According to Greek legend, it was a goatherd named Kaldi who accidentally stumbled onto the stimulating effects of eating coffee beans. After too many cups of Kaldi’s Coffeehouse’s house blend and some stimulating conversation about goats and coffee, artist Jeff Grimes got intrigued enough to fashion the head of a goat into a beastly sculpture, a cross between Heart of Darkness (“The horror, the horror”) and Bill the Cat in the old Opus cartoon strips. The goat was lewd and bestial.
“I think Kaldi’s was alright until I took away the goat,” Mike Markiewicz told me once with a twinkle in his eye. I snuck a peek at the creature where it sat on the top shelf of his book shop at Woodward and Main streets. I couldn’t help shuddering. It was so, well, goat-like.
Mike — a little goat-like himself wearing a cap over his disheveled salt and pepper hair — had a dark, mad look about him. His story had some ring of truth. He founded Kaldi’s with Sonya McDonnell in 1993 after having been an English professor, a dishwasher and an itinerant grape picker.
It was Mike who lined the tobacco-stained walls with books of all kinds, from French deconstructionists to Mickey Spillane paperbacks from the ’50s with buxom blondes on the covers.
I first met Mike when I started playing music at Kaldi’s back in the early ’90s. For a long time he’d disappear into the basement, where he kept his books in those days, but sometimes he’d come up and crouch in the doorway between the café side and the bar side, a homemade cigarette between his fingers. When he liked something, he’d smile slightly, and you felt you had done a very great thing.
Eventually he sold his interest in Kaldi’s to Dave Miller (who also performed as a fire-eater on special occasions) so that he could become an ungentlemanly farmer in Kentucky, then to Maine, into the woods. There he amassed a fine collection of rare books, but some matrimonial sturm and drang forced him to leave, and he had to sell his books at a loss. It was a blow.
He washed up in Cincinnati again and rented Merle Rosen’s old art studio at 722 Woodward (the building with the bluebirds on the shutters). His business, Sibylline Books, came together quickly. In one day he built a wall of shelves, and then another. For a week, he hammered and sawed at all hours, using only old lumber, of course.
He would have nothing new. Everything must be recycled. He sent out the books his e-mail customers ordered in recycled cardboard, and most importantly he took back the goat.
After the Troubles came, Mike and I spent some time trying to dissect, even define what had made Kaldi’s memorable. We thought of Aralee Strange’s movie, This Train, with Soupy Sales sitting at the bar of Kaldi’s the night Sophie’s Dry Cleaning (a few doors down) caught fire and many of her tenants had to seek shelter at Kaldi’s, wrapped in blankets.
Billy Walker — nearly 80 and thin as the mercury reading in a thermometer, his African get-ups, his obsession with the Lottery — used to work there in the kitchen. I remember all of us watching the 2001 riots; some of those images are seared in my brain.
Kaldi’s was a place where ideas happened, and the intoxicating energy of ideas rose and mingled in the air with the smell of coffee and red beans and rice. It was a clearinghouse for artists and musicians: You could get a job in one minute and, if you went to the far end of the bar, you could probably hire the musicians to play it.
“It was the theater that happened among the people who worked there,” Mike said once, citing Michelle Red Oak and singer Karin Bergquist, who waitressed for a couple of months in the very beginning of Kaldi’s until her band, Over The Rhine, hit paydirt. (Her soon-to-be partner, Linford Detweiller, had a studio just across the street.)
I think it was the artists themselves who drove Kaldi’s. It was their oasis from the tyranny of the act of making art. Most of them had moved to Over-the-Rhine to take advantage of cheap rent, and they fed on their proximity to each other. They worked hard, never sold and were consistently eccentric enough to be entertaining.
Late at night, painters Tom Bacher and John Stone would come in on the café side and sit at a rough wooden table, drink coffee and talk nonsense. They always sat at the same table in the same chairs. In Kaldi’s lighting, which was lovely, they looked a little like one of van Gogh’s paintings themselves. Sometimes they were joined by Jim Wainscott, Will Walters or Gregg Storer.
I met Tim Tattman outside Kaldi’s when he was selling raffle tickets for BASE Gallery across the street. Roger Reifonas painted an art car, every inch covered with figures and swirls. He also showed up at the infamous Orange Party with a paper bag over his head cut out at the eyes and mouth. He had painted a face on his bare chest.
Alan Sauer lived inefficiently and recklessly in the IceCream Factory, and Gregg Schmidt installed a swing and a trapeze in his Central Avenue warehouse. I was there one April afternoon when he wheeled out a catapult he’d built and hurled small tied bags of sand at the street. Kelly Wenstraub carved huge animals, Linda Hartley did exquisite photographs and Kate Schmidt wore safety glasses and welded like a man.
Now that the Art Academy is moving down to 12th Street (see the cover story on page 19), I expect great things from the coming generation of students, and I know I will meet many of them in the morning at Kaldi’s. Will they surrender to the spell of art? Will they come to believe the goat’s head is big medicine?
We’ll have a chance to see for ourselves, because the statue will return to Kaldi’s at its grand opening later this month in a ceremonial procession with banners flying, making me believe even more in what I call the old blood, the ancient German weltschmerz that underlies the character of this city.
It’s at once secret and deeply felt, and it is the single most important part of the character of Over-the-Rhine.
Her column appears here the first issue of each month.
This article appears in Aug 3-9, 2005.