Rough Theory

So for the past few weeks, when I’ve been able to fight the crowds to get to my usual spot in my coffee shop (as I type this, one of my postgrad students has walked past and casually asked, “Oh! So is this your office?” I’m getting emails from people I don’t even know, asking whether I’m in my “office”, where the emailer clearly means this place… The regular use of this term for this place has to come from students talking to one another, since I don’t advertise it – er… other than writing about it to the entire net, of course… But no one gets their information from the internet, do they?), my view as I look upward is something like this.

I’m taking these photos on the webcam built in to my laptop, which is not what one would normally call a high resolution device… So, in case it’s impossible to tell what this is a picture of, the photo is meant to show the padded tiles along the walls (yes, folks, I voluntarily place myself in a padded room on a regular basis), looking up toward the purple ceiling. You can see the previously-blogged ceiling power point – the white cord dangling down is the extension I’ve donated to the place, so I can plug in my laptop without scaling the furniture. For some weeks, my extension cord was the only thing regularly suspended from that power point. But recently there have been a couple of additions – the two light fixtures (presently turned off) that have been plugged into the power point, and then clipped with random office supplies to the beam that runs across the ceiling.

This gives my regular table a veritable wealth of light sources (all the others have one at most) – the fruits, I suppose, of sitting under a power point. But who am I to argue. I’m used to the interior of this place changing quite often, as the owner stumbles across new objects from which he creates found art. There are some fixtures, such as the Garden of Eden mural next to where I normally sit, which are constants.

But most of these bits and pieces on the ceiling, for example, are new. I’ll just walk in one morning and find – as shown in this photo – that someone has strung a flag, or hung up lots of clear plastic streamers with glistening foil fish taped to them, or found a convenient spot to prop a pair of stray blue legs…

In context, the fact that my table suddenly sprouted two new light fixtures in addition to the one it’s always had… not really that strange…

So I didn’t ask.

This morning, though, the owner wandered over personally with my coffee. His eyes followed the line from my laptop, to the extension board, up the way to the ceiling power point, and then, leaping back – “WTF?! Where did those lights come from?!”

“I thought you put them up,” I said, startled.

“No – no – not mine,” he stepped back to appraise them from different angles. “I like though… I like… They’re very nice…”

And off he wandered, looking pleased.

Now I’m finding myself reappraising the interior: how much of this place, exactly, has he deliberately created? I’ve seen him do some of it – I had assumed it was all his… Now I’m wondering… How much of the regular, ongoing transformation of this place comes from people like me – people who decide to make… just a little change… add just that little bit… to feel more at home… A cord… a light fixture… a pair of blue legs tucked in the corner just so… Maybe even a mural of mutual temptation… Found objects… donated ones… deliberate designs… detritus… How much of this place did the owner discover one morning, to his surprise, and then accept with a pleased “I like… They’re very nice…”

My coffee shop has recently begun opening on weekends. Read more of this post

My coffeeshop has been going through a remodelling process over the past several months – a process we have occasionally had reason to suspect was orchestrated to make a lot of noise, so as to move us along, when we monopolise a table longer than our collective coffee rent justifies.

Aside from more structural changes, the remodel has also involved the addition of new furniture, including today’s novelty: a large “communal” table created out of a metal ladder, suspended between what look like those small metallic barriers occasionally used by street cafes to create a boundary around their outdoor tables. The rungs of the ladder are capped for the moment by ill-fitting metal plates salvaged from fire-escape-style staircases, but will eventually be covered by deliberately mismatched wooden planks. All pieces of the table – like the rest of the furniture and artwork in this place – have been created from materials salvaged and recycled from other places: the owner steadily collects, gathering materials into storage until he can visualise something that can be made from them. He also weaves people into his creations: the welding was done by a regular customer who happened to overhear the owner wonder who he should get to do that work. I’ve heard this kind of thing happen before here – been drawn into it myself, on occasion.

Because the owner deliberately mixes materials and styles, new creations tend to cause cascading transformations of the entire environment, as their idiosyncratic mix of stuff contrasts too starkly, or blends in too well, inspiring or irritating the owner to transform the space until things settle into a new dynamic tension. The interior of this space is thus in a constant state of transformation, occasionally interrupted by breathing periods of stasis.

The auditory environment is similarly bricoleured. There are times when I will swear the owner deliberately introduces profoundly irritating musical tracks just for the almost expressionist experience of relief it provides when the track has ended – it’s a thing of wonder and beauty, a genuinely novel way of experiencing a mundane and generally dull piece of music, when for the first time you hear it out of context, following something truly awful. Occasionally, I’ve been here when this kind of experiment doesn’t work as intended – when I’ve paused in my reading or writing in a kind of open admiration for how truly abysmal some cover or mix happens to be, only to have the music stop in mid-note and be exchanged for something else: at that point, I’ll know the owner agreed, and that the moment of transcendence I was waiting for – wondering to myself: what can possibly follow and complete this? – will never come.

This morning, though, it was the new table that was the centre of attention. I loved it on sight. I said as much to a member of the waitstaff, who at first smiled indulgently, and then realised I might be serious. They couldn’t contain their surprise: “You do?!” I think it’s wonderful, I repeated. They laughed nervously – I think they were convinced I was teasing them. You don’t agree? I wanted to know. More nervous laughter as they scuttled back to the kitchen.

The staff, apparently, are divided on the issue. The budding opera singer looked at the table with frank admiration. The owner gazes on it with no small mixture of externalised exhibitionism. The most senior staff member doesn’t see the table, only the owner’s tactile enjoyment of it, and that is enough.

Customers are divided as well. Everyone who ducks in for a coffee, even if they don’t normally investigate those nether realms of the establishment where the table resides, must come have a look. Again nervous laughs. Some customers clearly don’t believe this table will stay – it can’t be serious, this table. I mean, just look at it. A few offer suggestions for turning it into a more conventional eating surface: “Why don’t you just, I don’t know, cover it with a big plank of wood?” – “Oh I’ll cover it with several planks,” replies the owner, “but they have to be different colours, you see – they have to have different grains”. Some, too polite, reach for neutral words: “That’ll seat twelve people for sure”, one man offers. Others, more bluntly: “What happened to that medieval table thing you used to have here? I liked that.” The owner points to the fragments of what used to be one large tree-trunk table – now scattered against several pillars throughout the room, multiple tables now. He doesn’t explain that this multiplicity can also coalesce: if you hang around here long enough, you’ll occasionally see the fragments dragged back together into a plausible imitation of their former cohesive self.