cafe tableaux » Santa Monica

18th Street Coffeehouse

j.h. trefry — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 17:02:43 +0000

i havent been to the 18th street coffeehouse in about 4.5 years, but it was the kind of place i sense would not change so much over time. it seemed frozen in its little sundrenched plot and the strains of patsy cline ambling across the tile floors and echoing against the cast iron ceiling must still sing out into the doldrums of santa monica. in a truly dismal and forgettable spot in the city, this coffeehouse became my living room for a few months at the end of summer in 2000. a large mexican family had moved in downstairs from me bringing with them a large stereo and a passion for ranchero and polka beats. i learned to stuff clothes into the crack under the bedroom door and sit without my feet touching the floor to avoid picking up the vibrations. it was a nightmare that accompanied a particularly alienating stint in the beige city. i sought refuge every morning at 7am, driving out of the way on santa monica backroads, to wander into 18th street where i worked on various things to keep occupied. in this transporting atmosphere i could almost think of those situations from which i was hiding as impersonal fodder. the small patio style mosaic tables were a bit hard to write on but when the bay windows onto the street were open and david duchovny and tracy ullman were breaking off coffees and getting harassed and crazy, im crazy for feeling so lonely tinny across the room, and the wretched apartment was gone and i was working, and i couldnt change a thing about it ever again, not the kind of pencil i write with, not my productivity in coffeeshops, and not my memories of that little place. after those few months and after i moved out to culver city i rarely went there again. this little place deserved more than to be used for self-indulgence. there is a way that you abandon a place not because you burn out on it but because it doesnt make sense or seems offensive to that dreamy place somehow to include it in your new phase of life, as if you wanted to selfishly rely upon it to conjure up some feelings that had no place in your new situation.

Mani’s Bakery

j.h. trefry — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 17:00:30 +0000

mani’s was all the things the cogs argue that los angeles is, too big, too many disparate functions, too many pretty empty faces. it is true, mani’s in santa monica was a big open room with little character, they did try to sell womens clothing in one corner and on the other side that kind of los angeles handcrafted tubesteel furniture where the ‘craft’ is the use of an angle grinder to smooth down the welds your boss did whilst sniffing coke out of a drawer, and yes the barristas were more often than not pretty boys and girls, ciphers in black shirts waiting to be plucked from obscurity, or as in one instance, snapping free from their affectations just long enough to look into a roomful of despondent westsiders, to empathize with those empty eyes, those empty balmy nights, and to put out a full plate of vegan carrot raisin cupcakes as free ‘samples’.

if there were any other people there it was probably the bohemian santa monican (an oxymoron i believe) whose pick-up acoustic folk set had packed up and left him staring wistfully into space with his overly wet lips slightly pursed and his head cocked like art garfunkel. he didnt go for the cakes. i did, and helping myself to a bit more soymilk from the carafe on the counter to temper my mediocre beverage, i polished off at least two of the massive things. because it was so atypical, so positive, it is not a night i look back on in my catalogue of los angeles memories as somehow formative. it is one where for a moment there was a looseness, a giving spirit, there was no landlord trying to sell me the refrigerator he had taken out of my apartment just before i moved in, no oafs in sweatpants posturing at the postoffice, no people at the beach, no people in the hills, no cold barristas absently cleaning out the pastry cooler or standing with their fingers arched on the counter, there was me with loads of frosting caking my intestines.

Velocity Cafe

Saul Cups — Thu, 29 Sep 2005 16:11:30 +0000

I understand the most recent edition of the _Taschen Encyclopedia of 20th-Century Design_ describes the interior of Velocity Cafe as a veritable taxonomy of postwar vinyl mobilier and oeuvres d’art plastique. The fact of its inclusion in this volume will most certainly ensure that cafe receives the patronage of thrift-store enthusiasts, nostalgic baby boomers, and the occasional graduate student, who, no doubt, is mining the streets of Santa Monica for a profound (and marketable) dissertation topic. In spite (or because?) of the excess of kitsch that appears to have been vomited onto every surface of Velocity Cafe’s insides, the interior is visually inoffensive…nay, even pleasant and fascinating.

What I mean is sometimes cafes take things too far: the chrome Cadillac bumper, for example, should not have been welded to that Soho cafe counter. Or, the tin-pressed ceiling panels (of some hip cafe I am now imagining or recollecting) are clearly of recent manufacture. With its crap canvas paintings; dusty 10-yr-old power strips haphazardly glued to the walls; and crunchy, overgrown brown-and-green fern that hangs by two different types of chain from an overextended hook emerging from a gouged cleft in the semi-glossy painted ceiling, Velocity Cafe has managed to achieve a remarkable equilibrium between product and process. (Imagine, as well, a brick dado, splinter-inducing wood paneling, and terracotta floor tiles, and you may begin to appreciate the complex tonal harmony of brown hues which has blossomed autochthonously from the planes of this streetside polyhedron.) The amalgam of hodgepodge is not an affectation. Its mismatched, slipshod appearance is not a ‘look’; on the contrary, it is the strata of time’s deposits, the open, gaping wounds of use and neglect, the story of something taken apart and put back together again. This place works, not in a Hausmannish way, but more like the winding, beehive neighborhoods of Fez, where routes of movement follow from patterns of habitation and commercial/social exchange, rather than the reverse.