Postcards from Hawaiʻi
Postcards from Hawaiʻi
Pink pancakes. Goth slug. The logical endpoint of Sexy Baby.
The terrestrial hub of O‘ahu’s north shore is Foodland. The grocery store has a great logo, with the “F” doubling as the handle of a shopping cart:
Is there an obvious term for this in design? Where the form of a letter is incorporated into a related image? The only other example I can think of is the Goodwill logo, with its g resembling half of a smiley (“goodwill”-exuding) face:
When I was on the north shore in January I loved going to Foodland. Partly because of the logo, partly to clock island prices (Spinach: $7.99 / bag; Oreos 2 packs for $9), partly to eat housemade ube chiffon cake that tasted of purple air, and partly to stand in line for poke behind guys shaped exactly like a Duvel bottle. This is a physique found exclusively in humans whose sole form of exercise is surfing. Key features include a tree-trunk neck, massive traps, enormous delts, and low center of gravity:
The swell arrived on a Monday and everything leaned seaward. By Tuesday the waves were Venti-sized and I parked myself between Backyards and V-Land to watch kids zip toward the water like iron filings. Their moms, sleepy and sweatshirted, followed slowly with mugs of coffee.
The swell came from two directions and broke in unpredictable teepee, wedge, and ingot shapes. Some waves tubed, some spat, some crumbled, and some accomplished all three. A tortoise the size of a hubcap made progress along the shore.
After a while a woman came down and spread a towel nearby. She coated herself in Monoï oil and the morning light reflected dreamily from her shoulders and back. It made an edenic picture, this babe on the beach. She was wearing the current favored shape of bikini bottom: a pouch hoisted by strings yanked north of the hip bones—
There’s a line in Victor Pelevin’s Homo Zapiens about a young man facing the rise of hyperconsumerism in early 1990s Russia. It goes: “Tatarsky knew the new era had no use for him either, but he had managed to accustom himself to the idea and even take a certain bitter-sweet satisfaction in it.”
…and THAT’S that’s how I feel about the above style of swimwear!
I’d packed two books for the trip but recklessly finished both of them on the 11-hour flight and now had nothing to do except watch Live Ocean TV and ponder bits of information I’d picked up in conversation since arriving. Luckily I’d stumbled into a lot of information, all of it interesting to dwell upon: The secret to Hawaiian-style mac salad is grated onion; the forbidden island of Ni’ihau is owned by a family called the Robinsons; there are no snakes in Hawaiʻi; there is no Hawaiʻian word for salad; the trees with the raunchy-looking pods are called Inga edulis and their pod pulp is edible but not ripe in January.
Oh, and the official Ni’ihau website looks like this:
On the last day I went to Waikiki to see friends. After the friends departed I was at loose ends and went to a hotel restaurant famous for its pink pancakes, which tasted both pink and famous.
During the flight home I sat next to someone who elbowed me twice per minute, or roughly 1,300 times total. I briefly fantasized about chopping off her elbow with a machete and then, when that failed to subdue my irritation, reversed course and imagined that she was actually a friend who was constantly seeing funny stuff and elbowing me in a “Hey Molly, get a load of this” way. When THAT didn’t work, I commanded myself to utterly discredit the notion of comfort, which is what I do when I have to get a root canal or submerge myself in 40º water or whatever. For this trick, all you do is inwardly repeat the phrase Your comfort is irrelevant until it becomes mildly true.
Here are a few more photos from the trip. Mahalo.
