Windy Today

Windy today (think there's a cyclone in Fiji) and an earthquake last night, felt good. Friday had a housewarming, fun but two mugs and a bowl went with the boys in the taxi on the way to Billfish, ugh, now I'm really down to one plate and 3 plastic forks. Somehow domesticity elludes me. Lolo brought a kitten he found on Saturday, beautiful marking, golden brown leopard spots and tiger stripes, must be 2 or 3 weeks old only. Maybe 4. I don't know.

Thank god I had Masami bring an Mp3 player, the walking and bus riding and sitting at the internet cafe is much more reasonable -- err -- palatable with my own tunes bumping secretly in my ears.

I thought I'd update and say I was in Samoa for 2 weeks in November, a little R&R, I attended the Miss South Pacific, which MISS TONGA won, woohoo. I'm interviewing her this month to post up on Mahe'i's website: Check it out at www.kakalaotonga.com, and got to track down Walter Pupu'a, boxer extraordinaire, to interview him as well. Anyways, got those to line up this month. Eh, before I forget I met a dude who works at the US Embassy in Apia, notified me that only 6 deportees sent back from US to Apia. He said their office is notified of all transiting Tongan deportees on the LA-APIA-TBU flight, the same flight I was on this last time, and the same flight Salesi took too, the same flight most Tongan deportees take..

Now in Tonga

Well I arrived in Nuku'alofa on the 25th of september. Took me about three weeks of backpacking and lodging at guest houses to secure my own rental, a one bedroom flat part of a large house on the main road in Fanga. The house is called "sailoame" and in the two weeks I've lived there have had two breakins...one by a friend who is now on my black list (there's a story behind this) and the other by some local Fanga boys, who brought back the laptop minus the stickers on the front (my decor) because they knew that Sini was also staying at that spot, and because of Sini's dealings with local communities, they will stay away. It also helped that for the past week a friend who also is a professional security guard has also been posting at my spot and alas, today is friday so the weekend no doubt I will post all day all night and see what pops up. I spent the last three days attending the Tourism Week workshops with Sini who I'm assisting with research and development of a water-based tour operator business. The Weslyans are running a program for return migrants "Reconnection Program" been attending that past two weeks. And just basic stuff here and there. Hmmm, reason for my lack of blogging, well the internet is hella slow here, but today at the workshop at the brand new convention centre, the internet is FREE and quick in the "delegates room"....Last week was the South Pacific Forum. This building is soooooo not eco-friendly. Tonga is a trip.

Smith College & Narratives of Success

I am an alumna of Smith College. I attended the all-women's liberal arts college in the small New England town of Northampton, Massachusetts for my first year of college, before transferring with no regrets to the University of Utah. However, because Smith is a really well-endowed school, they send all their alumnae a quarterly magazine, four times a year, just so alums can stay in touch with the college---Smith was one of those 7 sister colleges, partnered back in the day with Yale. So alums stay connected because the brand name of Smith. One of the ways they do this is to contribute to the trust funds the college has. I know many of their alumnae contribute because one of my student jobs (aside from catering, stocking the kitchen, and cleaning bathrooms) was to ask alumnae for donations in the annual phone-a-thon (barf, I'd done telemarketing before in high school, and it was not fun). This was all new to me---this East Coast Syndicate shit, I was not one of the East Coast syndicate boarding school bitches, as I call them, no offense). I remember calling many alums and them plopping down two or three grand on their visas like they were giving away candy. One was a speechwriter for the President.
Anyways, the latest Summer 2007 Smith Alumnae Quarterly had an article that piqued my interest, from the current President of Smith , Carol Christ. The article, "Life Stories: Smith is poised to help young women rewrite their own narratives of success", and it made me think back to the crossroads in my life where I decided Smith was not meeting my needs. Carol Christ writes, "..it is every young woman's story to write, and women's colleges are well positioned to foster the conversations and reflections to help her write it.", this leads into her launching "Women' Narratives of Success", which through workshops "encourages students to think deeply and systematically about their multiple life goals." Right now, I've taken out some old school boxes, one which oholds my University of Utah Bachelor of Science degree. It states I have been conferred this degree "with all its Rights, Honors and Responsibilities". However, I don't remember being told what these rights, honors and responsibilities were. And now I'm enrolled in a PhD program, where the words epistemology, and all those attendant and corresponding lines of thought, just gets hazy. It brings to mind that great old standard "Imagination": imagination is funny, makes a cloudy day sunny, makes the bee think of honey, just like i think of you, imagination is crazy, your whole perspective gets hazy, starts you asking a daisy, what to do? what to do?" Imagination....what if I had gotten my degree from Smith instead of the UofU? Would I have other "rights" to success? Would my knowledge garnered and gathered and given at/from Smith be more pertinently entangled in my own 'narrative of success'.
The other day at Goodwill, I bought a t-shirt with a quote attributed to Albert Einstein "Imagination is more important than Knowledge". What I did not tune into at Smith was that imagined world of rights, success, and privilege. I remember being really pissed off that there was a support group for "Low-Income Students", and the only student organization I was drawn to (but too insecure to join) was a black sorority AKA, because they wore pink and green and learned to stomp, not to mention socialize with some fine black and latino boyz from across the nation....
I've decided my narrative of success would be very different if I had been conferred the rights, honors, and responsibilities of a Bachelor's degree from Smith. My narrative of success went off-grid. And adventurously I set forth to tackle a dream and a calling, which has more to do with imagination and the people of the sea...than with east coast syndicates....and can you imagine I regret nothing, but savor every crossroads which brought me closer to the place I stand today, here in Hau'ula Hawai'i....poised to lift off towards another adventure in Tongatapu....My narrative of success,,,,,,this is truly something to contemplate, and I'm grateful for the Smith College Alumnae Quarterly for keeping these kinds of meditations on my mind.

Leads

Crime Fiction: Dashielle Hammet, Elmore Leonard, Raymond Chandler, Walter Mosley (Easy Rawlins)
Bandits, by Hobsbawm
American Artisans, ?
Road to Mobocracy, by Paul A. Gilje
Rioting in America, by Paul A. Gilje
Guerilla Filmmaking, by Van Peebles
DVD-Zatoichi, Asphalt Jungle, G-Men
Dead Ends---(organic chemistry) "Dead End Kids"
"The Storyteller", Benjamin in Illuminations, Harry Zohn, ed. p. 159; Fables of Desire, p. 59.
THUGS: Confessions of a Thug (Meadows Taylor, 1839). The Wandering Jew (19th century) Eugene Sue. Thug, or a Million Murders, James Sleeman (1920). 1950s academics studying Thugs: Hiralal Gupta, Stewart Gordon, Christopher Bayley, Radhika Singha. New generation "revisionists": Parama Roy

"Peace to thee, friend" said the thug.

The Pele Farm, Hau'ula, Oahu Hawai'i

Here are some flicks I promised, visuals for the farm. Size: just shy of 5 acres, situated at the base of the Ma'akua Gulch Ridge. Cleared to the top of the boundary in August 2007. What a release of energy! hau'ula flows different now, just a bit...things is loosened, and we are grateful that Maui was able to usher that phase in. We mourne the fact that he is being held at O.C.C.C. and pray that he returns home (foki ki api) as soon as is humanly or angelically possible.

The Artist and Society: BioPolitics of the Condemned Body

"Katchafire" Concert Review: Kahuku High School, Home of the Red Raiders, Oahu, Fundraiser for Big Boyz Football League (?), Labor Day (9/4/07)

This was the last concert on Katchafire's U.S. Tour, which commenced on July 25th. Note Maori ending, and two or three hana ho songs. Conversation with Samoan cop, noted that the football field was not the venue (my suggestion/question) because of crowd control issues.
Photos by Lea Lani Kinikini.

2 guitars,
1 bongo drum set
drum set
sax
keyboards (2)
vocals-all

Recommendations: Visual Slide Show on projector to emphasize Fundraiser, Band, etc.

'Aina as teacher

I've been totally occupied by farming, and have tied in some research about educational community farming....its going to be very interesting to write now that i've experienced the past couple months.

First of all, my greatest teacher thus far has been the 'aina....I used my savings of $1400 to hire a bulldozer to open up the remaining three acres that stretch up to the mauka, and never realized how sanitized my life had become. And in case I haven't ever mentioned this before, I'm talking about our family farm here in Hau'ula. Pictures to follow. And currently I'm brewing ideas for community development---how participatory methods speak to community development processes. The Pele Farm in Hau'ula is one of my case studies in this applied research.

I'm gearing up to transition again, this time to Tonga, for a four month stint, to complete my participatory film projects. I've just purchased an imac on ebay which is being UPS'd out here, its got all the film making and music making software, so my open house idea for music and art making LIVES. This will be very coooooool, for I've been meeting artists nonstop and the prospect of bringing music and inner vision to the outer world and work, will be fruitfull.

Media, Priests and Mad Men

I just watched the new cable tv show on AMC, called "Mad Men". Its set in an advertising agency in New York in the 1960s. Its a good show--really well-written and acted with a clear tone of authenticity, from the perfect wardrobe to the camera eyeing between nice long takes of interesting conversation, that like building blocks is coded into plots...the social customs really standout, like the cigarette smoking, the females in the workplace what the 90s begin to call sexual harrassment. Anyways, the episode today had one of the ad execs have a conversation with a hippie-beatnik type, and this hippie-beatnik accuses the ad exec of being basically a high priest (media is a vessle, an oracle) of the new capitalist religion of mass consumerism...somewhere I've read and copied down the phrase "it wasn't the oracle, it was the priest behind the oracle"---(that must be from a movie).

Hau'ula

snapshots of hau'ula

The ridge of pine trees that casts a long shadow over Hau'ula sets it apart from the other villages on the Northshore. Right before the Mormontown of Lai'e, Hau'ula is what some would call a castaway, or throwaway community. In a close reading of the politics of the Northshore, the capitalistic enterprise of La'ie (which includes BYU-Hawai'i and the Polynesian Cultural Center) dominates the three sister villages which line this end of the Ko'olau mountain range: Hau'ula, La'ie and Kahuku. La'ie is a space in the Mormon collective imagination, one of particular meaning-making for LDS people in the Pacific, but also for Euro-American LDS from the continental US.

White kids from the continent come to school here at BYU-H to get an education. Some come to surf, and enjoy the land of music and flowers, like my mother in 1962.

Life stories can begin in a number of time-space crossings. I guess you could say mine began at the star-crossed meeting of two lovers who both enrolled at the Church College of Hawai'i (now BYU-H). La'ie and the campus of BYU-H holds memories for my parents, who met and courted between the meticulously manicured lawns and soft beach breezes of girls Hale 3 and boys Hale 5. For me, La'ie is a place where the speed limit drops to 25 from 35, where only McDonalds and Chevron are open on Sundays, and where no alcoholic beverages are sold.

I'm certainly not a local by any means, not by a long shot. I'm one who passes through. But I do feel rooted in some way to Hau'ula, where the pine trees on Ma'akua Gulch Ridge always cast a striking silhouette against an often sea-grey clouded sky.

The weather differs in marked ways between Hau'ula and La'ie. The Ma'akua Gulch is like a suction cup that calls clouds from the sea up its narrow cleavage, and often these clouds carry wetness that falls as they prepare to journey up the Mountains which are a green majestic core at the center of O'ahu. While Hau'ula is marked by this sea-grey cloudiness and precipitation, a mile down the road, as one approaches La'ie, right before one gets to the PCC, the sun bursts forth and shines more days than in Hau'ula. Those LDS builders who foresaw the tourist boon that has become Hawai'i really picked the spot.

Place and Time Collide in Tonga July 07

I am about four weeks into my 'fieldwork', and its like that scholar whats-her-name said, its more like "homework". I attended the TRA conference in Tonga, July 11-14.

From memory, I think that poet Kalo Mila summed it up the feelings of the TRA academic thought waves which pulsed in Nuku'alofa, she said it in a poem she composed just for the event, and read on the closing day. She is really a wonderful poet! I spoke with her briefly because I had heard of a poem she wrote about the flames of 16/11, and she directed me to her blog site at Huia Publishers, where I found the poem...which will be great to discuss when I open my chapter about Eyewitness Accountings of 16/11...that chapter will be about the eye-witness verification for narrative knowledge aka "storytelling".

a spade in black and red
a line of thought
deep rooted to the sky
tou'a and Filipe Tohi
a spade in black and red
as he flicks the line of thought
earth it breaths
that clings to the root
up into my sky
Something I heard today:
john jones
the dead man's chest
has john jones heart
our rectangle, national flags form the shape of a coffin

Streets

Films to consider for media nights:

Scarface (1932)
Angels with Dirty Faces (1938)
Godfather (1972)
Black Caesar (1974)
Scarface (1983)
Goodfellas (1990)
Menace II Society (1993)