Photo by Sean Sinclair
…at the beginning, the theory of the society of the spectacle was an effort to understand the disembodiment of human sociality…. Bodies spoke a different language from that of their leaders. They were a reservoir of insubordination.
– T. J. Clark, A Brief Guide to Trump and the Spectacle, London Review of Books 1/23/25
Little by little Tolstoy came to the settled conviction… that his trouble had been not with the common life of common men, but with… the life which he had personally always led, the cerebral life, the life of conventionality, artificiality and personal ambition. He had been living wrongly and must change.
–William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience
[T]o me the Cafe was like a slice of heaven that God commissioned the Dominicos(sic) to run…The coffee warmed your pallette(sic) but the café warmed your soul. Their blood, sweat and tears could be felt everytime you entered those doors because nothing was as more consistent, genuine and full of pride than this oasis.
–A Cafe customer
Cafe Domenico spoke to people’s souls and with its language, it had a soul itself. I am so happy that I was able to pass this bit of soul on to my two kids who too have had the joy of playing in the secret spot under the stairs. Although it brings tears to my eyes knowing they will not have the same Cafe Domenico that I had much longer, perhaps their early memories of the cafe will live on and grow to magical proportions in their minds in the way childhood imagination performs its best work.
–A Cafe customer
Last Thursday night at the February meeting of The Other Side board, we considered together what can we do here to address these convulsive times. Drawing strength from our togetherness and mutual trust, the ideas we discussed did not seem futile and pointless beside the enormity of the assault from the Trump Team that is going on. In fact, we begin to feel our tiny organization – with no organizational hierarchy, relative independence from corporate sponsors, longtime commitment to an outsider, utopian perspective – may be in a perfect position to respond. The very basis for our existence, the Cafe that brought us together, born from a dream, though now gone, may offer a clue to the kind of strength we must have in times that just keep getting darker.
Weeks earlier, some of these friends, as a way to jumpstart our “Big Conversation” speaker series suggested Orin and I give a talk about our Cafe, (scheduled for Jan 29), so I had to begin to contemplate what it would be like to speak to a wider, but still local audience about the experiences that had led to the Cafe’s birth.
Despite the Cafe’s end 9 months ago , and the troubled aftermath since, my faith in our Cafe’s having been more than the sum of its parts, its existence partaking of “metaphysical” as well as “bricks and mortar” reality, remains, if now hanging by a thread: Once again, to tell its story, I would have to explain it as I have seen it, as a representation of that immaterial plane. A tall order when facing what I assume is a reason-biased, left-leaning audience. Not to mention my own doubts and nearly overwhelming tendency to “hide my light under a bushel.” (Huh? What light?)
(Side note: In a celebrity-focused page in a magazine called The Week, I read about Denzel Washington’s “vision” he had while on a yacht in the Mediterranean last year. Listening to a song called The Face of God on his phone, he gave a thought to actually wanting to see the divine visage for himself. A voice told him to turn to his left: there he saw a “detailed, proportionate face that took up the whole sky.” Denzel, well aware talk of God is unfashionable in Hollywood, says, “I don’t care. I know what I saw.”)
The challenges to giving such a talk were serious. Besides my own timidity, I was unsure Orin was up to the task or maybe it was that I was unsure I could handle working with him. But my main challenge was how could I tell this story in a way that included the fantastic and the intangible, without which I cannot tell my story? How can I tell it so it sounds not like some kind of “awesome,” occultish personal experience but as the bigger thing, the Big shared Dream of world peace? It felt like a coming out, making me terribly vulnerable. In the end, still fearful of using the word God, I relied on that word “intangible,” because it says enough without naming, and thereby instantly raising a red flag. (My motto has always been: Avoid the word God unless you know and can trust your audience. It’s dawning on me this “smart” approach may be cowardice on my part, an habitual effacement in relation to the dominant secular liberal social world in which I exist, and which at the same time, like Tolstoy, am profoundly antagonistic to it.) As a way to handle my fear, and give the whole thing a lighter feel, I came up with the title: The Ballad of the Glad Cafe. (for anyone interested, it’s posted on YouTube)
Preparing for the talk, I had to finally deal with the “avalanche” of written testimonials we’d received up to and right after the time of the closing, some posted on our website, others handwritten. For 9 months I had avoided looking at them. I’m not sure why, but there was some lack of trust on my part, some doubt that they would express the passion I felt I needed to hear. Several weeks before the date of the presentation I forced myself at last to read through them. Many were perfunctory, but some reached for words that were close to poetry, direct from the heart, with plenty of passion!
Intuition prompted me to use them in the talk. I typed out all the handwritten ones and asked Andrew, our “tech guy” to prepare a slide presentation using all the quotations. It came to me later what these testimonials did for me. Here was something I could believe over my own faintheartedness. They testified to something that had been true for every writer. Both in the sheer volume received and – especially – in the poetic expression of some of them these were my evidence of “things unseen,” of the vibe the Cafe had as incarnation of a dream.
But there’s more to the story than the mystical side of the Cafe’s origins; things even harder to talk about that were not mentioned in our talk. It took two of us for the Cafe to be incarnated. Were he writing this, Orin could add those things that were his passions, earthier, more sensual and more “vulgar” than mine: to serve great coffee, play great jazz, and make it a place for the Italian-Americans to gather and ( my words) “bless with their Italianness,” and where he could throw around the f-word, of which he is so fond. In effect, what he’d wanted and expected, from the day we put his surname on our sign was that Italian blessing! These aspects Orin provided that I never could have added up to the Cafe’s “attitude.” It was not to be Tibetan flags, incense and crystals. Nor would it be minimalist modern but a colorful riot of appeals to sense and imagination. The combination
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Immersing myself in recollections, I was brought back to the harrowing memory of the sale that took place in the early months of 2024. Due to the unlikelihood of finding interested buyers, we had decided against putting our little countercultural business up for public sale and agreed to sell privately to a woman we knew. Rachel, worthy, creative and talented, had worked for us and been inspired by our Cafe to run a coffeeshop of her own. Differently from us – from the beginning we’d stayed clear of nearly all prudent business advice in order to protect our utopianish dream – she worked with a local business incubator group, and with the bank throughout the transaction.
By the time of the sale, Orin had withdrawn from involvement with that depressing end of the dream. Completely out of my element, I’d had to handle the negotiations mainly by myself. Molly attended the meetings, but she brought her own “issues” to the table, specifically her fear, due to burn-out, that her parents would blow it and miss our chance to offload the Cafe. I understand better now why something in me shattered the day it became clear there would be nothing in Rachel’s purchase offer to cover all that the bank reduces to “good will.” Here was the second reason the word “intangible” was useful to me in telling the Cafe story – the Cafe’s intangible assets – a business that had grown deep roots in the community, was loved by people of all ages and ethnicities, its location known and recognized throughout the region – these facts – could not be considered in the purchase offer.
Well, of course not! It’s not that her offer didn’t make irrefutable sense. If she had not heeded her advisers, with no other prospects likely, we would have been reduced to holding a going-out-of-business sale. This is Utica, not Brooklyn. We were a niche business with a tiny niche. We were lucky to have her! But the words that came to me, as I recalled the sting I felt that day, were “Et tu, Brute?” Coming from someone who’d “got” what our Cafe was showed me – not her villainy, I emphasize this, but – or so it seemed to me – the fragility of my/our dream, its unsuitability for this world, its unfitness for survival. On her lawyer’s advice, Rachel held the money for the sale in escrow until our NYS sales tax debt had been satisfied, an obstacle that made paying off that debt more difficult and was – between friends – unnecessary.
The effect of this encounter with the business world we’d intentionally avoided was soul-crushing. It appeared that Orin and I with our little idealistic enterprise, the coffeeshop-with-an-attitude that we kept alive against the odds for almost 22 years, had trespassed in that world of “conventionality.” Here was the good deed getting its just punishment!
Today I ask, was this smart business approach really the only option? Or was Rachel forced to resort to it because Orin’s kind of “non mi frego” attitude that so effectively deflected the inhibiting doubt and uncertainty of a would-be entrepreneur is practically extinct in our time, a remnant from a culture mostly lost to assimilation? I can’t answer that question, of course, but I see now that Orin’s and my mutual dependence on each others distinct gifts allowed the Cafe’s incarnation, without having to soil ourselves with business world realismo.
In part then, you could say, the Cafe’s embodiment relied on “toxic masculinity;” that defensive imperviousness to self-doubt, which, when it extends to being unable to take in the real existence of other subjectivities, has its infamously destructive “downside. But when serving the Dream, that masculine spirit is capable of maintaining healthy suspicion towards all the pretenders, all the bullshit artists, all the bamboozlers. So my question is, without problematic masculinity, can we do anything but partner instead with depersonalized entities that are antithetical to dreams like our Cafe? Does such one-way dependency leave us even further from mutuality and interdependence, reliant instead on separate incomes and social positions, sameness (and whiteness), that keep us alienated and alone? Is it possible feminism’s independence (an unspoken but real influence in this story), treated as ultimacy, works to shame us away from our organic complementarity, surely a feature of embodiment? These disembodied values can be seen through by poor and nonwhite people, but those of us mesmerized in liberal reality are relatively blind to them.
True enough, the commons as a lived reality is way off in utopia somewhere, “in yer dreams.” But if “disembodied sociality” has brought us the Spectacle, the apotheosis of which is the rise of Donald Trump, ought we not each make the attempt to incarnate the dream? And what will prompt us to do that when relatedness is conditional? Already so many of the human capabilities necessary for living in a commons have been devalued, many shed in the name of getting rid of “toxic masculinity,” all dangerously pointing to mistrust in in-common humanity. That is, to have mutuality, there has to be faith in something that will not agree with self hate or “other” hate, but contradicts it with that dream of unity that is real, though unfulfilled. And such incarnation means “I have been living wrongly and must change.” No one can tell us where and when we must change, in which of our decisions, choices and actions, but change we must. Each defiance of conventionality, of corporate enclosure, of more and more power concentrated in the hands of a few, by moving back into embodiment and local living – not easy! – matters.
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Over the last several months, Orin and I both have floundered in the wake of our loss. But the Cafe’s singular feat of bringing people back into relationship, expressed in all the words that have come back to us, reassures me. It became clear that for a very special segment of the population, the Cafe had nurtured hope and kept it alive.
In this winter of much snow and cold, mutual aid and neighborliness once again appear, pushing cars stuck in deep snow, shoveling or snowblowing the neighbor’s sidewalk, a stranger lending a screwdriver to open a frozen-shut gas cap cover, as happened to us yesterday. What I brought to the Cafe’s incarnation was belief in the intangibles, in the reality of God, as opposed to the idea or the word. This is the quality I do have, to a modest degree, but real. It turns out people can see it in me and ask it of me. It seems I’m being asked to allow into consciousness the realization that other people want what I truly have to give. This, too, is mutuality.
