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Coffee Shops
I love coffee shops. I love strong coffee with sugar and just a bit of half-and-half ... but that's not why I go. After going to a shop daily for a month or two, a sense of connexion—a sense approaching ownership—sets in: ‘Going to get coffee’ becomes ‘spending the day at *my* coffee shop’. –and– So, after almost three months' absence, I return to my coffee shop this evening. Coffee Boy gives me my fix of coffee, a perfect pint of dark, strong, aromatic blend in a glass with one of those novel holders so you don't burn your fingers, the ones with a rough, textured surface made from recycled paper. One of the lights is out on the main fixture in the back room; a new lamp illuminates the table where people usually play chess. Music a bit too trendy to be in my repertoire but close enough to my taste to be pleasant provides the atmosphere, but I am the only one listening: the two women at the next table are too captivated by the ‘content of the stupid exam’ for which they are studying; the man at the counter is too wrapped up in deciding between coffee and chai; another man just wants to find the restroom and relieve himself before going on his way. Then there are the sounds of coffee: pouring from the carafe into glasses; a sink running now and again to clean this or that, a burst of steam from the cappuccino machine, footsteps as the Coffee Boy brings a sandwich out to another anonymous patron. There's a new painting across from my table! Fantastic: The view of an oddly-placed chair in a wood-floored parlour seen through the doorway of the next room. Eight o'clock: time to put another album on; Coffee Boy and his co-worker debate what to play and eventually decide on some jazzy but slightly-poppy CD ... not my favourite, but, as part of the implicit contract upon entering the shop, I have relinquished control of my music selection. Of course, I could put on my headphones and listen to whatever I have in my bag, but what would be the fun in that? My wrist makes an horrible crack as I write; I cringe reflexively but try not to judge. Hmmm ... that's the problem with people: we are predisposed to judgement. If everybody made an effort to accept and understand then there'd be no greed, no war, no hate ... –but– Unfortunately or not, that wouldn't be reality: Life's that thing that happens between visits to the shop, between the bottom of one cup and the first sip of the next ... –and– coffee is my escape. Hotels
Hotels are smashing. Ever since I was very young, I have loved staying at hotels. A while ago, I saw ‘The Royal Tenenbaums’ with Sally and Lori; the title character and his faithful servant live in an hotel room for years and years. How fantastic! After seeing the end of the film, all I could say was ‘how wonderful must it be to live in an hotel!’ I didn't quite know or care what is so incredible about the experience, but then Putta showed me ‘Hotel People’ and it all made sense. Hotels represent to me freedom and anonymity. All of the things in life that I find terrible are gone: Your bed gets made every morning and mints placed on your pillow, the bathrooms cleaned, the trash taken out, the carpeting vacuumed, the windows washed, the towels folded, the little bottles of shampoo replaced; there is always someone to greet you when you walk in the front door, someone to hold an umbrella over your head while the valet brings round your car, someone to screen your calls, someone to make coffee which awaits you constantly just a few floors down in the lobby, someone who will help carry things for you, someone paid to pretend to give a damn about what you say, or at least to call you ‘Sir’ or ‘Mr So-And-So’. All this may seem trivial, but the removal of these concerns from one's life leaves so much more time: Time to listen to music, time to take long baths, time to watch the telly, time to read, time to ponder the meaning of life, time to pick out clothes that actually match, time to relax over a cup of coffee and a bagel, time to make sure your tie's knotted perfectly, time to stand at your window and watch the crimson sun slip into darkness, time to clean your spectacles, time to dig life. The floors of hotels have been tread by innumerable feet, the walls been party to countless late-night talks, the bed been refuge to a million weary travellers: The room is simultaneously home to everybody and to nobody. And where better to make your residence than such a place when you seek to be nobody, to go unnoticed? The walls hear everything but remember nothing. Neighbours come and leave, too tired and disinterested to notice your presence. The staff view their interactions with you as their job only and are entirely willing to think not of you when quitting time comes and somebody else takes the next shift. Anonymity heals the mind, I think. All day, you must face the world as yourself; at night, you return to your hotel—your temporary home—and can be nobody, nobody at all. This is balance, and life's all about balance, but that's another discussion for another time. How I Was Castrated by the '90s
Oh how I loathe it. Desire and the uncomplicated ease of the primal beast residing in my groin. It is so unintellectual, so base, so green with envy, so red with passion, anger and seedy lust ... –and– It's such a needy whiny little bitch ... You may hate it. I'm not a woman; empathy is the peak of my ability to see your trials and tribulations at the hands of a brutal and unfair patriarchal society. But as a male, and more specifically a male who prides himself on first being a human and even a bit of an intellectual, I hate it more than you ever could. It is my addiction and my fucking crutch. The world may be persecuted by it but I live with it inside me. It sleeps next to me at night polluting my dreams. It walks with me to work, and it invades my nodes while I am unwary ... It makes me want to fight, to scream and to fuck ... It's sort of like being born a horny crack baby ... I don't want it in me anymore. This is its official eviction notice. Screw it. Mother Nature and her cronies can go take a flying fuck at a rolling doughnut; I, for one, am through being the god damn evolutionary test rat for God, Darwin, Xemu or whoever is running this damn game ... I demand absolution for my crimes ... Just a few days ago, a friend of mine, who is normally very calm and collected about women and anger and passion and all that rot, was stopped mid-sentence by a very attractive girl. All she had to do was walk by and he was jolted into a coma like silence with his eyes glazed over. I could see it; I could see exactly what was going on with my friend. All he wanted to do was converse and joke with his friends over iced coffee and out of nowhere, blam-o, he gets hit; run over by a tall, sculpted, coy looking vision. He stood about as much of a chance as an opossum has against a Mack truck ... You could almost feel the need radiating off him. One minute he is telling a witty story, the next he (Mr Cool-and-collected, mind you) is gaping in stunned silence ... But wait, it gets even worse ... See, living with this beast is one thing. You see that pretty girl and all you can do is stare. You can't play it cool any more than a drunk can stop staggering. –but– here it is, the modern world, you are not allowed to stare. You are most certainly not allowed to touch. You, my friend, are fucked. There is no dance, no mating call, no right way to approach this woman. You can try, and in all probability be shot down and have your exploits retold in an angry tirade later to her girlfriends. Tough luck pal, there is no support group and no one gives a shit ... Here comes the fun part ... Since the '80s and '90s, not only does the world not care about your unwarranted and almost mysteriously random desires, they have deemed it illegal ... BzZzZt ... Gong ... Can't feel that way, have to be the sensitive male ... I want to be the goddamn sensitive male, someone give me a fucking hand here. Please, take away this magnetic and unrational pull; take away that weird and foreign desire to hit people. Take away the involuntary gawking and sexual desires that make me want to tear out my hair ... It's like a little war going on between my head and my balls. I hope I win. Expression in the Information Age
Thanks to the Internet, I have over the years managed to get back in touch with many long-lost friends. –but– one of them recently sent me an e-mail complaining that, now that we are communicating on a regular basis, she actually misses me more, not less. Astounded by the seemingly paradoxical statement I immediately hit reply: ‘L. what on earth do you mean?’ Within half-an-hour or so, her e-mail came back with a strangely familiar passage in quotation marks. ‘Late last night the rain fell. It dripped and dropped against my windowsills announcing the departure of a lethargic winter. Yet L. I must confess, I didn't mind the winter nights. What I fear is the warmth of summer. When my skin turns bronze and my body is ripened for love, when that afternoon sun lingers a bit too long on my shoulders, oh L. I get in trouble.’ Only when I got to the end did it dawn on me that it was my own writing. I wrote this passage to L. more than a decade ago in a handwritten letter, something I regret to report that I rarely do these days. L. concluded: ‘See what I mean? Where is the writer of this letter now? We e-mail, but are we really in touch?’ Hers is a fair accusation, though she, too, has stopped writing such expressive letters. Since we communicate by e-mail, we say things that are neither deep nor profound. We are communicating again after some silent years, but L. and I communicate badly. Our electronic correspondence stays on this shallower side of the lake, and our prose, if such it can be called, is only a bit wittier than the yellow pages of the phone book. ‘How's it going?’ I would ask in one message. ‘Bye.’ ‘Went to see Stomp last night,’ L would answer in another. ‘Fantastic. But my kid's crying though. Got to go. Love.’ My suspicion is that in a world where we are constantly chatting, very little is actually being said. We substitute human emotions with those strange symbols :-) and :-(, hoping somehow these colons and exclamation points could substitute our sensibility and taste and convey the nuances of our lives. The US Department of Education recently supported my suspicion. Last October, it found that only one in four students in high school, both public and private, could write ‘at a level of proficiency necessary for future job success’. The survey also found that while students are often capable of ‘social chit chat,’ language for the purpose of narration or argument is beyond them. Nine out of 10 of these students are native-born speakers of English. It is worse, actually, with people who speak English as a second language. Robert Woo, who hails from Hong Kong, says that he can't write in Chinese anymore. ‘I e-mail all my family and friends in Hongkong in English but I haven't written anything in Chinese in almost a decade. My parents used to get these expressive letters from me when I was in college, but they can read in English, via the Internet.’ He doubts that he can write in Chinese anymore. ‘Not enough time,’ he said, shrugging, ‘not enough incentive. Besides, there's always the phone’. So with speed and easy access, the first few casualties may be depth and style. But I fear the last might be literacy itself. ‘She was, like, you know, so mad ... ’ or so the housewife on a talk show began this morning, ‘and like I don't know why’. Neither did I, to be honest, but her incoherence made me wonder what happened to language and ideas in a country where people are less self reflective and yet, at the same time, as if cursed by Andy Warhol, more expressive. To live in the information age is, in a way, to live in a modern day Tower of Babel. One is constantly communicating—with cell phones, e-mails, pagers and in chat rooms—but one may very well be out of touch. One gets on the ‘right’ side of the digital divide but one might have to pay a price: Language is streamlined, and intimacy is forsaken for the high valued currency called information. Soon, I fear the thick novels of Tolstoy and Melville and the like will fall by the wayside as Americans and the rest of the wired world fail to understand or, for that matter, to create language that is complex and substantial. Marshall McLuhan, a Canadian professor of Renaissance literature, foresaw the decline of all that he loved and knew—the age of literacy. He predicted, instead, the rise of new oral / aural technologies. People chatting while driving, reading their e-mails at the coffee shop, but don't pause long enough to reflect. Indeed, these days I find the only people who write good letters are the old or those living in refugee camps or soldiers writing from the war front. The dispossessed refugee, robbed of his home, his future uncertain, becomes a consummate writer. He picks up his pen and begins to bleed himself into words. –and– The soldier, too, who lives intimately with the knowledge of his own mortality, and who longs for the insularities of the world he left behind, finds his voice true and clear. For the rest of us in this age of mobility and information, there simply isn't any time for such a thing as a long, flowing, hand-written letter. Odd, isn't it, in a world where one does not need fire to boil water or a teller to withdraw cash, there isn't any time left to complete a whole paragraph? I am, alas, no exception. The impulse to write a handwritten letter has long left me. I am not unaware of the irony: Me, a writer and journalist who makes a living out of writing on the pages of various newspapers, finding it harder and harder to write a letter the old-fashioned way. Like everyone else, I am a hopeless e-mail addict who has been seduced by its split-second convenience, and only on special occasions do I dust off the writing pad and fountain pen to jot down thoughts and emotions and write something close to what you would call a narration. L., as if to chastise me, sent yet another passage from my past: ‘A curtain of fog fell on the Merced lake today. Everything is obscure outside my window but I can hear the sea beyond the dunes and see a few joggers appearing in and out of the fog. Then I hear a seagull let out a piercing cry somewhere overhead, lost perhaps from its flock, and L., he might as well be singing my song.’ –but– I had already got the point and the cry of the seagull does strike its chord once more. Reading the passage I was overwhelmed by the desire to possess those letters I had sent away so freely a decade or so ago. –or– Rather, I longed to know him again, the lonely writer of those letters who never heard of such things as e-mails or the Internet and who lived in an age not so long ago, but that might as well belong to another era. It is one where the mailman still played the troubadour of sorts for star-crossed lovers, and not what he is now: The carrier of bills and junk mail. So. Dear L.: I miss you, too, dearly. Especially this foggy morning walking again at our beach, I smelled that salty odor of the sea with its hint of dry kelp and dead fish wafting in the cold air and feel the caressing fingers of winter. I'm sorry I don't write letters anymore, sorry that I've lost the impulse. I am wracking my brain to think of how I can make it up to you. An ad in the paper to say I miss you, perhaps, or a billboard over the exit to your house. –or– maybe, just maybe, an editorial. Why I Love Liz Phair I remember so vividly the first time I stuck ‘Guyville’ into my CD player, slipped on my headphones, lay down, and waited with great anticipation for the music-goddess that a friend of mine had told me I would love so much. –and– Then, ‘6'1’ hit me—first Liz on guitar, then a crisp drum hit, then the bass ... and then 30 seconds into the song, her young-sensuous-raw-sweet-strong voice sang ‘I bet you fall in bed to easily with the beautiful girls who are shyly brave ...’, and I was in love. There was no bullshit, no pretence, no apologies, just a confused-brilliant, naïve-insightful, caring-selfish, independent-needy mid-twenties girl trapped somewhere between the idealism of youth and the cynicism of one deeply wounded by life. By the time I had reached ‘Gunshy’, I had realised that this was going to by my favourite album for quite a while (and it still very much is). Liz, her voice, her attitude, and what she sings about are all feminine but not in the least bit girly—she's a woman, but she doesn't use that as an excuse for weakness; rather, she takes her femininity as something supremely empowering. It's ‘the sign of someone adamantly free’ that I love so much about her. Liz rocks because she sings what she knows and is cool enough that she doesn't give a shit how people judge her. |
