There are points in any life when people burrow. I know I’m in one when I’m reading almost nothing but essays about art with murder mysteries on my I-Pod, the latter to guarantee that as I engage in humdrum tasks, the voice in my head is not my own.<\/p>\n
I surfaced into a (slightly) larger world this weekend when I looked up an old friend online and found her writing<\/a> for Dwell. I don’t care about Dwell, which appears to be fetishistic about the finer points of gracious living, but I do care about leads. My friend, Deborah Baldwin<\/a>, writes them as well as anybody. <\/p>\n Here she is on getting fired:<\/p>\n When someone gets fired from a French kitchen, the chef de cuisine says simply, “Take your knives.” To a chef, the knife is like an extra appendage, and its dismissal cuts deeper than the standard American “It’s just not working out.”<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n And on the lost pleasure of coffee shops:<\/p>\n I love coffee. It’s coffee shops I have a problem with. Whenever someone suggests we “grab coffee and catch up,” I instinctively shudder and suggest instead a nice cocktail or root canal.<\/p>\n Once havens for intellectual inquiry and quiet perusal of newspapers, coffee shops are now basically retail outlets and free office space. As in art, it’s not the tale but the teller.<\/p>\n Update:<\/b> Even though the Deborah Baldwin I know writes about food and wry lifestyle, I’m quoting another Deborah Baldwin. Everything’s accurate about this post, except that I don’t know this Deborah Baldwin from Adam. Or Eve.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" There are points in any life when people burrow. I know I’m in one when I’m reading almost nothing but essays about art with murder mysteries on my I-Pod, the latter to guarantee that as I engage in humdrum tasks, the voice in my head is not my own. I surfaced into a (slightly) larger […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-1172","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1172"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1172\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1172"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1172"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/anotherbb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1172"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nNursing a cappuccino the other day, I observed a frantic businessman conducting a conference call on speakerphone, a woman toting a hysterically yapping Labradoodle, and two frosty socialites loudly debating the relative appeal of the spray-on tan. Kerouac would never have got anything done.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n