Liminal

(taken from my notebook-Sept. 09)  

The narrative of this story has already become fractured & blurred by time & distance, alcohol & distraction, by failing memory,  by the little sleep I've had & all the sleep I've missed..
It began with a large bottle of red; split 3 ways between 5. Then 3 of those split too. With nothing better to do, nothing but the night & the city, we took to the streets.

"Let's make this coffee Irish" we joked, and we did. Sat outside a cafe that felt like I shouldnt belong in this city. A lost orphan of cafe culture. Time took steps and steps took time & streets from beneath us, down from Takadanobaba to Shinjuku & on to Yoyogi. The night reveals the city in mysterious ways, my companion revealed more of his history. His Story.
Harajuku soon became Omotesando & Cat Street led us toward Shibuya; by day these areas were crowded, the business end of Tokyo. In the chlorine light of the convenience store we appeared as pale ghosts haunting an empty night. lost souls.
Can we get some service?

Slipping into Shibuya we sought out, once again, the bar that had become a part of our own urban mythology after some half-remembered drunken night summers before. Despite bearing the legend "Too Sweet Ass" in brilliant red neon I recall the place hadnt seemed nearly as provocative as the name suggested once within. Although my companion (also present that fateful summer eve) had sworn he had engaged in discourse with a concubine.
Unbelieveably, we managed to find it.
But they refused to let us in.

Our pretense at some destination or goal momentarily gone we needed a new plan. Trains were hours away on either side of us & so my erstwhile companion suggested we press on to Roppongi & the spider that lurks in the shadow of the Mori Tower.
Our walk had, over the course of the past hour, been transformed it seemed into some kind of quest.

However, somewhere between the disbelief of finding our initial destination, the disappointment of our lack of ingress & the formulation of our new plan Shibuya had spun us round & spit us out on some unfamiliar part of it's periphery. My unfaltering sense of direction faltered, then failed.
& then we became lost.

Moving only forward we could be, should be moving toward Roppongi- we even catch a tantalising glimpse of the famed tower through a thicket of blacked out, onyx buildings only for it to disappear again & forever. It's a mirage, a Siren call that we follow down to drown in this concrete sea.
There are no landmarks anymore, maps are old, yellowed & indecipherable ("How does it feel to be illiterate at 30?"). We flotsam & jetsam on an ocean of night, adrift on the waves of the city. Seeking out some Plutonian shore.
Soon the sky pales; velveteen blue to grey & before we have time to outrun it dawn is upon us.
We are still lost. Time has become slippery & we cant hold onto it. The light is the grey light that inhabits dreams, discomforting & strange. There's no skyline that I recognise. I havent seen a train station in hours. We are in some post-Lynchian suburbia of expensive, sleeping houses,BMW's & Porche's guard driveways. I feel 100,000 miles away from Tokyo.
We have entered the Twilight Zone.

Jpop, in his delirium, asks for directions.

Walking, stumbling, laughing, freaking out. Roppongi is forgotten. Our destination is somewhere, anywhere. Anywhere but this nowhere.

Everything becomes a blur of architecture & I cant believe we 're so lost. I will always keep the vision of my companions face- a touch of insanity in his eyes- as he cackled & asked me or whatever gods might be watching, "where the fuck are we?!"
I couldn't answer him then just as I cant answer him now.

We finally find a Denny's & eat breakfast in silence. It feels comforting despite it's Tarantino pretensions. Everything is almost okay- although night feels like it happened to someone else, even dawn is fading into memory. It's undeniably day. Trains have been running for hours, not that we've seen a station, and we're still lost.
Then, inexplicably, we're in Shibuya again.
We sit at Hachiko & drink a final beer. The clocks say 8:30 but they speak a language I no longer understand.
A train waits to carry me home.

My bed waits to carry me to sleep.

"The what line?"

In all the years I've been in Tokyo I've never heard of it- the Ikegemi Line- but that's where I'm headed. It's a small line that seems like it doesn't belong. And it sneaks out of the city under the cover of darkness.
At first glance, Ikegemi itself seems like a thousand other satellite towns dotted around Tokyo. only smaller & with less invading skyline. Or so it seemed.
I'm here to meet M. It's been too long. Too long since we've been face to face over a couple of beers- something the ersatz experience of ambient awareness could never compete with.
Those same few beers later we head out to restock & for M to reveal to me the secrets of Ikegemi-

A hundred thousand stairs or so it seems & I'm glad I'm already drunk- but it was well worth it. The temple seems big & given such room to breathe that you just don't find in the claustrophobic confines of the city. The pagoda disappeared into the darkness & we found our way to the top of a nearby viewing tower to take in everything from Yokohama to Tokyo- a constellation of sodium-lights & neon scattered beneath & beyond us.

(Thanks to M. for the foto)

It's one of those great, quiet moments where just for a second everything else is forgotten; the stray dogs of your worries cease their incessant barking & watch with you.

And then the police arrived.

Okay so the tower IS off limits at 3 a.m. Surprisingly.
We act dumb- although I'm not acting & M's native tongue works better than mine. A few verbal wrists slaps & some apologies should be enough but the guy decides to go ahead & search us too (can they do that?) but to no avail. We are sent on our way.

It's been a good night- the impromptu ones usually are.
I needed this. I think maybe M did too. It's been a long week, maybe more. So I'll take the 5 hours sleep & the hangover & the rolling into work in yesterdays clothes because this is the kind of thing that makes the rest of the week, maybe more, easier to bear.

Marching Bands of Monday Nights (Nov 2009)

A random Monday in November, a random route around the city. We walk & talk as we always do, our autopilot instructed by both a sense & an aversion to the familiar. We walk backwards into Shibuya & before the noise & the neon we find music & marching. It's a parade for who knows what. Technicolour uniforms, majorettes & twirling battons.
It's things like this; these wonderful random, meaningless yet meaningful idiosyncrasies that make me remember why I love Tokyo.
The band eventually passes into the night. It leaves behind no memory of it's tune only the warm afterglow of some bit of magic. Smiling, we press on into the noise & the neon that awaits. 

What's in a name?

There was once a blog that garnered some favourable reviews & keen readers but it has long since been abandoned, become derelict, crumbled & decayed until it was swallowed up once more by the wilderness of the internet.
Since disconnecting my Facebook account (a liberating experience that may well be undone by the creation of this site) I decided to pursue a new avenue for somewhere to display my thoughts, feelings & memories as laid out in words & pictures...
The title-Postcards from yesterday was a term I came up with about a year ago. Maybe more (time is lapping me now). The idea was, & still is, to put together the photos I've taken over the years into some kind of book.
I have no pretentious of making a living as a photographer- my photos are just another medium in which I record the world around me & my place in it.  Just as a long-awaited letter reveals to us the thoughts & feelings of the writer, spilled out in ink in their own unique hand, on paper that they themselves once held, we get a glimpse into where they were or still remain.

My photographs are my own way of keeping in touch with my future self; etched out in light & memory they are my own postcards from yesterday...