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.

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I wondered which came first, the self-consciously selected alternative soundtrack or the edgy, quirky little shops on Ferndale’s downtown strip. Certainly my guess is that American Pop (I imagine it probably takes several years for caramel corn to turn black when it is left sitting out) and Record Collector (home of the 20% discount if you are buying Albert Ayler (or maybe everybody gets it) were there first, a beachhead of funkiness, before Ferndale made the conscious effort to cultivate the sidewalk scene with nice benches, numerous intrablock crosswalks, and of course, the speakers on the lightposts that force you to use ‘Rock n Roll Highschool’ or ‘Blue Monday’ as your soundtrack for trying to feed the meter before going into Java Hutt.

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I had hoped to introduce thos. more to Monmouth Coffee Company during a London business sojourn in December 2006, but my plans were thwarted by the fact that this café keeps rather inconvenient business hours. I suppose opening at 8 am is a reasonable business strategy; closing at 6:30 pm, on the other hand, is a lamentable decision. This means that the calendrical system, if you will, of Monmouth Coffee Company is firmly anchored to the workaday schedule of your average London suit. Presumably, once the shops and offices have closed, everyone heads to the pub. But for those of us who are more café-prone in the evenings, we are left with few options in Central London other than the Costas and the Starbucks. And for those of you who intended to skip church to go hang out at Monmouth Coffee Company, I’m afraid you’re also out of luck: the cafe is closed on Sundays.

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I wish this place were called ‘Angles in my Kitchen’, or ‘Angels in my Emissions’. As it is, I can barely stomach writing about anything that purports to involve angels. If there truly are angels in this café’s kitchen, I hope they are at least sanitary, vegetarian, and somewhat interested in good coffee. I don’t want to end up with another intestinal parasite just because some seraphim forgot to wash his hands after using the toilet. And, frankly, I find the thought of any angel implicating himself in the preparation and consumption of animal flesh abhorrent—certainly one of the many reasons I find the Judeo-Christian tradition so unsavory (see: Abraham and his dubious sacrifice of the innocent ram in place of his son Isaac, Genesis 11:22).

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(DECOMMISSIONED)

Holy fucking shit! We forgot all about Joe! The day that I took Ashley on a tour of West Philadelphia before his paper on “The Pitt”, we stopped at Green Line so he could evacuate a bit of diarrhea and order a few rounds of French Roast.

While Ashley was chatting up his ‘sexy barista’, trying to assure her that he was not in a gay relationship with me without going so far as to reveal that he has a wife (providentially, he had insisted that I stash his wedding band in a drawer in my chambre earlier in the morning), I took a look at the family-friendly flyers covering the door to the WC, where I noticed a flyer for a book, Consuming Starbucks, that was either being released at Joe or was being read at Joe or was for sale at Joe — I have no way of knowing without actually reading the entire flyer.

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Ever since I was exiled to the continent (and, currently, to the ‘sub’-continent) nearly six months ago, I have been at a loss to find cafes that fall within the narrow guidelines deemed appropriate for tableaux by some of my colleagues on this site. So what is one to do if soymilk and vegan cookies are not offered on the menu? Or, if one is more likely to hear Journey or Michael Jackson piped through some kluged together sound system, than Cat Power or your local mason-jar-toting friends’ band? Should the fact that ‘pastanesi’ (Turk. ‘patisserie’) is in the establishment’s name disqualify it from receiving mention here?

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If I had to walk another 50 yards in my heavy trenchcoat and longjohns carrying my 30 pound pack, I would not have made it. Although the promise of hot black joe did not seem to be an antidote to the unseasonable heat and the sun which pummeled the back of my neck, it was the sun, which would foil the rest of the day’s perambulations, that would serve as the delicate saviour of Chapterhouse in the little moments to which it brought solitude.

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