looking despondingly at one of my latte art abortions.

Having been in the restaurant industry for so long and not desiring to move up in the industry has limited my creative drive. There is no desire to expand, to get better at my job and so I feel alienated from my work. Having extra creativity, obsession coupled with boredom I make crappy latte art.

Swirling clouds of cow puss

In Georges Bataille's theory of the Accursed Share, an organism has an excess of energy to it, this is unlike classical economic theory in which organisms are always faced with finite amounts of energy. The excess energy according to Bataille, or Accursed Share, is a luxury and this luxury is spent according to the form of society.

I am not sure how much longer I will pursue this ultimately wasteful activity. It offers me little to nothing, it wont get me a raise, I don't drink coffee, it all seems like some perverse vanity project, besides there's a certain satisfaction in burning people's milk, perhaps that's why I was doing it for so long.

Once in a while

Its been some time since I've written on this blog. Initially the blog was a space for me to explore attempts at writing. I've since enrolled in college which has taken up a lot of my creative writing time. This past semester I took a creative writing class, one of my pieces was published. You can read it here.  Along with that piece I wrote a multitude of others, of varying quality. Below are two of the pieces that I did, the first is an ode the second is a prose poem. Enjoy.

Ode to My Iphone V

When you came on the marketplace,

Oh how I waited,

With breath unabated.

I waited in lines,

For your sale,

For hours,

For days,

For minutes of eternal entity.

How I longed for your sleek, slim, casing to spirit me,

Along the internet oceans.

The anticipation of your arrival,

Was more to me the death of a million Jobs,

In America, in China, in the dying of the world economy,

More important than the dinner conversations

That a few years ago went languidly uninterrupted by 

Your buzz, your beautiful buzz or your Marimba ring tone,

The world could collapse as long as I had you,

And my 4G network.

You, you are my key, my plane, my ticket,

Out of boring conversations,

Out of mundane work activities,

Out of the here, the now, 

To that technological palace

Of Facebook, with its internet popularity contests,

Of Okcupid, with its countless sordid matches,

Of Youtube, with its clips of grown men being hit in the balls.

Of Instagram, with its hipster's pictures spam

And your apps,

The skyping, the twitter, the flashlights, the games, the netflix, the banking,

The ability to see stocks and the weather,

Real time watching of the 

Fall

Fall 

Fall

Your camera,

With its ability to give birth to

Panoramic dick pics

To send to anonymous numbers

So they might see

The high resolution abilities 

Of your great technology.

Oh Iphone,

Oh Iphone,

How I long for an Iphone 6

----A Prose Poem

"Sleep, Commute, Work, Sleep, Commute, Work..."

I woke up with a hangover. I commute, commute, commute arriving ten minutes late. The boss rolls her eyes as my feet shuffle to the table.

"Hello my name is... Can I start you off with a cocktail?"

I had too many last night. I don't pay attention to what they say. I just nod my head and write down what I want. Little scribbles of stickmen being hung. I walk back to the terminal punching in their order. The goods are shuttled. 

"How is everything?" A muster of care.

I walk around and around and around. A customer scowls, picking up their check, the meager tip creates a continuinity of scowls. I meet and greet another table. Then another and another. Boredom mixes with malaise. My phone doesn't ring, so I'm still waiting, waiting, waiting, for the call that will get me   out of here.The shift is over and my feet are tired. I sit down with a drink, and another and another. I think I'll wake up with another hangover, and over, and over.

Pimp

I was in Bangkok when I first heard of Iceberg Slim's autobiography "Pimp." While talking to a young english man about gender he mentioned pimp as being indicative of some of the dynamics between men and women. Eventually I picked up the book and read it quickly. Despite its heavy slang the book is easy to read and a page turner.

Published in 1969 the tale follows Iceberg Slim, a man so icy cold that he doesn't stir from his seat when bullets shoot through his hat, and his journey into becoming an infamous pimp in the 1920s and 1930s. The majority of the narrative centers around Slim's early days of pimping. From a young age he aspired to be a pimp and after a few bouts with the state via reformatory schools he acquired his first whore, who would later prove to be a hinderance to his life as a free man. He made his whore work 16 hour days and under the advice of a fellow pimp beat her with a wire hanger when she feigned sickness. The woman stayed with him much like someone involved in the cycle of abuse. The pimp has to secure the woman's continued employment by presenting some sort of end goal, that of a glorious future with the pimp.

Continual reference is made between the relationship between a whore and a pimp as being a reversal of the whore's game. A pimp is just a man who has reversed the dynamics on the whore. He demands payment for the whores work, just like a whore demands payment from a john for her work.

The book reminded me in many ways of Eugene Vidocq's "Memoir's of Vidocq" in which Vidocq is a thief and lives in the underbelly of society until he is "reformed" and becomes one of the pioneers of the modern detective skill set.

Like Vidocq, Slim preyed on those around him for the purpose of survival and like Vidocq, Slim is also reformed through the prison system. Reformed meaning that they no longer desire the precarious lifestyle afforded to them by being a thief and pimp respectivelly.

What is most apparent in both these books is the sense of adventure. Slim is continually on life's edge and is arrested several times. One of the most exciting parts for me in Slim's tale wasn't his countless conquests of women but in his successful prison escape.

While I can't condone Slim's predatory enterprise and bougerois spirit I do admire his adventurism and his life as an outsider of society. I hold a strong sympathy to those who toss the chains of society aside and attempting to living life according to one's own will, even if that life might not be particularly moral.

Coming Communism!?

The alarm next to my bed went off. She rolled around in the blanketing. I got dressed putting on my warmest clothes. I put on my shoes and went outside. My friend was waiting in his car. The vehicle took us to West Oakland bart. The sky was still dark from the evening.

Our arrival at the bart station for the west coast coordinated port shut down was met with about 1,000 other early morning risers. I was hoping that the event would be short and sweet; some spectacular opposition with the police and a return to my bed within two hours.

En masse we marched down to the port and picketed next to three of the berths. Two of them had ships arriving that day and thus were important to blockade, while the third was an opening for workers. A row of riot cops stood in front of the picket. The picket circled around. My friend and I milled about.

Four hours later the port was announced closed for the day. I sighed with relief. My toes and fingers were cold. We walked back to the car and I went back to bed.

-

The discussion got started late. I drank a free beer and chatted with the people sitting around me while we waited for the presentation to begin. The book release party for "Communization and its Discontents," lasted three hours. The presenters rambled on about communization theory. The theory, coming from a post '68 left communist mileu asks us; "What does communism look like now that there is no longer a mass worker's movement, and how do we deal with the real subsumption of capital?

Theorie Communiste, one of the groups at the heart of communization theory, identify the decomposition of a mass worker's movement as the decline of programmatism. "In brief 'programmatism' is the forms of organization (mass parties, unions) and ideologies (socialism and syndicalism) that valorized workers' power... TC argue that with an intensification of 'real subsumption' - essentially the submergence of the entirety of society within a self-positing capitalism - in the 1970s the 'old' workers' movmement and proletariat become further imbricated within the reproduction of capitalism... the worker's movment carried within itself its antagonist in the shape of a reconstitution of capitalism in the very form its resistance takes - the valorization of the proletariat. (p.198)

In the contradictory struggle of capital against labor workers movements of the past have just helped to create a new dynamic capitalism. 'Old' mass workers' movements gains were merely reconsitutions of capital. The recuperation of revolt back into the arms of capital is made more poignant when we consider the real subsumption of capital.

Capital has moved beyond formal subsumption, its general form of domination, in which it "...subsumes an existing form of production 'as it finds it'. For example, peasants may still work in the fields in the way they always have but now they are compelled to take their goods to market to realise value. In this mode of subsumption, Marx argues, capital generates absolute surplus-value and can only do so by demanding extension to the workind day. So, surplus-value can only be genereated by fordcing work beyond the amount necessary for self-reproduction, although this compulsion does not tend to happen directly but through economic funcctions, i.e. you need to produce a surplus to generate income to live... This stands in contrast to real subsumption, in which capital revolutionizes the actual mode of labor to produce the specifically capitalist mode of production (p.11)"

Capital has made all labour ingrained to valorise itself for capital thus everything we look at is a thing and its price. The workers struggles of yesteryear are no longer viable attempts to overthrow capital. "That which distinguishes real subsumption, that is, this period in which capital has in a certain manner absorbed the totality of social reality rather than remaining restricted to the productive process, is that any activity is capable of becoming a part of the process of valorisation (p.73)."

Yet if there is no point in struggle against capital anymore why all the theory? Is it merely a hobby to pass the time for graduate students and communists who wish to explain their failings of the past? Endnotes puts its clearly when it states "This arrival of 'communization' at the forefront of radical chic probably means little in itself, but the major movement so far to find its voice in this language is more interesting, for the impasse of this movement is not merely a particular lack of programme or demands, but a symptom of the developing crisis in class relation... If communization is presenting itself currently, it is the palpable sense of an impasse in the dynamic of the class relation; this is an era in which the end of this relation looms perceptibly on the horizon, while capital runs into crisis at every turn and the working class is force to wage a struggle for which there is no plausible victory. (37-38)"