Post #738046 by Jungle John on Mon, Feb 23, 2015 11:12 AM

The management regrets to announce the immediate closing of the "Aloha Hut" due to concerns over the cultural insensitivity "tiki-culture" connotes in the United States in the modern 21st-century. We apologize if any of our actions caused harm to any ethnic community. We have initiated aggressive re-branding efforts post-haste to remedy our wrongs. Henceforth the former "Aloha Hut" will now be known as: Jungle John's Florida Key West Parrothead Bar and Voodoo Pirate Grill-- Arrgh. Remember, it's-five-o-clock somewhere! So metaphorically we are removing the black-face and we are painting over the brown tikis with a fun Caribbean theme--lots of oranges and bright greens! Let's limbo!

From what I understand "tiki culture" has racist overtones, it attracts a less than family- friendly crowd (swingers, beatniks, alcoholics, tea-partiers, ironic hipsters) and finally, a few comments about tiki culture in South Florida: It belongs here like a hamburger on a vegan menu, like a turd in party punch bowl. South Florida is crazy, and despite the urban sprawl ubiquity, one does sense it has a sense of place if close investigation is made with an anthropologist's eye. This is voodoo-Caribbean-pirate-key-lime-Key West-Jimmy Buffet in a hammock on the beach land if anything! It's more Tommy Bahama than Don the Beachcomber, more Johnny Depp in swaggering Jack Sparrow costume than silly elctro-mechanical singing tiki birds.

All that tiki jive and surf music and chrome custom cars are southern california vibes. Let southern californians relish their past, and we can enjoy it too, as long as it stays in the past. South Florida is imbued in multiple bright garish colors while tiki is all brown and dark and somber. It seems silly to import a style to a place that is the nexus for a confluence of original styles already. I've been to Southern California (and choked on the smog and sat on the interstate highways in perpetual gridlock) and tht place is a visual potpourri and a jumble of everything, almost like Disneyland planning. It suffers the democratic curse of too many designers and not enough management with good taste in control. Well, that applies to almost everywhere in the U.S. doesn't it?

So keep tiki culture in California or Michigan or anywhere else. Tropical escapism is understandable in places in the colder northern latitudes. Finally, I might have suggested that being in South Florida, and having 80 degree weather while most of the east and midwest are snow and ice covered, is something neat-o. Well it's not. I would urge anyone up there to stay put and do not come to this hell-hole of a state. Remember it's "Flor-i-duh", kooky weirdo land, bug infested, rain every day in summer, high unemployment, terrible-awful-place to be state of Florida. Yuck. Tourists are not welcomed here as far as I know, and it's strange that anyone would even want to come here! Come visit the Mai Kai and then go home. Take the overpriced potential food poisoning with you. That roach infested (read the Broward county health inspector's reports) dump should have been torn down with all the other tiki temples long ago. Instead it gets historic landmark status. I think that "date stamp" speaks a lot. The folly of the past does not need to be resurrected and glorified. It should be cast into the glass cases of the museum, oogled at, and serve as a reminder that we can improve as a species over time.

Well now that I've gone all troll-y and spoke my mind and dissed the Mai Kai and everything, I guess I should bow out and slink away. But I still have a soft spot in my heart for the relics of the old 1950s tiki culture. Maybe its memories of mom and dad and their few exotic tokens of a night out at that fancy Polynesian place, or the weird smokey allure of the mystery of the South Seas from a Melville novel. Tiki-culture-- I can't deny that I'm attracted and repulsed at the same time. I know some of you, those who appreciate gray-thinking, can understand that. Here's a chart illustrating my life-long attraction-repulsion to tiki culture:

As you can see, as a kid I found it awesome, but from the mid 1970s to the 1980s I hated tiki stuff, it looked like dirty dive bars and serious food poisoning. That period coincided with the overall decline of "tiki culture". Then, in my 30s with the advent of kids and watching SpongeBob, tiki got kind of cool again. I built a backyard tiki hut, made tikis, and then it got old and looked suspect. It was garish and cartoony, and it moldered away or got torn down over a decade. The strange thing is why I ever thought building a new tiki hut was a good idea. I already examined this in an earlier post. Was it a longing for those earlier days when the kids were little? A desire to have a little "paradise" set dressing to enjoy during my inevitable decline? Ultimately, I think I just needed something to do. But the more and more I got into it, read about it, tried to understand my compulsions, the more I realized I was unsure if this is what I really wanted. I think I just enjoy appreciating things through appropriation.

I'll never go to the annual "Hukai-lau"-- not my scene. I'm not a real social animal. I don't fit-in at casual social situations, and I'm socially awkward. I don't even drink. One ounce of rum and I'm snoring away two hours later. I put up flimsy trellis of a tiki hut, that will maybe make it through the hurricanes, because I was getting fat and lazy and wasting my time on other things. It was a yet another navel gazing exercise of self discovery.

I think my kids' teen friends dig the whole tiki hut thing. They love cheesy crap from Hot Topic, and they wear fezzes and like to mock their parents' tastes. I don't know. I hope they don't mind when I switch out the the Martin Denny exotica music with steel drums and Jimmy Buffet.

Please don't hate me. Allow me to be myself. Thanks. Peace and love and all that jazz. If having fun is a crime, then slap on the cuffs and haul me away to jail. Or better yet, exile me to some far away tropical island.