Culinary Adventures: Beer Thanksgiving

Because most young federal employees like me don't have enough vacation days to take off for Thanksgiving and Christmas, we have to make a choice - and inevitably, we choose to save our days for Christmas.  This leaves us to our own devices for Thanksgiving.  This time last week I was on my way to "Friendsgiving" at S & D's and brought along homemade brownies (not a very good recipe though - they taste good, but they don't look it).  Since K&R and I all had to "work" yesterday, we decided not to celebrate Thanksgiving on the actual day, but on the following Saturday - today - as an organized sort of potluck.  But whenever  K has potlucked Thanksgiving with friends she has a culinary theme.  Last year it was bacon (I went home, so I missed it), and this year, it's beer.  Everyone who brings food has to have worked beer into it somehow.  I jumped at the opportunity - I love a good culinary challenge.

All right, you think.  Baste the turkey with beer, and serve beer, and perhaps put beer in the stuffing, but how to work beer into everything?  Doesn't sound easy, does it?  Below, with one exception, are the results of my own efforts:

The exception is the batch of cookies in the upper right, which have no beer in them and are not intended for Beer Thanksgiving.  They're intended for me.  But the upper left is beer bread, and the lower right are cornbread muffins with beer in place of milk.  Have a closer look:

I'm still working on my food photography, but I think that's a tolerably good photo.  And furthermore, these are really easy.  The base is Jiffy Cornbread Mix which, as a Midwesterner, I swear by.  All you need to do is follow the instructions for cornbread muffins and substitute 1/3 c. of beer (relatively dark, so it has some flavor) for the 1/3 c. of milk the recipe calls for.  I used Killians (the bottle on the left in that first picture) because I only had one bottle of Guinness, given to me by K&R so I could make beer bread:

Now, if you like beer in your food, you'll be pleased to know that this is almost as easy as the muffins are.  Just take 3 c. of self-rising flour, add 3 Tbsp. white sugar, and one bottle of dark beer, like Guinness (don't do this with Miller Lite or it will taste like wallpaper).  Mix and pour into a greased loaf pan, then bake at 350 for 45 minutes, brush the top with butter, and bake for another 15 minutes.  (Honestly, though, it was practically done after the first half hour, so since you're supposed to brush the top with butter once a crust forms, I did it after that half hour and then put the loaf back in for the 15 minutes, and got what you see - I suspect this is because I had it on the bottom rack).

Both the muffins and the bread smell delightfully of beer when hot, and I'm sure they'll be a hit.  I just need to pack them up, change clothes, and toddle over the K&R's for my third (!) Thanksgiving!

(Oh, and if you want the recipe for those cookies, just ask.  They're amazing.)

 Om nom nom nom nom...

Happy Thanksgiving!

I've just returned from dinner and Battlestar Galactica with K&R, but I wanted to take a moment to wish Happy Thanksgiving to all my readers!  You'll probably have noticed that I've fallen a bit behind, but while J was here I spent my time with him, not writing (sorry, but can you blame me?), and this week has been excruciating.  I'll catch up shortly, I promise - I've done it before (remember October?) and I'll do it again.  In the meantime, though, I'd like to send Thanksgiving greetings to all my readers around the world.  They're a  diverse group:

Austria, Canada, China, Costa Rica, Denmark, 
Egypt, Finland, Germany, Hungary, Japan, 
Poland, Russia, Slovenia, and the United States

I don't know all of you (or at least, I don't think I do), but thank you for reading.  I never thought that I'd have readers from multiple continents when I started writing - I had just intended it as a sort of visual diary for myself!  But even so, I do hope you're enjoying the reading as much as I enjoy the writing and the exploring which stimulates it.  In thanks for your attention, I have a pair of presents:

• If you'd like to make keeping track of my exploits easier, I've added a "Subscribe" feature on the right, beneath the bagel (ha!).  
• I've also added a "Cast of Characters" section on the right, under the labels.  Since it's my policy not to identify people by name or otherwise make their lives public, I only use first initials.  This means you might get confused as to who I'm talking about, so read the "cast list" to get sorted out.

Happy Thanksgiving!

Dear "Leadership Guru"...

...Martin Luther King, Jr. was not a "schmo," Sir Isaac Newton did not discover gravity when an apple fell on his head, Saving Private Ryan is not a management instruction tool, and you're not funny.

That is all.

The Capitol (at Night!)

Backdated from more than a week later...I'm a bad person (again).

This evening, when I arrived home from work, I found the first half of dinner on the table and the other half being constructed in the kitchen by J, who can cook gourmet-quality when he sets his mind to it.  We ate early, because he had been advised to see the Capitol at night.  So we walked up 4th and took a right at the mall.  Unlike yesterday, I had the good sense to bring my camera:

What most people don't know is that there are two reflecting pools - the famous one that runs from the Lincoln Memorial east, and then this one, between the Capitol and the rest of the Mall.  On the other side of the pool is a statue of U.S. Grant (probably the only memorial he's got, unless you count Grant's Tomb).  From this far away you get a lot of traffic lights - not a terribly good photo.  We ventured closer, and I tried again.

There, that's better.  Interestingly, the dome is the only part of the Capitol that gets floodlit.  I suppose I had expected it to be more like the White House, which is almost entirely illuminated:

(This is from March - I haven't actually been past the White House at night since I moved here.  Perhaps I should rectify that.)

Today, I should note, was the first day Congress was in session since the midterm elections.  As we hung out and looked around (I insisted on inspecting this fountain because I love water feature's - J doesn't), we heard sirens and looked to the north - left - and saw a cavalcade of police cars with a black van in their midst.  I wondered aloud if it were a cabinet official coming from testifying to Congress, but J thought it was too grand for a secretary, and besides, would they be testifying over the dinner hour?  It was big enough for the president, he opined.  Then I remembered that the vice president is the president of the Senate, and noted that the flag on the Senate - which indicates whether it's in session - had been taken down.  It would make perfect sense for a cavalcade to speed the vice president from the Senate to the north-west, which is where he lives (the Naval Observatory is in the northwest part of town).  So perhaps that was him.  My first brush with Washington celebrity!

We talked and observed a while longer, but then it got colder - it had been cold to start, but the wind picked up - so we walked home.  J was to leave tomorrow - he would fly out while I was at work.  Fortunately for both of us, our parting wouldn't be as unhappy as when I left Chicago (we were both torn up for days), because over the few days we've been together we've sorted a lot of things out in the best possible way.

Anyhow, the Capitol's always been neat - now it just has another layer of significance for me, which can be added to all the other layers of significance others have attached to it.  If you could see them all, the Capitol would start to look more like an onion than a legislature.  This might be awkward - who wants to take orders from an onion?

The National Cathedral

As my readers have doubtless figured out, I'm Catholic, but my boyfriend isn't.  He's unencumbered, religiously-speaking, but has a gay uncle who is the rector of a large Episcopal church in Dallas.  I am told that this uncle applied for a position at the National Cathedral, and helped write the hymnal they use there.  I also know - no need to be told - that my boyfriend is an Anglophile of the most dedicated sort, and having seen the National Cathedral briefly in March, I know that it's trying hard to be an English cathedral.  Fortunately for those of us who like that sort of thing, it does quite well in that respect.

What may surprise you, however, is that I gave up my weekly Mass to attend the National Cathedral instead (exhibit A in the case for me being ridiculously in love with that man).  So here goes - a Catholic in the heart of Episcopal America (the National Cathedral is where the Episcopal church's presiding bishop was inaugurated, after all) - will they scent the foreigner in their midst and cast him out, with much wailing and gnashing of teeth?  Will it be a revelation that drives me from Rome to Canterbury?  Will the cathedral impress my unflappable boyfriend?  Read on to find out!

Washington National Cathedral
3101 Wisconsin Ave. NW 
Website

The National Cathedral is located, surprise surprise, in the neighborhood of Cathedral Heights (check the blog map for the exact location), and sits on a hill such that it can be seen from the platform of the National Airport Metro station (which is outdoors and on stilts a few dozen feet from the ground, but quite a ways away).  To get here from my place, take the Metro from Southwest to Chinatown, then transfer onto the Red in the direction of Shady Grove (is it shady, I wonder?).  We got off at Cleveland Park and stopped for a bite to eat (for J, not me, because I had eaten breakfast while he was in the shower).  We then walked west on Macomb St. and approached the Cathedral from it's north side (the picture on the left is from the south, which is much prettier as it gets all that lovely southern sun that I used to have in Chicago).

When we turned the corner and saw the towers of the cathedral, J was mightily impressed (there's your answer to question 3).  The National Cathedral does its level best to pass for Canterbury - you think I'm kidding, but look at this photo of Canterbury and then this one of the National Cathedral and tell me there aren't any similarities - so for my anglophile par excellence  this was absolutely great.  I like it too.

We had decided to attend the 11:15 Eucharist (not Mass, I learned - Episcopalians don't say "Mass") because it had organ and choir, and promised to be the most immersive experience.  And it was.  The service opened with the cathedral choir (men and boys, in the proper English tradition) processing in while singing a motet, continued with several excellent hymns, and concluded with a very well done organ voluntary.  In between there was chant, more boy choir, and solo organ.  I am mightily impressed, but as I said to J, one of the reasons you see this here but not in many Catholic parishes of local prominence is that the National Cathedral can afford, and can draw, a good organist, a talented choirmaster, etc.  Most Catholic churches don't have the prominence to draw such people, and even more often can't afford them.  Even some Catholic cathedrals struggle with music due to money.

The only complaint I have is that all of the hymns were pitched too low for me to sing at my best.  I've been every major voice part in the course of my musical life - I started as a boy soprano, and was subsequently "graduated" to alto because alto parts for boy choir are always harder and I was a good singer, even though I still had the voice to sing soprano (I took the change of assignment as a demotion and a personal insult, because the soprano melody line was always prettier and they got to sing the descants at Christmas).  When my voice changed, it sank all the way to bass, and I sang bass in the high school madrigal group as a freshman.  But then I began to ascend upwards again, singing second tenor as a sophomore and rising up to the elite ranks of first tenor by senior year.  I'm still a tenor - a first tenor by any choir's standards, though not by operatic standards (though, as I have no intention of pursuing a career in opera, I suppose that doesn't much matter).  The majority of men, however, are middling baritones, and it was for these men that the hymns were pitched.  This is all well and good - more people feel comfortable singing, which is great - but I don't get those soaring high notes that let me stand out from most of the other guys in the room.  Nevertheless, the portly lady standing next to me complemented me on my singing voice as the service drew to a close.  I was surprised she'd even been able to hear me, and managed little more than a bashful "thank you."

I won't acknowledge that this sort of music never occurs in Catholic churches (although I am willing to concede that you'll have more luck finding it in Europe), but the liturgy here would not happen in a Catholic church.  Most prominent among the differences is that the Episcopalians have a First Reading and a Gospel - they're missing the Second Reading which Catholics always include.  There are differences in some of the prayers, of course, and I definitely messed up the Creed, although the lady next to me didn't shoot me a glare or raise a ruckus and have the infiltrated Papist thrown out (answer to question 1).  It's times like these when I realize how attached I am to the Catholic Mass - to the point that I will recite what I know, only to notice that the rest of the congregation isn't saying what I am.  Oops!


One thing I've gotten used to in the Catholic church is homilies of moderate length and moderate impact.  The Savonarolas and fire-breathing Dominicans have been supplanted by modest parish priests with modest goals for their sermons: elaborate on the readings of the day and attempt to relate that somehow to a social problem or a moral lapse that everyday Catholics encounter/experience.  Even the remaining Dominicans don't breathe fire (see the church review for St. Dominic), and I can't remember remember the last time I heard a priest speak about Hell.  But I suppose there's something about the National Cathedral that inspires the grandiose.  Maybe it's the stained glass (above).  Or perhaps it's the vaulted ceiling, soaring pillars, and elaborate woodwork (right).  Could it be the intricate marble floors, or the painstaking (and very aesthetically pleasing) needlework of these kneeler pads?

I don't know.  And I wish I had more pictures to share with you, because I forgot my camera and had to make do with my phone, so only about half of them are free of blur.  I'll just have to return with my camera sometime.  But in any case, my point is that the sumptuousness of the cathedral evidently inspired the homilist to attempt to reach the lofty heights.  By which I mean he spoke at length on every major theme which has ever occurred in a sermon, and then attempted to link them with some scripture passages which preceded the gospel.  Not the actual reading itself, mind, but the passages which precede it.  Three quarters of an hour later (you think I'm joking, but I'm not - at least, not much), I had no idea what point he was trying to make and I was craving some lunch.  Three cheers for the apocryphal Catholic priest who, on a boiling day in August, got up to the ambo to deliver his homily, said "It's hotter than Hell in here," and got back down.

On a totally unrelated note, did you know there's a lump of moon rock in the National Cathedral?  There is, in the "Space Window," on the left.  The moon rock is actually in the window, in the middle of the dark circle in the center-top (surrounded by the white ring).  Twenty feet to the left is Woodrow Wilson.  Yes, our 28th president.  He's buried in a sarcophagus in one of the aisles of the cathedral, and is actually the only U.S. president buried in the District of Columbia.   I've always shad a soft spot for Wilson, so J looked on in bemusement while I said hello and attempted to get a photo (this is the photo I was trying to take, but mine didn't turn out.  This is what I get for going to a cathedral without a proper camera).


Now, since this isn't a Catholic church I can't really call this a church review, as I won't contemplate attending on a regular basis, but supposing I were to review it anyway...

Location: 3 when the Metro decides to cooperate (as it did today), but a 2 on days when it doesn't.  Also a 2 once the weather gets colder - the hike from the metro station to the cathedral is about a mile, which I don't want to do in sleet.

Aesthetics: 5, without a doubt.  See pictures and gushing above.

Music:  Very good indeed.  It was all pitched too low for me, but quite good nonetheless.  Give it a 4.5.

Liturgy: Not really feeling the whole "sanctity of the Mass" thing Catholics look for, and the sermon was awful.  2.5 - a 2 for the sermon, but an extra .5 for women at the altar.

That gives us 15 of 20, or an average of 3.75.  Good, but not so fantastic that I'll be converting any time soon (there's your answer to question 2).   However, the National Cathedral, it should be noted, is not funded in any way by the government or any public funds, nor is it funded by the Episcopal Church, although it is Episcopal (though you have to look pretty hard on their website to find this out).  No, the National Cathedral is supported entirely by private donations, which has meant that it has suffered greatly during the recession.  In fact, it has reduced its staff by more than half to meet budget shortfalls caused by a slump in donations.  So if you've got some money to burn and love a good cathedral - in the very best, English Gothic sense of the word - perhaps you'd consider a donation.  Doesn't matter if you're not Episcopal; this building is awesome.  So although I'm not going to convert, once my finances loosen up a bit, I may have a donation or two to make...

Vietnam War Memorial

We (the boy and I) have spent the day on the Mall, and some of the places we perused will show up in other posts, but today is Veteran's Day, and that deserves a post of a certain gravity.  So I overshot completely, and decided to write about the Vietnam Memorial.  On Veteran's Day, it doesn't get much more grave than that, does it.

Normally the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, which is the proper name, looks like this, but if you are eagle-eyed you will have noticed the reflections of lots of people in the wall (live people, unlike the odd photographs etched in stone over at Korea).  Remember, this is Veterans Day, and many of the veterans of Vietnam are still alive.  A subset of the survivors of our longest foreign engagement came to pay their respects and remember their compatriots who didn't make it out of Indochina alive.  You can see some of them below, on the right in the black leathers jackets.

This is our Wall.  In Berlin they have fragments of the Berlin Wall, which was their Wall, dividing one country in two.  In Israel/Palestine there is a Wall which is a political division made manifest in concrete and barbed wire. Here we have our own Wall, memorializing a conflict which divided the United States public just a bitterly as the two halves of Cold War Berlin; even if there was no real geographic division, it was perfectly possible to be firmly on one side or the other of our Wall.  Perhaps that made it even more bitter - your adversaries were not safely locked away on the other side of a wall.  You might work with them, or go to church with them, or live across the street from them.  There was no physical wall, but there was a Wall.

The Vietnam Veterans Memorial from above.  Not my photo (duh).

Perhaps it is appropriate, then, that the memorial - wall though it is - has only one side.  It's not really visible in any of my photos, but at either end of the path that runs the length of the memorial the wall is only a few inches high.  As you follow the path towards the center, however, you walk downhill, and more of the wall emerges from the earth, etched with the names of the dead.  At the nadir, where the two downward-sloping paths meet, is this:

(At the bottom of that seam, on the left side, is 1975, the year the last American troops withdrew and Saigon fell, signaling the war's end.  You can see it - the date, not the fall of Saigon - here.)

This is the deepest point of the wall, which feels like a pit, sunlit though it may be, with the wall rising a several feet above your head.  Behind the wall, here and all along it, is earth - the earth from which the memorial rises, cousin to the earth which holds the bodies of the men whose names are carved into the rock (it's gabbro).  But unlike the walls in Berlin and Israel/Palestine, there is no "other side" of this wall.  When you come to see the memorial, you stand on the side with the names.  Everyone stands on the side with the names, and you read them, even if/though you don't know who they are.  We're all on the same side of the wall, united at the memorial to the war which divided us.  We're looking at the names of the men who died in the jungles of Vietnam, and behind them is the earth, from whence we came and where we will return.  Our soldiers have merely preceded us.

Blow up this picture and look at just a tiny fraction of the names carved there. They sound like ordinary men.

Wilbert R. Butler, Lester L. Crooks, Ralph Byrd, Bobby Lee Favors, Guy F. Snyder, Helder A. Correia da Silva, Carl S. Mays, John B. Mecker...

Who were they all?  Each one of those names is more than just a collection of characters etched into a rock.  They were all someone, all people, with families and pasts and aspirations for the future.  They were also all casualties of a war that, when it was over, was hard to clearly define.  What did we get out of it?  Why were we there?  And why did it take so long to leave?

Ring a bell?

The Potomac River

Part 4 of the adventure which began on Sunday, backdated from a few days later.

Once I reached the end of the canal, I hastened across the bridge over the freeway and found myself once again in Foggy Bottom.  Walking southwest I paralleled the river as best I could - I had been doing so since descending Georgetown hill and wanted to see how much longer I could do so - running into the Watergate and the Kennedy Center (which deserves a couple of posts of its own, since I've been short-changing it regularly and I do have things to say about it).  But once I got to the Kennedy Center, I found myself in a tight spot - literally, caught behind an impassable barrier of freeways, unable to continue westwards towards homes.  Frustrated, I went around the center and saw the river, and a path running along it, separated by a four land road with a narrow, grassy median.  Reliving Frogger, I crossed, and found myself face to face, for the first time all day, with the Potomac River.

It ain't pretty.  Many of the waterways we think of as beautiful - Paris's Seine, the Arno in Florence, or the Grand Canal of Venice - are those which are well integrated into their cities.  In Washington, the Potomac is an obstacle, to be bridged as many times as possible so people can cross over into Virginia twice daily during their commutes.  The riverbank is put to use as a place for a parkway (the fate which would have awaited the site of the canal I had just visited, had it not been set aside as a park), nestled within an impenetrable (to a pedestrian) web of freeways, interchanges, and overpasses.  All of this I can understand, since Washington has only gotten busier as time progresses, but one thing I cannot understand or even excuse.

This:
Before you dismiss the images in the mud as driftwood, you might want to blow this picture up.  I count thirteen tires, three buckets, what appears to be a plastic jug of some sort (the yellow thing), and a traffic cone.  There are other objects in this picture - and in the river mud - that I simply can't account for.  But I would also like to draw your attention to the upper left of the picture.  See that balustrade?  Here, look again:

It's a rather fancy affair, what with it's smooth surface, pillars, decorative motifs, and so on.  It is in fact a promenade, designed so that pedestrians can walk along the river.  And look at Washington's very own dump, within sight of the National Mall.

Follow the promenade to the bridge in the background - dodging cars if ever you should try to cross, since there are no traffic lights - and you will eventually arrive at the back side of the Lincoln Memorial.  Guarding the bridge are these scupltures:

They are as shiny and beautiful (if this style is your thing, and I'm not confident it's mine) as the river bed is ugly.  They are gold within spitting distance of grime and white stone pedestals grayed and pitted by car exhaust, cousin to the delicious chemical cocktail leaching from those tires and plastic products into the river.  I will spare you the environmentalist's rant, but suffice it to say that this is another one of those moments - just like the homeless men in DuPont Circle - when I begin to see the ways in which the capital can serve as a microcosm for the entire country.  And I don't like it.

However, some good did come of this part of my journey, for I passed the Lincoln Memorial, and I have at last found Wisconsin's allocated place.  It is on the southern side, which is only visible from a rather inconvenient spot.  And, thanks to river, I was in that spot, and able to snap this picture:

So there.  Some good comes of trailing along an ugly river anyhow!

[Just a note - tonight my boyfriend gets into town for his long-awaited visit, so posts may be a bit sporadic while he's here, since I want to take advantage of our sadly-limited time together.  I will make it up to you, though, promise!]

The Chesapeake & Ohio Canal

Part 3 of the adventure which began on Sunday, backdated from several days later.

Seeking a different way to return west - retracing steps is for the non-adventurous - I spotted a stairway leading off of Georgetown's hill, and decided to scamper down, to see what I could see.

Precipitous it was, and headed towards the river.  On my way down I caught site of these two graffiti:

I must admit that I agree with both, although the first strikes me as far funnier than the second, which is more plausibly a statement of fact.  Perhaps it's the non-sequitur of juxtaposing "killing people" with "rude," since "rude" is definitely not the first word I would choose to describe "killing people."

As I stopped to take these pictures, a woman passed me on the stairs and asked her companion if the canal was this way.  "Canal?" I thought, ears tingling.  I love a good water feature, be it a fountain or a river (this comes from someone who, despite having grown up next to a river, gone to college next to a river and then, after realizing how much I missed being near a river in graduate school, moved into an apartment in DC thirty seconds from the river, does not like to swim), so I resolved to find this canal.  After all, I had found Georgetown University - surely I could find a canal?

I continued down the stairs, stopping at the bottom to take in the sight of office towers on the other side of the Potomac (Rosslyn, VA), and observe to myself that Virginia is for lovers unless you're both the same gender, in which case you'd best stay here in the District, and then went in search of the canal.  After a few minutes of poking around, I found a promising path, and followed it down alongside a building and, without terribly much warning, I was on a bridge.  I turned left, and saw that I had indeed found the canal.

Clever, I thought, to run paths alongside, and since this was a Sunday afternoon (remember, this post is backdated), people were taking advantage of the pathway, walking, running, riding their bikes, and watching the ducks.  I hadn't seen ducks for quite a while, so for a few minutes I indulged my inner child and watched them bobbing about in the weeds, ducking (ha!) down into the weeds with their feathery behinds in the air to find something to eat.  Funny creatures, ducks.

After marveling at birds which stand on their heads under water just to eat, I walked along the canal to the west, confident that it would lead me somewhere but uncertain as to what exactly it was.  Along the way I looked for clues.

#1: Canal silted up, quite shallow, and full of weeds.  Obviously no longer used.

#2: Canal infrastructure - locks and retaining walls - are being maintained, so it's not simply being allowed to fall apart (you don't really want a photo of the lock they were reconstructing, do you?  No?  Good, because I haven't got one).

#3: A boat in the canal, with an associated dock.  Someone is riding about in the canal, even if it's only up to the next lock.

But these clues only told me that although the canal was not being used for its original purpose, someone was invested in it not falling completely to ruin, even to the point of maintaining a canal boat.  But who?

I should have known, since this is DC.  The responsible party is the government.

See?  Here's the historical marker which was bolted to a nearby boulder (click to enlarge if you'd like to actually read it):

Mystery solved!

(When I got home, I decided to do some research, and Wikipedia kindly informed me of multiple things.  You can read about them here.)

Georgetown

Part 2 of an adventure which began on Sunday, backdated from Thursday.

Georgetown University, (O and 37th Sts. NW)

I'm sitting on a bench in front of Georgetown's iconic main building, a soaring Flemish revival castle which could well be the setting for an American version of Harry Potter.  In front of the building is a statue of John Carroll, the first Roman Catholic bishop and archbishop (of Baltimore in both cases) in the United States.  He's also the founder of Georgetown University, the country's first Catholic school - it's Jesuit, remember - which is why his statue sits outside the main building, magisterially robed in a way which might befit a wizard.  Wouldn't that be cool?  I should've gone to Georgetown...(I did actually apply for a PhD here, but they turned me down - just as well, because I've since realized that I really don't want to go into political science.)  Nevertheless, I wanted to see the main building (Healy Hall), so I made the trek, which I'll describe momentarily.  But first, more pictures:

If you're thinking that you've seen something like this before, you probably have - it's similar in many ways to the Canadian Parliament building.   My other favorite aspect of this building - besides it's general fanciness - are the little details.  Like gargoyles (see right - click on it to enlarge)!  Also, that tower has a clock in it, which chimes the quarter-hours with a tinny bell - 2:30 just now; Daylight Savings did just flip today, so I suppose it's yet to be changed.

To get here I walked from the little traffic circle where I had lunch straight west on M St., passing by and stopping at the only Walgreens in the entire District of Columbia (!).  They did not, alas, have what I was looking for (Jiffy Pizza Crust mix - very popular in the Midwest, nonexistent out here) but they did have Cadbury bars on sale, 2 for $3, far cheaper than anywhere in Southwest.  And, as I have always maintained, it is better organized and more sensible than any CVS, even the new one at Waterfront.  I'm definitely coming back.  I'm also waiting for the execs at Walgreens to ask me to start an ad campaign for them.  :)

M St. in Georgetown is lined with shops - scads of them, of every imaginable sort, practically.  Clothes shops, restaurants, coffee shops, jewelers, shoe shops, pubs, ice cream shops, jewelers, bookstores - I even saw a gentleman's club!  I walked about ten block from the Walgreens, eying the shops but resolved not to spend anything, before I began to worry that I had missed Georgetown University, my eventual goal, altogether, perhaps passing it by, and that I would soon find myself in Maryland.  I scanned the skies for that iconic spire, and seeing nothing, turned north to climb up the hill on which Georgetown is perched, hoping that I would have a better view from up there.  On the way, I passed some of Georgetown's iconic rowhouses, the most fancy of which I had to photograph:

I was just beginning to lose hope when I spotted a dark, squarish tower over the roof-line of some of the charming row-houses.  "Aha" I thought, "that looks dated and institutional - Georgetown must be that way!"  Then I rounded a corner and saw this:

So I knew I was on the right track.  And I was right about the tower - it belongs to Georgetown's hideous library:

It was built in the 1970s, and it's even uglier that the library at UChicago, something I never thought I'd say.  I can only imagine whether it's more soul-crushing than the Regenstein, though...I suppose it's just as well that I went to Chicago and not Georgetown.  At least in terms of libraries, I wasn't missing out.

Now I'm going to head back east and maybe go to a museum - but who knows what else I'll discover on this weekend's adventure!

Church Review: The Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle

Part 1 of an adventure begun today, backdated from Monday.

The Cathedral of St. Matthew the Apostle
1725 Rhode Island Ave., NW
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I have finally made it to the Cathedral, thanks to the federal government, which gave me (and you, if you're one of my readers living in the United States) an extra hour of sleep this morning.  Normally, I don't want to sacrifice my precious sleeping-time to trek all the way up here, but with an extra hour under my belt, I felt energetic enough to do it.  And am I glad I did!

To get here I took the Green line up to Chinatown and then transferred to the Red, since the Blue and Orange lines are on crack (read "being maintained") this weekend.  I got very lucky with both trains - a three minute wait at Waterfront and four minutes at Chinatown.  Interestingly enough, today I decided not to worry about making the trains; I just went.  Perhaps this means I should stop worrying about trains altogether?  Still, had the trains not cooperated I would have missed Mass; 4 on location for the days when Metro is feeling benevolent, and 3 on those days it isn't.

After a short walk up Connecticut Avenue and a right turn on Rhode Island (which, interestingly enough, is something one could actually do in Connecticut - make a right turn at Rhode Island), the first thing I saw was the hulking pile of red brick pictured above.  The only real clue that it's a church and not a fancifully-done gymnasium is the dome, and the single ornamentation on the facade - this mosaic (visible in the lower right of the picture above).  Upon arriving in front of the church the primary impression is one of tallness, not of beauty.  In fact, I remembering musing that it looked more like a church with its skin taken off - or unfinished - than what one would expect a cathedral to look like.  There is precedent for churches with unfinished facades - it happened a lot in Italy, where city-states or wealthy families would bite off more than they could chew and be unable to finish their cathedral/church (an example: this picture of San Lorenzo, the Medici family church in Florence, whose facade has never been completed).  But this doesn't usually happen in the United States - if a church project runs low on funds, you strip back the design rather than continue on the originally planned path until the money runs out.  This generally means lopping off towers...which was also the case in Strasbourg back in the Middle Ages.  The mosaic, however, is a hint: whatever the plainness of the cathedral's exterior may tell you, ignore it - when people starting dealing in mosaics, it means they aren't messing around.

See?

Inside the architects have made up for their outer frugality several times over.  Every single surface is decorated in some way, be it with marble, mosaic, glass, fine metalwork, painting (fresco?), carpet (yes, alas), or sculpture.  It is so much to take in that I scarcely know where to start.  Fortunately for you, I took lots of pictures, so I'll let them do most of the talking.

The Cathedral is actually relatively small - it is no longer than the Cathedral in Green Bay, where I once was an acolyte (but it is wider).  Like most cathedrals, it is cruciform (shaped like a cross - a Latin cross in this case), with the two transepts forming the shorter bar of the cross and the nave the longer bar.  This is the left transept:

Opposite it, in the right transept, is the organ (about which more will be said later):

(If you find the ceiling decorations reminding you of something, well done - it's mimicking the ceiling in St. Peter's Basilica in Rome.)

Where the transepts cross the nave (the technical word is "crossing" - not joking) is indisputably the best place to put a dome...

...and so the celebrant has something pretty to look at while he says Mass, the back of the church is also decorated sumptuously:

(Do you see that crimson blob on the left, in between the two hanging lanterns?  It's a cardinal's hat - the old-style one, called a galero - which I presume has been strung up from the cathedral ceiling in celebration of Archbishop Wuerl's impending reception of his own, about which I have already expressed my feelings.)

I have lots more picture but, at risk of extending this post to an absurd length, I'll save them for a rainy day.  Suffice it to say that this place is absolutely gorgeous, and fully deserves a 5 for Aesthetics.

You will doubtless have noted the presence of an organ, in the right transept (not in the choir loft, where it ought to be, but this is most likely because there isn't a choir loft, so I suppose I'll forgive the powers that be their less-than-ideal placement of the organ).  What this means, however, is that the sound is projected across the transepts, not down the nave to the altar, so if you're not in the transepts or the crossing, the sound is muddy and unclear (it's probably pretty bad on the altar, too - sometimes even if the sound is good in the rest of the church it's bad near the altar).  The organist seemed moderately skilled, although he left the cantor (who didn't enunciate enough) and the congregation (which was timid) behind on a few occasions.  I was beginning to contemplate awarding a 3 for music, but then the organist had the last laugh: the postlude was Aaron Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man," which sounds surprisingly good on an organ.  Well played, sir - have a 4.

The most unique part of this experience, of course, was the liturgy, since this was a Latin Mass (the sermon was safe and forgettable).  Not a Tridentine (pre-Vatican II) Mass, mind, but the Latin language version (technically the original, rather than a version) of the Mass, commonly referred to as the Novus Ordo (New Order, but you knew that).  Very kindly, the Cathedral provided handbooks for the Ordo Missae (Order of the Mass, which you also knew, surely) alongside the hymnals, for which I was grateful, since I don't know the Novus Ordo anywhere near the level I would need to to sing it unaided.

That's right, sing it.  The Missa Novus Ordo is primarily sung, both by the celebrant and the congregation, so the youngest of the three (!) celebrants, who cannot have been older than 30, got to do the singing bit (you can hear the pope do it whenever Masses are broadcast from the Vatican - Christmas Eve Mass, for example, is usually carried on EWTN live, so when it's midnight in Rome you can sit down after dinner in the Midwest and listen to the pope's quavering voice sing the celebrant's parts of the Missa Novus Ordo - add that to your calendar).  It is chant, much of it centuries old, and written in Gregorian notation (see the picture).  I have only passing familiarity with Gregorian notation, since the only place it's used any longer is churches where Masses are sung in Latin, which are not commonplace in the Midwest (this sort of thing gets more play on the East Coast, where the Catholics are generally more conservative than those in the Midwest).  Of course, I'm also not used to singing some of the longer prayers in Latin (Agnus Dei is one thing, and it's only three lines, but the Confiteor takes up two and a half pages!).  It's entirely possible to get distracted by the unfamiliar text and mess up the chant, or focus on the chant so intently that you end up neglecting the text, producing beautifully-chanted schwas.  There is no denying that chanting the Mass in Latin feels more mystic and formal, but it's disjointing if you aren't used to it.  3 because I keep tripping up - 4 once I've learned it.

Summary
Location: 3 / 4 (3.5)
Aesthetics: 5
Music: 4
Liturgy: 3 / 4 (3.5)
16/20 (4)

A good rating, an average of 4 (though, depending on other factors, it could slip to 3.75 or rise to 4.25), bit there are signs here of some of the less pleasant aspects of the Church's doings.  For example, the homilist (the eldest of the three celebrants) felt compelled to mention, although it was by no means integral to his homily, that when God created marriage (ahem), he created it between a man and a woman (I have plenty of counterarguments to both points of this statement, but I'll refrain from haranguing and merely note that I disagree), which is quite in line with Cardinal-designate Wuerl's stance on the matter.  Furthermore, at the end of the Mass the baby-faced celebrant introduced the middle-aged celebrant as a deacon from San Antonio, who was there with students from his school.  An Anglican school, because (as Babyface explained), Cardinal-designate Wuerl is the pope's liaison with those American Anglicans who wish to come more fully into communion with the church.  In other words, not only is the not-yet-cardinal one of Washington's biggest homophobes, but he's also His Holiness's hatchet-man vis a vis the Anglican community.  I don't even know the guy and I detest him.

What I'm trying to say in a roundabout and highly sarcastic way is that although I liked Mass at the Cathedral - liked, not loved - I'm not exactly comfortable with one of the celebrants who may turn up (I'm glad I didn't end up going to the Red Mass, as I read later that it was something of a pro-life tirade, which is why Justice Ginsburg no longer attends the Red Mass).  While I may return to familiarize myself with the Latin and hear the choir, which was off this week, I'm pretty sure - no, certain - that St. Matthew the Apostle is not my religious home.

Mini-Adventure

This afternoon I decided to walk home from work, since the sun was out and it seemed like a relatively nice day, which would be a first for this week, which has been rainy and cold (and it was cold when the sun went and hid itself under a cloud nonetheless).  On my way home I passed Smithsonian Castle and, seeing a bit of a garden behind it, thought I would go see what it was.

It turns out this is the Enid A. Haupt Garden, and it covers over four acres, sandwiched in between the Smithsonian Castle (the iconic red building in the background) and Independence Avenue.  The garden is divided into several sections, one centered around a fountain, one inspired by the gardens of China, and one (through which you approach the castle from Independence Ave.), a Victorian formal garden, complete with topiary:

Across the street you can see the monstrous (both in size and aesthetic) hulk of the Department of Energy; in the foreground, the formal garden.  I learned from one of the signs that this is technically a rooftop garden.  As the garden's website puts it:

While wandering its brick paths, admiring the parterre and hanging baskets, or splashing in the fountains, few visitors to the Haupt garden realize that they are standing on the roofs of the National Museum of African Art,  the Arthur M. Sackler Gallery, and the S. Dillon Ripley Center (International Gallery).

Indeed!

After perusing the remaining flowers, I walked over towards a building that, earlier, I had noted was closed for renovations, following the path above (that odd shadow on the path is actually a palm tree - they're more resilient than you think.  They grow in Scotland too, you know.)  The building in question is the Arts and Industries building, and can be seen in the background - I followed it along towards the right, where I saw a sign informing me of what I already knew - that it was being renovated.  So I took a picture:

Not too bad for a cell phone, eh?  Underneath that central arch is an entrance to the building (closed, of course), which possessed and interesting set of cast-iron gates.  As readers of this blog may have noticed, I have something of an obsession with cast iron architectural features, especially ornate lamps and gates.  So, a picture of the gate:

Neat old wooden doors too.

After snapping a few pictures, I continued on my way home, which meant crossing Independence Ave.  You may or may not have noticed in the picture of the formal garden that the Energy building (the monstrosity in the background - Brutalism at its worst) is on stilts.  This means you can walk under it.  You can also drive under it.  On a road.  Once you get to the other side, this is what it looks like:

Might we be in East Berlin?  I think so.

This is L'Enfant Promenade, part of a massive complex referred to as L'Enfant Plaza; both are named after Pierre Charles L'Enfant, who drew up the original blueprint for the city of Washington (it was not followed in its totality, but L'Enfant is most definitely to blame for the District's periodic diagonal streets).  L'Enfant Plaza is mostly office towers, although there is apparently an underground mall as well.  Even during the day, the area feels dead - at night it's so quiet it's been nicknamed the Valley of the Tombs.  I prefer to think of it as my own personal trip behind the Iron Curtain.  (For more about L'Enfant Plaza, go here.)

Speaking of dead things, guess what this is!

If you guessed "the headquarters of the US Postal Service," you'd be right!  Seems appropriate that it's located in the "Valley of the Tombs," no?