Q and A

On the home front

Senator Daniel Akaka
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Senator Daniel Akaka / As U.S. Senator Daniel Akaka approaches the 20-year milestone of his time in the Senate–some of those years highly productive, others less so–the 85-year-old chairman of the Senate Committee on Veterans Affairs says he’s still looking forward. In honor of this week’s… [»Read]


X-Woman

Kathryn “Kathy X” Xian, Girl Fest Hawaii
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Kathryn “Kathy X” Xian, Girl Fest Hawaii / When Kathryn “Kathy X” Xian isn’t busy as a filmmaker or performing duties as Legal Aid Society of Hawaii’s director of communications and development, she is the “non-executive director” of Girl Fest Hawaii–an annual event advocating violence prevention… [»Read]


Deserving Lebanon

Walid Raad
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Walid Raad / Artist Walid Raad was born in Lebanon in 1967 and lived through the early years of its civil war (1975–1990) before being sent to the U. S. in 1983. Since 2002, Raad has been a member of the faculty at Cooper Union School of Art in New York City. A 2009 Guggenheim Fellow… [»Read]


Seaweed rebellion

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David Helvarg is an award-winning journalist who once covered wars in Central America and Ireland, and now focuses on writing about the oceans. The San Francisco-based activist has written several books about the need to defend our marine environment. His most recent book,… [»Read]


Catch as Katch can

Katch One
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Katch One / With the streets of Hawaii as his canvas, underground artist Katch One was once a snot-nosed tagger who roamed all sides of the island to satisfy his art fix. Not anymore. With years of international acclaim behind him and a new 256-page artbook in print, Hawaii’s… [»Read]


Thirst for film

Park Chan-wook
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Park Chan-wook / Park Chan-wook was studying philosophy and working as a journalist and film critic when he switched gears and began to make films of his own, releasing Moon Is the Sun’s Dream in 1992. Now one of South Korea’s most successful directors, winning the Grand Jury Prize… [»Read]


Familiar face

Matt Costa
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Matt Costa / If you haven’t heard of singer-songwriter Matt Costa yet, you’re about to. Well, technically, you just did. But trust us when we say that this skinny indie rocker is well on his way to becoming a household name. As Costa was prepping for a mini-tour of the Islands–he’s… [»Read]


New heights

Michael Arcega
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Michael Arcega / The venerable monkeypod trees on the grounds of The Contemporary Museum have sprouted new growth–a series of 101 small tent-like structures attached to branches and tethered to the ground with colorful ropes. This is the work of Bay Area artist Michael Arcega, who has… [»Read]


Books

Central character

Chris McKinney
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Chris McKinney / This is starting to feel like Chris McKinney’s time. While his early novel The Tattoo launched him into the consciousness of local educators and literary types, his latest offering, Mililani Mauka, explores new emotional and physical terrain, and promises to grow the… [»Read]


Critical transformations

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With Hawaii hosting the 2009 Association of Asian American Studies conference comes the opportunity to reassess how scholars in Hawaii approach the subject. UH-Manoa Associate Professor of English Candace Fujikane recently released the book Asian Settler… [»Read]


Government

Telling secrets

Ben Wizner
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Ben Wizner / In the seemingly never-ending debate over what constitutes torture, what obligation the U.S. government has to protect human rights and where a line can be drawn when it comes to individual freedoms, maybe no point has been more maddening to civil liberties advocates than… [»Read]


Music

Just Cruz

John Cruz
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John Cruz / John Cruz, one of Hawaii’s most cherished musical talents, has been building his mainland fan base for years now. The “Island Style” singer-songwriter is off on tour again this week, with a few dates in California followed by a trip to SXSW (South… [»Read]


Cunning linguist

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On March 12, linguists from across the globe will descend on Hawaii to discuss the loss of language around the world, and how to prevent it. Professor of linguistics at the University of Hawaii at Manoa Nick Thieberger is one of the conference’s… [»Read]


You are what you eat

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Pamela Ronald / Though genetically-engineered crops, often referred to as GE crops, have been produced since the 1980s, they have made their way into virtually all processed food. But it seems only recently that the controversy surrounding genetically modified organisms has been heating… [»Read]