October 14, 2007

California (Pt.9): San Francisco to Nashville


10/7/07
On Thursday, our room at the Golden Gate Hotel was on the front of the building, on the fourth floor - one of those bay windows was ours. Tonight, however, we would stay in Room 107, on the first floor behind the kitchen. Were the kitchen furnishings also charmingly antique? Yes, they were. There was also a surprisingly lush courtyard/garden out the window that gave the room a sense of calm and quiet compared to the bustle of Bush Street. (?!?)
After a splendid lunch at Duca, we went back to savor Joseph Cornell: Navigating the Imagination at SFMOMA. I do not have the time right now to say very much about this exhibit except to say how much I appreciated its lighting and display. Each object was dramatically well lit (and boxes that had independent lighting allowed one to press a button to illuminate the inside of the box). Cornell's work borders surrealism and abstraction, romanticism and modernism, profundity and sentimentality, the banal and capital-A Art. A richly illustrated catalog of this exhibit has been published by Essex Peabody Museum and the Yale University Press.
There was nothing left to do after all this but take a nice nap back at the Golden Gate Hotel.
After a peaceful repast, we headed down towards the financial district for an authentically delicious French dinner at Cafe de la Presse.
10/8/07
Flying east, time plays cruel tricks. Even though we spent much less time actually travelling, it was relatively late at night when we arrived back home. Fortunately, we had wisely planned to take the next day off to recover our equilibrium.
What a delightful trip.
--rgc

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

No time for Amoeba Rekkids, huh? heh heh

Rodger Coleman said...

Sam - thought about it, but it was way across town. And those hills are killer! We needed a nap!

One weird thing: fighter jets were buzzing the city in formations all afternoon. It was pretty freaky.

--rgc