Welcome . . .

The Nearby Café is now open. What's your pleasure?

Step in to The Nearby Café: a quiet, relaxing cyberplace where you can come by anytime to engage with the varied projects, activities, and ideas of some vital people and organizations in the fields of the visual arts, literature and writing, politics, food and travel, love and lust -- a reasonable cross-section of the central issues of 21st-century culture. Our goal is to provide the ambiance of the classic international café with an Internet spin.

As befits such a place, since we opened our cyberdoors in fall 1995 we've attracted a truly diverse international clientele. To date, we've had visitors from all over the U.S., and from dozens of other countries as well: Brazil, Canada, the Czech Republic, Israel, Japan, Mexico, the United Kingdom, Poland, Russia, Sweden, Finland, Norway, Denmark, Malaysia, Argentina, and Croatia, to name just a few. (Hello, Kazakhstan!)

All of our content areas are finished and waiting for you to visit. Please pull up a chair and settle down at any of them -- or feel free to table-hop. Make yourself comfortable here.

As you can see, we incline towards a comparatively calm, low-key site; we think it makes for a more conducive environment for thinking, reading, reflecting. Call it house style, if you will. And that's the core of the café tradition as a whole. So you won't find a lot of bells and whistles here -- not too much that blinks, shakes, wiggles or burps. The Nearby Café is deliberately heavy on content and light on visual or auditory distractions.

We regularly enrich the content of our site in all our subject areas, including new portfolios in the Nearby Café Gallery. Periodically, we enhance the site technically by introducing new facets to existing Café features. We announce these additions and changes as our Blackboard Specials, and we suggest that you check there first each time you stop in, to see the very latest offerings. And we encourage you to come back often; we're open 24/7/365 -- plus leap years.

Limitations of the space-time continuum currently prevent us from serving you any sort of beverage other than the virtual. Feel free to bring your own. Everything else on our menu is real. Take a look . . .

-- The Management