For a brief period decades ago, I used to go running semi-regularly on the Bay Ridge esplanade between Shore Road and the Belt Parkway, which afforded a continuous view of the harbor. As I remember it, there were frequently cruise ships, the giant ones that seemed defiantly out of scale with everything else in the water — absurd, floating manmade parodies of sublimity. I would then spend the entire run focused on them, as though they posed some elemental mystery. Could anyone on the boat could see me, as a unique person, or did I just seem like one of the scampering insects that Orson Welles’s character talks about in the Ferris wheel scene from
They sound like passengers in the film WALL-E moving in a kind of eternal sunshine. A friend went on one and talked more about the on-board "experience" than the places he visited. The dream of luxury turns out to be a void. İs capitalism, then, really just a ship of fools?
Yes Rob come back to South Brooklyn
This is courageous. Supermodernity on vacation. Marc Augé at an all inclusive. Bravo.
They sound like passengers in the film WALL-E moving in a kind of eternal sunshine. A friend went on one and talked more about the on-board "experience" than the places he visited. The dream of luxury turns out to be a void. İs capitalism, then, really just a ship of fools?
Great reading!
A note: on the eight paragraph says "cruise chips".
Great essay