Disney Magic?

After digesting last week's Disney experience, I have a few notes about it.

We stayed at a Disney hotel at the park; The Grand Californian. Done as an Arts & Crafts Lodge of the type one might have seen around Tahoe in the twenties, the hotel gets all the details right but the irony is overwhelming. The Arts & Crafts movement was based in organic forms that featured huge wooden beams morticed and tenoned together and expressed an affection for natural materials. Shingles usually clad the exterior and art nouveauesque forms predominate. The Grand Californian, like a movie set (or theme park) gets it right on the surface, but when examined closely it all falls apart. The huge beams that predominate the structure are not wood, but poured concrete covered with a plastic resin that imitates the intricate wood grain of the originals. The shingles are the same; not wood, but plastic. The whole of it betrays the very form it claims to represent. It is not A&C. It is some Hollywood imitation of the form.

I arise early every morning out of habit rather than choice. I grab a cup of coffee and usually watch the sun come up. At Disney my routine continued. I would head down to a little alcove by the pool and welcome the day. The first morning, as I sipped my coffee, I noticed the sound of nature was a little overwhelming; birds twittering, frogs croaking, loons looning. After a few minutes it occurred to me that there was no way those creatures could exist there. I looked up and down, and then found the speakers. Disney pipes in the sound of the wilderness. Of course, at 6:00 am on the dot all the nature stops abruptly and is replaced by new age music. A hotel security guard walked by that first morning and asked me what I thought of the fake nature. I told him I had just noticed it and laughed. He said I should wait till the wolf howls, and then added, "Just kidding."

In the hotel rooms, when the call of nature hits in the middle of the night and you toddle off to the bathroom, you may turn on the light. When it comes on you notice how little illumination it provides. Then you notice it slowly, almost imperceptibly, becoming brighter. The light is on a self dimmer that takes a full two minutes to reach its maximum intensity. It allows the eyes to adjust, protecting you from the middle of the night, oh my god I'm blind, totally miss the toilet, disaster.

Speaking of bathrooms, the shower curtains feature a well-conceived Arts & Crafts print of a forest, but, being Disney, the forest is home to Bambi and Thumper. Weird to do your business with little doe eyes (yes, I know Bambi's male) staring at you.

No Free Coffee!

I'm sure I will have more to go on about. Hey, I have so little in my life to share.