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, Tanqueray, and Big K, and possibly not having picked the dried bits of puked-up Varsity off of their soccer sandals. I was supposed to meet my ‘team’ at ten that morning to work together on a shared chipboard site model for the studio. Had I realized before I got there that the time had changed that night, that I was an hour early, I would have just concocted the inevitable lie without dragging myself from Home Park. As it was I perfunctorily loitered for about ten minutes before heading back home to see what sort of debauchery Jeff was into for the day. Whether I have been more of a grown up since that day is arguable, but I never benefited from ignorance of DST’s mechanics again until this just past fall.

In Athens for a gastronomic Grand Tour, we had already hit The Grill, 5&10, Big City Bread, Clocked, and The National, and were emptying out our legs for a Rabelaisian brunch at The Grit. We walked through the clear chill of the Samhain morning from our motel to The Grit. Nervousness and immediate hunger pains prickled when we found the place closed. A couple of other fools stood in front of the door with us until we all realized that we were out of step with the world and we decided to recalibrate for an hour in the new cafe that had filled the block husk of Go Coffee.

Go was a great light-filled diner of a shop that we used to spend mornings playing Scrabble in. Red Eye, we found, was significantly darker in pallor and was jamming NPR’s Sunday Morning throughout our stay. It became quickly apparent that Red Eye had something in common with my deceased bros at Method with their connoisseurship of beans and with their Chemex brewing vessels. I noted this to the somewhat disinterested proprietor and he mentioned that Octane, who had bought out Method, was going to be utilizing the same brewing process and would be opening soon. Now in April of the following year I haven’t had the courage to field verify his assertion. I also noted that I used to kick it in this space when it was Go; his disinterest resurfaced.

It was quiet save for Bob Edwards on the squawk-box and the day with all of the rest of the folks in it loped toward us in the Sunday sun like a slow-motion mob advancing. The cork coaster protecting the glass coffee table kept sticking to my cup and falling in my lap. A man from the real day entered the shop hesitantly. He carried a fresh baguette that filled the whole room immediately with warmth and crusty aroma. A fresh baguette on a Sunday? I recalled another time when I was doing the unstuck. I arrived via treno in Venice on a Sunday morning and hurriedly took a camera at a joint right there in the Canneregio. I had probably been up since four or five because I couldn’t sleep in Florence for some reason that escapes me now. I was hungry and bewildered by the city I had been co-opting for years already and rushed out to find a loaf of bread. Most of the bakeries were closed and a few little bodegas brandished their empty cabinets sadly like I had been at the end of a particularly long Russian bread line. Roman Catholicism’s stranglehold on poor little Venice had reached my doorstep and I languished on the cobbles of a campo until the sun set. It was as odd to me that Sunday wouldn’t be the perfect day to bake oodles of fresh bread as it was that wine couldn’t be purchased in Georgia on Sundays; name two more popular miracles of Jesus than the feeding of the multitudes and wedding feast of Cana. This bastard in Red Eye was lucky, and the smell brought me chronosyncronous with him and the sun.

Bound as we were back into the world, we headed out to destroy The Grit and stroll through ‘Bear Hollow Trail’ at Memorial Park to kick it with their crippled Bubo Virginianii.

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…

“Wouldn’t it be nice if someone knew what they wanted when they came in?”

Well, let me you this, jackass, this horrible world is overflowing with filthy Burger Kings where I am certain you may find plenty of greasy mouthbreathers to stagger to your work station and demand a ‘#2′ or the ‘Valu-Kit’ or whatever they name the rubbish they box for sale in national chain restaurants. You could skate over to MLK Blvd and fill out an application immediately, forgoing the reading the remainder of this surly rant. As it happens, you choose to work behind the counter in a boutique coffee house where the menu is not reduced to efficient numerical packages, and the overwhelming majority of the populace does not have a comprehensive and intimate knowledge of every cake and tart in your case.

One wonders, as I do, what it was that you were doing that was so important that made my approach to the counter such a distraction. I would expect that you are in this cafe for the term of your shift, which is the same number of hours regardless of what any moment’s task entails, whether it is cutting eight dollar slices of peanut butter cake, hosing human fæces from the bathroom sink, or standing sedately at the register when a customer tries to order.

Given a choice, what else would you do with your time at the cafe? Were there many lives depending on you checking the messages your iPhone? Were you on the verge of breaking through a gene sequence that would prevent cancer or provide telepathy for future generations of humans? Was Obama texting you for advice on how to get 30,000 troops to haul ass to Afghanistan before accepting a Nobel Peace prize?

Not Gallery Espresso.

In the event, no one asked you to stop what you are doing and ‘wait for me’. I walked into the building and stopped five feet, minimum, from the counter to have a look. This tableauxist is the one least known for meticulous descriptions of a cafe’s physical complexion and superficies, but I do take notice. For these are those ‘things I can’t live without’ that are listed in my online profile, but they are not something I can sit down and catalog in any cohesive form. Why do you think I only write internally monologued biographies?

If my apparent dispassionate observations come across as confusion or befuddlement, maybe I am too easily distracted; perhaps if you tore down the display stands hocking earrings made from seashells and hot glue and demounted the matted laser prints of potted plants and shutters, and you instead put up a massive banner that states ‘No Vegan Items’, then I could rush the counter with out the need to spend a minute scanning every piece of text on site before my approach for a coffee.

What Ho! Can you imagine my surprise when upon my ordering ‘a coffee‘, you had to ask ‘what kind?‘?

“Wouldn’t it be nice if a barista could just take a simple order?”

There is only one thing ‘coffee’ can mean. I didn’t say I needed ‘coffee + soymilk’ or ‘coffee + sugar’ or ‘coffee + hazelnuts’. You don’t pour a sack of flour into a bowl and say ‘here’s your cake’; if you add anything to coffee then it is no longer ‘coffee’. If I say ‘coffee’, all I want in the cup is coffee. There is no ‘kind’, if I wanted a ‘kind of coffee’, I would have asked for coffee with a kind of something.

The only way your question would have been valid would be if you had a dozen varietals and/or roasts to choose from, which you did not, or if you offered a variety of brewing methods, such a vacuum pots, french press, the method method, or cowboy coffee. Even then, I would expect your question to be, ‘How would you like that coffee brewed, superuser?‘, since the ‘kind’ of coffee remains the same, but you only serve the standard auto drip.

This is cafe tableaux; when it comes to writing about about the nature of a cafe’s coffee, or the coffee + smilk, if you please, only I can decide what is apropos. To the reader who wonders, ‘hey brah, why don’t you devote more time to the coffee/baristas/lighting/whatever other hook I feel is so vital?‘, the answer is ‘because this is cafe tableaux‘.

However, in contradiction to my usual affected aloofness with regards to the rabble’s criticisms, to nip that shit, I’ll tell you now: I have found nothing remarkable about the coffee at Gallery Espresso, except that it was convenient and never hot enough. I’ve never touched the food there, but I once rendezvoused here with a couple of skinnies from pie v cake; they could not stop raving about the non-vegan pecan pie, and I recall they went back for second pieces. Also, you need a key to use the head. That should cover everything.

Anyway, this ‘tableau’ is obviously little more than a rambling diatribe. Gallery Espresso seems nice enough; it is just that one barista is a bit of a cunt. It strikes me that Gallery is a place is more suited for tourists to get sandwiches after visiting the Forrest Gump bench or the Girl Scouts house than it is a place for locals to meet for their Sunday morning Reading Circle (this week: The Red and The Black), so a barista could call you a ‘shit stain’ to your face for all the difference it would make, as you won’t be around town for a second visit anyway.

This could probably be taken up in klatch – and would have been if anyone used it – but I wonder if cafe tableaux might develop a classification system for the various but limited cafe typologies. It is not for a lack of cafes or trying that this superuser rarely posts new tableaux; you see, unlike JHT, I am unable to eat dung and shit silver — trust me, I have seen the man in person and it coats him like dew every morn. The truth is, believe it or not, I am debilitated by depression and loneliness 9 days out of 10, and the chances that anything noteworthy transpires at the moment I visit a cafe are slim to none; it is this fading of one cafe experience into the next as ‘my life drips like coffee down the drain‘ that unmans me as I stare at an empty jotter night after night.

Allow me to assure the reader, I have tried to enliven events, for your sakes — manipulating craigslist missed connections all week before going in to judge the employees’ and customers’ behaviour, or pouring coffee on a cute girl’s notebook whilst she is in the restroom then telling her that I saw the guy who did it running out the door. However, though we are not objective here, it seems like an impropriety to affect the story with such tactics; this is not ‘gonzo tableaux’.

So! All of these cafes look the same to me. After describing one of each type in the first round of tableaux, I have no zest for listing their details again and again. If this site were to take any lesson from Burger King, we could just stamp out ‘visited a #2′ and maybe keep the attention of the baristas at Gallery:

1. Strip Mall Cafe — Clad with cheap wood veneer, tile floor, and neon. Owned by a wife-husband team or a sole proprietor with another, reliable source of income; they have heard that this Starbucks thing has made billions of dollars, so they want the same from cafe. Bottles of syrup prominently displayed. Everything looks cheap and cash-and-carry, because they put bare minimum of profit back into store, for the rest goes to buy a new flat screen or smart-phone. Lasts 10-15 months.

2. Business Cafe – Run by someone who is not particularly into coffee or cafe ‘culture’, but knows how to run a service business. Usually savvy enough to leave coffee/cafe decisions to someone else. Likely have broader menu than just coffee drinks. On the ball about fixing things.

3. Passion Cafe – People love coffee and will do anything to keep store running, like it is their baby or puppy. Similar to the Strip Mall, but the owners are more earnest, and have quit their jobs and invested all savings into cafe. Trying too many things at once to make everyone happy, they burn out in 8-10 months, putting up a sign that says ‘coming back soon’. Probably would be the type of cafe run by most contributors to cafe tableaux.

4. BoHo – Mismatched chairs and cups. Lamps on tables. Menu is hand written in chalk cute names for ‘specialty’ drinks that every other cafe also has (ex, espresso shot in coffee: red eye, shot in the dark, dive bomber, brown star). Meets most people’s conception of a cafe, because it is what they would see on tv or movies, but it is not the actual ‘cafe’ they go to (see 5).

5. Corporate Lite – Not a chain, yet, so you don’t feel like a complete asshole for visiting, but you do feel like an asshole lite. Menu is a printed sign that matches the furnishings. They have store-bought prints framed on the wall. A logo is printed on cups and paper takeaway menus. They are most likely to open a drive-thru.

6. College Cash Barn – Near university or similar high traffic area. Owners don’t have to do anything special but keep the electricity on, and the money just pours in the doors. Could also fit into other types’ classifications, which is unfortunate in the case of Strip Mall or Corporate Lite, as they will last for years.

This is a work in progress; feel free to add your own.

For the sake of disclosure, and to defuse a barrage of charges of elitism and class warfare, it shall be known that this tableauxist was himself a barista for six (6) years and in that time was only gruff with a single customer — in a case that was justified. All disgruntle and crabbiness was directed at the other baristas, until the day I had to quit, so as to avoid being ‘taken outside and taught how to shut [my] mouth‘, but that is a tableau for another day…

However, it was mildly soothing scene in one respect; I was liberated from a specific hunger: soymilk was cheap and tofu was local; I was finally freed from my steady diet of sour apples, budget digestive biscuits, and boxed multi-vitamin ‘dryck’. On the other, hand I was marooned on a barrier island with only sporadic communication with my outside world, narrow as it is, without a bicycle for the first time since 2003, and obliged to a task too grim to describe in the pages of cafe tableaux.

Days were wasted traversing the island on foot to the county library, where I could attach my portable computer to the internet and frantically click through dozens of websites dedicated to polling of detestable groups – NASCAR Dads and War Moms — and to deconstructions of Youtube videos for Senate campaigns in states I never cared to otherwise know about, save for in my dreams of an exhaustive study of highway rest areas about which I have mused to everyone I have ever met.

It’s difficult to imagine now the public mood of those yond days in the context of what has followed. Voting is for suckers; there is no doubt about that, but the manufactured drama of elections can suck almost any cynic into the charade. Now we all know that it does not matter one way or the other who is acting as president when he or she is not doing jack shit, but back then, we were on pins and needles, wondering about some Aryan Nation maniacs assassinating a candidate, dreading the day an air-headed empty suit would succeed to the office upon the death septuagenarian Vietcong Candidate, and tasting something hypocritical in our mouths as the ‘grass roots’ candidate spent more than million dollars on one night of 30 minute teevee commercials.

Despite my obsession with the ‘national conversation’, in moments amidst the hours spent at the public library refreshing sites like the hysterical dailykos, the more rational fivethirtyeight, and even the crude wonkette, I pushed the keyboard to the back of my cubicle and scrawled a few ‘notes’ in longhand in the margins of my viking novel-in-progress, which, by the way, was conceived twelve (12) years earlier in a shower across the hall from Peter Zellner’s dorm room near Boston — not in Sweden the previous month.

It was this penciling of gibberish that caught the attention of one of the library maidens, one responsible for re-shelving audio tapes of Carol Higgins Clark works and giving out 30 minute passes for the computer stations, most likely because I was the first person she had seen inside the building not using a cell phone or arguing over the right to play World of Warcraft without headphones. After thirty days of my warming the same seat in the rear corner of the biography stacks, she approached me and asked what it is that I was always scribbling on a ‘graph paper’ notepad.

“it’s this story about these three months i spent building a cabin in the Ardennes”
“wow, is it true?”
“i only write autobiographies”

She stooped over my shoulder and scanned my spiral bound Pocket Notebook; I fanned my hands to cover most of the thumbnail drawings of battle axes and ravens.

“you should come to our short story salon, ok? we meet every week and exchange stories”
“is that something i can do online?”
“no we meet at a coffee house and give each other feedback”

I am not really one for a salon, but I am one for a comely young dish with a bookish look and, on occasion, a slight aura of crunch.

I don’t know how to compose short stories, either, but I do know how to lie about my name and how to steal things off the web. Thus, I was introduced to the salon as ‘Jagger Herzt Trefry’ before presenting several of my ‘Decay’ pieces the next week, fragments of a narrative edited within the bounds of Creative Commons license to remove the more lurid sexual innuendo in the source material.

It was after the presentation of one of these pieces one night at Sentient Bean, a piece in which I neglected to discern, and therefore expunge, a metaphor for the vulva represented by Sepulveda Boulevard as it climbs away from Venice, that the fine lass from the library approached my easy chair.

“ok, it’s really cool that a guy writer can be so in touch with his feminine side”
“ok”
“no i mean your story you read tonight, ok?”
“yeah that was like really hard to do. i don’t think i’ll do that again”
“dude you totally should. it was so awesome…all these other guys just write about spies and hating their fathers and stuff, ok”
“uhhhhmm, i do have some more things like this one, but it is pretty hard to read them aloud in front of these guys –”
“fuck those guys”
“–especially the guy in the fucking ed hardy shirt and crocs”
“dude those guys are losers, ok? you need to write more like that shit tonight, ok”
“yeah…maybe i will send you something.”
“that would be rad ok?”

I hauled ass back ‘home’ and scoured my namesake’s partner site for more of the effeminate compositions. The best piece with a woman’s touch that I could find was an sketch for a work of awkward erotica about a father and son. I bent the genders a bit and removed the most alarming segment – describing an episode under a tree on Xmas eve – then sent an email to the young library trick from a spoofed account intimating that I would be more comfortable sharing this story in person, on a hard copy, not digitally and infinitely reproducible, suggesting that we meet somewhere peaceful where she could read it without distractions “like maybe your apartment or something.”

Whilst I waited at her kitchen table, staring at her knees and other select parts, she turned over the last of the loose leaf pages onto which I had transcribed the holiday tale.

“do all your guys shoot themselves at the end?”
“no! it’s rare. i actually prefer the notion of a hanging –”
“god that’s morbid”
“–preferably with like a belt or the cord from a motel room blinds”
“dude”
“what’s the difference? in the long run?”
“it’s not funny ok”
“shit, i’m not famous for writing fucking comedies”
“well i have a thing about it because my dad was a suicide victim, ok?”
“hmm” there goes that.
“he did it after my mom contracted breast cancer –”

Jesus Fucking Christ. I wondered if I could text someone to call me with an ‘emergency’.

“– he couldn’t bear to see her all sickly and weak from the chemo, ok?”
“uh ok”

She shielded her face with her hand, fingertips on her forehead, as her eyes began to water. No! No! No! No! No!

“you know when i was in Sweden we had these lamps we had to sit under for like two hours a day so we wouldn’t kill ourselves…because it is dark there perpetually”

Her shoulders trembled as she gasped a silent sob; I looked past her neck at the clock on the stove that indicated only 20 minutes had passed since I arrived…

And when I awoke, I was alone, this bird had flown
So I lit a fire, isn’t it good Norwegian wood.

Shortly after 6am, I scratched out a note about needing to be “on set” at 8am and stuck it to the refrigerator with some ‘Poetry’ magnets spelling out ‘Anticipation Settles Accounts”. I swallowed a few gulps of pulp-free orange juice from the carton, swiped an Odwalla Superfood bar from the pantry, and crept into the hall. I held my breath as I turned the deadbolt to open the door and climbed along the iron handrail down to the sidewalk to avoid stepping on the creaky wooden stairs. Upon reaching the landing, I sprinted down the remaining brick steps and jogged around the corner towards Broughton Street.

I headed towards my uncle’s sweet shop near Habersham, where I napped on the sidewalk in front of the entrance until he arrived to open for business.  I begged him to loan me his Prius so I could drive back ‘home’, but naturally he refused, suggesting instead that I use the Islands Shuttle that takes people out to the beach from Emmet Park. After using a trip to the bathroom as a pretext to steal two cans of cocoa from his storeroom, I thanked him for the advice and ran to catch the shuttle.

Knowing that no place serving coffee on Tybee would be open and feeling a little gypped by the promise of ‘Super’ in the Odwalla bar, I implored the driver to let me exit the shuttle at the traffic light in front of Davis Produce and Circle K, and I walked the half-mile to Johnny Mercer at low tide, the path reeking of sulfur and the flinty stench found in an old tackle box or the shitter at a Captain D’s.

By ten o’clock, I had reached the ‘Islands Center’ strip mall, figuring this would be the closest I ever found myself to the Savannah Bagel Cafe at ‘breakfast time’, so I crossed the street at the sight of their mildewed sign and anonymous box of shit and stucco, dripped sweat all over their floor and tables as I drank overcooked coffee from a foam cup and ate the best rosemary and garlic bagel outside of New York City and West Los Angeles. I never again saw the interior of the island’s library.

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.

Tilt Coffeeshop

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, 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. Wachovia

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’.

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 memory when they are gone. It is also not really the goal of this project to bitch about the people who prefer to go to these corporate establishments, who like to joke about it being ‘their thing,’ while they boast about their inability to survive several hours without a latte from CBTL. It is however our purview, in the intersection of these worlds, to lambast the fool who marches into Savannah Coffee Roasters Cafe to ask them where the Starbucks is located.

It is entertaining for querulous people to mask their critiques or complaints within their declarations that they are not going to complain or criticize. For instance, in response to this gentlemen, the tableautaur might say, “I am going to refrain from making some obvious statement like, ‘You are looking for a starbucks? Close your eyes and walk 30 meters.’” Such statements like these are easy ways to pretend that you are bigger than the culprit and too disinterested to descend into a debate about the merits of such a booji boy. So I will refrain from making such statements as well!

The look on the Starbucks-bound pedestrian’s face characterized the whole larger exchange. It was one of guilty self-satisfaction.

Like a bloated red-faced bank manager, freshly shorn face dappled with sweat from strolling in the sultry spring morning without his parasol, he loses his way, this portion of town is unfamiliar to him, it brings fear to his giant heart, weakened and fat as it shuffles watery blood past his sock-garters into his oedemic ankles, he ducks his head into the cleanest hovel he can find, even then having to push aside mangy curs and urchins with blistered mud-caked hands aside while his eyes adjust to the darkness, he yells out into the dim space, after tucking a finger beneath his starched collar to let his sweaty bosom cool and clearing his throat, “I say, is there anyone down there? I seem to have lost my way… could anyone tell me on which square the Havelocks, Buzzy and Veronica, are having their garden party? I am already frightfully late!”

So it was that the humble folk would offer to help, to no benefit of theirs. The gentleman of course is satisfied that people are generally decent, and that he can continue to enjoy his high standing. But beyond that, in his sheltered and linear existence, he feels proud in his pity for these people who have chosen the low road, but only because he knows that he has made all the right decisions in his life and there have never been moments to look back or cast a stray glance.

But sir, you missed that the people in the den, whose faces were obscured in shade and in the sweat running down your eyebrowless forehead, were smiling, were talking about ghosts and aviation, were smelling the freshly roasted beans and attempting to guess how many were filling the bin, were ruminating on the pleasure of the trek to the bathroom which took them through the lobby of the adjacent building, down a service hallway, and into the lightless bowels of some nowhere building on a corner of some sundrenched square down the road from Starbucks.