Attempting to drift like a vagrant in one’s own town prompts reconsideration of local haunts we take for granted. It is fun to consider what Aurora would be like were it in a different city, or to visit it without the decade and a half of Atlantan desperation to patina it. It is in fact, dope. Bonus: JhT is haunted by a French Canadian troll!

cast of characters: pop: seasoned world traveler, coffee aesthete, perfectionist son: uptight prosewriting provocateur wanda: mountain woman soulpatch: failed SCAD hack, opportunist, venice beach reject cashier: current SCAD student ms. soulpatch (offstage): condescending masculine female

Although it appears to be a pasttime of mine, I do not so frequently get the opportunity to hang out in coffee shops. So when the perhaps weekly chance for me to go sit in a shop alone and do some writing comes up, I usually gravitate toward the more established (at least in my [...]

Oh, where to begin. . .let’s just start with this place can kiss my honky ass. My significant other has been begging me to go to this stupid coffee shop for months now, and I finally acquiesced, ending the struggle.

Cafe Tableaux is constantly derided for is fixation on noisy children, classless hillbillies, dog owners, and odd supplemental business invading the coffeeshops of the world. Let it not be said that our bitching is baseless and insurmountable. For, though also accompanied by these shortcomings, Dr. Bombay’s is one case of simple perfection in spite of their attempts to otherwise corrupt it.

Erstwhile tableauxist Loren takes one for the team by visiting E2 on East Atlanta’s abject Moreland Corridor. This bleak shop may have benefited from the original tableau in which it was closed for business.

(DECOMMISSIONED) A very cold winter dusk in Athens. Downtown, resisting the easy answer of just ducking into Blue Sky, we walk up Lumpkin, past the ‘new’ University buildings with uniform brick stretches and bulbous, orderless stucco columns. The wind whips up Lumpkin all the way from Five Points. Tucked in behind some churchy University outposts [...]

Historians and Gore Vidal can not tell us what hipster dipshits were called in the 17th century or whenever the ‘oldest coffee house in Savannah’ commenced operations. SCAD and fixies had not been invented, and neckbeards and fedoras probably could not be used with irony yet. No one knows. We can assume with confidence, however, [...]

On my return trip to Sweet Java Brown the place was called Gathering Grounds. They appeared to have the same operating hours, but, as I have been privately insulted for making an issue out of coffee shops that close absurdly early, I will not rail too much on the fact that Gathering Grounds closes at [...]

As an ‘architect’ I regularly struggle with my fluctuating attention to the specificity of designed environments. I realize that every manmade condition is ‘designed,’ and so are many so-called natural settings. The way in which my attentions shift are as follows.

(DECOMMISSIONED) Some things that are commonplace, and often visually associated with banal and infuriatingly mundane errands for those who do their jobs near it, are capable of arousing delight and mystery in others through their covert locations. It is very easy to be covert in Atlanta. Rule number 1: Locate where you are not visible [...]

This will probably be a negative review. If so, it will not be necessarily Java Lords’s fault. The coming of the new year has this tableauxist reflecting on the last 12 months, which have contained some of his life’s most abysmal moments since 2004. The upcoming months look to be no less of a test. [...]

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 [...]

(DECOMMISSIONED)

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 [...]

there have been 2 shops in my short life thus far that, for any appreciable length of time, usurped my home as consistent theatre of operations or sitting parlour. one was the 18th street coffeehouse in santa monica and the other was jittery joe’s at five points in athens. for about 1.5 years i spent [...]

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 [...]

(DECOMMISSIONED) As is becoming a little habit of mine I consulted the internet before leaving on a daytrip to Macon (/ˈmeɪkən/) to find a place to take a coffee at the end of our familial obligations. Lord, I knew we would need it, and as has become my customary thought when entering into unfavourable situations, [...]

there is precious little i can walk to in my ‘neighbourhood.’ although i am honored to visit the candler discount mall (as seen in ‘cannibal apocalypse’) on a biweekly basis, the commercial strip from glenwood to memorial on candler has no less than 6 hairbraiding shops, 3 pawn/title loan shops, and one new place called [...]

(DECOMMISSIONED) 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 [...]

Oh the new shop. Actually I don’t know how new. Thos. has been asking me to go here for some time I believe, and I have finally made it, on a rather non-descript early fall evening. With the new shop and the fresh I night I ventured to revisit an old piece of writing that [...]

I have spent cumulative weeks of my life sitting on the low circular brick planter (now sans sharp holly at its perimeter) in the Equitable Plaza within sight of One Caffe, formerly (briefly) Saxby’s, and formerly something I can’t even recall. I have little to say towards One Caffe other than if you are planning [...]

As a lad I grew up at the beach, on a barrier island astride the Atlantic Ocean along Central Florida. All the memories of my childhood are infused at some level with blinding white sun, the smell of salted air, flat topography, and a sense of ease that comes with the slow pace of seaside [...]

When I was a junior in college studying architecture I was less than enthused about the stature and promise of my studiomates, much less their personalities. On a Sunday morning I could be sure that they would be significantly less charming than usual with their khaki shorts reeking of some unidentifiable cocktail of Natural Light, [...]

Sequestered in coastal Georgia, a tableauxist uses his personal writings to seduce a young island librarian. Will his lecherous plans reach fruition, or is there a monkey wrench waiting to be thrown into their workings? Dun dun dunnn!

It would be foolish to take space in this forum to decry the homogenizing effect on world culture that corporate retailers have. In fact, this entire project is in a sense a repository of the twists, discrepancies, extremes, both positive and negative, that independently owned coffeeshops provide us with. This repository exists to preserve their [...]

the ‘great’ film paura nella città dei morti viventi was filmed in savannah. the film is often ‘lauded’ for its atmospheric quality and of course the tight soundtrack by fabio frizzi. it is a touchstone of fine fin de la d?cennie (the 70s that is) italian incoherence with a preference for evocative imagery and non-sequitur [...]

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: j.h. trefry said: This was the first shop I had visited with Thos. since Mani’s [...]

Sometimes in this line of work you drink a cup of blackjo “just because.” It is not the lure of the steamy low lit den with pressed tin ceilings, or the wide open transparency of a corner shop with white walls and stripe-shirted baristi, or even the desperation of the pedestrian in the strange city [...]