i lost my notes. i know i took some, but it was so hot, and i kept on my long sleeve shirt and soft hat, that the purple runnels of text on my 89c spiral notepad that i thought were from a rain or spilled drink accident might actually be my sweat-redacted jots from the patio-cum-theater backyard of common grounds. i do still have the pictures, and my laser intentions of forcing myself to down a styrofoam cup of black-joe in the 90 degree east-central texas heat just to be able to write about it here would have been foolishly entered into if i didnt have a somewhat articulate memory of places (less so of people), knowing that i also cant save pocket-sized notebooks worth a darn.

“im thinking of stopping in waco on the drive (from austin to dfw.)” “waco is just a blip on the map.” i guess in reality whomever said that was right, but in a drive that bleak, a blip looks like an oasis, and indeed the flowing streams and heat-bedraggled college kids seemed like a sunken city beneath the highway that the relentless east-central texas landscape just continued to flatten over, although i can only speak about the air-conditioned endless shanty world that was common grounds and the crick-walk on the baylor campus, which, although hot as woolly balls, were all dappled in shade tree shadow and the silence created by heat slowed voices and exhaustion.

someone had told me that baylor university was in waco, and it turned out that common grounds was practically on its campus. the entire sprawling establishment was filled with college kids. the one note i remember having written down was “is baylor a girls’ school?” 95% of the kids in there were young ladies, all with their laptops, ipods, and accouterments spread across tables throughout the interior where nary a seat was vacant in the enfilade of rooms and side parlours where muted light padded like the flickers of late stage heat stroke. there were a few anxious guys standing around, but i assumed they were suitors or townies.

i took my cup out to the patio and sat with my forearms on a vinyl counter overlooking a big fred-sanford-decorated gravel yard with a stage. there were platforms with seating on that i can only assume became after-hours some lukewarm christian hybrid of hee-haw and club mtv. flyers for a solo show by some young beau-hunk stating that he was ’still single’ further fueled my perception that this place was a seething amazonia, and as i watched girls sleeping and lounging and propped up on their elbows or with their feet on tables, all in small groups a fire was lit, like the wink of an arsonist, when a pop-collared, capri-bepant’d, frat-mopped goon strolled across the patio, through a wooden gate, carrying a puppy. he could not have had a more smug and self-aware look than if he was the last man on earth and responsible for propagating the species with a village of young ladies. shrieks and sighs and coos rose up from all around the patio as i watched in straight-lipped contempt all of the girls rush to this tool like iron filings in a junior high magnetism experiment, knowing not what they did, but knowing that the magnet controlled them, and that his magnetism was as easily procured as rubbing against another stronger magnet, or in this case, by brandishing a puppy at a fucking slumber party. not that i was concerned that i had caused no commotion myself, but the gang bang quickly grew irritating after the quiet studious and languid peace of my first twenty minutes in waco.

on my way back through the joint, foreseeing the immediate diuretic effects of the beverage in the heat, i stopped in the can, and knowing thos’s affinity for the cans of the world, took a photo of the watchful glowing owl that lit the dark room like the inverse of the white world and black moments in the blinding daylight of waco.

and into the bleak sun that swooped me back slightly into the texas sky i walked onto the baylor campus, and still unsure of its gender affiliation, feeling like an awkward wolf sure to be caught leaning against a henhouse, i chose a low road along a concrete creek or spillway that had a meandering sculptural promenade. a bell tolled in the distance. at the end of the promenade a steep stair led back up to a parking lot where i could see, from below, a net or enclosure that looked like it might have been an aviary. hoping to perhaps see a real owl i climbed the stair where a group of children out of their strollers were milling around.

after they were quickly dispersed by the arrival of a large bee, i was able to see through a thick window in a phony rock wall what they were looking at. two living bears were wrestling in a phony rock cave just on the other side of the window. i watched for quite a while, for some reason not wondering why there would be bears in a pen on a girls’ college campus. as the children returned i got my head out of the window and read a placard describing the bears’ origins, or at least the origin of the rationale for the bears. apparently the bear is the mascot of baylors’ slow-pitch softball team or their volleyball team.

luckily, all my questions were answered, especially the burning one that came to mind as soon as i saw their brown fur and snouts in the shade, “do they still drink dr. pepper?” of course, the only two things us highway bullets think when we see the signs for waco are ‘branch davidians’ and ‘dr pepper,’ and why wouldnt it stand to reason that a waconian bear would drink dr pepper. unfortunately, they have stopped forcing them to drink the questionable elixir, much to the locals disappointment it sounds like, and i can only assume that the net spread over the top of the enclosure was to keep rowdy baylor boy-toys from throwing two-liter bottles of dr k or something over the fence to watch the bears lose their cool. the sign didn’t address the branch davidians; i can only assume they still allow the bears to eat them.

did i mention how fucking bleak it was out there?

“case study number two in why fairmount cannot sustain a decent coffeeshop…”

Saul Cups, 7:03:38 PM:
ugh

Saul Cups, 7:03:46 PM:
flying saucer sucks

Saul Cups, 7:03:47 PM:
big time

Saul Cups, 7:04:01 PM:
there isn’t a single TOLERABLE coffeeshop in my neighborhood

Saul Cups, 7:04:22 PM:
i’d rather be stuck at walnut bridge coffeehouse than mugs or saucer

thos. more, 7:04:42 PM:
where’s fsaucer?

Saul Cups, 7:05:00 PM:
26th and brown

Saul Cups, 7:05:06 PM:
it’s the place where i went one weekend

thos. more, 7:05:09 PM:
never heard of it

Saul Cups, 7:05:17 PM:
and people were talking about eating rabbit and venison

Saul Cups, 7:05:23 PM:
i decided to give it another chance

Saul Cups, 7:05:33 PM:
i arrived around 10 past 6

thos. more, 7:05:33 PM:
too bad we ran mojoe out of business

thos. more, 7:05:35 PM:
oh!

Saul Cups, 7:05:41 PM:
i knew it closed at 7

Saul Cups, 7:05:48 PM:
the barista says

thos. more, 7:05:48 PM:
what about that place by wf

thos. more, 7:05:53 PM:
java’s brewin’ ?

Saul Cups, 7:05:53 PM:
‘you know we close soon?’

Saul Cups, 7:06:02 PM:
‘um, like in 50 minutes?’

Saul Cups, 7:06:10 PM:
‘well, you’re welcome to hang out till then’

Saul Cups, 7:06:18 PM:
‘you mean, i’m welcome to hang out till you close?’

Saul Cups, 7:06:20 PM:
silence

Saul Cups, 7:06:28 PM:
fucking rude

Saul Cups, 7:06:33 PM:
and stupid

Saul Cups, 7:06:35 PM:
so i sit down

thos. more, 7:06:37 PM:
maybe they have a pre-close policy

Saul Cups, 7:06:43 PM:
just like last time

Saul Cups, 7:06:47 PM:
everyone there fucking knew each other

thos. more, 7:06:50 PM:
‘funny’, the same thing happened to me during my pleasant holiday in sweden

Saul Cups, 7:06:53 PM:
and were talking at each other from across room

thos. more, 7:06:56 PM:
‘we close in one hour’

Saul Cups, 7:07:03 PM:
about dumb shit

thos. more, 7:07:07 PM:
maybe their usual customer expects to sit there for 9 hours

Saul Cups, 7:07:11 PM:
the barista was the worst

Saul Cups, 7:07:22 PM:
talking at very high volume

Saul Cups, 7:07:27 PM:
and their internet was out

Saul Cups, 7:07:30 PM:
and he didn’t even tell me

Saul Cups, 7:07:34 PM:
i hate that place

Saul Cups, 7:07:38 PM:
it’s almost as bad as mugs

thos. more, 7:07:42 PM:
fuck saucers

Saul Cups, 7:07:59 PM:
when i write the tableau

Saul Cups, 7:08:04 PM:
it will start with

Saul Cups, 7:08:26 PM:
“case study number two in why fairmount cannot sustain a decent coffeeshop…”

Saul Cups, 7:08:51 PM:
everyone who lives in this neighborhood is a douchebag

thos. more, 7:09:28 PM:
you can just post this chat as the tableau

thos. more, 7:09:48 PM:
’saucers isn’t worth any more effort than an online rant’

Saul Cups, 7:10:05 PM:
yes

thos. more, 7:10:43 PM:
i’ll do it

Saul Cups, 7:11:22 PM:
i hope they go out of business

thos. more, 7:11:50 PM:
are you going back there this weekend?

thos. more, 7:11:55 PM:
to learn your lesson again?

Saul Cups, 7:11:56 PM:
no

Saul Cups, 7:12:08 PM:
the barista and some customer were having a debate

Saul Cups, 7:12:18 PM:
about whether one should feel sorry for the somali pirates

thos. more, 7:12:21 PM:
mugshots would be ok if they didn’t have the ‘restaurant’ and the sex creeps

thos. more, 7:12:44 PM:
hm

Saul Cups, 7:12:55 PM:
take away the bacon, the kids, the baristas and mugs would be fine

thos. more, 7:13:01 PM:
i don’t feel sorry for pirates

Saul Cups, 7:13:14 PM:
it was fucking absurd

Saul Cups, 7:13:34 PM:
you have my permission to post this chat as a tableau

thos. more, 7:13:41 PM:
i wish the seal snipers would set up on the ramparts of eastern state penitentiary

Saul Cups, 7:13:54 PM:
http://www.theflyingsaucer.net/blog1/

Saul Cups, 7:14:03 PM:
don’t include that part when you c&p

thos. more, 7:14:13 PM:
which part?

thos. more, 7:14:15 PM:
the link?

thos. more, 7:14:40 PM:
that site looks stupid

thos. more, 7:14:43 PM:
i closed it already

thos. more, 7:15:06 PM:
i expect a cafe site to have hours and info about fair trade coffee & soy milk

thos. more, 7:15:26 PM:
not a newspaper full of feeds the baristas think are hilarious

thos. more, 7:15:40 PM:
‘funny things chlöe found on gawker!’

Saul Cups, 7:16:00 PM:
i know

Saul Cups, 7:16:06 PM:
i meant don’t include part about snipers

thos. more, 7:16:13 PM:
?

Saul Cups, 7:16:18 PM:
i don’t want saul cups to have fbi after him

thos. more, 7:16:28 PM:
the fbi were on that sniper ship, too!

thos. more, 7:16:34 PM:
they were all in on it

thos. more, 7:17:01 PM:
those seals weren’t on the ship when that shit started

thos. more, 7:17:16 PM:
they were flown there,

thos. more, 7:17:28 PM:
and they parachuted into the fucking ocean!

Saul Cups, 7:17:35 PM:
i know

thos. more, 7:17:36 PM:
and had to be plucked from water and put on ship

Saul Cups, 7:17:36 PM:
i mean

thos. more, 7:17:42 PM:
is that the easiest way to get on a boat?

Saul Cups, 7:17:49 PM:
i don’t want anything about snipers in phila assoc with scups

Saul Cups, 7:18:07 PM:
that’s the last thing scups needs

thos. more, 7:18:19 PM:
i just meant i want fairmount hill to be safe from pirates

thos. more, 7:18:48 PM:
not that bacon dbags should be shot

thos. more, 7:19:24 PM:
oh dear, what is this shit

thos. more, 7:19:32 PM:
Google Latitude Introducing Google Latitude

thos. more, 7:19:38 PM:
‘See where your friends are right now
Enjoy Google Latitude on your phone, computer, or both.’

thos. more, 7:19:41 PM:
great

thos. more, 7:19:53 PM:
another tool for my stalkers

thos. more, 7:20:49 PM:
maybe next google will have a website where you can turn on your ‘friend’s’ webcam from your own browser

thos. more, 7:21:38 PM:
Google Bug enables you to turn your friends’ cell phones into listening devices from your computer!

In the middle of it all we were hanging out in the basement print lab of the UT architecture school. It was September 2008. I had my copy of ‘Strange Details’ alternately curved in my back pocket or stuck in my waistband like a pistol. An almost Los Angeleno night breeze spoke in the dark courtyards. It was the dry kind that made it feel like the sun was still up; the last time I felt it was poking my head out of the sliding wood door in my studio in Marina Del Rey ten years ago. I could feel my thicker hair and smell Ray Chi and Jin Won Kim’s cigarette smoke. Jin Won could smoke a whole unfiltered cigarette in under a minute, in 3 drags, with his hard yellow hand cupped over the top of the ember.

We were told they had French press coffee almost immediately across the street and I was anxiously waiting to take a hot glass vessel with heat discolored brass fixtures and fittings that looked like the sun shining in oily puddles back to my table to relax and watch the sinister roast suck light from the air.

We took a detour for dinner further north up Guadalupe and then strolled back toward Medici full of dry overglazed tofu and noodles. Coffee should have been the furthest thing from our minds. I knew it would take my stomach on its descent through the night. We eagerly ordered in the vast hall downstairs and took our coffee cups gingerly up the steps, somewhat dejected. I surmised that they made the coffee in French presses and then poured it in a cup and served it to you.

Part of the joy of French presses is the ritual of preparing, serving, and carrying on in the presence of the press as a prop. Certainly it tastes superior, but half of the taste is knowing visually that it came from the press.

I am one to whom context affects the senses. A lousy meal, like the one Weaver and I had just eaten up the street, can, in the thread of an evening in which began after a swim at Hamilton Pool in the afternoon and a long hill country drive, tossing out conjectures about the end of a news snippet we caught which offhandedly noted that McCain was suspending his campaign, back to Waterloo to waste money on records, then after a short nap in the hotel, we walked the few miles from downtown in the cool air to stalk the UT College of Architecture and break on the weak forms and hack modes of representation, which now lead to this compartment of experience which became a facet of the worked jewel of a memorable afternoon, not a frustrated stuffing of braised tofu into my craw while I tossed scorn at the waiter who spilled water on me or the bleak streetscape of midtown Lavaca, or the fact that I didn’t hold a steaming French press in my hand.

So, carrying on about the context manufactured by the French press I recall Medici now, having described it all leading up to this, as being within the context of this pleasant afternoon and evening which then found us on foot again all the way back into town to sit in the yard of the Gingerman Pub for a few more hours, still carrying my copy of ‘Strange Details.’

Postscript: Although the atmosphere of a vast lit hall in a black night made me feel as though I had walked through an entire desert to find its light and warmth as a mirage, so otherworldly was my displacement in the limbo of idleness, my eyes closed to listen to Mulatu Astatke over the stereo only to open on a sea of hand-made chairs that, for me, could not have looked less comfortable. Utilizing the tripod, which is of course the only logical leg’d structure, they fouled up by putting a single leg in the back and a pair in the front. Were I alone and pulled up at the table to work I may not have cared, but in company I like to lean, and the shortcoming in this aspect of its function is all too apparent. Luckily there were some upholstered seats in the back by the top of the stairs from which I could spew my unfounded venom.

I am a connoisseur of silence. On my back porch the birds sing above the crouch of quiet cats. The Bubo Virginianus that lives in the woods behind my house is back. I hear him. I know silence not for its aural qualities, but merely as a condition in which I recognize the opacity of things, of the air. Airplanes from Hartsfield bring thunder invisibly from the low cloud ceiling all at once. It has been a silent afternoon.

University classes start tomorrow but today Emory was mine. At one PM I stepped through the marble gates which were at the time being rebuilt by two laborers chatting and stepped through a planter to fork on the right side of a long wooded gulley toward the again marble Carlos Museum’s back entrance which I had entered alone probably seven years ago for a lecture about Huysmans and color whose title alone, if I closed my eyes, would be more evocative than the words which drained out of it in an upstairs room with a lingering slide of Moreau’s John the Baptist in radiant decapitated stillness.

At the bridge that crossed the gulley a woman in a black cloak talked on her phone opposite me and I stopped for a moment to allow her to walk ahead. Below me almost disappearing into the leaves a rusted diamond plate landing with very narrow steps led into the woods and down the slope. A small sign indicated the path to be a work of environmental sculpture by George Trakas. Intrigued I followed the path which turned into a single wood plank inches above the leaves. A tree had fallen across the path and I stepped on it and over as it led down to the creekbed and stopped three feet above the wet stones and flowing water. I sat on it like the end of a diving board in the woods beneath the city and heard traffic noise pass above me, able to grasp only edges of it. I crossed the loose stones to another steel stair on the opposite side of the creek and climbed up to the back door of the Carlos Museum. It was open. An empty coat room was lit to my right and I boarded the elevator contemplating spending a half of an hour looking at photos of the discovery of Tutankhamen’s tomb. On the first floor the elevator opened facing a gift shop. It, like the rest of the campus save the departed woman in her cloak, was empty, but open, and Billie Holiday sang “them there eyes” in tinny distance from behind the shelves. To my left the front door let out onto the quadrangle and the Cannon Chapel in the distance. After the Huysmans lecture I had gone to the chapel and recalled nothing of it. It being a work of a canonical mid-century architect I felt like I should have an impression. It was closed this Sunday.

I felt the dilemma in the emptiness of the campus of selecting just the right spot to sit. This task is usually sorted out for me by the distribution of people in a public place, but here today I was overwhelmed by the freedom of the benches surrounding the quadrangle and leading down into sub-quads and tributaries. I followed the path down below the ramp to the chapel and beneath the barrel vaults overlooking the campus central plant where three giant chillers whirred. Once out from under the building I was in a courtyard with a smooth concrete and glass building ahead of me. It looked flat and dead. I made the decision not to retrace my steps and sat in a raised circular brick patio next to the back entrance of the chapel. Although it had rained for the last three days and the air was still thick with cloud the smooth bricks were dry. Rudolph at least succeeded in designing a plaza that could drain. I sat leaned against the high end of a brick wall that spiraled down around the perimeter of the circle to a zero point where I had entered it from the third step up off of the courtyard. I edited the first half of a story and listened to the cooling towers. Two couples walked through the courtyard to the back door of the chapel which was locked. As quickly as they passed out of the courtyard I felt as if they had never passed through it. An entire university campus empty under the full sky. I felt that the sky had come down into the spaces between the building and although I could see every surface with shadowless clarity far into the distance I was within its humid solidity. I had an impression of the chapel now.

At three PM I felt the pangs of urine tapping at my bladder and finding the doors to the concrete building at the far side of the courtyard locked I made my way back to the hydra of an intersection at the entrance to the campus to find a public toilet. I opted to play the urban game of paying for a hot beverage at a coffee shop in order to use its toilet. The cycle has been described in other tableaux I daresay. I floated into Method Coffee Bar and Tea Lounge through its covered patio and glimpsing the restroom to the far left approached the barista to order a tea. He spoke kindly to me, beyond the minimum of an exchange and put me at ease. I used the can while he put my tea together and then sat against a felt banquette to drink and do some additional editing. A booji couple on the turtleneck end of the spectrum of their ilk came in to inquire about the whole bean coffee for sale and asked whether the Yergecheffe could be used for espresso. The proprietor was polite and offered one of his espresso roasts as they went into a strained sounding reminiscence of the Ethiopian espresso they had subscribed to that was no longer available and longed for its smooth flavor. They ordered a tea and sat down.

I espied a group of four glass carafe cum funnel vessels on the counter and noticed next to the list of coffees available a chalk sketch of the same vessel. Feeling let into a conversation with the proprietor after his initial offering I ventured out of myself and walked to the counter to ask about the vessels and whether he served coffee from them. Indeed they did. I asked if I could photograph them. I could. He suggested that he was about to make a cup for himself and I could photograph one in action and as it brewed we talked about the origins of the brewing method, his shop, his name was Don, its proximity to Starbucks and the fact that college undergraduates don’t drink coffee they drink Starbucks, the coffee ‘cupping’ similar to wine tastings that his shop hosts, Costa Rican Tico coffee preparation, the fact that his shop was in the former home of the Emory branch of Inman Perk, which was in the former local outpost of Caribou, and breaking my cover as I never have before, the existence of this website. He gave me the cup of coffee he had just brewed on the house, it was the Nicaraguan, and I packed my things, and, thanking him, promised to come back. I felt like the translucent ‘I’ in a Sebald novel, sometimes myself, sometimes not, slipping through a barely grey luminous world and limping into faint sketches of conversations with familiar strangers. Don had looked, in certain poses, like my college mentor and as much as we spoke, I still had the peaceful feeling of having been silent throughout.

On the patio a man sat against the window with a book of Chekov criticism and I fancied the scorn I would garner in some forums of feeling a certain satisfaction at being alone on the patio with that man for a moment. Other than him the metal mesh tables were all empty and the same shadowless light from the courtyard filled the plastic enclosure with the calm abandonment one finds on the French coast out of season with white skies and empty cold beach patios, or the vision of the resort patio where the protagonist from “Souvenirs du Triangle d’Or” sat and was apprehended from, and I thought about the chance events spilling forth from my full bladder which allowed me to reflect back on the events of those three hours and make them concrete.

I took my Sebald novel to one of three benches across the street in front of a drug store and did not read it. A booji beturtlenecked man in his late thirties came out to a Landrover parked in front of me with a girl dressed in black tights and a cloak with bright red lipstick and straight dark hair, she felt too old to fit comfortably as a daughter, yet too young to not look oddly suspicious kissing his grey temples, which she did not do but in my mind’s eye, but too similar in costume and mien to have not been selected out of society by the man. Both were as disinterested in each other as a father and daughter would be, or as Delores and Humbert were rolling down the highway after the release of their first tryst. As they pulled away she leafed through a stack of long register receipts held up against the light through the windshield. The automatic bifold front door flapped like a mechanized screen door hitting its dryrotten jambs and a parked car filled with children that had been there for thirty minutes already still sat with its left turn signal flashing. Everything felt slow, as if the coffee had sped me up enough to document the intersection’s tableau vivant in minute detail as it moved at regular speed. At four PM blue ribbons threaded across the sky like Escher’s unraveling head.

Being in such a dour and surly mood perhaps is not the proper condition in which one should open up a new tableaux, but House One: Hider-In-The-House has crashed and my own newly self-inflicted daily project has proven impossible to break through. Unsatisfied, then, I focus my wrath upon Java Lords in lieu of other outlets.

I am surprised that JH has not already covered this place. Atlanta is more his town than mine, now, and there are not many other coffee shops left for him to tableau. I presume he is occupied by spending every free moment at Dr. Bronner’s or whatever that coffee place we went to after the Portman speech is called.

Whatever the case, I do not really have any place writing this tableau; I didn’t pay much attention to the operation of this shop when I visited. Both times I was full of potato and broccoli burritos from El Myr that I would have rather been purging in an alley or toilet room than having sink like stones in my bowels. Through the pain, there are a few things I vaguely recall noticing; maybe the reader finds them valuable:

• The cafe is open to the box office of a theater or concert hall.
• Some flyers for Phantasm.
• The coffee is from Cafe Campesino.
• The restroom is enormous (possibly due to association with theater.)
• A full scale crucifix lords over the outdoor seating area (shared w/ a falafel or Vietnamese restaurant).
• Some paper bags for sale as art (verified).
• Coffee served in paper cups(?)

What I definitely remember from both of my visits, the most important point regarding Java Lords, is that there were foxy ladies behind the counter – and each was accompanied by a male cockblocker who charged across the room to intercede us before said fox could take our orders.

The male cockblocker. He is a different animal than the female variety found at bars and parties dragging their more attractive friends away from hot guys. Still, you’ve seen the type. Guys who have no charm or charisma, so their strategy is serve as a wet blanket thrown over any interaction between their attractive female ‘friends’ and any approaching dandies from a local collaborative constructive. Imagine, if possible, a reversal of Blane’s and Ducky’s roles in Pretty in Pink. These guys reckon that their coworker will have an awful taste in her mouth, metaphorically, after each exchange with a customer, and will eventually give up and fall into the cockblocker’s embrace. It is a twisted Pavlovian exercise by the cockblocker, as he is responsible for the distasteful event to begin with.

For fuck’s sake, one of them was wearing one of those bluetooth earplug things for his cell phone when he took our orders! For a fuller description of at least one of the baristas, try searching for ’short yellow dress’ along with ‘handsome soymilk drinker’ on Atlanta craigslist missed connections.

In conclusion, I guess my points are that I did not spend much effort thinking about Java Lords before writing this, and that it’s a good thing some douchebag in a headset took my order because I wouldn’t have known how to talk to the girl in the yellow dress, in any event.

Aurora would probably be the coffeeshop I ended up making a pilgrimage to on my visit to Atlanta if I were a wayward anti-tourist from Marked Tree, Arkansas or Searchlight, Nevada. It is a safe place that has a patina of freshness to it, it is in an area where one could easily spend an afternoon wandering, buying records, looking in a used bookstore, loitering, or eating some vegetarian indian food. It alone is not a destination, it is in support of a greater destination, its presence completes the entirety of a district that is found in every somewhat major city, the ‘funky shopping district,’ where you can buy patent leather outfits, stupid graffiti inspired toys, or jack kerouac texts, all while flexing your independence for the 4 hours that mom has allotted you to pretend you are a street-urchin. But as I said, this would typically be a destination for me as a wanderer. But for me as a resident, it merely exists as another place in the city that has worn out its welcome to me and teems with the archetypes of human annoyance.

As it happens, the only times I seem to end up at Aurora are those where I explicitly put myself out of sorts. Maybe it is a lunch taken biannually with a friend in L5P that we feel like extending out of sentimentality and continued conversation potential by dropping into Aurora for a cup. Or it might be a multi-annual MARTA fugue in which I get on the 107 bus and inexplicably follow the same route through Little Five Points, through the Highlands and Piedmont park to the Arts Center train station and points north. I fantasize that the day is going to transport me from the workaday usage of the city as a prop for making ends meet into a world of pure experience, of pure focus, in which any moment that I put my ass down on a flat surface will coincide with the inspiration I am fishing for to put pen to paper, or media to medium. I cant say it is exactly like this when I am traveling even, but it is certainly an association I have with traveling. Can one truly get lost or transported in one’s own city? Of course you can. But you cant trick yourself into letting it happen in a place you have been coming to for 14 years. My enjoyment or immersion into the experience becomes a pantomime.

Even the funky rabble and pedestrians casting the farce of an early morning coffee in the proscenium of Little Five Points, whom I might use to get into character, the wandering scribe, the flaneur drinking in the twists of behavior that define each and every individual in the vertebrate world, noting them, letting them play off of my own behaviors and gestures in silent jibing with the new, are, when I unscrew my eyes, the same damn people I somehow manage to bump into in the most dehumanizing stages of my day. A barista that I faintly recognize from ‘back in the day’ serves my delicious locally roasted beverage; in from his car with steel drum strapped to the roof strolls the slovenly French Canadian (I think) who I see draping his mat of hair through the Publix check-out, MARTA trains, and every other debilitating den of human limbo that I pulse through; if I am lucky a police-officer who I repeatedly see naked in the YMCA locker room will come in and try to make eye contact with me.

Normally, either in a coffeeshop in Atlanta that floats outside of one of these reciprocating contexts, or one in another city that is sited similarly to Aurora, this cavalcade of spectacles would either play into the depersonalization that I crave or would simply slip past me in soy milk steam. It is unfortunate for me and probably less so for Aurora that I cannot subscribe to what it is and its importance as a beachhead of independent coffee in Atlanta. I can only hope that in twenty years, when I have been living far away (hopefully) for long enough, and I happen to breeze through Atlanta, Aurora will arise out of such anonymity and freshness that I can experience it for what it truly deserves to be recognized for.

Endnote:
As you might recall from my Jittery Joe’s Athens tableaux, I like to sit very close to the table I am trying to work at. There is nothing that will crap your labor mojo faster than a chair and table configuration that positions you, at your closest, with your knees aligned with the edge of the table. The below photo illustrates the ‘leg’ of the chair, a solid board, coming into contact with the cruciform leg of the table, the whole of my lower body visibly forced out from beneath the table. Sure this is probably great for leaning back and talking about Noam Chomsky or something, but for those of us endeavoring to get some shit done, no dice. Although, see all of the above for why this would not have been possible in the first place.

As Tilt Coffeeshop was visited by two (2) Cafe Tableauxists simultaneously, we decided to post dueling tableaux, as a sort of ‘He said, he said’ experiment - a look at the divergent, opposing, and/or confluent views of a shared experience:

This was the first shop I had visited with Thos. since Mani’s Santa Monica in the fall of 1998, about 9.5 years ago, that neither of us had previously visited. This experience was pretty much the same as that one, although fleshed out a bit more by 10 additional years of repertoire rehearsal. We bickered and picked the place apart while trash-talking about people like Grace Lau, who, I would imagine, we would have just begun complaining about 10 years ago at Mani’s. It doesn’t really bother me that so little has changed. It is pleasant in a way that there is a constancy in the personality of the independent coffeeshop, even the new ones that keep stacking up on top of each other in the gentrifying corners of the country, that refreshes my spirit like bullshitting with an old friend.

Established old friends, we like them because they have grown on us, we are able to overlook things that have faded into the background over time. With our good old friend the coffeeshop, we are faced with the difficulty of reconciling that familiarity with the jolting differences that we find in the newer manifestations of their kin. It would be deceptive to chalk Tilt up under the BFF ’standard independent coffeeshop’ category in which you might find Xhedos in Detroit or Green Line in Philadelphia. There was a pulse to Tilt that beat with the juice of modernity’s life’s blood. No, it wasn’t ‘damn fine coffee.’ It was teevee. I can go a long time without watching teevee, and any time that I do I end up wondering why I hadn’t done something else with my time. Perhaps you have encountered self-loathing grouches like me sometimes. Perhaps you think it is out of step, or painfully self-conscious. But my question is, how can it be that a human being can not survive, or at the very least, not be able to while away the moments in a coffeeshop, without being linked to their own personal television set, or for the more socially inclined, the group teevee room in the back with the big flat set on the wall. It is odd to me that that might be a selling point or an attraction to the coffeeshop goer. It makes me think back to the terminal at the old Melbourne (Florida) Regional Airport that had hard black plastic teevee/chair combos that you could pay 25c to for 15 minutes of black and white re-runs. But then again, you ‘had’ to be there, which would be the only excusable reason to need a teevee to pass the time there, if you had not the prescience to tote along a text or blankbook. One doesn’t go to Tilt because they have to, and it would follow that you would be going there as a destination to pass the time filled with that destination, not going there on purpose and then requiring a teevee to distract you from being there. It doesn’t add up. At least you could turn the built in sets at the small tables off, which we promptly did upon sitting down.

It is hard to know what Thos. is going to latch onto for his Tilt narrative. We agreed to post our tableaux together and compare them. I might guess that he would talk about me forcing him to walk through the heat to get there, or he might damn his camera for sucking dry his batteries before he could take pictures of the toilet room at Tilt, or rail against some minutiae of the interior design like the overwhelming turnbuckle fetish or whether the place was called ‘Tilt’ because the shelves were improperly braced and threatened to toss a plate of brownies onto the floor. I can only guess. It will probably have more subtle and lucid language, less hyperbole and melodrama, and probably not reference the fact that he was there with me at all.

I hate to sell Tilt short as the place with the television sets at the tables. That would be like describing your experience on a MARTA bus solely through the get-rich-quick infomercials in which a propped-up Tom Bosley implores you over the bus’s built-in teevees to sell crystal unicorns and embroidered throw-pillows over the phone, instead of expanding the narrative with screaming children, adults screaming into their cell-phones, and teenagers listening to screaming adults over their poorly shielded headphones. I actually enjoyed my time there, I enjoyed the open roll-up door letting in sunlight, I enjoyed the missing ceiling tile in the bathroom that let you see back out to the main space, I enjoyed the little soy milk pitcher and the free soy milk, I enjoyed being complemented about my tie by the diminutive male barista, and I enjoyed having a new yet familiar place to visit with my old friend.

addendum: After further reflection I have realized that I have visited quite a few establishments for the first time with Thos. I don’t know that the cafes in Paris should count, but certainly Chapterhouse and the dive in Chelsea that will probably remain forever absent from this website should count.

Jesus Christ, if I had known the brutal nature of the journey we were to undertake, I would have made preparations by fortifying myself with the four-vegetable plate at Eats, then stripped about half of the layers of clothing insulating my body and fashioned them into a sun-shielding covering for my head, neck, and face. Instead, I began the day’s ordeal unaware that JHT had devised this trek as a method of retribution for what he perceived as punishment inflicted upon him, per my design, as we strolled along the streets of Philadelphia last Spring, as expertly documented in his Chapterhouse tableau.

Somehow, between when I am away from Atlanta, I manage to forget how fucking hot it gets there. There are cities located further south, and certainly places that are more humid, but somehow Atlanta still feels less comfortable than Miami or New Orleans or even the DF. Possibly it has something to do with the fact that you can walk from MSME to Tilt and back without seeing a single tree. As I staggered along our path, the heat beating up from the asphalt and on all sides from the enormous concrete volumes that fill the city southwest of Five Points, the only glimpse of greenery I managed to catch was a patch of grass bursting through an abandoned parking lot 600 feet below the web of viaducts we traversed across the wasted land that JHT affectionately calls ‘The Gulch’.

as seen in 2005

Who knows when and where that name became popular; I’ve never heard it used before this blistering march across town. The Peachtree Plaza is now the Westin, the Nationsbank building is now Bank of America Plaza, Bellsouth is now the AT&T, HP is now Crawford, and Stewart Avenue is now Metropolitan Parkway. I never saw the sign, but my dad still complains that Ivy Street is Peachtree Center Avenue and Houston is John Wesley Dobbs. I would bitch about the OMNI, but I recall that they imploded the last bit of it to construct the Philips Arena or the Georgia Aquarium or some more Post Apartments. I grew up around these places, but when I talk about them now, I get all of the names wrong, appearing like a clueless greenhorn fresh from a boat from Cleveland. Amidst my protests regarding name changes of buildings and destruction of buildings that are superior to their replacements, viz.: The C&S Tower and the First Atlanta (later Wachovia, natch) Building, JHT claims that when you die, you forfeit the right to have something named after you; however, I did not hear him complaining when he was driving down Ponce de Leon Avenue a mere 45 minutes earlier in the infernal afternoon.

r.i.p.

I did not enter Tilt for the coffee; I sure as shit did not do so as the thermometer on my wristwatch climbed to 102°F. I entered Tilt and ordered a beverage that could have been brewed at room temperature out of duty to CT. I do not recall Tilt being distinctive compared to numerous other cafes – or bistros, boutiques, bike shops for that matter – located in former industrial sites that have been gutted and fitted out with stainless steel fixtures and exposed halogen bulbs - excepting the fact that there were televisions on every table. I do not know if Christian Unverzagt has built anything; I do not want to know, but this is what I imagine it would look like – minus some green curving planes or Lucite. If I was not obliged to take part in this tableaux tandem, I would have forgotten Tilt as quickly as I forgot the flavour of their brew as I sweat it through my pores, swooning whilst hearing JHT, as though from the bottom of a boiling well, tantalize me with mirages of falafel sandwiches and the number of a girl named ‘Thos.’ from the Green Line during the plod ‘home’.

usually a place provokes a narrative of memories, a chain of things that had happened before the tether that place to a mess of things from the past. stringing those together in a text is best left to those with more time and those named proust. koffee is the first shop under my oeuvre of tableaux that was recommended to me by someone other than google, a former new havenianiter i suppose, im not quite sure. there was no description or reminiscence in the recommendation, just the name, which i had to follow up on google. so in a way it was still my find. rather than string all of the bits together i will just throw the coins on the table and see what they add up to. you will find the place yourself no doubt, or already have, and i would hate to ruin it for you; its a treat.

i have some mugs at home that are special to me, ‘old mauve’, ‘old blue’, ‘grandmas hugs are the best,’ what have you. they are special i suppose because i have used them for so long now, im worn into them. the slime that i have on my lips in the morning is caked permanently onto them. the insides look like an unwashed toilet bowl. memories of mugs in coffeeshops, if you are lucky enough to get one these days, are typically sparse for me. i know that thos. enjoys the black mugs at green line, and has probably started bringing his own empty tofu tubs to satellite to drink out of, but my mugs at home have never found a counterpart out in the world. as not getting a real mug has become the norm at most shops, getting handed a sturdy speckled clay mug full of coffee is a treat. the mug had the name of the shop on it, which was cute, and i appreciated the proud touch. it wasnt until my father sat down with his cup, and i noticed that his logo was spelled differently (correctly), did i realize just how personal the mug was, this fucked up one was certainly my mug away from home.

i like secret places. sometimes secret places arent secret, they are just uninteresting. sometimes they are both. the cavernous guts of the wholesale ‘marts’ in downtown atlanta are not secret, they are private, and they are incredibly banal, but sneaking into them on a weekday afternoon, when all 20 floors of the full city block are empty and dim, is like being one the last of two people on the earth and staying silent about all of your memories and desires from the old outside world. of course that is hyperbole when describing the storage crawlspace behind the trompe l’oeil door in the basement restroom of koffee, but its creepiness, its moist limy odor, and the fact that i think it might have connected to the other bathroom, made it a memorable find in what is certainly a competitive field of odd coffeeshop waterclosets.

the milky light from the skylight ran down a brick pillar next to my chair. on the pillar was taped a poster featuring an adult with down syndrome. he looked out under a banner text that read something to the effect of ‘do you see me, i see you.’ it appeared to be for a mentoring program or a social advocacy group for the treatment of mentally handicapped folks. his eyes were full and sad. i see it when i see folks with down syndrome in the street or out and about somewhere, a longing kind of look. it didnt make me feel sad, sitting next to the poster, i actually thought about looking up the group. i saw a poster on the train back home in atlanta and thought about it again. i just remember the milky light and the sad eyes. i dont think about it too much.

Autumn, near Halloween, in a strange town, strange to me and strange somewhat in its postured image for itself, on a Friday night and saturnine day, finds kooks aplenty roaming the streets. My colleague, who was in Seattle this same weekend, remarked that he saw people with the troll under the bridge made up and in costume, but who could say whether it was for Halloween or if he had in fact seen ‘the creature’ and its horde. In Asheville, the revelers were almost certainly of the seasonal ilk, and their self-conscious theatrics made for uncomfortable strolling but for delightful observation. Things were amiss, Bean Streets was gone, and of course, years in the grave, my beloved Interstate Motel only a memory. We stood in the window of Downtown Books & News late after closing looking for the cat who lived there and wondered whether bookstore cats actually live in the bookstores or whether they go to a home at night. He wasn’t there and we hypothesized that he had died in the couple of years since we had seen him last. Across the empty street lights were on in Izzy’s Coffee Den and I questioned whether I was ready for the new.

A crowd filled Pritchard Park, awakening in the morning. The square was being dug up. Men strolled toward the park with their bed rolls, most likely emerging from behind our motel, and we made a beeline for the bookstore to see about the cat. After pretending to look at books I brought one up to the counter to look around for him. He usually laid around on the counter somewhere. There was no sign of him until my eye stopped on a picture frame on the wall. There was a picture of him and a plaster cast of his paw and some sort of eulogistic text with a date. He passed away just a few months short of our visit. Asheville was falling to pieces around me. My memories there, begun not so long ago but in the flesh of my life still buried quite deep, had become obscured by layers and layers of opaque years and by the new. I paid my respects to the man at the counter who shrugged me and my affinity for his cat off into the fall morning.

It was time to start anew. Bean Streets was really not so great after all, was it? It was just there, and it felt oddly dusty in my memory. There always felt to be lacking a coffeeshop proper in Asheville. A place with some diy art on the walls, a place with concrete floors (were they?) and just enough seats and tables in just enough space to feel like you are floating in the mug or enveloped in a wing chair, a small personal place, a ‘den’ as they call it. Although the west morning light floated in coldly and the chairs were made of wire, it was a bit more on the mark and may have comforted folks from Satellite to Stumptown and in between. A small child sitting at the counter was put to work placing ‘Izzys’ stickers onto the paper cups and I wondered why the bookstore guy shrugged me off. He reminded me of me, but I would have graciously accepted the condolences of someone whose coat was clearly covered in cat fur. Maybe I didn’t belong there and the emotions didn’t belong to me, but over coffee as Izzy’s filled up, I felt a little bit like they did. I felt like the new wasn’t really the new, like I had seen it all before, and out it played.

Autumn, near Halloween, in a strange town, in a strange coffeeshop on a saturnine day, finds kooks aplenty detailing their festive plans. Here is the new memory growing from the chatterix of the little shop, strange somewhat in her postured image for herself, a memory not really new because the people weren’t new, they were the same as those cats in Austin and by god they started talking about Austin, and about their costumes, and about their exploits and about the three parties they ‘had’ to go to and did they see what Josiah dressed up as, and did they know that Janine had packed up and moved to Austin and the place was getting smaller and smaller. I focused on the coffee and the tall woman left sowing silence behind her and I quickly forgot everything but what she had been yammering about.

I thought about Retail the cat, asleep on the counter of my memory and wondered if he would have remembered me.

In the Boy Scouts I was a member of the Order of the Arrow. When someone asks me what it was I tell them it was an ‘elite camping squadron.’ I don’t quite recall what it was, but membership required participation in an ‘ordeal,’ which, among a vow of silence and manual labor, consisted of sleeping out under the stars with no food, water, or tent by yourself where ever you were instructed to sleep. In retrospect… not much of an ordeal at all. When I went camping just west of Cherokee in the Smokies I believe I finally earned my status in the squadron. My bright idea to backpack in away from the RVs and rabble for a quiet night in the woods backfired when the fabled black bears of the area took an interest in our site. Miles away from anyone, we spent the night dead still and silent, mentally rehearsing our primal screams inside our tent and listening to the creatures shuffle and gallop around, intermittently grunting and groaning and sniffing. My hand never left my camp shovel. At one point one of the beasts trotted around and fell silent in a thicket near the tent where I was sure it lay in wait. The first bird song of the morning was beautiful and unzipping the tent fly to see a blank forest gave me pause to revalue my life. We got the fuck out of there shortly after sunrise and decided to check out the coffeehouse we had seen driving through Cherokee the previous morning.

Cherokee is the quintessential national park buffer with its gift shops and shows, such as ‘Unto these Hills,’ devoted to the indigenous people that called the area home. There was also a casino and a ‘zoo’ with 6 bear cubs. The strong native American theme here replaces what is typically Flintstones or Santa related tourist traps. It is hard for me to say ‘theme’ though, as the inhabitants are in fact Cherokees. I know it is not in my purview to judge, but I was disappointed in the silliness of the representations in the area which seemed to lower expectations to the level of team mascots selling peace pipes. However, the significant presence of what I assume is the Cherokee written language made me think there was a deeper striving to perhaps show visitors the strength of the culture and the people. Some reading on the town will quickly reveal that it is in fact the intention of the tribe to revamp the image portrayed by the place and they are going so far as to remove distasteful and tacky outlets capitalizing on popular conceptions of ‘Indians.’

When I am on the outskirts of a national park there is little I expect more as a vegan gourmand than to be eating an iceberg lettuce salad and drinking black diner coffee. Never would I have imagined, that in this little enclave I would find an inspiring and satisfying place. Tribal Grounds on the one hand could be seen as your typical coffee shop. There was some sort of proto-industrial music playing, there were thrift store couches, young baristas. What was odd was that it was here, on the outskirts of a national park and amidst the usual pap. But as much as it was a typical shop, because it was where it was, not amidst the tourist crap, but amidst the history and culture of ancient people, it seemed distinctive. There was something more that just cups made of recycled material and recycling bins and soy milk, although all that was there; there was a sense of pride, of ownership of the place, investment, and what I took away most of all was a stewardship, not only over the earth, but over the place, Cherokee. Perhaps having survived my pathetic mountain ordeal put me in a reverent mood, or the shock of being able to pour soy milk in my beverage in a Western Carolina 1-stoplight-town quelled my jaded perceptions. However, I think it is merely the fact that Tribal Grounds was a satisfying place to be, with helpful people, and positive aspirations illustrating culture by modern lived example rather than charades.

They also roast their own fair-trade beans. Hail!