Café 13: Animal Orchestra

Location: Grattan Street, across from Melbourne University, Carlton
Date: Thursday, 08 March 2007, 4.00pm
Coffee: Morrocan mint tea - iced, $4.00, outstanding
Reading: selections of writing by Roland Barthes

First, apologies for posting this a week late. It is only with much thanks to Allan that I now have dial-up internet at home. I’m definitely an addict, having found myself quite lost and time-wasteful without having it at home, having to travel to libraries and universities to get on the internet, having to choose what and what not to do within limited time.

Animal Orchestra is a fantastic café, exactly what you want out of a café in a city on the uni/alternative side of town (though I suspect everyone else thinks so too and others might find it too popular). The café’s home is a traditional Melbourne house. The dividing wall between counter and dining room is wall-papered with images, mostly of people, from different eras and styles, in colour and in black and white, wall to wall. The other walls are white on the upper half, grey-blue on the bottom, with a thin maroon stripe in the middle. The near corner of the small dining room has a Victorian(?)… antique! corner settee upholstered with a faded green decorative flower pattern. On the wall above the settee is a long, narrow, three panel mirror and above that a yellow curtain. To the left is a wall of mirrors held in differently shaped thin wood frames. The tables are mostly quite tiny, imitation grey-streaked marble, round, with brass edging, and some bigger square and wooden tables as well. There are bare light bulbs hanging low from the ceiling, pointing down to a distressed wood floor. The café is a bit dark and there has been good music playing quite loudly – first a folky-country singer with a great throaty voice, then crooner jazz.

The mint tea is gorgeous – several sprigs of fresh mint piled in the glass, a lemon slice, lots of sugar, cloves. Must have that again and again. It has been a while since I last wrote so there is much to report, but I’ll try to summarise. On Friday I met a guy from Pittsburgh: he is my age, a reader, and very funny and personable. On Wednesday I forgot to bring my student card with me to uni so I couldn’t take all the books I had searched for out of the library. I was pissed off, because it meant I had to go all the way back to Clayton on Friday. I discovered there was a postgraduate coffee networking thing on Friday afternoon so I figured I’d go to that, giving a little more meaning to an essentially unnecessary trip to the suburbs. I hit it off with H right away, because my Dad’s family is from close to Pittsburgh, so I could enjoy reminiscing about my times spent in the city. In the end, I stayed all night with H, drinking red wine and talking into the night at his house in Fitzroy. We talked until 7.00am…and then had to deal with the day… I feel so glad that I found a friend so quickly!

On Monday I moved into Ann’s house. My room is big and I’m sleeping on a sofa bed, which means I can fold it up and, wallah, I have a sitting room. The biggest problem with the house is that it has a crap shower – England crap! But its fun living with Ann – we talk about our studies a lot and giggle often too.

Yesterday Ann and I met H for dinner. We planned for Mexican and an art gallery, but ended up at a Columbian restaurant and ate and chatted right on through the gallery opening (ie. we didn’t make it there.). It was a lovely evening with the three of us interacting really well together—all talkers, all interested in travel and other cultures and acculturation. Ann suggested we make it a regular weekly thing. The Columbian food was like home – fried plantains, red beans in tomato sauce, yucca (not like home – this was pan fried rather than boiled). I also had a fried egg between two corn cakes – they weren’t tortillas – they were more bready – delicious. There was salsa music on in the background and no one else in the restaurant.

I’ve been reading interesting Marxist theorists from the Frankfurt School. They are easy to read and clear. Adorno is anti capitalist culture to a fanatical degree – culture is an industry to keep people working and reproduces the mental conditions of labour – repetition, mindless attention. Althusser gave an interesting Lacanian reading of ideology – it serves to make people feel like individuals in a State/system that only requires depersonalised workers and works through the symbolic order – our conceptions of reality (once we can conceptualise through language we no longer live in the Real but only through our sense of our relations to the Other). I also read a psycholoanalytic version of Marxism whereby the State works through repression of desire and people’s belief in ideology is a neurotic displacement of thwarted desire. Interesting stuff!

If you are curious, ask me to tell you in an email about my second Structuralism and Postmodernism class.

Before arriving at the café, I did find myself in the huge used bookshop across the street. I bought two books: a hardcover for $5.00 about why overmedicalisation is bad for you – taking on received wisdom about breast exams and heart bypass surgery and chronic pain—and a $1.00 paperback of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a book I have wanted to read for years, ever since reading a James Agee story in tenth grade.

On Monday I went to see Little Children, which really moved me. I came out of the movie upset and somewhat disoriented and in a funk. It was the ending, but I don’t want to say any more – you should see it if you haven’t already. Lady Chatterley’s Lover is also putting me in strange melancholy emotional states. I cry a bit when I read it, either because things are awful or wonderful, but either way beautiful and surreal. I would like sex to be like in a D H Lawrence novel but I don’t think it is quite so….divorced from the rest of consciousness (once you let it be). Perhaps that’s just me.

I am putting my little essay on C S Pierce on this blog as it seems the easiest thing to do. I'm not sure if my essay is any more understandable than the original, but I know from writing it that I mostly understand the original! Good luck if you attempt to get through it. I suggest not reading it in Blogger as it is fairly long. Long live copy and paste...