STL DPB ON THE ROAD - YOU CAN'T BE TOO CAREFUL THESE DAYS

Like many of my online friends, people who don't wear masks in public make me angry. Our family, even the little ones, are with the program. While waiting for the next flight at O'Hare, Ellie, Lambie and her favorite doll, Aliane (pronounce it the French way - we think she is Québecois because the card that came with her says she likes poutine) are full of respect for their fellow travelers. Hard to see in these pictures but Ellie put a little bottle of hand sanitizer on each of their left wrists. Not everyone in the terminal was so respectful despite the Illinois state mandate.        

STL DPB ON THE ROAD - O'HARE AIRPORT

Changing planes at Chicago's O'Hare airport. Saw this on our way between gates and I don't get it. Recreational marijuana is legal in  Illinois if you get it from a licensed dispensary. So if you brought it in from somewhere else you shouldn't technically be taking it out of the airport. But if you got the stuff through security in carry-on luggage at your home airport, do you really think you have to worry about it on the streets of Chicago? Or is it for people leaving Illinois? I doubt this gets a lot of use.

Lansing, Michigan, Thursday night, then up to Clare to see the family on Friday. 

BEEN A LONG TIME

An old photo of the main concourse of the American Airlines terminal at Chicago - O'Hare. There was a time in my life when it was a rare month that I didn't fly somewhere. Now it's been six months since we set foot on an airplane.

We have one grandchild in STL, the redoubtable Ellie. But there are two more in central Michigan we see all too rarely, my son's kids, Audrey, almost 5, and the well-named Atlas, close to a year and a half. We researched this thoroughly and we decided it's okay to visit. (Ellie and our daughter Emily are going along.) Very short flights from here to Chicago and on to Lansing, Michigan. We are on smaller jets with 2-2 and 1-2 seating, no middle seats. We got a stash of N95 masks (Chinese, so we hope they are not fake, but at least they enclose the mouth and nose tightly.) We got sterile, disposable plane seat covers and tray table covers.  We got sterile wipes out to here, purchased before things got bad. We have  an Air BnB cottage with no one else around. So, volare...              

EAT MY SHORTS

From the graffiti-permitted section of the Mississippi River floodwall. I've always admired Bart Simpson. He was a boy I never was, self-determined, sometimes rebellious, sarcastic, often disrespectful. I was a good kid, reasonably obedient, following the social, political and religious party line. Always had a good haircut. Rarely got into trouble. Then adolescence hit me in the cauldron of New York City. Wow, did things change. 

Got some mildly irresponsible things to do tomorrow. Three airports: STL - ORD - LAN. Gotta see those other grandchildren.    

PLACEBO

The upper part of Roxy Paine's Placebo on the lawn next to the art museum. It's stainless steel and stripped of foliage. This seems to be Paine's thing. I've seen other versions of this. I remember one in Union Square in New York.

There is a trend I notice in contemporary visual art and sometimes music that I don't like, even with artists I generally admire, They find one thing that gets popular attention and then beat it to death for years. Paine is an example, but think of Chuck Close's exquisite sorta-pointillist portraits from here to eternity; Philip Glass's death by arpeggio (although I think Satyagraha is the finest opera of the 20th Century); although I adore her work, Jenny Holzer's unending streams of aphorisms; Botero's infinite parade of chubbies; Cindy Sherman's mercurial selfies. But then there are are those whose every major work tells us something new: Stravinsky, Shostakovitch, Bernstein, Sondheim, Arnold Newman, Ansel Adams, for example. So that's my occasional rant.