The Home Stretch

Well, I have less than five weeks to go onboard the Majesty. Five weeks and my first contract will be over.  I've been here since March 5th. I'll sign off on September 24th, fly back to Indianapolis for three weeks of vacation, and then fly to Spain to join the Adventure of the Seas on October 13th. I'll be fulfilling another full contract with Adventure and will be onboard for roughly seven months.

I'm not really sure what to think at this point in my contract. Many of my friends onboard who have been in this same position were very excited to sign off the ship and have the contract over with. They couldn't wait to go on vacation and be home. I'm not sure that I feel that way. 

Most people onboard are looking for ways to 'make the contract go faster' by filling their down time with side jobs and extra assignments. I don't want to do that either. I understand that people like to make a little extra money with the side job, but, it seems that a lot of people are just trying to make the contract go by as quickly as possible.

For me, it's different. This aren't precisely the right words, but, I don't really have anywhere to go. I don't really have a 'home' right now.

Don't get me wrong, now. Am I looking forward to seeing Ted? Absolutely! Friends that I haven't seen in 6 months? Definitely. Eating food other than the 'curry du jour' in the crew mess? Without a doubt. Am I excited to watch my college and pro football teams and be able to turn on ESPN without seeing days and days of in depth cricket, cycling, and Australian rules football coverage? That will be great. And, of course, I am enthusiastically awaiting walking around places where I don't have to duck (for fear of hitting my head) all the time like I do onboard.

Besides that, however, I don't have a lot of motivation to get off the ship. There is no "home" for me to go back to currently. I wrote in a previous blog post that home is just a concept to me at this point. The ship is my home, I suppose, but it can never truly be that. The ship is a temporary place to be for everyone. It can never be permanent. It will never be a place where I can be home because of it's transient nature. Onboard, I am literally here today and gone tomorrow. Relationships with other crew members can be good, however, it's known by everyone involved that they are impermanent. 

Given that, I'm not even that enthusiastic to join the Adventure. At this point, it just seems like another ship to me. More temporary living. That's not a bad thing, by the way. It just is what it is.  I have a pretty good idea of what the gig will be like onboard in terms of musical satisfaction, so, there won't be too many surprises there.  I don't have a great desire to visit Europe or the Eastern Caribbean. As long as the ports have good food, fast internet, and hopefully the ability for me to use my cell phone, I'm cool with that. It's kinda funny that what I look for in a port is the ability for me to easily communicate with my friend network back on land even though I don't feel like I have a real place there to call my own. I have tons of friends and support on land, but, I don't have a place to settle there. Basically, I'm onboard to play trombone and…figure shit out….and review movies, I guess.

A musician friend of mine recently resigned from a ship right in the middle of the contract. Had to pay for his own flights back to the States from VERY far away. He'd had enough of the ship life, I guess. Another friend of mine is back on ships again after I thought that he was done. I wonder where I will end up after this experiment/healing process is over? I'm not much closer to figuring that out than I was when I first started on the Majesty, but, I don't have any expectations on myself to make that decision in any kind of time frame.

Most of the communication I do with friends and family back on land is through Facebook. With that program, users post a 'profile picture' to identify themselves to others. Most people use a picture of themselves. I haven't been able to do that for a long time because I just haven't felt like myself for about a year now. So, I've been using pictures of movie characters that I can relate to as my profile pic instead. Hell, just take a look at the background photo of this blog. That just about says it all. Anyway, when I do get back to posting pictures of myself as a Facebook profile pic that will be a big cue that I've gotten some things processed and I feel like myself so that I can move on in a specific direction. Until then, I'll just be out here on my Walkabout continuing the process.

Vlog Post 3.0 - Primrose Kindergarten

A friend of mine teaches at Primrose Kindergarten near Indianapolis and she was talking about me working on a ship with her students back in the Spring. The class ended up sending me some letters with questions about the ship. Some of them also did some drawings of what they thought the ship might look like. I took the opportunity to tape these to my cabin wall (you can see them in the video briefly). Instead of writing them a letter back, I decided to make this short video with the help of my roommate Tony.

This was a fun project - thought it would be cool to post here. Enjoy!

Vlog Post 2.0

Here's that answer video I know you've all been waiting for!

Guess What Happens Next - The Answer!

Vlog post

I must admit: ship life has become routine for me. I credit this to the fact that we do 3 and 4 day cruises over the same area. Juxtapose that with my next ship, Adventure of the Seas, where we will do 7 day cruises with 2 different itineraries in the Eastern Caribbean. That means I'll only be in certain ports once every 2 weeks. Hopefully, this will break up the monotony of the trip and inspire more blog posts.

In short, I feel that I've explained everything that is "new" for me about Miami, Nassau, CoCo Cay, and Key West already. Barring anymore "food posts" or movie reviews, there will most likely not be any earth shattering news from the cruise front at this point.

I did think it would be fun to share a little video project that I made recently. First a little background:

All crew cabins are equipped with TV's. We can watch all of the channels that the guests watch from their rooms as well as a few other channels just for crew. For example, there is a channel that deals only with crew safety training. Videos on the correct procedure for water tight doors, lifeboat evacuation procedures, etc. We also have several channels that are dedicated to showing movies. Each channel shows one movie, back to back, for about a week. When the movie is ends, it just repeats from the beginning. Over the course of a week or so, you can find time to catch all of the movie if you are so inclined.

One of these channels, for some reason, has turned into the "Freddy Krueger" station. For the past 2 or 3 weeks there have been showings of various films from the "Nightmare on Elm Street" franchise (not in order mind you...and I do find this activates my OCD tendencies). I have always been terrified of these movies. Especially when I was a kid. The idea that there was a murderer who existed in your dreams and would kill you when you were sleeping was truly horrifying to me. To be fair, I've always been afraid of all scary movies. I tend to watch movies while suspending my disbelief completely during the film. During the movie, I get totally wrapped up in the story, characters, and action. This makes for some good times watching movies, but, also predisposes me to living vicariously through the actions of my favorite movie stars and their films (read: I tend to enjoy movies that are generally considered bad by most people/critics).

In any case, watching the Nightmare on Elm Street movies now makes me wonder how I could ever have been scared by them at all! Not only because the special effects are so hilariously out of date, but, mostly because the idea of a dream killer is so far-fetched and unconvincing.

So, Ian and I were watching one of the Nightmare movies while getting ready to play a show last week and came across a scene that, if we had the technology, would've been rewound and replayed MANY times. We didn't have the ability at the time, so, I decided to create this video. Enjoy!

Guess What Happens Next!

Let's all go to the movies…

Opening day for the new Batman movie, The Dark Knight Rises this past Friday. Despite sad news of tragedy in Colorado, a group of us made the pilgrimage to a local Miami movie theater to check out the show.

We went to the Coco Walk Mall for the 10:30 AM showtime. It's a good thing that we went to a showing that early because the movie has a running time of 165 minutes. That's quite a time commitment for those of us who really can't afford to be late getting back to the ship. We had no reason to worry as the same cabbie who dropped us off agreed to pick us up again after the show to get us back downtown. With five of us splitting the cab ride ($10 each round trip) it wasn't all that expensive. $19 total for movie and transportation. We even had time to grab a late lunch at the New York Bagel Company afterwards before heading back to the ship.

I really enjoyed the movie. Directed by Christopher Nolan of Inception fame, this film was an epic conclusion to the trilogy that he started with Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. While the Oscar winning performance by Heath Leger of "The Joker" from TDK certainly set the bar very high for this the TDKR villain, Bane was up to the challenge. A powerful and sinister villain who was unyielding in his barbaric quest to bring about the downfall of Gotham City. Plus, he totally reminds me of Lord Humongous from the cult classic The Road Warrior…so…extra points for that.

Nolan did a spectacular job of keeping TDKR in the spirit of the previous two films while at the same time paying clever homage to previous Batman interpretations. This latest film continues the gritty spirit of the others in the Nolan trilogy with dark lighting, lots of shades of grey and black in the set and costume design, and continues the overall utilitarian feel to Gotham City. Ian pointed out that at one point in the movie, Bane comments on a young boy performing "The Star Spangled Banner" as having "a wonderful singing voice." Jack Nicholson, in the original Batman movie, had a similar line when portraying the Joker. That was a nice tie in.

The movie also draws direct inspiration from a set of graphic novels called Knight Fall in which Batman's battle with Bane depicts Bruce Wayne's eventual end as Batman and protector of Gotham. In fact, it seems that some of the fight scenes between Batman and Bane are storyboarded directly from the Knight Fall comics. Very cool.

Another thing I like about Nolan's interpretation of Batman is the human aspect of the "superhero" myth. Faithful to the spirit of the comics, Nolan portrays Batman as what he is: a man with a painful childhood, passion for justice, and love for a city and humanity. That's it. He's just a man. An athletic man with plenty of money, assets, and cool gadgets to be sure. But in the end, he's only a man. He's not Superman. He doesn't have super strength, x-ray vision, or any other type of "super" power. Nolan holds true to this by not having Batman perform acts that are too far out of bounds from a highly athletic and intelligent person. In short, he can't leap tall buildings in a single bound because we can't. In fact, this version of Batman (played extraordinarily well by Christian Bale) is the most human yet, in my opinion.

Nolan's direction of action sequences also relates to this portrayal of true-to-life hero. The fight scenes are about as unidealized as I've seen in modern film. When Batman is engaged in hand to hand combat (which is most of the time because he doesn't believe in guns or killing his enemies) the camera work is decidedly still. 

A popular technique when filming fight scenes is to shoot the footage from many different angles. In post production the scenes are cut together with audience perspective changing very quickly, sometimes more than once per second. This does a couple of things. One, it makes the fights seem to have more speed and excitement than they normally would. Also, it hides the limitations of the actors/stunt personnel, as they try to portray extreme fight sequences using moves not normally performed by humans. Basically, it allows heroes and villains to perform superhuman fight scenes, without actually having to perform them due to the fact that the audience never gets to see more than one second of action per camera shot (see movies like The Borne Identity, Salt, Casino Royale for examples of this technique). 

Bourne fight scenes (the first 30 seconds tells the story):



In the spirit of keeping Batman and Bane human characters, Nolan avoids this technique. Fight scenes are shot using very limited camera editing. The characters are shown from one angle fighting each other for long periods of time. The effect is quite arresting and different from other movies. It makes it seem realistic, or at least, more realistic than other action flicks. Neither of them are performing acrobatics that are incredibly unrealistic. They are basically just brawling. I like it and think that it speaks to Nolan's attempt to create a human heroes and villains, not a superhero/supervillains, in Batman and Bane respectively.

I also liked the music during the movie. Often times, I find that movie scores get in the way of the storytelling. However, I didn't find that with TDKR. Bane (the villain) has a theme, but, it's not overused so it's quite effective when heard. Also, there is great use of silence in this movie. Sometimes, it's better not to have any music at all...just watch The Wire for examples of this.

Overall, I thought the movie was terrific. Definitely something to see on the big screen and, given the opportunity, a movie that I would definitely see more than once.

July 21

Waffles on the Bridge

Twice a month we have an event on the Majesty called "Waffles on the Bridge." It happens exactly as it sounds like it does: waffles are cooked on the bridge of the ship and all crew are invited to partake. I went this week to check it out. It was my first time up there. It's a nice opportunity to meet and talk with some of the officers onboard. I found out that the Hotel Director is a huge jazz fan. His favorite trumpet player is Clifford Brown. Nice!

Also, I got to see first hand an area of the ship that most people don't get to see. I didn't have any waffles (trying to watch my figure, you know), but, they sure smelled good! Pics below - enjoy!

Great views of Nassau from the "wing" of the bridge.

Looking back at the Majesty from the bridge.

We were parked next to Carnival and Disney ships.

The Bahamian Naval vessel looks like a toy from our ship.

Instrument panel inside.

The picture does not do this view justice. You can

see just about everything from the bridge windows.

Best view I've had from the ship yet!

This is a picture of some pictures of the bottom hull

of the Majesty from dry dock. Side thrusters, stabilizers, 

and props in the back. Cool stuff.

Waffles, ice cream, whipped cream, berries, chocolate

sauce. I can't believe I stayed away!

From this panel the officers can control and monitor

operation of the water tight doors onboard.

Me in the big chair with my friend Ahmed (he works

on the bridge).

Out the front windows to the bow.