A Titanic Mistake?

In the year 2000 I embarked on a nice ocean cruise on Royal Caribbean’s Monarch of the Seas. It was my first try at a cruise of this ilk and I was duly impressed by the sheer size of the vessel. A huge horizontal “hotel” with lots of great amenities for the lazy and libidinous. During the cruise a video was shown (several times) touting the next generation of cruise ships, centering on the Voyager of the Seas which, unlike the Monarch, would have too large a hull to pass through the Panama Canal. The video showed “special” stuff like a climbing wall (which I would never think of trying) and a skating rink (ditto) and just generally speaking to the fact that an additional 1,500 passengers, or so, could be accomodated. Not my cup-of-tea was my reaction…the crowds aboard the Monarch was sometimes almost more than I could take.

So, although I’ve taken two more cruises since, I’ve avoided the biggies. If you look south on this blog you will see a paragraph about watching the new Queen Mary 2, the current size-leader in cruise ships, gracefully slip out of New York harbor along with the Victoria and the QE2. The Mary looked about as tall as it was long and although a very impressive sight, it was not something I aspired to board anytime soon. And now, beyond my comprehension as to any reason why, next year will greet the next generation of ship…that is, Royal Carribean’s Genesis which will, upon launching, be the largest vessel ever to hit the high and/or low seas. Although tonnage is hard for me to compare to anything, the Genesis is 220,000, far outstripping any competiton, and has a passenger capacity of 6,400 plus, I’m told, at least 2,500 crew members. It is 1,180 feet long, 154 feet wide and 240 feet high. Although scheduled to serve the Caribbean, there are currently no ports capable of providing berthing space and even it’s home base, Ft. Lauderdale, is having to make some major improvements to accommodate her. Mind boggling.

I have two fairly self-serving thoughts when I look at the artist’s rendering, above. I can’t help but try to place myself in one of those little dots that represent portholes and being reminded how tiny and insignificant I am. And I can’t help thinking how much I don’t want to be part of a mass stampede trying get off the ship to board a snorkeling excursion in some overwhelmed Caribbean port.

When is too big too big? The Genesis just might be it.

Friday's & Sunday on Saturday

I saw Stephen Sondheim’s Sunday in the Park with George in its original incarnation on Broadway sometime in the spring of 1984. It got mixed reviews but still won a Pulitzer for Drama in ’85, but got shut out for Tonys except for a couple of design awards.

In my hazy memory it was two musicals. The first act was done in period, that is, during the halcyon days of the Impressionist movement in France (Paris in particular). Based on the creation of Georges Seurat’s pointillist masterpiece “A Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte” (shown here) in particular and the art world at that time in general the show was a tour de force of logic and preciseness, with a book and direction by James Lapine, that created a perfect setting for Sondheim’s incredible talent for lyrical imagery and musical genius. I recall being blown away by this production; especially with the crescendo of beauty at the first act curtain that left me, and everybody I knew at the time, totally stunned.

Oops, wait, the show was only half over. And, oops, as I recall vividly, the second act handed us a lemon and, although some lemonade bubbled up later on, it was a disappointing letdown of the first rank. Act two begins with a fictional descendant of the original artist, also named George, who tries to get us to believe that modern art in all its creativity could be equally compelling. He could be right but in 1984 it didn’t get done, although performances by Mandy Patinkin and Bernadette Peters almost saved the creators from themselves. Almost. As I recall it was a really weird evening of theater with an incredible high, brought low. As I consequence it is memorable to me now as only half of a wonderful show.

This is corrected in some ways by the 2008 Broadway revival I saw at this Saturday’s matinee. It is the 2005-06 production originally staged in London and imported to these shores by the Roundabout Theatre Company as part of their season. The two lead actors, Daniel Evans and Jenna Russell, came along for the ride (the rest of the company are Americans) and I thought she was great (and a very, very good singer) and I thought he was good but lacked a certain ballsiness that I wanted in the role of a maverick (at the time) artist like Seurat.

This production probably comes as close as possible in getting that dratted second act under control. We only get an “impression” (get it?) of the “Chromolume” that I thought was a horrible problem in the original production, so the laser lightshow we see now serves to bridge the two acts fairly successfully and pretty much makes the show into one. I’m not saying it entirely worked for me; but the second act also boasts some glorious music, which feeds off of our appreciation from the first act and it was quite enough, thank you, to carry the day. And the play.

By the way, boys and girls, there is quite a lot of animation in the set design. I don’t mean technical animation in the painterly sense, I mean animation as in, well, animation, as in Pixar Studios (herein by an outfit named Knifedge). Although very interesting I don’t think it either enhanced or detracted from this musical; it’s just another facet of what, I’m sure, is becoming more and more the utilization of modern techniques in a lot of areas in the arts. And in ART (capitalized).

Oh, yeah, I guess it’s up to me to say it. I coerced my companions into having lunch at T.G.I.Friday’s (damn expensive cheeseburger), the sole purpose being that we would then be able to say that we did Friday’s on Saturday before Sunday. Forgive us our sins.

My New Sneakers

These are my new sneakers. I ordered them on-line from Zappos.com Sunday night and they were delivered via UPS on Tuesday. They are "Saucony Originals Jazz Low Pros" and I love them because they are so cool, they fit perfectly and pretty much go with all my basic outfits (which nowadays consists of jeans and, well, raggedy jeans). Not only was delivery exceptionally prompt, as an added treat an extra pair of contrasting-color shoelaces were included; a nice surprise and much appreciated--one cannot have too many pairs of color-contrasting shoelaces. I also bought a second pair of sneakers (Saucony Originals Courageous) and, although they are also cool, being various shades of gray and pale violet, some might say they match my persona more than the ones illustrated above. I try not to hang out with those people a whole lot.

Fair-Weather Football Hugging

I do like to watch football on the telly, honestly I do. What I cannot admit to, at the present time, is that I am any sort of fan for any particular team. But I am not immune to the hype once the playoffs start and especially once the Super Bowl rachets up the interest. Living in New York I was, of course, semi-rooting for the Giants this year but I would have been more than happy to see New England make history with a perfect season. But it was not to be and the game was certainly an exciting spectacle nonetheless. I also must admit to laughing out loud at the commercial for E-Trade with the baby urping on his keyboard.

Oh, well...the Super Bowl is over for another year and I'll try to start paying better attention, earlier, next season. Honestly I will.

A View of Vizcaya

So what’s a guy to do on a rainy day in Hollywood, Florida? Not that I was sick of the sun or anything but I guess Mama Nature decided three days of fine weather was enough and on Monday we were visited by overcast skies with accompanying occasional spritzes from the strato-cumulus formations overhead which deterred even my speedo-motivated immersion in 75-degree water. So at the suggestion of my gracious host Bernardo, the Prince of Ecuador, we headed down to Miami (Coconut Grove to be exact) and spent a couple of hours strolling around Villa Vizcaya.

Vizcaya was plopped down on the shoreline of 180 acres of fallow fields near Miami between 1914 - 1916 (during it’s construction the population swelled by 1,000 since most of the workers had to be imported to what was then, essentially, a fairly forsaken backwater). The estate was built by a dude named James Deering who had inherited a vice presidency in the International Harvester Company and, for health reasons, needed to escape the wintry climes of Chicago and the Northeast. Vizcaya is a North Italian sixteenth-century style villa (Google informs me the Villa Rezzonico at Bassano del Grappa was the basic inspiration. That piece of obscure geographical trivia could probably have been discarded, but I liked the sound of it).

Deering seemed to have had zero taste in practically anything and hired advisors to accompany him to Europe where he more or less legally plundered castles and palaces (and villas); buying entire rooms, furnishings included, and having them transported back to Florida (sometimes intact; sometimes cut up into pieces and reassembled) where they were shoehorned into spaces designed specifically to hold them at Vizcaya. I think, despite what our knowledgeable tour guide espoused, Mr. Deering had only one thing going for him: money. Nonetheless the Villa is quite an unusual building in what is essentially a tropical southern climate. The house and gardens now sit on about 16 acres; the remainder of the land having been sold off after Deering’s death in the mid-1920’s and it is now the property of Miami-Dade County. It is a designated historical landmark and 35 of its 70 rooms are open to the public.

As a member of that public I am always filled with a slight unease when tromping around this sort of opulent construction, including San Simeon in Calif., the mansions along the Hudson in New York and, especially, the monolithic wedding cakes in Newport, Rhode Island. Maybe I have a basic communistic gene hidden in my psyche that, while admiring the result of it, I still object to the needless opulence and self indulgence they represent. Maybe I just don’t feel very welcome in a house that I would never have been invited to in its heyday; unless to fulfill my role as riffraff.

Nonetheless, visiting Vizcaya is a darn good way to spend an overcast, occasionally rainy afternoon in So. Florida; especially with buds who pay your (senior) way.