Blog
Tag: Globe & Mail
Coffee Talk
by Dan
Food & Drink + Vancouver / February 04, 2010
As a quick follow-up to yesterday's post about the art and science of the perfect espresso, I just thought I would post a link to this Report on Business article in The Globe & Mail about Vancouver coffee institution Caffè Artigiano:
“The coffee world has really evolved in the past five, 10 years, the science of extraction. A large corporation can't focus on that. Coffee's becoming more and more detailed. People will want to know where the coffee came from, how sustainable it is, how the farmer is treated, how much he was paid, the terroir of the farm.”
The general manager of Caffè Artigiano on Hornby, Kyle Straw, is the current Canadian Barista Champion(!), and along with Bryant Simon, author of Everything but the Coffee: Learning about America from Starbucks (University of California Press), and business reporter David Ebner (who wrote the article), he participated in an informative live chat about coffee with Globe readers yesterday.
(Pictured above: Wanderlust Coffee Journal from Chronicle Books)
Richard Poplak on Kenk
by Dan
Graphica / February 04, 2010
Richard Poplak, author of The Sheikh's Batmobile and Ja No Man (published by Penguin Canada) recently talked to the Globe and Mail's Peter Scowen about his forthcoming project Kenk: A Graphic Portrait, which captures the life and times of the notorious Igor Kenk:
Igor has indeed been convicted as a thief, and he indeed made many people's lives miserable. But that's where the story starts, and it goes way deeper... Igor tells a much, much larger story – about a neighbourhood in flux, about what we're willing to accept as a community, about who we are as people. Igor is about much more than just Igor...
I'm very attracted to the old New York reporting of Joseph Mitchell and A.J. Liebling – guys who wrote about neighbourhood personalities for the New Yorker in the 50s. To me, this is the apex of journalism, because it says absolutely everything – not just about the characters in question, but about those that loved them, those that avoided them and the times in which they lived. These extreme characters explicated their surroundings and their epoch.
Richard also posted about his reasons for working on the project on his own website late last year:
Very simply, we are defined by characters on the extreme edges of our society. As much as I’d like to write about the upstanding citizens of the world – and the older the get, I happily realize these are in the vast majority – they can play a little dull. Kenk... is as much about what it means to live on the fringes of a tightly regulated society as it is about bike theft. And if I had to define the book in one word, I’d assert that it’s about compulsion.
Kenk: A Graphic Portrait will be published by Pop Sandbox in May 2010.