Honolulu is under a smoggy, gray haze again. Only it is not smog, or haze. It’s vog. This picture was taken today around noon.
Whether arriving via airplane or cruise ship (both pictured above) or living la vida local, these noxious natural fumes fill the lungs. There is no daily vog index popularly reported. Who is studying vog? Is enough being done to warn people of potential dangers?
Here is what our view towards Diamond Head looked like at noon today:
Recently I was doing research on the 90s music scene in Hawai’i.
I found this guy JonHawaii2003 had posted footage of Tool and Stone Temple Pilots at the first Big Mele—an alternative music festival that ran in Hawaii for seven years—on YouTube. Turns out Jon was one of the sound guys for the show, and knows a thing or two about getting quality concert footage.
I contacted him to thank him for the hard-rocking flashback, and a week later he reuploaded the Tool footage in even better quality!
Here’s the link to the entire 10-part playlist, or if you just want to hear my favorite (aka most popular on Radio Free Hawaii) song of the day, that’d be Opiate featuring a surprise guest appearance from singer Layne Staley of Alice in Chains:
The one thing you can’t see here is the waves, they are going off(!!) in an area of the island where huge surf is not that common. Despite Kualoa being a Ranch and having an abundance of ranchly things like cow poo (and the fungus that grows upon it), I can hardly imagine a more beautiful backdrop for a killer music festival.
I wasn’t even a huge Tool fan until that day, when the bass in my face—an emotionally blown state since I’d just been dumped that day—rocked my world. Other artists that played the Big Mele were Stone Temple Pilots, Fishbone, Violent Femmes and Primus.
No subsequent Big Mele ever packed as much of a punch as this one did, for me. They lost even the little bit of diversity they had, becoming way too alterna-punk-heavy for my tastes, tho I did go in ’96 (No Doubt! plus Cypress Hill and their ginormous inflatable Buddha) and ’97 (Wu Tang, sorry guys, that is *not* Wu Mountain behind us). Lineups of all The Big Mele festivals on hawaiibase.com.
Two Beer Queers is a podcast about beer, from Hawaii. These guys have a great balance of raunch and refinement–they take their beer very seriously, but get in plenty of off-color silliness as they pour, observe, sniff and drink(chug!) each brew.
Hosts Bully O’Sullivan and Russel Kealoha taste test all the oddball beers that I would like to try, if I weren’t reaching for familiar brands. Even tho I consider myself a discriminating beer-drinker, the beers featured on this show make me want to challenge my palate.
I really love how the Two Beer Queers keep in mind the masses of BudLight and Heinekin drinkers, constantly encouraging everyone to try something new. At the same time, they let us live vicariously through them, since my wallet already knows that a $13 bottle of stout is not gonna happen anytime soon! I can’t imagine what a 20-something(??) oz beer would have to have in it for it to be worth so much. Breastmilk? Miracle anti-oxidants? sheeeeeit. But watching you drink it is fine with me, 10% ABV would put me down too quick anyway.
Cheers, fellas! I am officially a fan. Keep up the good work!
This three minute, 50 second video was featured as a web extra to accompany a story about seahorses in the January 2009 issue of Mālamalama online.
My job was to coordinate the production, do the interviews, edit the spoken audio and when we didn’t have all of what we needed, to do some narrative voice-over. The decision to add the voice-over was last-minute and it ended up being recorded in an empty office with leftover fake Xmas snow used as sound insulation(?!).
This web extra has had over 400 views on Vimeo so far; that’s the version embedded into the story, but you have to go to Vimeo to see the glorious HD version. We used Vimeo because we were having some problems uploading to our Mālamalama YouTube channel. Now YouTube is cooperating, so I’ve embedded the HD version here.
Splitting our views between different video hosts is obviously not ideal. YouTube is less elegant than Vimeo, but it has a *much* larger community. Vimeo looks awesome, and for a small fee, we’d be allowed to embed HD video on our site, but no decision has been made yet.
I welcome any feedback and opinions on the issue of video hosting and playback.
So I’m adding them all but justifying the lack of editorial eye by using this as a chance to play with the NextGEN photo gallery plugin (again).
This time it needs to be a sidebar with a thumbnail that launches the whole photo gallery, from alongside a larger story. This is a functionality that has been requested at Mālamalama, just testing it here.
By the way if anyone else is just getting started with NextGEN Gallery plugin, there are some helpful instructions available from this guy.
UPDATE January 12, 2009
Doing this all kinds of wrong, ugh. Using the compact view album instead of a link to a gallery that has it’s own page(!!). Makes a lot more sense… I think? Only thing is, I can’t have words wrap around this because if I put it in a narrow div then the gallery and slideshow try to open within it.
Now to figure out why the captions don’t show in the slideshow…
Malamalama, the magazine where I have been a writer and online editor (content manager) for the past several years, is being cut back from three to two print issues per year.
However, they’re adding 4 web-only issues to the production schedule–in addition to weekly updates–which means more online content is needed, especially audio and video. As a feature journalist and content producer the chance to work with an enthusiastic team on new media projects is super fun, even with the increased workload(!).
So far we’ve taken a collaborative approach to the producer’s role of these web extras and are improvising and learning with every assignment. I’ve mostly been the one to collect and edit the interviews (with sound help as needed) while magazine art director Rowen Tabusa and photographer R. David Beales handle the visual content and editing. Then I write the meta data or descriptions, upload the content and often do some online promotion.
Links to our web extras with a few notes on productions are below.
Feedback is very welcome!
Web Extras
Bamboo Ridge: Celebrating 30 years of local writing and writers written by me, picture by Cory Lum, audio and video work by Rowen Tabusa. The Bamboo Ridge package was for the first online issue in the new magazine layout–why yes, it *is* built on WordPress heh–a whole other accomplishment of which I am proud and enjoyed working on.
From Page to Stage, a behind-the-scenes look at The Little Snow Fox and Other Tales of the North Pacific. This was put together in lightening speed with almost no advance planning — whew!
Homecoming 2008 cute slideshow put together by David and Rowen.
Our best work came next, the Writing with Thread feature about a world-class textile show in the art gallery. This one hit a minor chord with YouTube commenters.
Most recently, Newcomer Butterfly has a Light Footprint is one I wrote and did an audio extra recorded over the telephone (photographs by lepidopterist Jim Snyder). This is my most self-contained web extra and even includes my voice sounding goofy as usual. I do like that Yahoo audio player that comes out.
Taken Nov. 30, 2008, off an Oahu lanai with a pocket camera that doesn’t begin to capture the color and texture of this beautiful evening.
According to the tv news, tonight was supposedly the best night for this biyearly phenomenon, but it was cloudy where we stood and only the crescent moon managed to break through, for a short time. Maybe tomorrow will be good.
Carousel Candyland in Kahala Mall is the only place in Hawaii with a reliable source of black licorice and most importantly, the salty salmiak kind. Above are the four strong ones they had earlier this week.
The kitty kat one is very mild and sweet with a hard, gummi texture but sort of a waxy, shell coating. The diamond and the coin are Dutch, very salty. Both are usually chewy, but unfortunately this double salt coin is hard and stale. The lil gumdrop is somewhere in the middle flavor-wise, sweet but with a definite tang.
Yesterday there were two serious accidents involving bicyclists on Oʻahu, both before dawn, one a fatal hit and run. With bikes sales increasing as people try to work around the laughable rise in gas prices, this is definitely a cause for concern and perhaps the start of a disturbing new trend.
Last year, I gave up my parking pass and have been biking to and from work. I live about 10 minutes away from my job so it’s not like a Herculean feat, tho I do sometimes do it in a skirt and heels. And then it starts to rain! But for the most part, I think it’s actually easier than driving. Plus it’s fun, good exercise and there is no sticker shock at the pump, cuz air is still free. But commuting by bike has given me a perspective on how bike-unfriendly the city can be.
For example, the ridiculous bike lanes that put cyclists in glass-strewn gutters alongside cars rushing on and off the freeway, like on University Ave. going up to UH. I don’t go that route. It sucks. The lower part of University is better, but even still, a line on the ground demarcating a narrow path between a row of parked cars on one side and careless drivers on the other is kinda sketchy. Luckily I don’t have to go that way too often; day to day I ride side streets instead.
The problem there is that some drivers don’t seem to think that the rules of the road apply between them and bicyclists. They often don’t bother to signal, and if it is a narrow street where two cars would have to squeeze to get by, they just stay right in the middle if I’m coming towards them on a bike. Not cool!
There are definitely more people of all ages biking around town these days. Yes, some of them are inconsiderate and stupid. But in the end, more bikes = less cars on the road. We all agree that’s a good thing, right?
Eating cheesecake and sampling cocktails, yeah, I know, I make it look easy. But the painstaking hours of research paid off because both these articles look good enough to eat. And drink.
A Sergio Goes photo takes full page in the Hana Hou piece and the four (count em, 4!) pages in HI Luxury include a shot of my girl Chia making a sour face while muddling limes. haha.
The afternoon sun was an unnatural-looking orange smudge in the sky when I got off work yesterday. The city was covered in a blanket of gray. I honestly thought there was huge fire somewhere. Nope, just the vog back again.
These were taken the today, looking into Manoa valley.
Weather people say it should clear by the end of the weekend when the winds change. One TV newscast reports that the most noxious of the sulfurous fumes dont travel too far from the eruption. *cross fingers* Tho the Big Island gets the worst of it, vog is causing health problems across the islands and apparently economic ones, too.
My contacts feel like plastic wrap on my eyeballs; sinuses and throat are itchy. I think I’m building up an immunity tho, last month I was sneezing and sniffling like crazy. Meh.
The band was in-between songs and there were still tables open when I walked in to the Dragon Upstairs last Saturday, just behind a group of retiree-aged hipsters. “C’mon in,” boomed a voice from a dimly-lit corner; the band gestured for us to do the same. I gamely follow a white-haired man in a pin-stripped fedora into the intimate, match-box sized club.
Stressing and pressurizing the local as a site of “critical resistance” posits a more dynamic way of imagining the relationship of a region, nation, and globe in which difference is not subsumed nor reified but circulated and affirmed” (Wilson 14).
I side-stepped the bell of a trumpet held close and low, nodding to the band while snaking past the potentially expectoration-flecked front line, to the raised seating area where Rowen, Miki and Hank sat holding court at the best table in the house.
It was only the second time I’d met Hank, the owner of both the Dragon Upstairs and Hank’s Cafe, another live music venue downstairs in the same Nuuanu Street building. Last year was the first time we’d met, I’d interviewed him for an article for Hawaii Luxury magazine. He’d impressed me with his charisma and passion for music. I’d sat at the bar drinking chardonnay, asking questions and scribbling notes for my story. Eventually he leaned in and spelled it out: “I want Hawaiian jazz.”
It’s a pet peeve of mine how bag-happy the local grocery stores can be. Does the 12-pack of soda–with the handle–really need to be double-plastic-bagged?? I think not. Sheesh. My theory is they use as many bags as possible so you feel like your $80 worth of groceries got you something, but canvas, mesh and reusable plastic bags tell the truth, well, at least, they hold more and don’t require double-bagging.
A few years ago, I was too shy to bust out my own bag at the store. I didn’t want to be that granola chick holding up the line at Long’s offering a funky net bag or tote bag to the cashier. But when I got three of these bags for Christmas, I figured I’d at least use em at Kokua Market where the organic-loving clientele wouldn’t blink. Now I’m so used to carrying them around, I have no shame to bust em out at Safeway or the corner liquor store. Sometimes the clerk even thanks me.
Apparently normal plastic bags take like 1,000 years to degrade (or a few decades, depending on the source) and require obscene quantities of crude oil to make. When you combine that with the huge number we go through and the damage they can do in marine environments, it def becomes a problem–but a solvable one. You can easily find out more, it’s a trendy topic right now. Regarding that last link, I personally don’t see the need to make a fashion statement out of a shopping bag, I think it kind of misses the point that if you only have a few things to carry, any old bag will usually do, messenger, backpack, tote bag, whatever, but yea, whatever.
At the same time, banning plastic bags outright doesn’t seem totally necessary. They’ve recently done this in San Francisco and are discussing it in Hawaii and in a number of cities elsewhere. I think charging for (biodegradable) plastic bags would be fair and offering recycling for plastic bags seems like a great idea.
