Tag Archives: coffee

Kyoto/Japanese/Cold Slow Drip Coffee and Internet Fail

The Internet has failed me. And I’m increasingly cynical about the state of journalism and, more importantly, people’s ability to follow-through on curiosity. But then I remember Mos Def and the state of hip hop:

Listen.. people be askin me all the time,
“Yo Mos, what’s gettin ready to happen with Hip-Hop?”
(Where do you think Hip-Hop is goin?)
I tell em, “You know what’s gonna happen with Hip-Hop?
Whatever’s happening with us”
If we smoked out, Hip-Hop is gonna be smoked out
If we doin alright, Hip-Hop is gonna be doin alright
People talk about Hip-Hop like it’s some giant livin in the hillside
comin down to visit the townspeople
We (are) Hip-Hop
Me, you, everybody, we are Hip-Hop
So Hip-Hop is goin where we goin
So the next time you ask yourself where Hip-Hop is goin
ask yourself.. where am I goin? How am I doin?
Til you get a clear idea
So.. if Hip-Hop is about the people
and the.. Hip-Hop won’t get better until the people get better
then how do people get better? (Hmmmm…)

Therefore, in my hunt for some real information about Kyoto Slow-Drip Coffee Makers (aka Japanese Slow-Drip Coffee Makers, aka Cold Slow-Drip Coffee Makers), I have to stop criticizing everyone else’s sloppy reporting that focuses on where these devices are and not how these devices are constructed. Instead, I need to work on researching blueprints to build one.

The first step, though, is that if I want the coffee reporting to get better, and the coffee reporting won’t get better until the people get better, then how do we get the people better? Well, I’m going to jumpstart things by asking if any of you have experience with these devices and insight into how they work and how I can build one. That’s step one.

Step two is that I’m going to harass coffeeshops.

Stay tuned…and post a comment if you know something!

p.s. Thanks to ZS for exposing me to this awesomeness.

Favorite Music Reviews: A New Series (hopefully the City Paper won’t steal my idea this time)

Earlier today, I tried starting a blog post series of my favorite–note, not best–songs. The first one was going to be Reverend Gary Davis’ I am the Light of this World (which would have been followed by about eight other Davis songs; I sweat him hard), but the limits of blog software led me to a cup of coffee instead. In this spirit, I launch a new series of Favorite Music Reviews, of which this post is the first.

For the record, most music reviews make me sick. (seriously; I’ve had a near panic attack over one in particular; ask SF). In fact, my own album ratings is an ironic and functional spin on the review process, where thoughtless albums receive a tremendous amount of column space and incredible albums register only a few gazillion hits on Google. Furthermore, the only music critic who does not make me want to throw my Internet out the window is Sasha Frere-Jones, and even he decides to write about inconsequentials such as Neko Case.

Nonetheless, about once every decade, there is a music review that I find so absurdly great that I put it on my fridge, mental or physical. To these reviews, I dedicate this series. Typically, my favorite reviews are those that are ruthless (in either a positive or negative manner), to the point, and demonstrate a wide knowledge of music without coming off as clever. People who know me, know that I feel CMJ reviews are the antithesis of this.

The first is Richard Gott’s Liberation Music, which appeared in the March 12, 2009, issue of London Review of Books. Now, Gott’s article is great, but it’s not his work that ranks him in my favorite music reviews. No, it is who he quotes. Specifically, I am keen on a Rodney Bennett review of a January 1960 performance:

It took time, though, for the new experimental music to be widely accepted in London. Cardew and Tilbury had played pieces by Feldman and Cage at a concert at the Conway Hall in January 1960, and Rodney Bennett, who was present, recalled that the audience of 70 sat ‘transfixed with gloom’ while the two pianists produced, slowly and laboriously, ‘a series of small tired noises, not violent, not beautiful, not exciting, not even remotely interesting: the whole effect as soporific as an evening spent listening to the complete Methodist Hymnal’.

The entire article is filled with these sorts of gem, and I encourage some of you to read the entire piece.