Q and A
Civics

GiRL FeST talk with Yi

7th Annual GiRL FeST Hawaii
Comes with video

7th Annual GiRL FeST Hawaii / Kathy Xian’s 7th Annual GiRL FeST Hawaii begins this week and the lineup for the multimedia art festival and conference to prevent violence against women and girls through education and art is awe-inspiring. There will be the island premiere of the film Salt of This Sea, a drama about a Palestinian woman in Brooklyn who travels to her home country.


Environment

Writing an end to tyranny

Frances Moore Lappé

Frances Moore Lappé / Forty years ago, before the ideas of eating with a smaller carbon footprint and eschewing factory-farmed beef were en vogue, Frances Moore Lappé wrote Diet for a Small Planet, a book that exposed the excessive waste in the grain-fed meat industry and championed instead a plant-based diet. This book and her work since then garnered recognition around the world; Gourmet Magazine named Lappé among 25 people (including Thomas Jefferson, Upton Sinclair and Julia Child), whose work has changed the way America eats.


Books

Let’s talk about tantric sex

Tantra of the Tachikawa Ryu: Secret Sex Teachings of the Buddha

Tantra of the Tachikawa Ryu: Secret Sex Teachings of the Buddha / John Stevens’ Tantra of the Tachikawa Ryu: Secret Sex Teachings of the Buddha is a graphically sexual, arousing and entertaining tale of a young monk who learns the ways of tantra from the alluring Zen practitioner Lady Hotoke. The experience of writing the book gave Stevens, who lived in Japan for 35 years but now calls Oahu home, the energy and drive to conquer a life-threatening bout with diabetes.


Music

Whataya want from him?

Adam Lambert
Comes with video

Adam Lambert / After losing to Kris Allen on the eighth season of American Idol, Adam Lambert went on to record his smash debut album For Your Entertainment, spawning the hit single “Whataya Want From Me.” Before he arrives for his Blaisdell appearances, Lambert took time to speak to the Weekly about his sexual identity, his beach attire and that kissy performance on the American Music Awards. Happy 10/10/10.


Dollars and sense

Craig Watanabe

Craig Watanabe / Like many of the old-time coin dealers, Craig Watanabe, owner of Captain Cook Coin Co., believes that treasure hunting is the nature of a true collector’s being. He’s a wholesaler most of the time, but on rare occasions, Watanabe retails his coins at trade shows, collectible shows and conventions.


The Case of the 50,000 voters

former US Representative Ed Case
Comes with video

former US Representative Ed Case / Change seems finally to have arrived in Hawaii Democratic politics, and in a great irony, the standard bearer for intraparty reform, former US Rep. Ed Case, sat this cycle out.


Iron man cometh

Chef Masaharu Morimoto

Chef Masaharu Morimoto / Not that the opening of Morimoto Waikiki will need extra publicity, but is it too much to hope that it will open with a throwdown between Iron Chef Masaharu Morimoto and Chef Nobu Matsuhisa? Probably.


The science of Iriscience

Rakaa Iriscience
Comes with video

Rakaa Iriscience / Before the launch party for his first solo project, Crown of Thorns, at Don Ho’s, Rakaa Iriscience plans to relax, reconnect and pay respects to a dear friend. The Weekly caught up with the Dilated Peoples emcee, who grew up in Waimanalo and now lives in Los Angeles, to talk about creativity, living aloha in LA and his connection to Hawaii’s hip-hop scene.


This is combat

Sebastian Junger on Restrepo
Comes with video

Sebastian Junger on Restrepo / He’s still best-known for his gripping book The Perfect Storm, later made into a hit film starring Mark Wahlberg, but Sebastian Junger is one of the great combat journalists of his or any generation. He’s been reporting from Afghanistan longer than US troops have been fighting there, and has been on the receiving end of Taliban fire more times than he can count.


Going South

Andy South

Andy South / Before you could say, “auf wiedersehen,” Hawaii’s own Andy South, local contestant on the upcoming season of Project Runway, was saying, “aloha” and heading to the Big Apple. South’s journey from Waianae to New York City is a Cinderella story in the making…only he’s designing the dress before midnight.


Politics

Gary being Gary

Gary Hooser
Comes with video

Gary Hooser / The Weekly has been exploring the Democratic race for lieutenant governor. Up this week: Senate Majority Leader Gary Hooser.


The good lieutenant

Lyla Berg
Comes with video

Lyla Berg / Honolulu Weekly has been talking to candidates for Lieutenant Governor–before the other races suck all of the oxygen out of the proverbial room. This week, we spoke with State Rep.


LG style

Brian Schatz

Brian Schatz / Before political season really heats up, we’re shining a light on the oft-ignored race for lieutenant governor. We begin with Brian Schatz, the former state legislator, congressional candidate and Democratic party chairman.


Pauly Shore lives

Pauly Shore
Comes with video

Pauly Shore / The Pauly Shore you know best is the one with the blanket of springloaded curls, the silly slang-rich locution and that just-dare-me twinkle in his eye. A major haircut and 15 years later, Shore is still doing what he’s always done best: Making people laugh.


On the decks

Big pimpin’

DJ Neil Armstrong
Comes with video

DJ Neil Armstrong / DJ Neil Armstrong (Jay-Z’s official world tour DJ) took a break before his Saturday night set at Stage to talk with the Weekly about coming to Hawaii, Jay himself, and halo halo. That’s not your real name is it?


Food

Johnny mangoseed

Mark Suiso of Mākaha Mangoes

Mark Suiso of Mākaha Mangoes / In case you couldn’t tell already, mango season is upon us, as manifested from Chinatown streets to farmers’ markets to highway shoulders to–if you’re lucky–your backyard tree. For Mark Suiso of Makaha Mangoes, mango season means not only keeping up with demand at Whole Foods and Alan Wong’s, but preaching the gospel of a mango tree in every backyard.


Quentin queries

Comes with video

Director Quentin Lee’s HIFF hit The People I Slept With will be part of the closing night festivities at the Rainbow Film Festival. Joining him will be one of the stars from the movie, Wilson Cruz.


Alone in Iz world

facing future by DAN KOIS

facing future by DAN KOIS / A film critic for the Washington Post has just published a book about one of the seminal albums in Hawaiian music history. How was this East coast native, who lived in Honolulu for just one year a decade ago, able to get inside the world of Israel Kamakawiwoole, from hanabata days to the Makaha Sons of Niihau to the making of Facing Future?


A pardoner’s tales

Fun With Problems

Fun With Problems / Robert Stone is a National Book Award-winning author of seven novels. A friend of celebrated local writer Ian MacMillan from his time at the University of Hawaii, Stone recently released Fun With Problems (Houghton Mifflin, 2010), his second collection of short stories.


On stage

Five questions for David Spade

David Spade

David Spade / What’s the biggest difference between a rookie and a veteran in stand-up comedy? You do it longer and there are more opportunities to do badly.


Life on Mars

Blue Mars

Blue Mars / Jim Sink is the CEO of Avatar Reality, a locally–based gaming company. Its first game is Blue Mars, a 3D virtual world that will remind you of Second Life at first glance but aims to be the next generation of virtual worlds.


CAKE bakes a jam

Cake
Comes with video

Cake / Nearly two decades and five studio albums since CAKE formed in 1991, the alternative rockers aren’t showing any signs of slowing down. The band, known for its distinctive vocals and blaring brass, kicks off its spring tour in Honolulu this weekend.


Food

Behind the green door

Charles Phan

Charles Phan / Charles Phan opened the original The Slanted Door in San Francisco’s Mission district–it has since moved to a more expansive location in the Ferry Building– in 1995. While Phan drew inspiration from other Bay Area restaurants’ food philosophies, he broke new ground in giving Vietnamese food a modern, upscale setting.


Out of this world

Karen Meech

Karen Meech / As a faculty member at the University of Hawaii at Manoa and the leader of the UH branch of NASA’s Astrobiology Institute, Karen Meech considers some of the biggest of the big questions. One of her main areas of interest is water, and how its presence makes planets conducive to life.


Yes, mistresses

Heaven and Hell

Heaven and Hell / Dominatrixes, or doms, are the people in charge of whipping, scratching, nibbling, teasing, pinching, burning and cajoling willing participants at Alter Solum’s monthly BDSM event, Heaven and Hell. In short, they keep the party going.


This week

2013 Summer Books

On a breezy May evening, in the courtyard of the state library, local publishers, writers and book designers gathered to celebrate the 2013 Ka Palapala Pookela Awards, sponsored by the Hawaii Book Publishers Association. The place was packed, and I was struck by such a healthy showing for an industry whose demise has been predicted since before the advent of Amazon.

Unlikely Pairings

I was intrigued recently to channel surf upon a deft interview of Susanna Moore on PBS Hawaii. Moore is the nationally acclaimed author of nine books, perhaps best known for her luminous My Old Sweetheart and other Hawaii novels, as well as the rough-sex 2004 noir In the Cut.

A Long Lost Era

Kabuki Boy, a novel, reads almost like an autobiography filled with vivid details that transport us to 19th-century Japan during the “Tokugawa Era.” Fast-paced and humorous, it aptly dramatizes an ancient dramatic art. The hierarchy between the social classes of samurai, geisha, peasants and monks comes alive from the page, seen through the eyes of Myo, a young boy aspiring to become a kabuki actor.

Panek Point

Calling this big fat novel Hawaii was bound to raise eyebrows. Hey, come run to the schoolyard to watch Mark Panek throw down!

Inward Journey

Beautifully designed, with outstanding photography of India and Tibet by Linda Connor, the newest edition of Manoa is especially ambitious in its choice of subject/theme. It attempts to present diverse interpretations of the meanings and implications of the term “freedom,” doing so in the forms of fiction, essays, poetry, memoir and drama.

Gardens

This new book of poetry is easy to read, yet I had all kinds of strange dreams after reading it. The poems are short but poignant–a lot of thought and crafting went into every well-placed word.

Brotherly Tears

When the young narrator, Landon DeSilva, of Tyler Miranda’s novel Ewa Which Way, watches an episode of “Leave It To Beaver,” he sees a family whose idea of discipline is a father and son discussion without “head cracks” or “cuss words.” In the episode, Eddie Haskell and Wally Cleaver talk about the Beaver’s highjinks, and Landon’s friend says, “just like your brudda . .

Community

In a poetry class I teach at Windward Community College, a student recently did a presentation on coming-out poems and presented her own. One of her peers asked a thoughtful question: “If you are a gay, are you automatically part of the gay community?” It’s a question I’ve had about being Asian American–and a poet.

Cruelty

In Wing Tek Lum’s poem “The Red Circle,” a sergeant teaches his soldiers how to use a bayonet during Japan’s infamous occupation of Nanjing, China in 1937: “With a nub of red chalk / our sergeant marks off / a crude circle in the center / of the chest.” The men are instructed to stab everywhere, except the heart. A quick death would be too kind–too merciful.

Wit

“We are selves in a world because we have words,” writes the late poet Tony Quagliano in the preface of his book, Language Matters. In this masterful collection, every line absorbs the reader into the writer’s world, revealing his intimate thoughts on politics, writing, Hawaii and life.

The Romance of Sunset

A sort of team anthology, Sunset Inn: Tales from the North Shore is a collection of fiction, poetry and a play published by the Aloha Romance Writers, who admittedly chose–over margaritas and Mexican food–the conceit of a colonial-style seaside inn, described in Patrice Wilson’s poem “This Haven” as “white as salt” and “bleached coral in the sea,” as a central setting for their book. Like the landscape and the building, the collection holds stories of love found, lost and always remembered, some of which are based in Hawaii history and some from a contemporary eye, but all adhering to the familiar elements of the romance genre and the romantic.

Love Lore

In Huna Magic: The Hawaiian Odyssey, Dawn Star puts on a modern spin on Hawaiian mythology and folklore. Set in ancient Hawaii, the book starts off with the classic forbidden love story between a young woman, Kuulei ke Anuenue and a handsome man, Kai, who happens to be the chiefess’s love slave.

Reassembling

The reader weary of cutesy novels with multiple story lines that are obviously going to be inextricably tied together, somehow, might not want to venture too far into Darien Gee’s The Avalon Ladies Scrapbooking Society. But if it’s comfort food for the brain you’re after, you’d be missing out.

Green Noir

Set in Hawaii, Saving Paradise, Mike Bond’s sixth detective novel, tells a passable if unevenly written story featuring one Pono Hawkins, a Special Forces vet (Afghanistan), celebrated international surfer and correspondent for ocean magazines. He also insinuates himself into the woes of others, in this case a beautiful young thing whose lifeless body bumps into Hawkins as he goes surfing at dawn.

Decolonizing Our Future

Confucius said, “If your plan is for one year, plant rice; if your plan is for 10 years, plant trees; if your plan is for 100 years, educate children.” The philosopher’s sagacious message seems to align with the alternative approach to education seen in Hawaii’s charter school system. Noelani Goodyear-Kaopua’s The Seeds We Planted is an ethnography articulating the establishment, growth, and success of Halau Ku Mana, one of the few Hawaiian culture-based charter schools in Honolulu.

Navigating Selves

Leilani Holmes’s richly chronicled journey toward a reconnection with her Kanaka Maoli culture opens with the epigraph: “For those who came before us. In hopes that we act on behalf of your bones.” Ancestry of Experience is a thoroughly researched and deeply genealogical journey.

Think Pink

There’s something foreboding about the cover of Pink Globalization. It’s a dark, monochromatic picture of an enormous grey Hello Kitty gazing ominously into the night in front of a corporate-looking building. The picture is certainly intriguing and symbolic–Hello Kitty is taking over the world.

Hardships, Loneliness, Triumphs

A deeply researched and careful weaving of previously unheard voices can be found in Mai Lepera, adding another layer about leprosy patients exiled to settlements at Makanalua peninsula in the 19th century. Keri A.

Transcending Prejudice

If resiliency spoke of a group of people, the Japanese population of the then-Territory of Hawaii during World War II claims the description. With one specific attack on December 7, 1941, an island-wide prejudice against all immigrant Japanese was born, painting a picture of angry nationals who plotted Hawaii’s demise.

Mano

An ambitious, immensely rewarding product of nearly five decades’ research and teaching (beginning when the author was l3 years old), Patrick Vinton Kirch’s A Shark Going Inland is my Chief bids fair to be a definitive, almost exhaustive look at “the island civilization of ancient Hawaii.” Divided into three major parts, Shark starts with Cook’s arrival when Hawaii was four major kingdoms in the midst of creating stratified societies.Kirch deals with religion, evolving social structures and belief systems to make ancient Hawaii come alive. Especially noteworthy are beautiful descriptions of the making of canoes, particularly the vaka moana, capable of transporting families.

Charts for the Band

Music stores abound with compilations of “50 Favorite Songs” for everything from jazz to the Beatles to Bach. Now it’s time for the mid-20th century music of Hawaii.

Racism of Record

Compiled by Christopher LaVoie, Annexation! presents the imperialist agendas of the U.S.

Charting Our Ancestral Past

Hawaiki Rising by Sam Low tells the epic saga of voyaging on the Hokulea, which, as every Island schoolchild should know, is a traditionally constructed Hawaiian sailing vessel that is steered by observing natural elements, without instruments or maps. Low, a part-Hawaiian anthropologist who participated in three voyages, follows the Hokulea through conception, construction, and navigation.

From the Outside

The feeling of being an outsider in one’s beloved homeland is the theme underpinning Pamela Frierson’s fluid and honest nature writing. In her books, The Last Atoll: Exploring Hawaii’s Endangered Ecosystems and The Burning Island: Myth and History in Volcano Country, Hawaii, Frierson explores Hawaii’s unique ecosystems, while also searching for personal relevance where she grew up very aware of being merely a “second-generation colonist.” The shadows of a world unknown drive the writer, teacher and homesteader to attach to the landscape, pursuing a deeper understanding of Hawaii’s natural order, and, through those experiences, a sense of belonging.

Bearded beauties

Donald Hodel’s Loulu: The Hawaiian Palm is winner of this year’s Ka Palapala Award for Excellence in Natural Science. Loulu the Hawaiian Palm Donald R.

Missed Connections

Charlotte A. Tomaino, neuropsychologist and former nun, started with the intriguing concept of explaining how grace and spirituality can “awaken” the brain to a fuller potential through expanded consciousness.

The Naked Truth

Sharon Hicks’ How Do You Grab a Naked Lady recounts the relationship between Hicks, her mentally ill mother and idealist father. We meet Hicks at age 16 as she witnesses her mother parading around a mall in the buff, yelling and cursing–one of many manic episodes we’ll see during the book.

Last Train to Ho’opili?

One paradox of TheLast Train to Zona Verde, Paul Theroux’s 46th book and his latest about Africa, is that it’s also one of the best meditations on Hawaii you’ll ever read. But first, why Africa?

Every Reader for Himself

Confirming rumors, Barnes & Noble’s (B&N) Kahala Mall bookstore will close when its lease expires in January 2014. There are no current reports concerning B&N’s Ala Moana location, but it’s probably a matter of when, not if, management installs a T-shirt store.

Island Girl

Last weekend, Susanna Moore was in town to read from her new novel, The Life of Objects. A striking beauty–high cheekbones, fine features, long white hair with an inky streak that matches her brilliant black eyes–she wore a sleeveless blouse, full cotton skirt and rubber slippers.

A Traveling Light

We were out at Tongg’s surf break when the world’s best-traveled writer paddled past in a kayak. I said, “Paul Theroux?” Mindy nodded.

CIVIX

KAKAAKO MEETINGS The HCDA will host a series of meetings to discuss the Kakaako redevelopment plan and how rail will fit in with those plans. The meetings are open to the public.

Make Our Day

On May 13, Common Cause Hawaii assembled a panel, titled “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly,” to deconstruct lessons from the recently ended 2013 Legislative Session. Commentators included Rep.

Homeless Plan

Mayor Caldwell is winding down his public town-hall meetings campaign. The meetings are designed to update the public on the progress of the Mayor’s major first-year initiatives: repaving the roads, getting TheBus routes restored, making the city’s parks beautiful, fixing Honolulu’s sewer infrastructure, building rail better and, most recently, solving homelessness.

Pacific Pivot

During a 2011 speech to the Australian Parliament, President Obama declared: “The United States will play a larger and long term role in shaping [the Pacific] region and its future.” On May 10, the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS) Pacific Forum hosted a panel discussion that sought to determine what a U.S. “pivot” toward the region would look like and what the reaction to increased U.S.

The homeless experience

I picked up your May 15 issue with great anticipation because on the cover was a photo of a person experiencing homelessness who I have had numerous interactions with (“Derelict Downtown,” May 15). He is someone I have always found to be articulate and friendly–an ideal person to talk to if one wishes to learn about experiencing homelessness.

Hawaiian rights

The puppetmasters controlling the creation of the Hawaiian Nation have manipulated Hawaiians who have signed up for any Hawaiian registry to become captive members of Kanaiolowalu, the Native Hawaiian Roll Commission. Those bills were heard this session and were passed by the Senate in the Tourism and Hawaiian Affairs Committee chaired by Brickwood Galuteria and the Judiciary and Labor Committe chaired by Clayton Hee, although the forced enrollment is unconstitutional.

Money over land

The Land Use Commission, the Honolulu Planning Commission, the Zoning Variance Commissions and all the other BS commissions are hijacked by big business (“Hoopili Miss,” May 15). Judge Rhonda Nishimura’s head is buried in the sand if she doesn’t recognize the votes were bought.

Cinema for all

I try to not miss a Redford film, and, of course, I can relate to events of the ’60s (“Last Round-Up,” May 8). It is disappointing that The Company You Keep is being shown only at Kahala Theatre.

Tea time

Aloha, I am Elyse. Please let me know if you have any questions, I would love to answer them (“Just Our Cup of Tea,” May 15).

Corrections

In last week’s “Derelict Downtown” (May 15), we mistakenly listed Kirk Caldwell’s campaign phone number. To contact the Mayor, please call 768-4141.