1. Bodies move through time & space on the curved edge of the Earth. We travel to be not here: no email, voicemail, memos, faxes, taxes, pagers, no cellphones, no bills; we travel from posessions, relations, wives, lovers, ex-wives, ex-lovers, onto the vivid open road.
747 to Edo,
LCD show duty free
champaign, sake, whisky,
gold, silk, leather:
symbolic consumption
above the great sky-blue Pacific.
Basho walked years for a few page journey, his days, months, years eternal travelers, with simple sandals, cotton clothing, only attached to poetry & friends. Now each golden moment rides a rocket-driven hearse. Instant links subvert time & place, nothing fast enough. Yet we are always here & here is always different; we cannot escape.
2. Saitama hotel, past white-on-white dress, red floral dress, cloth
flower cluster, makeup center, bluewhite ribbon hallway, photo-op lobby,
Newgreen buds crack
aging concrete pool &
full silver moon echoes
drunken wedding party.
3. Aoyama Dori business buildings, heavy Palace wall, police HQ
mock-medieval concrete fort, Sogetsu Kaikan, almost missed it, so blends-in
steel & glass; 6 story lobby, hardhat chainsaw Ikebana, whole bloody blooming
trees.
Two foreigners first lesson, fifth floor view Imperial roofs & gardens. Thai princess with embassy minder, heavy denim skirt & jacket, awkwardly aging, one more in a lifetime of lessons, cannot balance hikae, bowl keeps tipping. Minder taking notes, so eyes on her pad serious, not to smile.
Underground CyberScapeCafe, ten thousand yen internet access, 500 yen coffee; Java lessons & sex adventure logo. Newest technology meets oldest human drives.
4. Rural near Kanazawa, graduate new all computer science school,
5. Not so large, central Kanazawa, aristocratic craftwork, samurai house
district & green tea microgarden. Jazz cafe, vinyl disks & double ancient
MacIntosh gunmetal gray & polished silver glass vacuum tube amps, cappuccinos
& 60s pop music. Nothing is stable.
Inner Kanazawa, large apartment numbered blocks on concrete riverbed, uniform schoolkids. Pierrette casual cafe, 98-3999, rough tables, slickpaper napkins, 150 yen mug coffee.
Once wanted cars, kids, homes, debts, investments, friends & honors. Now wants come & go like winds, & simple things seem best: clouds, shadows, grass, the glue on the back of a chair.
6. Kanazawa International Hotel lobby cafe, delicate cakes, fragile
cups & cinnamon sticks, high ceiling windows.
7. Holiday weekend Ueno, Aizu trains no standing room. Far from
elegant deep under ground transport cafe, waiting with Mori-san, talk of tea,
guitars, tourists, soft drinks, emptiness.
Train uncrowds & snow appears `tween ugly square ski resort hotels. Late nothing open semi-rural Aizu, not even the railway restaurant. Tiger, lion, guruda, dragon railway square underpass tunnel mosaics. Hotel so near not worth taxi, wide smiling driver; wedding dress & gifts again; computer science school, lecture & banquet again. Such cold nights.
8. Hazy-hot backstreet Shinagawa: steep step paths, old stones, small
gardens & gravesites, fresh white blossoms, hidden gems of houses. Lost, late
& sweating. Distant huge hotels. Old persons stream towards temple; building
site workers -- no English. Accidental taxi to Tani-san's Sony robot learning
cardboard mazes with basins of attraction & autonomous closure. The
artificial gains one step more on the living.
Sogo fifth floor Franco-Turkish tres elegant cafe, 5 foot graceful brass curving urn, ornate little tables, tiny French paper flags, 2 pretty tea girls surprised to see us, rugs, tapestries, paintings, sipping thin inlaid cups in wingback chairs. Such intense shopping outside mahagony frame no glass window, tiring just to see it.
9. Tokyo BlueNote, Tokoro-sensei host.
10. Cafe Arabica, back alley central Shinagawa, huge outside black
wrought iron gas flame lamp, yellow stucco descending wooden staircase, large
empty room, heavy wooden tables. Coffee & small orange cake, 2400 yen.
Research chemist barista, thick black horn rims, thin black tie, white lab
coat, brass balance coffee scale, beaker water, Bunsen burner, background
Mozart floor show, old man head on back corner table one cup more please. I
wonder what crowd comes here in the night.