Post #283179 by Thomas on Sun, Feb 4, 2007 10:15 PM

Many seem to have gotten into it due to early exposure. The opposite for me. The aesthetic exuberance and joyful whimsy characteristic of tiki style and exotica music were totally absent where I was growing up and in the reigning ethos of our household. Like many here it seems, Gilligan's Island provoked many a pleasant daydream. I wanted to be there. Later, Hawaii Five-0 suggested that you could have your cake and eat it too -- live in a beautiful tropical island setting, wear wildly colorful clothes (even to work!) -- and enjoy all that a modern society offers. (I currently live in Arizona where we plant palm trees and wear Hawaiian shirts and kind of pretend. But Asia-Pac. has been a big part of my life.) Anyway, my entry into a kind of contemporary tiki "scene" was via thrift store record collecting. I was drawn to anything suggesting a refreshingly naive, maybe even politically incorrect, tropical/exotic fantasy world. All those Latin dance, "Tijuana Brass," Hawaiian hits, Calypso, whatever ... albums that needed rescuing. Exotica is the "Rome" to which all those roads lead, at least in my mind. I liked finding image collections of similar record collections on the internet -- the weirder the better. Of course it wasn't long before I found Tikicentral. To which, come to think of it, that "Rome" metaphor also applies nicely I think.