I arrived in Tokyo five days ago, on Sunday. Landing in Narita International, on an Aeroflot flight out of Moscow, and hearing the soft polite sounds of Japanese ground control take over, I felt a great sense of relief. As a New Yorker, there is something of home for me in Tokyo. Anna, my Moscow friend, commented how much Narita recalled her experiences of US airports like Washington D.C’s Dulles: clear and efficient, lots of signs in English, brisk politeness and smiles–customer service.

Entering the city in a dream state after a long flight into a future 9 hours ahead of Moscow, and 14 hours ahead of New York, I experienced an immediate calm: the quietness of the voices, the deliberate design of every amenity, the sense that this city “cares” for strangers. I mean, the seats in public toilets (they have free public toilets in Tokyo! Are you listening, New York?) are perfectly warm, and massage your nether regions with accurately aimed sprays of water. Tokyo convinced me to actually sit on a public toilet for the first time in my life: a revelation.

With my hair piled high, and my bright leggings and large sunglasses, I appeared strange, even among the colorful fruits of Harajuku, with their asymmetrical spike haircuts and wild costume clothing. I felt only brief looks on the subway and in the streets, a fleeting sense that I was out of place. Almost in unison the citizens of Tokyo cast their gaze away from me, as part of the perennial politeness, or a sense of cosmopolitan pride, or some combination of the two. They fitted me with a welcome indifference towards strangeness, so familiar to me as a New Yorker, but almost impossible to find in Moscow. This meditative withdrawal of attention fills me with relief, whether or not it indicates a true tolerance of difference or is simply a rote performance of politeness.

Travelling through the underground tunnels and pedestrian bridges connecting multiple train and metro lines, I sense both the crowdedness of the city and the deftness with which people manage the small spaces between each other.

This past April, Machado went back to Shanghai for the first time since 1946, accompanied by her husband, her daughters, and her grandsons. She’d avoided the visit for five decades, thinking it would be “too painful,” that she’d be reminded of the war or, worse, of how all her close family members had either passed on or been scattered around the world without her ever seeing them again. “Tears were running down my face,” she says, when she visited her old apartment in a beautiful Art Deco building fallen to ruin. The Catholic church she’d attended was just a façade; the nave had been gutted and turned into offices for the Communist Party. Still, she loved the life and spirit of the new Shanghai and returned home to Long Island inspired enough to paint a guest room in the theme of what she’d seen and to redo one of her gardens in the Chinese style, complete with manicured dwarf maples and custom-made moon doors. And the pain, well, it didn’t feel like pain, exactly. “In Portuguese you call it ­saudade,” she says. “It means a kind of longing and a love that still remains, that every once in a while when you think about it, it is with nice memories. It’s a missing. The other word in Portuguese that is similar is lembranças. Memories. They’re both beautiful words.”

“I didn’t think of myself as good-looking at all: China Machado’s many beginnings,” by Jada Yuan, New York Magazine, Aug 14, 2011

Sometimes it is wonderful to go for a (moon)walk by yourself through the night city.

“See, if you don’t take money, they can’t tell you what to do. That’s the key to the whole thing”

It’s fashion week in New York, and you know what that means… a lot of walking! I went to see Victor de Souza’s showing of his Fall/Winter 2011-12 collection at Exit Art, in Manhattan’s fashion district. Victor is my downstairs neighbor, an impeccably disheveled man who is always hard at work on Fashion, into all hours of the night. It is hard to believe how, in the death-grip of laziness, I lounge about reading and sleeping in the rooms right above his busy little workshop. I was excited to finally see the finished work, after getting glimpses here as there on visits to the apartment. I was not disappointed. See for yourself:

“Her eyes are so wide open that she seems to be devouring the future.”

Legendary street photographer Bill Cunningham is an observer of subtle shifts in the city’s seasons and moods. On his walks and bike rides around town he takes pictures that together constitute an archive of the ephemeral: style.

In his January 23 dispatch from the streets he discusses the way footwear, in this case the high-heeled ankle boot, can define an era. He points out the 7-year life cycle of the fashion trend, which go hand in hand with shifts in the relationship between ankle-boot-wearing women and their urban environment.

Being one such ankle-boot-wearing New York lady, I appreciate Bill’s sensitivity to the huge difference a shoe makes in posture and movement–in the way I travel through city streets, in my body’s lines of flight. He picks up on the crossed-leg posture that seems to come with the shoes. While I’m not a leg-crosser, the way I stand, my attitude, the way I imagine the potentials in my relationship to other walkers is certainly shaped in no small way by the sort of shoes I wear. One might say that choosing shoes for the day is a way of selecting a mood, a way of approaching the town, and my fellow urbanites.

Style and fashion–the fabrics, cuts, shapes, and the ‘postures’ that come with them are as much archives of urban experience, as any documents down at City Hall. Maybe even more so!

a spectator in the spectacle. more to come

Young bodies navigate the city streets more gracefully than luxury vehicles.