Chekhov’s Mistess

Illy in the USA

Illy, the Italian coffee maker, opened a temporary cafe called The Galleria in Soho. The idea is, as they say, to “immerse yourself in the culture of our unique coffee brand.”

That Illy culture happens to have an entire aesthetic attached to it to justify the expense of their coffee – about $12 per pound (still only about 34 cents per espresso, but it adds up quickly and is nearly twice what an average brand might cost). Ah, but I did spend an hour or so there yesterday, “immersed” in Italian coffee culture, working on my laptop, comfortably moulded into an egg-shaped chair, sipping espresso – to the point that I was talking like Scorcese by the time I went to my afternoon meeting.

I fit right in at Illy though, if only because I use a very handsome Apple Powerbook (they asked some poor guy to leave for having the audacity to pull out a Dell laptop, and I admit I was politely asked put some gel in my hair if I planned to stay more than a half-hour.) To their credit, Illy does take their “culture” seriously, with seminars on coffee and coffee making and art, and they even have a library of coffee books. Yeah, it’s marketing, but damn they’re good.

What I found most striking about the Galleria was the video display of Brazilian photographer Sebastião Salgado’s work. He has a deal with Illy to tell the story – through photography – of workers on coffee plantations. The photographs are beautiful – the sort of thing that black & white photography was made for.

But while I stand in awe of the photographs’ beauty, I stand in a place the subject of those photographs can’t imagine – the ironic spectrum is inescapable, like looking out a window and watching our workers in the field, but infinitely detached from their reality.

In Susan Sontag’s Regarding the Pain of Others, she says of Salgado:

The sanctimonious Family of Man-style rhetoric that feathers Salgado’s exhibitions and books has worked to the detriment of the pictures, however unfair this may be (There is much humbug to be found, and ignored, in declarations made by some of the most admirable photographers of conscience.)


Salgado’s pictures have also been sourly treated in response to the commercialized situations in which, typically, his portraits of misery are seen. But the problem is in the pictures themselves, not how and where they are exhibited: in their focus on the powerless, reduced to their powerlessness.


It is significant that the powerless are not named in the captions. A portrait that declines to name its subject becomes complicit, if inadvertently, in the cult of celebrity that has fueled an insatiable appetite for the opposite sort of photography: to grant only the famous their names demotes the rest to representative instances of their occupations, their ethnicities, their plights.


Taken in thirty-nine countries, Salgado’s migration pictures [a different exhibition than mentioned above] group together, under this single heading, a host of different causes and kinds of distress. Making suffering loom larger, by globalizing it, may spur people to feel they ought to “care” more. It also invites them to feel that the suffering and misfortunes are too vast, too irrevocable, too epic to be much changed by any local political intervention. With a subject conceived on this scale, compassion can only flounder – and make abstract…

[I broke this paragraph into several to make it more online reading friendly]

I don’t mean to sound sanctimonious, but once in a while(!) we become aware of this seemingly inescapable indifference in the oddest of places and it’s funny to run smack into that at a place trying to sell you on their culture.

I might add though, since it is Fair Trade Month, that Illy does seem to practice fair pricing policies and in a time of glut in the coffee market, happens to be one company keeping some farmers, albeit a select few, in business.

comments

Illy sounds amazing. How does the quality of drink stand up to their business model?

    – Daniel Nicolas (10/20  at  01:26 PM)

Hi Daniel - Actually in many ways Illy is amazing. The company is run by a bunch of chemists, which gives their product a certain level of integrity, as products go. And although they’re not retailers at heart, like Starbucks, they are great marketers.

The coffee is what espresso aficionados probably call “reference.” It’s quite good, but you may find better beans - the thing is - no one has the consistency of Illy.

Also, the way they pack their beans (with nitrogen, I think), keeps them fresh longer, while most espresso (and I’m not talking about anything like Starbucks, this is a whole other realm) gets stale very quickly after it’s roasted.

    – Bud Parr (10/20  at  03:37 PM)

You’re kidding about the gel, surely! I enjoyed the commentary on Salgado, perspective is a work in progress, is it not?

    – genevieve (10/20  at  07:51 PM)

Yes and yes Genevieve, I brought in the Dell and Gel silliness just to bring home the fancy atmosphere. I’m not a fancy person, but it was actually pretty comfortable there, so I was just trying to draw the comparison.

    – Bud Parr (10/21  at  12:59 PM)

Page 1 of 1 pages of comments

Next entry: The Enamoured Knight, by Douglas Glover
Previous entry: Inspiring Period or Big Question Mark?

« Back to main

About this Post

• Posted by: Bud Parr
• Date: October 20, 2005
• Filed Under:
  Polygluttonous: Food/Places

• Comments:4
• Links to this Post: Technorati

Recommended Links

- top -