tenez.
Un essai que j'ai fait sur Stumptown pour un de mes cours. Ce n'est pas un essai final, simplement un exercice. Et c'est en anglais. Donc on est gentil si on voit des fautes ou des incohérences. on se tait. ou on laisse un message avec son nom et son adresse auquel je ne répondrai sûrement pas, trop occupé que je serais à pleurer, heurté par votre mesquine remarque.
Stumptown,
The atmosphere in the back room is fairly different from the main room. All the sounds are smothered somehow; despite the nine feet high and nine feet large wooden warehouse sliding door wide open between the two rooms. Seven tables are lined against the walls, four on the left, three on the right, eight persons are sitting on them, they have an average age of, let’s say, thirty-five years old, no wait! Nine persons now, and a thirty years old of average age. The tattooed girl with leopard high heels, black tight pants a leather jacket and black hair with a small pink lock lightly touching her eyebrows is probably around twenty-three and just joined, what I imagine as being, her boyfriend, the also tattooed guy with a baseball jacket, gelled hair and a chain attached to his Jean's pocket. Her heels are making a clapping noise on the rusty-brown stone floor. Only by looking at the floor you can tell that the owner wanted to keep that cozy warehouse style, so enjoyed by the hip population of the city (to which the bartenders would be the perfect ad). The floor covered with dents, little holes, colored in grayish green, reddish brown and brownish orange, stained with old white paint, white paint that was also used to draw a single, two-inches large, line in the middle of the room, coming from the restrooms door all the way to the wooden garage door at the other end of the room, next to the two green couches. One of the wall is made of wood as well, the one that separates the two room; it is made of white-painted wood-planks, not the same planks than the sliding warehouse door I talked to you about, you can make two of these planks fit in one of the wall. Further up than the walls, the ceiling. It looks much more ordinary (note that it doesn’t change the rest of the room into something “extra-ordinary”), painted in white, with three, different-sized, vents, eight basic white metal Ikea lamps hanging on it, the ones with a wire coated with plastic continued by a piece which looks like a plastic goblet except that it is upside down, itself continued by some kind of a metal soup plate, but deeper and with a bulb in the center, and upside down as well of course. Do you picture it? Standard. The only noticeable thing about this ceiling (which are, actually, not one but two noticeable things) are the openings all the way through the five feet deep plaster that constitutes the ceiling, opening on the outside of course. Yes, a window. Two, seven feet long and three feet large, fanlight windows. On each side of the room.
The rest of the furniture stick with the atmosphere of the shop, the two green couches are used, worn, soft, one is more kaki green with a shiny lighter kaki green flower pattern, it has carved lacquered wooden parts on the front of the armrest, the other is more blue green, especially its shiny leaves pattern. They both have three sitting cushions. They are facing each other, the blue-green with me and my computer sitting on it, the kaki with two men on its cushions, both reading, one drinking his coffee, both bearded, one with a cap (the other one), both touching their lips with their fingernails when they are reading, one staring at me (with the cap)... Let’s put a deep interest in looking at the coffee table in front of us for a little while. Probably six and a half feet long but only a foot large it is a single worn piece of wood with four, thin, darker, wooden legs. It looks like the top plank has had another life before; it could have been a bar-counter, maybe a bed-frame or a board to make things slide on it. It seems that if it wasn’t covered with scratches it would slide very well. But now you can only look at it, you couldn’t use it to slide because there are two mugs on it, one cup of coffee, one glass of water, one goblet of latte (sixteen ounces), two newspapers, including the Willamette Week, one magazine talking about Sri Lanka with a smiling Sri Lankan on its cover, another magazine about Portland: “the guide for city dwellers”, a long spoon and my reading glasses. See, you wouldn’t be able to make anything slide on it.
…
My battery just died. Forced by my computer I had to move to the other room, where I could find an outlet to plug my machine in. Now it is charging, buzzing with pleasure. This room is less welcoming, the big coffee roaster in the back is sitting on its little platform, like a small German submarine from the second world war, with all its levers, its shiny pipes, its dirty handles and portholes in where you can usually see the coffee beans turning and slowly changing colors, going from a creamy white to a chocolate brown. Now the machine is stopped, it is already 6h30 PM and it has stopped for the night. It is sitting here, staring at the counter with its round, black, lifeless eye. The counter looks like a fort. You can’t see the waiter’s legs, it raises up to the top of their hips and then, for the rest of their body, they have two metal grinding machines, two stainless steel hot water tanks, one big, long and shiny, metal coffee machine that can shoot up two four coffees at the same time to hide behind, they also have a money box, an old one, I would say from the nineties, full of scratches and dents (probably from a previous battle with the German submarine-coffee roaster) and finally they have a three-story display case, wood and glass right in front of the German coffee roaster, facing it. Wood and glass against metal and hot coffee beans. Kamikaze.
All these machines are set in a half-circle, backing the wall in the middle of the room. All this machinery is softened by much more stylish lamps than in the back room (even if there are still some residual Ikea lamps on the ceiling, eight of them actually) they are sagging above the counter in the same half-circle, their lampshade in an opaque shade of creamy yellow with a little flower of metal on top, much more good looking than the poor plastic goblet on top of the Ikea lampshades. The walls are also smoother, mainly creamy white, their soft and lumpy texture make them look like a giant vertical frozen pool of cream. The wall backing the counter on the right (if you are inside the fort/counter) is, surprisingly, coffee brown colored. A tropical plant is running on it, not attached to it like some kind of jungle ivy, but rising out of a red-orange crock, it is almost touching the dark brown wooden border on the top of the wall running through the entire room, connecting the walls and their colors to each other. If the plant is so tall it is because it is standing on a metal shelve made of thin metal stems. It is also on this shelve that they store the coffee. Not the coffee beans, the grounded coffee, the powder, already in their light brown paper bags with tags on each of them saying their weight, their buyer if they are already allotted or the origin of the late-coffee beans. Next to this shelve, still against the wall there is another hot water machine, and then another shelve above a small counter. The objects on the small counter are not important, but on the shelve there are four big glass jars of coffee beans, they go from half full (or half empty, as you like) to almost empty (or far from full, as you like) with tags on them as well, but coated with plastic and in a brown color, more fancy looking. They say which type of coffee is inside the jar, of course, two from Ethiopia, one from Rwanda and one house blend. I’m not sure of what is the use of these jars. Their bean level don’t seem to lower that fast, and they are not very easy to grab. It is probably part of the interior decoration, a way to say: “look! You see what you drink, it comes from so far away (except for the house blend maybe...which probably doesn’t come from their backyard but probably not from an exotic place either) and see how it looks yummy in our nice-looking carved glass jars and their old-style iron lids”. It actually looks yummy.
The walls are probably the second most interesting things here; in first place are the people, but I am not going to describe them to you now. The walls are representing what the owner wanted for his or her coffee shop. You could actually almost describe the people in here just by looking at the walls, above the half-circle fort of the counter there are four chalkboards of different sizes. The one on the far left when you are facing the counter is entitled “Whole beans” in capital yellow letters and then list all the different kind of coffee beans you can buy and their prices, written in small white letters. The three other boards take up the same pattern, a big yellow title explaining you simply what is it you can drink of fabulous here, and then in small white letters they list their names and their prices: “loose leaf tea”, “Columbia Gorge organic juices” and the big one in the middle of the wall above the two water machines simply stating “Stumptown coffee roasters”, in case you had a doubt. Then if your eyes continue along the wall to the right (still facing the counter) there is a liege-board hung above a display case filled with Stumptown business and fidelity cards under which there is the last (but not the least) counter of the room, the one where you can provide yourself with lids, sugar, honey, cream etc.; A very strategic one. This wall, the one that start at the right end of the fort/counter and stops at the outside window right after the garbage can, is covered with pinned papers, flyers, advertisement for “The hippie home cleaner”, “dirty mittens” and “the touchables” two music bands, for car selling, language classes...there even is a child drawing, the papers go from your knees up to five feet higher. They are literally covering this part of the wall
On the table facing the window, right next to the wall, there is a vase with flowers in it. I can’t tell if they are fake or not, and I don’t want to stand up and go there to see. It seems odd. It doesn’t fit in here, not in this “hip-warehouse-but-still-cozy” atmosphere, it doesn’t fit with the red bricks wall under and along the window, it doesn’t fit with the worn wooden table with its tubular metal pipes legs screwed on the stone floor on which it seats, it doesn’t fit with the steel stools, it doesn’t even fit with the round light brown wooden table, against the other end of the window, it doesn’t even fit with the dark brown wooden chairs of this table.
And more than everything, it doesn’t fit with the photos hanging in their black vinyl frames on the walls of the two rooms. This vase and these flowers would have been perfect in a suburban house, on the small table in the entrance hall of the forty five years old couple that have just bought this brand new house.
I don’t want to see it, so I change my seat on the round table and face the two pictures on the wall that were hanging behind my back all this time. They are the final touch to the build-up atmosphere of the coffee shop. Maybe I think so because it is the last thing I paid attention to. But well. They are mostly black and white (except for the close-up of the tanned homeless man in the back room) and about one and a half foot long and one foot large. They all represent diverse scenes from foreign countries. The two in front of me were taken in India, in the street, you see blurred people walking, blurred moped rushing through the frame with their six feet load on the back luggage carrier; and you see old beautiful buildings standing still, unflinching to the rushing pace of the streets. The other photos represent the same idea, wet jungle after the rain, some more street life, children playing soccer in freeze frame on a dirt street of a rural village… A little cliché, but well a cliché IS a photo, so I guess it is ok. If I am honest with myself I can even say, without being negative, that it fits well with the place. It is dark out, they are cleaning up for tomorrow, I am one of the two last customers, most of the lights are of, the Ikea ones, it has reached a peak in it’s coziness. I pack up, open the door, shiver, close my jacket and leave.