When it comes to home coffee preparation, I favor a French press. Boiling water and remembering to let it cool a bit, measuring the coffee and keeping the time the grounds steep . . . all this adds up to about as much cooking as I do.
Also, it makes good coffee.
But breaking the glass carafe of my trusty Bodum led to a quandary, or rather an irritation, when looking for a new one. (A replacement glass carafe is more expensive than a new one altogether, naturally.)
Models with a plastic carafe, cheapest by far, would be environmentally iffy and unacceptable taste-wise, but the non-glass model the New York Times recommends is ridiculously expensive.
A knock-off steel model I find online should do the trick and if I can get over my guilt about using the European version of Bezos technology to have it delivered to me it will be here tomorrow. But I can’t pull the trigger or, in this case, press for the presser.
Because at the base of an otherwise sleek product is a big label of the brand. I hate this. I hate how ugly it is. I hate that I have to be yelled at about who I bought something from.
I guess if I look around everything from clothing to appliances to my food has some brand prominently displayed. But I deeply wish it were otherwise.
I wish, when I get on a plane the airline did not start advertising itself and telling me how great it is and reminding me of all the frequent flyer stuff I can do now that I have already spent all my money to get on the plane in the first place.
No doubt the one that is three times the price has its dumb name showing somewhere too, but not just as grotesquely. I wonder if that alone makes it worth it.
In the meantime, I’ll go to see Bruno and Francesco, Elmer and Siebrand more than I already do. Those guys have great names and great shops and really know how to make coffee. Also, I can buy a press from one of them.
Between writing the above and posting it now I do two things.
First, I have the thought that this may be the tritest piece of writing on the web, more prose finding its place at the bottom of the Internet.
The only redemptive dot—distant and impossible to connect now—I can come up with is how total and oppressive branding can become in certain environments, like how Coke exists in Johannesburg supermarkets. There, sometimes, you think that is the only liquid you can buy, except maybe for the water bottled by the same company, which is more expensive than the stuff with all the sugar.
I also go to Orangerie, one of Amsterdam's more gezellig bars to sit and read a friend’s book of poems. (The theme of the book is that if you “stop trying to figure things out, then everything gets easier.”)
Almost all the people in the bar are younger than I am but the music—Steely Dan, James Brown, the Beatles—that plays above us is my age. I've been hearing it my whole life.
Ob-la-di, ob-la-da, Life goes on . . .