valencia comic book store brave new world

Your small coffee with extra room for cream. With room for cream? Right away.” I pull myself together and put pen to paper. I find a seat at a shared table and try to write. “Out of a fiver! Here’s two dollars and one penny back.” That’s going to be $2.99.” I hand him a bill. “Here’s the empty glass portion of this morning’s entertainment. And can I get you a glass of ice to make it nice and fancy?” I agree. “We got a bottle of water,” Gandalf announces.

Real coffee, unadulterated and filled with that wonder drug we call caffeine.” When it’s my turn, I order a bottle of water, the minimum purchase required to inhabit a table. Garbed in a neatly folded apron, he narrates each order with a game-show announcer’s booming cheerful voice that seems comically ill-suited to the shop’s atmosphere of scribbling silence: “A coffee. In amusing contrast to the dour patrons, there are two zany, upbeat baristas at Borderlands: a blond, bandana’d hipster who approaches each order with a head-nodding sense of purpose, and a hippie Gandalf whose dangling gray beard clashes with his eye-popping pink ponytail. The heavy, humid air drips with the psychic weight of writer’s block. As I stand in line scanning the floor for a seat, a string of lone tables occupied by solitary people scribbling feverishly fills the space with a nervous energy. In Los Angeles, the title “writer” rings bohemian, yet in the Bay Area the word strikes an unpleasing antiquarian chord to the local ear.Ī militant silence reigns over Borderlands, indicting all those who deign to talk above a whisper. One meet-up called Shut Up & Write (“a one hour session of focused, productive writing”) warns participants, “he Café has been noisy lately so please bring your headphones/ear buds if you need to shut out sound distraction.” San Francisco may have been a writer’s city in the past, but in the dawn of the tech era to be a “writer” - rather than a “content creator” or a “storyteller” - is a curious, curmudgeonly vocation that attracts an obstinate breed of outsiders. Laminated announcements on cell-phone noise policies stud the tidy white walls, and the back table hosts a number of aggressively self-serious writing groups. We built this place just for you.īorderlands Cafe is attached to a science-fiction bookstore and attracts the sort of unsmiling patrons who identity as a “writer” with the utmost solemnity. These premeditated permutations are marketing code, a semiotic wink telling a certain class of affluent trend-conscious consumers, Come on in. Throwing in a pack of wolves saves the dreary craftsman from cliché and raises him from cheap to chic. The fashionable formula seems to involve taking a familiar item and injecting it with a slightly unusual accent - a blue hue or the fourth barrel - to lift the tediously literal into the intriguingly suggestive. Glazed with polished alliterations and alluring adjectives, the names leave an iron aftertaste of brand awareness and search engine optimization on the palate. The names of the cafes glisten with the sheen of carefully cultivated style. Drinking your way down Valencia’s coffee shops offers an unofficial tour of the city’s newly ascendant 21st-century lifestyles. GETTING A MORNING COFFEE on Valencia Street, San Francisco’s high hipster avenue, is not merely buying a drink: it is making an existential statement.

Valencia comic book store brave new world