California Tiki, Polynesian Pop

[sus]

Gonna be annoying and crosspost for the archive incase someone in 15 years stumbles upon this thread and is interested

Spoiler

Looks very interesting, I'll have to pick up a copy.

I was reading "Taboo: Time & Belief in Exotica" by the musicologist Phil Ford (who moonlights as a theorist of magic & alchemy on the Weird Studies podcast)

And he talked a lot about the transition from Greatest Generation 50s/early 60s exotica (& Polynesian Pop) to the Vietnam era mid 60s, when Boomers start dominating marketshare

And just how quickly exotica went out of fashion and was shunned for its campy inauthenticity

And yet Bobby Zimmerman, Elliot Charles Adnopoz (ie Ramblin Jack), Don Glen Vliet (ie Beefheart)—all these are also obviously inventions, fantasies, that go with the "Indian-style" fringed leather jackets and moccasins and featherbands. That really what happened was a shift from fantasies of the (spatially) foreign of the lush/colorful to fantasies of the (temporally foreign) roughened domestic: Greil's "Weird America"

Eastwood, and the antihero archetype he embodies, emerged at the same mid-60s moment, and I wonder if there's a connection. Obviously older Westerns (John Wayne in 48's Red River comes to mind) have this archetype too though.

And then in the 70s, a glam cowboy idea starts emerging—I still haven't sussed out the space, but there's Campbell's Rhinestone Cowboy, Elton John's poppy/diamond-crusted "Roy Rogers"—maybe even Joe Buck in '69's Midnight Cowboy. It all begins to feel more like exotica again

I was watching the new Hlynur Pálmason film, Godland last night.

Which is an attempt at a film in the tradition of the Romantic Sublime: a European who travels across Iceland on horseback and is exposed to both the beauties and terrors/dangers of nature. Lots of emphasis on landscape, on the sheer scale of mountains and glaciers and mossy canyons that dwarfs the human beings.

And what it reminded me of, more than anything, is a cattle drive film like Red River! This journey through a landscape where the landscape becomes a central character. River crossings and bad weather and moments of camaraderie between the men around the campfire.

Which is just to say that many Westerns seem like deeply Romantic films to me, upholding deeply Romantic ideals. The cowboys are poet-philosophers of silence and extreme linguistic economy, traveling through the wilderness and the fringes of society, whistling or humming their songs to the animals around them.

 

[Benny Bunter]

You could get some insane sounds out of a pedal steel

 

[Benny Bunter]

Gonna be annoying and crosspost for the archive incase someone in 15 years stumbles upon this thread and is interested

Dylan's Desire album fits in here right?

Not Polynesian, but that romantic exoticism

 

[Benny Bunter]

 

[sus]

Dylan's Desire album fits in here right?

Not Polynesian, but that romantic exoticism

Yeah totally, "Mozambique," "Isis."

And he looks like this:

Feathers and white-face. As exotic and decadent as he ever has. Maybe this austerity/decadence thing is on a ten-year cycle

 

[sus]

So I've been reading about Joseph Banks, the British botanist for Cook's Endeavour.

And his trip to Tahiti, the time he spent there, feels very storybook archetypal Romanticism. And is very much a foreshadow of 20th C exotica, American attitudes toward Polynesia. So I'm going to write a few things up

 

[sus]

Quotes are from Holmes, The Age of Wonder

"He had been told that [Tahiti] was the location of Paradise: a wonderful idea, although he did not quite believe it."

At last after a year on the cramped conditions of the Endeavour: the palm trees, the blue lagoon, the volcanic sands. Groves of breadfruit trees. Exchanges of beads and presents with the locals. "An Arcadia of which we were going to be Kings," he wrote in his journals.

The Tahitian girls draped flower leis around their necks and invited the crew to lie with them on coconut mats in the shade. But since the homes lacked walls and thus privacy, the English were too abashed at first to oblige. They would not be shy again.

 

[sus]

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.

 

[sus]

The Endeavour was there on astronomical business, to observe the Transit of Venus across the sun's face. Although a very different 'transit of Venus' would result from its visit, crossing the oceans in the fire of the crewmembers groins.

 

[sus]

The Tahitian girls draped flower leis around their necks and invited the crew to lie with them on coconut mats in the shade. But since the homes lacked walls and thus privacy, the English were too abashed at first to oblige. They would not be shy again.

The Europeans are People of Metal. Iron Men. This is what impressed the Mexica and Incans, too, two centuries prior. Whereas

There was no source of metal anywhere on the island. The Tahitians' hunting knives were made out of wood, their fish hooks out of mother-of-pearl, their cooking pots out of clay. The Europeans clanked and glittered with metal.

If sex is cheap, and iron is limited, then the marketplace becomes straightforward.

Much time was spent in bargaining for sexual favours. The basic currency was any kind of usable metal object: there was no need for gold or silver or trinkets. Among the able seamen the initial going rate was one ship's nail for one ordinary fuck, but hyper-inflation soon set in. The Tahitians well understood a market economy. There was a run on anything metal that could be smuggled off the ship—cutlery, cleats, handles, cooking utensils, spare tools, but especially nails. It was said that the Endeavour's carpenter soon operated an illegal monopoly on metal goods, and nails were leaving the ship by the sackful.

 

[sus]

A few years prior to the Endeavour, there'd been a British ship, the first to the island, named the HMS Dolphin.

A story had circulated among the British navy that so many nails had been prised from her timbers, by sailors seeking to buy sex, that she nearly split into pieces in a Pacific storm.

 

[sus]

Cook was certainly aware of these dangers. Had his entire crew meticulously checked for venereal disease too, by the surgeon. Didn't hire anyone aboard who was diseased. Didn't matter. The captain of the Dolphin, or of the Spanish and French vessels that had been there prior, hadn't been so diligent. Within a few weeks nearly every seaman on the Endeavour has venereal disease.

Alan Moorehead has written a book on this called The Fatal Impact, which I've ordered. And in Coleridge's "Ancient Mariner" he mentions the Mariner encountering a beautiful/alluring but diseased woman

 

[sus]

Banks is the only member of the crew to really integrate with the Tahitians. They let him in on their religious rites. Speak to him freely. He's not really part of the Endeavour's command structure, being a botanist. Neither an officer who needs to maintain appearances or a sailor who needs to follow orders. It's like the doctor in Master & Commander. There are always these scientist/doctor/anthropologist/bard/philosopher figures in these stories, yeah?

They're these quasi-neutral third parties. They're on neither side. They're curious and open and want to communicate. Rather than being interested in war and empire

 

[sus]

He watches them surf, provides one of the first Western accounts of surfing. "It left Banks amazed by the courage and dexterity of the Tahitian surfers, and the beauty and nonchalant grace with which they mastered the huge and terrifying Pacific rollers."

"Here the power of wild nature was not tamed, but was harnessed by human beings; and they evidently revelled in it."

 

[sus]

Pretty soon Banks is sleeping outside the British fort, with a Tahitian woman Otheothea who he's enamored with. (Although many others are proffered to him, and there's some implication that he has several orgies with Otheothea and other women, including the local queen.)

He stops wearing European clothing. He sleeps nude at night as is Tahitian custom and by day wears Tahitian clothes. "On 10 June his journal records how he stripped off, had his body covered with charcoal and white wood ash, and danced ceremonially with a witch doctor."

He's the only European to really learn the language too. Starting with parts of the body. Nipple. Breast. Buttocks.

 

[sus]

At some point Cook becomes concerned that his botanist is going native. He takes him on a separate expedition, just them two, circumnavigating the island's figure eight. Banks begins ditching Cook and journeying inland with a butterfly net.

On their trip they find an English goose and a turkey cock left behind by the Dolphin, which had become (Banks's journal now) "immensely fat and as tame as possible, following the Indians every where who seemd immensly fond of them"

Nearby, on the entrance to a longhouse, were fifteen human under-jaw bones, appearing "quite fresh, not one at all damagd even by the loss of a Tooth." War trophies, with hints of cannibalism, and the lack of missing teeth suggesting capture and sacrificial slaughter.

They find a wicker man made from basketwork and covered in feathers.

The women decorate themselves with flowers and mother-of-pearl earrings, which Banks begins to collect to bring back

 

[sus]

He watches a girl of 12 scream out for hours as a tattooing needle with three dozen teeth is pounded into her buttocks. The older women scold and beat and coax her in turn until she's done, and the next day they do the other side. Banks's journal: "The arches upon the loins upon which they value themselves much were not yet done, the doing of which they told caused more pain that what I had seen."

And: "For this Custom they give no reason, but that they were taught it by their forefathers... So essential is it esteemed to Beauty, and so disgraceful is the want of it esteemed, that every one submits to it."

@line b

 

[sus]

Then, the three months allotted for their astronomical observation ends. The Transit of Venus across the face of the sun is completed. He spends one last night with Otheothea his Tahitian love. Two marines from the Endeavour decide to go native, to stay on Tahiti with their beautiful Tahitian wives and never return. Cook won't stand for this, he can't have deserters. He takes some native Tahitians hostage and says he won't give them up til the marines are found and captured, so the Tahitians go out and bring the men back.

"Banks and Tupia then climbed the rigging and stood together in the crow's nest waving."

Awai! Awai! the young women cried, weeping as the mariners left.

 

[sus]

The voyage continues two more years. Nearly shipwrecks on the Great Barrier Reef. Then, in Batavia on the Malay Peninsula, the crew is overcome by malaria and dysentry. Half of the crew dies. "At one point Cook was only able to muster fourteen seamen on deck."

Half of Banks's close friends on the ship die. The expedition's astronomer. Sydney Parkinson, his botanical artist. Tupia and Tayeto, a Tahitian (priest) father and son who had volunteered to come back with the Endeavour to Europe.

By the time he reaches London in 1771, Banks "was shattered and disoriented. The bucolic memories of Tahiti were more than two years old, and instead he was haunted by the recent horrible deaths of many friends and shipmates."

 

[sus]

"Now I am Mad, Mad, Mad. My poor brain whirls round with innumerable sensations." He needs grass he says, needs to touch grass.

He breaks off his engagement with Harriet Blosset.

On his return to London he made no attempt to get in touch with Harriet... It was obvious now that, whatever else, his experiences had left Banks utterly unfit for a quiet, regular, married life.

The pair have one last painful meeting which which Harriet is reported to have "wept and swooned." The London papers are filled with the gossip and scandal.

Some people are ill-natured enough to say that, vitiated in his taste by seeing the elegant women of Otaheite [Tahiti], who must indeed have something very peculiar in their natures to captivate such a man, upon his return, Mr Banks came indeed to see the young lady and the plants; but she found her lover now preferred a flower, or even a butterfly, to her superior charms.

And Holmes reflects: "For Harriet the three-year wait ended in a 'most mortifying disappointment.'"

Those who have watched any of the Nosferatu films, or read the Odyssey, will recognize something here. The woman in wait, on the widow's walk. And then the man returns but he's not the same, he's transformed by his experiences.