Hawaii and Exit

March 25, 2008

Honolulu

Wonderful city, though terminally crowded with tourists. Not that I’m not one, you understand, but there you are. 

We pull into the city dock (not a container port, although not the dock at the Aloha Tower either) at 6 in the morning. At 6:30 I see the customs guys pulling up in a fleet of government cars. Uh-oh, I think. All the passengers have to go through immigration in the Queens Room, then the crew members who joined since New York City, maybe 20% of the crew, in another venue, the luxurious and splendid crew library. To complicate matters, the comings and goings of the crew office with respect to US Customs and Immigration are now being handled by the biggest jackass in the world.

So with the excreta hitting various air circulation devices, we are not “granted” shore leave until 11:45. 

I pile into a cab with Patrick and Campbell and head for Waikiki. (Patrick brutally mispronounces it, but the cab driver figures it out anyway.) I spend most of the morning sucking up bandwidth and caffeine in Starbucks while my pianistic friends go for a swim. By the time we hook up again they’ve had lunch and a few belts. Campbell splits off on his own and Patrick and I get on a city bus to the mall, he in search of DVDs to add to his collection, me for Wal-Mart for such reason as I can only imagine (though my supply of acceptable socks is dwindling for some reason). Our progress is impeded by an accident, an overturned truck full of chickens.

Patrick’s needs are first because he has IPM and an early set. I was to have had IPM, but the luckless Richard Williams is ordered into my place. We split, Patrick uses his bus transfer to get back to the ship while I go around back of the shopping center and find a huge multi-story Wal-Mart with slightly elevated prices. I buy a shirt, pajamas, and three pairs of socks. In England, it would have cost me $80. In Honolulu, it’s a little over twenty. It would have been even cheaper in Texas. I know we’re eating away the fiber of our beings as Americans every time we patronize the Bentonville Monster, but if I just stick to necessities I can assuage my guilt. 

I walk back to the ship, a couple miles with my backpack. I enjoy so much being back in the states. They say that travel changes you because it changes your point of view. I’ve been on a ship largely patronized by grouchy aging British citizens who look upon that ship and the ports we visit as indications of the collapse of their empire on the world stage. The ship’s going to Dubai and a refit as a hotel. The countries that Britain used to have influence over have become the powerhouse economies of this early century, while Britain has become a net consumer of the things it used to make internally. The folks who are passengers on this ship know it, and they’re pissed about it. 

March 26, 2008

The next day we are tendering in Lahaina on the island of Maui. Why is it that the captain now knows how to man all the boats necessary to land all the passengers and the non-working crew? Why could this not have been done in Vietnam on the 12th? What has changed? I do not know.

Anyway, I walk around the banyan tree, looking at the art goods for sale there. Even though it’s a Wednesday, the folks are all turned out with their goods. They take dollars like they were native currency, which of course they are. 

Lahaina like an old New England whaling village if you squint enough. (Ignore the palms and the pineapples.) I fall into step with Igor Mashura, who is looking for a cash machine. These Russians are something. They’ve learned how to make the most of us. We go to that most capitalistic coffee shop, Starbucks, and I use my new Starbucks Hawaii card I bought yesterday in Waikiki to spread a little hospitality. We come back to the center of town by way of the beach, and I get a little wet. Still we get back to the tender for the next to last boat and I note that the mix is 50-50 crew and passenger.

My Sprint phone likes it here in Lahaina, and I have a long conversation with Jan, until my battery runs out. Whales are breaching all around the ship at the time.

As far as I know, I am going down the gangway for the last time on the 30th. We have three sea days to go before Los Angeles. 

The sea days drag on, with the rituals of packing and preparing. I have six months’ accumulation of stuff in the cabin to deal with, but I’ve decided to pack some of it in a box and send that box by UPS from the nearest Office Depot. I’ve got commitments from my sister Cindy and Steve Johnson, my longtime musical associate, to show up around noon at the terminal. I figure it’ll take from 6 in the morning to noon just to get us leavers down the gangway.

We’ll see.

March 30, 2008

This is my last day on QE2, and they way things have gone, maybe my last on a ship as a bandsman. I got a little sleep and we woke up in familiar territory, under the Vincent Thomas Bridge in LA Harbor. It was here, 24 years ago or so, that I started on my first ship, the Azure Seas, plowing the waters between Los Angeles and Ensenada. Brendan was just born, and I got a call to fill in for the saxophone player, a friend from Santa Cruz whose dad was ill. Tom Hill, the funniest bass player I know, was on board, greatly lightening my load. My cabinmate Kevin fell hard for a dancer who didn’t reciprocate and ended up killing himself in a very messy way a couple years later. 

I guess when it all comes down and you have an experience like I’ve had for the last nearly 6 months, it’s the human relationships that you walk away with, maybe the only thing that really matters.

So as I leave QE2 I want to thank my Queens Room bandleaders, Jim Penalver, Archie (Richard Walliston), and Stu Bystricki for making the gig fun. Mates on the band Pete Clagett and Stu the only horns. QR pianist Adrian Cross, Brian Ibbitson, Archie, bass players James Klopfleisch and Richard Williams, who delivered us from evil. Drummer Brad, who didn’t know what he was getting himself into until he arrived in Valparaiso, kept that expansive metronome thing happening, thus keeping the customers satisfied and still finding our groove.

Friends who were singles: Irish pianist Patrick Patton whose New York Times castoffs made all the difference, pianist Bernie and ladyfriend Louise for keeping it light, Campbell Simpson for showing us the way whenever possible.

Trevor and Stevie, you guys give a shit when nobody else seems to. You deserve better, and once this ship offered it to you.

And Siân, some other jazz bloke might be lucky enough to deliver you to your Gareth at the end of your contract. I’ll miss our battles with cockroaches and I feel privileged that we had the good times we did whenever we did something together. 

Predictably, there are delays getting off the ship. It turns into noon soon enough. I waltz through customs and I’m on the sidewalk. Free.

My sister and Steve arrive at virtually the same time. Evan is with Cindy and Joe. I finally get to congratulate him on his scholarship to SMU. Steve takes us to a diner and we have a great meal. We find an Office Depot and drop of my box. 

Steve and I hasten to the nearest Apple Store so I with my wad of hundreds might have a look at the iPhone. But they are sold out. 

Cindy, Joe, and Evan head back to Orange County and Steve drops me off at American at LAX. I sleep most of the flight to Austin.

Hong Kong Almost to Hawaii

March 21, 2006

Been a while. We had one sea day on the 13th, followed by Hong Kong, where I hung out with Michel, the  new singer. We parked the boat at a container port, which is getting to be a problem not just with the crew but as well with the passengers. The cruise port, once again, was downtown and 40 minutes away by bus, no taxies allowed in the container port.

The problem with parking at container ports is that passengers and crew have long memories about where the boat parked last year, and the year before, and so on. (Stevie, for example, had done two decades of world cruises.) There, at the cruise terminal, there were two ships parked with four slips, one of which QE2 occupied last year. 

I was on the first bus (again) and found a Starbucks instantly in the cruise terminal. The wi-fi was dodgy, though, demanding a cel phone number that a password and user name could be sent to--useless for a USA Sprint user like me.

Michel and I hooked up soon after I finished my coffee and, while I spent nothing on hard goods, we tromped through the town and had very good sushi lunch. There was a lot to see, a lot more than I could have done in a couple days, which is what former world cruises gave passengers and crew.  Had I known how many tailor shops there were, I might have looked into buying a suit, although Campbell tells me that the best tailors are in Thailand and India. Because of the horrible situation with the buses in Singapore, I got back early, making a note to return to Hong Kong someday, in a cruise ship I suppose, provided they park the ship where the cruise ships park and not in a container port for crying out loud. 

Two more sea days, during which I sort out the situation where I’m getting off in Los Angeles. The guy who I handed in the form for shortening of my contract to left without acting on the form. Now I’m two weeks away from leaving and Brian in the Princess office sends an email letting me know that he can’t act to replace me until he gets a notification from the crew office. Unfortunately, the guy in the crew office was replaced by a foolish and belligerent idiot who accuses me of threatening him because I tell him I will be taking my American passport and getting off in Los Angeles regardless. He starts in with the name calling, so I know that the paper I’ve circulated and handed in to the crew office is gone. 

This fellow is the same guy who informed the USA citizens that they were no longer being payrolled, but were henceforth (not his word) independent contractors, thus increasing our tax liability by 14.5%. He is my inspiration for leaving, because he told Dwight, the bass player in the Grand Lounge, that our only option to accepting this abrogation of our contract at its midpoint was the gangway. It was then, the third week of January, that I started looking around for work. By the end of February I’d lined up another gig.

More than any single thing, when Stevie and Trevor talk about how this ship has slid downhill in the last couple of years, it’s the management people’s inability to run the ship that comes up, over and over. The passengers never see most of these ham-handed mismanagements, but they all add up to a crew with very low morale, so they’re the victims of the result. 

Monday, the 17th—St. Patrick’s Day—we’re in Shanghai, although few of the US citizens make it off the ship because of the $200 one-day visa. (I hear, though, that Homeland Security [a damned funny name] is charging the Chinese $500 a visa nowadays.) I knocked around the ship but can’t raise the necessary audience for the rest of my Redd Foxx recordings, so I listen to them myself. 

The Chinese are cracking down on dissent in Tibet. The Dahli Lama is all over every station on our TV feed except the American one, which is Fox News. THEIR lead story is Obama’s preacher. There is little or nothing about Tibet. Oh my god, look at what my country’s become! What must the world think when we’re so close to being a fascist state that the government’s dirty work is done by a television network? 

We have petitioned for a change on the ship to CNN, but to no avail. (The guy who ran the TV feed, by the way, a staunch defender of Fox News, was busted for drug residue and paraphernalia by the dogs of the New Zealand customs inspection back in Auckland. He wasn’t arrested, but he was let go and sent home, and replaced by his brother, who is just as right wing.) Can’t the Republican echo machine come up with anything else? The are truly pathetic.

Another sea day, and we’re in Osaka, which is miserably wet and cold. We park at a real cruise port, and I get off and wander a bit with Michel and, later, Richard Williams (our bass player). Unfortunately, an IPM drill is called. IPM is In-Port Manning, which means you stay on the ship so that if there’s an emergency you can deal with it. The drill is called, and Richard Williams should have been here, but he was walking around with me. There are repercussions. The drill was little more than a muster in the Grand Lounge followed by the taking of attendance, but Richard was demonstrably not there.

The Japanese people are tremendously polite, paying homage to QE2’s last call, almost as much as the Australians. (Of course, how could the Chinese in Hong King or Shanghai care about these things when we’re in a container port?) I get back on the ship at about noon, wet and cold.

What lies before us are six sea days, with either a time change (23 hours in a day) or, in the case of crossing the International Dateline, a repeated Saturday. These days slide by best to those who can nap, so this is my strategy. I get up around eleven (yesterday’s ten), get dressed, go to lunch, come back to the cabin, and sleep for a couple hours. Lucky for us musicians, we’ve got the flexibility in our schedules to sleep most of the day to cushion the effect of these days. 

On the third sea day, the first Saturday—the day before we cross the International Dateline—we play a lavish ball in the Queens Room. The Cherry Blossom Ball is Japanese themed affair, with one of the Japanese matrons in a kimono dancing to a recording of Sakura before we get underway. There is plenty of decorating done on the QR, with large paper lanterns, cherry blossoms and parasols hanging from the ceiling, a painted backdrop of Mt Fuji behind us, and the usual balloons. Of course, when we get our cue it’s the usual quickstep and waltz—nothing Japanese, nor even different from any other night.

The fun started when the ball ended. We were packing up, and the decorators were knocking down the room. Thomas had announced that the balloons were available for anyone to bring to their cabins, but other decorations were not. Just after that, the gal who’s the lead decorator came up to the stage and laughed, telling me that all of these decorations had been bought in Chinatown in Detroit, so she didn’t care what was taken. 

As I started to pack up my saxophones, there was a ruckus on the dance floor, followed by a screaming female passenger. I looked up just in time to see a fist fly from one male passenger to another, followed by the receiver of the punch crumpling to the floor. He wasn’t getting up. 

This was, by most accounts by those who’ve been here long enough to know, the first fistfight in the Queens Room. Security was called and a two-hour long investigation ensued. 

This may be another instance of all bark and no bite from Cunard. Although they beached a passenger in Easter Island (one flight daily to Valparaiso, if you’re wondering) that guy was causing ongoing trouble in the Yacht Club bar, not just an incident of a sucker punch.

UPDATE: My line of sight was impaired, so here’s what I’ve put together. There was an announcement made that the balloons were up for grabs, but to leave the rest of the stuff alone. One of the passengers decided to have his picture taken with one of the Japanese kimono-clad lady passengers, so he took down one of the parasols which was hanging from the ceiling. A second male passenger called him on it, noting that only the balloons were fair game, accusing the other guy of thievery. The first guy calmly went about his business of picture taking on the opposite side of the dance floor, and when he was done he ran up to his accuser and grabbed him by the neck and decked him. The accuser chose not to get up, and the scream I heard was the attacker’s spouse pleading with him to stop. So it wasn’t technically a fistfight at all under the Marquis of Queensbury rules of the sport, but rather an attack. 

One of the Gentleman Hosts maintains that, despite conducting a two-hour investigation of the incident there were no names taken, thus no penalty. I find this a little far-fetched even for Cunard.

We crossed the International Date Line, so had two Saturdays. The whole ship’s abuzz with the fight in the Queens Room the other night. I suggest that we might have a boxing tournament after we close at midnight. It’s nice to be seeing the sip move toward Hawaii. 

Another fight broke out, but in the Golden Lion Pub, the night following the fight in the Queens Room. The passengers are stretched by the six sea days, and we are too, of course. Honolulu can’t come too soon for this ship. 

On the positive side of the ledger, one afternoon in this six-day stretch I was up on boat deck reading a book when an elderly couple walked past me. The man went to the area of the deck enclosed by windows and to my astonishment pulled out a chromatic harmonica. He played Peg of My Heart (a hit record for the Harmonicats), Stardust without the verse, and several more familiar tunes. The German passengers who were sitting where he ended up were delighted. I was too. 

Still we motor onward, on a course 102 degrees and about 26 knots. How did the Japanese ever pull off Pearl Harbor? 

New Zealand to Singapore

February 24, 2008

We dock in downtown Auckland, New Zealand, The city has the look and feel of Vancouver, except a mirror-image Vancouver because people drive on the other side of the road. Finally, it feels like we’re back in civilization. There are real drug stores here, people carrying briefcases come and go from the intermodal train station where I encamp to use the free internet, courtesy of Subway. This could have been what I’ve been missing since Fort Lauderdale. 

On the other hand . . . the other day, trapped on the old rust bucket for two sea days, Siân sees a cockroach scuttling across the floor of the mess. The following day, she finds a live maggot in among her lettuce leaves and vows to eat nothing but Snickers for the rest of her contract. Nobody is going to bet more pissed off because of these incursions of the insect world than Siân. I didn’t see the maggot, but I was there for the second cockroach incident. When Siân brought up the matter to Wendy, the crew welfare lady, in the presence of no less than the Staff Captain and the crew housekeeper, she was met with the level of indifference she thought possible only in the Queens Room on the third set. They promised to investigate. Yeah. Sure.

We are at the crossroads once again. I keep thinking of what it’s going to come to when the Rust Bucket closes in on Dubai. “Toilet paper? What do you people need toilet paper for?”

Encouraged and emboldened by Auckland, we pull in to Sydney, famous for the transports of convicts. They could have learned something from this ship, and maybe it goes the other way too. We arrived Sunday morning and find our usual position in Circular Quay occupied by the Queen Vic. So we were moved to another slip on the other side of the Opera House in Wooloomooloo. The crew was informed to be back on the ship at 5:30 so we can move to Circular Quay at 6:00. I guess it’s better than a poke in the eye with a sharp stick, or a full drill in the sun. But there has been some, shall we say, resistance to the idea of going back to the ship on an overnight, although how many will refuse to come back is anyone’s guess. Many of these gripe sessions in the mess never materialize.

I spent a nice afternoon walking through the city’s Hyde Park, down to Circular Quay to have a look at the pokey QV, and generally through town until I got back on the shuttle and headed back to the ship in plenty of time to make me legal, with a sandwich from Subway in my bag. The band is doing our regular gig tonight, even though passengers might be few and far between. Three sets, to the show band’s zero. At least somebody works here. 

Maybe we can have a little quality time tomorrow. We also lose Archie, the Changes band, my roommate Junior and a host of others. Just normal turnover at a major port. 

Maybe we can sneak out tonight after work.

February 25, 2008

This morning, though, we had another incident with a cockroach and Siân in the Concessionaire’s Mess. Feeling something crawling on her feet as she was eating her toast and tea, she was shocked looking down to note a crawling cockroach. She flicked it off, but it wouldn’t be denied, and tried to climb back onto her foot, at which time one of the mess workers collected a napkin and dispatched him. 

John, the crew housekeeper, was having his toast and tea in the mess at the same time, but he shrugged it off. 

This is Siân’s third run-in with the insect kingdom in the mess. She’s beginning to feel singled out.

Afterward, after the official shrug, Richard, our bass player, and Siân and I went over to the Opera House to have a look. I got some pretty nice pictures, and then we went looking for Starbucks, which I had gone to yesterday. I knew where it was, but there were hills and Siân was certain that every tree in town had poisonous spiders ready to pounce on her head, and so wouldn’t walk under them. That being the case, our trip into town took a good deal longer than anticipated, but with the application of a dosage of caffeine all was forgotten and forgiven.

I’ve now exercised my Starbucks card in Texas, England, Greece, and Australia. Thanks, Leroy.

February 28, 2008

Today is a sea day between Hobart, Tasmania and Melbourne, although we seem to be doing 12 knots. By far the highlight of the day for me was when a recording playing in the Queens Room before we started to play started to skip on a tango. Just then Trevor walked in, one of the guys who’s been here since the dawn of civilization. When I pointed the skip out to Trevor, he walked back to the board and told Peggy Nixon, the dance instructor and partner of the unfortunately named Rick Nixon in dance as well as life. As the recording skipped merrily away on its version of Whatever Lola Wants, Lola Gets, Peggy responded to Trevor that this was in fact how the tango was played. This from a dance instructor, who one would suppose ought to know a little more about rhythm, even of their count is 5-6-7-8 to our 1-2-3-4. It was almost boneheaded enough a remark to be downright cute.

February 29, 2008

We are now in the “real” Australia, I feel. Sydney is a beautiful city, but it’s all polished and modern with the definite feel of an Asian city. Melbourne is another thing altogether. It was carved out of the wilderness during a gold rush, and still has many Victorian buildings to support the claim. I woke up way too early--always trouble sleeping before an important port--and took a tram downtown from the port.

Australia in the last decade has been aggressively supporting immigration from virtually the entire globe, so there are more diverse and younger folks here than Sydney or Hobart. The weather’s funny. It’s the middle of the summer, but the wind swirls and wehn it comes from the south the temperature drops precipitously. It shifts to that side of the compass every 30 seconds or so, so even when the sun does its best to warm things up there comes the Antarctic blast to cool things down again.

I found a couple of Santy Runyon’s wonderful rubber saxophone gimmicks in a music store, a days-old New Yorker in a magazine store, and laid hands on the Macbook whatever-it’s-called, which is incredibly light at the local Apple only computer store. Mostly I wandered like a rube around the town. We’re here til midnight, although things fire up in the Queens Room at 7:45 as usual. (Once again, for the second time in a week, the show band has the night off.)

I am filing a paper with the crew office which will if approved allow me to exit the QE2 in Los Angeles at the end of this month. 

The chef who cooks for the crew was replaced in Sydney. Turns out Siân’s discover of a maggot in her salad did a lot of good. She ran into the crew welfare lady, the crew chief steward and the big chief, the staff captain, and wagged a finger at them, accusing them of letting the quality of food in the mess spiral out of control. It’s true, but that maggot, along with the various cockroach incidents motivated her to do something. And now it’s done. 

The new guy gives a shit, and the food has improved noticeably. 

March 1, 2008

A quiet sea day between Melbourne and Adelaide. The form is making its rounds, collecting signatures. I saw a movie called “Dan in Real Life,” deeply flawed but the whole movie featured a large, multigenerational and multiracial family, which got me very homesick. Damned manipulative movies!

March 2, 2008

Pulled into Adelaide, South Australia this morning. Off the ship at 11, into town by noon on the shuttle, toured the street festival, adjunct to the Fringe Festival on the city’s mall downtown with Campbell, the English piano player who used to live in Laguna and Sonoma. Campbell is an excellent choice for a traveling companion in this instance because there the Fringe Festival has taken over the town, along with an adjunct street fair and buskers are everywhere. He’s seen it all, all the street fairs up and down the west coast of the USA, even though he’s English. We saw street jugglers who performed the same finale, who depend on the passing of the hat without being corrupted by accepting gigs on cruise ships, for example. 

In light of the recent upgrade in the mess, we elect to go back to the ship at 1:00 and catch lunch rather than eat lunch in town.

The town is in the grip of a multiyear drought.

March 3, 2008

We played jazz in the Lion at lunch. My contribution beyond playing was to suggest “Gregory Is Here,” a great unknown Horace Silver tune. First time I ever heard Michael Brecker was that record, back in 1977. My level of involvement seems to have lessened since I put in notice. I am also barking out opinions in every direction. When Pete asks if it wouldn’t be cool to play the first 2 A sections of Cherokee with just flugelhorn and bass, I instantly said “No!”

I am truly a short-timer now, unafraid of my opinions, no matter how extreme. 

March 4, 2008

Why we are visiting the port of Albany is anyone’s guess. Even the pandering Englishman who delivers the port lectures spiced with anti-American asides has never been there. Still, there’s a lot to like about Albany, even though it does seem like the shops raised prices when QE2 was on the horizon.

We were warned by the lady selling all-day passes on the shuttle bus that walking to town is a dangerous enterprise, fraught with peril. I challenge her to sell her bus tickets without using fear as the motivation, and she does back off a bit. The walk proves to be not dangerous at all, but we have to walk through a tent to get to the overpass over the rail lines where a new condo development is being pitched. 

One over the bridge we climb a hill into town, and there is a Dixieland band playing on a bandstand in the center of the street. These young guys are from Perth, the most remote city in the world as they say, but they are pretty good, especially the trumpet player and the cornet player . (They go with the two trumpet model of early Louis.) I am walking with Siân, who pokes the shops for a parental boomerang. We get snagged by a couple of passengers who hear her almost every night in the Chart Room and have a long coffee (no Starbucks here) in an outdoor cafe. Siân goes off after the coffee to play her 12:30 set, and I climb further up the hill to see if I can find some wi-fi. I run across a dog who is clearly part cardigan corgi on a lead and take a picture. Further up, a dingo cross seems disinterested in all of humanity, although intelligent enough to cruise the streets without harm. 

I find a cafe where I am required to buy a $4 pastry to use the wi-fi for an hour, and make the most of it. 

Walking down the hill to the rail bridge, I realize that this city, for all its faults, is a lot like Laguna in the early sixties. There must be artists here.

March 5, 2008

Fremantle is the port city of Perth. We come in an hour late so a container vessel can sneak in ahead of us. I’ve been warned that the weather will be hot here, and it is. Not quite Texas in the summer, but enough to notice it. I head out, cross another rail footbridge, and find myself in front of a coffee house carved out of a spare warehouse space in a bicycle shop. I have a coffee and a muffin, $6 special ($AUS=.95 cents US).

I wandered about with no particular plan, but got turned around by the town plan, which is not a grid. I made my wau from bus shelter to bus shelter, watching as the You Are Here dot moved across the landscape. Finally I came to the High Street, which in every English colonial city means downtown. 

March 10, 2008

After four excruciating sea days passing through Indonesian waters, including passage alongside Krakatoa (I took a couple pictures of the volcano from my porthole) we landed in a container terminal in Singapore. This is no way to treat a retiring lady, I think. There is a perfectly good cruise terminal a couple miles away, with shopping attached along with all the local goods and services, including that unique Singapore invention, the hawker food court. 

But wait a minute, a couple days before our arrival in Singapore a suspicious notice appears on the bulletin board of the resurgent crew mess: “INPORTANT (sic) NOTICE.” All crew taking shore leave are advised that they MUST be up the gangway by 4:00. NO EXCEPTIONS,  NO EXCUSES. 

Hmmm. Well, this is assuming that the buses are running in a regular way, and it hardly explains what the deal is. Any part of this INPORTANT NOTICE that can go wrong will go wrong, will go wrong, I’m thinking. Anyone who misspells IMPORTANT is likely to screw some or all part of this scheme up.

Anyway, back to landing in Singapore. The thing I was most looking forward to was the food stalls that Calvin Trillin described in the New Yorker. Truth be told, anything Calvin Trillin describes is of interest to me. Here’s the way the article starts:

THREE CHOPSTICKS

Does street food make the best cuisine?

When I think back on the conversations that took place after I told people that I was going to Singapore to eat, I'm reminded of the scene in "Little Red Riding Hood" when the title character first encounters the big bad wolf. I play the wolf:

"Singapore!" Little Red Riding Hood says, in an improbable New York accent. "But Singapore is supposed to be the least exotic place in Asia. There's nothing to see there, unless you're a connoisseur of skyscrapers or container ports or obsessive street-cleaning."

"All the better for guilt-free eating, my dear. Your meals can't be spoiled by remorse over not having conducted a thorough inspection of the second-most-important cathedral."

"And isn't Singapore the place where you can get fined for chewing gum?"

"But, my dear, you can't chew gum while you're eating anyway."

From those conversations, I have concluded that the governmental ban on chewing gum, promulgated in 1992, remains the fact most strongly associated by Americans with Singapore. If Singapore tested a nuclear device tomorrow, the stories in American newspapers would mention the gum ban by the second paragraph. (Three years ago, the government relented a bit, in order to satisfy the requirements of a free-trade agreement: you can now buy nicotine gum by prescription.) There is a collateral awareness of the penalties that Singapore imposes for such malefactions as dropping a candy wrapper on the sidewalk. According to what's listed on a widely sold souvenir T-shirt emblazoned "Singapore - A Fine City," the acts that can bring you a serious fine include not only gum-chewing and littering and smoking and spitting but also carrying a durian on a public conveyance. A durian is an astonishingly odoriferous melon, much prized in Southeast Asia. Having smelled a durian, I must say that the prohibition against carrying one on a public conveyance (for which there is actually no specific fine) strikes me as a very solid piece of legislation. In American terms, it's the equivalent of a law against carrying a cattle feedlot on a public conveyance.

I'd always thought that I wouldn't go much further than that in supporting Singapore's efforts to treat tidiness as the nearly Athenian ideal of government. Still, had I known that it was happening I would have backed the government's scheme in the seventies to bring food venders, called hawkers, off the streets and into centers that have proper sanitation and refrigeration and running water - a scheme that was inspired by a desire for tidy streets, along with public-health considerations and the needs of traffic control and, presumably, the relentless modernization that seems to have a momentum of its own in Singapore. My support would have been based on enlightened self-interest, one of the cornerstones of democracy. For years, as I've walked past food stands in foreign lands, I've struggled to keep in mind that for an American visitor the operational translation for signs that ostensibly say something like "bhel puri" or "tacos de nopales" is "Delivery System for Unfamiliar Bugs That You Will Bitterly Regret Having Ingested." The temptation to throw caution to the wind has been excruciating, since I may love street food above all other types of food. I have never figured out just why, although I've considered the possibility that, through some rare genetic oddity, my sense of taste is at full strength only when I'm standing up. (The fact that I particularly enjoy whatever I eat while standing in front of the refrigerator could be considered supporting evidence.) For a while, I thought about testing the standup hypothesis at some fancy Manhattan restaurant by springing to my feet halfway through the main course and trying to gauge whether that makes the roasted organic chicken with fricassée of spring vegetables and chanterelle polenta taste as good as those sausage sandwiches you get at Italian street fairs.

Gathering food venders into hawker centers, under the purview of public-health inspectors, meant that a Western visitor not only can have a safe shot at a variety of Singaporean delicacies but can do so in a setting so convenient that his energy is reserved for eating. All over Singapore, there are open-air pavilions where an island of tables and chairs is ringed by eighty or a hundred hawker stands - many of them selling only one item, like just satay or just fish-ball noodles. The government has established hawker centers in the central business district and hawker centers at the beach and hawker centers attached to the high-rise public-housing projects where the vast majority of Singaporeans live. In some of the fancy skyscrapers and department stores, private operators run air-conditioned, upmarket versions of hawker centers called food courts - a term presumably selected by someone who had never tasted what's passed off as food at an American shopping-mall food court. In Singapore, even the establishments called coffee shops are essentially mini hawker centers. They might have started as places that served coffee and the pastries that the British Empire, for reasons of its own, inflicted on unsuspecting colonials throughout the world, but these days the proprietor is likely to operate the drink concession himself and rent out two or three stalls to specialists in, say, fish-head curry or Hainanese chicken rice. It has become possible to eat in Singapore for days at a time without ever entering a conventional restaurant. Since I have never been much taken with the concept of courses - my eating habits are more on the order of a bit of this, a bit of that, and, now that I think of it, a bit of something else - it almost seems as if the Singapore government of forty years ago had arranged its hawker policy with me in mind.

=================================================

Can this guy write or what? This is the writing that made me a subscriber back in the seventies, after I discovered when I was on the road that the long bus rides we were subjected to would be lessened by the magazine’s writing.

So you can see how excited I was to be arriving in Singapore, despite the INPORTANT NOTICE. I took the first crew bus to the cruise center, where we should have docked but were displaced by a ship called, improbably, Leisure World. I found a Starbucks and caffeinated myself. 

I hooked up with Richard Williams, Siân, Simon Galfe, and Brad the drummer. We take over two cabs and head for the town from the electronics mall, eight stories of small shops with all the stuff except, apparently, for the one thing I was looking for, a wi-fi detector. I could have bought one for $20 at Fry’s before I left. But they’ve got everything else and lots more. 

By mid-day I am looking for something to eat, and I am not disappointed. One of these hawker centers is in the basement of the electronics mall. I have a three dollar bowl of ramen noodles with an egg and a separately cooked piece of chicken. It is truly glorious. It’s so good that I’m thinking, “This is what the crew mess ought to be.” The taste of that wok-fried chicken among the fragrant broth with its noodles and greens is still with me. It was made by a family in a stand a couple stands down from the one marked PIG ORGAN SOUP. True to Trillin, all of the seats in this food court were occupied, even though it was past what I’d think was local lunch time. 

I wandered a bit with Simon and Siân, who were shopping, Simon for sunglasses and shorts, Siân for silk kimonos for her family and fiancé. We snagged a cab and drove back to the cruise center, past the world’s largest ferris wheel and what will be the only Formula 1 course designed specifically for night races. We arrived at the cruise center at around 1:45, cruised through the shops there, and got into the queue for the crew shuttle back to the ship at 2:45. Soon, there was a line of a couple hundred crew members.

Even though there were no crew buses forthcoming, there were plenty of passenger busses, and some of them were returning to the ship with less than a load. It became frustrating as the minutes ticked away on the deadline for the crew to return. Finally, a crew bus pulled in at 3:30. We were among the lucky 48 crew on that bus, and we ascended the gangway with fifteen minutes to spare.

What the INPORTANT NOTICE didn’t tell us was that the the reason they wanted us back before four was because the Singapore authorities wanted to stamp our passports, and as anyone caught in the web of Singapore regulations will tell you, you don’t mess with the Singapore authorities. 

But what then became of the rest of the crew back at the cruise center? Siân waved at Peter Clagget, who was one of the ones left behind. When I came back to my cabin, which I now share with the keyboard player in the Caribbean band, I recognized the mighty rumble of the leader of the band, who was visiting in our cabin while grousing about the situation. It turned out that 160 crew members had their ID cards confiscated for being on a late arriving bus. A crew members without a card can’t go off the ship, have a beer in the crew bar after work, or even buy a bottle of drinking water. The usual punishment for the offense of being late is confiscation for three ports. But 160 is way beyond the usual number of offenders, which usually number one or two. 

We spent the night wondering how the bridge might react to this situation. Those of us who were there knew that the problem was not the crew members in that line but rather the logistics dreamed up in the crew office for the conveyance of the crew from the cruise center to the container terminal.

UPDATE: All of the crew cards were returned the next day. There still may be some actions taken. We’ll see.

March 12, 2008

After a day at sea, and dealing with the usual fiasco of breaking in a new singer as Kenny left in Singapore, we are anchored off Vung Tao, port city of Ho Chi Minh City, formerly Saigon. We are just north of the Mekong delta. This place had a lot to do with who I am. Unfortunately, all of the crew members are still on the ship at noon. We are anchored off the city, a three-mile tender ride. This may be as close as we get to Vietnam. I’m still in my cabin, waiting for announcements. Guess I’ll go have lunch, my bowl of ramen still a close memory.

In no particular order. the three ports I wanted to see when I was deciding whether to take this gig were Easter Island, Vietnam, and Shanghai. Looks like I’ll be batting 0 for 3. Easter Island we were denied shore leave, Shanghai required a $200 visa nobody told me about, and today in Vietnam we were denied shore leave. This is shit. The announcement by the staff captain was only made to deck 6, where most of the foreign crew lives, but I heard it because there’s a stairway to 6 right next to my cabin. The message was pure noblesse oblige. “Thank you for your understanding . . . there will be vendors on deck 2 selling local goods . . .We are setting up busses for Shanghai and Hong Kong.” Yeah, and we found out how good that worked in Singapore. With only a handful of ports remaining—Hong Kong, Shanghai, Osaka, Honolulu, and Los Angeles—and lots of sea days in between, it’s beginning to feel like a prison ship. As Trevor told me the other night, the management of this ship has done everything possible to piss off the crew.

I spent the day here, of course. I went up on Boat Deck and brought my iPod and the speaker, and shared my collection of raunchy Redd Foxx recordings with the guys in the band. In the near distance, Vung Tao spread out. A passenger would walk by every now and then.

The Bumpus Rule

Thirty years ago I lived in Santa Cruz with some very special people, mostly musicians. Some of them are still important players in my life. One of the most interesting of these people was Cornelius Bumpus. Aside from having one of the most euphonious names, ever, Corney had the driest sense of humor on the planet, and he could play his ass off on tenor saxophone. Latecomers to this blog and its players may have heard Cornelius with the Doobie Brothers, with whom he played for two decades, or more recently with Steely Dan.

Corney was so devoted to music that when he made no money, it was no problem. He lived in his blue 1965 Volkswagen bug, not because he liked to, but because, on a musician’s wages, it was his only option. He’d play in the afternoons at Cooper House, the old county courthouse which had been converted into a place for the idle classes to fritter away their daylight hours over a walnut salad and Anchor Steam Beer. On the outdoor patio, de facto jazz groups played under a mural of jazz musicians playing at Cooper House. All of them including Corney were immortalized in that mural, which fell down and went to the sanitary landfill when the Loma Prieta earthquake changed Santa Cruz forever.

Cornelius Bumpus, who was one of the few Santa Cruz natives I knew, refused to sleep in Santa Cruz, even in his Volkswagen. The hat having been passed at Cooper House, the tips having been divided and distributed, Corney would rev up his bug and head out of town on Highway 17, headed for parts unknown, where he made camp and curled up to sleep. 

One spring in the late seventies, baseball fever gripped the musicians of Santa Cruz. It might have been David O’Connor’s admonition that the Oakland A’s--who were between owners and saw their attendance slide from pathetic to insignificant--“needed out support.” David, a bubbly Irish wit who had toured with Buffy St. Marie, Leonard Cohen and the Lettermen, organized (insofar as we could be organized) outings to day games at the Oakland ballyard, a vast expanse of poured concrete and genuine grass where we made up most of the crowd in the left field bleachers. We drank way too much beer those afternoons, due in large part to the fact that we had our own, personal beer vendors. O’Conner drove most of the time in the gigantic car that Steve Bennet owned. If memory serves, David was the one of us who was sober enough to handle Highway 17 and its blind curves. We drove to one day game in Jaws, also from the Bennet stable. Jaws was a Chevy crew van, retired from the Forest Service. I think Zack Arbios, who was not a musician, sold Jaws to Steve, who sold it eventually to drummer Peter Burchard. 

I have in my mind a picture frozen in amber of O’Conner behind the wheel of Bennet’s massive Chrysler, four of us in the back seat giggling like fools as he showed us how a Highway Patrolman would take a curve coming on to 17 in San Jose. He kicked the transmission down and punched it, locked his arms at 10 and 2 on the wheel and grinned like a character out of a Hunter Thompson book as we climbed through the iceplant and pointed Bennet’s boat toward Santa Cruz. 

It became obvious that going to an occasional day game in Oakland wouldn’t be enough. The A’s were on the road half the season and could move to another city the moment Charlie Finley sold them. It was decided that our afternoons, after Cooper House ended lunch service and before happy hour was upon us, we would spend a few hours in Branciforte Park, playing softball. 

It was never an organized game, but these afternoons lasted through the languid summer until the rains came and washed the infield away. Almost every musician made at least an appearance, some lasted the whole summer. Some tried, without result, to get the game operating on a more serious level, or even to convert it to fast pitch. Whenever the bartenders at the Crow’s Nest or the Catalyst showed up there was some effort to take the game to another level, either by making the pitches whiz by or using one of the massive 12-inch spongy softballs favored by Polish teams in Chicago.

I am happy to report that all efforts to organize and change the basic reason we were playing failed, because we were, well, musicians from an essentially anarchist community with a socialist majority on the city council, enjoying the afternoon. We started a pickup game that stayed a pickup game, wedged into our schedules between afternoon gigs and evening gigs, once a week.

The only significant deviation we had from the rules of the game involved Cornelius Bumpus. 

Corney possessed massive upper-body strength. When he swung at a ball he moved nothing from his hips down, relying instead on his arms and trunk to launch the ball when he connected. He hardly ever whiffed. Striking out was not his problem. He could easily slice five or six foul balls down the left field line. And that was a problem.

Branciforte Creek formed the limit of left field, running through the park. Only Corney could hit the ball into that creek. There were a couple guys who had volunteered to bring softballs to the park, and their balls were frequently fouled off into the creek and were coming back soggy. These guys, it must be said, were not musicians, but friends of musicians and bartenders. Unfortunately, we made so little playing music that we didn’t have it in our budgets to buy new softballs.

After a couple weeks of walking away with soggy balls, the bartenders and friends of musicians decided to impose a new rule that would penalize Corney. Henceforth, a “Creek Ball” would be called if a ball was sliced foul into Branciforte Creek, and the batter would be out.

I remember watching the Bumpus swing. Corney swung like a gate, all muscle in the top end with hardly any leg movement at all. I also noted that Corney was pointing his toes into foul territory, guaranteeing a long series of foul balls. Once the new rule was in place, I took Corney aside and suggested he might point his toe around into the field of play. He tried it and, with no modification to his swing, just moving his gate more toward fair territory, Corney was able to change his long loud foul balls into long loud home runs. But the non-musicians were still getting soggy balls, as the creek also ran defined the home run line as well as the foul line. And so the Bumpus rule was extended to fair balls as well as foul.

Corney took it all in stride, and in time started peppering line drives into every field by shortening his stroke and pointing his toe just before swinging the gate, much like Saduharu Oh. He became the nemesis of every outfielder on the opposing side. 

When we started playing--when we made that transition between the bleachers in Oakland and the hallowed fields of Branciforte--Corney was playing music primarily with Jerry Miller in his resurgent Moby Grape at night, and daylight hours in the odd jazz gig at Cooper House or one of the various venues around town.

We were all a little stunned when Corney brought a couple of the Doobie Brothers to Branciforte to play one afternoon. The Doobies were from the other side of Highway 17, the area that was to have become Silicon Valley in a few years. They seemed to play pretty well, and I think we treated them like regular musicians. 

And so it came to pass that Cornelius Bumpus was recruited by the Doobie Brothers, not for his mighty swing to the outfield that resulted in the institution of the Bumpus Rule, but because of his soulful tenor playing, his doubling on Hammond B-3, and his vocal skills. Michael McDonald had recently joined the band for touring, and it was a good time to make a move. The Doobies had a hit record out called “What a Fool Believes” and were packing them in at stadiums and larger venues worldwide. 

Word was on the ballfield that Corney was pulling down $1200 a week retainer when the Doobies were NOT touring. For a bunch of guys who, like me, had cheerfully gone out on the road for $225 a week, it seemed like Corney had made it, big time. Nonetheless, Corney still wore plaid long-sleeved shirts and Levis 501 jeans on stage and off. 

I saw him about 6 months later, when I had moved to southern California so I could gain visibility as a road musician looking for work. We met up by the Universal Sheraton hotel at the top of Cahuenga Pass. Larry Scala and I were living a couple miles apart in West LA, and, as part of the Branciforte mob, we decided to drive up to the hotel and take our chances on finding Bumpus before the band headed off to the gig. We were successful, although we felt like stalkers. We caught him between limos, heading off for a sound check. Larry and I congratulated him and wished him well, and he was off. 

A few months later I got a card from him saying he had made a record and would be driving down to play at the Baked Potato in Los Angeles, and suggesting that I might want to hear the band, which was made up of him, a Santa Cruz piano player who had played a few games at Branciforte, and “a couple brothers from Harlem.”

When I got to the venue, it turned out the drummer and bass player were indeed brothers, but not from Harlem, but Haarlem, in the Netherlands, two gangly white guys.

Corney got married, built a house in the Sierra Nevada foothills, and started a family. He became a part of the community when he was off the road. Longer than a decade later, the Doobies imploded, but Corney was ready with Plan B, and moved with his family from Murphys, California to New York City, where in time he joined Steely Dan.

He always maintained ties with the Sierra foothills. One day he got on a plane to perform at a jazz festival there. He died on that plane, of a heart attack, over Montana, nearly thirty years after the Bumpus Rule went into effect at Branciforte Park.

I still congratulate him and wish him well. Keep swinging, brother.

Beyond the Dateline

February 16, 2008

We crossed the international dateline last night. When I was a kid, we had a globe in the house and I remember the little rotating pressed metal plate on top of the thing that figured the time zones. I’d line up the time in Massachusetts and try to figure out what the time was in some of the cities that I heard about on the radio, television or in the paper. Now I’m going to be in Tonga, for crying out loud, although none of us is counting on getting off the ship because it’s a tender port. I have IPM too. I also happen to have a brother-in-law, about to become a transplanted Texan as his son will play for SMU, who was born and raised in Tonga.

For those of you home gamers who don’t know, IPM stands for In-Port Manning. You get IPM every eighth port on this ship, and you’re obligated to stay on the ship for the entire day in case anything goes wrong. 

Brad asked me a couple days ago if I wanted the bandleader job in the Queens Room. He was conveying to me the wishes of the office, but I’m going to turn him down. First, we have a young trombone player who wants the job so bad it hurts. Stu will do a fine job and he knows the gig better than anybody, having been on the band since last June. Second, I’m wary of the additional responsibilities. I’d rather help Stu however I can by writing and keeping up the standards of play rather than deal with passenger complaints about how fast a cha cha ought to be. You can’t win in the Queens Room. You have two factions that are trying to rip the band apart at all times. Any decision the bandleader makes is going to cause an eruption from the opposite faction that feels like it’s been slighted. 

This is the second sea day since Papeete, Tahiti, although on the calendar it looks like we did three because of the dateline. Another two days separate Tonga and Auckland, which has a proper port. That’ll be Thursday, then another two sea days and we’re in Sydney for an overnight.

Today at dinner, Siân and Patrick are miffed at the absence of milk--the allocation thing again. You can’t deprive an Englishman, or for that matter an Irishman and a Welch harpist--of milk for their tea and not expect to hear about it. They do not disappoint. Siân finally manages to get one of the manager girls, the one who has her waiter guys tucking napkins into the serving pans so they don’t appear so messy, to make a call up to the passenger areas and order some milk. How they expect to balance their books with irritations like this one is anyone’s guess. 

In addition, right before the latest milk allocation this evening, a roach climbed the wall of the mess. Nothing you can do about that, I’m thinking. We are in the tropics, and some are bound to stow away with the food provisions loaded up in Tahiti. Then again, my experience says that if you see one, there are thousands hiding in the walls, breeding. We have an inspection in Sydney on the 24th. 

Looks like we are getting off in Tonga, though. The larger boats will be used for tendering. Siân will be leading a tour without a tour guide. That’s what they do in Tonga. I might take a stab at getting off the ship even though I have IPM. 

Blood Pressure

I started using a cuff to monitor mine when the pressure of adapting to this ship caused my BP to soar into the near-dangerous range. I started taking pills that I’d stopped when I was on shore, to see what would happen. on the 25th of November my BP was 172/85 with an 85 BPM pulse.I started a FileMaker database to see where it would go. 

This morning, almost 3 months later, my BP is 112/56 and my pulse is 54. I have lost weight on this trip. The food is dreadful except for our 20 minutes of glory in the Lido after work. And I have to climb 5 flights to get almost anywhere worth getting to. I’m not making a big deal about it, just going about the business of the day and adding a couple pills, climbing the stairs a few times every day, passing on the food that’s awful, substituting something raw that they can’t mess up.

Today we played another Jazz at the Lion at 12:45. This time, Brad just indicated that the whole Queens Room band would play, ending the unintentional policy of setting up de facto groups. We are playing very well together. We opened with Sofrito, then Tin Roof Blues, On the Sunny Side of the Street, a ballad medley like in Jazz at the Philharmonic, and closed with Mood Indigo. It pleases me that we cover so much ground, so much so that we are hard to pin down stylistically. I was the announcer, which is a lot of fun.  

Monday, February 18, 2008

It’s been a pain going through the South Pacific staying connected with email. For that reason, I’ve been using the ship’s wifi. At 50 cents a minute it’s an expensive way to go, but there’s a bit of business I need to do that requires internet access. My guess is that things will get better when we hit Australia and from there on out.

Archie is on the coals because, although he might be sick, he didn’t try to tell Brad until 11 this morning, thereby making his job a lot more complicated. Because the entertainers for the day were already set in the Daily Programme (yes that is what it’s called), Brad is sending Stevie down to work with us tonight. That ought to be interesting, the triumphant return to the Queens Room of one of its former bandleaders. I won’t even begin to describe the torments that the Queens Room had for the rather unassuming Stevie, other than to say that, at the time, it was decided that ProShip had an exclusive monopoly to book the band and they sent the sorriest bunch of losers ever for Stevie to lead. Then the passengers, having something to complain about, proceeded to make it all a hell of a lot worse. 

I spent much of my lunch time with Trevor trying to convince me that I had made the wrong decision to turn down the gig leading the Queens Room band, but I was having none of it, despite his best efforts.

Valparaiso to Tahiti

February 7, 2008

Well I’ve heard of some weird policy decisions made on ships, but this takes the cake. All the musicians were rounded up for a meeting in the band room behind the Grand stage at three this afternoon and informed that the officers were cracking down on alcohol consumption on the ship. This past week 10 crew members were taken to the bridge after being breathalized and found to be over the two drink maximum. 

But then we heard that one of the cases was a chef who called Security to report that a crew member was pissing on his door. By the time they got there the pisser was gone, and the Security chose to breathalize the chef who had made the call, who was sleeping it off when he called them! 

I don’t endorse drinking to excess, but this is absurd.

Among the other plums which we were privy to at this meeting:

We were told that we had to wear name badges, even though no name badges had ever been issued to us. 

We were instructed that “having more fun than the passengers” would have to stop, specifically in the Lido, or we would lose our 20 minutes at the buffet after midnight. This wouldn’t seem like an unreasonable request if the passengers, specifically those with the tendency toward complaining, weren’t such a collection of dour sourpusses.

More restrictions on dress: no open-toed flip-flops, no denim of any kind, just shirts with collars.

What this amounts to, then, is the institutionalization of common sense, in the service of Command and Control management. But they weren’t done then. Abruptly, the topic, and the style of management changed. We were asked for suggestions which might save the company some money. Suddenly we were using the horizontal management model, and asked to innovate with ideas which, regardless of the impact to the bottom line, would net the initiator $50 and a hearty handshake from the captain.

We were promised at this meeting that we would be granted shore leave in Easter Island on the tenth. Fat chance.

 

February 8, 2008

Sure enough, I showed up for my 12:30 jazz concert in the Golden Lion and found out that Brad, the bandmaster, was otherwise engaged. Instead of playing trumpet he was up on the bridge with two or three of the Russian musicians who were breathalized last night and failed. There was a birthday party for one of them in the Fol’csale which got rowdy, by all accounts. I can’t believe that these guys, all of whom were at the meeting, didn’t heed Brad’s pitch at the musicians’ meeting.

Later in the day, in the Staff Mess, the Russians are there and Brad can’t disclose what happened. Either they actually got the wrong cats (unlikely) or they caved when they realized that they’d have to replace three (or is it two?) of the guys in the show band way out here in the Pacific Ocean, miles from anything. I lean toward the caving explanation, and I think this shows the gross hypocrisy of doling out these unenforceable  policies. What next, the lash? Cat-of-nine-tails?

It’ll be interesting when we get to Easter Island, because we were promised shore leave in our meeting the other day. It’s a tender port, though, so I’m not counting on it. 

That’ll be three days into Easter, the day where we can see the island in the distance, followed by three sea days. Another seven days on the ship. That’ll land us in Papeete, where there’s a boat drill scheduled. Assholes.

February 9, 2008

Third sea day out of Valparaiso, straight as an arrow at a course of 280. Dwight, the American bass player in the show band, is sick, so they robbed us of our bass player, leaving Archie, aka Richard Walliston, to play keyboard bass. On a break, Archie and I have coffee and he is about as emotionally exhausted as I’ve seen anyone in the crew. He does have his travel advice, though, the information about his flights when the ship arrives in Sydney on the 25th. For someone carrying this document, he’s a little on the emotional side, but we have put up with rude passengers, fellow crew members who have their own agendas, and the maddening addition of command and control rules. I don’t have any answers. I feel the same way without the travel advice. Turns out he was ready to leave the ship in Barbados a couple weeks ago, He’d already lined up a flight. 

Which leads me to the next revelation. If they don’t start treating us like the adults we are I will leave the QE2. The easiest way would be to leave in Los Angeles and take a Southwest plane to Austin. March 30 is the day we are in LA, and I’ll be trimming off three weeks and a flight from Heathrow to the states. Not a bad option. There are other airports, too that have cheap connections with Austin: Fort Lauderdale and New York (Islip).

They just monkeyed in a real fundamental way with our salary, making us into independent contractors instead of employees, thereby making all the rules that they care to enforce on us useless. Or that’s what it seems like to me. 

February 10, 2008

Sure enough, when the officer of the watch comes on this morning to announce the passenger procedures for tendering, she adds the following: “There is absolutely no crew shore leave.” Snotty little bitch. 

At lunch, I sit with Trevor and Patrick, and Trevor tells me that Brian Ibbotson, who played piano with us before Archie got here, had to be airlifted from the Queen Mary 2 with massive organ failure. He’s in a coma in a hospital in Barbados. They’ve amputated his legs. 

Brian’s worked as a single and trio pianist on the Mary since its launch. He’s a great piano player, a superb arranger and a hell of a nice guy.

Except for the youngsters in the Purser’s office who sat there at lunch contentedly chattering, there is a lot of palpable tension in the mess this afternoon.  

February 11, 2008

Trevor buttonholes Wendy, in charge of crew welfare, to explain why keeping the food at this level of expertise is asking for trouble. A large black woman, raised in Hawaii and living in Siân’s home town in Wales, Wendy thinks Trevor is being sarcastic and gives him the brushoff.  This is a typical reaction in this ship. Hey, it’s not us musicians who are pissing on cabin doors. When somebody who’s been on this ship as ling as Trevor has brings up some issues, you should do yourself a big favor and listen.

February 12, 2008

The new singer, Kenny, comes from an acapella background, specifically barbershop quartets. He’s brought his first efforts at arranging, and there are a lot of problems with them--road mapping, voice leading, range, layout--that he needs to address. He’s counting on me to straighten him out on these things, but hey, I’m not here to teach arranging or Finale. He’s fallen into a bit of a trap in the Queens Room. The old birds who think they run the place are up in arms because Kenny reads his charts when he sings, pulling a Manhasset music stand up so high that it obscures his face. That’s something they can’t abide apparently. 

Once they’re on to you, they circle like sharks. My guess is that Kenny’s in for it. You don’t want to cause these tongues to clack. Less stated is the fact that Kenny doesn’t seem to understand about the importance of setting and maintaining dance rhythms, even down to the level of individual notes. Nobody cares what sorts of vocal gymnastics the singer may be capable of. They want a presentation of melody that allows them to dance. That’s the simple fact that so far only Neville seemed to know. Why is this shrouded in mystery? Just stand there and sing. 

From a rocky start, the new drummer has risen to the occasion. Archie is counting the days/hours/minutes until Sydney and his release. 

Today we had one of the strangest encounters with civilization in the history of cruise ships. Between Easter Island and Tahiti is Pitcairn Island, famously selected by the mutineers from the Bounty as the place they’d be safe from capture by the Royal Navy due to its remoteness. They mixed with the island’s natives and in time an odd mix of people arose from the island, and the Bounty burned and was scuttled. Unfortunately, when the Captain announced that we would be calling at this unscheduled port, it was revealed that we would be incapable of landing because there is no wharf, and our boats couldn’t even tender because of the lack of a wharf of any sort. 

No matter, though. We would, the captain announced, circle the island twice after representatives of the inhabitants (drawn from the 150 or so who live on the island) had come aboard to sell their wares and otherwise swindle the passengers. 

Imagine! No troublesome landings. No more surly immigration officers. Let the port come aboard to you.

Instead of slogging through the surf (admittedly a difficult option for this demographic) the natives board the ship and sell pieces of wood for the Yankee Dollar. Postcards are sold, stamped and posted from the island when they return to it, as long as the mail bag is not lost in the breakers. Your passport could be stamped by a Pitcairn official for a mere $5. This is entirely consistent with my theory of life becoming more and more inauthentic and more like professional wrestling. Of course, most inauthentic experience comes to us by way of television, or through Disney. Disney television is the double whammy. 

The Pitcairn inhabitants stayed with us a couple hours as we circled their sad and remote island a couple times, got on their aluminum longboat and left. We press onward for another two sea days. By the time we get to Papeete we will have been confined to the ship since Montevideo, except for on day in Valparaiso since January 30. By then it will be February 14.

February 13, 2008

This afternoon someone (not me, I promise) posted a single paragraph apologizing to the passengers for the crew’s inattention lately and blaming it on the captain’s clamping down on shore leave privileges. The reality is a little more complicated, but that is one of the (many) core issues. Maybe the passengers don’t need to know what’s happening in the mess, what the Filipino overtime hours are, and the other issues are. I heard from Archie that the Lido privilege was withdrawn two years ago and the musicians, seeing it was their only 20 minutes to throw together a good meal from what’s essentially a snack service, layed down their tools. When confronted with no music, the officers reinstated the privilege in a hurry.

Papeete is famously a port where no crew members may join or leave a ship without French work papers, which take at least a month to obtain from a French consulate. 

It might be a good time, depending on the mood of the passengers, to make a case. I know that the apology came not from one of us musicians. Maybe one of the Filipinos has been pushed too far by the officers clamping down on our privileges and the supervisors pushing them too hard. I know that the crew is ready to do something. I just wonder what it’ll be. 

I am just about two-thirds through my contract. 64 days to go.