September 28th, 2003
Life in the suburbs
There is a really good piece by Future Sound of London that captures almost perfectly the way I feel right now. “Domain” is two minutes and fourty-seven seconds long, which I am not sure is a blessing or a curse, for every time that it ends, I am half-wishing it went on longer and I want to loop it, but part of me feels deeply satisfied, as if it served its purpose in full, and we are each complete in having experienced it together. Regardless, it fits a certain kind of mood at a certain kind of time, and that time is now.
My apartment in Sendagaya is fairly close to the business district in Yoyogi, giants like Glaxo Smith Kline and See’s Planning are dark, quiet giants for most of the hours that I am home, so an open wind brings no company to my ears other than the rare cheer of a victorious soccer crowd at the national stadium about a mile to the east.
However, lying in bed here in Kawasaki, I am blessed with a curtain of bubbling warmth from my fellow Tokyoites nearby: children laugh and run down narrow alleys, a car starts in the lot below and meets others in a dull sea of whooshes several streets away. The trains come regularly, and their gentle clacking reminds me of time spent by my window at Lambeth, or the occasional freight deep in the woods behind my grandmother’s backyard.
These are the sounds of suburbia, a place I’ve been away from for too long; buried in stuffy, dimly lit study rooms, or under the weakening fluorescent flicker of the sticky mocap lab. I grew up like most Americans on the outskirts of a city pushing 50,000; the base of a mountain surrounded by cow pastures and horse farms. As a child, some of the most exciting events for the city included visiting The Golden Mile and seeing what sorts of Christmas decorations were up on the outside of Eyerly’s department store.
I don’t think that I begrudge living in the center of a grey slate commercial metropolis, it’s location is prime and not completely without charm. I think as an artist I should like to move as a stray dog, drifting from borough to borough with sporadic pockets of consistency, sampling with vigor each welcome house’s flavors and aromas.
