CLASSIC CAFES

[Zlatko Waterman]

Here's the link to the Classic Cafes website:

http://www.classiccafes.co.uk/Intro.html



Three ideas are close to me connected to this theme:

1. The chance to watch passing humanity-- in my case, sketch them, and of course, take notes about them.

2. The fine observation this article makes with its apt phrase "The brutal Starbucking of the City . . ." could apply anywhere-- certainly in LA where I live.

3. The mention of the desirability of "a local butcher" as a business in the neighborhood. Since my father was a local butcher in small towns and I grew up more or less in a small butcher shop, this intrigues me.

I came across this website researching a writer I'm reading at the moment, Iain Sinclair, who appears here as one of the writers interviewed.

Sinclair isn't well known to the American public, but he is a vast chronicler of "sixties and seventies" phenomena in London, a friend of the spectacular and better-known writer Peter Ackroyd, whom I have read extensively.

At any rate, I hope you enjoy some of this series of interviews with writers in London coffee shops. I did.

There are plenty of analogies to the US for Americans to think about.

By the way, I first heard about Iain Sinclair on the William Gibson website.



Zlatko