Honolulu Advertiser Covers IZ Book

Honolulu showbiz eminence grise Wayne Harada mentioned my IZ book in the Advertiser last week, quoting a press release that I think came out from the Mountain Apple Company, IZ's record label.

...with New York-based writer Dan Kois (a former Honolulu resident who has contributed to The Advertiser and Honolulu magazine) zooming in on the late Island entertainer's "Rainbow" connection, thanks to "Over the Rainbow/What a Wonderful World."

Well, I do hope the book will zoom in on a lot more, but I'm grateful for the mention. Thanks, Wayne!

The Sanjaya of His Era

Don Ho, who died of heart failure Saturday at 76, was inarguably a terrific entertainer. In many ways, he was his era's Sanjaya: a crooner, a showman, a lover boy. Like the ponyhawked American Idol contestant, he could connect directly with an audience, whether on TV or live; like Sanjaya, he also represented to mainstream America the harmless exotic, the "other" who was safe to admire from a distance. Ho's long and happy career should serve as warning to those who dismiss Sanjaya as a flash in the pan whose fifteen minutes are about to run out. (It's not hard to imagine a 76-year-old Sanjaya playing to packed houses in Vegas, as Ho did in Waikiki; all he needs to find is his signature song.)

For his whole career, Ho represented a certain image of Hawai'i: the islands as vacation mecca for haoles from the mainland, a kitschy paradise of co-eds, beach boys, and tiny bubbles. Despite his outdated act, and despite the fact that few locals attended his Thursday-night shows at the Waikiki Beachcomber, he's being canonized in Hawai'i today. The flood-the-zone coverage in his hometown paper reflects the state's love for any native son, no matter how little he has to do with everyday Hawaiians, and no matter how skilled he actually is. (I still remember the 2000 World Series, in which local boy Benny Agbayani was the lead story in the Honolulu papers, not the Mets or the Yankees or even the games themselves. AGBAYANI HITS DOUBLE, the headlines would scream, and then in tiny type underneath: "Mets Lose 6-5.")

Ho began and ended every concert with his signature tune, "Tiny Bubbles" -- a song he professed to hate but nevertheless played twice, once early for the audience members who had to go to bed, and once late for the audience members who wouldn't remember he sang it the first time. I prefer to remember him for his jaw-dropping 2002 cover of Peter Gabriel's "Shock the Monkey." It's not that good, but he sure sounds like he's having a great time singing it. Me ke aloha pumehana, Don Ho.

Kurt Vonnegut Joins Rodney Dangerfield in Heaven

Unlike many readers, I discovered Kurt Vonnegut not through a friendly English teacher or an older brother or a dog-eared copy of Breakfast of Champions found at a local hippie's rummage sale. No, I discovered Vonnegut through his cameo in the Rodney Dangerfield film Back to School.

In Back to School, Dangerfield's character, millionaire Thornton Mellon, has returned to college in order to encourage his son's faltering academic career. Assigned a paper on Kurt Vonnegut, Mellon commissions an essay from the author himself, who (as I recall) appears at the front door of Mellon's spaciously remodeled dormitory suite in the middle of a raging kegger. I still remember seeing Vonnegut's cheerful, rumpled-suit person in the midst of that madness and thinking, "Is that guy real?" To start with, Vonnegut looked like Central Casting's idea of a novelist more than he looked like an actual novelist. And a famous writer -- a writer famous enough to be taught in English classes, anyways -- showing up in a movie that even my 12-year-old self could recognize as somewhat trashy (though awesome) seemed so out of line with the mein of a Serious Writer that I immediately became interested in his work.

Vonnegut's inability to take himself too seriously -- so much so that he was perfectly willing to cameo in a Rodney Dangerfield movie -- characterizes his writing, and it's what made his books the perfect gateway writer for young readers like me moving from genre books to literary fiction. Kurt Vonnegut was the first "serious" writer I ever read, but I read him precisely because he wasn't "serious." His novels were approachable and playful and used plots and techniques I was already familiar with from the sci-fi novels of my youth.

In Back to School, Mellon's essay on Vonnegut -- written by Vonnegut -- gets an F. "Whoever did write this doesn't know the first thing about Kurt Vonnegut!" Mellon's professor rages. Cut to Mellon on the phone, shouting, "And another thing, Vonnegut! I'm gonna stop payment on the check!" I always liked to imagine a giggling Vonnegut on the other end of this conversation, lighting a cigar with Thornton Mellon's check, delighted to have delivered an intentionally incompetent essay on himself. So it goes!

Anti-Climate Change Concert: Exit 16W

So "Live Earth" US has been scheduled for Giants Stadium on July 7. It's a concert benefiting anti-climate change charities, and will feature a lot of acts I'd really like to see: the Police, Kanye West, Smashing Pumpkins, Ludacris, Rihanna, Kelly Clarkson. However, Giants Stadium is such a total nightmare to get to that it would take some kind of dream lineup to get me there. Like, the Beatles, Marvin Gaye, circa-1981 R.E.M. and Wolfgang Amadeus Fucking Mozart. The one time I ever went to Giants Stadium, for an exhibition match between Juventus and Manchester United, getting in and out of the stadium required wells of ingenuity of the depth usually reserved for solving the Middle East crisis.

We probably should've driven, but instead tried to take a bus from the Port Authority. After walking past the (literally) block-long lines for Meadowlands shuttle buses, we bought tickets for a regular NJ Transit bus and convinced the driver to just let us off at a gas station a half-mile from the stadium. We got into the stadium in time, but when the game began less than half of the seats in the sold-out house were filled and most of our friends didn't get there until halftime. After the game, it took us over three hours to get home.

So to recap: unless you are willing to drive the New Jersey Turnpike to this anti-climate change concert, you should probably leave right now to get there on time.