Coffee Table anticipatory web announcement; 500px. x 250px. + / 2001 (Click to see the announcement as it appeared on my web site.)

In my entire life, I have had the equivalent of about one cup of coffee, all before I was in high school. Lured by the sheer “adultness” of it, I wrapped paws around a few of those thick ceramic handles but my young palette was far too immature to appreciate the bittersweet complexity of the fabled bean and never did I finish a pour. I also have an annoyingly low tolerance for burning my mouth on hot things, which basically sealed that deal. When I was older and more likely to enjoy it (“coffee” had easily become my favorite flavor for anything that named it), I refrained from the temptation, prophesizing that it could become an unwieldy daily expense, and boy, would I have been right.

Nevertheless, there is something so damn cool about coffee that I could never deny. Luckily for me, it has very little to do with the drink, itself. Coffee’s transcendence from mere beverage to cultural phenomenon is perhaps superseded only by that of alcohol, but coffee’s affect (and effect) bears a decidedly more conscious flavor: an enduring symbol of learned European Modernity, a catalyst for artists and philosophers exchanging roles in Bohemian cultural movements, an enabler of late-night epiphanies and an antidote for the mornings after. A solitary indulgence or a shared experience for the aware.

The objective devotions to the ritual of coffee are as deliberate and rich as the blends. Enormous, industrial machines used to whistle down the most potent formulae at a preciously drizzling pace, sculptural carafes of glass, aluminum and plastic, and of course the myriad cups. But the piece most concretely symbolic of the dedication to all that coffee represents is its forum: the coffee table… Read the rest of this entry »