Unfortunate Suggestion for Campaign Yard Sign Slogan

OK, I think that, as a rhetorical device, Barack Obama's line, "Not This Time"--in reference to swiftboating--is great.

However, I saw on his blogs where one supporter suggested yard signs with this slogan.

Hmm. Think how that would read: "Barack Obama - Not This Time."

I'm sure it reflects Hillary's and McCain's sentiments exactly.

'Akua nana' -- God is watching.

Tuesday I had a visit from a member of Boston's Hawaiian community; a Hawaiian elder. Only he doesn't like to be called that--"Kupuna!" he shouted when he heard me referring to him to someone on the phone as an elder, "A *young* kupuna!"

'Kupuna' means 'grandparent.'

So: Kupuna lives in the city and does not own a car. He took Amtrak to Providence and I was to pick him up at a cafe in the Arts District. I got to the place a little after 10:30 in the morning, pulled in next to a hydrant, and phoned his cell.

A few minutes later he emerged from the building next door to the cafe, which could have been the Amazing adult store or an office in the same building. He had a ponderous, luggage-sized backpack with him.

"What's that?" I said.

"For meeting," he said in his friendly Hawaiian Pidgin. I took it to mean not our meeting. Kupuna is into everything; he's some kind of Commissioner in Massachusetts and pulls all kinds of influence.

I wasn't sure what kind of meeting would require materials gleaned from a mystifying, film-noir building in Providence and crammed to weigh down a Samsonite backpack. I thought it best not to pursue the matter.

Kupuna had promised to bring champagne for our meeting, a working session to plan a hula demo to a college ethnomusicology class. He insisted on stopping at a liquor store, where he picked up two matte black bottles of chilled Freixenet.

We settled into my office with the booze and plentiful pupus, finger food I'd prepared because it is impolite not to have lots of food to offer visiting Hawaiians.

In the ensuing five hours we polished off both bottles and somehow planned our show.

Kupuna is a slight, intellectual-looking man, retired from a federal-government job. He looks as Chinese as he does Hawaiian, with long, straight, black hair caught in a queue and streaming down his back. He speaks in a strong, authoritative baritone and he has Presence. A New Age person might say he has a big energy body--he can fill a room with meaning and leave an audience knowing they have arrived at a new and significant understanding.

We were working on this project together because we both believe in cultural outreach. Kupuna would open our demo with an `Oli Aloha, a chant of welcome. This would not be spectacle or entertainment, but a true act of inviting the students into our culture.

Working though our ideas, we played cuts off my iTunes, discussed, and made notes.

It was a sunny midday with a hint of spring. Part way through the first bottle I looked out my window at my yard, with its lazy landscape just waking up from winter slumber. "This is what life should be like," I thought; and made a note to try organizing my life such that I could have more long, European-style creative working sessions.

Several flutefuls later, Kupuna was saying, "Hoo, I get a buzz from dat stuff," and I was struggling to keep my notes legible.

Kupuna pulled out several Hawaiiana books I hadn't seen in about 30 years. Since our initial meeting on the demo, he'd had time to think, and think, and had added a whole new didactic theme to our 80-minute spiel.

I have produced and directed lots of expensive corporate videos, not to mention professional stage shows, and to me, the Stopwatch is King. I was worried, but remained poised in perfect balance between killjoy clock watcher and respectful junior giving an elder his space.

In other words, I sat listening to Kupuna and, save for a couple of halfhearted interjections of 'lo`ihi!' ('long!'), did nothing.

The problem really wasn't cultural. It was a matter of decision-making styles. My own process is like a square wave: When I have something to decide, there is no conscious consideration of the options. It's just, bam! I've decided. As if lightning has struck, incinerating all options but the one that remains standing, smoking slightly, on the scorched terrain. (There are advantages and disadvantages to deciding things this way, but I will leave that discussion for another post.)

Kupuna, on the other hand, uses a decision-making process more like an oil slick slowly spreading. Amorphous, in rainbow colors, it flows in all directions, pulled this way and that by currents of thought, engulfing myriad, bobbing chunks of flotsam and jetsam.

This style of decision-making has its good points, but alacrity is not one of them.

As the day declined, we arrived at a plan. The only thing that remained was for me to sober up so that I could drive Kupuna back to Amtrak.

About two hours after I stopped drinking, I was ready for the journey. Kupuna wanted to stop somewhere for a bite to eat, "To soak up the booze." He expressed surprise and dismay that the quaffing of a solitary bottle of sparkling wine could cause him to be buzzed.

I was all for the food idea, but Kupuna's train was due to pull into Providence in less than an hour. The really cool restaurants near my house could barely muster a waiter in that time. So we drove into the deeps of Providence, Kupuna directing me.

"Have I told you I'd rather stick my finger into an electric socket than drive in Providence?" I said.

The streets are ridiculously narrow and laid out not so much, as in Boston, to follow ancient cow paths, but apparently to follow the paths of cows that had grazed on hallucinogenic herbs.

And, more than that, my internal Producer was kicking in again. I brandished my watch: "If I had a train to catch by then," I said, "I'd be standing on the platform by now."

Kupuna was serene. He had me park on a Monopoly board-sized street (probably Baltic Avenue, given the derelict nature of the buildings that lined it) and we went into a corner dive bar for hamburgers. We ordered and waited, and finally got them wrapped to go.

From there, neither of us had the slightest idea how to navigate to the train station. The train was due in ten minutes. Kupuna directed by gut feel, and I fretted and drove.

"Akua nana," he said. "God is watching. No worry. We'll get there, no problem."

And we did.

Akua nana; pronounce it Ah-KOO-ah NAH-NAH. I knew the words, but not the expression. It reminded me of the serenity with which I observed Hawaiians, way out in the country on the Big Island, dealing with life as it came, back long ago in the 1970s.

I thought, how wonderful to be of a culture that thought, when God was watching, it was to protect us and not find fault with us.

Literal, or signifying?

As much as I ponder it, I still can't figure out whether this bumper sticker, which I saw during the week, is meant literally or as a tweak:

Jesus loves you, but I'm his favorite.

Unfortunate Business Name of the Week

This week's winner, from Warwick, Rhode Island:

A Triple Threat Performing Arts Center

I'll take two seats in the second balcony, please. Aisle, and make that near the exit; thank you.

He got QAT!!!!!

I never much liked prosecutors. What kind of person wants to spend their life seeking punishment of others?

The word 'prosecute' sounds almost like 'persecute,' and sometimes the activity is like it, too. You have to question what motivates someone to focus on this aspect of life--other people's failings. Is it a kind of OCD? Everything must be clean-clean-clean? Anger, maybe? Vengeance?

The prosecutor belongs to an unfortunate archetype. Prosecutors are the heroes of victims, and victimhood, although in the fact unavoidable, is pretty unhealthy to maintain as a self image.

Prosecutors are the enemies of the rule-breakers, and the more they pursue their prey, the more Trickster looks like a pretty good guy or gal, a folk anti-hero.

Eliot Spitzer got elected because he was clean-clean-clean. He even looks well scrubbed. He was the Magic Eraser for the State of New York, capable of rubbing out those stubborn heel marks, etc.

Oh, but except for one little detail: Participating in a stupidly named, high-end call-girl ring. (Why do these businesses all have names as lame as your average two-guys limousine service?) He got QAT!!!!!

For the Wall Street crowd he persec--, er, I mean, prosecuted, this is rich. Now Eliot Spitzer is Inspector Javert to their Jean Valjean; Marshall Sam Gerard to their Dr. Richard Kimball.

Bad things happen to overzealous prosecutors, in real life as in story.

"Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before the fall."

Wiki Wacky Woo

There's a certain type of academic, a publish-or-perish jock, who probably should have been an accountant, only they got wired wrong. They have a dainty, risk-averse approach to what they study. And the last thing they want to risk is political incorrectness.

This leads to a kind of intellectual Twister game [see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twister_(game)] where professors and grad students are tripping over themselves and each other to make reality conform to slick, primary-colored tenets. "The game that ties you up in knots."

All I have to hear is the word "post-colonial" and I see red. I could rant on this, but instead I want to divulge something:

I have just fulfilled a 30-year ambition by choreographing a hula to Lola O'Brien, the Irish Hawaiian.

This song is as silly as it sounds. Four of us ladies intend to garner free beers with it over the St. Patrick's Day holiday weekend, by performing it in our local Irish pub. We have sparkly green top hats, green silk-flower leis, and iParty grass skirts (the raffia kind from the Philippines--I have some standards).

In other words, we're members of a consumerist society's cargo cult. Did I mention we're going to Savers to trawl for Irish cable-knit sweaters, to complete the outfit?

At this point, I am ready for both the politically correct and the ultra earnest of kanaka maoli (ethnic Hawaiians) to unleash their invective. Cool, bring it on. I have a right. My kumu hula, who had the hula kapu, proudly claimed to have invented the cellophane skirt. She also taught me a great hula to Brenda Lee's version of Rockin' Around The Christmas Tree.

See, hula isn't what you necessarily think it is. I believe this, and probably so does even the daintiest, pickiest, most parochial hula master of the current bumper crop.

Some may think that hula is a retrospective to sepia-tone days of the Hawaiian monarchy, some may experience it as a cultural revival.

What I think it is, is what my kumu (teacher) taught me: Acting. Portrayal of text. Declamation. A speech act.

Hula is like singing in American Sign Language. At least, the style I learned, from someone who still spoke Hawaiian and knew how to choreograph to the words, is.

Hula is also a product of a mixed culture. To call it "post-colonial" really frames the discussion in a value judgment.

It's a cultural fact that someone (probably mainland haole?) composed Lola, and I know I'm not the first person to choreo it. There's a collection at Wesleyan that includes the dance notes to and vinyl recording of Lola as danced decades ago by a celebrated hula dancer, Vivienne Huapala Mader.

I used to hear the tune on the radio in Honolulu in the 1970s. It was old back then. By the time I got to where I could choreo it, it was out of print. Thanks to the Internet, it's now available as an mp3, as recorded by Manny K. Fernandez, who looks from the album pic as if he must've originally sung it long ago.

Later this month, I'll be giving a lecture/demo on hula to a Wheaton College ethnomusicology class called The Politics of Movement. I'll be joined by a leader of the Hawaiian community in Boston. We'll be both illustrating and reacting to the assigned readings from academic journals.

I warned the prof. about my orientation to hula, and she is on board. My Hawiian friend and I enjoyed a pleasant cocktail hour at the Harvard Faculty Club planning the show. We're going to demonstrate a wide range of hula genres, including hapa haole (half foreign, to English language tunes). This, even though the readings seemed to denigrate hapa-haole hula or even discount it as not hula.

The point I want to make: Hula is a performing art. It's not necessarily all a fine art. Some of it's a folk art. And for more than just one kind of folk.

A performing artist (or choreographer) necessarily feels the pressure to please her or his intended audience. This pressure is part of what shapes the art, no different from how the structural rules of sonnet writing shape a poem.

If human culture is the subject of intellectual and academic inquiry, then Wiki Wacky Woo deserves to be recognized, explored, and appreciated, as much as the high-culture genres of hula.

But above all in-your-head inquiry, hula needs to be experienced. See you at O'Rourke's!

Look out below!

I live in the flight path to the Providence airport. And I don't mean simply that my house is under the super-skyway. When the prevailing winds blow, the incoming planes are on their final heading, ready to hit the runway. I can't exactly wave at individual passengers, but I sure can see the cracks in the planes' doors.

And hopefully, no other cracks. Now I learn that Southwest Airlines has been flying their cheery blue and red birds over my house all day, and some of them might have been short a few pin feathers.

Southwest has been my airline of choice; I was so thrilled when they started flying into Denver. That meant I didn't have to trek up to Logan for a JetBlue experience if I wanted to fly right and save money. This, despite some 737 suspicion, based not so much on the widespread problems they had a few years ago, but on that convertible model that Aloha Airlines landed in Maui in 1988.

When I lived in Honolulu, I flew Aloha all the time. All their planes were painted with the names of Hawaiian monarchs, and that craft was named Queen Lili`uokalani. When the Aloha accident happened, I kind of lived it somatically, relating the footage of the plane landing, top stripped off like the lid on a can of sardines, passengers with their hair flying.

How many times had I flown on the Queen Lili`u? Landed right there in Kahului? With a bit less draft in the cabin.

One time I got stuck on a prop jet between Kahului and Honolulu. It was noisy, closer to the sea, and it took forever to get from OGG to HNL. So long that the flight attendants were passing out free drinks. There was plenty of time to think of the safety record of commuter jets.

This particular flight informs my every viewing of LOST, by the way.

So. In the past few years, I had kind of gotten over my 737 suspicions. You get into your 50s, you know you're going to die anyway, you don't worry so much and you don't try to game the system. Welcome aboard.

I love flying and I think back fondly to those days in the 1970s, when all the Aloha jets had lots of legroom, and facing seats, like on a train, at all the emergency exits. Back when my Hawaii friends used to travel in packs to visit each other and visit the outer islands. When those departing or arriving would get sent off or greeted by the rest of us with ukuleles and leis.

I guess it still doesn't bother me to fly on a 737, even after the Southwest Crack-a-thon. But where I live, I can hear the engines reverse thrust exactly 120 seconds after an incoming plane's shadow darkens my lawn. In good weather, I can sometimes hear the screech of the tires hitting the tarmac.

And when I'm working in the garden this spring, I'll be looking up and thinking about it.