(DECOMMISSIONED)

although the desperate neon of rembrandt’s can be seen in the distance, all one-way streets seem to lead away from the cafe, forcing us to continue towards the chaos of the turnabout at the steps of the pma. as we pass an apartment block that has been transplanted from miami, we encounter the first street that allows to head north from fairmount. we take the turn and search for a path to rembrandt’s, without enthusiasm.

“maybe we’ll discover a cool coffee place on the way.”

“like cafe mojoe?”

i point to a painted sign which is becoming visible through the chain link fence. we dispose the of notion of attending rembrandt’s and enter cafe mojoe, excitedly curious.

Read the full tableau »

It is strange being at Java Monkey in the middle of the day. I usually frequent this coffee shop in the evenings, where the sounds of live music and poetry slams resonate through the cafe. Instead, Interpol or some other band is playing on the stereo system overhead. Java Monkey is by far my favorite coffee shop. The atmosphere is cozy, and it is decorated with second-hand furniture. The dim lighting and style of furniture gives this place the feel of a library/study. They sell wine and many different kinds of micro-brewery beer, so if you don’t want to get jacked up on caffeine in the evenings, or at all, you can choose among various depressant substances. For those who are interested, Java Monkey participates in fair trade, and prides itself on this code of ethics, indicated by the standards of fair trade listed on a wall. There are several different rooms in this cafe. The room in which you enter is occupied by tables, chairs, couches, as well as the registers. Turning left into the other room you will find yourself in the bar. There are two different patios, one which is covered and has a wood burning stove for those cool evenings, and the other is an uncovered, gated patio.

Read the full tableau »

As far as I can recall, there is not much to say about this coffee shop. The east-side of Athens is populated by cheap college apartments, and their respective denizens. This is not the most happenin’ part of the town by any means, but you can’t beat Jittery Joe’s coffee. This Jittery Joe’s is basically the sister shop to the one in 5-points, and is positioned in a tiny strip mall, sharing its walls with a Papa Johns, and various other businesses.

Read the full tableau »

i haven’t been to the 18th street coffeehouse in about 4.5 years, but it was the kind of place i sense would not change so much over time. it seemed frozen in its little sundrenched plot and the strains of patsy cline ambling across the tile floors and echoing against the cast iron ceiling must still sing out into the doldrums of santa monica. in a truly dismal and forgettable spot in the city, this coffeehouse became my living room for a few months at the end of summer in 2000. a large mexican family had moved in downstairs from me bringing with them a large stereo and a passion for ranchero and polka beats. i learned to stuff clothes into the crack under the bedroom door and sit without my feet touching the floor to avoid picking up the vibrations. it was a nightmare that accompanied a particularly alienating stint in the beige city.

Read the full tableau »

mani’s was all the things the cogs argue that los angeles is, too big, too many disparate functions, too many pretty empty faces. it is true, mani’s in santa monica was a big open room with little character, they did try to sell womens clothing in one corner and on the other side that kind of los angeles handcrafted tubesteel furniture where the ‘craft’ is the use of an angle grinder to smooth down the welds your boss did whilst sniffing coke out of a drawer, and yes the baristas were more often than not pretty boys and girls, ciphers in black shirts waiting to be plucked from obscurity, or as in one instance, snapping free from their affectations just long enough to look into a roomful of despondent westsiders, to empathize with those empty eyes, those empty balmy nights, and to put out a full plate of vegan carrot raisin cupcakes as free ‘samples’.

Read the full tableau »

it was not the time to be roving the streets of some distant city. sometimes the distance from home helps you feel alienated enough to make assumptions about who you are, who you want to be, how you want to be seen. this is not the case in a motel room, one as tiny as if it were in an upstairs veronese pensione, with one window looking into a ventilation courtyard and a bathroom that you step up into. this is not the case surrounded by associates in intermittent pockets of the city. perhaps over a boule taken in the embarcadero plaza, or poking through the metreon, one can begin to see how others are seeing you, come to terms with how everyone has been seeing you your whole life, and figure out how right they are.

Read the full tableau »

a creation scene painted on the ceiling. he (adam, joe?) reaches out languidly, recumbent on a flocculent drift of brushstrokes that blow toward the restrooms as if by force of the godhead and the divine finger, er, finger looped through a coffeemug handle. his finger is as limp as the miniscule penis he is rendered to have. his body is doughy in the fashion of a shaven adult baby. he regards the divine coffee indifferently, although the tempestuous glare of the godhead indicates that this is no trifling gift. does he ever grasp the mug, drink of it, stand up from his cloud, stand up to be a man like the men who made him, or does he recline eternally languishing, flaking, falling into mugs of coffee and being fished out in fragments that patrons flick from their scalded fingertips onto the massive leathery couch, or the rigid wooden chairs, or the dining tables in line as though a sequence of kitchen stage flats were lifted into the flyloft and forgotten. he has been there this long, since this place was called sacred grounds.

Read the full tableau »

what a simple yet evocative name. if a comma were added it could serve as a list of the essential components of civilised existence. we made a long trek to coffee cat from the hawthorne district, strolling through neighbourhoods until the heat grew unbearable. then when it became clear that it would be another 2 miles we collapsed in a bus shelter to wait for the trimet bus. the bus arrived. i climbed up the steps and felt freezing air blow across my soaking skin. i nearly fainted. why were we voyaging through this heat into the suburban hinterlands of portland to drink coffee? because coffee cat was a cool low-lit little corner, with a cat astride an armchair often squinting to awakedness to sniff your chai and lick the air; worn rugs over wood floors lay haphazardly, sometimes overlapping one another and coffered wood ceilings set low were illuminated by sconce torchieres. there was no heat outside, in fact there was no outside, this was a sanctum, a library of leatheroleum bound volumes, an arabian tent lavished with pillows, catacombs seen through the thick smoke of a swinging censer, and of course, a large adult cat, preferably half-asleep… thats why.

Read the full tableau »

cafe allegro is downstairs from the pensione, college inn, right across the street from gould hall, the university of washington college of architecture, which i had gone to visit in the spring of 1998 to investigate their graduate program. the inn is housed on the second through fourth floors of the tudor style building. the cafe is housed on the first. i had completely overlooked it in 1998, my interests not having been fully cultivated, it was of course not until i arrived at graduate school elsewhere that i began my descent into the sober liquor, at first drinking cowboy coffee at my desk and, after being chastised by my parents, venturing into more mature forms of coffee consumption. but here, in my adult life, visiting the area, and having slept 3 out of the preceding 36 hours, cafe allegro leapt out like a mirage, a monumental mug rising from everstretching fog banks like mount rainier.

Read the full tableau »

peripatetic in the city. sure it is romantic, sure it brings you to a space of scrutiny in which you can enjoy the stain of dirt left above the extinct neighbour’s roofline on a brick party wall for longer than you could at a stoplight, or at a busy bus stop, sure you can try to follow unsuspecting couples around the city at night trying to tail them, find out where they are going, sure you can stop completely at random to duck into a small boulangerie to break off a boule or batard, or a demi. the thing that all these activities, when combined with the final activity, possess, is a duration away from home base in which that bread, coupled most likely with an espresso beverage, give rise to a fearsome need for a public restroom.

Read the full tableau »

Every so often you encounter a place, that, late in your life, aligns with a place that you have been enjoying in your mind’s restful hours for many years. At this stage you cannot divorce the physical place from the one you believe you had remembered. Were you indeed remembering it, somehow traced past in your travels, peering through plateglass windows as a child, caught for moments in a film of warm nighttown, or was it a place that had grown out of the dissatisfaction with all of these fragmented moments, grown together to form one subtle impression, sketched in the meagre spaces of what you felt the world “should not be”, a place that was constructed by you as what you thought all of these things “should have been.”

Read the full tableau »

Camera Café indeed lives up to its name, offering for purchase various kinds of hot drinks, as well as filters, lenses, and—yes—cameras. I don’t want to spill forth right at the start all the reasons Camera Café is amazing (café + camera = guaranteed good thing), waxing hyperbolic towards a soaring crescendo, to leave the reader at the end with only a trite denouement. So, I will begin this ‘scene’ with a litany of criticisms, which may or may not touch upon some common café complaints, such as regarding baristas who spitefully inform customers of extra charge for soymilk; the subjection of patrons to hours of commercial-accompanied classic rock; drug busts staged frequently at intersections adjacent to cafes; streams of perambulators persistently filling café spaces; café interiors that are too dark; and so on. But I can’t do that. Because Camera Café is (near) perfect.

Read the full tableau »

“you enter a chamber containing a scepter, a tiara covered
with baubles, and a suit of studded leather armour.
something tells me it was left by someone
of high standing, possibly Storm.”

there is not much that can parallel the entertainment i get from eavesdropping on coffeeshop rpgs (role playing games!). i would much rather listen to a stereotypical bimonscificon dm (dungeonmaster) lay out, in a staccato pace that allows phe to construct the flimsy narrative as phe goes along, a potboiler of a fantasy scenario in a nasally, wheezy voice, whilst accepting cues and decisions on the fate of the characters from their player(s) than see some twerp (or adult) reading harry potter or see the lord of the rings films gross enough green to purchase arkansas. even if it is weak, tired, and tedious, the look of satisfaction they get from hashing through it themselves and cultivating ownership over their fantasies is fruit enough for me.

Read the full tableau »

Approaching Mugshots by bike from Center City, one is obliged to trek up ‘Fairmount Hill,’ as my colleague has recently dubbed that mound of residential rock which is capped by the Eastern State Penitentiary. I cycled up there one day late last spring–greeted by the prison’s looming turrets and crenelated crest, my mind began to wander to thoughts of battlements, the neo-post-neo Gothic as a Platonic ideal, and . . . bacon. Yes: This overwhelming waft of swine, as I was soon to learn, was emanating from none other than Mugshots. In this quaint Philadelphia prison neighborhood, it is apparently customary on Sunday morns to ‘perfume’ the streets with the scent of bubbling lard. How nice, I might have thought, if I were inclined toward lard, schmaltz, and the like. As it were, I am not. And yet I persevered–giving the prison one last squinty-eyed glance, I proceeded to boost my sickened viscera with a dose of prophylactic adrenaline, and then dragged my sorry form into Mugshots, fixed to receive my punishment.

Read the full tableau »

I understand the most recent edition of the _Taschen Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Design_ describes the interior of Velocity Cafe as a veritable taxonomy of postwar vinyl mobilier and oeuvres d’art plastique. The fact of its inclusion in this volume will most certainly ensure that cafe receives the patronage of thrift-store enthusiasts, nostalgic baby boomers, and the occasional graduate student, who, no doubt, is mining the streets of Santa Monica for a profound (and marketable) dissertation topic. In spite (or because?) of the excess of kitsch that appears to have been vomited onto every surface of Velocity Cafe’s insides, the interior is visually inoffensive…nay, even pleasant and fascinating.

Read the full tableau »

When freely associating, the name Stumptown reminded me of the devoted self-sacrificing tree in “The Giving Tree.” By name only, I expected this cafe to be a sort of dive, where old grizzly Portlanders would frequent in the mornings before continuing with the daily grind. I pictured ratty sofas, paint chipping off of second-hand tables and chairs. To my surprise, Stumptown was Hipster paradise. Inside, one might say that the atmosphere was sterile and antiseptic, despite being in a brick building. The cafe was sparsely decorated with IKEA-like furniture, and on the coffee tables lay a wide assortment of hipster mags (adbusters, dwell, wallpaper). The dichotomy between building and furniture did not feel interesting or unique, but egregious to the extent that it lacked any personality. The burnt sienna coffee mugs were perfectly coordinated with the light pine buffet, in which sat the usual coffee accompaniments. Everything about this place was coordinated–clientele, furniture, employees.

Read the full tableau »

if you go the other way off of congress avenue from the bars, rock clubs, and bat caves you will stroll through what, in the heat of the day, is an unbearable wasteland, and as i did not chance it at night, i can only assume, a dark, unbearable wasteland. there is a noodle place right on congress avenue where during lunch i told an associate of plans to develop this website. associates are strange, they arent colleagues, they arent friends, and any entree to the sheaf of personal papers beyond the front page is made with a certain hesitancy. it was clear he thought the idea was tight but was unsure how much enthusiasm to show. i would have preferred to return to safe ‘work-related’ territory but the envelope had been breached so we sat in intermittent silence broken by his suggestions of names for the site, one of which made the ‘wild card’ list! he became so wrapped up that he asked a noodler where a decent independent shop was in the area. we were pointed toward halcyon coffeehouse, the place in which, saints be praised, i had planned to spend the afternoon reading a text before i discovered that i would be shadowed through the afternoon.

Read the full tableau »

on my first and last trip to Last Drop, i asked the hipster behind the counter, ‘Why do you charge extra for soymilk?’
he replied, ‘We have to pay for it.’
i pointed out, ‘You have to pay for the cow’s milk and cream with which people supplement their coffee, as well; why don’t you charge extra for that?’
he stared, slackjawed and silent — no surprise there.

Read the full tableau »

disturbed by the arrival of a thickly-lensed tweaker, who, before continuing to walk up 43rd street until disappearing over spruce hill, places a gallon of water and a copy of ‘mastering agriculture’, which apparently has been lifted from the library of the university of new mexico, on the table just beneath your perch, you look up from your novella, and, glancing past the perpetually opening door, you see a girl nestled in the corner with her back to the horizontally arcing window which affords a view of a small plot of untended garden and an archipelago of slatted wooden tables blistering in the sun. she is studiously focused on the papers, texts, and dictionaries heaped upon the round ‘marble’ before her; dark tresses are tucked behind her ears to afford a better view of the work. she has buttoned a tight white blouse to her throat; the tails fall over an ankle length skirt consisting of two layers – one sheer and one of sheen.

Read the full tableau »