Holiday Inn

For the past couple of Christmases my family has had the good sense to move into a hotel for Christmas dinner. The food is good and plentiful, there's a suite for late-night partying, people can retire to their rooms when overwhelmed by holiday intensity, and nobody has to cook or do extensive cleanup. Plus, the hotels have pools with awesome water slides, which keeps the kids amused, but, more important, also keeps me amused. This year's water slide was truly exceptional - four stories high, and mostly enclosed and therefore dark and extra scary. My young cousins soon discovered that the acoustic qualities of the tube were such that if you shouted into it, the person in the slide would hear your voice as though it were directly behind them, thus enhancing the freakout factor.

Dinner was a buffet in one of the ballrooms. The vegetarian option consisted primarily of an endless supply of pierogies, which made my day since there isn't much Ukrainian cuisine available in Lubbock. The ballroom was clearly equipped for business presentations, as there were six digital projectors and screens installed in the room. In support of the Christmas theme, they were each showing a video of a fireplace - not unlike the fireplace channels one sees on tv at this time of year. It did strike me as strange, though, to have six of them in one room, and all showing the same fireplace. Between that and the spooky water slide, it was a bit like spending Christmas in a Janet Cardiff installation. My young cousins embraced the opportunity for performance art by posing in the projection beam to make it look like they were being consumed by flames. This might have come across as mere mischief, but I preferred to read it at part of a larger tradition of video art. So there.