Venue of Celestial Possibility

Back in the atrium of the Palace Hotel.  I walk down the side and try to ignore the same musician who was hear yesterday, playing an electric guitar all by himself in this high-Victorian temple.  I like electric guitar as much as any man but damn if it didn’t seem like someone had invited a guy playing for tips out on the corner into this hallowed space.  How lovely it might have been to hear a big band fill out this space.  Surely, the original architects would have howled in disapproval were they to have heard Billy Eckstine play here in the forties just as much as any solo guitarist.   

I walk in and up the side of the space to the left until I come up to a red roped off area.  Staring up and around at the ceiling, considering the pale, winter, afternoon light only just making it through the stained glass above, the patterns simple and somber,  I realized then why I was so taken with this venue of celestial possibility, as it suddenly feels like a cathedral.  I’m considering it now in this way.  And uncontrollably, my mind moves to the Victorian San Franciscans and imagine them with their brash new money moustaches and the truisms that guided their days in their golden outpost. 

Soon I was in the Uber going over to Oakland again.  It’s 5:00PM here in California and Beijing is waking up for its Saturday morning.  One person and then another reach out on Wechat.  Someone calls, and drops and I call him back and soon we are reviewing a week’s worth of information back and forth in Chinese on the phone.  I hadn’t looked closely when I got in the cab,  as he helped me with my luggage but when I’d finished my fifteen minute chat in Chinese he immediately laughed loudly and asked about my Beijing pronunciation of things.

This young man was from Nanjing, it turns out.  He’d been in San Francisco long enough to master “hey man, what’s-up?” English usage. I asked if he was intending to head back home to Jiangsu.  He wasn’t.  It was interesting to have spoken and then debriefed his impressions of the U.S. and he home the left behind, in his uber-driver-English, contextual slang.  Discussions in English about Chinese themes, then, certainly different.

Coming up to where my friend's home is located, I learned that my mother and step-father were staring down an evening without heat, back in the Hudson Valley.  I couldn’t reach them on either of her numbers.  My sister said she’s spoken with them that calmed me down.  It wasn’t snow, I was told, nor was it ice or rain but wind’s what did it to them there.  Trees blown out by their roots.  All sounds rather extreme.

Friday, 03/02/18

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

A Flash of Proximity

I’m traveling to Oakland.  Apparently, even at 4:30PM, certainly well into the SF afternoon rush hour(s) traffic over the Bay Bridge, we can get across swiftly.  My driver pointed out to me that, “we’re right by the entrance to the bridge, so if we can just cut in here, its a quick hop into the final entrance."  And so it was.  I had been afraid of arriving late but it looked like we’d be early to this restaurant in Oakland that I’m heading toward. 

Off to the side, a flash of proximity from the left: bang.  A grey car minivan struck our vehicle and after righting itself, sped off ahead and disappeared on to the highway.  My driver was flustered and limped along to the side of the road where she considered the damage.  A car full of young people pulled up behind us and came to speak to us, which had me curious.  “He hit us too.  That’s why he swung over into you, as well.”  This enriched the narrative.  The guy must have really wanted to get away.  My driver offered that she’d be calling the police for help.  This car load of young people suggested they’d rather not have a conversation that involved the police and drove away. 

She was OK.  I was OK.  She was shook up though.  I offered to get another car, though I didn’t know where I was.  She’d already turned off the clock and ended the trip, but was kind enough to suggest bringing me the last five minutes to my destination.  The hold-message on the police hot line just continued, language, after language.  I heard Spanish, Cantonese, Mandarin.  Whatever your disaster. 

I stayed as a curtesy.   The dispatcher picked up after about seven minutes or so.  She was a consummate professional and she handled my driver's concerns, such as they were, deftly.  My driver was a bit disappointed that there wouldn’t be a cop coming to visit.  Rest assured Ma'am an officer will be looking for a “Grey SUV, that sped on to the highway.”  And it was clear to everyone involved that no one would ever find anyone in relation to this event. 

I could still feel the tension in my body suggesting a sudden over reaction on the part of the muscles when the car was struck.  I was still working to undo that constriction, suddenly imposed.  Fortunate really, that it was only this modest disruption rather than something more impactful and violent. 

I found my restaurant on Broadway in Oakland.  Carefully crossing the street, I considered this neighbourhood of marquee facades that must have been glamorous, before they were abandoned and now reclaimed.  My destination has no marquee.  The dining is informal.  A phenomenal wine list names four different dry whites from Croatia by the glass.  And I get a pint of soda water and wait at a huge table all by myself for a little while till my friend comes and introduces me to his remarkable wife.  Later I’m to the north in Berkeley, where I eat a bit more and talk for hours about what "China" thinks. 

Wednesday, 02/28/17

Sun Cuts Mighty

Up too early.  No drilling noises outside this morning but I read one paper and then another and eventually decide I should head down to the gym, admitting that I’m up.  Even at 5:00AM there were already two determined fellas in there with me.  And you never want to bother considering much what anyone else is doing, but you do and what their doing always looks smarter and more effective than whatever it is you’ve decided to do.

One information session after another.  Even if it is interesting and this is, it takes rarefied commitment to keep one’s mind absorptive.  A proper diversion happens when a friend calls and I’m out on Tennessee Street talking about Vasily Grossman and what it was that Krondstadt really showed us about Trotsky.  The afternoon sun cuts mighty through the cold San Francisco afternoon bay breeze. 

Called from one event to another, headed to a club.  But that changed and we were heading to the restaurant, one that I remember so well from when I was a young father.  It is certainly the most consistently wonderful Greek dining I can recall enjoying outside of Greece.  Sixteen years ago I went there with my boss at the time who ordered up a fine spread, dining, laughing, making points, listening.  What an evening.  My boss rose, suddenly and said he’d have to leave.  “John, take care of it and expense it, would you?”  “Sure” says I, reluctantly.  It was three times what I’d ever paid for any dinner in my life. 

A pasta dish.  I really didn’t need it.  The meat others were having looked rather splendid.  This and we left with a choice around how to get home.  We chose to walk it instead of one more Uber.  We proceeded passed a venue.  Do you know I saw Van Morrison and Aretha Franklin this place, right here, says a friend.  It was the greatest hall in those days.  The Financial district gives way to this new SoMa sizzle-atop-shank aesthetic.  Upstairs I bravely cracked my book, took out my contacts and awoke with a start as the book fell off to the left with a thud. 

Tuesday, 02/27/18

Roughly Against the Dock

Late night hotel in South of Market, up now, suddenly at 3:30AM.  An extremely loud, primal, grinding, now part of my room.  It’s not a temporary matter.  It continues. Is everyone in the hotel awake, like me, confronting this sound?   Outside two blocks up, there is a construction site.  There is no way to ignore this sound.  I can’t return to sleep and consider getting on with the day.  Twenty minutes or more later the noise just stops. 

The gyms at the Marriott locations tend to be rather modest with a minimal number of machines to keep a small group of people swiftly rotated in and through their workouts.  At 5:30AM there are already two other people hard at work.  Mid way through a routine the human form beside me taps my shoulder and he takes the form of a colleague.  I pull out one of he headphones to greet him.

Later dinning by the water, I forgot about these vegie vows I’d taken with the family and went straight for the oyster bar.  No oysters, just ceviche left, which looked sour and delicious on a shelf of ice and I grabbed a plate and began to eat the moment I sat at the table.  Second bite?  As many as three?  I’m not supposed to be eating this, I suddenly consider.  Because I said so.  Right.  A pang or three.  Move the plate to the middle of the table then.  Reluctantly looking over at it then, for a while.

Outside, docklands in SF with their seventeen decades of stories that lead to this broad emptiness.  I watch the brutal water slap up roughly against the dock.  And uninvited the Otis Redding theme music begins to play like a commercial in my mind “wasting time”, away from others, absorbing for a moment.  Conversations at dinner lead to Fermor in Bulgaria, and memories of Turkey and I note how preferable it is to discussing software with this dinner companion.

US hotels seem to have done away with the idea of room service.  They’ve done away with having a Snickers bar in the fridge.  No thoughtful little complementary treat left for me?  Is this how it is in New York as well or do they feel obligated to provide food for you to order, through the night?  It’s best I don’t have a Snickers Bar or a big complementary brownie.  But I am definitely hungry tonight, heading to bed, ceviche-less.

Monday 02/26/18