This is the artist’s statement from my September 14 show of coffeehouse portraits at Emergency Arts. It’s more of a confessional, really, but if you give me too many words that’s what you end up with. The first reading went great; during the second I had a coughing jag that almost caused me to pass out.

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This gallery show began in spring 2009, when I offered to take free headshots of my Seattle friends and acquaintances if they’d agree to meet me for coffee. I needed the human contact. I felt terrifically isolated in Seattle for most of the ten years I lived there. I was in an unhealthy relationship that served to isolate me, though I didn’t realize it at the time. It only got worse after I was laid off from the Seattle Times in late 2008, and I began working out of my apartment. It’s all too easy to close yourself off from the outside world in a town where sunshine is only implied. 

So, yeah, coffee and headshots. It was a no-brainer. Seattle is liberally peppered with coffeehouses, so I could meet people most anywhere, and I tend to move in social circles that are in constant need of fresh headshots. Hence, my “Coffee and an Extra Shot” photo series was born: We’d have coffee, talk about whatever, then go outside and take a nice, professionalish headshot (weather permitting). Then, we’d take an “extra shot,” usually something fun. I got off about five of those before Seattle spit me out.

But here’s the thing: That’s not where it began at all. It began in 1993, here in Las Vegas, shortly after a breakup that, several heartbreaks along, still ranks in my top five. So I ventured out into the world, 26 years old, hippie-haired and overwrought. I didn’t know it at the time, but that’s exactly what our nation’s volunteer coffeehouse poets look for in fresh meat, and I was recruited. For too many years, I read my shitty, non-rhyming, unmetered verse–which, by the way, wasn’t all the different in tone from what you’re listening to right now–to coffeehouse audiences comprised of fellow dilettantes, pretty girls in black leggings and, to my everlasting shame, actual poets.

But let’s back out of that room slowly, and talk venues instead. I frequented four coffeehouses between 1994 and 1996.  Cafe Copioh was the first one I discovered; it was located across the street from UNLV and run by an expatriate Israeli named Mike. He decorated the place in thrift-store rococo, stayed open late and made a coffee slush that was really a milkshake, but that’s OK. I logged enough hours there with my notebook and video camera for James Reza to make Scope Magazine and for Pj Perez to make a Maryland Parkway documentary.

The legendary Enigma Garden Cafe–today an empty lot about five blocks that way–was my favorite, a trio of railway section houses with a courtyard in the center. Made the best lattes and mochas in this town. I’d spend entire weekends there sometimes, enjoying proto-jam bands and talking nonsense. Eventually, its proprietor, Julie would become one of my closest friends, shortly after I got coffeehouse poetry out of my system. 

There was also Java Hut, on Sahara–barely remember it now; we went just because my friend Gregory had set up a weekly poetry reading there. Later, I took over the poetry reading at Enigma and, Jesus Christ, I’m really sorry. You have no idea how much. And Cafe Espresso Roma, where I rarely went because a rotating cast of druggy blowhards hung out on their couch–the kind of dudes (it was always dudes) who would tell me, to my face, that my writing was sentimental crap. That bit of “just calling it as I see it, bruh” was only helpful the first dozen times I heard it. 

But I’d go to Roma now, if it still existed. I miss it. Even though this town now boasts at least twice as many places where I’m likely to settle in with a cup of coffee–that’s Grouchy John’s, La Postte, Makers & Finders, Mothership, PublicUs, Sambalatte, Sunrise, Vesta, Writer’s Block and a bunch of places I haven’t even been to yet, including that one Harry Potter-themed coffeehouse that only exists because its owners apparently didn’t know that copyright infringement is a thing… 

Look, it’s not the same, because I’m not the same. And the world isn’t the same, either.

In 1989, four years before I wrote my first crappy haiku, a sociologist named Ray Oldenburg coined the phrase “third place.” A third place exists outside of first place (that’s home) and second place (that’s work) as a host for “the regular, voluntary, informal, and happily anticipated gatherings of individuals beyond the realms of home and work.” (Sorry, I copied that last bit from Wikipedia.) Third places, Oldenburg says, are where communities are made. It’s a neutral ground where you can relax, engage in conversation and enjoy the feel of the room. He further suggests that parks, clubs, churches, restaurants, public libraries and–omigod–cafes and coffeehouses could all serve as third places. (And there’s this economist, Arnault Morrison, who suggests that a fourth place is an inevitability–a thing that combines work/home or coffeehouse/work into some ghastly hybrid that’s a little too close to all that “collision” bullshit we had to swallow a few years ago in order to get a Downtown music festival. We’ll just bury that one in the yard.)

I sincerely hope you remember how wonderful it was, or that you know how wonderful it still is–to walk into a place knowing that you’re going to see some of your friends. That they’re going to call you over, hug you/fistbump you/fondle you or whatever, make room for your cup of coffee and leach the poison from your day. That you can talk about your relationship or your job or your family or appointment television, and you’ll get something back in return. An idea, a commiseration, an argument. Whatever it is, it’ll be something that gets you out of your own head. Within weeks of my first visit to Cafe Copioh, I had made at least two dozen good friends, some of which are in this room right now.

Now, you may remember that about 45 minutes ago I indicated that I stopped going to Las Vegas coffeehouses in 1996. That’s not exactly what happened. What did happen was that I got an Internet job.

I could branch off here. There are those who say that the internet is another kind of third place–though the kind of people who say that tend to profit from the internet. Still, I could talk about early blogging and social media platform LiveJournal, which consumed my life for longer than it should have. It was too easy, much easier than going out for coffee. My friends were always there. I could put ideas, prose or–whaddya know?–amateur photos out there and receive instant feedback on a scale I’d never imagined. LiveJournal changed the course of my life, a third place with no dimensions, no gravity. 

I will footnote Facebook, Instagram, texting and the like here, because they’re not worth talking about. They’re what I was trying to get away from when I began pimping myself out for Seattle headshots. In zero gravity, everything goes soft. After several years of online life I felt so isolated and lonely and broken that I believed I needed another coffeehouse gimmick to get people to respond to me. Which, of course, wasn’t true; friends, real friends, are just happy to get the call. And acquaintances want to roll the dice, to see if a deeper friendship is possible. (Then, when you’re tight, that’s when they can hit you up for headshots, and doggo-sitting, and rides to the airport.) I’d spent too long floating in the ethernet to know that sometimes, it’s just good to see you and good to be seen, even with empty hands.

When I returned to Las Vegas in 2012 I continued taking pictures of friends over coffee, but the tone of the photos was completely different. I was grateful just to see all the friendly faces I’d left behind a decade before. These days I don’t bother with the headshots, or even some kind of formalized “goofy” photo; I just raise the camera to my eye while my friends are drinking coffee and talking and begin snapping away. I do this in hopes of capturing our friendship unaware. I try to get a shot of the two of us grounded in our third place. Getting a photo of a friendship in the wild isn’t easy, when the mere act of pointing a camera at anybody usually makes everyone’s butt clench up tight. The secret is, of course, to keep talking; to keep being friends even as this intruder tries to break in. Also, it doesn’t hurt to take, like, a whole shitload of pictures, because at least one of them will be good. 

I am not a professional photographer. The professionals among you tonight will look at these photos and see immediately where I fucked up the composition and the lighting. And those among you who aren’t professional photographers: Please don’t ask me what settings I used or what kind of lens mount I have, because I don’t know and I don’t care. It’s probably for the best if the camera and I don’t know too much about each other. I am, by temperament, an observer; by craft, a storyteller; and in aspiration, a giver and receiver. That’s the lens through which I’d like you to consider this, my first photo show in nine years. I did this show on the advice of my accountant and my therapist. The former tells me I need deductions; the latter tells me I need friends. 

By the way, I don’t mean to make you feel bad for having a smartphone. I use the shit out of mine; it’s an amazing tool. Delivers food, news and pictures of boobies with an alacrity I could never have dreamed of. But this tool is making adjustments to me that I don’t care for. Even though we’re all in here–our photos, our stories, our likes and dislikes–we ourselves are not in here, not in the way that counts. We are losing our gravity, and with it our ability to understand what’s natural and what’s only pretending to be natural for the sake of our followers. What’s breaking will stay broken if we don’t get together, in third place, and forge our treaties. Reaffirm our followers as our friends.

Those means I’m not done taking these photos. I’m going to keep adding to this series until me-in-third-place becomes a default state. I’m tired of jockeying for likes and retweets, tired of driving myself into email bankruptcy again and again and again. I want eye contact and embraces and fistbumps. Gravity. If you’re pissed off with your workplace, proud of your kids or unable to process today’s headlines, I want us to grab a table and two hot drinks and talk about it. 

I can’t change this world in any way that will last. The more time I spend online, the sadder that realization makes me. But I can sit across a table from you in third place and tell you that I hear you what you’re saying, and I want to understand it, to receive it. That you are seen, as they say. You are seen. I submit that the proof is on these walls, and there will be still more evidence of it as soon as you’re free for coffee.