Ride Studio Cafe

Ride Studio Cafe in Lexington

Since I didn't have to work today, I visited Ride Studio Cafe in Lexington. I've met one of the baristas before and it seemed like an interesting place, combining a bike shop with a cafe that serves pour-overs and espresso drinks.

When I got there a customer was at the counter who had brought in his vacuum pot. After being introduced, he proudly explained to me that he bought the pot over twenty years ago at The Coffee Connection. And here we were, brewing some of the recent, excellent El Salvador La Pinera from George Howell Coffee. For those of you who don't know, George was the owner of Coffee Connection.

It seemed that most people in the cafe were enthusiasts of both cycling and coffee, and the converations shifted between those two topics.

The coffee was excellent: clean, sugary sweet, and fruity. Sal, the barista, poured multiple glasses so that numerous guests could try it. Despite the winter, it was a warmish day today, and standing there with a number of coffee lovers enjoying not just the coffee, but a moment of warmth among strangers, only added to the experience.

After that, I tried a shot of the Stumptown Hairbender espresso. I've had this before, and Sal hit the shot dead-on. I also ordered a pour-over of the De La Paz Hariman Tiger from Sumatra. While this had the typical earthy, tobacco taste of the classic Sumatran, it also had a refreshing, dominant, and unexpected strawberry note to it.

Sal's style was unhurried, but deliberate, so I had my drink in hand quickly. I sometimes hear that people complain about how long it takes to get pour-over drinks, but this was not the case at Ride.

Enjoy the pics posted above!

I Am Now Post-Punk

I did something for the first time today.

I listened to music while roasting.

Or thereabouts.

I have what by now is an ancient ipod. I bought it while I still lived on the farm and, I swear, I never quite got the mud out of it, but there it is, and I have some sort of mix on there and was listening to music that reminded me of the heady transition times: high school to college, college to thereafter: Sonic Youth, Smog, Slits, lots of s's. Times that surprise you now when you realize they were decades ago. And I had to get up at five thirty today to get roasting early so I hadn't slept enough and felt emotional. The music played me: it almost felt like cheating. I could WORK and yet have this aesthetic experience overriding all. And the music was speaking to me. And I remember thinking, how the fuck did these bands, that I've ignored since, somehow then, know what I still don't know now. Or something like that.

I bought my noise cancelling headphones in NYC, so I could ride the subway in a bubble. 2002? 2004? Sometime after the twin towers cast little bits of paper of into Steve's back porch while I listened to Love and Theft on a Sony walkman. I sat in lawn chairs while bloody paper filled the skies. In the distance, I heard the wailing of old women, and put the headphones back on.

I think the first thing I ever listened through the farmbought ipod was a Stephen Malkmus solo album. It was all the electric I had, in the cabin. A strange cat used to visit me. It was crosseyed. We listened to music together.

*

At a certain point, someone was singing, and it all felt a little raw, so I went back earlier, to Motorhead, to junior high, to the Hold Steady, to the romanticism of whatever whatever whatever. I read the new Philip Roth novel this weekend. He talked about growing old, and how we still see the same old face in the mirror. Only now it is puffy. It is like we are wearing a mask. That's all that has changed. We lose integrity. We are somehow something else and yet the same.

But even the early Motorhead felt raw and exposed. "Lost Johnny." No one writes songs like that!

*

That is what it was like to roast coffee and listen to music, for the first time.

Drink Coffee and Destroy

My friend Mikey gave me this shirt last night. It's a shirt from a band called Bouncing Souls, whom I've heard of but have never heard.

It's a great shirt. Thanks, Mikey.

In this pic, you can see me pretending to roast on the Probat. Our Probat is a 1950s era German machine, simple and big and photogenic. I usually roast on the other machine, but this one is all steampunk and unstoppable circles, so it gets all the camera time.

*

I was supposed to post some pics of the Colombian CoE cupping today. For those of you new to coffee, a cupping is just a tasting.

The coffees were excellent, and there was a kind of pleasant energy in the cupping room that comes from being surprised when things turn out better than expected. It doesn't always happen.

However, the pictures didn't measure up to the event. I somehow deluded myself into thinking I could make pictures of people hawking into spittoons look interesting. I cannot. Not yet.

*

After bolting out of work and nearly poisoning myself with a masochistically delicious plate of phat mhu gratium at Southeast Asian in Lowell (if you ask for it spicy at SA, they give it to you spicy), I went to a poetry reading by John Sinclair. He managed the MC5. John Lennon was his friend. He went to jail for a few days. But the dude never showed up so I sat around drinking from a Coke bottle I'd emptied out and filled with the Mass BJJer's drink of choice, Dr. McGillicuddy's, and talked to Stephanie and some other people at the 119 Gallery in Lowell.

Meaning: it was a good day, spent among good people. I made some good roasts. All good good good. But it was a rare off day with the camera. All shit shit shit. Except for one pic I didn't even take -- thanks to Judo Tim for saving the day with the camera.

Why I Like Starbucks

The pros and cons of Starbucks are both too obvious and tiresome for me to write about.

I like that their employees get health insurance, and that they follow relatively fair labor and trade practices. The music is often better than expected -- I once heard a Rolling Stone's Exile on Main Street outtake that was so good it made me want to take heroin and buy a two-track recorder -- and I've heard the Tom Waits version of "Long Way Home," not the blander version by I-don't-care-what-you-think-about-her she's-still-a-sex-kitten Norah Jones, in which things are a little little forlorn but there's a light up ahead....

We know Starbucks over-roasts and does disservice to some coffee farmers by emphasizing identity-robbing blends. We know they offer shitty sandwiches and overpriced almonds. We know that there is an air of sameness to them, an air of the empire of plastic and industrial design. But I don't want to go have to read Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" looking for quotes, and I also am feeling a little too grumpy to let my cultural identity be formed by such relatively banal choices such as where I take my cup.

What do I go to a cafe for anyway? I'm not speaking for you, just myself, and I'm being honest. I go to drink coffee, yes, but I'm also there to read, to get out of the house, to look at pretty girls, and to engage in some sort of public activity, in a public place, for social reasons. On the production of the coffee business, we are philosophers, and truth ideally triumphs over all. But in the cafe, experience reigns -- the languages spoken, the fashion, the art on the walls, the music, all these things are part of the context. A great cup drunk among loudmouths on cellphones is hardly worth it. And an ashy cup on a cold night in Lowell among daydreamers and meth addicts and girls with mismatched socks? One of life's great and rare pleasures.

*

So, leaving aside how people somehow feel I ought to think about a place, what do I actually feel?

When I lived in Tampa, I spent most of my cafe hours in the Starbucks near the University of South Florida campus. There was an independent coffee house nearby. It was refreshingly gay-friendly in a not-so-liberal city and held poetry nights. There was art on the walls. Local bohemian types from the Suitcase City neighborhood frequented there. But the fucking lighting! You couldn't read a menu in that place, it was so dark. So, I had the Starbucks. And in that Starbucks, I graded two years worth of student papers. I read Husserl. I argued with friends over Heidegger and Catholicism. There, I met a man who taught me how to play a song on a banjo, and another who introduced me to the local Indian classical musical society. I have good memories of that place.

When I was in New York, it wasn't a great time for independent cafes, or at least ones that were within walking distance from my apartment. The Astor Place Starbucks was past midnight. I was able to walk there easily from my apartment on Bleeker Street. There, I sat and read Byron. I saw the most beautiful people in the world walk by the window and I looked at their boots and their necklaces and their hair. I watched punkers try to spin the giant cube-art that stood outside.

One time, a stunning Russian woman knocked on the glass where I was sitting, and pointed at the book I was reading. I didn't understand the words she was trying to mouth to me. So she came inside and talked with me for half an hour, asking me about the book. "You looked so into it, I had to ask." I wondered if this could possibly be happening. This woman was doll-like, an impossible pristine face, but she had a long meltingly toothy grin and that grin? Well, she was smiling at my stupid jokes!

But then, a hard-faced Russian man suddenly knocked on the glass and motioned for her to follow him outside. It was probably her husband. She didn't kiss me on the cheek when she left. I never saw her again. In those early days in NYC, I was as invisible as any man, except, perhaps, for that one night.

*

In the same Starbucks, I watched Fisherspooner play one of their first shows when they were just a street act.

Kembra, the singer of The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, showed nude polaroids of herself, completely painted in red, to a friend, while I was spending a lonely Friday night alone, studying.

And then, one day, while I sat writing in a notebook, Henry Rollins sat next to me. He also opened a notebook and took out a pen and started writing. The man who sang the greatest punk song ever about my favorite drink, "Black Coffee," was sitting next to me. I don't think I ever idolized him, or anyone, but he was certainly a major figure in my life when I was growing up. This was the man who had stopped punk rock shows so he could read passages from Henry Miller. This was the man who made me understand that music at its most vital could be both smart and dangerous. He was a force, a cultural icon, and whatever it was he did that so mystified me or intrigued me when I was younger boiled down to this one thing we had in common: we drank coffee and we worked alone.

*

And then, well, there was my favorite Starbucks of all, the one in South Nashua. Henry Rollins never walked through the door and I never saw anyone passing nude polaroids of themselves. But in those horrible days last year and into this when I was struggling to put my head together, I sat there and wrote page after page of poetry. I drew cartoons for a book of children's poetry I was writing. I read Houellebecq for pleasure and Napoleon Hill to try to figure out how to drag myself out of the hole. There was always a free cushioned chair and the staff were gently pleasant to me, making me feel welcome day after day as I scribbled away, scratching my beard and watching the wind shake the strange tree that grew across the street.

Not long after I stopped going there, the place was shut down. Not because it didn't do well, but because of problems with the landlord. And, with that, the best Starbucks I had ever known was gone forever.

And so this is why I like Starbucks.

Black Diamonds

I started drinking coffee in high school. I drank it with milk and sugar, like my grandmother. My early associations with coffee were not positive: when my grandmother and mother took the kids out to eat and ordered coffee at the end of the meal, it meant we had to sit at the table and not interrupt.

But I probably started drinking coffee because it was there, and because of books, and because I was a nighthawk. I used to sit at the Drum Hill Dunkin Donuts when it was just an L-shaped bar and it was still legal to smoke inside. I would sit quietly in the corner and read Jean Genet and smoke cigarettes and listen to the people around me talk. I used to write down snatches of what they said and would use them as lines in short stories. Even in high school, as soon as I could drive, I would drink coffee late into the night.

A cafe opened up in Westford called Browse and Beans. I wanted to the place to be great. Books and coffee were already associated in my mind when I was a teenager. But they kept a small shelf of junky romance novels in the corner, and the cafe was usually cluttered up with baby strollers. It was decorated like a woman's dress from the nineteenth century. I wanted bearded old men reading Gogol. I didn't want Christmas ornaments and plastic letters of the alphabet. I was young then, you see. But it seemed to be the only place around. And, on cold autumn nights when there was no place else to go, and it was nearly empty inside, it really wasn't so bad. I drank a lot of mugs there and probably had crushes on some of the girls working behind the counter.

*

In college, I'm almost certain it was my friend Dan Moran who got me to start drinking coffee black. In the fog of my memory, the conversation went something like this: he explained that there are milk type drinks, which are thick, and water type drinks, and coffee was a water type drink. It was pure, like a crystal. It didn't need milk. I doubt this is what he actually said to me, but that's how I remembered it. I don't think I'd known anyone who drank black coffee then, and, the way he explained it to me, he made coffee seem very "of the earth" -- diamond-like and primitive.

Perhaps I drank a few more cups after that with milk and sugar, but only a few.

*

I went to a liberal college called Goddard. It's located in Vermont and we had no grades. I remember one winter, bringing a hot thermos of black coffee into the library and gently pouring myself a cup after pushing a sofa chair up to a window in the back corner of the building. It was snowing out. I opened up Moby-Dick and read it, with full attention, for the first time, and I never wanted that afternoon to end, or the snow to stop, or the book to finish, or the cup to run dry. Ever since then, whales show up in the limits of my dreams: white fire on black fire. And that corner of the building shows up in my dreams, too, where I once sank peacefully into the cushions and meditated on the blood of the whale.

Travels with Meat

So, I've been unemployed or underemployed for longer than I'd care to admit and one of my biggest concerns this week was eating. Thanks to BBB, I landed a little copy ad and editing work at the end of the week to give me some cash, but I still ended up bringing a box of marinated meat with me in my travels to get ready to cook it. I begin work early tomorrow, but I got home from NYC tonight after ten p.m. tonight. And the meat still had to be broiled.

Hand ground, toasted coriander and cumin. Brisket cut then while still half-frozen. Dredged in olive oil and paprika before going under the flame.

I will eat well on my first day of work, brothers and sisters.

Assuming, that is, I am alert enough at six in the morning to remember to pack a lunch.

*

Had two coffees at Cafe Grumpy and one at Stumptown this weekend. I need some sleep, so you'll have to wait for the thorough verbal, but the pictorial will be up tonight sometime around midnight on my flickr site -- www.flickr.com/photos/dougsparks.