New avenues in De Niro research: Grace Hightower's coffee

So. I’ve sub­mit­ted the manu­script of Anatomy of an Actor: Robert De Niro to the edit­ors at the book pub­lish­ing arm of Cahiers du Cinema. The book is part of a series (Karina Longworth’s con­sid­er­a­tion of Al Pacino is out soon, and Longworth has star­ted a Tumblr devoted to the book; I might do same myself, or some­thing, when the time is appro­pri­ate and I Oh Christ do I have to think about it right now) that’s pretty strictly format­ted: General intro­duc­tion, essays on ten films that encom­pass the whole of the per­former­’s career until now, outro (or “Conclusion”), ten side­bars, and sup­ple­ment­al mater­i­als such as bio­graph­ic­al chorno­logy, filmo­graphy, and foot­notes foot­notes foot­notes. But of course in writ­ing about the ten indi­vidu­al films one does con­tex­tu­al­ize by dis­cuss­ing oth­er movies, and so in the short time I had to write the book I ended up extremely immersed in the man’s work. Thank God for Amazon Instant Video, and by the way, Ivan Passer’s Born To Win is actu­ally worth your time if you haven’t seen it already. After a little bit I star­ted devel­op­ing a slight resent­ment. Then I began to feel like Steve Brody in the Looney Tune Bowery Bugs, at the point when he fails to put two and two togeth­er on dis­cov­ery that all of his tor­ment­ors through­out the car­toon have been Bugs Bunny in vari­ous dis­guises. “Everybody’s turn­ing into rab­bits!” he laments before diving off the Brooklyn Bridge. Substitute “De Niro” for “rab­bits” and you get where I was com­ing from. I won’t go into the details of a dream I had in which an appendage…well, as I said, I won’t go into the details. 

The book does­n’t men­tion De Niro’s per­son­al life all that much, which was good for me giv­en that the two De Niro bio­graph­ies I worked with were highly prob­lem­at­ic any­way; when I star­ted this pro­ject I learned that my pal Shawn Levy is work­ing on a prop­er De Niro bio, and I regret it was­n’t avail­able to me as it would have been an excel­lent resource. (See Shawn’s superb bio of Jerry Lewis and you’ll under­stand what I’m say­ing.) But giv­en the extent to which cer­tain of De Niro’s career decisions have been affected by changes in his per­son­al life, and by his increased vis­ib­il­ity as a pub­lic per­son, and so on, some things are dis­cussed. I’m not sure if I neces­sar­ily would have made room for a men­tion of the below dis­cov­ery had I made it before fin­ish­ing the book. Said dis­cov­ery occured at the Court Street branch of Union Market, a gro­cery much favored by the Young And Awful Parents Of Gen-X-and‑Y Driven Bourgeois Brooklyn. What can I tell you? It stocks a lot of good, albeit pricey, stuff, and it gen­er­ally plays vin­tage Blue Note fare on its sound sys­tem, which is nice. (And some­times, as when the “free” sec­tion of Herbie Hancock’s “Survival of the Fittest” came up on  one Sunday morn­ing, this music makes the Young And Awful Parents Of Bourgeois Brooklyn a little uncom­fort­able, and they’re not sure wheth­er admit­ting to their dis­com­fort will make them seem unhip, and their psych­ic gyr­a­tions in this respect are a won­der to behold. Unless I’m just pro­ject­ing. I could be.) It was in the cof­fee sec­tion. New among the offer­ings of Stumptown and Peet’s and all these new con­cerns whose rubber-stamped-logos-on-plain-brown-paper-bags con­tain beans as costly as gold I saw a shiny deep purple pack­age and on closer inspec­tion dis­cerned it was a product from Mrs. Robert De Niro. 

You wanna talk pricey? $12.99 for a 10-ounce bag. But I bought it. How could I not. 

Let’s get into the cof­fee first. On open­ing, one encoun­ters a pretty nice look­ing bunch of beans. I took a pic­ture of those, too. 

I threw said beans in the Krups burr grinder and brewed up a big pot for myself and My Lovely Wife. 

It’s pretty fruity,” My Lovely Wife observed. Whenever I hear any­one say “fruity,” I think of Mrs. Bates protest­ing to Norman about being dis­placed from her bed­room, but I let it go quick and— agreed—it did have a ripe but acid­ic sweet­ness to it. “Do you prefer the African bean or the South American bean?” My Lovely Wife asked. I had to admit that as much of a cof­fee con­nois­seur, I mean HOPELESS AND ABJECT COFFEE ADDICT as I am, I had­n’t giv­en the mat­ter much con­sid­er­a­tion before. I guess when it comes right down to it I DO prefer the South American. The best cup of cof­fee I’ve exper­i­enced in recent years was from a Honduran bean har­ves­ted by Those Fucking Hippies at Ritual Coffee. Scarfed it down in San Francisco, brought home a bag, haven’t been able to find anoth­er since. As it hap­pens I’m not crazy about the fruit­i­ness for which African cof­fees are renowned; I prefer some­thing a little more robust. Although I’m extremely par­tial to the Tanzanian pea­b­erry. I con­tain mul­ti­tudes, clearly.

Anyway, none of this is to say that the cof­fee from the Rwandan bean that’s the sig­na­ture of Hightower’s brand was bad. It’s highly flavorful—complex, as the review­ers like to say. I could totally see it, per­son­ally, as a dessert cof­fee, if I was back on dessert. 

The oth­er sali­ent fea­ture of the Grace Hightower/Coffees of Rwanda brand brings us back to the pack­aging. Which is shiny and has a weird design (I don’t think that exten­ded ampersand really works, frankly) and fea­tures a shit ton of copy. On one side there’s copy that begins, “There is a place called Rwanda.” On the oth­er side a couple of para­graphs signed “Grace Hightower De Niro,” begin­ning “We believe that doing good busi­ness means doing good for the com­munit­ies in which we work.” On the back, a stick­er that, in this case, tells the story of Buf Café founder Epiphanie Mukashyaka; below that, on the pack­age itself, an explan­a­tion of the “Signature Series.”  If all this copy does­n’t keep you engaged while the cof­fee brews, or if you want to learn more (and my feel­ing is that the people behind the product are going for the lat­ter) there is of course a web­site for you. 

I don’t point this out to make fun. It’s pretty clear this busi­ness idea emerged from a phil­an­throp­ic impulse on Hightower’s part, and a laud­able phil­an­throp­ic interest at that. What’s inter­est­ing is the way that this enter­prise so neatly slots into the con­tem­por­ary Way Of Doing Things. Anyone who’s tried to get a busi­ness off the ground or pub­lish a book or do some­thing along such lines is invari­ably told that regard­less of how strong your idea might be, it can­not be launched without a PLATFORM. A celebrity, or the wife of a celebrity, or the part­ner in a celebrity mar­riage that has already estab­lished its phil­an­throp­ic bona fides, already has, it is uni­ver­sally acknow­ledged, a viable plat­form. Once that’s estab­lished, the indi­vidu­al with the plat­form will be told that he or she needs to con­struct a nar­rat­ive. This is regard­less of wheth­er the ven­ture is char­it­able or profit-driven; nar­rat­ive is all, even if it’s made up. In Hightower’s case, the pos­sible nar­rat­ives have deep roots in recent his­tory and of course the chosen nar­rat­ive is the one that is all about hope. One that also, here, tends to assuage non-climate-change-related con­cerns about the eth­ics of cof­fee con­sump­tion. At least until the con­trari­an per­spect­ive on that starts com­ing into vogue, as it may be. (I read a head­line some­where the oth­er day about how “food­ies” were actu­ally mor­ally rep­re­hens­ible, or some­thing, but you know I almost nev­er have been able to hear or read the word “food­ie” without throw­ing up so I skipped the actu­al art­icle.) Until then, if you’re look­ing for a fruity and com­plex cof­fee that sup­ports a growth industry in a par­tic­u­larly fraught part of Africa, I give Grace Hightower’s brand a thum­b’s up.