I got back this morning, with a broken toe and a completed script for an ultra-short, but I’m getting ahead of myself. Here are the things I posted in my head while on vacation:
Hawaiian Grafitti. The drive from Kona to our hotel crosses a basically 20-mile lava field, an otherworldly (read, Icelandic) landscape devoid of humanity. Except, of course for the ubiquitous/distracting/engrossing white-coral-on-black-lava grafitti. There’s surprisingly little online, so I took a picture. There are some petroglyph-style examples, and a few hearts, but most tags are just head-on text (including a few in Japanese and Korean). Maybe it was tagging along at an astronomy conference, but I thought making constellation grafitti (foreshortened, so it can be read from a speeding car) would be truer to the medium.
Heat The fine officers on Hawaii Five-0 did all that great detective work while wearing suits. Even with a childhood in the South and more than a little fashion victimhood, I could barely put on a t-shirt. (Fellow salad bar diners, don’t worry; I did put it on.)
Crime. The pervasive “pay before pumping” signs made me think gas-n-go is the most common crime on Hawaii. Not a Triad or a jade smuggler in sight. Where did McGarrett & co. (and Magnum, too, for that matter) find all these criminals?
Christian Hip-Hop. While we were driving through the vast ranchland and lava fields, we found Urban Filez, hosted by DJ Sizzle; favorite lyric excerpt: “after three days and nights He popped up like a toaster.” Righteous living=righteous music + righteous gear. Fosheezy is the clothing line named after a non-swear word I’d previously only heard on trips to Utah (where it dominates other f-words like “flippin’,” “friggin’, ” and “fetch”). Maybe the proliferation of ChristAltRock cleaned up the crime; it’s certainly influenced the taggers.
