Argo Revelations

Argo Revelations

by | Nov 28, 2012 | Island Style, Mainland Living

I recently watched the movie Argo. It’s based on the true story of when the US Embassy in Iran was taken over by militants in 1979 and its staff was held hostage for a staggering 444 days. Six embassy staffers escaped to the Canadian Ambassador’s house where they hid until a gutsy CIA operative came up with a hail Mary plan that wouldn’t work in today’s world of cell phones and internet access. Even knowing how it ended, the movie kept me on the edge of my seat. Cleverly edited to include real homeland responses and reaction to the events, it brought back a lot of memories of hearing Walter Cronkite’s gravelly voice announce the mounting tally of hostage days spent in captivity—along with flashbacks of posturing politicians and news people eager to spin the wheel on their daily game of What America Should Do.

There are many moments in the movie that are hilarious to those who know their history, like when a government official claims there’s nothing to worry about; the hostages will be freed in 24 hours or when another one says Carter wants to wait because he’s planning a secret military strike. I choked on my popcorn and Diet Coke on that one, laughing so hard. If you like political thrillers and history, you’ll love this flick.

Thinking back to that time, I left the theater realizing that I was far more politically aware in my younger days. News and world events had an urgency to them that made staying informed, having an opinion, and being involved feel as critical as breathing or eating. It was startling to recognize that for all the world’s brave new instant access via smart phones and the internet, I feel less connected to world events now than back in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

It could’ve been due to growing up in Hawaii during a time when film at eleven meant footage deemed too graphic for primetime by most mainland broadcast stations was regularly shown on our 6 pm news. I have vivid memories of the fall of Saigon and of asking my mother what she would do if we were some of the faces locked behind the gates as the helicopters took off and landed on aircraft carriers. I watched, astonished that as soon as the people scrambled out, ducking under the still rotating blades, the helicopters were pushed into the ocean, splash, to make room for the next one to land. When I asked why didn’t they go back, “Not enough fuel or time,” was my mother’s response.

It might’ve had something to do with soldiers and wars seeming very close back then when PTSD Vietnam vets lived rough in the jungle near our house and would come into our yard from the beach to use our outdoor get-the-sand-off-before-even-thinking-about-going-into-the-house cold water  shower. One vet in ragged camouflage pants spotted my sister and our teddy bear picnic and collapsed at her feet, weeping silent tears into the grass as he almost, but never quite, reached out to touch her long dark brown hair. That day our mother magically appeared and gently lead us back to the house, locking the door behind us. “He’s just a little sad,” she said, “because of the war,” when we asked why.

Boat People, those brave souls who’d rather take their chances on the open ocean in leaky sampans than risk another day under communist rule, were also more than photos on the news to me. The kind janitor at my mother’s office who always made sure the coffee was hot was once a respected doctor; the gas station jockey who washed our windows and checked the tire pressure used to own a chain of grocery stores.

For a few years, hard news was my life. My days revolved around the evening broadcast, getting it on the air just as the meatloaf was coming out of the oven. If it bleeds, it leads was more than just a joke back then. The bloodiest footage I ever saw was in the raw video feeds uploaded by freelance videographers during the 1980s uprising in the Philippines. When ousted President Marco ended up seeking asylum in Hawaii and living in a house on Kalanianeole highway, the main road from Honolulu to where my family lived, I couldn’t believe it, nor the hours long traffic jams caused by protesters and pro-Marco supporters duking it out in the street. Imelda’s shoe collection was also very real, especially when secret service types routinely hustled everyone out of Liberty House so she and her entourage could shop. No, really. They’d shut down Kahala Mall’s poshest shops so she could get her shoe fix. I saw it more than once.

Growing up, politics and news were regular dinner conversation, opinions tossed back and forth like the salad; my parents seldom agreed back then, and neither gave an inch. Over french fries and Cokes my friends and I debated:  women’s rights, the right to choose, affirmative action, regressive taxes, trickle down theories, evolution in schools.

It all mattered greatly back then.

Today, not so much.

Part of the reason it’s taken the backseat could be that I now live out in the country where the biggest concerns tend to be keeping chickens out of the neighbor’s garden and funding a new community rec center; the threat of soldiers marching over the hill seem a lot more remote than they did years ago when I couldn’t swing a cat without hitting a GI or a G-man.

It’s a symptom of my isolationist feelings that I seldom watch the evening news anymore, preferring to read news online or to listen to brief top of the hour newscasts on the radio while playing chauffeur between piano and soccer. When news is reduced to a snappy sound bite or a headline on an IPad, it’s easy to maintain the illusion of being informed without really knowing anything.

If I try to put a date to it, I’d say I stopped caring about news a few years after 9-11, after losing people in the towers and watching the days go from red to orange to yellow to orange alert again. It’s hard work to maintain that kind of immediacy day after day, especially when carpool and the science fair keep rearing their heads.

I’d say my current apathy is less a loss of faith in country and leadership than it is a loss of faith that my opinion or voice really matters. The young and eager believe they can do anything, that the rightness of their vision ensures eventual success, that all effort no matter how small somehow matters. Twitter and Facebook are full of their optimistic rhetoric, but I fear it’s the barricade scene from Les Mis played over and over.

I’ve lived long enough to know that the things you anticipate are never quite what bite you in the butt. It’s what you don’t see, what doesn’t make the headlines, that gets you every time. The sad truth is that now, when I see the passion for news and world events in the younger generation’s eyes, I don’t feel hope or even inspired. I just feel exhausted. I’ve run this marathon before.

Today, I’m blaming my melancholic outlook less on the recent presidential election and memories stirred by Argo and more on the new blanket of snow outside my office window. An island girl needs sunshine, warm weather, and surf to chase away the winter-long blues. Time to see something more like Chasing Mavericks. Maybe then next week’s blog will be sunnier and surfier.

Learning ‘Ōlelo: One

by | Nov 26, 2012 | Learning ‘Ōlelo

one:

(wŭn) Adj. Singular, a or an.

Example

English: Do you have an ‘ukulele?

Pidgin: Eh, get one ‘ukulele?

Note: ‘Ōlelo is a Hawaiian word meaning language, speech, word, etc.  To see the current list of Hawaiian and Pidgin words, definitions, and usage please click on

Pidgin Dictionary

 

Plotting Along,Writing By the Seat of My Pants

Plotting Along,
Writing By the Seat of My Pants

by | Oct 24, 2012 | The Business of Writing

Once a publisher makes the sign of the cross over your work, blessing it and pronouncing it fit for public consumption, a lot of people want to know about your writing process. It’s kinda like being the fat kid who suddenly loses a lot of weight; everybody wants to know how you did it, especially if all you ate were Cheetos and watermelon seeds and your cardio program consisted of dancing naked in the moonlight to a Johnny Cash soundtrack.

Wow. Think I just gave myself a nightmare!

Plotters want to read about how you outlined every nuance; pantsters want to hear how the story grew organically into tightly woven plot. Everybody’s looking for validation or insider tips, the secret decoder ring to success.

For me, the truth is really more mundane. I need a couple of things: a deadline and a target audience. Gallons of icy Diet Coke, bowls of almonds, grapes, or bits of cheese, a lock on my office door, and an excuse to avoid housework all help, but plotters and pansters aside, it’s all about the ability to sit down and work something through to the end.

For short pieces like articles, I keep an idea list on an electronic sticky note on my computer desktop. These are pure pantster exercises where I just think about the topic, consider the audience, and write. Most times they’re completed in one sitting, usually after couple of false starts until it suddenly clicks and comes together.

For bigger projects like novels, it’s all about the pre-production. Since One Boy, No Water and the rest of the Niuhi Shark Saga is set in Hawaii, several thousands of miles away from my current high desert home, I start by reading everything I can about Hawaiian history and culture, mostly dry historical and cultural tomes, the kinds of things I avoided like the plague when I was in school. Though the internet I listen to Hawaiian radio stations as I clean house to brush up on my Pidgin and read the Honolulu Star Advertiser to get an idea of current events. I also watch a lot of documentaries about sharks and try to keep up with some of the cutting edge research. I constantly read a lot of fiction—the great, the so-so, and the truly terrible regardless of genre. It all goes into my bubbling stew of a brain where my sub-conscious churns it all over and over, waiting to get the fermentation just right.

Meanwhile I try to be a good plotter and outline the novel at a very high level, usually using Scrivener’s corkboards. I may bang out a couple of chapters, but no real progress is made until like a circling shark the deadline bares its teeth and grins. I start to feel its breath on my neck—if sharks had breath—and see the dorsal fin slip under the water for the kill. I start to think less about the story and more about the audience. What do they expect? What do they want to have happen? How can I delight and change their expectations? Somewhere in my head the theme to Indiana Jones starts playing. That’s when I clear the decks, stop reading, get ahead on all the little writing projects, stock the fridge for the kids, and check the family calendar to be sure I can lock myself away for the next few weeks and write.

And I do, sometimes for twenty or more hours at a time. It helps that I’m an insomniac. It double helps that my family is pretty self-sufficient, at least in the short-run. Typically it’s a marathon writing session followed by a break of a day or so to recover and ice the tendonitis from typing so much. I’m also guilty of the cardinal sin of editing while I write, so a net day of 5,000 words was probably more like 9,000.

Like a classical plotter I know where the story needs to go, but how it gets there is always a surprise to me. I even work backwards sometimes from one plot point to another, so I never have a writer’s block excuse for not writing, just pure laziness or carpool duty. Or bruised elbows from my desktop. Thank goodness it’s cooling off enough for fuzzy long sleeves!

I’m more pantster than I like to admit, but it’s pretty apparent when you consider the lack of detail in my outlines. For example, my outline for Chapter 1 in book two simply says Kalei finds out about Zader. Not a lot to go on unless you can peek inside my head. (I don’t recommend it.)

A big writing day usually starts in the shower as I figure out how the next plot point is going to develop. You don’t wanna see my water bill. I take a lot of long showers. Life would be easier if I could connect to my inner muse by cleaning house or exercising, but apparently she’s a water muse. Tough when you live in a desert.

Plotter-ish outlines give me a skeleton, off-the-cuff pantster writing allows me to dress the body in ways that keep me engaged and the material fresh, deadlines give me a reason to sit and finish, and the target audience reminds me who I’m writing for, which also keeps the inmates from taking over the asylum. My writing process works for me, but like a diet of watermelon seeds and caffeine, it’s not for everyone. I can’t even recommend it!

Aunty Mary Kawena Pukui

Aunty Mary Kawena Pukui

by | Oct 17, 2012 | Island Style

When you ask anyone with any knowledge of Hawaiian history or culture to name the most culturally significant scholars who preserved ancient knowledge, Mary Kawena Pukui will top the list. More than any single person I can think of, her work paved the way for rebirth of the Hawaiian Renaissance in the 1970s.

Born in 1895 and following the ancient traditions of hānai, she was initially raised by her mother’s parents in Kā‘u on the Big Island. It was during this time that she learned to cherish her Hawaiian heritage and began building her formidable foundation as a Hawaiian scholar, dancer, composer, and educator.

Her grandmother had been a hula dancer in the court of Queen Emma and taught her chants and stories. From her grandfather, a traditional healer who was known as a kahuna pale keiki (obstetrician) who used lomi lomi (massage), laʻau lapaʻau (herbal medicine), ho‘oponopono (forgiveness), and pule (prayer) came her great knowledge and understanding of the Hawaiian people’s relationship between the spiritual and mundane.

Mrs. Pukui composed over 150 songs, recorded miles of audiotape, published over 50 books including Nānā i ke Kumu (Look to the Source), and co-authored the definitive Hawaiian-English Dictionary in 1957. Bishop Museum, that bastion of Hawaiian culture where she worked as an ethnological assistant, has preserved her notes, film clips, and oral histories. They are considered priceless.

In my mind, Mary Kawena Pukui stands as a giant among Hawaiian scholars. Hero worship isn’t going too far.

Which makes the story my grandmother told me all the more mind blowing.

It was a couple of days before the publication of One Boy, No Water. I’d called her to wish her happy birthday and to find out how the party she’d hosted—champagne and cake—for friends in her retirement community turned out. Talk turned to the book. Ever mindful about manners and proper protocol, she asked if I had an acknowledgement section in the book.

“Yeah, Grammie, I do.”

“Well, did you remember to thank everyone? You didn’t write that book alone.”

“Yeah, I thanked my family for their support, Kamehameha Schools for my education, and people like Mary Kawena Pukui for their preservation of Hawaiian history and culture.”

“Oh, Aunty Mary! Good, you remembered her.”

Aunty Mary? “Grammie, I’m talking about Mary Kawena Pukui, the mother of the Hawaiian Renaissance.”

“Yeah, Aunty Mary! After school, we used to go to Bishop Museum and run up and down the stairs and take all the covers off the displays and she’d chase us around the halls and finally call the police station (Grammie’s father was with the HPD) and say, ‘George! Your kids are driving me nuts! Come get them!’ Oh, we loved to tease Aunty Mary! She and my Dad were good friends. She used to come to our house often.”

And my mouth is on the floor and I start to think about it and realize that her family home in Kalihi was a block or two from Bishop Museum and my Grammie isn’t joking. She kept telling me stories and I couldn’t wrap my head around the idea that the woman who wrote at least 20 books on my shelves about Hawaiian history and culture was Aunty Mary to my grandmother!

Blows my mind almost as much as the idea of Grammie and her siblings playing hide and go seek in Bishop Museum’s hallowed halls after school!

Uncle Dave’s Green Flash

Uncle Dave’s Green Flash

by | Oct 3, 2012 | Island Style

My Uncle Dave Hopkins was a master of the green flash, that split-second when the sun dips below the horizon and a brilliant green flash lights the sky at sunset. It’s thanks to him that I saw it as often as I did growing up in Kalama Valley. We’d all be piled into his car coming around Hanauma Bay on our way to volleyball or back from the beach and he say, “Today’s the day!” and whip the car into the overlook turnout above Koko Marina. From there you can watch the sun set into the ocean, and we’d sprawl over the rock walls, relaxing in the tradewinds, waiting sometimes half an hour or more, and end up late to wherever we were supposed to be. Time was a flexible concept in Uncle Dave’s world. But it was worth it. Most times he was right. Long before anyone scientifically analyzed this phenomenon, Uncle Dave knew it was a matter of location, horizon, and atmospheric clarity. He’d watched a lot of sunsets.

Uncle Dave always had time to smell the roses, sample the kim chee, or teach kids how to catch crabs, boogie board, or the best way to set the volleyball just off the net for the perfect spike. Our families used to go beach camping and that’s where he taught me how to cook fried rice for breakfast using leftover rice we’d made with ocean water the night before. Uncle Dave loved to eat and knew all the best places around the island to eat anything—crackseed, shave ice, guri guri, teri chicken—he was better than a restaurant guide.

Like many people with big hearts and even bigger opus, Uncle Dave died young, too young,  when I was a sophomore in college. I miss him. I’m sure he’s up in heaven yelling down at us to slow down, relax, and enjoy the journey. A hui hou, Uncle Dave!

Tips to Spot A Green Flash at Sunset

Hawaii is one of the best places in the world to see a green flash at sunset. But be careful; there’s a true green flash and a false green flash. The false green flash isn’t as spectacular; it’s more of a green haze over everything and lasts too long; it comes from staring directly at the sun as it sets and damaging your retinas.

  1. You need a clear, distinct, and distant horizon. A sun setting into the ocean’s the best bet.
  2. The sky has to be perfectly clear; no clouds, vog, or haze on the horizon.
  3. Position yourself so you’re looking right into the setting sun, but keep your eyes off the sun itself until just the barest hint is above the horizon.
  4. Don’t blink! A true green flash only lasts a fraction of a second. Watch for a green flash, flicker, or glow about the setting sun. If you look away and everything has a green cast to it, it’s a false flash.
  5. Have patience. Like my Uncle Dave and Uncle Kahana in One Boy, No Water say, you many see a green flash only a handful of times in a lifetime, but once you’ve seen it, you’ll never doubt again!