The movie is finished. The sound is locked. I’m mixing at 10:30 AM tomorrow with my mixer. At 12:30 PM, I’ll be done.
Retrospective to come.
My phone sounds like it’s dying. I have the ringtone from Crank, and people who haven’t seen the movie tell me it’s a “scary ring tone.” I roll over and paw it to my ear.
“Freddie, I’m at Ralph’s. Get ready a little earlier, cause I’m thinking of coming straight there.”
Logan is businesslike and no nonsense because today, the last day of September, he’s declared a holiday: Man Day. He and I, tired of our frou frou film projects, completely worn out from working days on end without sleep, fretting to and fro about insignificancies such as permits, actor release forms, sun paths, film stock and footage, and shooting schedules, had had enough. Today, we set aside to become reacquianted with what we both have, in the past month, come dangerously close to losing – our manlihood.
First stop that morning was Krav Maga. This is, arguably, the impetus wherein Logan and I first became acquainted. During 290 (the class where you make 5 digital movies in the course of a semester), Logan had expressed interest in taking a self-defense. Having done my requisite nerd duty vis-à-vis research on the deadly arts, I casually suggested Krav Maga, the Israeli Defense Force preferred method of taking down enemies of the Israeli state, the national training center being conveniently located in Los Angeles. Krav Maga advertises itself as being a tried and true method of self-defense. In addition to being adopted by many police agencies, you can probably imagine the Palestinians who have been taken down by this form. Not surprisingly, the literature for Krav Maga tends to emphasize the “SWAT teams use this” as opposed to the “Palestinians get owned by this” angle when it comes to self-promotion.
Logan, Katie, and I rolled out after class one day to check out our self defense options. Logan had heard of a place on Sunset Blvd, which not only had a legit website, but the head instructor had also apparently attended one of the USC self defense classes as a guest lecturer. After passing the place a few times, we finally squeezed into the strip mall parking lot, and climbed the stairs to where this deadly dojo was situated.
The first thing we noticed were the screaming kids doing summersaults on the padded floor, and the rows of bored parents in folding chairs. More importantly was the lack of instructor. One kid in particular, I remember as being extremely devoted to his warm-ups, following up a forward roll with a resolute front kick and loud kiyai. I can only imagine that he was channeling all sorts of Saturday morning cartoons through his movements, and in his fertile mind, he imagined himself as the best ninja turtle – the one with the coolest weapons, and the one that all the other ninja turtles secretly wanted to be. Even Michaelangelo, brashest of the bunch, after the flippant remarks and cholesterol clogging pizza consumption, alone in the empty sewer that was his bedroom, would think to himself “If only… if only…”
We squeezed into a narrow backroom inhabited by several large men with Russian accents. Two of them were sitting watching a pirated DVD on a off color tiny television screen, oblivious to our presence. Logan spoke first, asking for class schedules and pricing. The head instructor asked him in a heavy Russian accent “You want to do the ground fight or the striking?” Logan replied timidly “Well, a little of both,” at which point the large Russian man coughed and handed Logan a flier.
We left that place very quickly. The Krav Maga center, in comparison, was like a heaven of hitting things. There were sweaty people, sweet looking leather bracers, and hard hitting ass rocking action. We left there very impressed, and here, a half year later, I find myself paying the monthly fee, and struggling to find time to go while doing a film project.
But today, we would make time.
They had us doing “Level 2” stuff, being the last day of the month, which involved hitting focus pads. Before and during each session, you feel like the wimpiest man alive, struggling to keep your arms up after shadowboxing for a while, and then afterwards, you feel like you could wrestle a rabid boar over Niagra Falls. The problem is at no point between “during Krav” and “after Krav” does anything happen which would logically cause you to feel that way about boars, save for simply “not throwing up during the session.” As a red blooded male, I’m fully aware that sometimes that’s the best that I can hope for.
This criteria for “feelin’ groovy” has been extended to exams, papers, and film shoots. A film shoot is a’ok so long as I didn’t spew queasy chunks on my actors. I’ve found living this way makes things a lot easier to handle.
Afterwards we stopped by Island’s Burgers on Pico, basically a Red Robin with x-treme sports videos playing, and all the waiters wear tropical themed button up shirts. This, to me, was dangerously un-manly, so I made sure to order my burger cooked to an acceptably manly medium-well.
During the service, our waiter was on top of the Coke refills like nobody I had ever seen before, which almost prompted me to reward him with my Secret Bonus Tip award, even though he did not qualify for it. Let me clarify – I have a secret thing that, if a waiter or waitress does it during the meal, instantly doubles their tip. I have awarded this Secret Bonus twice in my life, once at the Grinder by USC, and once at an Olive Garden.
To qualify for this secret tip, a server must remove and refill my empty Coke without me noticing it. Subjectively to me, it would appear that I finished my Coke, turned around to check something, and when I looked back, it was full again. The best part is, of course, the waiter or waitress would never know what qualified them for such a massively generous tip that seems to come from out of nowhere.
While our waiter at Island’s was fantastically on top of things, he wasn’t super secret ninja stealthy on top of things. Still, he was rewarded for his service, but not as absurdly as if he had been ninja about it.
Afterwards, we swung around back to USC and picked up David to go to the LAX Gun Range, located in Inglewood. It’s proximity to a not-so-nice neighborhood was evident, as the entry foyer of the gun range was behind a massive bullet proof window, where the employees would check over you and you could enter only after they buzzed you in.
Inside, the gun range was packed with people. Apparently, it was Smith and Wesson day, and you could try all the S&Ws for a mere $5. “Smith and Wesson sure as hell know it’s Man Day,” noted Logan. After handing over our state IDs, we were assigned a range and given a weapon, targets, and ammunition, a process that seemed “disturbingly easy” to David. After showing the two the basics, we sent 250 round of 9 mm downrange, with an occasional pit stop through a hanging paper target.
It’s hard to avoid flexing every muscle in your body, not out of tension or being scared of recoil (heavens no – we are men are we not?) but because if you’re holding a pistol, the epitome of destruction in a convenient, hand-held form, you feel like you should at least make sure your pecs are showing a little bit. Nothing wrong with that, except that it throws your aim off.
Then again, nothing wrong with having poor aim, so long as you’re firing a weapon and looking sleek and buff while doing it.
The HK USP Compact ended up being a little spitfire that was accurate as all hell. Heckler and Koch, besides bringing precision German engineering into the culturally unfamiliar realm of “killing people,” has one of my favorite corporate slogans: “In a world of compromise, some don’t.” Not only do they establish themselves as perfectionists, but in one fell swoop also manage to cast the rest of the world’s weapons manufacturers as dainty daisies that sit around during board meetings and dec
laring to each other that what they’re working on is “Good enough for now.” Each one of those board members probably shoot double bogeys on average at the local links, whereas Mr. Heckler and Mr. Koch have an unspoken agreement that if they don’t both sink hole-in-ones on a dogleg par five, they have promised to kill each other.
Biceps sore (from the flexing), we left the LAX Gun Range, where Logan and I proceeded to enter the final phases of Man Day – a visit to a German tavern, to consume bratwurst and sing loud German folksongs.
While Silver Lake doesn’t seem exactly like the Eagle’s Nest at first glance, the Red Lion Tavern on the inside is indistinguishable from some tucked away hearth in the Swiss alps. While we waited for our meat dishes, we arm wrestled. “The secret,” I told Logan after beating him, “is to imagine your wrist coming down over top of the other person.” A middle aged woman one table away interrupted me and chimed in unexpectedly: “No no – the real secret is to pull your opponent’s arm towards you, and then go down.” Leverage-wise, this made sense, and applying the technique, Logan defeated me soundly. While we geared up for another go, the woman’s friend came over and felt my bicep, which was both unnecessary (anyone can see it’s the largest thing in the room), and super creepy and awkward.
I like to think she hasn’t washed that hand since, not because she touched one of my legendary rippling biceps, but because the sheer raw potential energy in my flexed bicep caused her hand to shrivel up and fall off, and nobody wants to wash a little ol’ shriveled up hand anyway.
Afterwards, we went to Ralph’s, and purchased the most expensive cigars they had ($2 a piece). They came in special individual glass cases, which were already shattered, which meant extracting the cigars from what essentially ended up being a box of broken glass shards. We lit them up, and Logan proceeded to use a wood burning tool to etch a naked woman riding a swordfish onto a large pine blank for his movie.
Then, I started to wave bubbles through Logan’s bubble sword. He asked me to stop, citing a violation of manliness on this most holy of days. I continued anyway, because if waving bubbles around with a plastic sword is wrong, then dammit I don’t want to be right.
Man Day ended up being a fantastic idea to unwind from shooting our 310s. I shot a gun, punched things, ate tons of meat, got felt up by a middle aged woman, smoked a cigar, and made bubbles.
Jealous? Thought so.
“Do you have any free time?”
Logan was asking me to help him on his 310. I was stuck dead north on the 110 into downtown – USC was playing the first home game this Saturday and traffic was a clogged toilet shit storm.
“As soon as I get out of this shit, I’m coming over there,” I told him.
310, as a reminder, is a class where we shoot a short film on 16mm film. We use 310 to also refer to the films we’re making. Most kids, myself included, go the artsy-fartsy dramatic route. Logan, too, toyed briefly with that idea, based on a script he sent me this past summer. A day later, I had an email telling me he had another script he liked better. He eventually eschewed the artsy drama and went full tilt into Night of the Swordfish, which was in my opinion, 100% unadulterated J.L. Olson.
Logan told me Miami Vice was basically Michael Mann vomiting onto film and printing it as a movie. Night of the Swordfish is to Logan as Miami Vice is to Mann, basically. There’s strippers, blood, broadswords, shotguns, ass slaps, and popsicles, and all this in five and one half minutes.
Tired as I was from my shoot, I sure as hell wasn’t going to miss out on that.
The Zemeckis Building smelled air smelled like dead fish. At first, I assumed the worst: Logan’s movie was called “Night of the Swordfish,” and I idly wondered if Logan was taking the title a little too far. The smell disappated, to my extreme relief, as I pushed the heavy, soundproof door in to Stage A, where Logan, Sam, and their crew had converted the space into a dingy strip joint.
“Logan,” I asked, “Why does it smell like hot sweaty anus out here?”
“Fucked if I know,” he said, taking off his sweaty Dragonforce cap and running his fingers through his hair.
The Zemeckis sound stages aren’t much to look at. They have soundproofing on the walls, and that’s about it. I had to weave my way around tall drapes to reach the set. They had set up a pretty convincing strip club interior, complete with pole (for dancing purposes, which for those who know me, I made sure to keep far away from) and bar complete with booze bottles, dingy couches, and stage lights. Logan had, in essence, traded in favors with production folks he had worked with over the summer, to help him with the set, and it looked fairly spectacular.
While I strapped on the trusty Production Assistant Utility Belt (contents: compressed air, light meter, measuring tape, pens, 8 kinds and colors of tape, lens cleaner and cloth, and maglite), Logan asked me to stand in as an extra cheering on the leading lady as she pole danced. Good start, I thought, as I sat down.
Later on, Sam was setting up for their next shot – the money shot of the main character at the bar, getting up, and walking to a massive swordfish mounted on the wall, which he would use shortly as a weapon.
“Isn’t that… a little big for a swordfish?” I asked. “It’s actually a marlin,” he told me, “but don’t worry – we’ve figured out how to fix it – as he goes up to take it off the wall, we’ll have a sound of someone yelling from offscreen ‘Hey that’s a marlin!’”
I pushed the dolly as the main character stood, pounded down his beer, and strode to the wall mounted marlin. The first take, he knocked off a glass from the bar, where it shattered onto the floor. “Fuck it,” Logan shouted over the whirr of the camera, “Keep going!”
Logan had a certain style of directing. Before a take, he shouts while pointing right at the person he’s addressing, “YOU FUCKING READY? YOU FUCKING READY? CAMERA READY? FUCKING LET’S DO IT! ROLL CAMERA! ACTION!” This energy, he theorized, translates directly into performance.
He would also talk the actor’s through their performances. On an extreme closeup of the main character he shouted “You hear the music. You KNOW what’s going on back there!” Logan then would assume the voice of a character in the background, “Yeah baby give me some of that sweet ass!” Then, back to the in-the-head voice “You hear a slap. That does it. Someone’s gonna DIE. Get up and let’s rock some faces!”
He would also give directions like “No! No! More just ROCKING and less RAAAGGH RAAAAAARRRGGH! Basically more Gene Simmons and less the one he worships!” The actor paused at the Gene Simmons direction, and asked “Logan what are you talking about?” Logan responded with more gutteral sound effects.
The money shot of the night called for an actor to get stabbed with that swordfish. We spent a good hour and a half rigging blood tubes and clothing. The actor would lay down flat on his stomache elevated on a table, head pushed through holes in the back of a few shirts that hung over the edge. Swordfish nose goes through, blood shoots out, screaming etc. The blood tubes were in place, and I rigged up a foot pump from a plastic inflatable chair. Logan called the camera to roll and the fish just went. Blood exploded out and everything – I think it looked pretty good, but with film, we have to wait until Wednesday to see it. People were flipping out on set though, so I can only assume it was rocking. I was too busy furiously depressing the blood pump.
Afterwards, even though everyone was tired as fuck, I went to his apartment where we tried to make a latex cast out of Kevin’s arm (result: utter failure and tears from ammonia in the liquid latex) and watched Road House on DVD.
Some kids studied all weekend for a midterm and partied a little. I was up 20 hours a day working on movies and rigging someone to get stabbed with a swordfish. This is basically how film school works.
-fw.
310 is balls time consuming. I need to start eating more. Need to call actors for callbacks and find our fucking locations.
I’m taking notes. There’ll definitely be a retrospective on this semester.
shiiiiiiit
I just came back from a midnight screening of Crank. I don’t blog about anything, much less movies, but here I am.
Crank is the most rocking movie I have ever seen. I left the theater speechless. There is more rocking in that movie than an entire Slayer discography being catapulted straight into the sun.
Everything is downhill from here on out, folks.
School started and we’re living in a significantly less shitty place, codename Fire Island.
The Fire Island blog is here: http://6dudes3rooms.blogspot.com/
The class I’m taking is 310, which is me and my partner shooting two 5.5 minute movies on film. It’s supposed to be balls time consuming.
A couple of days ago, I went to Krav Maga with Logan. During blocking drills, he punched me in the mouth, and I punched him in the eye. It was a good day.
-fw.
My blog statistics counter indicates that over 3% of the readers of this enjoy the puns in the titles.
The chime of the onboard P.A. system and the sonorous voice of the cruise director jolted me rudely awake at the ungodly hour of seven in the morning. I didn’t hear what he said – it was slightly muffled through the door, as well as two pillows I strategically placed between it and my ear.
Ketchitkan is a fishing town meets massive cruise tourist industry, something like a bastard child of Juneau and Sitka. The sprawling main city center was chock full of a smorgasbord of conflicting architectural styles and designs, as if, speculated my dad, the architectural firms were all in some other city and they designed each building at random without ever coming to Ketchitkan to see the environment. And like every other city we’ve hit, the seaside roads were full of jewelry shops and even more Alaska themed items. Just beyond the edges of the streets by the water layed a sleepy fishing town, the harbor chock full of ships, and the houses drab and standing guard in a row.
After some speculation and deep thought, I’ve finally come up with the ultimate Alaska themed t-shirt. It is a lone wolf on a snowy crag, howling at the moon which sits atop the flowing Aurora Borealis. In the background, a gold panner looks on as a majestic bald eagle, despite not normally being a noctural beast, swoops in and grabs a jumping salmon in its razor sharp talons. Ideally, we would use the latest in thin LCD technology to animate the eagle on the shirt, as it swoops in majestically, as it grabs its prey heroically, as it flys away victoriously, and as it poops into the eye of a black bear in the forest freedomly. Upon closer examination, the gold panner is wearing a large tanzanite spinner pendant, as well as diamond encrusted rings. You wonder why you didn’t notice this detail before, but before you can give it further thought, an unstoppable stampede of the elderly crushes you as they rush to buy the items which bear this awe inspiring design, your cries of pain falling on literally deaf ears.
I stole a few minutes away to get on the internet, and had a brief conversation with G, who told me that Ketchitkan was "tight" and he had come here to do salmon fishing before. I was incredulous. I promised him a sweet Alaska sweatshirt, but I had to return to the ship before I could pick out a suitable one. Truth be told, once I had my ultimate design in mind, every other design fell short and failed to move me in any way, shape, or form. We left at 12 noon, spending a scant five hours in town. Jimmy told me, as we walked to the boat, that we must’ve lucked out because we arrived on one of sixty days in the year where it didn’t rain.
Jimmy is one to talk about luck: he’s made another $30 playing Blackjack, turning his initial $40 investment into a fairly respectable $110. In fact, as I type this, he’s at the tables tonight once again, for one last hurrah, plopping $30 on the table. I started to watch him, but left as soon as the first few hands of his busted. "I’m a bad luck magnet," I tell him, leaving him to his de-vices (hah hah).
One game I cannot get enough enjoyment out of in the casino is "Hi-Roller," which is of the coin pushing variety. I’m sure many of you are already familiar, or have at least seen one of these casino coin pushing machines before – there are three slots where one can drop twenty-five cent tokens. The tokens are subsequently launched up into the machine, falling in front of cycling metal pusher blades, which add your modest sum to a pile of tokens, in the hopes that your coin will push a few over the threshhold into the lower level, where you hope those coins in turn push more coins into the return slot. Holland America, in a stroke of greedy genius, added a twist – a fat stack of dollah dollah bills, what looks to be a hundred dollars in singles, sitting tantalizingly close to the edge of the return slot.
But if you’ve watched anybody play the game for any amount of time, it becomes immediately obvious that appearances are deceiving. I’ve seen old ladies (and so far, it’s been only old ladies) plop in a hundred dollars in coinage without moving the stack of bills so much as a centimeter. The stack sits atop a layer of tokens which, although appearing to be on the edge of tumbling over and taking the stack of bills in turn along with it, are surprisingly resiliant to the advances of flat cylinders of metal. Rather than drop, they’d rather layer, much to the chagrin of the players. The stack of bills has in fact dropped once this trip, to a young man who watched countless old ladies prime the machine for him, and then dropped about ten bucks in coins before getting it. He was either very lucky, or smart enough to know when to play.
Later on the afternoon, Jimmy egged me on to participate in the shuffleboard tournament, which consisted of four people, meaning it was 50% dominated by the Wongs. With my few minutes of curling experience, as well as the cold, keenly calculating mind of a brilliant tactician, I won, and got a mug (they didn’t have any ones with lone wolves, unfortunately). Right afterwards, we rushed all the way to the first deck, to participate in a putting tournament. Holland America, it seems, has a whole lot of ridiculous time wasting activities scheduled. Jimmy and I unfortunately lose this one, as well – a few days earlier we tried another putting tournament, with the same results.
A long blonde haired girl, looking around her mid twenties, was running the competition. She seemed clearly bored to be there, and the first tournament was full of unbelievable dickheads. These portly assholes surrounded the putting pad, leaning back and cocky as all hell, and were quick to loudly correct the poor girl if she made any sort of tabulation mistake. "No," they would say with clear derision, "That was only ten points, not twenty." These were the same kind of abusive dickweeds that were competing in the Blackjack tournament. They were being impolite, cocky douchebags to some hapless employee over a fucking coffee mug and hat. These competitions seem to bring out the most ridiculous attempts to justify one’s masculinity among the over-the-hill crowd. I nearly delivered a set of devastating elbows to faces. The only saving grace is that the girl didn’t seem to care enough to be offended. Seriously though, some of these guys need to chill the fuck out. If they’re acting like this over a coffee mug, I’d hate to see what kind of assholes they are in day-to-day life.
Speaking of assholes, there is one lady in particular I wish to hand deliver an ovary punch to. She sits next to us in the formal dining room. One night, the sea was particularly shakey, and halfway through dinner, my grandma started throwing up. She insisted she was fine, but threw up again. This lady sat at the other table glaring at her. Afterwards, she made a vocal complaint to the waitstaff about our table, and has glared at us ever since.
At first, I thought she did have a point – it’s disgusting to see someone else throw up, and maybe we should’ve took my grandma back to her room immediately. I talked to my dad about it, who changed my mind in a few sentences: "Freddie," he sighed, "I’ve been a doctor for many years, and I’ve seen every kind of suffering. What this amounts to is a complete lack of compassion – yes, sure, that woman may have been disgusted by grandma throwing up, but whatever discomfort she experienced paled to what grandma must have went through. Instead of showing human decency and compassion at another’s misfortune, she could only think of herself, and her own discomfort."
I need to vent a little bit. Some of these people on this cruise are really beginning to get on my nerves, and some of them, from what I’ve seen, just straight up aren’t decent people.
I know I should leave them be, and just let it go, but its hard when you’re on a freaking boat. There’s a reason Buddha sat under a tree and went for the enlightenment thing rather than paddled out with a bunch of other dudes into the middle of the ocean. Maybe even several reasons.
Great. Just now Jimmy flashed me a toothy smile as he strut out of the corridor leading to the casino. "I made another $70," he tells me. Just great.
In the morning I am awoken to the inexplicable sounds of what appear to be jackhammers, drills, and Demons from Hell cavorting outside the cabin window. Turned out the crew was lowering the massive motorized lifeboats that consisted of our view from outside, and lowering them into the water. These boats would serve as ferries between the main ship and Sitka.
Going up onto the damp deck, Sitka is a small city, larger than Juneau it would seem, and spread out amidst small islands and mist. A medium sized traffic bridge can be seen in the distance, and just below it, the ferries have already begun to drop passengers off at the small dock.
Sitka, for whatever reasons, sticks in my mind as a name, until I finally figure out on the short ride over that the name is familiar for the type of spruce tree that the region grows. I’ve seen fairly high end acoustic guitar manufacturers proudly proclaim that their guitars are using "Sitka spruce" wood, which is why I feel like I’ve seen the name of this city somewhere before.
Disembarking and walking on the streets, Sitka is refreshingly less tourist oriented than Downtown Juneau, but it still has its fair share of Alaska branded memorabilia. Added into the mix are a great number of small shops displaying wood carvings by local artists. Walking along, I realize now where all those sweatshirts and mugs with "Alaska" on them come from – grandmothers and grandfathers taking cruises and stopping by these bustling tourist shops with the intent of bringing back a keepsake for the little ones. Naturally, the second best way to remember the majesty of the untouched wilderness of Alaska than a generic totem pole design on a 100% Cotton sweatshirt?
The first best is obviously a fresh, decapitated bald eagle head. Bald eagles, I might add, happen to be in greater abundance up here, and I’m sure the feds wouldn’t mind a sportly culling of the herd for the purposes of treasured memories. (Incidentally, the third best way to remember Alaska happens to be a photograph of you holding a decapitated bald eagle head, which is then printed onto a mug, or ironed onto a sweatshirt. Some people argue that this is better than just a plain old vanilla Alaska mug or sweatshirt, but I say the eagle loses much of its appeal at a smaller resolution, and plus iron on transfers wash off).
Sitka stands out because of a palpable Russian influence. In the center of town, a large Russian Orthodox church stands, roadways curving around its imposing steeple. The doorway is flanked by cracked bells with cyrillic writing, and a hand lettered sign asks for two dollars to view the icons contained within. I just about march inside with a fanfare, confident that my semester spent in Wolfson’s Russian class at USC would elevate me to the status of "lesser master" when it came to iconography, but instead was served up with a cold reminder about knowledge, and how lack of use is very closely tied to retention. My enjoyment of the iconostasis was, at least, partially informed with some semblance of knowledge, but as I walked around inside, I couldn’t help but hear Wolfson’s voice chiding me for not paying more attention in his class, or not doing more primary source readings in his class. I shout my apologies to the voices in my head and quickly beat a retreat out.
Further on, about a half mile out of town along a two laned road, lies the Sitka National Park entrance. Along the way we pass a large, orange, Orthodox Bishop’s house, preserved by the park service, as well as a huge fat orange cat licking its crotch (I’ll take a moment to note that people tell me they read this blog because they think my writing is lyrical and poetic, but I prefer to think people read this because I deal out the straight shit, unfiltered).
The Sitka National Park visitor’s center is home to some impressive totem poles, as well as a clearly bored native Tinglit carver. In his workshop, he fielded all manner of hard hitting questions as "Did you carve all these yourself?" and "Are these pictures in this photo album of carvings all yours?" and "Where’s the bathroom?" I just miss the showing of the 12 minute introductory film, and walk around a bit looking at the displays instead. The rest of my family starts chomping at the bit, and we return to the boat.
On board, I fall asleep for four hours straight, and can’t remember any of my crazy dreams. I wake up again to the rattling sounds of the crew, this time reattaching the lifeboats, and the engine rumbling to life, headed towards Ketchikan.
The lack of activity means that, for once in the history of this thing, I’ve been doing daily updates and dumping them online whenever I get the chance. Don’t get any ideas – I fully expect this pattern to stop as soon as I hit land.
Jimmy bumbled in at around 1 A.M. last night, Juneau safely behind us. "I doubled up in Blackjack," he said non chalantly, "forty bucks." I suggest he push his luck and enter the $500 slots tournament tomorrow, but he doesn’t seem to want to sit around elderly ladies pumping coins and pushing buttons for a few hours. I can’t see why not – proximity to folks dumping away hundreds of dollars of their retirement funds or hours of their wages in the space of minutes can be exhilarating. Not exhilarating in the sense that there’s the inherent possibility, however slight, that they’ll nail a jackpot, but exhilarating in the sense that you could be so lucky and find yourself in a room full of so many rich idiots.
I read somewhere that casinos will use chips both out of convenience when it comes to dealing with money, but also to make the very concept of money more abstract – a player is not throwing down a hundred dollars in dollar bills, but five colorful chips, as far removed from the green paper money as physically and metaphorically possible. There’s no chance that a player, perhaps a little woozy under the influence of a few too many Cosmopolitans, would start to hallucinate that Abraham Lincoln and the whole gang of our great nation’s forefathers would lie there on the felt, their faces scrunched into piercing, accusing stares, their lips intoning curses, and eyes seeming to say, "You who would sacrifice your earnings in a heartbeat, you who would act so callously towards the symbols of our capitalistic society, you who would try to exploit that very same system by games of chance, shortcutting your way around hard work and honest labor, you do not deserve freedom, nor do you deserve to even kiss the same ground that your fellow honest citizens walk upon." Lincoln, from the slight weaves of the ten dollar bill, might add, "Listen, bitch ass, I wrote my homework on a motherfucking shovel. You bet your fucking balls I didn’t throw my money around like a prancing ninny."
This morning, we arrived at Hubbard Glacier. The ship’s director told all on board to dress warmly when viewing the glacier, as if mere proximity by several thousand feet to a massive wall of compressed ice would somehow change the fact that we were in motherfucking Alaska and it’s already cold as shit outside. The ship took a leisurely lap in front, allowing for some spectacular views of the glacier. The sea was a blue gray. Chunks of ice broke off infrequently and made massive rumbles as they tumbled into the water. I speculated that Holland America flew in at night and laid explosive charges deep into the ice fissures, and the captain of the ship could detonate these at will, in order to rally wavering attention spans of those on deck, and also ensure that the Holland America cruise goers got a full serving of the Alaska experience. A few explosions later, we had turned around and chugged out of the bay, bound now for Sitka.
My brother and my cousin and I, bored out of our minds, snuck into the exclusive TEENS ONLY area (13-17 according to Holland America), where we were greeted by a table chock inexplicably full of empty water pitchers. The sole attraction of this hip hangout was a touch screen computer which allowed one to cue up songs and music videos that would play on screens scattered around the room. The fact that this room appeared, for all intents and purposes, to be completely devoid of any sort of teenage activity meant that we owned the place, and could cue up whatever nasty ass music videos we wanted. Upon discovering that 90% of the music videos already were sexy and violent hip hop videos, we cursed silently and left. We were too late, it seemed, to corrupt the minds of the nation’s youth.
On the way down to lunch, I passed a Purell hand sanitizing station, an automated Purell dispenser that would squirt one serving of Purell alcoholic gel rub into your eagerly awaiting hands so you could get them dripping and rub them all over themselves. The memo in our cabin noted that there has been an increase of gastrointestinal illness lately (i.e. people be throwin’ up and poopin’ all the time), and these hand sanitizing stations were the first line of defense against unsightly dining room incidents. Employees stationed at the door of all the meals were instructed to let nobody pass without getting Purelled. Whether or not there really is such a risk, or if it’s a brilliant marketing scheme devised by the heads of these two cruise ship and evaporating hand sanitizer giants remains to be seen. One fantastic use the Purell stations have is they dispense just enough Purell to have a good flinging mass, and when the opportunity to brutally sanitize the back of my brother’s neck presented itself, I took it.
Another activity that I’ve begun partaking in, despite how uncharacteristic it must be for me, is running, doing laps around the ship on the Promenade deck, jumping over outstretched lawn chairs and juking out walking snuggling couples. The backdrop of the ocean, and clouds, and mountain peaks in the distance couldn’t be more conducive to exorcize, and it doesn’t hurt that sometimes some morbidly obese moron will squeeze into an elevator to go up one freaking floor. This has happened three times now, all three times from deck eight to deck nine. Deck eight consists of the more expensive staterooms and cabins, and deck nine consists of, surprise surprise, the all-you-can-eat buffet line. One flight of stairs is apparently one flight too many when it stands between them and bottomless pasta.
Needless to say, a cruise ship is probably the worst place when it comes to obesity. Sitting on the promenade deck since starting to write this, I tally a full 90% of the people who passed would probably need to grease up their stateroom door to fit inside. Darkly fitting, perhaps, that today’s activity is sitting around viewing a glacier six miles wide. In the deep blue compacted ice, does the land whale see their own reflection staring back at them? Does that stony wall, silent and towering, cry an ominous warning? Probably not – at least, if it did, it’d be hard to hear over the din of the buffet line.
This morning, we pulled in early to Juneau, Alaska. Nestled between dark green mountain slopes, and right up against the water, Juneau looked to me more like a quiet, small town than a state capital. The large population is mostly spread out in suburbs, somewhere behind the city’s massive limits. The downtown area is flat and sparse, and the crowd gathered on the top deck didn’t seem to be there to take pictures as much as get out and look at something that wasn’t simply bare expanses of gray sea.
Holland America had arranged a whole smorgasbord of shore excursions, most pushing the $300 mark for a single person. These were all mostly helicopter tours of Mendenhall glacier, a massive glacier that sits a short bus ride (or a massively expensive helicopter ride) out of downtown. Otherwise, you were expected to mostly fend for yourself. Perhaps somewhat pessimistically, I noted that they had scheduled a putting tournament and a bingo contest a few hours after we were due to dock – I guess Holland America wasn’t too optimistic as to what entertainment Alaska’s state capital might offer its well fed and overly pampered guests.
The sky was clear, although the forecast called for clouds. "This is the first day in about two weeks without rain," the bus driver noted as we rode the mile or so into central downtown along the shore line. We disembarked, and the few streets that ran through were packed on both ends with gaudy tourist shops and jewelry stores, many likely being paid or run by the cruise lines. All manner of cheapo gemstones set shittily in silver bracelets, and all manner of Alaska branded t-shirts, mugs, teddy bears, and drug paraphernalia didn’t interest me, although it apparently interested enough of the cruise riding crowd, as nearly every shop I passed had at least a few golf visor, white shorts, and fanny pack wearing grannies and granddads browsing through their wares.
I passed one jewelry store with a woman leaning her elbows listlessly against the otherwise spotless glass display case, clearly depressed that the only hope of human interaction that she could look forward to on a Monday would be crowds of self-appointed cocky cruise ship bargain hunters, educated the very day before by a fifteen minute seminar onboard on how to bargain for jewelry, and how to "spot out fakes."Another similarly empty jewelry store along a side street proclaimed, in a loud printed sheet taped to the front door, that this shop was "Locally owned!" and "Not run by cruise ships!!" The location of the shop was not within easy striking distance of the main drag, and subsequently suffered for it.
Tour busses to Mendenhall glacier were advertised at a steal of some $22 round trip, so while the chumps on the boat all went the "flightseeing" route, packed into cabins of floatplanes and helicopters, the Wong brigade went in style in a baby blue converted school bus. The driver was not a local – he was a young Korean guy with a shaved head who came up to Alaska for a summer job. He had a healthy disrespect for the cruise lines, pointing out several onshore activities (such as a brewery tour for some $200) that would be free if you just went on your own. He suggested renting a car in some of these cities, and simply following the tour busses around and joining the group when everyone got off. He had an open personality, and admitted he was bumming around and seeing how long he could sustain himself post-college graduation without having to get a "real" job.
Mendenhall glacier was a pale sea blue, and sandwiched between cliffs, only visible across a wide lake. The rocks nearby all displayed the layered scars of a much earlier glacial retreat. My cousin offered a thousand dollars to swim across to the glacier and back, but quickly withdrew said offer when it was apparent I was deeply considering it. Not much to do here but take pictures, and within the hour, we were back on the bus towards town. As we drove away, we noticed a group of local kids wearing trunks and carrying an inflatable orca. "They go swimming whenever it isn’t raining," said our driver, "I don’t know how they do it – they’re crazy. The water’s always right above freezing."
The streets were even more packed as a result of two other cruise ships having disembarked their passengers, and the jewelry shops were bustling with activity. A very young girl stood on the sidewalk sawing at her violin for extra cash while her dad and sister sat a safe fifty odd feet away, watching the cash flow in. On top of an electrical box, a group of long haired teens sat strumming a guitar and belting out folk songs, knitted cap outstretched and jingling with coins. And out from the shops and novelty bars emerged the cruise ship tourists, dazed into the overcast skies, blinking and walking aimlessly, flitting in and out of these bright storefronts in turn like flies throwing themselves against windowpanes.
As night fell, the engine of our ship rumbled to life and we started to pull away. I wandered up to the top deck. It was cold, empty, and damp. Lights flickered as Juneau retreated into the darkness. Outside on the deck, it began to rain.
