Perhaps I needed to shit. Perhaps longing for another mouth for my voice. The word coffee loomed and lit white from a white sky was more a brown katana to my bowels. I bought a white bagel and clumped floating soy in a cup. I used the men’s room. Advertisements on the walls convinced me that Kick Butt was a gateway business for a dojo; advertisements and throwing stars at the register. The Matrix on a television and the conversations of businessmen ushered me back outside. I ate half the bagel under a billboard. I ate the other half and drank the coffee in the parking lot of my destination.

Yes, yes, yes, I know their full name… Quack’s Bakery. And yes I know they serve sandwiches and soups, but so does Java Monkey and 18th Street and Kavarna, all of whom call themselves coffeeshops. And jesus, Mani’s is called Mani’s Bakery but I never ever went there JUST to eat a cupcake. So what is in a name anymore, and what is left of the criteria that we established for this site? Obviously it is a lot more difficult to quantify what establishments belong on here among their peers than it is to establish futile rules to endlessly squash the tableau trolls who seem to think that just because their girlfriend is a barrista at a place or can wordlessly get their desired drink without ever having to stop talking into their bluetooth headset that all of our experiences counter to theirs are somehow delusional. So yes, Quack’s is a coffeeshop. Get bent.

Quack’s was lit like a place where people get shit done. And to be sure the place was filled with university students of all stripes and ages. Some looked like they were working on group projects, others toiled silently on laptops that I couldn’t see the display of (probably updating their Facebook pages), and a few were having conversations sans agenda, probably on some perennial campus topic like post-something or meta-something. Cups were strewn across tables, empty chocolate-smeared dessert plates stacked one atop another, and sweating tall glasses of chai or iced coffee glimmered from the tepid spring evening. If the rapture came upon this room of saved souls just as I, a heretic, happened through the door, I would describe, from the evidence strewn through the empty room, the place to be a coffeeshop. And satisfying myself with this, would most likely have followed through on my plans of sampling one of the sinfully unraptured vegan peanutbutter cups and a palpitating mug of black coffee. Although we would all have snooped around behind the counter for mugs had we been left the last man on earth, in reality I appreciated Quack’s everyday use of the mug rather than a paper cup.

I took the treats outside, facing the parking lot of the designer grocery store across the street, and turned my back to Quack’s. I set my wares on the metal bistro table and waiting for my counterpart observed the grain of the fresh peanut butter in the cup, tasted a bite and then swirled it in my mouth with the coffee and my heart raced and eyes swelled. When Matt came out we talked about his work at school and his summer plans of traveling to India. We talked about them as one would at a coffeeshop and the light from behind me through a large plate glass window fell on the parking spots and windshields like light from a coffeeshop, warm, busy, endless.

I have no reservations about its peerage on this site. There is no formulaic checklist to provide admittance. Formulas don’t quantify atmosphere or spunk. These are things that we have to see for ourselves, and Quack’s, with its life, its goods, its intentions, was up there with the big boys. Who am I arguing with anyway?

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 get nervous flying in a plane. Unfortunately my time in Austin is always bookended by flights and usually the time is so short that I do not have a day in Austin that I am not also on an airplane. After traveling more frequently over the past few years I have also noted that taking a coffee beverage before flying does not increase my ease and does not allow me to focus on my breathing. In fact, I cannot even peel my face away from the little portal window watching the ground plane and calibrating my inner gyroscope, even when we are flying through a mile thick cloud cover and the landing gear come out before I can see the city below (or dear god if I am in the last seat in an MD-88 looking out the window at nothing but engine waiting ceaselessly for it to either fall off or burst into flames) nor slow my heart rate enough to think rationally about what is going on. But when was chance ever rational. I still plaster my face against the window even if I had tea, or orange juice, or even if I want coffee so bad and want to go to the little Jo’s next to my hotel so bad, but I just keep my face against the auto window as we cruise past. I snapped out of it this week and could not fight the urge to attend the little Jo’s on South Congress.

I could go into its relationship with the little boutique motel next door and how the cats in the room next door had a swinging patio party outside my room with their door open and I had to sleep on the couch with the bathroom fan and air conditioning on and wet toilet paper stuffed in my ears piled beneath every pillow and cushion in the room so as to get a few hours of spatchka, or my fear that those same people would populate the little Jo’s, or my fear that I was not any different from them in my tastes, but certainly in my consideration. Even not getting into it, the little Jo’s had a similar attention to detail that the San Jose had. Although I cringed most of the time I was in my room, I enjoyed the little poem tacked to the wall, the selection of DVDs available from the front desk (Texas Chainsaw Massacre seemed to be overlooked), and the soft light that the lamps in the room produced. By virtue of its compactness I believe that Jo’s was beholden to the sort of detail and organization that gave it the richness that I appreciated. Although I picture Thos.’s coffee trailer in an Atlanta parking lot or his guerilla shop in the parking lot of SCI-Arc not really having the loving organizational fetish that makes Jo’s both appealing and functional.

What this signage and compartmentalization fetish does is to turn the nugget of a building into a black hole of a building. By this I mean that its energies have been compressed into an incredibly dense morsel that contains all of the trappings that a larger shop would, but they occupy little to no space, which in turn causes the space next to the building to assume that function or sensibility, to be drawn into it. Jo’s does not send out rays of itself, it consumes space by claiming it with visual energy.

Thus I was sucked out of the car and out of the motel to risk a coffee before flying out into a clear blue soothing forever sky. They have damn good vegan oat cakes as well.

When I heard the b’hoys at Page Southerland Page talking about AMLI, Ill be honest, I had no clue what they were talking about. It was not until I saw their fetid property on the side of I85 up near Shallowford Road on my way to Harmony Vegetarian that I picked up on what they might be. I saw them as poised to scoop up some of the market share that Post Properties might be relinquishing in the area of superstrasse fronting apartment tanks. But what do you do when someone or something is not all bad?

Thos. and I were discussing this past weekend the frustration with the new ‘live/work’ communities sprouting up in metro Atlanta. They are still afloat in seas of parking. Because of their greed and fear and big box aspirations they cannot support themselves through the patronage of the people they beckon to live their but also must pander to the folks who live 15 miles away and think it might be ‘funky’ to go to a Target that is ITP. In the face of this, Thos. mentioned that Mr. Post had a midlife crisis in which he saw this problem and created a dense little block in midtown Atlanta with small shops that front right on the street and dwelling units that take advantage of not only these but also the surrounding fabric (hail Outwrite!!!) because they do not have to walk through a parking lot to get out of their enclave. Such is the richness of downtown Austin. It seems that Mr. AMLI must have suffered the same awakening of conscience, although we all know that the city of Austin requires this typology in their downtown area and he could not have built there at all if he had not submitted to the mandate.

The thing that is strange about this sort of city fabric which one is used to from Chicago, Seattle, San Francisco, etc is that in Austin it is new. The sidewalks have a strange Jerdesque crispness with trees growing in large pots, the buildings have a lot of the Austin staple of galvanized metal and more glass storefront on the ground than one is used to in this sort of dense fabric, and it just feels new. One can expectantly see, down 2nd Street, the type continuing to sprout up. This old and new is a difficult line to straddle. It feels like maybe there was some third solution that could have arisen but I am not creative enough to think of it. I would have just filled the street with boulders. But the old and new paradox seems to slough away when you dip into Jo’s.

The new is still there mind you. Jo’s downtown is the antithesis of its SoCo counterpart, that little meteorite. It is large, a new large. The new large is one that yields to space as a quantity, not as a complex sequence, a series of chambers, like Chapterhouse in Philadelphia for example. But this largeness and simplicity is where AMLI’s project falls apart, where it does not complete the social agenda of enriching people’s lives. It is a militaristic intimacy. The kind you have to learn to live with showering with your neighbours in a dorm, albeit a much more funky and hip dorm than the one people used to rollerblade in and out of my freshman year at college. Jo’s downtown is the explosion of the SoCo Jo’s like a self inflating liferaft that has hit the gaping space of the AMLI shell and just kept growing, the compartmentalization giving way to spatial compartmentalization, a pastry zone, an ordering zone, a pick up zone, a cafeteria-like seating area. It again, like the newness and specious reinvigouration of old types, belies the intimacy of the spaces one would typically find in the above mentioned cities in these street level hollows. It is a breath of fresh recirculated air.

And they have some damn good vegan oat cakes!

Business travel is a very odd experience. I do not care for it. It is a tease. I have been to Austin several times for business for various durations, the longest being a recent 3 day and 3 night stint. In anticipation I concocted what all of this extra free time I had there would mean to my understanding of the city, how much I could infiltrate, consume, and digest. It was enticing. The schedule of the days even seemed to support some possible daylight peregrination. I was wrong. The first problem with business travel is the sense that activities must occur in groups. One often sees groups of conventioneers or business men out wandering the city, ribbing each other, and enjoying the flow of comp’d booze and possibly a trip to a local naked establishment. I look at them and picture myself sloughing off the group and inserting myself into the alleys and parks with a batard and a text. Although my colleagues do not submit to the same long-distance pleasures as the typical business traveler it would still take an elaborate lie to sneak away to seek out my own path, and even then I might bump into them strolling away from the AMLI development as I head from Halcyon down to the river to look at the trains coming over the water. So time is lost.

I find moments after dinner that are trembling with exhaustion from a 15 hour day filled with tedious meetings and schlepping boxes and drawings around the city, and I force myself to stroll alone disinterestedly. In the mornings, in my sterile hotel room, through a night that seemed more like a slightly protracted nap on the bathroom floor of my office in a series of 3 days of work that feel like one day of work puncuated regularly with naps on the bathroom floor, I find it more difficult than usual to arise. I know the promise of a couple of local shops should draw me forth, as if the tongues of coffee fumes tap the windows of my hermetically sealed chamber like a vampire child longing to gain entrance. But I look lazily out from beneath my fortress of pillows at the sky above the Driskill and listen to the classical radio station for another hour. Even the thought of sitting in a coffeeshop sounds like work to me, it is part of the continuum of work embedded in travel.

I finally rise, angry at myself, with about 1 hour to spare before meeting my colleagues for another day. I bolt out the door in case any are already in the breakfast room, and head straight for The Hideout, my only chance to have a good spell of coffee and reading without a significant investment of walking. It is in fact directly across from my hotel, facing Starbucks. It is a businesslike little shop. I sit in the window, fighting my impatience that the day move forward, attempt to calm myself enough to focus on my reading, and spend more time watching the day begin than surveying the interior of the shop. It becomes a cell in the continuum of bleary days, the rich red walls I see in my photographs, the warm bronze on the tables are nowhere to be found in my memories. I see laminate conference tables, fluorescent light, lay-in ceiling tiles, dry-erase boards, carpet, hell, the farthest spot from natural light that man can construct, a tunnel that leads from the airport in a temporal swirl that is tailored to each traveler’s itinerary, in this case just long enough and with enough loops to fill 3 days of continuous walking, or 3 days of being pulled continuously on a cart through windowless airless tombs. I want to apologize to The Hideout and give it back the warmth it clearly possesses, the charm and completeness, all that it gave to me and all that I pushed away in the confusion, the whole city shoved into a drawer in the stead of eternally flickering fluorescence.

My perception of Austin is very skewed and alien, it remains so. I have been to Austin many times but have never had much opportunity to ramble out about its streets unfettered. My first derive was on a humid weeknight, after a day of thunderstorms. I moved quickly through downtown and across the Colorado River to the south side of the city. I was in search of something new. The city was crawling with dudes and skanks out to bar hop and I needed a cup of blackjoe. Flipnotic, down through the drollery of Barton Springs Road, the Whataburgers and Bennigans’ you do not find downtown, stood sweating above an intersection, a lone lit window with the indirect and low light of a delightful little coffee house. I was soaking wet standing before it, my hair slick with the night’s moisture and my shirt stuck to my back. Coffee in this state would be wretched, and probably spoil the remainder of the walk, but I ascended the steps, readying my pencil to do some serious work and soak up some AC.

The patio area I was forced to enter through was standing room only. This place was popular. But… everyone on the patio was drinking beer! Curious. What was this place? Had I walked all the way here to find myself in just another watering hole only on the sucky side of the river? I entered the cafe and immediately ordered a black coffee, not looking at anything, only hoping, perhaps as a test, that the place actually served something other than beer. They did, yet when I asked if there was somewhere inside I could sit I was referred to a 6 inch deep couter right in the window above the street I had just peered through. It would suffice; I was away from the new set of dudes and skanks, or so I thought. I took out my text and began to make notes beneath the beer light.

I made one note, then through the din of the shop I was interrupted, for the remainder of my stay, by an insipid conversation of forced and painful irony, social oneupsmanship, and tragic hipness between the barrista, who thought many things to be ‘amazing,’ and two skinny guys with ironic hair. I will not embark on an analysis of the fine points of indie conversating, but some highlights below should flesh out the character of my remaining 15 minutes in Flipnotic and weigh in favour of the solace I found thereafter communing with the swans and toads on the humid northern bank of the Colorado.

‘are you looking for a job?’ ‘well, looking? -chuckle-, i guess, not really, are you offering me one?’ ‘maybe.’ ‘ill think about it, but i need to be home to watch jeopardy every night!’

‘he types his posts on myspace in all caps, it makes me so anxious!’ ‘i only accept correspondence from him if it is hand written or delivered by carrier pigeon!’ ‘there are no carrier pigeons left! those went out with the lindy hop!’ ‘have you heard that josiah is going to have a sock hop?’ ‘that will be so amazing!’

‘casey just got back from midland.’ ‘is that like casey at the bat or kc and the sunshine band?’ ‘casey at the bat, i have never been to midland.’ ‘have you ever been to el paso?’ ‘no. i really want to go to marfa!’ ‘whats going on there?’ ‘janine is have a really big party there in september.’

‘have you seen the bikers coming into town for the rally?’ ‘you mean the republican sexist biker rally? i wrote a blurb about it for my application to the texas monthly. joan jett is playing at it.’ ‘yeah! david allan coe played it before, and the guy who sang shooting star.’ ‘you mean richard marx?’ ‘hahaha.’ ‘what? richard marx is awesome… seriously!’

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

this cozy shop near the noodle restaurant, in the aforementioned badlands, is fitted out with an adaptively reused charm that serves the type well. the raised loading docks of fourth street serve as a nice patio area and give the place a distinction from the street, as if it knows that it is superior to the blah that it floats in (it will also give a good view of the top 3 floors of the new federal courthouse c.2010). it isnt what i would characterize as a bookish shop, nor is it overly magazinish. one could imagine a harper’s before a dwell but a t.c. boyle before a j.k. huysmans. any text would have been welcome to present an exit from staccato conversation. it was not the place’s fault that i couldn’t chat but my own trepidation and unwillingness to present myself as a pleasant companion that might be open to many future coffee-takings. the place was actually an ideal coffeehouse and could certainly summon halcyon memories of archetypal coffeeshops across the board. unfortunately it could not bolster my wooden personality. the music in the place and the necessity that i acutely observe the joint gave me a respite from conversation and an opportunity to imbibe in silence. o, i could see myself getting comfortable enough to tote a fine text up in there if i were summoned to austin solo someday. i could have done without the barristas wearing shorts but i guess it was like 600 degrees out yonder.