Superfreaks

Did you miss the Materialist last week? DID YOU? Don't lie. It's very nice of you to make the effort, but the Materialist is well aware that her readers were too busy stuffing their craws with turkey and stuffing to notice her infrequent posts.

Well, the Materialist has a good explanation for her silence--she was (as promised, and promised, and promised) in Japan on her annual trip to visit her favorite city, Tokyo.

But is your favorite city still your favorite city when seen with your entire family in tow? The Materialist has visited Japan with her mother, and with her father, but never with the two of them at the same time, not to mention her brother as well. In the months before the trip, the Materialist's personal terror alert never fell below orange, especially after her parents informed her that all four of them would be sharing one room, and the Materialist and her brother a double bed, a bit of enforced incestuousness that was making the Materialist, ever slow to the wallet, begin seriously considering checking herself into the Park Hyatt, alone, her bank account be damned.

Needless to say, this was a real quandary for the Materialist. On one hand, the Materialist's father (also cheap) was paying for the bulk of the trip, and so the Materialist had very little control over the situation. On the other hand, the last time the Materialist had had to sleep in the same bed with her brother, she was 25, he was 22, and she woke up in the morning with him essentially atop her, circumstances that would send any less frugal person shrieking to the psychiatrist. When the Materialist explained to her mother that she considered sharing a bed with her brother at the age of 32 creepy and weird, her mother responded, somewhat plaintively, "But he's your brother!," a comment that revealed such an utter lack of understanding about the inappropriateness of the situation that the Materialist wasn't sure how to continue the conversation.

Before the Byattian freak show began, though, the Materialist had a couple of days to herself in the city, during which time she stayed at the Granbell, a small new hotel in the Shibuya neighborhood. The Granbell, despite its modest pretensions to something grander and chicer (the massive pale-pine door; the twill curtains printed with a large Lichtenstein-ish Fuji-san-ish mountain scene) is, in the end, a Japanese business hotel, which means: no lobby, no frills, little English spoken. It later emerged that certain photographers associated with CNT were unhappy with its limitations, but it suited the Materialist just fine--there's a real dearth of hotels in the Shibuya-Harajuku area, and a real dearth as well of Tokyo hotels in the $200 range, so the Granbell, she feels, is actually a find. For around $240 (the single rooms are an unbeatable $125), the Materialist had a quiet, comfortable, spacious double room just a five-minute stroll over the elevated sidewalk from the area's train station, one of western Tokyo's main hubs. (A warning, though: while easy to locate on foot, neither of the taxi drivers the Materialist had were able to find the Granbell at all, despite the map the hotel had provided.)

The next morning, the Materialist began what she considers her first-day orienting trek: through Shibuya, with its signature necklace of teenybopper department stores, up Omotesando, the wide pedestrian boulevard that bisects Harajuku, and to which gaggles of inventively and wonderfully costumed kids lend the air of a perpetual parade, and through the massive torii, or wooden gate, marking the entry to one of her favorite shrines, Meiji-jingu. The first time the Materialist visited Tokyo, eight years ago, she stayed with her friend Kana, who was at the time living in a large three-bedroom apartment a few hundred meters south, in a building called the Green Fantasia. Meiji was the first shrine the Materialist ever visited, and whenever she walks the long, curved, graveled path leading up to it, she feels, as she did then, the air cool and sharpen around her, the almost unbearable awe that this Japan and the electric and eclectic Japan outside the shrine's borders can exist so seamlessly, so close.

After a fortifying visit to the shrine, the Materialist began her ritual of stomping around Harajuku and neighboring Minami-Aoyama, feeling, as she always does in Tokyo, large and ancient and disheveled, like some ungainly coelacanth finding herself in a tank full of wispy sea monkeys. By about noon, the Materialist was so exhausted she felt ready to curl up and die, but was determined--more so after she realized one of her favorite stores, the Bathing Ape offshoot Baby Milo, had closed--to make it down to both Comme des Garcons and to Original Fake, the latter of which she'd been longing to visit since it had opened in May. One of the sadnesses and pleasures of visiting the same city year after year is the frustrating yet somehow comforting realization that life, and the life of the city itself, moves on without you. Stalwarts close, and new places open. Some fashions change, and odd trends endure. Everything is just different enough to make you feel an outsider anew, and tantalizingly familiar enough to make you feel, each time, as if you might have some place there, however small and fleeting.

The Materialist had read on jeansnow.net that Comme had set up a temporary kiosk outside their flagship store featuring some of their "Play" merchandise, "Play" being Comme's good-natured subline, whose pieces feature the signature evil-eyed heart insignia that was developed by a famous eastern European graphic artist whose name is, embarrassingly, eluding the Materialist at this moment. The kiosk was only to be up from late October through late November, making it essential for the Materialist to drag herself down to pick up her loot. Once she'd pushed several delicate and soft-skinned Japanese out of the line, she was greeted by a poreless and pale clerk, who took one look at the Materialist and said, "We're out of large size." The Materialist folded in her linebacker-sized shoulders as much as she could and meekly told the vicious clerk that she was looking for men's T-shirts, thank you very much. She also asked for another of the tote bags--all printed with the heart--that accompanied each purchase, but was denied, despite the fact that she bought two shirts.

After that bit of humiliation, the Materialist glumly made her way past the famous honeycomb Prada store over to Original Fake, which is a joint venture between Medicom, the toy manufacturer responsible for Kubricks and Bearbricks, and KAWS, the New Jersey-born graffiti artist whose iconic, thatched eye figure (which looks something like a sinister Michelin Man) has become emblematic of the sort of collaborations between graphic artists and streetwear brands that have flourished in the past few years (before there was Marcel Dzama, there was KAWS). Like the Baby Milo shop (to which, as Superfuture points out, Original Fake's design alludes), the store, which was designed by the genius Tokyo firm Wonderwall (which also designed Baby Milo), is both witty and awe-inspiring. One climbs down a flight of stairs and is confronted with a ten-foot tall fiberglass sculpture of one of KAWS' signature characters, half of it in gray tones, the other half flayed down to its muscle and bone--something like a mashup between Disney and Damien Hirst--a combination of snuggly cuteness and disconcerting malice, all the more alarming for being completely irresistible. Inside, the Materialist rifled through the T-shirts, the cashmere sweaters, the pins and toys, all of them by KAWS and all of them being fondled, gazed upon, and whispered about adoringly by a clot of teenage boys, before buying the one thing she could afford: an evil-looking cushion of a shapeless head, its long intestine, evilly yellow and rendered puffy as a cloud of smoke, trailing from it like a benign, fluffy cat's tail.

It'd be the third guest in bed with her and her brother, the Materialist thought, walking home with her new protector. Freud hadn't seen nothing yet.

The next day, the Materialist's mother and brother arrived. So did her father.

He sprang for a second room.

Needless to say, this was a real quandary for the Materialist. On one hand, the Materialist's father (also cheap) was paying for the bulk of the trip, and so the Materialist had very little control over the situation. On the other hand, the last time the Materialist had had to sleep in the same bed with her brother, she was 25, he was 22, and she woke up in the morning with him essentially atop her, circumstances that would send any less frugal person shrieking to the psychiatrist. When the Materialist explained to her mother that she considered sharing a bed with her brother at the age of 32 creepy and weird, her mother responded, somewhat plaintively, "But he's your brother!," a comment that revealed such an utter lack of understanding about the inappropriateness of the situation that the Materialist wasn't sure how to continue the conversation.

Before the Byattian freak show began, though, the Materialist had a couple of days to herself in the city, during which time she stayed at the Granbell, a small new hotel in the Shibuya neighborhood. The Granbell, despite its modest pretensions to something grander and chicer (the massive pale-pine door; the twill curtains printed with a large Lichtenstein-ish Fuji-san-ish mountain scene) is, in the end, a Japanese business hotel, which means: no lobby, no frills, little English spoken. It later emerged that certain photographers associated with CNT were unhappy with its limitations, but it suited the Materialist just fine--there's a real dearth of hotels in the Shibuya-Harajuku area, and a real dearth as well of Tokyo hotels in the $200 range, so the Granbell, she feels, is actually a find. For around $240 (the single rooms are an unbeatable $125), the Materialist had a quiet, comfortable, spacious double room just a five-minute stroll over the elevated sidewalk from the area's train station, one of western Tokyo's main hubs. (A warning, though: while easy to locate on foot, neither of the taxi drivers the Materialist had were able to find the Granbell at all, despite the map the hotel had provided.)

The next morning, the Materialist began what she considers her first-day orienting trek: through Shibuya, with its signature necklace of teenybopper department stores, up Omotesando, the wide pedestrian boulevard that bisects Harajuku, and to which gaggles of inventively and wonderfully costumed kids lend the air of a perpetual parade, and through the massive torii, or wooden gate, marking the entry to one of her favorite shrines, Meiji-jingu. The first time the Materialist visited Tokyo, eight years ago, she stayed with her friend Kana, who was at the time living in a large three-bedroom apartment a few hundred meters south, in a building called the Green Fantasia. Meiji was the first shrine the Materialist ever visited, and whenever she walks the long, curved, graveled path leading up to it, she feels, as she did then, the air cool and sharpen around her, the almost unbearable awe that this Japan and the electric and eclectic Japan outside the shrine's borders can exist so seamlessly, so close.

After a fortifying visit to the shrine, the Materialist began her ritual of stomping around Harajuku and neighboring Minami-Aoyama, feeling, as she always does in Tokyo, large and ancient and disheveled, like some ungainly coelacanth finding herself in a tank full of wispy sea monkeys. By about noon, the Materialist was so exhausted she felt ready to curl up and die, but was determined--more so after she realized one of her favorite stores, the Bathing Ape offshoot Baby Milo, had closed--to make it down to both Comme des Garcons and to Original Fake, the latter of which she'd been longing to visit since it had opened in May. One of the sadnesses and pleasures of visiting the same city year after year is the frustrating yet somehow comforting realization that life, and the life of the city itself, moves on without you. Stalwarts close, and new places open. Some fashions change, and odd trends endure. Everything is just different enough to make you feel an outsider anew, and tantalizingly familiar enough to make you feel, each time, as if you might have some place there, however small and fleeting.

The Materialist had read on jeansnow.net that Comme had set up a temporary kiosk outside their flagship store featuring some of their "Play" merchandise, "Play" being Comme's good-natured subline, whose pieces feature the signature evil-eyed heart insignia that was developed by a famous eastern European graphic artist whose name is, embarrassingly, eluding the Materialist at this moment. The kiosk was only to be up from late October through late November, making it essential for the Materialist to drag herself down to pick up her loot. Once she'd pushed several delicate and soft-skinned Japanese out of the line, she was greeted by a poreless and pale clerk, who took one look at the Materialist and said, "We're out of large size." The Materialist folded in her linebacker-sized shoulders as much as she could and meekly told the vicious clerk that she was looking for men's T-shirts, thank you very much. She also asked for another of the tote bags--all printed with the heart--that accompanied each purchase, but was denied, despite the fact that she bought two shirts.

After that bit of humiliation, the Materialist glumly made her way past the famous honeycomb Prada store over to Original Fake, which is a joint venture between Medicom, the toy manufacturer responsible for Kubricks and Bearbricks, and KAWS, the New Jersey-born graffiti artist whose iconic, thatched eye figure (which looks something like a sinister Michelin Man) has become emblematic of the sort of collaborations between graphic artists and streetwear brands that have flourished in the past few years (before there was Marcel Dzama, there was KAWS). Like the Baby Milo shop (to which, as Superfuture points out, Original Fake's design alludes), the store, which was designed by the genius Tokyo firm Wonderwall (which also designed Baby Milo), is both witty and awe-inspiring. One climbs down a flight of stairs and is confronted with a ten-foot tall fiberglass sculpture of one of KAWS' signature characters, half of it in gray tones, the other half flayed down to its muscle and bone--something like a mashup between Disney and Damien Hirst--a combination of snuggly cuteness and disconcerting malice, all the more alarming for being completely irresistible. Inside, the Materialist rifled through the T-shirts, the cashmere sweaters, the pins and toys, all of them by KAWS and all of them being fondled, gazed upon, and whispered about adoringly by a clot of teenage boys, before buying the one thing she could afford: an evil-looking cushion of a shapeless head, its long intestine, evilly yellow and rendered puffy as a cloud of smoke, trailing from it like a benign, fluffy cat's tail.

It'd be the third guest in bed with her and her brother, the Materialist thought, walking home with her new protector. Freud hadn't seen nothing yet.

The next day, the Materialist's mother and brother arrived. So did her father.

He sprang for a second room.

Comments

[phunk15]

I loved your latest entry, Materialist! I've just been to Tokyo in October for the first time and reading your entry today really made me want to be there again. It's such a refreshing city in so many ways--and you're completely right about being an outsider no matter how many times you visit a place, because a city's always changing. Fantastic! Keep it up.