COFFEE BEANS & BEINGS / TAKING IT SLO & STEADY

Walking up Santa Barbara Avenue in downtown San Luis Obispo, you can almost feel the pull of continuity before you see the sign. At 1901 Santa Barbara Avenue sits Del Monte Cafe, a family-run diner that has anchored this mid-California neighborhood for more than four decades. 

Its doors opened on February 2, 1981, when Debbie and Mark Collins took over an old, boarded-up corner grocery and restored it as a working café. Long before that, the building housed The Del Monte Grocery, an early-1900s neighborhood store where residents came for staples and small talk. When the grocery closed, the space sat idle for years, until it was returned to daily use as a cafe. 

The café serves breakfast, lunch, and dinner on weekdays, with shorter, brunch-centered hours on weekends. It opens early, closes early enough to signal it belongs to the rhythms of the neighborhood. The menu follows the same philosophy. 

Breakfast is the anchor, and it’s handled with restraint and confidence. Eggs arrive the way you asked for them. Potatoes are crisp, pancakes substantial, and the chicken fried steak and eggs remain the dish most often cited by regulars. Portions are generous without being excessive, and the food favors familiarity over spectacle. Nothing on the plate tries to surprise you, which is precisely the point. 

The main room is modest in scale, practical in layout, and comfortably worn. Booths show their age in the best way, softened by decades of use rather than disguised by replacement. Tables are sturdy and close enough to encourage conversation to overlap. The floor and fixtures favor durability over polish, and nothing appears to have been added simply to make a point. Broad front windows let in steady morning light, flattening shadows and giving the space an unpretentious clarity. 

It’s a room that wakes up naturally with the day. There is no performative nostalgia here. The décor does not announce itself as “retro.” Coffee cups are thick and utilitarian, the kind meant to be refilled, not photographed. Wall décor is sparse and local, accumulated rather than curated, and the overall effect is continuity rather than theme. The space feels adjusted over time by necessity: a chair replaced here, a counter repaired there. It reads as a place that has always been busy enough to matter, but never so busy that it needed reinvention. 

Service moves at the pace of the room. During peak hours, tables fill quickly and the café hums with overlapping conversations, the clink of plates, and the steady movement of servers who know both the space and the clientele. Reviews over the years reflect a simple truth: not every moment is flawless, but consistency matters more than perfection. Del Monte has endured by doing the basics well, day after day. In a region full of restaurants eager to reinvent themselves, Del Monte Cafe remains grounded by refusing to do so. It is not chasing relevance. It already has it. The room, the food, and the building itself carry the quiet authority of a place that has earned its role simply by staying open and doing the work. And when the weather agrees, it has plenty of California sunshine out in the patio.

FRIDAY FILM/ CINEMA RETROFUTURA: THE MIX OF WHIMSY AND STEAMPUNK ART VISUALS JUST FOR THE FUN OF IT.

PillartoPost.org original essay on an aspect of creative contemporary art.

HEADS  IN THE CLOUDS

Retrofutura is not a studio, a film franchise, or a formal art collective. It is a loose, contemporary visual movement—born online—centered on a shared aesthetic idea: imagining a future that values beauty, duration, and mechanical grace over speed, efficiency, and constant disruption.   

In practical terms, Retrofutura exists as a growing body of long-form ambient visual works, most commonly encountered on YouTube. These pieces are typically presented as high-resolution, cinematic “moving environments”—sometimes described as moving wallpapers or ambient films—designed to be watched slowly, partially, or repeatedly rather than consumed in one sitting.   

There is no ticket to buy. There is no platform to join. Viewing is free.

A viewer encounters Retrofutura by searching, clicking, and pressing play. That’s it. The works circulate openly, supported only by the standard, optional mechanisms of online platforms: voluntary subscriptions, occasional soundtrack downloads, or passive ad support. Nothing essential is hidden behind a paywall. The experience itself is not commodified.   

What the viewer sees, almost immediately, is a world suspended above the Earth.   

In the imagined universe of Retrofutura, oceans have been replaced by seas of cloud. Vast airborne vessels—often called Aerobus Skyliners—glide between floating cities, mountain peaks, and moonlit horizons. These are not airplanes in any modern sense. They are flying architectures: part cruise ship, part sky train, part steampunk cathedral.   

The ships move slowly. 

Deliberately. Their long, articulated carriages hum with visible mechanics. Brass frameworks, glass-vaulted observatories, panoramic decks, and hanging gardens are not decorative flourishes but core design principles. Everything mechanical is allowed to be seen. 

Everything functional is allowed to be beautiful.   

This is retrofuturism in its purest form—not irony, not parody, but belief. The aesthetic draws heavily from early twentieth-century visions of tomorrow: Jules Verne’s optimism, Victorian engineering confidence, Art Deco ambition, and the pre-jet-age fantasy that technology might elevate daily life rather than compress it.   

What makes Retrofutura distinctive is its refusal to tell a conventional story.   There are no characters. No dialogue. No plot. The Aerobus does not “go” anywhere in a narrative sense. Instead, the films are structured around time itself. 

Light changes gradually from pale morning blues to late-afternoon gold, then into deep nocturnal calm above darkened oceans. Music and ambient sound evolve slowly, almost imperceptibly, mirroring the passage of hours rather than dramatic beats.   

Watching one of these works feels less like watching a film and more like occupying a moving room.   

The ships cross impossible bridges—spanning vapor, eclipses, and altitude—not as feats of conquest but as acts of coexistence. Nature is not something to be outrun or pierced. It is something to drift alongside. The future imagined here does not land because landing would imply completion. The journey continues because continuation is the point.   

So who is actually behind this art concept?  A steampunk Banksy?  

The truth is both simple and unsatisfying to anyone looking for a single name. Retrofutura is produced by small, independent digital artists and sound designers, sometimes working alone, sometimes collaboratively, who share a common visual language and release their work publicly. 

They are not a formal collective with a manifesto, nor a branded studio seeking recognition. In many cases, individual creator names are de-emphasized or absent altogether.   

This is not accidental, and it is not a legal shield.   

It is an artistic choice rooted in the tradition of ambient work, public installation, and design movements where authorship recedes in favor of atmosphere. Retrofutura functions less like a director-driven film and more like a shared architectural style: iterative, anonymous, and cumulative.   

That anonymity can feel evasive in a culture conditioned to expect credits, founders, and press kits. But here it serves a purpose. The absence of a visible auteur keeps the viewer’s attention on continuity of mood rather than personality. There is no creator to follow, only a space to return to.   

What is “going on,” then, when someone lets one of these films run?   

What’s going on is intentional slowness.   

Retrofutura belongs to a broader cultural countercurrent sometimes described as slow media: work designed not to interrupt but to accompany. These films are meant to run while you read, write, work, study, or think. You do not owe them your full attention. You are invited, not commanded.   

The engines hum. 

    The light shifts. 

        Time stretches.   

This is why Retrofutura resonates now. In an era dominated by short clips, algorithmic urgency, and constant calls to engage, it offers something quietly radical: a future that assumes patience. A future that believes machines can still inspire awe. A future that treats travel as ceremonial rather than transactional.   Retrofutura does not claim this future will happen. It does not argue policy or prediction. It asks a gentler question: what did we lose when progress stopped caring how it felt?   

Somewhere above the clouds, the Aerobus Skyliners continue their unhurried passage. Morning turns to evening. Evening to night. The ships do not arrive, because arrival would break the spell.   

You press play. You drift for a while.   

And when you leave, the journey continues without you. When you return, perhaps, you've arrived in a world envisioned by author Philip Dick, whose imagination inspired movies much like the Blade Runner flicks.

Steampunk not Blade Runner

 To start go to YouTube search and ask for "Retrofutura."

Welcome aboard.