St. John the Divine - Back to My Favorite Cathedral

Is it pretentious to have a favorite cathedral?  Probably, as I didn't have one growing up in suburban New Jersey.  We had malls, not cathedrals, although malls are religious mecca for people who shop at Forever 21 and Spencer Gifts.  In our home town mall there was a store someone very unfortunately decided to call "Little Elegance", and that's precisely what it had.  Plastic flowers did abound.  But New York city, particularly my 'hood, is not devoid of stores with silly names.  In Washington Heights, there is a store called "Everything Stationery" - which, of course, my first glance told me was "Everything Stationary" and I envisioned walking in there and seeing everything, including the humans, glued to the floor.

Anyway, I finished the latest draft of my play earlier than I expected to this week, and was faced with some actual time to myself, so I thought I'd go grab some late lunch at 1018 and then hang around the cathedral at St. John the Divine in the hour or so I had before it closed.  I hadn't been down to SJTD in a while, and wanted to check in, light a candle in the poet's corner (more pretentiousness, right?  Can you be a girl and still be a wanker?) and take some pictures with my newly repaired digital camera.  Imagine my delight at finding this very cool and creepy video art installation set up in a tent in one of the chapels there.  It was fascinating - I took a little video clip.  It made up for the fact that SJTD has no air conditioning - at least not during regular weekday hours.  I can't imagine the priests and deacons running around in full drag with no AC and 91 degrees out.  They're not exactly the Cistercians.  I tried to upload the video in here but am having a bit of trouble.

The heat is really getting to people, too.  There was some dork on 42nd and 9th trying to navigate his mini cooper past a traffic cop who, like most traffic cops, was creating more of a problem than he was solving.  Anyway, he was motioning for this guy to drive against the light - why they do this I have no idea - and the guy refused.  So the cop kept waving him ahead and waving him ahead until he finally relented and? nearly got clipped by a bus.  So the guy screams "Fuck you!" to the cop at the top of his lungs.

My friend Aash has been in L.A. the past couple of months, and she asked me if people in this hood are still acting like knuckleheads - chicken bones in the lobby, loud music cranked out of cars they can't afford etc. - I assured her that things here are the same.  In L.A. apparently everyone is pretty fairly civilized.  She says she will miss it when she comes back here.  I have to say, I live in this 'hood for one very basic reason - cheap rent.  If I had to worry about the behavior up here, you know I'd be in trouble. I wish I could afford to live near the Cathedral, but alas...

Alas.  Pretentious again.