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March 08, 2005
Leslie Schumacher: Creating a contrived coffeehouse history
Ah, the joys of a smoke-filled cafe! Here I sit at Caffetto, off of Lyndale in the hoppity-hip Uptown province of our fine metropolitan area. Can anything replace the splendor of such an experience? Can anyone surpass the enjoyment of an afternoon wasted in a malodorous, poorly ventilated room filled with funky art that could have been painted by either a modern genius or as coked-up subprimate (my bet is on a tarsier: Their enormous eyes give away their predilection for artistic behavior)? The answer, my friends, is of course, yes! Yes, yes, and one more yes!
Oh, do not misjudge my words! No, no č on the contrary, I love cafés. It is just that they really are a waste of good time. A café’s personality is wrapped up in the heady mixture of the history of the drinking of coffee (and its sorry substitute, tea) and the Western intelligentsia. The “salons” of the Twin Cities await our patronage and our scrutiny. To start, if the most pompous café-goers in the history of caffeinated-beverage purveyance (I mean, naturally, the 18th-century flatulents Messrs. Johnson, Boswell, and Goldsmith) had decided they would rather drink clean and refreshing well water, we wouldn’t have a dictionary, sex-filled
British comedy, or gonorrhea. Western culture should thank these three loafers for these crucial developments, without which life would certainly be less worth muddling through.
Cafés have bred culture, but they are also the downfall of society. Just take the 19th- and 20th- century existentialists, who spent too much time drinking French roasts. If not for Sartre, Camus, and Nietzsche (Kierkegaard, ever the guilty Lutheran, probably drank decaf; he’s not included), we would be happier people and the world would make sense.
There are many other, more edifying ways to spend our fleeting and disappointing lives than to dilly-dally in a room of strangers, most of whom you would č if you were truly honest with yourself č rather choose to ignore. Spare me your tired desires to “people watch.” You can do that at an outdoor music festival. For my case study, we will explore a typical scene, the inevitable “burnout that got stuck in Minnesota halfway through a cross-country journey in [pick your date between ’64 and ’78] and decided to stay.” Cast your minds to a place clear of cobwebs, and let us commence: “It was just me,” he would say, “my ’63 Harley, a yellow-striped tabby named Little Mao, and the open road. I got a flat 50 miles out of Pipestone on the South Dakota side. I spent the night in the ditch, and in that time I composed, with the help of an acid flashback, a song dedicated to Little Mao called ‘Little Kitty, It’s Time You Took Your Good Thing to the People ... and Then Some.’ After that song had been written, the sun rose over a sea of cattails and empty
Old Style longnecks. I knew then the Minnesota country was to be my home.”
“Wow,” you would probably say, in this highly hypothetical conversation, “what happened then?”
“What happened, little friend,” he would say with the raised eyebrows of someone on the edge of lunacy,
“is that Little Mao gave birth to 14 beautiful kittens. And I began my life as a soothsayer ... I know what is going to happen in your life.”
“What’s going to happen?” you would ask, feeling trepidation and discomfort at realizing an innocent, mind-expanding conversation has turned into a negotiation č possibly for your life and/or virtue č with a psychopath.
Lighting some rough-cut shoved into a discolored Top rolling paper, he would take a drag, cough, and say: “You want a kitten? I got a box out back. Take your pick, only a buck.”
Posted by msveum at March 8, 2005 04:39 PM
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