California Tiki, Polynesian Pop

ver$hy ver$h

ver$hy ver$h

Well-known member
They filmed a couple of the Indiana Jones films in Hawaii, but it was a stand in for other locations. Shame, really. They could have explored Gus' American wartime angle, given the period.
 
ver$hy ver$h

ver$hy ver$h

Well-known member
@sus

Have you read Didion's piece, 'In the Islands'?

1969: I had better tell you where I am, and why. I am sitting in a high-ceilinged room in the Royal Hawaiian Hotel in Honolulu watching the long translucent curtains billow in the trade wind and trying to put my life back together. My husband is here, and our daughter, age three. She is blonde and barefoot, a child of paradise in a frangipani lei, and she does not understand why she cannot go to the beach. She cannot go to the beach because there has been an earthquake in the Aleutians, 7.5 on the Richter scale, and a tidal wave is expected. In two or three minutes the wave, if there is one, will hit Midway Island, and we are awaiting word from Midway. My husband watches the television screen. I watch the curtains, and imagine the swell of the water.​
 
sus

sus

Moderator
Benny Bunter said:
His imagination is that same frontier American one, projected out into exotic locations, that you've been talking about
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It feels like there's this flowing or changing into in the poems. The forms are always shifting, shifting into one another. Boundary dissolution as the state of the jungle.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
sus said:
It feels like there's this flowing or changing into in the poems. The forms are always shifting, shifting into one another. Boundary dissolution as the state of the jungle.
Click to expand...
Yes, very characteristic of Stevens to never stay with one idea for long. No sooner does he come up with one image or metaphor, he'll discard it and invent something else. It's the imagination at play that takes primacy over trying to express any fixed meaning or reality per se.
 
Benny Bunter

Benny Bunter

Well-known member
The important thing is not to be boring and dull, which I think is why he tended to come up with all this gaudy, exotic stuff that quite often tips into the nonsensical and ridiculous and silly. Not all the poems come off, but I like how he's not afraid to go into that space in his imagination.

His actual real life was really boring and grey - an insurance company executive trapped in a long and unhappy marriage.

Gubbinal

That strange flower, the sun,
Is just what you say.
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.

That tuft of jungle feathers,
That animal eye,
Is just what you say.

That savage of fire,
That seed,
Have it your way.

The world is ugly,
And the people are sad.
 
Murphy

Murphy

cat malogen
posted for the pedal steel

an unremarkable country rock piece without the solos, yes there are two and they are sweet as fuck, apologies for the post Gram P FBB’s hair bears not a perfect world

 
sus

sus

Moderator
Been listening to Speedy West all. morning

Still can't get over these Elvis photos. The leis are so damn decadent, really incredi ble. Not your dimestore plastick lei
 
sus

sus

Moderator
sus said:
Tahiti shaped like a figure eight, like infinity. "Bali Hai." On the other side is death. On the other side is always death.

The moment of greatest ecstasy. The dissolution of self. From the Norman O'Brown @blissblogger quoted: "On the other side of the veil is nothing; utopia; the kingdom not of this world."

The French had named it La Nouvelle Cythère, the New Island of Love, and Lorde de Bougainville's botanist had published a letter in which he called the island a sexual utopia. All of Rousseau's ideas of primitive life were true.
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James saw that “every opposition, among whatsoever things, vanishes in a
higher unity in which it is based; that all contradictions, so-called, are but dif-
ferences; that all differences are of degree; that all degrees are of a common
kind; that unbroken continuity is of the essence of being; and that we are lit-
erally in the midst of
an infinite,
to perceive the existence of which is the ut-
most we can attain.
 
william_kent

william_kent

Well-known member
I came across this passage last night in the David Toop book, Two-Headed Doctor, where he says this about exotica:

[..] the exotica movement functioned as a seductively voyeuristic rear window onto a fantasy paradise conspicuously free from US invasions, either military, religious or economic. Exotica could be described as an index of whiteness, a perspective view of otherness which excluded indigenousness or authenticity.
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sus

sus

Moderator
Ian was there for the first sip. A flaming concrete beach. We were there together wond'ring Romantic at the exquisite creations of Culture. Now it's an obsession it's becoming the prism through which I understand all my own desires for Grand Sweeping Adventure and the Other
 
sus

sus

Moderator
I think in part because Malick's New World meant so much to me.

That film and Herzog's Nosferatu use the Rheingold intro as signifiers of the sublime
 
sus

sus

Moderator
I've written an essay on this stuff if anyone would like to read it, I dunno what I'll do with it it'll probably sit on a hard-drive otherwise

It's about loads of stuff we've talked about on the board lately, not just tiki but the reptilian brain, and Ballard's Drowned World, and leaving words behind, and The Master, and Jim Morrison the Lizard King, and the Venice beatniks
 
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