Saturday April 19th 2008
Noon position: 37 degrees 44' North, 32 degrees 30' West (Course 90 degrees, Speed 18 knots)
Bob: I was hoping to arise in time to do another morning stretch class, but didn't quite make it so we had breakfast in the Windjammer around 8:00 a.m. and did the Walk-A-Mile to stretch our legs a bit before attending the 9:00 lecture on the interiors of the luxury liners of the 20th century. The interiors for first-class passengers started out quite grand even on the early liners and progressed to ever larger and more impressive furnishings. The furnishings for second and third-class passengers were, however, much more modest and didn't change as much over the decades. The poor folks in steerage, of course, had minimal bunks, minimal food and minimal space to move around, which didn't change at all over the decades. We also attended the subsequent lecture on acceptable evidence in courtroom testimony. Although that sounds dry and technical, the presenter was a past prosecutor and judge who made it interesting with first-hand anecdotes from his courtroom experience. I spent the rest of the morning backing up pictures and stitching panoramics together, which took far longer than it should have. The dratted flaky Olympus software simply refused to rotate some pictures and then rotated part of the image but chopped the rest completely off! Arrgh! So I had to work around that fault but finally obtained a nice panoramic of the three levels of the aft dining area of the Navigator of the Seas. The Navigator was a huge ship and many of the public lounges and deck areas really needed a good panoramic shot to give the Gentle Reader an accurate sense of how the ship actually appeared to us. |
Monika: We did not get up in time for the morning stretch but did manage the Walk-A-Mile. The morning's lecture was on the interior of the big ocean liners. Again the pictures were all mixed and mainly of first class lounges, staterooms, dining rooms, etc I would have liked to see more pictures of second, third, and steerage accommodations. But I guess, that was not worth preserving in pictures. We stayed for the next lecture by a prosecuting attorney on what he looked at during jury selection and what was really meant by "irrelevant" and "hearsay" evidence. He gave some nice examples from his experiences which livened up the lecture. |
Bob: So we had to have a late lunch and then hustle off to a screening of the film "Destino", a collaboration between Salvador Dali and Walt Disney in the mid 1940s that was finally completed by Roy Disney and a team of French artists around 2000. The combination of Dali-esque surreal backgrounds and pictorial elements with a Disney type of story line was absolutely fascinating, so do go see that short film if you get a chance. It's unique, that's for sure! The screening of "Destino" only lasted 8 minutes, and we stuck around for the next short movie segments. Those segments were fascinating because collectively they traced the creative process of Pablo Picasso. Each movie was made simply by taking pictures every 10 seconds while Pablo Picasso was creating some of his paintings. I immediately thought that Laurie in particular would have been fascinated by seeing how Picasso went about shaping his pictures into their final abstract, cubist form. I was surprised that in the three movie segments we watched, Picasso clearly started with a fairly representational initial drawing that was gradually modified to become more abstract and cubist over many, many, iterations of changes. Heavens, how much he altered each and every piece of the original outline, often five to ten different versions of things like facial outlines, hairstyles, and so forth on each figure! So although the final product looks "simple" in that abstract, cubist fashion, the creative process as documented by those series of photographs proves that it was an extremely complex and iterative process during which he successively changed the original forms into his final artistic vision. It greatly increased my respect for Picasso as a painter/sculptor. |
Monika: After lunch I convinced Bob to go with me to a screening of an animated Disney short shown by the art auction people. This particular movie "Destino" was thought of by Walt Disney and Salvador Dali in 1946. They recorded the song "Destino" that they were going to use as a score and Dali painted a set of storyboards. Then the Disney Studios got into financial trouble and the storyboards and music were put into the vault. In 1999 Roy Disney retrieved everything from the vault and set about bringing this collaboration back to life. The result was a 8 minute film. It was a fascinating film because Dali's nightmarish qualities were softened by the Disney sweetness and light, and Disney's too sweet images and segments were brought to abrupt ends by fantastic Dali transformations and imagery transitions. They used the clocks, bugs, bicycles and other oddball elements of Dali's works but the also the image within an image designs, being able to focus first on one than on the other. If you ever get a chance to see this short animated film, do take a look at it. After the Disney movie, the art auction people had a bonus for us: Picasso at work. A still camera took 10 second interval pictures of the canvas while Picasso was creating one of his paintings. So the movie showed how the canvas changed every 10 seconds. Picasso seemed to start with a rather realistic sketch of the picture, that becomes more and more abstract by adding lines or shading here and taking them away someplace else. It was fascinating to get a little insight into his artistic works. |
Bob: Our last stop that afternoon was a cabaret-style vocal performance by one of the lead singers in the Navigator of the Seas' song-and-dance troupe. She seemed to be a contralto and was really very skilled, but the over-amplification on some of the numbers made it very difficult to enjoy. Both Monika and I were sticking our fingers in our ears to cut down the decibels to tolerable levels, but unfortunately that process also distorts the sound. Some numbers were at bearable audio levels, fortunately, and she did very well on those. She had a first-class musical theater and jazz type of voice, but not quite the timbre and control I would expect for an true opera singer. Why can't some of Laurie's students who really do have operatic voices get these opportunities? Reminding myself to find my foam earplugs and take them with to any future performances, I returned to our cabin to update my journal and get ready for dinner. Although the dinner was scheduled for casual wear, we dressed in some fairly nice togs so that we could have more portrait pictures taken. I had liked some of the more professional looking portraits with plain white or back backgrounds and hoped they would have one of those setups available. Indeed they did, so after dinner we got in line with Jeff and Helen to have our portraits taken one more time with professional props, strobe lights, and posing. Afterwards we got to bed early for a change, hoping to catch up on our sleep deficit. |
Monika: We then went to a martinee in the theater. This evening we were not offered a show. Instead one of the lead singers of the production numbers got a chance to do a half hour show by herself. She was really quite good, and I really would have enjoyed it, but the amplification again was so high that Bob and I held our ears. But we did enjoy her and I thought it was nice of RCI to give her a chance to show herself. With no evening show, we just went to have our picture taken after dinner. They had one place, were they have "natural" poses (I know, an oxymoron) against a white background. When we looked at the pictures later, they really turned out quite nicely and we ended up purchasing 3 of them. |
| Prolog | Map of Trip | Epilog |
|
|
||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||