We wandered around Tokyo yesterday. This little creature is an ad for a store called something like hysteric.
Stopped in at some tea shops; the deal is you get powdered green tea whisked to a foam in hot water, just a few ounces, kind of a super version of tea, you get a good heavy hit. With it I got a sweet bean cake, they came in different colors, I went for green and purple
Always admiring the octopi in the market. Tentacle frenzy.
They make all these long vegetables like cukes, eggplants and daikon radishes into pickles by setting them in this salty muddy bean paste and massaging them all day long.
This was in the garden of Kawai Kanjiro. The zen thing. That rock no means there by accident. Harmony. I once heard a good way to start learning sculpture is to try to make a sphere.
Two guys were playing music for a radio station on a side street, a guitar and a conga drum. The streets were mad crowded with shoppers Sunday afternoon. Nice to sit on the curb watching the guitarist.
Everyone layering onto each other, a human collage.
We saw a weak museum show in Gion, the best thing was a maple growing up to an elliptical hole. Kind of a saucerian effect here. The maples haven’t turned red yet, which will be a big deal.
I saw a Shinto shrine with a robot inside a glass case. A regular Unimation arm robot like you see on a factory assembly line. But they’d dressed it up like a Shinto priest or demon, with a robe and a face. This combo seems quite Japanese.
The robot was moving all the time, turning his head, like the puppets in “Kukla, Fran, and Ollie,” nosing at a toy mouse that he had. And if you put in 200 yen, the robot fetches a paper fortune and drops it in a chute to slide out to your hand (you can always buy fortuens at temples.)
The utility poles are really overloaded with wires here. I think in the U.S. we put most of them underground.
Great patterns of the wires against the sky, dig that helix.
Nice walking around with a camera when the right shot jumps out.
A store looking like a face…
Another idol in the form of a rock with an apron! And a face drawn on with magic marker. Littler offerings of food in the bowls. The crow is the priest here, or the verger, inky, mangy, ideogrammatic. How would he get along with one of Bruegel’s crows? Peck!
October 15th, 2007 at 11:19 am
Ah, matcha! Foamy seaweedy green tea buzz. There’s a Koots teashop near where I work, and that’s my afternoon addiction.
October 16th, 2007 at 6:24 am
In Japan, green tea seems always “greener” for some reason…. and is the originator of “Hojicha” (see wikipedia….) The tea company “Yama-Moto-Yama” exported to all the Japanese markets here in the west and all over the world actually seals every individual tea bag in aluminum foil…. !!
October 17th, 2007 at 9:20 am
Rudy, you are one sexy writer. I’m in the middle of Postsingular and I love it, as usual. My favorite book of yours of all time is still White Light… it was the first one of yours I’d read and it blew the top off my head. Can’t wait for the next one!
October 19th, 2007 at 7:03 am
By the way, that picture of you and Hysteric freaks me out every time I look at it. She makes me think of those toons in Frek and the Elixir. Very Rucker.