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Nine competing specialty coffee shops from around Cleveland have come together to produce a calendar in support of the Cafe Femenino Foundation. The Cleveland Barista Calendar will be available for $15 at all featured coffee shops and select third party retail partners in November.
Featuring thirty baristas from Phoenix Coffee Company, The Root Cafe, Rising Star Coffee Roasters, Gypsy Beans & Bakery, Loop Cafe, Dewey’s Coffee, Katz Club Diner, and both Erie Island Coffee locations, the Cleveland Baristas Calendar 2015 is a collaborative project designed to showcase the character and sparkle of the baristas in the growing Cleveland coffee scene in support of women and their families in coffee communities around the world.
The idea for the calendar was hatched by Phoenix Coffee staff during a Latte Art Throwdown at the shop of their competitor, Rising Star. “Looking around, we saw baristas from nearly every cafe in the city there, just hanging out together, having a good time. The Barista Calendar came out of that same spirit of collaboration,” recalls Phoenix Coffee’s Coffee Director, Christopher Feran. “It seemed natural. Why not come together as a community to support a cause we all believe in—supporting coffee growers?”
Cleveland-native photographer Angelo Merendino shot the calendar, produced by Sarah Antonik, at Pete Larson Photography at W.78th Street Studios in Cleveland.
All production costs for the calendar were underwritten by La Marzocco, Torani, Caruso’s Coffee Roasters, Serengeti Trading and Jakprints to enable all proceeds from the calendar to go to Cafe Femenino.
Cafe Femenino, a 501(c)(3) non-profit, all-volunteer organization provides funding to support grant requests from women in coffee producing regions around the world. The foundation helps promote the integration of women coffee farmers into social, political and occupational organizations by providing grants that help support the women’s efforts and enhance their status within the community.
There are a lot of voters—Democrats—out there who want to use Ed FitzGerald as their punching bag this November.
[Full disclosure, Roldo most likely count me in that club, for good reasons.]
Henry Gomez already has secured that job.
FitzGerald has turned out to be a sad candidate. He’s taking an ongoing beating in the Plain Dealer for his missteps. Even though they haven’t been major or governmental.
Furthermore, he’s done just about everything the Pee Dee has had on its cheerleading list during his County term. Some gratitude.
The paper was never going to endorse him. But it has made it appear easy to oppose him by repeating his problems over and over again. Same as they did to Jimmy Dimora.
As if there were nothing else to the race for governor but a driver’s license. The lazy PD was always going to go for Gov. John Kasich, as they did four years ago—without good reason then. The made a joke of themselves Continue Reading »
Because of this dictatorship of the ritual, however, power becomes clearly anonymous. Individuals are almost dissolved in the ritual. They allow themselves to be swept along by it and frequently it seems as though ritual alone carries people from obscurity into the light of power. Is it not characteristic of the post-totalitarian system that, on all levels of the power hierarchy, individuals are increasingly being pushed aside by faceless people, puppets, those uniformed flunkeys of the rituals and routines of power?
The automatic operation of a power structure thus dehumanized and made anonymous is a feature of the fundamental automatism of this system. It would seem that it is precisely the diktats of this automatism which select people lacking individual will for the power structure, that it is precisely the diktat of the empty phrase which summons to power people who use empty phrases as the best guarantee that the automatism of the post-totalitarian system will continue.
From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978
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If ideology is the principal guarantee of the inner consistency of power, it becomes at the same time an increasingly important guarantee of its continuity. Whereas succession to power in classical dictatorship is always a rather complicated affair (the pretenders having nothing to give their claims reasonable legitimacy, thereby forcing them always to resort to confrontations of naked power), in the post-totalitarian system power is passed on from person to person, from clique to clique, and from generation to generation in an essentially more regular fashion. In the selection of pretenders, a new “king-maker” takes part: it is ritual legitimation, the ability to rely on ritual, to fulfill it and use it, to allow oneself, as it were, to be borne aloft by it. Naturally, power struggles exist in the post-totalitarian system as well, and most of them are far more brutal than in an open society, for the struggle is not open, regulated by democratic rules, and subject to public control, but hidden behind the scenes. (It is difficult to recall a single instance in which the First Secretary of a ruling Communist Party has been replaced without the various military and security forces being placed at least on alert.) This struggle, however, can never (as it can in classical dictatorships) threaten the very essence of the system and its continuity. At most it will shake up the power structure, which will recover quickly precisely because the binding substance—ideology—remains undisturbed. No matter who is replaced by whom, succession is only possible against the backdrop and within the framework of a common ritual. It can never take place by denying that ritual.
From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978
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Yet, as we have seen, ideology becomes at the same time an increasingly important component of power, a pillar providing it with both excusatory legitimacy and an inner coherence. As this aspect grows in importance, and as it gradually loses touch with reality, it acquires a peculiar but very real strength. It becomes reality itself, albeit a reality altogether self-contained, one that on certain levels (chiefly inside the power structure) may have even greater weight than reality as such. Increasingly, the virtuosity of the ritual becomes more important than the reality hidden behind it. The significance of phenomena no longer derives from the phenomena themselves, but from their locus as concepts in the ideological context. Reality does not shape theory, but rather the reverse. Thus power gradually draws closer to ideology than it does to reality; it draws its strength from theory and becomes entirely dependent on it. This inevitably leads, of course, to a paradoxical result: rather than theory, or rather ideology, serving power, power begins to serve ideology. It is as though ideology had appropriated power from power, as though it had become dictator itself. It then appears that theory itself, ritual itself, ideology itself, makes decisions that affect people, and not the other way around.
From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978
Fjaerland book town, Norway: Fjaerland is one of Norway’s Book Towns near Jostedalsbreen, the largest glacier in mainland Europe. Old sheds, houses and even a hotel have been converted into bookshops. “During the winter, the bookshop owners have to transport the books from place to place, over the snow, on kick-sleds,” says Campbell.
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As the interpretation of reality by the power structure, ideology is always subordinated ultimately to the interests of the structure. Therefore, it has a natural tendency to disengage itself from reality, to create a world of appearances, to become ritual. In societies where there is public competition for power and therefore public control of that power, there also exists quite naturally public control of the way that power legitimates itself ideologically. Consequently, in such conditions there are always certain correctives that effectively prevent ideology from abandoning reality altogether. Under totalitarianism, however, these correctives disappear, and thus there is nothing to prevent ideology from becoming more and more removed from reality, gradually turning into what it has already become in the post-totalitarian system: a world of appearances, a mere ritual, a formalized language deprived of semantic contact with reality and transformed into a system of ritual signs that replace reality with pseudo-reality.
From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978
D’s Books, Pnomh Penh, Cambodia: Vantha Douk, like many Khmers, had a poor and difficult upbringing in rural Cambodia. She worked many jobs to afford English classes, and when her aunt met an American bookseller who was opening D’s Books, she got a job as a bookseller. Six years later, she managed to buy all three branches of D’s Books in Cambodia.
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The whole power structure (and we have already discussed its physical articulation) could not exist at all if there were not a certain metaphysical order binding all its components together, interconnecting them and subordinating them to a uniform method of accountability, supplying the combined operation of all these components with rules of the game, that is, with certain regulations, limitations, and legalities. This metaphysical order is fundamental to, and standard throughout, the entire power structure; it integrates its communication system and makes possible the internal exchange and transfer of information and instructions. It is rather like a collection of traffic signals and directional signs, giving the process shape and structure. This metaphysical order guarantees the inner coherence of the totalitarian power structure. It is the glue holding it together, its binding principle, the instrument of its discipline. Without this glue the structure as a totalitarian structure would vanish; it would disintegrate into individual atoms chaotically colliding with one another in their unregulated particular interests and inclinations. The entire pyramid of totalitarian power, deprived of the element that binds it together, would collapse in upon itself, as it were, in a kind of material implosion.
From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978
John K King Used & Rare Books, Detroit, USA: Kings is located in a huge 1940s glove factory, which John bought in the early 1980s after having outgrown his former premises in the Michigan Theatre Building. The shop has twenty employees, two dogs and two canaries.
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If ideology was originally a bridge between the system and the individual as an individual, then the moment he steps on to this bridge it becomes at the same time a bridge between the system and the individual as a component of the system. That is, if ideology originally facilitated (by acting outwardly) the constitution of power by serving as a psychological excuse, then from the moment that excuse is accepted, it constitutes power inwardly, becoming an active component of that power. It begins to function as the principal instrument of ritual communication within the system of power.
From The Power of the Powerless by Vaclav Havel, 1978
The Bookworm, Beijing, China: This store combines reading and partying: “The Bookworm often has impromptu music evenings that bubble up out of nowhere, normally huddled around the bookshop piano. In some rooms the bookshelves are floor-to-ceiling, and there is an outdoor terrace where they serve cocktails,” says Campbell.
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