Feliz Birthday Nouvel Xmas

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This awesome dude, whom I found busking opera-style with a boombox on Maiden Lane in San Francisco, wishes you happy holidays. As do I.

December is a festive time for my family, what with my mother’s birthday, my dad’s birthday, my birthday, and that small matter of Christmas and New Year all crowding the month. (My September-born brother is the only trendbreaker in the family.) The discipline of so much celebration leads us to practice a sort of end-of-the-year of extremes: we vomit in mall trash cans during 5 a.m. Boxing Day sales, we cook stuffing recipes which call for 4 lbs of sausage and 10 diced apples, we have screaming fights on December 25th while wearing fur coats, we serve dinner hours late for uncertain reasons, and we veg out in front of Myth Busters for the rest of the day. The whirl of sequential holidays becomes a vortex of accretion, and then New Year wipes the slate clean.

This year, my parents came to me (and to my SF-based aunt, uncle and cousins): let me take this opportunity to thank you, Mum and Dad, for not obliging me to travel to Minnesota. I just checked and it’s -16º C there. My brother and father seem to have spent the week before Xmas arguing about snow and driveway snow-shoveling. I’m pleased to have been spared that.

My aunt cooked a tremendous dinner, which involved a flock of dead Cornish game hens and half a lamb, as well as a squash soup with a cranberry reduction which was furnished by a guest. The meal for 13 was served in Peter’s and my living room, with our scaredy cat, Truman Capote, confined to the bedroom for the evening. There were two kinds of stuffing, and we didn’t even take the foil off the final dish of leftovers until Friday afternoon.

Let’s summarise in pictures.

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We visited the Japanese fashion exhibition at the Asian Art Museum. Highlights: Seeing a Yohji Yamamoto twisted silk wedding dress I remember from a Paris Vogue editorial. Seeing the dress above (also by Yamamoto). Seeing plenty of iconic Issey Miyake, Rei Kawakubo, Junya Watanabe, and Yamamoto.

Lowlights: Seeing only Miyake, Kawakubo, Watanabe, and Yamamoto. They’re all immensely talented, but they’re all names you’d come up with in the first thirty seconds of a brainstorm on post-1950 Japanese fashion. Boring curation (bunch of dresses in near-darkness, on mannequins lined up in front of a wall, organised by designer — snore), even non-flash photography not permitted (shot the above boiled wool frock surreptitiously; the suited docent pacing the back of the room had me so freaked all my shots of Kawakubo’s glorious aluminium-rod dresses were blurry. Bastard!)

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Look at my mum and little bro, all museum’d out! There were Korean monks making religious paintings and prints in this atrium. We sat and watched a woman in saffron and maroon robes score the outlines of waves in black paint.

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This was the line outside House of Nanking, clearly the Bay Area’s best Chinese restaurant, on a Saturday at 3 o’clock. I let Mum, Peter, and little bro run along to City Lights to browse and called them back 20 minutes later when I had scaled the queue. Actually I took this photo when Peter was being my temporary place-holder: he’s the one wearing a navy jacket, red hoodie, and brown hat, and giving me the What The Hell Are You Taking A Picture Of This For? look. Bless him.

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Little bro, who started college this autumn, enjoyed the house blend jasmine flower tea very much. Other recommendations: The salt-and-pepper mushrooms, the crispy garlic fish, the pork dumplings, and the shrimp pancakes with house peanut sauce.

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This looks self-taken, but actually Peter was kind enough to frame and focus the shot. My eyes are, however, not green.

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Later that afternoon, we met up with my aunt and, at her urging, made the final seating at a spot called Lovejoy Tearooms. Look at the spread: crumpets with Devonshire cream and lemon curd, petit fours, salad, tiny crustless sandwiches, scones, and sliced fruit. Peter had a delicious Shepherd’s pie. We shared two pots of tea — Lovejoy’s gumboot blend and a Yorkshire Gold — and it was divine. The place looks like Dolores Umbridge’s office, with every available space bedoilied and becoseyed and covered in floral motifs and lacework crochet, only there’s nothing sinister about great tea served properly. The severed hands bracketing the picture are Peter’s (left) and my aunt’s (right).

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Mum and Auntie share a scone with a quickness too fast for this Pentax Optio W10’s image stabilising algorithms. I think I’m going to put the kettle on. This post has already motivated me to reheat leftovers from House of Nanking. God how can anyone make mere mushrooms, salt, pepper, Thai basil, and onion taste so superplusdelicious?

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Dad’s birthday doubles as New Year’s Eve. Last night he was spoiled with ties, a chocolate cake, a cherry/pear pie, gelato, a Dilbert book, and a perspex reading lectern to latch onto the handlebars of his stationary bike.

Then Peter and I watched Paris, Je T’aime with my aunt and uncle, and drank champagne. Happy New Year, everyone.