3:15 o’clock
I did not realize that you
Occur twice a day

So tired right now
Next to the Kid on the plane
Someone else driving

Atlanta airport
On time despite de-icing
The boy wants biscuits

Delta “dropped” our seats
No explanation, but we’re on
Hope bags make it too

Sitting on runway
Returning to gate for check
Good company helps

We’re leaving soonish
According to the pilot
You rock, maintenance crew

(BTW, there was no time for biscuits, but on the plus side, all the bags made it. YES.)

Of course, I had a poem for when we landed, but alas, the island does not speak Sprint so at that point my heavily populated Face book feed cuts off. Here it is:

Heavenly island
Some kid just said, “Hey, Mom, look.
There’s an ocean.”

When I pointed out to my Kid, who had provided me the snippet (he overheard it, didn’t say it), that I was short a syllable, he said, “Add an exclamation point.” He’s a problem solver.

We stood in line in 80 degrees with a bright sun waiting to go through customs. The Kid said, “Call me crazy, but I think I prefer this to Michigan.” Practical and wise.

S picked us up after a lengthy and chaotic customs entry process, and off we headed in our rental for the day (he swapped the motorbike). On the way back, we took a back road and saw this amazing little girl.

Here’s the house. And it has a view.

Ha ha. That was a wee joke. I hope you enjoyed as hearty laugh as I.

We climbed up and up and up. Look for the rainbow. (Look hard.)

The Kid continues to hone his fine eye for the good shot.

Then we climbed up and up to the house. It’s like being back at Cornell. In case you can’t tell, that hill is steep.

Here are some bananas from a tree in the backyard. I bet you didn’t know that this is what bananas look like before they have Dole stickers on them.

Here’s the hammock chair on the upper balcony where I’ll read one of the 10 books I brought. Check out S’s rasta hammock. Not for nothing did he spend two years in Jamaica. Heh.

Here’s the protected bay where we’ll initiate snorkeling. I love the pinkish lavender cast that oceans around islands have.

Not that I could keep the Kid out of the water. Some background: When he was a baby, I used to take him and his sister to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens. Every time we got near the lily pond, I had to physically restrain him with all my might, often enlisting the other kid. It was like trying to hold onto a salmon.

Afterwards, we ate on the verandah and looked at stars. They look really close down here. And pretty darn big.

Note: In order to access the web, we have to either go to a café or stand in the one spot in the house where there’s access. It’s very similar to the old rabbit ear TVs. You tell yourself, “ok, move a quarter inch to the left….another quarter – STOP. Lift one arm a little higher. Ignore the searing pain in your shoulders initiated when you click email icon. Daily Candy Weekend Guide to NY. Awesome. All right, that’ll have to do for now.” It’s a bit strange being quite this far off the grid, only because my habits in checking email and Facebook are so much more deeply ingrained than I’d realized.

Sign me up for more.

Exhibit A: This beautiful piece on Detroit by Heidi Ewing and Rachel Grady.

When I saw that one of my ushering assignments for 2012 would be Einstein on the Beach, the seminal Philip Glass/Robert Wilson collaboration, I believe I murmured a dutiful, “Oh. Awesome.” Glass’s music does very little for me. I find it odd that he’s been termed a minimalist. I wrote a definition of minimalism that I taped to the wall behind my desk: “Exactly the right amount of a good thing.” Glass’s musical phrases, often in 6/8 time (da da dah DAH da da) are repeated ad infinitum, which is hardly the right amount, and the phrases themselves are tedious, droning on an on; I don’t need to hear them 8 times, let alone 500. Someone likened the music to Ravi Shankar’s: “You’re supposed to just kind of trance out, I think.” Shankar never simply repeats, and he’s fully engaged; watch his sequence of Monterey Pop (scroll down if you can’t wait) for an example. Glass’s music is the essence of detachment. When I hear the allegros, I feel stuck inside an audio blender.

Einstein is 4.5 hours long, and I lasted for 1.25 of it. There is no question that the tableaux are breathtaking, and all performers evince extraordinary discipline as they strike poses and repeat movement continually over 20 minutes or so; the opera is constructed of a series of vignettes of approximately that length. In particular, the musicians seem to have made some sort of pact with the devil; the score is not just fiendishly difficult, it repeats so often I’m not sure how anyone keeps his or her place. It’s plotless, something I heartily appreciate (as a Balanchine fan, it’s required). It’s utterly cerebral, and is in fact a towering work of conceptual art.

As I sat, first on a step then in an unoccupied aisle seat – the performance was almost completely sold out – I kept thinking how much I would enjoy the whole thing were it hosted in a museum. I imagined myself walking around to look at the different sequences from a number of angles: peering at a particular performer up close, hunkering down so I could look up, walking to the back to get a far perspective, and, most importantly, whispering to a companion about how the thing was speaking to me at a particular moment. Like a great painting, Einstein constantly provides new and interesting things to look at, but it would be so much more effective to not be confined to one ass-numbing vantage point.

Glass and Wilson’s solution is that audience members are free to leave the theater at any time; as ushers, we were told to give the instruction “come and go as you please.” But the lovely thing about a museum is that you can discuss the art, quietly, of course, while you’re in the room with it. How marvelous it would be if Einstein were installed for a longer period of time in a museum-like setting. And I imagine it would prove a valuable experience for the creators as well; interactivity would point to fascinating patterns, I’m sure, as you could see when the audience is truly transfixed and when they’re just plain bored. Stuck up on a stage, its audience alternating between still reverence and static bewilderment, the piece isn’t fully served.

No doubt had I been able to last, I would feel immensely rewarded; certainly my dreamscape was altered somewhat, and it seems my REM was populated by big panels of white and smiling people in trousers and white shirts (an early motif). But it was a cold night in Michigan, I’d been away from the kid for a week, and I wanted to Skype with my beau. I left Einstein and its icy, glassy thrills to the virtuous theater elite of this fine city.

Now here, to warm you up, is Ravi. Trance-tastic.

Because first of all, how can one not love someone with the name Alison Pill? Its nursery cadence, like Marjorie Daw or Scarborough Fair, that heavenly last name that sounds like an insult? On top of it, she’s cute as a button, like Ellen Page minus the smug, because you know if you grew up with the name Alison Pill, you’ve taken some lumps.

Pill is a loopy delight as Zelda Fitzgerald, just one of the art deco-era characters that populate Midnight in Paris. Woody Allen’s latest is hardly a masterpiece, but it is bubbly good fun, and it’s the first time I can remember him actually inserting historical characters into a movie. He’s always terrific with period pieces; Bullets over Broadway and The Purple Rose of Cairo are two of his finest 90 minutes. Here, the characters’ dialogue is non-sentimental and snappy. The casting is even better than the writing, particularly a solid Corey Stoll as Hemingway and a droll Adrian Brody as Salvador Dali, who redeems the choice of Owen Wilson by noting that his lips look like they’re melting. If only Penelope Cruz had been on hand to play Gala. Sequel, Mr. Allen? Please?

Wilson is quite a bit less annoying than usual, restraining his customary stoner drawl and turning in a watchable performance. Sadly, Rachel McAdams, so terrific in Slings and Arrows, has been given a dreadful role; Allen nearly always has a bitchy, head-scratching choice of girlfriend who drives the protagonist to escape into fantasy and a hotter chick, but rarely does she get quite so much screen time. McAdams’s character is obnoxious to the point that the writing feels downright misogynistic, and her mother, played by Mimi Kennedy, doesn’t fare much better.

As the flip side of the coin, Marion Cotillard’s character doesn’t exactly get the long end of the stick, either. It’s impossible to not love Cotillard; she’s as beautiful as Isabella Rossellini and a much better actress. But the character can’t hold a candle to some of Allen’s wonderful women, including those played by Dianne Wiest in Hannah, Bullets, and Radio Days; Mia Farrow, Diane Keaton, Charlotte Rampling, and Tracy Ullmann have all been given much better material. Maybe mooning over Scarlett Johansson for all those movies shot in London flattened out Allen’s keyboard.

But let’s get back to Alison Pill. Say it with me: Alison Pill, Alison Pill, your name be proclaimed from a very high hill. Can’t you just feel the little bluebirds tweeting ’round your head now?

The New Year’s Eve roses hit their peak over the weekend. Pretty, n’est-ce pas?

“I loved it. It’s set in Hawaii.”

“Nice music.”

This is not exactly an irresistible come-on, at least for me. I subscribe to Afar and Nat Geo Traveller; hell, I can google or spotify pictures and music from Hawaii galore any time I want. I’ve never really even wanted to go all that much. I lived on Key West for 2 years. I know it’s not the same, but I’ve done the tropics to at least some degree.

The Descendants, however, is getting an absolute ton of critic love, despite having about as much depth as Don Ho’s music. It starts with lengthy voice-over; long ago, when I interviewed director Philip Kaufman for a Criterion disc, he said that he felt voice-over had a deadening effect on a movie, and indeed, it was one of the things that Ridley Scott hated most about the studio edit on Blade Runner. And yet, here we have George Clooney droning on in that sometimes character-less monotone of his, about how terrible it is to live in Hawaii, over a crass montage of those Down and Out in Oahu – crass because Clooney’s character is an exemplar of First World Problems, e.g., “I have to wear these stupid Hawaiian shirts because everyone else does, when you know what I really want to do is rock me some Brooks Brothers.”

It’s not a bad movie. The time passes amiably enough, because Clooney is eminently watchable. But the accolades for his performance feel overly gushy. There’s none of the wild-eyed brio that the Coens harnessed so beautifully in O Brother, Where Art Thou, nor the world-weary tenacity of Syriana or Michael Clayton. Clooney’s a solid, old-school Hollywood actor who plays variations of himself; it makes him a great movie star, so let’s not lose our minds and say that he’s doing something amazing when he’s just doing what he gets paid very well to do.

Special notice is owed Shallene Woodley; anyone who’s survived raising a fiery adolescent will initially shiver in recognition. Of course, there’s also some solace, since, despite starting off as a classically (I won’t say stereotypically) angry teen, the kid turns out to have a decent sense of self as well as fairly good sense. Clooney always strikes me as a generous actor; despite his godlike charisma, or perhaps because of it, he has a way of making the screen feel balanced. He and Woodley play off each other beautifully. There are also some very nice bits with Beau Bridges, who seems to have settled into older, fatter brother mode with a pleasant joviality, and who looks not just at home in technicolor palm tree-festooned attire, but as if he doesn’t have anything else in his closet.

Director and co-screenwriter Alexander Payne is good, and his other movies, including Election and Sideways, provide a nice, breezy stage on which people on the verge of some sort of crisis fumble their way through it. But there’s little resonance here, possibly because the genuine tragedy of a comatose wife – admittedly, not very interesting to watch – is eclipsed by things that should be smaller, including real estate deals, infidelity, and a 10-year-old who text harasses another kid (something about pubic hair). The script is so much vapor, occasionally producing a chuckle, wringing out an easy tear in the goodbye scene, but overall the whole thing feels rote in a way that Miramax in particular specializes.

There is one remarkable scene, less than a minute long, and it belongs to Woodley: an underwater shot in which she deals with her impending loss. (Props to Payne for coming up with an ingenious shot.) And there’s a particularly fine performance from Robert Forster, veteran of about a million things and one of those “that’s that guy…who…” (and then you can never remember where you’ve him, you just know you have) actors. As a hard man faced with the unthinkable, he shows the nuance that can be achieved from working solely in iron.

But honestly, gang, you really can wait for the DVD and even then I’d opt to watch Melancholia again instead. And of course, with certain Oscar noms, at least for Clooney, screenplay, and Payne, and a good shot for Woodley, you’ll see enough clips to get the gist of it.

In the extraordinary Argentine movie The Secret in Their Eyes, the protagonist, a frustrated writer, finds a scrap of paper on which he has previously written “TEMO,” “I fear.” After a good hard look, he carefully adds an A: “TEAMO,” “I love.”

One more reminder that tiny but significant adjustments don’t take that much effort. Just creativity, a little courage, and the willingness to change your mind.

More on the movie (and about a dozen others) later. Have a lovely day.

Rather than make year-end lists, I follow them. I know, it’s a little silly. I’ve often confessed to my love of lists; in this era, there is so much stuff out there, I’m perfectly happy for someone else to do at least some legwork.

Naturally, I pay a price, especially for my childish insistence on trusting the NY Times “Best Books” list, which has proven time and again to be a big fat dud. I’m not even going to attempt to read the Stephen King tome; as my son says, “All Stephen King books end with ‘It was an alien, all along,’” something not really true, but that kid just makes me laugh. But diving into Swamplandia!, exclamation point mandatory, had me wishing for some sort of spaceman intervention. Over several tortuous nights, I tried to read it and kept falling asleep. The author’s sentences are microscopically crafted and no doubt strike some, including the venerable Paper of Record, as high art. They gave me a headache. Judge for yourself:

“The tourists moved sproingily from buttock to buttock in the stands, slapping at the ubiquitous mosquitos, unsticking their khaki shorts and their printed department-store skirts from their sweating thighs.”

It’s not awful, but it just never freaking ends. The characters have names like Osceola, Kiwi, and Hilola. There’s barely a chink of air anywhere. No wonder I’d fall asleep, I couldn’t get any oxygen to my brain. But I did think the culprit was me, and that I just needed a good run at the book to get some traction. An unexpected 30 minute wait with only the book for company proved me wrong, and at page 89, I officially threw in the towel, or as the author might say, the omnipresent terrycloth fabric remnant that dolefully circled my neck like a scruffy noose.

It’s too bad, because an alligator wrestling theme park on the skids seems like it could yield something rather fine. As a kid, I read somewhere about Weeki Wachee theme park, a magical destination somewhere in Florida that promised live mermaids who ate hot dogs underwater. (It’s STILL there; I just googled it to find the above link.) I also recall reading, not that many years ago, about the various mermaid ailments that were part and parcel of employment at Weeki Wachee, included some bizarre tail fungus that came from being in waist to foot spandex for hours on end. My friends, that is indeed grounds for a novel; well, more likely a novella. Ok, maybe only a story. A graphic one.

Anyway, Swamplandia! did not fulfill my expectation, which was not that it would be one of the Best Books of the Year! but that it would be at least fun and diverting. Ah, well. So far I’m having better luck with The Tiger’s Wife, by a 26-year-old Belgrade native who can, so far, really really write; she’s good enough that she’s not pissing me off, as 26-year-old publishing darlings tend to do.

Really, I have to stop checking the stupid Times Best Books lists year after year. Their shoddy treatment of James Wolcott’s terrific memoir Lucking Out and curious notion that first-class writer Laura Jacobs doesn’t exist are just the latest in a long list of misdemeanors. Dennis’s first book, Mr. Mike, was never my favorite – rather fraught was the personal life as he wrote that one, and I had a rough time separating the experience from the work – but it’s a serious, well-written study of a seminal comedy writer and deserved an incisive critic, not the smirking prat who wrote about it.

2012 is the year of breaking old patterns. Goodbye, NY Times list. You and your alligator wrestling treatise have pushed me beyond the pale. Here’s to a year of reading stuff that just looks interesting.

S and I arrived on a truly glorious day; very little wind, brilliant blue skies. First stop after checking in at the James (a great hotel): Mag Mile. On our way there, we saw this cool place. Not sure what it is, but that’s the beauty of Chicago architecture; there’s so much to look at.

Here’s a close-up from the monster tree at one of the big vertical malls on Michigan Ave. Those are big honkin’ ornaments.

And here’s some cool detail from the Tribune building. There are pieces of other structures, including the Parthenon, Arc de Triomphe, and one of the pyramids embedded in the outer walls. How those Trib correspondents managed to get these things is no doubt a good story, and hopefully a testament to the American mastery of swiping.

I love the Bean sculpture, more properly known as the Cloud Gate. Below, a farther shot and a closer up one. If you know what to look for, you can find me and S in the lower one.

Oh, all right, here we are.

At last, the moment you’ve all been waiting for: a semi-recognizable picture of me. Here I am, outside one of my favorite places, the Art Institute. Note that it is late December and I am holding my coat.

That night, we jumped over to the small plates vegetarian restaurant, Green Zebra, in West Town, then to see actor/creator Jay Torrance’s Burning Bluebeard, way uptown at the Neo-Futurists. Performed in a beat-up black box, the show began with its 6 actors emerging from body bags to relive a 1903 performance of Bluebeard that ended in flames and 603 deaths. A great concept with a somewhat haphazard script redeemed by a powerful ending and committed, exuberant performers; of special note, the beautifully precise Dean Clark and delightful Gumby girl Molly Plunk. Theater is alive and well in Chicago, and it’s a wonderful thing to see.

The next day, we headed to the Hyde Park neighborhood to stop in at the Robie House, Frank Lloyd Wright’s masterpiece of Prairie Style architecture. Before the tour, we poked around the University of Chicago campus, starting with the Rockefeller Memorial “Chapel,” a behemoth American cathedral without a whole lot to recommend it. We searched and then found the Bond Chapel, a breathtaking gem tucked away on a quad. We had been looking for an ornament, unsuccessfully; here, we felt as if we’d stepped inside of one.

All in all, a grand 36 hours. We’ll be back.