“Now you understand the Oriental passion for tea,” said Japhy. “Remember that book I told you about? The first sip is joy, the second is gladness, the third is serenity, the fourth is madness, the fifth is ecstasy.”
-The Dharma Bums
Kerouac Café, which opened last month on 35th Street, is a concept whose time has both come and gone…thus is the perpetual market for genre-nostalgia, though in the frankly unremarkable stretch of neighborhood ‘round 617 W. 35th Street (relieved by the nearby Venue on 35th , locally famed for its open mic readings and theatrical productions) it has the novelty of having created a market of its own. Like so many speakeasies of old (or famous clubs in NYC, San Francisco, etc) the cafe looks like nothing from the outside and is easy to miss, if you’re not scrutinizing storefronts; but once you do find it, the doors swing open into a kind of rustic, cozily low-lit “Hernando’s Hideaway”…..complete with what’s generally either Beat appropriate vintage jazz or classical music playing softly on the record player.
For an enterprise that only opened this Valentine’s Day, the Kerouac has done pretty well with amassing a regular clientele of artists and eccentrics. The café has the local distinction of being staffed entirely by artists…written, visual, theatrical, and any combination thereof or in addition to. (The café’s owner, Phil Odango, is a playwright and the director of many local productions at the aforementioned Venue. )
The Kerouac is divided into two levels. The main floor boasts a mostly donation-stocked bookshelf featuring a broad selection, from the requisite Beats to Chaucer-to-Charles Simic anthologies to Ayn Rand; a TV/VCR with a selection of films (an eclectic combination of high-brow and mainstream) available for the watching, and a spacious but intimate living-room area with comfy chairs, sofas, low-burning lamps, and that all too rare public accoutrement: reliable WiFi. So far, the café only serves a small but gourmet selection of coffees and lattes (including double espressos strong enough to turn you into Butthead’s Cornholio) and teas, but in the coming weeks they plan to start carrying organic juices and edibles (suggestions in that dept are currently open for suggestion on their Facebook Page).
But the most unique aspect of the café is the upstairs, where customers are invited to scrawl literary quotes and pretty much anything else they please on the walls. This space already boasts a veritable gallimaufry of drawings and sayings, with citations from everyone from Djuna Barnes to poems by Kerouac’s sometime-nemesis Kenneth Rexroth to urban spoken word to a liberal sprinkling of gems from Jack himself (“I accept lostness forever…everything belongs to me because I am poor’). Kerouac aficionados will recognize homages to the author, including tributes to the “short sad-happy life” of his legendary little brother (“Kissable Gerard,” reads one such token…a quote taken from Jack’s beautiful childhood memoir Visions of Gerard; the two words are accompanied by a lipstick print….a gesture both gaudy and touching). Odango plans to paint over the walls every three months or so, thus rendering a new canvas; but before the old versions are erased, the “best of” their quotes will be photographed and eventually bound up into an anthology (“kind of like our own version of a cock print book,” he jokes….referring, presumably, to the trend started by Warhol superstar Brigid Berlin at NYC’s iconic Max’s Kansas City in the 60s). The café will also be installing a typewriter, stocked with the requisite roll of teletype paper, à la On The Road, which will serve as a kind of ongoing exquisite corpse; everyone who comes up is encouraged to simply sit down and start writing where the last user left off, or begin typing, period (call it what you like; Truman Capote’s ghost is surely elsewhere). Have books, VHS flicks, original artwork, curiosities; trinkets? The café welcomes donations in moderation. It’s is certainly a community effort….one with an obviously specific theme, but also a broad-minded openness to possibility.
“I see this basically as an incubator,” says local filmmaker and employee Nathan Liebold. “We don’t know yet what’s going to hatch out of this venture, but we’re interested in seeing what it is, and we’re optimistic. Everyone who comes in here seems to get something different out of it.”
Different, as in fabulously unique, is exactly what the darkness on the edge of this town needs. The Kerouac is indeed custom made for “the mad ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing.” It’s a work in progress off to a prodigious start. Here’s to hoping it takes off and realizes the potential the purity of its intentions deserve.