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 to take a coffee in downtown Atlanta it should be your only choice. The closest other options (Tilt, Danneman’s) are not technically downtown, and you will, during the day, on a weekday, find no exterior spot that is so thoroughly not Atlanta (robustly populous and alive) within the perimeter. It is a safe place for me, where even though my thoughts often roam amongst the rabble to my eternal question of whether I would have time to see my brains on the bricks before me if I were shot from behind or to the fragility of the social contract, I still feel ownership over the bricks in front of the stylobate I lean against.

There is little I can say of my visit today that has not been said in spots of virtually everything I have written in the last ten years.

Excerpt from Chase Scenes 2008:

Far away again in autumn. The sunlight through a flat cloud as you stood on the sidewalk outside a door without a handle flat into the glazed bricks was quiet. The one week of the year had come across trees that had enough leaves on them to blot out the southern sun and the shade was warm enough to sit out in. You spent the long afternoon in a plaza downtown sitting on the swept bricks. In the absence of those faces you couldn’t retain your eyes filled with the white sky. You worked your way back through the mosaic, around cavernous voids that you could feel between your eyes and your skull where whole weeks had been handed over to some black vessel willfully, intentionally. You rock back and forth in the gathered up twine of time hanging down from Atlanta. In some phrases you are there, like now, under a sparse pear tree in the plaza, or slipping back down, not as a journey into that empty Valley, but a plummet, or a twinkling transmigration into a moment. When you began at the end, as a human destination with a trail let out behind it, there was nothing concrete enough to withdraw from but the euphoria of the continuing tides of the hotel, to step backwards from your death and gaze upon it from life. You knew the debris that ended every story. The same things with different connotations. You felt like a bronze cast.

Excerpt from Marquis: A Post-Dated Picaresque Romp Through the Oeuvre of the work.group:

The Equitable Building with Roof Forest

Excerpts from Chase Scenes 2006:

These little compositions generally are born more of their, no, of the conditions under which they are written, such as now, in front of the Equitable Building in Atlanta. The protesters are still here. Their first day was last Thursday, the afternoon I left for the trip. I could not focus at work that day, the impending air travel spooking me a bit so I pulled together all my gear with the intention of leaving for the airport straight from lunch. I sat out in the sun for about one and a half hours (1.5 hours) reading Titus Groan and watching the protesters. They stand against a construction company who is fitting out an office in the tower. I must confess that they bring little sympathy out from me because they appear so singularly disinterested. Each day there seems to be a foreman of some sort who manages the group, he is well-dressed and often has a video camera. The rest of the group appear as if they might be working for their lunch. They are not only an unsavoury group, they seem to have little or no passion for the cause, many listening to Walkmans or only trying to hand out leaflets to women. One of them is the short man who sells pirated DVDs on MARTA out of his backpack which he wears on the front of his body, either for ease of sketchy access or because he has been stared down by a mighty bison on the sage flats of North Dakota.

The man leafleting directly to my left just successfully obtained a woman’s phone number. Apparently she is “staying with her sister out in Stone Mountain.” I wonder, were I to ask the man why he thinks he is of value, not in any context, not ‘to other people,’ ‘to commerce,’ or ‘to the intertwined systems of nature,’ what his answer would be. Would it be different than my answer? What would my answer be, I cannot say. It would most likely be bloated and circular, meaningless. To actually answer these questions I think it is first necessary to answer a question, a fundamental question, does anything have value outside its capacity to perpetuate your own life, or to perpetuate other systems, and then, what is the value in their perpetuation? There is some of that circular logic I feared I would have no recourse to avoid and no ability to rise above.

I have been back from North Dakota for five (5) days now and I stretch my memory during this compositional process to recall episodes that I am neglecting. I believe I shall list them here for the sake of the remainder of the footnotes, first I should like to mention that the man leafleting just to my left was just barking very loudly like a dog. I wonder what sort of impression we used to make in the mid-1990s when protesting fur stores. We received a balanced share of positive and extremely negative attention. I remember one instance in front of Lenox Mall in Atlanta where a man in a pick-up truck threw a large piece of meat still on the bone out of his window at us, then proceeded to drive up on the sidewalk at us. And although we most likely looked like fools, I can be sure in saying that, at that moment, we all felt and exhibited passion for the cause we were standing for [I don’t know if I was inspired by the glances upward in the page where my mind may have trained on “sell out,” for I did mention in the note that “at that moment” we all felt strongly, because it was not long after this period of time that we were having regular protests that some of the most vocal animal rights activists began to do such things as eat meat or become interested in survivalism and hunting in the spirit of Ted Nugent, real roughriders and plainsmen, or whether the thread was inspired merely by the ineffectual protest being staged amidst my composition]. No, I shall not list the episodes for your sake.

Excerpt from Roosevelt in Ruins:

Im sitting in the cavernous lobby of the Marriott Marquis again because it has grown so familiar to me, and although I have finalized a preferred route into and through its bowels, it still perplexes me, at the inception of the project I sat outdoors at lunch against that low brick coping in front of the Equitable building, the timing was ideal as the leaves had flourished all spring and summer on the scrawny trees but had not yet been shed by autumn, the temperature had settled to the point where I could bring my sweater but usually used it as a pillow to keep my lower back from getting gouged by the leading edge of the brick, the university was in session providing an interesting cross section of people to observe as they made their way around me, I spent equal time drawing and developing insights about the folks that strolled into Starbucks, dug through the trash, ogled each other, cut through the park, jaywalked, strained and craned upward at the tall buildings, and hollered into their cellphones, my efficiency ratio was low but the material was grounded in a buzz of life, in shared experience, at night I blazed through fragments of material alone that remained fragments reaching back into the day, but idly, and only in my head, alone they were echoes…

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’.

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 has been on the shelf since spring awaiting my completion of another thing, but it doesn’t mind, it has been languishing for 6 years now, most of it in a completely unassembled state, and for the past 2 years, in a 1/3 complete state. My feelings for the shop, as is the focus of this site, were in turn corrupted by my attempts to reattach myself to this tired old text. The pattern of writing has seemed to be, write non-stop mess against a slightly linear outline, assemble into digestible paragraph blocks of similar length, blend edges of paragraphs, draw out major lines of imagery and action, write another sequence, etc. This revisitation finds me in the middle of a train of thought which I had closed the book on in the blink of an eye, all the direction left unzipped, and unresolved. So, diving into it in a new place made me feel doubly alien.

Luckily, I was not in such an unfamiliar place. Within the canon of coffeeshops, there is a limited palette of styles and atmospheres. What I found at Octane was comforting enough on two fronts to allow me to sink into the worn armchair (armchairs at a small circular table! genius, the table is for beverages only of course, composition is done on the lap) and sew up my memory. Two fronts: the aesthetic and the social. Octane is in the school of Portland’s Stumptown and Atlanta’s own Inman Perk (although not quite as designed). It is an intensely volumetric space, the lighting has sparkle, the surfaces are used and abused, but tempered with slick cold treatments in bars and furniture, and new storefront glass, in short, everything feels like it is reflective, even when it is dull and decrepit. But perhaps more soothing to me was the clientele. I don’t know if it was that night in particular, but the place was filled with geeky looking folks wearing ironic t-shirts touting that “as a matter of fact, the earth does revolve around me,” girls with greasy ponytails, and professional student types sporting those yellowy clear braces that are clearly braces although they look more like placque and the person still looks like they have an orange rind in their mouth when it is closed. This is comforting because these people are clearly from my alma mater, Georgia Institute of Technology, and although I never spent time with their ilk during my matriculation, their presence puts me in the old psychology building studying for an history test while listening to Tiamat on my Walkman, or falling asleep in a chair on the top floor of the library, that big modernist womb.

It is strange to look at them from outside of the situation they are in, and I was once in, and strange to look at myself in a new coffeeshop, dozens of which seem to be springing up all over the city, to both my delight and chagrin, for I have undertaken the responsibility to haunt them all, when I would much prefer to go to Octane, or Inman Perk, or Joe’s, or Java Monkey. I still haven’t been to Maasty. I did not ever really enter back into the text. I’m not sure I really even entered into the stream of Octane either. There were too many associations abuzz, too many loose ends that were tickling my neck mutely. As with all of these places, it is not their fault, and I appreciate them for being little incubators that somehow rouse in me this nostalgia. Perhaps though, it is the beverage. I am reminded of the quote that periodically pops up on the front page: “As soon as coffee is in your stomach, there is a general commotion. Ideas begin to move…similes arise, the paper is covered. Coffee is your ally and writing ceases to be a struggle.” Lucky putain! Octane, I will figure you out!!!

As my mother and I got in the car , in unison , we took sips from our drinks and exchanged disgusted looks as if we ourselves made the drinks for each other. It was absolutely horrible !

So the ambiance was horrible along with its coffee. I hope they catch these issues in time because they have a pretty cool location and a lot of potential in a space like that. Ambiance and product quality are the most important factors here.

I wrote that first portion about three weeks ago on an airplane flying to Texas. I had to stop because I grew afraid that we were about to fall out of the sky.

Revisiting now my feelings about the place I find more tenderness in my views. I let the hours slip from my radar and see a well put together little shop with pockets of space called into being by furniture arrangements and taller elements (which might be shelves, yes, in my mind’s eye they are shelves) that remind me of what Mani’s Santa Monica would have been if the furniture store and the coffee shop that occupied a 5000sf space were drawn down to a more cozy 900sf. There was one strange detail that I did not care for. Instead of a wainscot or chair rail, there was a fairly heavy steel angle bolted to the wall at precisely the height that my ear would fall sitting in a seat close to the edge of the space. Although I am not so rude as to presume that it would be acceptable to lean my greasy head against the wall, it stirred discomfort in me just by making me picture how frustrating it would be to want to lean against the wall and find a cold unfinished piece of steel against that bony protuberance behind and slightly behind my ear.

There was one reason why I could not stay long that was not related to my desire to get to work. The clientele that was in the space with me was a bit too ‘regular’ for my taste. I like regulars. I have even been one for short periods of time. But there is a character within the pool of regulars who I find intolerable: the regular who wants everyone to know how regular they are. They force the barista to recognize it, to tout it for them. “You know Marcus needs space in his cappuccino for honey, right?” “Oh yes, I always forget that.” Or, “Do you remember that dog that was hanging around in the lot across the street?” “Yes.” “Janine finally caught it. She is taking care of it until she can find someone to adopt it.” “Here is Janine’s hazelnut steamer.” There is also the aspiring regular, who sits near the bar and attempts to insinuate theirself into conversations with other regulars, or to distract and garner the attention of the barista by starting catchy conversations. What is most painful, and what drove me to the door, is the failure of such aspirations, most notably, a baited prompt that began, “I saw Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young last night, they played for 3 hours.” “How was that?” “It was intense.”

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. Certain conditions exist in such a way that they trumpet the human ingenuity that wrought them, materials are used in new ways, environments are tailored toward specific atmospheric effects, furniture, colours, and fixtures are composed with the space toward a tableaux that begins to have a voice, a recognizable, if not understandable, enunciation. These are self-conscious designed conditions, and as they beckon appreciation from the world-at-large, they invite scrutiny from me. Yet, I can walk into a bank that was ‘designed’ in 1970, clad with dark wood slats, hideous bank-lobby art made from irridescent oiled copper and steel, with hardly any windows, and whatever natural light does seep in is yellowed by aged tint and shellac, and although attentive to the details, I file them more under how they make me feel, rather than their immediate motivation, perhaps because they are so far removed, in time, or in voice, like a gas station ‘designed’ by a developer and inhabited by a sloppy franchise owner. They are environments rather than personalities transformed into environments.

When I step into Inman Perk, excitedly seeking a soy latte in the newest Atlanta coffeehouse, since all my old favourites are either overrun by children or dinks, having been prepared by their webpage as to the presence of an architect in the design process, I begin peppering the space with my gaze. Lwat81 and I discuss the various design flourishes. After digesting the overall aesthetic I begin to pick at details. I greatly appreciated the dropped ceiling with warmly stained/sealed planks, it recalled to me the ceiling of my room at Arne’s Royal Hawaiian Motel in Baker, California with its haunting yet womblike oppressiveness. I liked the way it pressed down over the couches, which we did not sit on but which looked slightly too austere to drink coffee upon, and drew your eye across the bookshelves, which is still slightly sparse which caused the use of some ‘face-out’ displays which I did not find necessary. There were two magnificent lamps under the low ceiling which felt like a cross between a dentist lamp and something out of the above-mentioned bank. The higher portions of the ceiling were clad with a haphazard area of unfinished pine 1×6s thrown up like the logs floating in Spirit Lake beneath Mt. St. Helens. I felt that there was not enough rigor in their placement. In fact, with the warmth and clarity of expression in the rest of the joint I felt this looseness was unmistakably out of place, a different voice. If there had been some geometric logic or an illegible rule to the placement that allowed the boards to transform into a pattern to which their ‘boardness’ was subservient, I would have acquiesced. Finally, next to our table, I appreciated the way in which the mud from the new drywall construction was feathered over the existing(?) concrete block walls and then painted all a uniform colour. Kudos on that detail.

With candles flickering throughout the space and festive yet balmy light radiating from the open patio, I felt cozy. The place was just empty enough, which is sure to change very soon, to give me space to perform my analysis. It is a burden to me at times, but even when I am at odds with a designer’s voice, it is at least someone who I can always chat with.

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 from an automobile. ‹end rules section›

Once, when jolted from the fog of days, clustered without linear relationships, a particle of time slipped free, the shackles of demoralizing faceless continuity were disrupted, our office was relocating 1 block down the street, everyone had been released from their sedentary occupations and was pitching in to do some manual labour. It was a rainy day, the sky, befogged, went flat across the skyscrapers, an autumn morning in Atlanta. Bodies, used to sitting in primo Aeron chairs for 10-12-18 hours a day were rickety in their forced movements, the fog aggravated joints and minds. I was requisitioned to discover some specialty coffee drinks for the group. I pressed the founder of our feast to accompany me to an establishment closer and less nefarious than the Starbucks at Equitable Plaza; she deigned to follow along and as the route took us mostly through lobbies and parking garages, her unurban nature would not be spoilt by a walk through the rain. We made our way through the tunnels beneath the parking garage, up across the bridge over Peachtree Center Avenue, and back down the escalator into the basement.

“I never knew this was here!” The Cafe in Georgia Pacific Center is in the basement of the tower, at the entrance to a small suite of retail that includes a mercurial postman, a cobbler, a drycleaner, and possibly a jeweler. There are no chairs, and there is one table to saddle up to while you wait for the postman to come back from one the 6 fifteen minute breaks in his 5 hour workday.

“You probably have much in common with the people who pass it every day, who realize it is there but are distracted by their need to get their loafers resoled, their dinner jackets pressed, their diamonds reset, or their ebay auctions mailed to Dresden. What you have in common with them is that you find your daily life to be one of destinations. You rarely spend moments outside the office roaming for a new place to sit, one where the sharp bricks of a coping do not draw lines across your back, or by not taking coffees in the city, never have cause to discover obscure public bathrooms. You saw me once, outside of this very building, from your SUV as you cruised past at lunchtime, as I sat in the plaza reading Gautier, and commented upon returning to the office that you had seen me engaged in an ‘urban moment.’ What you saw was a moment freed of destinations, in which the entire surface of the city around International Bean Cafe was a destination, that, continuously occurring, was both immediate and postponable. Instead of setting a course for Mama Fu’s or OK Cafe, at least see if there is something off the street, behind some pink granite walls or neck-high hedges, you can always walk back to get your car when you come up empty-handed.”

But was there delight to be found in this discovery? For her, who can say, but there was for me, even though the Cafe itself was not a discovery, for as many times as I have passed through this route in different ways, stairs, elevators, escalators, car ramps, there was always only one set of double doors to exit through, and this time, once again, I attempted to open the incorrect, locked leaf, thus ensuring myself at least one more voyage through those tunnels until the process became rote, and dismissible.

UPDATE: THIS GLORIFIED VENDING MACHINE IS NOW A CARIBOU, DON’T GO THERE.

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. he has watched cnn on the teevee all days and all nights. he has watched me come in intermittently, sit on one of the couches and drink soy lattes out of paper cups. he has read over my shoulder. he is the unevolved catalogue of my memories of joe’s. as i will do, he will not grasp the gift that is handed to him until it has evaporated or the godhead has taken offense at the squandered beverage he relentlessly foists. as i do, he will watch aimlessly the coffeeshop days turn to night in the streets of east atlanta, he will wonder about other coffeeshops and wonder when he will flake off and float away. he will idle away his nights disinterestedly, and like him i will not remember joe’s until it is a memory, but at least i took the cup and drank from it.