Category Archives: cafes

Sipping Coffee on LeCorbusier

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Cassina IXC

There’s a furniture store on the first floor of the building where I work out. They have designer furniture from the greats like LeCorbusier and Mackintosh. It’s like a museum actually. The cool thing about this store is that it has a café inside. So you can sit on $11,000 chairs and eat Vietnamese noodles and sip very strong iced coffee, served by silent black-clad waiters. I never entered before because it looks expensive and well, pretentious. But actually 1,000 yen will get you a very tidy meal, al dente. For directions click here.

There’s the usual pampered young Shibuya housewives with their ignored kids dressed in designer garb. And there are always groups of what looks to me like designers of some sort. They are dressed in dark clothes, wear ironically chunky glasses, and their haircuts are sculpted into well-placed disarray. And they always have at least one open laptop and some very important papers scattered about their tables.

Still, it’s a totally chill atmosphere. It’s never crowded, never noisy. There’s not even any piped-in music. The only sounds are the sounds of self-important chatter and the street noise outside. But it’s all absorbed nicely by the furniture.

I sat on the long counter, soaking in the first pleasant day of autumn. Scribbling in my notebook and then spacing out at the minimalist flower arrangement in front of me.

Recommended Company: your friends in ‘design’ and architecture to smirk at the latest fads.

Suggested Reading: biographies of mid-century modernists.

Likely Activities: sketching perfect curves and concocting self-referential parodies.

Photo from the Cassina website, until I can take a decent picture of the place. Click on the picture for the source.

Blown Back to Ashland: the Windiad no. 4

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praise

The Wind Bag
Aeolus is the wind god, or he controlled the winds anyway. In exchange for stories from Odysseus, Aeolus gave a bag of winds that would help Odysseus find his way back home. Odysseus told mostly stories from the Trojan War, with other tales of fishing trips and crazy relatives in between to pad the mostly uneventful decade of half-heartedly laying siege to Troy. Aeolus wasn’t really into the stories, but he liked to listen to people talk while he cracked open a beer.

The bag of winds was really big, made of blue silk and lined with the feathers of doves and peacocks. Odysseus’s men thought it was treasure that he didn’t want to share, so they opened the bag to see what was inside. The winds were released and the ships got blown back to where they started.

One place I find myself blown back to often is Ashland.

Shakespeareville
Ashland and I go back a long way. Back when I was in high school I first visited my buddy Kevin who had just moved here. For a Southern California boy, my image of Oregon was of log cabins, rednecks, bears and forests. They all certainly exist here, but I also found a town full of artists, musicians, dancers, hippies, America’s largest Shakespeare festival, fresh air, rivers, and a sky full of stars I’d never seen through the haze of Los Angeles.

It was a revelatory vacation. I got to see an alternative to the materialistic, status-loving, car culture of Hollywood. And I questioned everything about the superficial life that I felt I’d been living. Once I returned to LA, I went through more than a decade of navel-gazing, studying religions and philosophies, to try to break through the veil of the illusory, physical world. I read a lot. And pondered over Sartre, Nietzsche, Chuang Tzu, Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, bell hooks and many others.

That was a heavy time. Since them I’ve discovered the meaning of life and I’d like to share it with you. Just send $49.99 to: Universal Secrets, P.O. Box 13, Lagos, Nigeria.

lithia fountain detail

Ramana
If you really want answers to the big questions you want to consult with my long-time friend, Ramana.

We met with her and her husband, Stacy, at a Japanese restaurant called Kobe. Surprisingly the sushi was outstanding, but very California. The delicious rolls had stereotypical names like, Red Dragon and Kamikaze, with sushi ingredients never seen in Japan like avocado and sun-dried tomatoes. When we asked for more shoyu, the waitress had a perplexed look on her face until we said, soy sauce.

Ramana is a dedicated Soto Zen practitioner. She’s the seer in my life story. She’s a combination of spacey mystic and grounded explorer. At various times in her life, she went to a prestigious art school to study film, wandered in the desert as an apprentice shaman, collected lovers in Europe like Starbuck’s city mugs, lived in Buddhist monasteries, wrote erotica.

During one of the many times I’ve crashed at her place, she kept parakeets and lived in a charming house with a sloping floor. Another time she lived in an even cuter house behind the bakery where she worked. Now as a mother and wife, she still has a priestly vibe to her, and her house is like a redwood cathedral.

In short, she’s led a fascinating life. And she’s filled my bag of winds many times over.

Bloomsbury Café
Cafes are the best places to find meaning. One café I get blown back to often, and so I guess is my favorite Ashland café, is Bloomsbury Café. It’s upstairs from the Bloomsbury bookstore. They have a large shady outdoor seating area, a cozy interior with lots of stuffed chairs. Here, I suggest reading children’s books with dark themes, after meeting a friend you haven’t seen since you were a teenager.

sycamore bark

Lithia Park
Nature is also a good place to seek answers. One of my favorite parks in the world is Lithia Park. It’s enormous, stretching for miles it seems, along Lithia Creek, which has natural lithium. Lithium water tastes like rotten eggs and the element is used to treat schizophrenia. So it’s an excellent place to stop hearing the voices in your head. The park has a pond with a pair of swans (though I didn’t see them this time around), a sycamore tree grove, a crumbling white fountain, an amphitheatre, tennis courts, roses, deer, and at one time had monkeys.

Yup, I love Ashland.

World Press Photo 08

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The Exhibit
Finalists of the World Press Photo 08 awards can be seen at the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Photography in Ebisu. While a journalistic award, the judges make it a point to explain that the artists are chosen based on the artistic merits of the photographs and not as representative of important issues. Nevertheless, there are plenty of important issues touched upon.

For instance, the 1st prize series captures activities of US and Afghan soldiers in a backdrop of stunning forested mountains, as well as blurred intimate moments of anguish. There’s a Kurdish women’s rebel/resistance military camp. And the sad stories of violent elections in the Democratic Republic of Congo and Kenya.

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Rue Favart

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ceiling poppies

On the edge of the Ebisu Garden Place is the coolest little café in my neighborhood.  I walked past the Rue Favart for years and was always intrigued by the glimpse of the sumptuous poppies painted on the ceiling. I don’t know why I never went in. It was always on my way back home or to some place. I also liked that there were places I’ve never entered but would like to. What’s more delicious than an unopened present?

Today T and I opened the present and it was indeed delicious. One of my favorite things about Japan is the lunch special. For about a 1,000 yen, almost all restaurants serve a choice of main dishes, and a drink. The lunch specials in Rue Favart, at 1260 yen is a little more than average, but it also includes a salad and dessert. I paid an extra 100 yen for wine. And it includes all you can eat fresh-baked foccacia. The food was quite good. The pumpkin custard was excellent. And the wine appeared to be a nice mellow Bordeaux.

The theme of the café is rustic French, rural Italian. The second floor is casually charming with dark wood, ironic iconic art and weathered leather chairs. The 3rd floor, with plush blue chairs, had a brighter bistro feel.

We got there early for the lunch special around 11:30 and got to sit anywhere. We picked the counter facing the window. It got pretty busy by 12:15. From 3 to 5pm there’s a light meal and dessert set. I imagine there are fewer people then if you want to do some reading or writing.

There’s no elevator and the stairs are steep, so it’s not wheelchair-accessible, but I have seen tables on the first floor and outside on occasion.

two peas and a fork

Other People
The clientele was mostly young office workers, nearly all women, with the usual pockets of housewives and madams that often take over cafes in the afternoons. Claimed by hipsters in the evenings.

Recommended Company
It’s a beautiful place to relax with an old friend who you’ve traveled with, and imagine yourselves stranded in a Provencal village, killing time before the next train arrives.

Recommended Reading
Baudelaire or e.e. cummings.

Notebook Activity
Sketching summer flowers with watercolors.

Directions
From Ebisu Station, take the East Exit and get on the walkway to the Ebisu Garden Place. At the end of the walkway go left along the street. At the end of the block you’ll see it diagonally across the street from the police substation.

St. Mary’s Cathedral

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St. Mary's Cathedral

Japan’s most important architect is the late Kenzo Tange. Previously I wrote about visiting one of his works, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building. And I also wrote about one of his works being featured in an exhibit about architectural photography. I visited this structure, St. Mary’s Cathedral. Built in 1963, the cathedral, which is the seat of the Catholic Church in Japan, is a striking building, gleaming like a futuristic space station. The design is decades ahead of its time, using dramatic vaults that dip in the center. From the sky, you can see the traditional shape of the cross.

let there be light

While the exterior is lined with metal siding, the interior is bare concrete, presaging the current popularity of this look. The cavernous interior hearkens to the echoing spaces of traditional cathedrals. The spine of the vault consists of a long line of skylights. Inside there were numerous modern art elements such as the cubist baptismal.

baptismal

I like this quote that I found by Tange:

Architectural creation is a special form of comprehending reality….This understanding of reality which takes place through architectural creation requires that the anatomy of reality, its substantial and spiritual structure, be grasped as a whole…

— Kenzo Tange

Because the cathedral is far form any train or subway station, there was only a trickle of tourists on the grounds. When I was inside, there was no one. It was eerie. Outside, the bell tower is a sharp white needle that seems to disappear into the sky. It was a nice contrast to the billowy cathedral.

eaves and bell towers

Directions.

To get to the cathedral, take the Yamanote Line to Mejiro statioin. Turn right on the street in front of the station and walk for about 20 minutes. You can take a bus but I prefer walking. On the way I passed Gakushuin University, where the Japanese royal family attends, Tokyo Women’s University and the Kodansha Museum, which was closed on a Wednesday.

hobby horse

Near the cathedral I chanced upon the Humpty Café, which is a small cozy restaurant with lots of interesting objects throughout. The main theme appeared to be children’s books. The only dishes offered were curry. It was ok. The coffee was quite good though. Then across the street from the cathedral was a wholesale nursery and it was fun looking at a lot of very cheap plants, which I didn’t want to buy and carry back.

Other than that, there really isn’t much in the neighborhood. But if you want to see one of Tokyo’s most unique buildings, and experience a rare quiet religious moment, it’s well worth the trek.