 warm welcome back to this think-tank wise human, human architecture. You are happening to be with us the 318th time if you watch all the episodes of this show here. And us is you, Distolo Brown, otherwise Bishop Museum Historian with us again, I, Distolo. Good morning, good day, whatever it is for when you're watching this. Mm-hmm, and me, Martin, the Spang. And this is catching up on your birthday, which you had last week, and we celebrated in the breakers, both of you turning 70. And today we're gonna reflect and probably more shows, we're gonna reflect a little bit on what the sparks of the breakers can all cause or have caused. And for sure, if it's one thing that it has to do with internationally, it's about the perception of paradise. And although the Tiki movement really didn't originate particularly here, but on other Polynesian islands, Tahiti being one of them, many people are associated with us, right? So I'm back to back, I'm talking birthdays and we're thinking about, you know, when now our different rich is currently in the hospital and Bandit is on his side and, you know, his engine needs a little bit of re-tuning. So we wish him all the best. And so, again, birthdays, all that we get then think about every day is a birthday, right? But in many cultures or religion, we celebrate that one day that we were born on. And back to back, when this show will be posted, we'll have been our exotic escapism expert, Susanna's birthday, have been. And she's also our foreign correspondent in many ways because when I can't be there, she keeps feeding us with things. And you like, she brought you ones, what did she bring you this photo? She brought me the Trader Vic's menu from Munich. It's the German one. And that was a big moment of excitement and I was presented that right here on this show. So I got to get it live in front of an audience. That made it even more fun. Exactly. And that one is from, for you, the historian, it's from 1972, our favorite year in many ways. And it was when the Olympics were there that we're very fond of. And that is still there, which is really great. And it's pretty much unchanged, but we also want to report on new things. So here is the surprise now. When I was there over the holidays, we were doing this footage here. This is a new bar and that is called Maui. And it's got this phrase that we got a kick out of that you see here. They're called this Hawaiian kitchen. So it's obviously a blend of fuse, a fusion of Hawaiian and Asians. So they don't want to just cook Hawaiian, whatever people think about what that even is, Brian. And I threw in a couple of other cookies. So here is your fan and collector of menus. So here's a menu here with the things that I thought you get the most pick out of it. So what's your response? What do you see? This, as usual, one of the things that amazes me as a native speaker of American English is how pervasive the English language is all over the world in so many different cultures. And it amazes me to see that in Germany, as you, for you, it's normal, but for me, it's amazing, how much English is in use in everyday life there and how sometimes menus are almost entirely in English for German people. And so here we have what, the Honolulu Juicer, the Kama Aina, the Blue Hawaiian on the menu. Now, one of the things that just happened to me in reverse, you can see in the upper right corner of the screen here because I was at a coffee bean restaurant, not a restaurant, but a coffee place. And I looked at the familiar yellow and black danger signs or warning signs. The two of my great surprise right in front of me, this one not only was in English and not only was in Spanish, which we often see, but it also has German on it. And I thought, why on earth is there a German caution sign in Honolulu and why does the company even make them with German and Spanish? How many places in the world would those languages, those three languages all be in current use? But regardless of that, it's a little touch of Germany in Honolulu rather than a large touch of Honolulu in Germany, which is what we normally see. Yeah, and the word for you, the home work word for you was, you see it down there. Yeah, and I can't remember. It means slip hazard. And I can't remember what it was. Rutschgefahr as it says down there, but that's- Rutschgefahr. There you go. Very good, very good, very good. That's right. So with us going back to the menu, it's actually a fusion too, because if you read the ingredients that's here, at the very bottom, Koko's creme is not an English word, nor is titonens up. The others are. So it's again, it's this blend, which the Mai Tai, which Jose and Happy Birthday again is holding there, right? And so it's all a blend, right? We're all one big world now and we can go to these little places some more than others, because it takes some money to do that. So it's not as inclusive as we wish, but it's not as back in the days when the whole movement was born where people pretty much in America couldn't travel a lot because that was the beginning of America becoming very prosperous. And then so it was basically brought to them, rather than going to it, right? Yeah. This is an architect to show after all this. What did you want to say? Well, I was gonna say too that there was also a fascination in Germany with the South Seas and with Hawaii. And for them, it was really out of the question, even until quite just recent decades to be able to travel that far away. The technology wasn't there. It was far too expensive. It took far too much time. And so hardly anybody in Germany who longed for a romantic warm vacation could actually take one. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And that's why we retract through these restaurants where it's heated. That was Christmas, you know, and it's nice and cozy. The, it's a nice, you know, architecture is also interior design, as they call it, or interior architecture. In best case, there is no separation between the two in the old days of Frank Lloyd Wright and Charles Rennie McIntosh, our member in Glasgow. It was all the arts and crafts and everything is one thing. But this is a restaurant in an existing building and it's fairly nicely done. The vegetation, however, is artificial that we don't like. So it tries hard, again, to get you into the mood of the place they name it after. And it's a good place. We like it. We go there. And the way I found out about it, this gets us back to exterior architecture versus interior architecture because when I had to be at this building there at the top, which is a longer story, but I was standing there because I was angry because this is my embassy. This is the, while you have a Hawaiian side and an American side, I have an American side since a couple of years and a German side. So my American side was going there because we had some visa issue with Suzanne that we don't want to get into. That's a longer story. So while being going there and trying to make my case, I needed you to find parking with a twingo and around that area, I found this restaurant. So it's very close by to actually where these sort of, I guess the representation of American culture is politically because this is the consulate in Munich. And this is of course for you to make you happy. This is a historic picture because you can only imagine why it doesn't look like that. I mean, the buildings are still there but there was an event in 2001 that changed it forever as the world. So now it's all dedicated. Now it's all protected with big boulders and stuff like that. But we threw in that little text here that we researched. Also the building's origination is actually a blend, is a fusion like you do with drinks, with picky or the music, right? The exotic music, these are all blends. This is a blend because America thought that it's utmost corporate firms, Gitmo Owings Merrill that we've been talking a lot about, to our favorite buildings we have on the islands here which is the Monarchy Beach Hotel and on New Age, the School of Engineering, both buildings and America thought, okay, they're gonna build our embassy. Well then these stubborn Bavarians, as we'd heard Suzanne is one of them, basically said, no, no, no, you're not gonna do that. That's gonna be very imperialist, you know? We need to set you aside one of our architects. And this is also our favorite, there's a show yet to be aired, which we call Germany's most Hawaii architect. And that sounds very exciting, hopefully for you. And so I look forward to that one. And so that is Zepp Roof. And Zepp Roof was then sort of collaborating. So again, the building is both, right? It's both American and German and it's a blend of the two. And again, Suzanne, our foreign correspondent part of the day when she came off work, which is working at a school, they had the U.S. diplomat, the utmost ambassador of the United States in Germany, Amy Gutman, you would call her, but her name traces back to German, that is Gutmann. And she came to commemorate the White Rose event and we had the 79th anniversary of you, Americans. Thank you to Soto and everyone else and Ron as a veteran having saved us from our darkest, what we caused ourselves and basically liberated us from that Nazi regime and also again, the Holocaust. And Auschwitz was basically liberated 79 years ago. And that's the content that she is basically coming. She's coming to, she spoke at LMU, which is the Ludwig Maximilian University, which is not Tom that we actually have in exchange Thomas Auer come to speak us and put this on your calendar. It's gonna be in March. I'll tell you the exact date, it's a must, you need to go. So Thomas comes all the way from Germany and talks about climate engineering, which is something we think is very, very important. So he's from Tom, but she spoke at LMU and she also spoke at Suzanne school to the students there again about the importance of anti-Semitism not happening again. For sure, if there's one country culture it shouldn't happen again, it's ours because we've been there, done it in the worst way, right? So that is all hot off the press as of today. And so we can move on to the next slide. And this is also very familiar to you in many ways, right? We did many coverages on that one, air ventilated mobiles and air ventilated immobilia, which is architecture. But this is also interesting that again, like the Maui Munich is of these days, right? Like you think of Tiki bars being from back in the day, right? So different than the breakers. This is about what is the breakers doing? What is the breakers keeping alive? So while this is the T2 model, it's not the very first bus that was the T1, but that's the T2. And that one was produced. I'm getting very sort of patriotic in my hometown of Hanover. This is where all the buses by VW were done are still done to these days, but also in other parts of Germany and also in other parts of the world. And this is the point here. When I was doing a little cruising trip to check on with our PI mobile driving by the Obama, because again, one of his buddies, the Magnum PI had one of these, right? And so I'm always checking on what's going on there. And I'm driving by a little further Sandy Beach and I see this thing here and I check these people up. And what they told me is totally fascinating. First of all, they said they rent this, which is makes us, okay, this is kind of illegal, right? Because you can actually drive around in these, but you cannot sleep in them. That's the law because they want to, you know, prevent competition between all the profit making hotels and Airbnb these days. And the second thing is that I basically said, wow, what year is this? And they said, well, we have lots of people coming by and actually teaching us that this is a novelty from another tropical area. This is a Brazil-made bus that was made until fairly recently in 2013 while the original one was discontinued in 79, I believe. So this is again, just like with a tiki, the legacy goes on and is to be continued because people think something actually both tropical exotic, although not born necessarily, you know, here, but they both very much identify as artist Nick Kuchar, who's following us and we him at the top right, you see. I gave you a sticker for Christmas from his beetle sticker, you know, so he's very much indulging in that sort of zeitgeist and he calls it the van life. That particular sticker is called the van life. Well, again, Nick is also, as you see, he's showing himself in front of his own bus, which we like the most because that's the utmost easy breezy. And hey, doggie behind you, you're doggie, there's a fellow doggie looking through there. So I'm sure they're gonna all get very excited about it. Don't give her any ideas. She's caught them all, but leave her alone. The really cool thing about this is at, you know, while it was from the distance really looked very familiar to me, not only, you know, hometown-wise where they were made and they're my culture, but the closer I got and this also applying to these tiki places, you know, when it's well done like the Maui Munich, so this is probably the good analogy from the other realm, you know, first you think like, oh, it looks kind of, you know, there is no such thing of authenticity. It's the authenticity of fakeness or the fakeness of authenticity. It's all fictional, right? But it's well done. And then the closer I got, I saw so many details that didn't, they made sense to them, but not to me where I came from. So I watched like you, a lot of YouTube's where they were going on and on what they all changed and actually optimized. Like for example, in Brazil, no autobahns existing. So bumpy roads, so they actually need to weld in more kind of, you know, trusses and beams to stiffen out the car and other things like that. They're really, I think I can see just by looking at it, the arrangement of the windows is different. And that was, I think the thing that also impresses me is that Volkswagen's, as we've discussed many, many times became so international and became locally here associated with a whole sort of subculture. And the vans in particular in California, the West Coast and here in the Hawaiian islands became associated with surfing. And so this is something that obviously is foreign to Germany where the van originated, but it was adopted and adapted for surfing and surf culture in the United States and here in Hawaii. And that's something that again, is nobody could have anticipated it. It just evolved that way. And today the reason that Nick does these stickers of Volkswagen's is because they are associated in memory with this carefree surfing lifestyle that nobody in Germany ever thought about when they were first under construction. Yeah. And, you know, he even has his doggy, your guy's doggy as part of the sticker. That's really good. And again, why, with all these problems in the world, why are we kind of, you know, doing dinking around here with recreational vehicles? There's another show that we have pre-produced already, which makes us rethink maybe revisiting the policy of that the mobile can be in immobilia again. So again, the strictness again of no RVs here, no trailers is really coming from again the profitability of the hotels. They don't want that. They don't want that as competition. So hopefully no one watches this and reports that that would be unfair because I think this is nice because I asked them also because talking about affordability, right? Do we price out paradise? That's what we do, right? Everything gets gentrified and in this show we will show things that used to be, you know, relatively, you know, affordable and are not anymore. So this one here, I asked them and I said, you know, we're here for five days and we thought, you know, this is a good alternative and it was 200 bucks per night. And now if you think about you need to rent the hotel room and you need to rent a car, this is then, you know, still, I mean, the breakers is 150 starting, right? But to find a rental car for 50 bucks is probably tough, right? And so this is again, this is a rather inclusive way of hospitality and hopefully again, maybe rethinking it could also be an alternative to dwelling for the suburban, especially in this particular case which people are doing, right? They're finding the niches, you see vans, you know, out commissions, you know, larger vans from others that you can, you know, imagine people are living in there but it's not, you know, it's illegal. So again, you can drive in it but you can't sleep in it with this kind of an odd way of sort of legally thinking about it. So we want to encourage again maybe opening up the mind again and you, the audience, please do that. I mean, these are just examples of us dinking around and driving around and walking around and seeing things and sparking our curiosity and then digging deeper and there's a lot of potential here in things that we already have adopted and adapted as you perfectly put that. So let's go move on next slide and dive a little bit into our dive because talking a resort that the breakers claims to be and we've been supporting that in the previous show, what actually is now the munchy part of it which is the sushi restaurant, Ethel told us and Houston Guzman who is the landscaping guy, told us it used to be a tiki bar in it which makes them total sense, right? The breakers being Polynesian puffed themed and you have a tiki bar in it. Well, that's long gone and now is the sushi bar which is good to have too but they pointed out go over there. Diagonally across and end up on opposite, diagonally opposite of the post office there next to eggs and things there's this very kind of informal kind of entrance to this place here. Once again, kind of marked through this tiki poem told him and then so next slide that walks us through gets us closer. So here you see there's something happening in the back. Next slide, we're gonna walk you guys through here in a little faster pace. So, but here we can see details, right? It's obviously themed. So, formally we see what we expect from a tiki bar but formatively that we actually, if not more interested in, you can see here the protections from the elements, right? And once from the sun and second from the rain and you see this here in two parts, you got this sort of bamboo ladders that protects you from the sun but still lets light through its gaps and then you have a corrugated plastic over it. So we actually wish you all see soon have been there in the rain. And while all other people say, ooh, we gotta go inside, you know, we did not need to because they facilitated in a pretty clever way, which make us again think if you can do this for eating, you know then you might also be able to do this for living. That's our point all the time, right? Embrace the outdoor. So let's move on to the next slide. So here's where we were sitting under. And yes, they are a little sort of improvised. So these sails were like filling with rainwater and then the waitress had to come with a broomstick and get the water out and we had to move away from it for a time. But that makes it fun, right? And it makes you actually, when you then think, oh, I'm coming from New York City, you know, I could never do this. Well, when you sit inside, you forget about that, right? And here it's really kind of, you know, hypersensitizing you about what we are about here, you know, year round and day at night being able to do that. Next slide. Yeah, so it has an indoor part, but there's sliding doors, folding doors always open. I don't think they're ever closed. Next slide. And there is the indoor part of it with a counter and of course it has American culture watching TV all the time, right? And watching sports, but you can call it a sports bar, but you also got the sports utensil of the indigenous, the surfboard there. So once again, you got a blend of cultures, right? Next slide. This is important, I let you talk about it because the parts of it is also from you. Well, obviously a sports bar is usually intended for men and in a bar that's intended mostly for men, not that this bar is exclusively patronized by men, you also like to have sexy things of women. And in this particular situation, these are depictions of women sexualized in the pose of a hula dancer who's topless. Now, in reality, by the time photography got to the Hawaiian islands in the 1840s, Hawaiian women were not going around in public without covering their breasts. That had already long been established. The missionaries have been here since 1820 and women covered their bodies, but still it remained in other cultures, obviously in the Pacific and in Asia, there were women who were not covering their breasts. And so that's a sort of got pushed back into well, the Hawaiian women are the same way, which they were not. Here are not only in this life size or this large mannequin who's very sexualized, but also the photograph. So there are two sets of old photographs. The one on the lower one is in fact a picture from the 1800s, from the 1890s, but that woman is sitting in a photo studio. And one of the things that she's doing, she's sitting on a pahu drum. That is absolutely forbidden in Hawaiian culture. You do not do that. That's considered offensive. She's sitting on it because the photographer told her to as part of the pose and the fact that she doesn't have a top on is also part of what the photographer did. And the pictures above that are very interesting. They're from the early 1940s. They're from World War II. And this is a very young Asian woman, maybe even a teenager. She's probably Japanese. And she posed for a lot of topless and nude photographs at the time, which were sold as souvenirs to guys in the military. And I've always been curious about her story and why and how she was doing something like that, which in Japanese culture, for family connections would be considered rather shameful. So these are mysterious stories with, that you don't know the backstory of, even though just in this bar, they're just part of the decoration. And there's a little more to it than just that. Yeah. And it's very loaded, you know, gender and discrimination loaded. And it needs a lot of discussion. We're just kicking it off. And we actually have to then start out this way rightly so at the beginning. But in the few minutes left, I will say that again, the picture at the top left, the left one of the two, when you turn it around, it says the Soto Brown collection. In fact, when you buy it at a new stand, that surprises you. And the one at the bottom right is a Bishop Museum one. So, and again, and there are both, the picture I took at the bottom left is from our youngest one, Jonathan, who you know, when they were here. And he's displaying that in his shelf next to a Nixon watch case. That's also a surf, you know, accessory company. Anyway, so there's a lot of, again, the perception of paradise. And hopefully you're gonna be with us again when we continue on this one here. And until then, please stay profoundly Polynesian poppy versus post-modernly. See you next week. Bye-bye.