The cruise ship industry is crushing the life out of my town
It was a Dick Dale kind of day. I'll explain later.
I woke up this morning around 7am. I work at 9am, so this is about an hour earlier than I am typically conscious. I think one of the boxes in my closet bedroom was annoying me as it had crawled onto the foot of the bed like a transmogrified cardboard halibut or something. I buy lots of shit online so boxes live with me in the extra spaces.
For whatever reason, I decided to call out from work and read a thesis I found on Reddit about SMiLE, the enigmatic follow up album to Pet Sounds from The Beach Boys. I just skimmed the Wikipedia article on SMiLE, and I believe it is accurate to say that there has never been an officially released version of the album, but the thesis helpfully contained a dropbox link to a fan-made reconstruction based on research of the available record on Brian Wilson’s original vision of the album.
I needed some sort of bliss during this period of dreary rain in Juneau. I needed respite from the mess that is my life. The summer of Big Cruise has led me down a path directly to SMiLE. The deluge of demand for bandwidth from the tourists has crushed the cellular grid near the cruise ships. I’m missing phone calls and texts. The credit card machines at local retailers don’t work some of the time. Downtown is an internet desert unless you can luck up on a wifi password. Even then, the wifi load is also through the roof. I’ve been listening to music I preloaded onto my phone because there’s not a strong enough signal for YouTube or anything similar.
This aggression will not stand, man. My life is now being directly impacted by the cruise ship industry, and I am over it.
I'm currently in the middle of listening to the FLAC of SMiLE, the lossless file format on computers, for the 4th time since about 8am. It's currently 1:15pm as I am writing this, and the run time of the album is 44 minutes and 58 seconds. There is no internet downtown for the most part.
Here’s the Reddit thread I discovered that linked me to Cassandra Burke's SMiLE thesis:
https://www.reddit.com/r/thebeachboys/comments/1ctsa06/beach_boys_women_academia/
Here’s a direct link to Burke’s thesis: https://thecarbonfreeze.com/2019/10/20/my-complete-thesis-on-smile-1967-psychedelic-album/
Here’s a link to the FLAC file for SMiLE on dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/s/6a8p856gxqco6ed/Romestamo.flac?e=1&dl=0
It all leads me, also, back to the baby boomers. This is the metaphorical summer of the winter of the baby boomers. If that makes sense. They are dying alright. Just as the actuarial tables would tell us. Maybe a bit ahead of the curve due to a recent-but-fading-from-memory health crisis. The Beach Boys are the archetypal baby boomers. They boomed the most. They still boom, but the conservators are starting to take away the keys and settle old accounts.
Baby boomers are the clientele, by and large, of the cruise ship industry. The cruise ship industry and baby boomers are both taxing me with their presence, and yet also providing some sort of sustenance. It is always a push and pull. The cruise ship industry, though, has become such a gigantic personal imposition to me, I have moved all other projects to the back burner.
I have been filming downtown on the docks in the tourist trap to try and capture some small part of this thing that is unfolding. It is a small, weird little saga. But it has captivated much of my waking life. It's like I get to play Federico Fellini with a giant hoard of extras for my own personal absurdist dramedy. Today I captured the wild tableau of hundreds of “newlyweds and nearly deads,” as they are called in the cruise ship industry, heading back on board the cruise ship.
Baby boomers are the most human of the generations. It might appear that way because of my own proximity. Up close, from down below. At the kids’ table. I am a geriatric millennial. The mix of the light and dark is reflected in The Beach Boys and baby boomers in general. Bill Clinton, too, is an archetypal baby boomer. Machiavellian. Capable of both great tenderness and great violence. Tragically flawed.
Also this morning, a coworker contacted me and in discussing the fact that I called out today, Monday, they recommended that I check out the music of Dick Dale. The pioneer of the surf sound. I was somewhat acquainted, but I undertook another course of research into Mr. Dale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dick_Dale
You may recognize his music from the opening of Quentin Tarantino’s era-defining classic Pulp Fiction: Dick Dale's version of "Misirlou" plays over the opening credits:
So, that’s all for today. I am making a YouTube video about the cruise ship industry. I re-read “Shipping Out - On the (nearly lethal) comforts of a luxury cruise” by David Foster Wallace and it inspired me. It’s one lodestar I am following, anyway. I’m also scheduling some more livestreams and hopefully I will drop a video in the near future on true crime. That’s the plan.
https://harpers.org/wp-content/uploads/2008/09/HarpersMagazine-1996-01-0007859.pdf
I'm not smart enough to enjoy most of David Foster Wallace's writing, but I did like that essay. Looking forward to your take on the "newly weds and near deads" and hoping it's easier to follow than DFW :)