A place to call your own
Jul. 25th, 2004 11:12 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusThis summer in Japan I'm doing a kind of 'stay a week here, stay a week there' thing. In exchange for bottles of duty free Veuve Cliquot and reciprocal invitations to stay with me in Berlin when they're in Europe, friends and acquaintances here are letting me pad crash and pad sit.
I want to thank M and A for letting me stay at their places so far. A has taken off for Arizona to do a hypnotherapy course, so his brand new place in Ebisu is empty. It's the pad-sit from heaven. With M last week it was more of a pad crash; she was there during my stay, and we had to negotiate the delicate matter of making our lives and styles fit. Like all crashes, pad crashes have their share of breakage and injury. In this case, shifting and ambiguous information from another friend about when I could move in made a few days stretch into what felt like a very long week, a sort of flexi-week. I was constantly on the point of leaving, only to ask to stay just another day. M (half-American, half-Japanese) was outwardly serene, but I began to feel intensely guilty, and she must have been longing to get her life back. Small style incompatibilities began to assume undue weight. My thing is to get up at about 6am and write or surf. M's is to lie in late. So I'd tiptoe around early in the morning, drinking chai and trying not to wake her up. DJing at her party, I played a France Culture horspiel by Julien Loquet and Chloe Delaume. M waited patiently until all 90 minutes of the sound art piece had finished -- and all her friends had gone home -- then put on all her favourite old Nick Cave records. Something tells me she was secretly weeping as they played.
In between my difficult flexi-week at M's place and my current blissful pad-sit between two Ebisu graveyards here at A's, I had a Saturday night in hell. After drinks with some friends (including Jean Snow and Audrey from OK Fred magazine) at Pause Cafe in Ikebukuro, I asked if anyone had a sofa. (A had told me he might be using his apartment on the way to the airport, so I wasn't due to move in until the following morning.) This being Tokyo, nobody had an inch of free space (or, in the case of the girls, it seemed inapppropriate to share a two tatami studio with a Scotsman of somewhat ill repute). Fine, I'd stay in a capsule hotel. I've never actually stayed in one of these 'sleep mortuaries', and welcomed the chance. But R, southern hospitality and impressive connectedness to the fore, assured me he had the matter in hand. Although it was already past midnight, he'd find a friend or a friend of a friend willing to put me up. He whipped out his keitai and began making calls. No, really, I kept saying, the capsule hotel would be fine... But R insisted, and succeeded in locating a willing ex-girlfriend in Meguro. After a long walk and a wait at a closed subway station, we met her. I was tired, and would have willingly curled up in some mosquito-infested park. But there was no stopping this scenario, heavily-laden with obligations and social niceties. A trip to the nearest beer machine was in order, and of course I paid for libations for my friend and hostess. While they drank Asahi beer and renewed their acquaintance, I had a long hot bath. I timed it in the reasonable expectation that after thirty minutes or so R would make his excuses and leave us to sleep in the tiny space. It was already nearly 2am. But R and his ex watched excruciating Japanese comedy variety shows for two hours, chatting away impenetrably in Japanese, while I, with a pillow over my head and a mounting sense of personal injury, tried to sleep. Well, R never left. Talking turned into snoring. I found some blue-tac in a tube and stuffed it into my ears. As I crept away in the early morning, my eyes baggy behind sunglasses, the TV was still on, the volume still up, the endless comedy variety shows still, apparently, hilarious.
There's nothing like peripatesis to remind you that basic psychological well-being is all tied up with having a place to call your own -- a place where you can sleep whenever you like, play your own music, hide, avoid people. A place you can fill with your own personal culture and your own personal habits, where you can structure time as you see fit, without inconveniencing anyone or having to feel guilty. As I unpack my suitcase at A's, the nightmare of the night before only makes me feel better about the week ahead. This pristine, central apartment is a refuge, and a fresh start. The feeling I get here evokes my ten year old self. I'd fly to Athens for holidays from boarding school in Edinburgh, exchanging a zero-privacy dormitory for my own little box room with a view over Narkissou, a street lined with orange trees. My first gesture, then, was a graphic one: I tacked up on the wall a calendar I'd found in an Italian fashion magazine. At A's place in Ebisu I achieve the same simple sense of satisfying symbolic occupation by ranging printed matter along the floor, trying to make a new look from the limited selection of clothes in my case, and filling the empty apartment with austere and delicate music: Mamoru Fujieda's lovely 'Patterns of Plants'. It's a wonderful thing to have a place to call your own, even for a week.
I want to thank M and A for letting me stay at their places so far. A has taken off for Arizona to do a hypnotherapy course, so his brand new place in Ebisu is empty. It's the pad-sit from heaven. With M last week it was more of a pad crash; she was there during my stay, and we had to negotiate the delicate matter of making our lives and styles fit. Like all crashes, pad crashes have their share of breakage and injury. In this case, shifting and ambiguous information from another friend about when I could move in made a few days stretch into what felt like a very long week, a sort of flexi-week. I was constantly on the point of leaving, only to ask to stay just another day. M (half-American, half-Japanese) was outwardly serene, but I began to feel intensely guilty, and she must have been longing to get her life back. Small style incompatibilities began to assume undue weight. My thing is to get up at about 6am and write or surf. M's is to lie in late. So I'd tiptoe around early in the morning, drinking chai and trying not to wake her up. DJing at her party, I played a France Culture horspiel by Julien Loquet and Chloe Delaume. M waited patiently until all 90 minutes of the sound art piece had finished -- and all her friends had gone home -- then put on all her favourite old Nick Cave records. Something tells me she was secretly weeping as they played.
In between my difficult flexi-week at M's place and my current blissful pad-sit between two Ebisu graveyards here at A's, I had a Saturday night in hell. After drinks with some friends (including Jean Snow and Audrey from OK Fred magazine) at Pause Cafe in Ikebukuro, I asked if anyone had a sofa. (A had told me he might be using his apartment on the way to the airport, so I wasn't due to move in until the following morning.) This being Tokyo, nobody had an inch of free space (or, in the case of the girls, it seemed inapppropriate to share a two tatami studio with a Scotsman of somewhat ill repute). Fine, I'd stay in a capsule hotel. I've never actually stayed in one of these 'sleep mortuaries', and welcomed the chance. But R, southern hospitality and impressive connectedness to the fore, assured me he had the matter in hand. Although it was already past midnight, he'd find a friend or a friend of a friend willing to put me up. He whipped out his keitai and began making calls. No, really, I kept saying, the capsule hotel would be fine... But R insisted, and succeeded in locating a willing ex-girlfriend in Meguro. After a long walk and a wait at a closed subway station, we met her. I was tired, and would have willingly curled up in some mosquito-infested park. But there was no stopping this scenario, heavily-laden with obligations and social niceties. A trip to the nearest beer machine was in order, and of course I paid for libations for my friend and hostess. While they drank Asahi beer and renewed their acquaintance, I had a long hot bath. I timed it in the reasonable expectation that after thirty minutes or so R would make his excuses and leave us to sleep in the tiny space. It was already nearly 2am. But R and his ex watched excruciating Japanese comedy variety shows for two hours, chatting away impenetrably in Japanese, while I, with a pillow over my head and a mounting sense of personal injury, tried to sleep. Well, R never left. Talking turned into snoring. I found some blue-tac in a tube and stuffed it into my ears. As I crept away in the early morning, my eyes baggy behind sunglasses, the TV was still on, the volume still up, the endless comedy variety shows still, apparently, hilarious.
There's nothing like peripatesis to remind you that basic psychological well-being is all tied up with having a place to call your own -- a place where you can sleep whenever you like, play your own music, hide, avoid people. A place you can fill with your own personal culture and your own personal habits, where you can structure time as you see fit, without inconveniencing anyone or having to feel guilty. As I unpack my suitcase at A's, the nightmare of the night before only makes me feel better about the week ahead. This pristine, central apartment is a refuge, and a fresh start. The feeling I get here evokes my ten year old self. I'd fly to Athens for holidays from boarding school in Edinburgh, exchanging a zero-privacy dormitory for my own little box room with a view over Narkissou, a street lined with orange trees. My first gesture, then, was a graphic one: I tacked up on the wall a calendar I'd found in an Italian fashion magazine. At A's place in Ebisu I achieve the same simple sense of satisfying symbolic occupation by ranging printed matter along the floor, trying to make a new look from the limited selection of clothes in my case, and filling the empty apartment with austere and delicate music: Mamoru Fujieda's lovely 'Patterns of Plants'. It's a wonderful thing to have a place to call your own, even for a week.
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Date: 2004-07-26 04:36 am (UTC)