There’s a swell on the horizon. Listen closely and you’ll hear it…AUDIO INVASION 2012.
Cover Story / Late last year, a two-year-old organization on Molokai called ‘Aha Kiole o Molokai put a simple yes-or-no question to the island households: Do you support a “cruise tour industry” setting up on Molokai? Surveys were placed in island mailboxes and made available at the island’s one-stop social-services center, Kulana Oiwi.
Spring Arts / Wake up and smell the freshly painted roses, Honolulu. The official start of spring is around the March 13 corner, bringing with it a fresh scene in stage, music, visual arts, film and more.
Starting Jan. 1, same-sex couples in Hawaii are now permitted to join in civil union under new state law.
Hawaii is the world’s leading producer of genetically engineered (GE) seed corn, which is now our state’s number one crop, according to the Hawaii Department of Agriculture (HDOA), but few citizens fully understand what this means. The issues surrounding corn seed encompass everything from the labeling of foods containing GE ingredients (currently not required in the US) to land and water rights and local and organic food production.
“It’s a lucky man who arrives at his three-score and ten in good health, with good friends, and still loving his work, still mystified and enchanted by life,” says Garrison Keillor, host of the venerable, beloved Minnesota Public Radio show, A Prairie Home Companion. A sort of Midwestern variety show, it originated in Saint Paul in 1974, at a time when tickets cost a dollar and first audiences boasted a whopping 12 people.
It’s been a rollercoaster few weeks for Honolulu’s proposed 20-mile, Kapolei-to-Ala Moana elevated railway. First, a skittish City Council asked the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) to delay signing of a $1.4 billion contract with rail car company Ansaldo Honolulu JV due to concerns about its solvency.
“In Loving Memory of Robbie and Kalakekuewa, 1969–2011,” says the smooth-faced boulder in big, grey-paint letters for all to see. On the margin, scrawled above a petroglyph-style sketch of a paddler, is the name of a canoe club, Healani.
Joan Conrow The Office of Hawaiian Affairs (OHA) has been fighting for decades to get some $200 million in back-due revenues in return for the state’s use of so-called “ceded” public lands that were siezed from the Hawaiian kindgom upon the overthrow of Queen Liliuokalani in 1893. And the state has been trying for decades to perk up the Kakaako area through redevelopment.
Most people in Hawaii have a system for surviving our state’s unique temptations and hidden dangers. A surprising number of people I’ve met never go in the water.
The Descendants is a stunning movie, full of surprises, its visual sweep and rhythm tied to Hawaiian music, its pacing as changeable as the weather and tragicomic adventures of our days. She knew it would be true to Hawaii, author Kaui Hart Hemmings told the Weekly, when they were filming on Kauai and it rained.
In this week’s issue, the Weekly celebrates the Made in Hawaii label, one that nearly disappeared just a few decades ago. On the cover, you’ll find the Primo Brewing & Malting Company, a 1913 image of workers who once believed that their beer would make Milwaukee jealous.
In the old-timey section of Kalihi, tucked between auto repair shops and boarded-up storefronts, Maza Attari, a Marshall Islander, lived with four family members in a one-bedroom apartment barely bigger than a ping-pong table. When visited by this reporter last summer, Attari had been unable to find steady work since being flown to Honolulu 12 years ago for back surgery that had left him with a severe limp and weakened muscles.
A book is a book is a book When APEC, the economy or the holidays bring your life to a grinding halt, hey, be happy for the chance to curl up with a book, be it in digital or–brace yourselves–paper form. Even the big new bio of the late father of Apple has come out in print, leading Stephen Colbert to repeatedly swipe at the cover photo of Steve Jobs to no avail.
Halloween / Since it’s not an election year, we decided to present you with the thirteen scariest people on the island. (Usually election-year Halloweens are scary enough without any help from us.) Granted, some of these people aren’t scary-looking, but the activities they engage in are kinda spooky.
In the 1990s, during a canoe race, Nancy Gove unthinkingly licked her arm, where an unusual amount of salt spray had dried. “It tasted better than any salt I’d ever tasted, so I decided to investigate why,” she says.
Aulani, a Disney Resort & Spa, Ko Olina, Hawaii, opened its doors to guests on Aug. 29, signalling a new, synergistic relationship between two of the biggest brands in the tourism industry: Disney and Hawaii.
In this year’s bar guide, we’re celebrating some perennial faves, bars that are new, some that have changed and others too often overlooked. Having wet their beaks in a selection of Oahu neighborhoods, our bar-hopping writers provide a modern tour of the Island’s ever-changing, ever-fading revelry.
“Do you like things bitter?” ourbartender asks. My friend crosses her legs tighter, removes a wild strand of something uncouth like dog hair from the sleeve of my sweater, and hisses, “Yes.” We first overheard the news on Facebook.
Amidst the usual suspects of hipper-than-thou clubs and bars, the Facebook status-ed blogged and tweeted–there’s an undercovered place: BambuTwo. BambuTwo is the Rick’s Cafe of Chinatown.
I owe the roof over my head to one long-vanished Honolulu bar I’ve never seen, except in pictures. It was opened on Liliha Street during the war, and it was one of the first integrated bars, where black and white servicemen were equally welcome.
It’s dusk. North Shore surfers catch last waves, and beach bums turn in the towel.
With their big, glistening eyes and round heads, whiskered smiles and hand-like flippers, Hawaiian monk seals–on the federal endangered species list since 1976–make for a winsome poster child. Since the early 1990s, when sightings of the rare creatures became a regular appearance throughout the inhabited Hawaiian Islands, tourists have flocked to take their pictures.
A good potpourri blends perfumes and petals, spices and…musk. Smell informs taste, and this theatre season’s offerings range from the redolent with sentiment like Phantom (this season’s big bouquet); a cool neo-classic like House of Blue Leaves; something primal and complex like Oedipus the King; or funky like a monkey on late nights at the Kennedy Theatre.
Yes, we’re totally dying to see Daniel Craig and that chick with the mean tat. We’re also breathless with anticipation for Leo doing J.
There’s a swell on the horizon. Listen closely and you’ll hear it…AUDIO INVASION 2012.
It’s been a while, but a man donning dresses and surgical gowns, spouting rap-rock assaults over a bed of crunchy guitars, has drifted back into the sunbeam of MTV like a forgotten fleck of light. With the spastic delivery of a fallen patient from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Matt Shultz, lead singer of Cage The Elephant, is channeling the preeminent poster-child of grunge–Kurt Cobain.
Boys, beaches, bags of weed. In 2010, Best Coast blazed onto the music scene with a sealed Zip-lock of 7” singles that led the indie pop duo to roll out a fatty debut record called Crazy For You.
So what do you do if you’re a band who made it big in the L.A. hardcore-punk scene with several critically acclaimed self-titled albums under your belt?
Last Thursday, Foster the People sent news through their publicist that they won’t be performing at Audio Invasion 2012 due to “unforeseen circumstances.” (They’ll return to Hawaii on March 18.) Rumors are their two Grammy noms for Best Alternative Album and Best Pop Duo/Group Performance led to their cancellation. What a let down.
On Jan. 26, members of the Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit (HART) Finance Committee mostly sat in silence while listening to an earful from Wynnie Joy-Hee of Mililani, who said that she had taken the bus all the way into town at 7am to address the issue of how her tax money is being spent.
HART intends to hire an executive director as early as March 1, 2012. The semi-autonomous agency is currently headed by interim executive director Toru Hamayasu, who is also a candidate for the permanent position The ED’s salary has been estimated to be within the range of $150,000 to $350,000, and HART has allotted $300,000 for the position thus far, Vice Chair Ivan Lui Kwan told the City Council Committee on Transportation on Jan.
Poor communication between the union and the teachers themselves, on top of a general sense of mistrust, were blamed for the overwhelming rejection of the Hawaii State Teacher’s Association (HSTA) contract last week–an unprecedented two-thirds voted against the union-backed contract. The president of the teachers’ union, Will Okabe, quickly took the blame, stating in a Jan.
The “war on terror” has taken a bite out of beach access on Kauai, where the Navy’s Pacific Missile Range Facility (PMRF) has kept five miles of westside shoreline off-limits since Sept. 11, 2001.
A bill that would require bags of roasted coffee sold in Hawaii to list the place where each type of coffee it contains was grown, and its percentage by weight in descending order, was introduced to the state legislature by Sen. Josh Green.
In September of 2011, the Weekly ran a piece highlighting one of Hawaii’s most dangerous invasive threats: the dreaded brown tree snake. Following up on Gov.
HART Board: The Honolulu Authority for Rapid Transit will meet and take public testimony before convening an executive session. For more info, contact the project hotline at 566-2299 or e-mail [email: info].
[Jan. 18: “Cheap Advice”] Robert Kiyosaki did not talk, or attend.
[Dec. 21: “Underground Railroad”] The anti-rail pundits are right of course.
I propose that President Obama devote the remainder of his presidency to doing something useful, which would be to seek out all the crooks on Wall Street and Washington who have contributed to the sorry state of the economy in this country. Obviously he has not lived up to the expectations of a president and continues to perform as if Saul Alinksy was a member of his cabinet and the United Nations was his political platform.
[Dec. 21: “Underground Railroad”] Traffic follows commercial development.
[Dec. 21: “Underground Railroad”] To all those opposed to the “rail.” You are the very people who will be in gridlock on the freeway, not able to move.
I was delighted to read the new USDA guidelines requiring schools to serve meals with twice as many fruits and vegetables, more whole grains, less sodium and fat and no meat for breakfast. The guidelines were mandated by the Healthy Hunger-Free Kids Act signed by President Obama in December of 2010 and will go into effect within the next school year.
[Jan. 25: “Kyo-Ya-Ya”] Making an exception on zoning sets a dangerous precedence that will undoubtedly be followed by other properties.
The protests last year of Turtle Bay’s expansion plans highlight the challenge facing us in Hawaii. We need to find a way to balance the need for new, upgraded hotel and timeshare offerings that visitors are increasingly seeking with the desire by nearly all residents to protect the remaining undeveloped areas of the island.
[Jan. 25: “Gridlock”] If the plan is to create a second city in West Oahu, I would consider that to be an urban center.
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