Post #102383 by bigbrotiki on Sun, Jul 18, 2004 8:51 AM

That's bad, kids, tiz tiz....those "gettin Lei'ed" jokes are getting to be as lame as they became in the 60s...corny/cool/corny ...BUT, this machine is undoubtedly an important artifact for any possible book on the Tiki revival and needs to be archived as such!

Now back to the BOT:

On 2004-07-15 17:06, Benzart wrote:
....I joined a woodcarvers club of crochity old farts who mostly carved birds and looked down on anything else. Now I seem to be the center of their attention in Nice ways and I hear the OLD stories about their past tiki experiences...

Wow, how great! This reminds me of another rewarding result of the BOT being published:

Beginning in 1992, when I first started submitting the BOT idea to publishers, I had been telling Bob and Leroy at Oceanic Arts that they should please save their material for me, and that my book would be THE definitive work on Tiki style. This promise started to sound pretty old at the end of the 90s, and I was beginning to loose belief myself that it would ever come to fruition...

And now it is a great feeling for me to finally have come through for them so fully. Bob and Leroy now have something in their hands that has substance, that they can show to their grandchildren and say “This is what we did in our lives!”. Like many veterans of Tiki that had been through it’s demise and discrimination as bad taste, they initially were kind of crochity and suspicious, then began to look at us Tikiphiles as kind of crazy....but now the response and revival have made them aglow with pride in their life’s work. That is a real satifaction for me.

Which brings up another point (that I might have mentioned here before):
I might loose some of you with this, but bear in mind that I love cross-referencing ancient and modern Polynesian customs. To me, old beliefs are not mere superstition, but often prove themselves as having a core of truth in them.
The Oceanic religions were basically built on ancestor worship, the elders were revered, held in high esteem and deified after their death. There must have been an intrinsic value to this custom. The way old people are forgotten and their wisdom is ignored in today’s Western societies seems like the extreme opposite of that. I am hoping that in contrast, the BOT and the re-validation of lounge culture are an example of beneficial modern ancestor worship!