Post #101900 by bigbrotiki on Thu, Jul 15, 2004 1:54 PM

On 2004-07-09 21:32, TikiGardener wrote:
I was just wondering how it feels for our Sven to be watching the plethora of Tiki goodies popping up all over the place? After all BOT is kinda responsible for the resurgence of Tiki on the pop culture stage.

No doubt others attentions ( Otto, James etc ) helped the tiki radar blip gorw brighter. But The Book Of Tiki really got that ball rolling. Just by being on the shelves across America ( and the world ) it put tiki into the collective subconciousness.

I'm glad cool reasonably priced stuff with character is coming out at Target and Spencers, and the others.

So Sven, how does it feel?

Tiki Gardener

Well....it feels GREAT. Very rewarding. I am not saying that it’s all directly resulting from the BOT....luckily, because I am not neccessarily partial to some of the cheapo candy color plastic Tiki crap that is out there...(but if it would be vintage, who knows?)
Collecting vintage Tiki in the 90s, I never would have imagined that something like Tiki “Soap on a rope” would ever appear again on the market, or that I would have my own Tiki mug out one day...it’s pretty crazy.

I love collecting items that use images directly swiped from the book, like CD covers, T-shirts and Aloha shirts, I even found a pair of boxer shorts with the Pitcairn sign on them. If anyone finds stuff like that, please let me know.

It is really hard to say to what degree the BOT is responsible, or how much Shag’s popularity had an effect, or if now it is starting to be a self-perpetuating trend (BAD Tiki inspiring more bad Tiki?). The easy availability of the Tiki image today muddles the line in recent history when there was almost no Tiki to be found. Nowadays newcomers have no sense of the fact that until the mid- to late 90s, the only thing that would come up when searching for the term “Tiki” on the internet would be “Tiki Barber” the baseball player and some woman’s website who had named her dog “Tiki”. There was no Tiki imagery out there period. It was true Urban Archeology to unearth anything.

One could compare this to the impact of Alfred Hitchcock’s “Psycho”: When this film came out, it was so revolutionairy in it’s style and look that people were amazed. Since then it’s stylistic language has become used so commonly and seen so many times in so many films that one can not appreciate the amazement that people felt when no one had seen anything like it before. This will be happening with the BOT also, but that is OK. People will THINK they new about Tiki style before the BOT came out, and take Tiki’s existence for granted. (And I am sure many of you on Tiki Central DID actually know something about it before.)

There were many Tiki enlightening contributions in the 90s, like when Otto and I began to publish Tiki News and hold Tiki Parties and slide shows, there was James Teitelbaum and his work, artist friends like Bosko,Josh Agle and Mark Ryden doing Tiki Art, and later on, House Industries and Doug Nason did their part, and generally many seperate hipsters knew what a Tiki looked like. But the BOT clearly accomplished two things:

1.) It pulled all the different threads of Tiki style together into a coherent picture and overwhelmingly proved that Tiki was a pop culture in it’s own right, which had never been done before, not even in it’s own heyday in the 50s and 60s.

2.) By making the book so chock full of quality color imagery, it glorified Tiki in the eye of the beholder and for the first time (compared to Tiki News and earlier Tiki publications) succeeded in making it a sensory, emotionally gratifying experience that did it justice (and made one want more!)

To me, it is not so much the products out there that give me a thrill, but:

A.) How many more artists and creative people have been inspired to pick up the chisel or the brush (me being an un-realized artist myself) to re-create Tiki in their own way, and with their work helped to spread the Tiki consciousness, and

B.) How many new Tiki temples have been built all over the world as a direct result of viewing the BOT, like:
First the Taboo Cove, then Waikiki Wally’s, the South London Pacific, The Hale Tiki, The Tabou Tiki in Berlin, The Kahiki Moon, AND, making it go full circle, the first new Tiki bar in Waikiki in 30 years, The Tikis Bar and Grill.
PLUS the fact that the BOT saved the Caliente Tropics from being renovated into a generic boutique Hotel. Yay!

All this means very little in the big scheme of things, but it is the game I play, and I am having a ball! And it is great to have a community of “Tiki Agents” spread all over the globe that like to play it too!

And one more thing: Boy am I glad that I started photographing the remaining examples of Tiki culture when I did, because since them MANY have been destroyed or altered beyond recognition. A little too late, and there would be have been much less proof of the grandeur of this lost civilization, because today we mourn:
The Kahiki, The Tikis, The Kona Kai exterior, The Hanalei exterior, the Pitcairn sign, The Samoa Motel, the Polynesian Village in Playa Del Rey, the Exotic Isle, and many other Tiki apartments. I am proud they live on in the pages of the Book of Tiki forever.