TIKI CULTURE

Memories from Hukilau 2010, Fort Lauderdale

There’s nothing like getting a bunch of swingin’ kats and kittens together with island music, vintage threads and lots of rum. Well kids, let me tell you, his year’s Hukilau didn’t disappoint. From tattooed chicks in short skirts and flower leis to guys wearing palm tree shirts and short-brimmed fedoras, the eclectic crowd that swamped Fort Lauderdale was more fun than a barrel of fez-wearing monkeys.

That's me, Tiki Chris with three of my best girls - Colleen, Shannon & Molly

If you’ve been to an event like this (or to this one) you know how much fun can be packed into a couple of rum-drenched days. If you haven’t then you should definitely plan to. Our presence at the event was truncated due to a busy work schedule, but we still had a fantastic time on Friday night, Saturday and Saturday night. Read the rest of this entry »

Looking forward to the Hukilau!

The Hukilau in Fort Lauderdale is this weekend, and I must say that us kats and kittens at Pirate’s Cove Tiki Bar have been looking forward to this since we left last year’s shindig. This year, we’ll be hitting the Mai Kai for dinner and show with a couple of friends who’ve never seen it…in fact, even though they’ve lived down here in the land of palm trees and Mojitos for years, they’ve never been to the Mai Kai at all. Krazy, huh?

Bahia Cabana, site of the Hukilau

That brings up a point. It amazes me just how little most people know about our little Tiki and Retro culture, even though if you look hard enough, it’s everywhere. The Hukilau is one of the largest Tiki events in the galaxy, and brings in a lot of business to Fort Lauderdale. Yet most of the people I’ve yapped about it to have never even heard of it. Hell, I didn’t find out about it until just a few years ago, and I love this stuff! Maybe it’s best kept as a best kept secret, huh?

As for this  weekend, we’ll be attending the Friday night party and we’ll be at Bahia Cabana during the day on Saturday; we’ll be watching the premier of the Tikimentary ‘In Search of the Lost Paradise’; we’re going to the Wreck Bar for the Mermaid Show and will hit the Mai Kai in the evening. (Note to burglars: We have a very large dog, an cop-wired alarm and a next door neighbor with a shotgun and a coke habbit).

So as far as Tiki Lounge Talk posts go, not sure how things are going to play out in the next couple of days, so you might not hear from me until Sunday. That of course depends on the level of intoxication achieved at The Hukilau, catch my drift? Groovy. And for those swingers going to the big party - see you there kids…just like last year, I’ll be the guy in the Hawaiian shirt!

-Tiki Chris Pinto, reporting from the lanai next to the pool.

Key West, Retro Style

Key West Brochure, c. 1960s. Click for hi-res version.

Time to hop in the convertible and motorvate down along the Overseas Highway Kids!

Just imagine dropping the top on your ’64 Cadillac deVille, tuning in the AM radio to some groovin’ Rock ’n’ Roll station and swingin’ down along A-1-A from Miami to US 1, all the way down to the southernmost point of the continental United States. You stop for a burger and Mojito at a roadside Tiki stand, buy a couple of stuffed baby alligators and cruise over the Seven Mile Bridge into the land of palm trees and sailfish.

And you got the idea from this fantabulous piece of promotional advertising, ‘Your Treasure Map to ‘Sea’ Florida Keys and Key West, for the vacation thrill of your life. Now, I’ve never heard of old-days Keys as being referred to as ‘thrilling’ before…sleepy, laid back, relaxing maybe…but then again I’ve seen some crazy stuff at Rick’s so…

Click on the pix to enlarge them enough to read the copy. It’s pretty neat. I especially dig the hand-painted artwork of the Keys map. We just don’t build stuff like this anymore. Sure, CGI is fantastic…but it doesn’t have the feel of the old, hand-produced stuff. Just imagine..an artist had to paint this, then a team of graphic artists had to do mechanicals, color separations, cut rubies, hand-set the type…oof, I’m gettin’ a headache just thinking about it! Something like this would have taken weeks to produce in the 60s. My my my how times have changed, huh kids?

Here’s the map on the back of the brochure.

Below is the copy on the inside.

Florida Keys and Key West Treasure Map

Florida Keys Brochure

-Tiki Chris, reporting from somewhere lost in the Keys, near a Tiki Bar with a giant lobster out front.

Art Deco & Mid-Century Modern Come Together in Downtown Hollywood, Florida

It was a beautiful day in downtown Hollywood, Florida where I work. Sun shining, puffy white clouds, not too crazy hot. So I decided to take my trusty Instamatic Camera (not really, it’s a digital camera) and head down to the happinin’ section of Hollywood Boulevard.

Hollywood was founded in 1925 by a visionary named Joseph Young who wanted to build his dream city in Florida. It quickly became a thriving city, with beachfront hotels, beautiful homes, and a busy downtown area. This downtown was first built up in the mid to late 20s, with some slowing during the depression and WW2. It found a resurgence in the 50s, as many vacation spots did, and had a building boom through the 60s. This history led to a unique combination of early Art Deco construction, Spanish-Floridian construction, and Mid-Century Modern.

It’s amazing that these buildings were able to survive through the architectual vacuum of the 70s and 80s, but some managed to hang on with their original look intact. The late 90s saw a re-popularization of the original styles, and luckily the popularization has remained through the present leading to numerous restorations, retro-refitting of more recent dull buildings, and dig this…brand new construction in the Art Deco and Mid-Century style. Seriously. (continued after the slide show)

I was able to get some very nice shots of the Art Deco and Mid-Century Modern buildings along the boulevard. One of my favorite buildings is the Great Southern Hotel, located on the corner of Hollywood Boulevard and Young’s Circle. I believe Young himself had this hotel built as part of the city plan back in the mid 20’s. It has a sort of Florida-Spanish style combined with that 1920s pre-Deco look you see in a lot of shore towns. What the hell do I mean by that? Basically it means simplicity, symmetry, and terra cotta.

There are a good number of trendy nightclubs and cafés along the boulevard, and most of them have stuck with the retro look. It’s nice to see people taking these historic styles seriously, and appreciating them for the timeless beauty they portray.

***

Funny story about The Great Southern hotel. When we first moved to Florida in 2000, my wife and I took a drive to Hollywood to check it out. At that time it was in a state of change; a lot of stores were vacant, and still looked like they did in the 70s. I noticed the big white hotel on the corner, and thought to myself that it looked really familiar, but couldn’t place it. Mind you this is the first trip I ever took to Hollywood. Anyway, a few years later in 2005, I end up working in a building on Hollywood Boulevard a couple of blocks from downtown. While there I picked up a local paper, which happened to have a story about “The Great Southern Hotel” on the cover. The story was about how the owners wanted to tear it apart to put up a parking garage, how the city didn’t see anything wrong with that, and how the historical society was about ready to commit murder if necessary before letting that happen. The name rung a bell…but I still couldn’t catch it. Then one day it came to me…where I’d seen that name. It was in a movie, which I ran out and bought right away.

There it was, in one of the last scenes of Midnight Cowboy from 1967. Joe Buck and Ratzo Rizzo are headed down to Miami on a bus. The bus stops for a break, and Joe Buck ditches his cowboy outfit and boots for a Hawaiian shirt. As he shoves the boots into a trash can, you can clearly see a giant white building with the name “Great Southern Hotel” in giant letters in the background. That was it; a scene in a movie I had seen when I was about 13 had stuck in my head for years…and as fate would have it, I wind up working down the street from the place. But here’s what’s even more interesting: One of the themes of the movie is that the characters want to get out of the city, out of the cold, away from the freaks up north and down to sunny Florida where the palm trees sway and you can pick the oranges right off the trees. Well, my father and I used to joke around about it all the time, that we had the same dream. Finally, in 2000, he, my wife and I made it down here. “Everybody’s Talkin’ at Me” from the movie was going through my head as we crossed the Georgia border into Florida. The sun actually was shining through the pouring rain as we drove down I-95 into Fort Lauderdale. My father, who was very sick at the time, made it down right behind us, but unlike Ratzo lived a few years to enjoy it. Whenever I see the Great Southern I think of him, and how we both got our dream to come true.

(This is a repost from last year, but it was such a popular one I thought I’d give it another view)
-Tiki Chris Pinto, for the Tiki Blog

A Little Chili in South Florida

Even in the land of swaying palms and warm sunshine, we get a few days when the temp dips down below 70°. This is one of those days. We had to bring the parrots inside from the lanai last night, because it went down to the 50°s! Seems strange when it gets chilly like this. Reminds me of the North. And I don’t like the weather in the North.

Which reminds me once again, why I moved to Sunny South Florida. Oh, there were tons of krazy reasons, but the thing that nailed the lid down on the coffin was when in Winter of 2000, during a light but annoying snowfall, I went to put my key into the door lock of my ’75 Buick LeSabre Convertible (which hadn’t had the top down in months), and the keys flew out of my frozen, trembling hand and landed in three inches of snow. It was the soft, powdery snow, and it promptly closed in on itself, disguising the place where the keys landed. To make matters worse, there was a good two inches of oak leaves and stringy dead grass under the snow. In the end, it took two hours, a rake, a shovel, and frozen feet and hands before I found them. It was then I vowed never again to live in a climate where A) I couldn’t put the ragtop down year round, B) The weather sucked eggs 9+ months out of the year, and C) I could ever lose my keys in the snow.

So here I am, where the sun keeps shinin’ through the pouring rain, where the weather suits my clothes. Today I’m wearing a sport jacket over my Hawaiian print shirt to keep out the chill. In a couple of days it will be in the 70’s again, and all will be right with the world.

-CP