The
main attraction of La Boulange, for me, is
not the food however; it is the atmosphere, a place
with tables out on the street where you can sit
and read, people-watch without being hassled (as
long as you order food at regular intervals and
pay your bill). The French bakery and cafe is actually
the prototype on which the modern cafe culture has
been founded. Starbucks, a branch of which is directly
across from Le Boulanger, also has outdoor seating
and you can sit and sip coffee and watch the world
go by. It is sort of like a duel between Superman
and Batman.
However,
Starbucks has a personal history. You see, I am
from a neighborhood in Brooklyn called Canarsie
. Canarsie has been described as Norman
Rockwell meets the Sopranos. Or perhaps another
analogy is this: did you ever see the episode
of Star Trek where Kirk and Spock got stuck
in an alien world that based its entire culture
on a book called the Gangs of Chicago and everyone
became a caricature of Al Capone and his gang? Well,
Canarsie in the 70's and 80's was similar to that
Star Trek episode, except the book that they based
their life on was actually a movie called Saturday
Night Fever. The height of style was to be cruising
in your Camaro Z28 with stereo blasting some disco
riffs, sporting gold chains and a feathery mane
of perfectly blow-dried hair. Connected
dudes hung out at the luncheonette in Canarsie
where everyone looked up to them. We did not have
any sensitive males or metrosexuals in Canarsie;
it was a place about as macho and anti-intellectual
as you could get without being in prison or the
military.
It
was out of this wasteland of American culture that
a man emerged and who would change the world. It
is the ultimate irony that a man from Canarsie,
the hairspray and leisure suit capitol of the world,
brought European cafe drinking culture to the world.
That man was a Brooklyn dude from Canarsie, the
last stop on the L train, Howard
Schultz - the guy who brought Starbucks coffee
to the world.
Schultz in his book Pour Your Heart Into It
talks about Starbucks as being "the third place
", an intermediate place that was neither work
nor home but where a person could enjoy a social
environment. It is in this intermediate setting,
where a person, relieved of his normal day-today
social roles and obligations could relax and could
chosse to be as anti-social as he chose. In reality
however, what Schultz did was to popularize and
mass market a concept that was already going strong
for centuries. You see, Jean Paul Sartre and the
French existentialist pioneered the past-time of
sitting in a cafe sipping absinthe-laced espresso
and contemplating their next welfare check.
