Jester With the Fife

Move hotels today.  A client had paid for a few nights at one place and now I'm on my own.   I have visited the Palace Hotel on Market Street many times but never properly stayed here.  The atrium is extraordinary, evoking an America, newly continental.   I stared for a while and considered the tempered, greens and yellows of the glass stains and imagined horses riding up in late nineteenth century San Francisco, just before the quake. 

There’s a meeting this morning and it is with a Japanese company contact.  Later we go through a rather invasive security session to gain admittance.  Inside now, the person is speaking English in a Japanese way: earnestly, ponderous.  Soon I feel like Max, sent upstairs without any dinner.  The room started to feel Japanese, in that way that only Japanese office rooms can, waxing mildly upbeat in antiseptic simplicity.  I considered the parking lot outside, in the rain.  An achingly Japanese, rainy parking lot it now seemed with shrubs manicured the way tortured greenery only looks, in suburban Tokyo.  And so it remained until we stepped out into what was most assuredly Santa Clara.  

Later, back in the Palace, we head to the Pied Piper, which reveals itself to be named after the painting behind the bar.  I knew this.  I’ve been here before.  Someone has explained it all to me before.  The painting of the jester with the fife, breathes like an old master.  It this an original?  A nostalgic re-rendering?  Or just outstanding and inspired lighting on a fine reproduction?   I ask one waitress and then another.  "Ask the concierge."  Later I do, but he isn't sure either.  

(No one at the Palace could help me with the history of the painting, despite a few inquires.  Maxfield Parish was commissioned to do the painting in 1909 for the hotel's reopening for the handsome sum of $6,000.00.  My mother always had a copy of his famous illustration, "The Dinky Bird" in her room, and now I know who the artist was. Now I know that the blue that exhaled like a Titian, is properly referred to as "Parish Blue", for the glazing technique that he invented to animate it so.)

We sit and talk with the painting over to above the bar, across the crowded floor.  I'm distracted though and cannot ignore the painting any more than the children can ignore the piper.  It's alive.  My friend breaks the spell and comments, no doubt correctly, that this would have been nothing but middle aged bankers a decade ago and how the city has rewritten itself.  Reluctantly, then, we acknowledge our own age.  

Thursday, 03/01/18