Coffeecore: The Goodbye

 

1.

My little flâneur, this time comes for everyone in the City, sooner or later. You give your orchids to Michiko, your spare set of cocktail glassware with the swirled teal stems to Adam and Lorraine.  They throw a small party for you at work; you remember the wide-cut ties and the smell of freshly laid industrial carpeting. You wait for a storm, the kind where you can see the backs of the wind-flipped leaves on the branches and hear the windows getting pelted. There are raindrops the size of train tokens. You walk out the front door of the building, and hear it close with a hydraulic whoosh behind you.

You do not take a key. 

Was this corner here a week ago? A month? You turn to go down the slick planes of the stairs and fold your umbrella neatly as the door opens. Where you are going, you will not need it. It is such a strange coincidence of the City, the ambient suitability to all moods and happenings of its weather. 

Coffeecore: The Winter Garden

1.

Even you, my little flâneur, need to get out of the city sometimes, no matter how much you love it. Take the 憧れ line to northernmost end, and get off at the last stop. It is neither the country nor the city here,  but a kind of in-between-place where everything is shifting.  The old estate with the winter garden is going to seed on the edges, and there are certain places where the plants get the upper end in the sticky mid-summer, but it not a ruin yet.

You enter through the conservatory, where you can feel the water content in your veins and the ferns touch your legs ever so gently as you walk to the makeshift counter, and order from the small machine the colour of a particular variety of chalcedony. You ask for a doppio, for the doubled arches and the enfilade of doorways that ratatats its way into the heart of the house, where glancingly, you think you see something and then blink and don't. Desire is fickle that way.

Coffeecore: Exercises In Style

1.

The true flâneur loves encyclopaedias-- for how could this not be so, when they traverse, in short strolls, the city of mind so conveniently and alphabetically?

Consider, for today's fodder, the following entry from Wikipedia on Queaneau's Exercices de Style:

'Exercises in Style' (French: 'Exercices de style'), written by Raymond Queneau, is a collection of 99 retellings of the same story, each in a different style. In each, the narrator gets on the "S" bus (now no. 84), witnesses an altercation between a man (a zazou) with a long neck and funny hat and another passenger, and then sees the same person two hours later at the Gare St-Lazare getting advice on adding a button to his overcoat. The literary variations recall the famous 33rd chapter of the 1512 rhetorical guide by Desiderius Erasmus, 'Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style.'

Today, like Queneau, we will take a bus, but not the number 84 bus, for in the Coffeecore Extended Universe the numbering of buses is a very precise and delicate thing. This bus is the not the S-99 but the X-99, since it crosses universes, and is an express which only stops, naturellement, at coffee shops. The passenger finishes a morning doppio espresso in a travel cup, watches a woman with a beautifully knit sweater, and dismounts at the cafe. Later, the woman in the sweater walks into the cafe and sits at a table.

Coffeecore: On The City

for r. a. p.

1.

I'm doing it just this once our of respect for the good coffee.

That was always a lie, my little flâneur. Just this once? How many times have you walked the streets of our handsome metropole, on the pretence of a latte? How many times have you traversed the never-insurmountably-wide avenues, on the summer nights pulsing with the afterglow of their own heat? The Coffeecore Extended Universe was always, by nature, an urbanism. It is made that way by your walking it. The city is always and never completely in its cups.

Look out your pleasingly round window. Watch your breath fog up the glass. Watch yourself being alone, frame the image in the mind, and file it away. It is time to go out and see the city your coffee made, and the transient beauty of just this cultivated loneliness.

Coffeecore: The Rainy Day

Grab a cup, and snuggle up ... 

...  because it's a rainy day in the Coffeecore Extended Universe. Think of an Impressionist's rainy day in 19th century Paris, but without the pungency of horse dung and deprivation. Okay fair, that wouldn't really be Paris, but keep the wide boulevards. And keep most urban Impressionism's persistent, drifting quality of light on every surface, glancing off the canvas. This, too, is essential for the sparkling countertops and empty windows of Coffeecore. The Coffeecore Extended Universe is loose about particulars, such as Paris or canvas, as #coffeecore is a sensibility and not a set of laws.

This umbrella is dropped for the sole purpose of the puddle accumulating in its forefront. It is always just about to overflow. You can see it glimmering on the neatly paved sidewalk outside the windows of the coffee shop. You hear the little bell ring on the door when you enter, and stamp off your rainy shoes on a generic mat that reads W E L C O M E, but means it. Look at the mass produced object in all its radiant uniqueness! Look, at what it has now become, purple and cupped liked an inverse nasturtium!