Listics

Holiday Over Doings

I had lunch this afternoon with Tom Shugart! Tom looks well and is planning some serious tech marketing work. We had a light meal at E O, a pan-Asian restaurant near the hotel. A satay platter with chicken, salmon, beef, and portabella mushrooms - all on skewers convenient for dipping in the tasty peanut sauce, a sweet soy concoction, and/or a savory garlic gravy. Accompanying the satay we had naan - fresh baked flat bread with a cucumber sauce for dipping, and bok choy that had been steamed and rolled in flax oil. This is not the source of my indigestion.

No, my indigestion flared up last night after three days in a row of serious high-end dinners…

Day 1 - 12/23: Farallon — where’s the beef? On my plate… I decided to bolster the failing US beef industry, threw fear BSE to the winds and tied into a filet that was served with a delicious merlot sauce and chestnut and mushroom “stuffing” on the side. We started with a demitasse of cauliflower cream soup and an assortment of three kinds of oysters. We finished with an assortment of desserts. Mine was a quince and pear crisp, all buttery and brown sugar.

Day 2 - 12/24: The Fairmont — coming out of Grace Cathedral with all of Nob Hill at our feet, we thought dinner at the Fairmont might be nice. We had scallops for an appetizer. They came with a cute little bouquet of lettuces and tiny mushrooms held vertical in a wrap of thin cucumber slice. I continued my support of the American beef industry with a filet mignon, prepared and served with the traditional bacon wrap. Roasted root vegetables were served on the side and I finished up with a delicate, buttery, plum pastry for dessert.

Day 3- 12/25: The 2:30 seating at the Ritz Carlton Terrace room — light jazzy piano and string bass in the background occasionally dropping into pop carols to remind us of the season, but also folding out into old Brubeck originals and jazzed or bluesy renditions of old pop standards. We started with an amuse bouche, a demitasse of champagne consomme with chestnuts and diced black forest ham followed by an appetizer. My appetizer was the foie gras with gewurztraminer gele. Beth returned to scallops, this time served in a citrus soup. Beth’s entree was the “duck duet.” Patriot to the end, i continued my support of America’s feed lots by ordering the roast rib-eye. This was a medium rare serving of the best part of a standing rib roast, accompanied by small leaves of romaine lettuce providing troughs for a creamy horseradish garnish. Roast potatoes and a tiny roasted onion offset the beef. (Maybe it was that onion that did me in later…). For dessert I had a “mont blanc” meringue with whipped cream and thin panes of dark chocolate stuck in the top to give the whole a modern sculpted look. It was early enough in the day that I risked finishing Beth’s chocolate tart for her along with two cups of cafe filtre prepared at the table in a “French press.”

About two hours later I was suffering. I think it was that onion. Fortunately I recovered in plenty of time for lunch today with Tom Shugart at EO and home cooking at our friends’ in Oakland tonight.

Day 4 - 12/26: The fourth remarkable dinner in a row! Tonight it was a roast pork tenderloin rolled in pepper and cooled with a tangy fruit salsa. Red whipped potatoes and a mesclun salad with a delicate goat cheesey dressing rounded out the meal and the wonderful conversation. For dessert, decaf and home baked frosted ginger cookies.

I realized as I finished this little remembrance that I didn’t mention any of the breads, the buns, the brioche, or the baguettes that accompanied these fine meals - nor the sweet butter and olive oil that came with them. Trust me… they were all among the Bay Area’s better baked goods, but I’m too tired to sort them all out right now. I’m just glad that last night’s dyspeptic moments passed off so easily… maybe it was third cup of cafe filtre.

Hey! Tomorrow is my birthday!

Food for the Soul

On the evening of the 24th we visited Grace Cathedral, not for the midnight mass which would have required more stamina than either of us could muster, but rather for the 5pm “Festival of Lessons and Carols.”

Okay. It’s a cathedral, so what might one expect? There was a Bishop, William Swing, and he was accompanied everywhere by a couple of guys carrying phallic sceptors or something. And there was a “dean,” Alan Jones, who also happens to be the “Canon (honoris causa)” of the Cathedral of Our Lady of Chartres. We heard lessons read by Albert Lander (the Verger) and by Martin Uden, (HM Consul General) — no separation of church and state for the Brits it seems… and of course Grace Cathedral is a royalist beachhead in San Francisco. …heavy sigh… I think I would have preferred the Interregnum, but alas the Stuart King, Charles the second was restored to the throne and it’s been downhill ever since, really.

But I expected the pomp of the high church. The robes, the vestments, the towering stone and concrete interiors, the stations of the cross and all the other proto-papist nonsense - the pictures of Christ as a baby in his mom’s arms, and the hangings of Christ as a grown man, come to his demise on a cross… this stuff goes with Christianity like saffron robes and bronze statues go with Buddhism. You buy the ticket, you take the ride.

No, it wasn’t the hyper-symbology or the hierarchical enthusiasm of the boys in their vestments that bothered me. It was the music. The men and boys choir was workmanlike in their presentation and they treated us to some arrangements that we don’t often hear. But the hymns and the carols that were selected for the congregation to sing were insipid, particularly so the arrangements for some familiar carols that we were expected to pick our way through when the Mendelsohn and Haydn arrangements for the same songs were struggling in our consciousness to break free. Admittedly, the music director picked some lovely German and Austrian carols for the choir to sing. I think that was a sort of bow to the disappointment he knew we’d feel over being required to pick our way through Forest Green’s uninteresting version of “O Little Town of Bethlehem.”

The disappointing music began and ended with the uninspired organist. Beth’s a soprano so she gets to sing the melody for the most part. The organist picked that single melodic thread on every piece of music he accompanied, lending no weight, no harmonic support to those of us not blessed with the soprano part. The organist, the choir and the congregation are challenged by the acoustics of the cathedral. By the time the sound waves of the first measure are bouncing off the concrete vaulted ceilings in the rear, we are practically done with the first verse. The organist’s solutrionb was to slow it all down to a dirge-like meter. “God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen” has a lot in common “The Volga Boatmen” at this pace.

Matt, Beth, and Ben… together again! And what do I care if Ben wears a silver ring on the impudent digit? It could be worse. It could be one of those decorative mucus emulations that hang from the pierced septums of so many young people these days. Harrumph…

We miss all the fun… the Santa Con happened on Saturday, a day before we arrived. On the other hand, we do eat good food! The name of the Dim Sum restaurant is Ton Kiang.

We have rezzies at Farallon for tonight. Tomorrow carols and services at Grace Cathedral. Then on the 25th walking on the beach and some fancy dinner.

Beth and I are heavy into the holidays. We usually have a big tree, an abundance of festively wrapped gifts, carols playing all morning as we eat stollen she has baked for the occasion… we are happiest when we have the boys with us too. This year the boys are long since men and our Quakerism is shaking my observance of some of those family traditions. Matt is coming home to California from Honduras. His brother is here too. We’ll be able to gather together this year, but the hotel room holiday is unique in our experience.

Historically, Friends haven’t been interested in elevating one day over another during the year. On the other hand, there’s no serious proscription against it. None of the people in our meeting care one way or another about whether or not we celebrate on the 25th. All of them would look askance if we showed up at meeting in a HummVee. Here are some thoughts about Quakers’ thoughts about Christmas.

Well, we’re off to see the Degas sculptures at the Palace of the Legion of Honor. It was closed yesterday as we trekked past. Just as well, since our feet were starting to fall off at that point. the next few days promise to be drizzly and dark. Perfect museum weather.

Today I met Lulu, a sweet kitty and I failed to take her picture. I can only pleas exhaustion - jet lag - something like that. Maybe I’ll get to snap her before we head out of town. How did my day go otherwise?

Light breakfast, aq little exercise, then out into the holiday streets looking for poinsettias. Found mistletoe, holly branches, and cedar boughs on our first pass through the downtown flower kiosks. Mourned the passing of Podesta-Baldocchi. Back to the room to decorate, beth making fanciful and creative use of the bathroom wastebasket to contain the major ah-rahnj-a-mont. We were hungry and we remembered that San Francisco is home to…

Great food… we picked up our dear friend and headed out to the high numbered avenues on geary and had the best dim sum I’ve ever had. Madison is a dim sum free zone, so it’s always a treat to visit the City and have the little plates of dumplings (today there was an emphasis on pork and/or shrimp) and exotic veggies (snow pea greens?! shaved asparagus! pork stuffed mushrooms…). We were served the best pork bow I’ve ever had. The steamed bun was light and sweet and the chef had stuffed it with more barbequed pork than I’m used to seeing in three or four of these when they’re served elsewhere. Jasmine tea… dozens of delicacies we were too few and too full to select. The only item I consciously avoided was the chicken feet. I may die without ever knowing how these are prepared or how they taste. The name of the restaurant escapes me, but when it surfaces I’ll pass it on. These dim sum are the best.

Then we walked and walked, from the east end of the Lincoln Park golf course around 28th avenue out to the Cliff House along the cliffs below the VA hospital. Walked back along the high road above the cliffs stopping at the Palace of the Legion of Honor for a few snapshots of the Rodin in the courtyard. The museum is closed Mondays. We paused too for somber reflection at the George Segal sculpture placed as a holocaust memorial.

Returning to the car, we drove down through the Presidio to Crissy Field. We learned that George Lucas is doing something wonderful at the old headquarters, a new ILM shop of some kind. At Crissy Field we acknowledged the generosity of Walter Haas who funded the major part of the salt marsh restoration project that is underway. I felt a little politically incorrect to be wearing Wrangler jeans here in Levi-land.

Tonight I had a cadillac Burger and garlic fries at Lori’s Diner in the Tenderloin.

Things change. Thomas Wolfe wasn’t necessarily right of course. Late this afternoon we walked up Kearney, glimpsed the banker’s heart at the California intersection, marveled over the wonderful new-to-us Alioto law offices on the Columbus intersection, passed the boarded up Belli office… some kind of construction going on there, pressed our noses against the antique store windows in the “decorator district,” peeked up Gold Street toward a bar call “Bix” (any relation I wonder?), reminisced about the high tone gay bar that occupied that location before the Gay Pride revolution — the culture was as out as anybody wanted to be, but as closeted as was prudent for some of those men — movers and shakers of San Francisco society who preferred their privacy, I guess — times were less open, less “tolerant,” (fuck you Frank, he’d say… who’s tolerating whom?), less “out” then, Lucius… and don’t pretend you weren’t marginalized by the very culture you led.

Walking on we crossed Broadway at Sansome and looking east saw the wonderful view of the bay without the Embarcadero freeway. That Broadway on-ramp was a fixture in my San Francisco experience, the quick hop out of North Beach and across the Bay Bridge. The neighborhood is so much nicer without it.

Henry Chung’s Hunan restaurant beckoned… we shared harvest pork, and dry sauteed green beans after an appetizer of green onion pancakes. Jasmine tea and a pitcher of ice water helped cool things off a little. Twenty years ago Hunan was one of those places we’d go with large groups for hot food, intoxicating drinks, and the conversation that went with all that. It hasn’t changed… it really hasn’t changed.

Walked up Broadway to Grant. Looked up as we passed the Condor, thought fleetingly of Carol Doda who made the topless scene famous and went on to greater fame as the sultry announcette for San Jose’s TV channel (”the perfect”) 36. We walked up Grant to Washington, down to Washington Square and back down Columbus toward Stockton. Stopped at a bakery for a cannoli, then headed down Stockton to Broadway, cut left past a Chinese grocery that thirty years ago was an outlet for goods from mainland China … enamel pins with red star designs and gold embossed portraits of the Chairman, Socialist Realism posters of heroic Chinese workers (my favorite was a young woman on a telephone pole working as a storm raged around her)… that kind of thing… things have changed a lot since then. We ducked into City Lights for some browsing, reading, shopping… picked Updike’s Seek My Face for Ben, and Jim Sagel’s El Santo Queso and Luis Rodriguez’ La Republica De East L.A. for Matt. We also scored five volumes for ourselves, including Quine’s Quiddities, John Kennedy’s Word Stems, a thin Cliff’s notes kind of volume - 58 pages by Christopher Johnson on Jacques Derrida, The Founding Fish by John McPhee, and Iceland’s Bell by Halldor Laxness. Great last name, Laxness.

Sated, we strolled down Grant through China Town and back to our hotel.

Later - deep fried calamari and an arugula salad with pears and gorgonzola cheese.

A few months ago, Beth and i decided we had passed corpulent and moved on to Porkulent. We dieted, we lost weight — even continued a downward trend over the Thanksgiving weekend. Now it’s another holiday season and we’re on the road and we’re just going to eat. Hope the exercise is sufficient to burn most of the calories… and after the first of the year we’ll go back on the stricter regimen.