And the Materialist is telling you, she is not going*

Photo: Habitat for Humanity

Whenever the Materialist leaves her office--on an exciting trip to, say, the bathroom, or the cafeteria, or even, occasionally, the great outdoors--she inevitably returns to find something on her chair, silently delivered by one of her colleagues. The offerings, left for the Materialist like droppings, generally take the form of a press packet that they're not very interested in themselves but--for whatever reason--are unable to chuck into the trash; the Materialist's Aeron, then, becomes a handy sort of purgatory: never the guilt of actually throwing something away, and always the promise to the publicist that it's been passed on to the appropriate person.

The Velvet Rope

The day before the Materialist and her family left for Kyoto, there was an article in the Daily Yomirui, one of Japan's English-language dailies, about a battle between two brothers.

Here's what happened: there's a store in Kyoto called Ichizawa Hampu (Higashioji-dori Furumonzen [Chion'in-mae] Agaru, Nishikawa, Higashiyama-ku, Kyoto; 03-75-541-0138), which makes sturdy and plainspoken hemp bags in various butch-chic colors: gray, olive, navy, black. After the patriarch died, the company passed to his third son, Shinzaburo. But then Shintaro, his older brother, contested the will. The case went to court, Shintaro won, and Shinzaburo started his own company, Ichizawa Shinzaburo Hampu, earlier this year. It was like Rashomon as chronicled by WWD. The best part? Not only was Shinzaburo making essentially the same product--though his bags reportedly had a more updated silhouette, as well as a broader and peppier palette--but he'd opened his store almost directly across the street from the mothership. According to the article, the battle had sparked something of a frenzy, and every morning, long lines (sometimes up to 100 people) gathered outside both stores, waiting to get in. This was something the Materialist had to see.

Consumed

Over the years, the Materialist's father's enthusiasms have turned to many things, and places, and people. What appears at first to be a harmless affection for a certain diva, say, or city, can deepen into something closer to an obsession, often without his family noticing until the consequences of his adoration begin to affect them. The Materialist's father has, at various points in his life, been besotted with the Germans, Los Angeles, David Hockney, Robert Adams, Maria Callas, Renee Fleming, Lorraine Hunt Lieberson, and, most recently, the Japanese artist Nobuyoshi Araki.

Araki is a member of that great generation of Japanese postwar photographers whose pictures capture that period of modern Japan's most profound metamorphosis, those frightening and fragile years in the late forties through the fifties and early sixties, when everything the country was, and had thought of itself, was suddenly made to change. Their collective images chronicle a Japan so different than the one we think of today that they seem to belong to another world altogether: of filthy orphans, their faces already hard and brown as adults', smoking cigarettes by a curb; of a group of defeated middle-aged men and women, their clothes so shapeless it's difficult to tell one gender from the other, lining up for work; of a mangy dog, its fur oily, its eyes gleaming, its fangs bared, caught wandering the streets of Tokyo. Along with Araki, there was Daido Moriyama, Masahisa Fukase, Ihei Kimura, Shomei Tomatsu, Shoji Ueda, and many, many others, some of whom have become internationally renowned, and others of whom have receded from public memory.

Acts of Worship

Shugoarts.com

After their expedition to TKG Editions, the Materialist and her father stuffed themselves into a cab for Kiyosumishirakawa, and Tomio Koyama Gallery. This was the third space the gallery had occupied in less than five years. In 2002, Koyama, along with a number of other prominent galleries, was located in an old rice factory in Saga-cho that was remarkable for being, well, old.

In London and New York, not only are the gallery scenes relatively concentrated in two or three neighborhoods, but they have the sorts of wide, unfinished, converted warehouse spaces that are simply impossible in a city like Tokyo, with its population density and its relative lack of buildings pre-dating World War II. The Materialist loved that Saga-cho space, with its weedy, pebbly courtyard, its buffed cement steps, its dark, damp nooks and crannies. But at the end of 2002, the galleries were ordered out of the building, and forced to scatter across the city: at the time, Taka Ishii, Shugoarts, and Koyama all moved into a rather featureless low-slung structure across from a gas station, a space the Materialist was unmoved by but which was, she thinks now, at least very easy to find.

Stop and shop

When on family trips, there is always one leader. On this trip, the Materialist was meant to be that one leader. She set the agenda. She read the maps. She dictated when, and where, people could go. (All while trying desperately to ditch them at every step.) But while the Materialist's mother and brother were happy to follow protocol, trailing after the Materialist through subway stations and down twisty streets, as obedient as small white dogs, the Materialist's father instead attached himself to her side, contradicting her every move. The Materialist's father likes to say that surgeons (with whom he has some experience) are "not always right, but always certain"--the same, however, must be said for him. If the Materialist said, "OK, let's catch the Chuo line to Kanda and then pick up the Yamanote," the Materialist's father was right there to say, "But why can't we just take the Chuo to Tokyo station and then walk from there?" If the Materialist said, "Let's stop by the hotel and drop off our stuff, and then we'll go off to Mandarake before it closes," the Materialist's father would say, "What? It won't close now! It'll be open another few hours at least!" If the Materialist said, "You can all go to hell in a handbasket," the Materialist's father would say, "But I think if we went by plane it would be much faster, and a more pleasant ride besides."

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.

The Camera's Eye, the Photographer's Voice

Terrace Court 2004 Photo: Alec Soth

Every once in a while, the Materialist has a fantasy of chucking this whole editing thing and running off to start a gallery. She likes art. She HAS art. And more and more frequently, she finds artists much more pleasant company than writers, who are, granted, more articulate on the whole than many artists, but who unfortunately are also given to employing their eloquence to complain, endlessly, about the many neuroses from which they suffer, and about the many forces they feel are conspiring against them. Writers also tend to be lonely, and spend long hours sitting in their boxer shorts at home, blogging. (Not that the Materialist is talking about anyone specific here! God no!)

In the end, none of this is probably very true, but the Materialist has lately become ever more convinced about artists' superiority as fellow citizens because of a blog by a photographer named Alec Soth.  Soth is a Magnum photographer and the artist of a sad, witty, tough, and harshly beautiful series called "Sleeping by the Mississippi"(1999-2002), and the recent "Niagara."  The Materialist first learned of his work a few years ago from her dear friend, Yossi Milo, who used to represent Soth (and who makes being a gallerist look so easy that he can be held at least partially responsible for the Materialist's unreasonable fantasies), and, she must admit, owns three prints from "Mississippi," which she bought during one of her many bouts of semi-employment on $200 installments. But as much as the Materialist admires Soth's work, she is equally impressed by Soth's blog, which is remarkable both for his generosity, his unstinting praise for and admiration of his fellow artists, but also for the serious, searching conversation he holds with its readers-and himself-about the nature of photography, and art, itself, its purposes, its meanings, its responsibilities. Reading through his blog, the Materialist is reminded of what a great photographer can do-how the camera becomes not just a way of seeing, but a way of puzzling. The photographer carries on an argument with himself, and the image he takes is, if successful, a distillation of every theory, and contradiction, and conflicting thought he may have had, all captured in a frame. But in Soth's blog, one actually sees this argument in words-it's a wonderful diary of engagement, and a sort of intimacy of thought that the Materialist feels lucky, every day, to read.

Tokyo 101

Worth the 16-hour flight Photo: Marumiya Tofu

In a few hours (two, actually), the Materialist is off for her annual November trip to Tokyo. November because, with its dramatic crimson leaves, the Materialist thinks of it as one of the country's signature seasons--the other being spring, with its pale, cottony pink blooms of cherry blossoms--and Tokyo because...well, so many reasons, which the Materialist will doubtless bloviate about endlessly upon her triumphant return. For now, she'll just say that it's impossible to be interested in architecture, and art, and design, and food, and not love, or at the very least admire, Japan, where such things have assumed a ritual and sort of worship befitting a secular religion.

However, for all this, Japan has relatively few tourists (in 2004, the country received only 6.7 million international visitors, a remarkably small figure when you consider that New York City alone welcomed 6.6 million in 2005), and the Materialist is always trying to get her friends who're designers and artists to go experience it for themselves.

The ultimate guidebook

Long ago, the Materialist worked at a magazine with a very talented and kind creative director who used to let her come into his office after hours and rifle through his collection of art books. Among them was a slim yellow bar of a book called Feedback (pictured at left), which remains, to this day, the best guidebook the Materialist has ever encountered.

Feedback is a publication by the uber-design firm Pentagram, who contacted everyone in their orbit--designers, artists, writers, photographers, stylists, illustrators, producers, and architects, from Stockholm, New York, Tehran, Tokyo, Singapore, Hong Kong, Paris, Budapest, Munich, London: really, anyone anywhere with an interest in design--and solicited their suggestions for their favorite restaurants, hotels, shops, parks, and sights in their favorite cities around the world. The volume, which is updated once every few years or so, is sent to the firm's friends and clients, and is filled with wonderful discoveries, lively, intimate writing, and (for design junkies, anyway) a thrilling peek into how the creative half lives and travels. Through it, you learn about famed product designer Constantin Boym's favorite Moscow restaurant, Apshu (an "enchanted space, a romantic ruin of an imaginary apartment") and artist Maira Kalman's favorite spot in Tel Aviv, the Bauhaus Center ("the best time to visit Tel Aviv is in the spring, before it gets too hot").

Nobody's business but the Turks' (Istanbul, Part 3)

"Take a raincoat," said Esin, the day before the Materialist's departure. "October is rainy in Istanbul. And chilly. In fact, it'll probably be pretty bleak." She sounded and looked quite cheerful at the prospect, as if the gloominess the Materialist would inevitably encounter while on vacation would be somehow a fulfillment of all of her hometown's best worst qualities.

The Materialist, who very much likes and respects Esin, nevertheless took this with a grain of salt. Esin is, after all, a photo editor at a travel magazine, and Turkish, and is therefore given to both pessimism (especially about the weather) and hyper-preparedness, though the Materialist will leave her readers to decide which part of her identity is responsible for which attribute.

She decided to leave the raincoat behind.