San Francisco, March 1st and 2nd 2008

March 2, 2008 on 10:08 pm | In wanderings | No Comments

Not much happened on the 1st. I woke up earlier than my friends did, Luc went home and Laura accompanied me to a breakfast diner around the corner. I shopped around the upper Haight for a bit, found an excellent embroidered dress shirt, a really cool electronic/ambient double CD in an Asian imports store containing some of the most beautiful and most expensive items I’ve seen for sale, and came back in less than two hours, cold, tired and with a sore throat.

Today I hit the ground running. I checked in at work, grabbed some coffee, and hit the F line to head back up Market. I hopped off to walk a few blocks over to a beautiful Catholic church, but it was fenced in and boarded up :( I got back on the F, switched to a cable car at Powell, and wandered around Union Square for a while.

I wound up at Grace Cathedral an hour early, and was greeted on the steps by Michael Gefty, the “indecent docent” of Grace Cathedral. We talked music and travels and church for a while, and I headed in for Holy Eucharist. Did you know that the small, easily passed door in the Narthex leads to a stairwell to the basement? And that instead of having a crypt, Grace Cathedral has a gymnasium, conference center, coffee shop, gift shop, and much more beneath the footprint of the building?

Dean Jones gave an excellent sermon as usual, centering on themes of light and darkness, self worth and priorities. All things I’ve wrestled with personally and recently. I’ve always felt uncomfortable taking communion because all through my childhood people told me I’m a bad person and I took it to heart, so to receive the Host in such a phenomenal setting, from the woman who lead the prayers, brought me to tears during the service.

After the service I rejoined Michael for a fascinating tour of the Cathedral. Paintings I had walked by many times were actually gilt. The silver was platinum, the blue color lapis latchuli. Each item on display in the cathedral had some significance making each a treasured work of art – and so easily passed by the casual visitor! A carved eagle lecturn in the apse is the only carved wooden work by Mount Rushmore sculptor Gutzon Borglum. Somehow I missed the ikon of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. A relief portait of the Madonna and Child I had seen, but Michael related an anecdote: they usually don’t let people touch the works, but a blind woman did so. She remarked to her husband: “Dear, isn’t it something how the angel on the left is smiling much more broadly than the one on the right?” I had to take a flash picture of the work and examine it on my camera to even SEE the angels in the background!

Now Michael revealed his having earned the name of indecent docent. One of the murals featured Sir Francis Drake among indiginous natives. Michael explained how the artist used Chinese and Hispanic models for the natives, then pointed out that his partner was Peruvian.

“The Chinese have a saying – that there are three sides to every story. My side, your side, and the honorable side. So with a Peruvian partner, understanding how the artist could feature this son of a bitch in a church is beyond me. We call them Conquistadors, but they destroyed entire civilizations and sent entire cultures down the drain. They robbed, they raped, they sunk the Spanish navy, hell, that’s what the Queen paid him to do, and we reward the bastard for it by featuring him in a mural!”

That’s as close to verbatim as I can remember properly. I had snuck away from the tour to watch Christoph Tietze practice for his 4pm organ recital, so I missed his rant on the Church’s misogeny but I’ve heard many of these rants before. Where would we be without women. Magdalane bankrolled Jesus and the disciples. So why do we still commonly accept the bullshit notion that she was a prostitute? I could listen to Michael go on all day :)

I attended Choral Evensong at 3, Christoph Tietze’s organ recital at 4, and was back in my Bed and Breakfast by 6. I was planning on taking MUNI back up to Masonic and Fell to try out Hukilau, but frankly the menu didn’t look that interesting (I wanted poi and ‘ava ‘ava but they serve burgers and chicken sandwiches. Coconut pudding isn’t enough to drag me up there) so when Dion offered to cook me dinner right in the Bed n Breakfast, I took him up on it. We’re going food shopping in a bit, but he won’t let me help clean the kitchen to speed things along. I may walk around the street a bit, but I’m definitely taking things easy tonight. Tomorrow will be a long day of sitting on a plane doing nothing! I have yet to understand why that takes it out of me so.

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