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City Memories
OCTOBER 25, 2000

Eating Out
OCTOBER 27, 2000

In The Rain
OCTOBER 28, 2000

Art and Life
OCTOBER 31, 2000

Millenium Thoughts
NOVEMBER 7, 2000

I have been fortunate over the years to come to know many places in the world well enough to feel comfortable getting around them all on my own.  The Upper West Side of New York City, for instance, has become a delightful place to stay when we are in the Big Apple for whatever reason.  Chicago, San Francisco, Boston also fall into this category -- along with Kyoto and Tokyo in Japan.  I would also count Goslar (Germany) and Hilton Head Island as well among these "comfortable cultural mindscapes", although these latter two are far from urban.

Yesterday I spent much of the afternoon wandering around one of my favorite urban neighborhoods, the Third Avenue Promenade area in Santa Monica near Los Angeles. 

Over the past several years I have been in Los Angeles on four occasions and, during each visit, I have been drawn to this beach town as one of the best outdoor spaces in the city. 

The Pacific Ocean is the big draw, of course, but the shopping ain't bad either!  And the general quintessential LA ambiance is very easy to take -- I can understand readily just why, despite all the traffic, mudslides and fires plus the threat of earthquakes, so many folks have chosen to squeeze into this one very special West Coast city.

Both Kyoto and Tokyo produce similar good vibes within my list of global urban mindscapes.  In each city I know where to go and how to get there by public transportation (bus and subway in Kyoto; always by subway in Tokyo).  I have a mental list of favorite restaurants and shops I like to visit each time I am either city.  And I know where to look to find out about the shows in town or the special events coming up or the big festival on the calendar.  I know, too, what the best time of year is to visit -- clearly, in the case of Japan, it's during the Autumn -- which lasts from early October clear through November.

Yet familiarity doesn't ever allow complacency.  Even on the bus ride into Kyoto from Kansai International Airport in Osaka this evening I noticed changes in the city from my last visit just a year ago. 

There are new fiberglass noise pollution barriers everywhere; the last vestiges of a private rail line linking Kyoto and nearby Otsu are fast disappearing (replaced by a subway in operation just over a year now).  There is also a huge new shopping - entertainment block that has gone up on the outskirts of the city, the appearance of which just blew me away!

I guess the more things acquire stature in the realms of memory, the more vulnerable they seem, in our contemporary day and age, to being swept away altogether by that which future generations will look back on with their own brand of nostalgia. 

I'm currently reading a novel by the Korean-American author Chang-rae Lee entitled A Gesture Life. In it a Japanese immigrant looks back over his life in a small American town, at one point remarking: "Of course, when you read something like a story, you can find yourself thinking too long about all sorts of ideas, which usually complicate rather than settle the questions at hand." Tell me about it! One of things these trips do for me is to provoke lots of thinking about lots of things.

Later the protagonist in A Gesture Life thinks: "In fact a man like me should be craving every last bit and tatter of his memory. He should consider the character of all his times whether pleasurable or tragic or sad. He should at last appreciate the serendipity and circumstance and ironical mien of events, and their often necessary befalling. He should, some god willing, take firm hold of all these and call himself among the fortunate, that he should have survived such riches of experience, and consider himself made over again for it, gently refitted for his stroll to the edge."

I suppose "city memories" fall into the same category -- the more they come festooned with memory, the more vulnerable they appear.  And yet, taken together, they become an important part of the whole of one's existence, whether encountered afresh with each visit, swept away by the onrush of the new or coming to one's attention for the very first time.

As some historians of Japan have remarked, the only constant in life often seems to be that of change itself. Coming to terms with that certainty is perhaps what Life is all about.

Otherwise we risk the alternative (again in Chang-rae Lee's words): "in fact I feel I have not really been living anywhere or anytime, not for the future and not in the past and not at all of-the-moment, but rather in the lonely dream of an oblivion, the nothing-of-nothing drift from one pulse beat to the next, which is really the most bloodless marking out, automatic and involuntary."

Let the adventure begin!