Temescal Cafe, Bukowski and me

My old favorite hangout used to be Temescal Cafe, a funky little breakfast/lunch joint which was the only place to eat near Telegraph and 51st (except for the really bad pizza joint, the Black Muslim fish & chips/bakery, and the not-so-spicy taqueria.)

TC was like a little bit of the old Mission District plunked down in the middle of North Oakland--amateur art on the walls, a beat-up piano, comfy couch & reading materials & games in the back, and tattooed, and surly wait staff whom you could always count on for a smart-alec remark early on a weekend morning. The line was usually 10 deep on weekends. The food wasn't fancy, just waffles, smoothies and sandwiches, but the atmosphere was punkrock artschool meets family rec room, totally unpretentious. I loved it there.

Then one day last fall I rode my bike past and the windows were all papered over with a sign, "closed for renovations" or some such. The neighborhood seemed to be changing fast-- fancy restaurants popping up every month, shiny lofts erecting faster than Rocco Sifreddi, cops walking a new beat. When the old TC looked like it was going to re-open I was relieved--finally there would be a bit of down-to-earth sanity in all this shiny new hoopla.

When the new cafe opened, called "The Mixing Bowl", I was shocked, shocked! They'd gotten rid of the piano, couch and games; gone were the mismatched, rickety tables. Everything was sleek and sanitized. The wait staff wore matching pottery barn aprons and cheerful smiles, and were eager to serve me my $8 sandwich. The food was complicated and nouvelle. The character was totally gone. I was sad.

Today while tooilng around in the 90 degree heat, I got thirsty passing by the Mixing Bowl. Well, I'll give it another shot, I thought. I went in, ordered my iced tea, and sat down. I didn't see any groggy hipsters or semi-sane homeless people sitting at the tables outside, just moms with babies and a guy working on his laptop. Shit, was there nothing to read here? The metier of a cafe is indicated by its reading materials (or lack of).

I spied a stack of Guardians on a table in the corner. I took one back to my table and opened it randomly to an excerpt from a forthcoming collection of Bukowski's work, and everything around me faded away. Suddenly I was lying in a shoddy San Francisco room, hallucinating off another drinking binge and screaming nonsense, and strangely, I began to appreciate the down-and-out charm of Bukowski.

Now, I was never much of a Bukowski fan, since reading his childhood memoirs and a handful of his later poems in my 20's. I thought he was a bitter, sexist alcoholic, and not unjustly. But sitting in the cafe, the world he evoked was refreshing, somehow, compared to the bland and sanitized place TC had become. It reminded me that the Bay Area used to be waaay different.

I grew up with stories of 1950's San Francisco and the Beats. My mom knew some very infamous people. She shared an apartment with Neal Cassady in the early 50's where, she says, they both slept in the same bed at different times of the day--he worked the night shift, she worked during the day. He used drive her to work in his beat-up car before heading home to sleep. ("We were just friends" she says, but I have my doubts). She worked as a phone operator for the police, he worked some kind of warehouse job.

More Mom stories.... Henry Miller pinched her ass in Big Sur, Allen Ginsberg heckled her at theater rehearsals; she visited Wolfman Jack at his radio station and ate burgers at Mel's. She swears she saw Malcolm X before he was Malcolm X, doing comedy at the Purple Onion.

This is the city I think of when I read Charles Bukowski--the city my mom told me about, full of gritty, working-class, half-drunk artists sowing the seeds of modern American culture. Reading Bukowski, I become nostalgic for the San Francisco that existed before everything got cleaned up and shiny, before hippies, new agers, Ben & Jerry ice cream, text messaging, yoga studios, dot coms, and nonsmoking bars. Before the Beat Museum and Burning Man. Somehow more human and real than some things I experience in my everyday life, sitting in a shiny cafe sipping iced tea.

The unevolved city of San Francisco before Jack Kerouac was assigned as high school reading: Much unhealthier, but in some ways more exciting and richer. I guess everything gets co-opted, eventually.

movie recommendations

Hi tribe people,

I've been totally immersed in school for the past year, and now I need to catch up. So tell me: What were your favorite movies of the past year and a half, in any category? And, why? (I will say that I tend to pass up Hollywood blockbusters, but if they're supercalifragalistic and unusual in some way, feel free to include.)

I did manage to see No Country for Old Men and part of Things We Lost in the Fire, which I walked out of.

Thanks a million for contributing to my cultural improvement.

wake up, little blog

I've been in school for the past year and a half, and this blog has suffered. Truth be told, I miss blogging. near-strangers reading semi-personal details about my life? Missed ya!

Anyway. I've been in school. I'm 3/4 of the way through with my program and have written numerous critical papers on media theory, made a few short experimental films with found footage and a couple of animations, produced a trailer for a documentary on my family, and written poetry and short stories. It's been pretty cool. I could be a student forever. However, it's getting nigh time I joined the real world, and I don't feel much closer to being prepared. It's one thing to do creative projects in the pressure cooker environment of school, where all the perimeters are delineated, and another to be disciplined in the real world, where there's more incentive to decorate your apartment correctly than to produce art.

But, I'm gonna try. yup.

on a related note, I've been looking into the whole pay-for-blogging thing lately. It seems like a bit of a scam. You write about certain topics, then keywords within your post are linked to advertisers. seems kinda slutty, and it doesn't pay that great. Does anyone have experience with this?

I dig this.

www.aikijima.com/