“The Misemono Spectacles of Asakusa Park,” from Tokyo fūzokushi, vol. 3 (1902), author Hirade Kōjirō, illustrator Matsumoto Senji.

In earlier times, Asakusa was elbow to chin with freak shows, clockwork automata, hydraulic automata, bawdy renditions of classics in loyalty and filial piety, figurative tableaux in bamboo basketry and dried kelp, raconteurs, thugs, and whores. In the last volume of his The Customs and Sights of Tokyo of 1902, gazetteer Hirade Kōjirō reported the following in the area: “ball riders, acrobats and cage escapers, living dolls, hand dancing, sword dancing, foot tricks (like shooting arrows and writing calligraphy), comic kyōgen, strongmen, sumo wrestling, top spinners, marionettes, moving pictures, dog theatre, monkey theatre, sparrow tricks,” and also exotic beasts like “tigers, leopards, elephants, crocodiles, and serpents.”

Modernization electrified some attractions. The coming of the cinema converted others to photograms and projected them onto walls. The expansion of the zoo at the Hanayashiki amusement park in the 1910s collected the monsters and put them in a cage.

“Asakusa Park and Twelve Stories in Flames,” from The Great Earthquake Illustrated (1923), lithograph print.

But in 1923, all was lost. What was burnable went to ashes. What was crushable was flattened. What was flesh crisped. And what could escape flew. To make room for refugees, many of the remaining animals at the zoo were poisoned. When Asakusa was rebuilt in the months following, it was done so steel-reinforced and neon-lit. Modanizumu had arrived. It was now the time of loudspeakers, the talkies, and racing car horns. But still the possibility did exist of hearing the sounds of a bygone city, the impossible made possible thanks to a private, personal, portable audio entertainment device developed in late 1923 and known as the Asakusa Eardrum.

The Asakusa Eardrum (1923), pine, 10-inch cube.

At a glance, even at a stare, the Asakusa Eardrum looks like nothing more than a small cube of planed pine. It has no external distinguishing features, but for its name written in ink on the top. One might think it held an expensive teacup, stored in boxes of similar dimension. When its lid was slid open, however, and an internal pin pressed, there began a tiny miracle—old Edo manifested in the ear.

The Asakusa Eardrum was a music box with a novel feature: interchangeable song. It was the Walkman un-electrified, before portable batteries, headphones, and magnetic tape. It was the offspring of careful Japanese carpentry and the wizardries of mechanical automata. With the lid fully removed, the guts of the machine are visible, at least in part, for wooden plates cover and protect the more delicate components. Amidst the ensemble of gears, springs, pins, clips, and rivets are two rectangular compartments, located left and right and a little below center. These are the cartridge compartments. The mouth of each compartment is color-coded: one rimmed in white pigment, the other red. The white operated by striking, the red by shaking. Various cartridge sets were available for purchase, each one named for the aural locale it recreated.

Postcard, “Asakusa Nakamise Shopping Arcade Devoured by Flames,” (1923).

The construction of these units was no less ingenious than that of its host hardware. For example, there was “temple fair” (kaichō) with the sound of small tin bells and the clinking of coins. The tin bells—miniature versions of the kind found at shrine and temple interiors, where Shinto deities or Bodhisattvas were beseeched through a small monetary offering, jangling a bell, and a clap of the hands—hung four on a thread, taught and suspended in a small half-box, a tiny open coffin. Placed within the white compartment, metal prongs would strike the thread and shake the bells with the dysrhythmia common to jostled temple-going. Into the other compartment was inserted a rectangle cartridge of similar shape but made of iron and closed. Inside were small metal discs (miniature coins), and the mechanism of the Eardrum was made to shake this box back and forth, back and forth, in regular rhythm, as if coins in an iron alms bowl waggled by a pauper monk. Thus, the sounds of “temple fair.”

And when one had tired of the simulated sounds of holy grounds, growing eager for greater worldliness, there was the option of nomiya, “bar.” For this set, the red compartment—the one for shaking—held a porcelain container holding two porcelain shapes, clattering together as flask drunkenly to sake cup. The workings of the white unit are both mystery and miracle, as they created, through the mere plucking and rubbing of small bamboo slats, sounds identifiable as vocal din, alternately rising in welcoming hollers and food orders and falling in inebriated spats. And there are others: “kabuki theatre,” “biwa hōshi” (“blind jongleur”), and “Hanayashiki” (“Flower Palace”), the last mimicking the Indian elephant and the tropical birds caged at the Asakusa zoo.

Photograph, “Gruesome Corpses of Prostitutes at Yoshiwara Pond.” (1923).

There was also a cassette pair titled “pleasure quarters.” It’s easily the queerest of the bunch. Surprisingly, it’s also the least jovial. When triggered, it made a high screech, sharp metal on metal, and a low grating moan, mimicking what? One first presumes the sound of heterosexual coupling. But so harsh and ugly? In contemporary accounts of the earthquake, one finds this: the piercing sound of air sucked out by consuming flames. And: the sound of fire engines with sirens blaring, the groan of melting bridges, falling towers, the deep roar of firestorms.

In this light, the other cassettes take on a shadowy cast. Together, they represent a whole city churned. Like claptrap houses of wood, first quake-shaken, with ceramic tableware and metal cooking implements clinking one against another as the tremors first rippled through the city, then crashing, the warm bar din now disconcerted grumble rising to panicked desperation, the zoo life scared and screaming, outside temples and shrines collapsing. Like a mean god turning a crank upon toy Tokyo, shaking it up, making some noise, and then tossing it all into the flames when the fun was done.

So too the Asakusa Eardrum, which sold poorly, was gutted of its internal mechanisms, of its tiny porcelain and metal riprap, and its pine casings sold en masse as kindling for the furo fires of one community bath.

Sources:
Markus, Andrew L. “The Carnival of Edo: Misemono Spectacles from Contemporary Accounts.” Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies 45:2 (December 1985): 499-541.
Silverberg, Miriam. Erotic Grotesque Nonsense: The Mass Culture of Japanese Modern Times. University of California Press, 2006.
Weisenfeld, Gennifer. Imagining Disaster: the Visual Culture of the Great Kanto Earthquake (forthcoming).

Credits

Zazzle: you’ve never heard of it. One of thousands of designer nonsense words necessitated by online commerce, invoking within the reptile mind something ugly, pointless and incredibly popular. And Zazzle is in fact more pointless than Twitter, more popular than Blingy, and it’s ugliness is only exceeded by it’s total, major importance. Not because it is the world’s leading platform for quality custom goods, or for whatever reasons lead Google investors John Doerr and Ram Shriram to pump 16 million into it in 2005, or TechCrunch to name it as 2007′s best business model. Zazzle is important because it has as a platform for design, fostered, or at least allowed to fester, modes of production, and millions of objects, belonging squarely to the future.

Zazzle is not the first online resource for applying your own graphics to manufacture-on-demand crap, what makes it different is it’s proprietary framework: Zazzle kind-of owns anything you make on Zazzle and will keep on selling it to anyone who wants it, until the end of time. The effect of this is that Zazzle itself, as a brand, currently holds an inventory of over 20 billion unique products! This astronomical figure is tempered slightly by the fact that none of these things actually physically exist, and explained to some degree by Zazzle’s EZ-create web interface, which automatically applies every uploaded design to every one of the hundreds of template-objects Zazzle has on offer.

EZ-Automation also accounts for some of the more pedestrian, but still mind-boggling, perversities regularly generated on Zazzle: Anal Queen infant onesies, gang-related German beer steins, painfully touching memorial mousepads, and white people wearing things that say “Nigga” on them. All of which are really, really funny, and infinitely valuable—if not as actual garments, then at least as jpegs. But even these works of art do not account for what is truly groundbreaking about Zazzle.

There is an entirely different order of product being developed here, far beyond the outer reaches of irony. I first started seeing them in Google Image searches; the most random queries were returning pictures of t-shirts, trucker hats, and especially ties that were truly uncanny. One could not, by looking at them, decipher how they had come about, what possible thought process lay behind them, who they were for, or why anyone would want them. They had something akin to the lost-in-translation weirdness of Chinese Shanzhai culture, but what was being lost was in a language far more distant than Chinese; one got the impression the “designers” of these pieces were speaking strictly in ones and zeros. I had visions of design-bots, data mining for user patterns, instantaneously designing products based on trending search queries, generating t-shirts like predictive text and graphics through some kind of visual auto-tune. Amazingly, it turns out I am not totally wrong.

Most people on Zazzle are actual people, making products, one at a time, for themselves, as gifts or to make a modest buck. Trolling through Zazzler forums, one reads again and again the hard-learned lesson of techno-capitalism that a hundred terrible shirts invariably will make more money than ten good ones. Here arises a mutant breed of Zazzler—representing a tiny minority of its members but a disproportionately large number of products—marrying the production line and the bottom line with the command line and developing programs that to varying degrees automate their design process, producing tens of thousands of products with little or no human oversight or labor.

LifeSphere

“LifeSphere has great great unique designs will keep you looking special with your one of a kind designs.”

LifeSphere currently offers more than 90,000 unique products and is more than likely run by one person in a suburban bungalow in Phoenix. As far as I can gather their process consists of ALPHABETICALLY(!) applying every single image in the Public Domain photography archive to every object Zazzle offers. Amazingly almost everything they make is amazing. From doggy clothes featuring macrophotography of Chex Mix, to “Thanksgiving Shrimp” skateboard decks, LifeSphere proves 90,000 times over that rigorous process-based design yields infallibly fresh results.

ShroudedLake

“A collection of images that take the mundane to a new level and give it a new life.”

ShroudedLake is unique in that its vendor description accurately describes what is in the store; ShroudedLake DEFINITELY takes the mundane to a new level. Like a corporate stock photographer on a meth binge, ShroudedLake basically arranges miniature versions of a fairly limited number of everyday objects in a seemingly endless number of combinations: square of grass with a tiny shoe on it, square of grass with a golf tee on it, square of grass with a golf ball on a golf tee on it, square of grass with a golf ball next to a golf tee on it, etc. The high quality of the photography and consistency of aesthetics would make the deadpan inanity of ShroudedLake seem almost self-conscious and ironic if it weren’t for the sheer scale of their inventory (40,000 items!). FIA? MoMA? Costume Institute? It’s time for a retrospective!

believe_in

“What do you believe in? Express yourself with these unique Believe in designs. Some are serious.. some are funny. Available on shirts, stickers, binders, buttons, postcards, totes and so much more.”

believe_in pairs the words “I believe in” with a picture of a thing. Its only redeeming quality is in the quantity and insipidness of its designs in contradiction to the inspirational implication of its theme. Bizarrely, believe_in has forgone the great variety of nominal concepts that would seem proper to “belief” (love, hate, fear, truth, justice, freedom, doubt) for a din of completely random and innocuous household objects: I believe in Nails, I believe in Nail Polish, etc. Without a doubt this was done because the collection of copyright-free clipart they are basing their process on had a lot of pictures of things that go on desks and in drawers than things anyone might ever actually believe in. believe_in also runs Animals for a Cause, an equally inane vendor which through the power of… combination, pairs animals with health problems in over 20 thousand variations. It’s true: Prostate cancer does totally stink.

These vendors are admittedly modest proof for a historic paradigm shift in design, and they do not fully articulate the logics they imply. Conducting research on Zazzle itself epitomizes the disturbingly quantum logic of our times: You can only find things in as much as you search for them, so what exists depends essentially on what is queried. Moreover, Zazzle is so well integrated into Google’s ranking algorithms, that finding anything out about it is next to impossible, as any search with the word Zazzle in it will return hundreds of pages of crappy Zazzle crap.

Nonetheless one sees in Zazzle’s machinations a new horizon for a capitalism in decline. In a twist on the trends of globalization, Zazzle inadvertently outsources, automates, and disperses not only the concrete labor and manufacture of goods but also the intellectual labor that engenders them. By analogy, one sees in Zazzle the the contours of the oft-misquoted misquote by Marx on the conditions that precede the death of state capitalism: The government of persons is replaced by the administration of things and by the conduct of processes of production. The state is not “abolished,” It dies out. Ironically, by way of mass-customization, Zazzle may represent the final spasm in another long-protracted demise—the death of the author.

September 24–October 5, 2011

October 5–19, 2011

October 20–November 16, 2011

Credits

Credits

Janos wears Capezio shrug with Nike Pro-Combat shorts. Cesar wears Capezio shrug with Under Armour shorts.

Cesar wears We Love Colors sports bra, Nike skapris and 2XU compression sleeves.

Janos wears Capezio halter top and Nike skapris.

Cesar wears capris, tank top and t-shirt by Dirk Bikkembergs and Nike sneakers. Janos wears UnderGear onesie and Reebok sneakers.

Janos wears UnderGear thong onsie.

Cesar wears Capezio pants and Nike sneakers. Janos wears Adidas sports bra, Under Armour shorts and Nike sneakers.

Cesar wears gloves by We Love Color.

Janos wears Stella McCartney for Adidas tennis dress.

Cesar wears Stella McCartney for Adidas tennis skirt.

Janos wears Dirk Bikkembergs blanket and Capezio underwear.

Credits

Credits

Photography David Toro
Post-production #HDBOYZ
Intern Austin Kinstler

Credits

DIS HQ is the temporary headquarters of DIS Magazine. Visit us at 14a Orchard St., New York, and/or online at http://dishq.tumblr.com.

DIS Magazine invites you to visit us at DIS HQ, our temporary headquarters located at Invisible-Exports gallery in the New York’s Lower East Side.

DIS has commissioned artist Lizzie Fitch to design our idealized office world, a lifestyle hybrid of corporate culture, fitness, and technology. The entire office will be under 24-hour surveillance, which will be presented on a flat screen in the window and streamed online.

This event and project space will give DIS a physical presence and allow us to engage with the community directly as a kind of cultural laboratory, hangout, and refuge. Like the online platform we’ve built, this space will be a platform for the production and dissemination of (new) content with a cross-disciplinary approach and a focus on e(-)merging fields. With weekly events in the form of lectures, workshops, and performances, it will be a dynamic social space where people (and ideas) show up to run into each other.

DIS HQ will grow throughout its duration, as the DIS “hub” continues to call for the creation of work for the magazine as well as generate the immaterial work of discourse. This open office setting will also allow for the “behind the scenes” daily tasks of our work to be laid bare and taken into consideration as work of art(istic) production in its own right. Passersby, at both the office’s physical and virtual locations, will be able to interact with, disturb, and alter the DIS HQ presence using various mobile and internet applications.

DIS HQ will be live and on display throughout August 2011 at Invisible-Exports.

Credits

HQ Space c/o Invisible-Exports
Interior Concept Lizzie Fitch
Interns Billy Rennekamp, Austin Kinstler, and Holden Miller

Sponsored by Consulate General of Spain in New York and Reyka Vodka
Special Thanks to Seva Granik, Preston Chaunsumlit, Daniel Wickerham

Ruth wears fishnet, dress, tights, and boots by Yohji Yamamoto.

Emilie wears half-sheer/half-wool sweater, pants and shoes by Alexander Wang

Analisa wear Missoni fur, Givenchy belt. Shoes model's own.

Emilie wears Dolce & Gabanna dress and bag belt. Shoes by Alexander Wang.

Rachel wears skirt by Givenchy, wedge by Alexander McQueen. Blouse stylist's own.

Rachel wears sweater, shorts, shoes, and metal hand brace jewelry by Alexander Wang.

Courtney wears Christopher Kane dress, Givenchy heels.

Rachel wears puffer jacket by Marios Schwab, , underwear by Victoria's Secret, and wedge heels by Alexander McQueen.

Analisa wears dress by Christopher Kane. Shoes model's own.

Credits

It is an inalienable right of every man, woman, and child to wear khaki. Looking, acting, and ultimately being Prep is not restricted to an elite minority lucky enough to attend prestigious private schools, just because an ancestor or two happened to arrive here on the Mayflower. You don’t even have to be a Republican. In a true democracy everyone can be upper class and live in Connecticut. It’s only fair.

—The Official Preppy Handbook, p 1.

Informal Empires

Khaki is a phoneticized loan-word from the Hindi-Urdu-Persian : (khak) meaning ash, or dust. The ee-sounding “i” is an added suffix signifying khak-iness; hence, khaki, by its entomological definition means “having the quality of ash, or dust.”

The backbone of business-casual: appropriate when jeans are not—without seeming fussy, khaki is formally un-formal. But, while developed in a similarly casual fashion, khaki was a Victorian military breakthrough. A technology, first and foremost, that gave the “Informal Empire” of Great Britain her second wind.

On June 20th, 1837, at the age of eighteen, Queen Victoria ascended the throne of Great Britian. She, the daughter of Prince Edward, Duke of Kent and Strathearn—fourth son of King George III, oversaw, over the ensuing sixty-four years of her reign, an era of unprecedented British imperial rule.

The Victorian era coincides with a time of relative domestic peace in Europe known as Pax Britannica—a period begun by the defeat and subsequent disintegration of Napoleon’s Army at the Battle of Waterloo (1815) by the forces of the Seventh Coalition¹ under the command of Lord Arthur Wellesley the Duke of Wellington, and ended with the outbreak of World War I (1914.) Great Britain, now the preeminent Western military power due to the strength of her naval forces, capitalized on this period of unprecedented domestic security in Europe by diverting attentions elsewhere.

Investing in the entrepreneurial spirit of maritime trade, Queen Victoria launched a series of “small” wars against an unprecedented range of new foes: Abyssinians, Afghans, Afridis, Arabs, Ashantis, Australians, Baluchi, Bengalis, Boers, Bunerwals, Burmese, Canadians, Chamlawals, Chamkannis, Chinese, Chitralis, Dervishes, Egyptians, Fingoes, Gaikas, Galekas, Ghazis, Hadendowahs, Hassansais, Hottentots, Hunzas, Indians, Isazais, Japanese, Jowaki Afridis, Kaffirs, Khudu-Khels, Kodakhel Baezais, Kostwals, Lushais, Madda Khels, Mahrattas, Mahsud Wazirs, Malays, Mangals, Maoris, Mashonas, Masais, Matabeles, Mohmands, Orazais, Pathans, Peraks, Persians, Punjabis, Russians, Sepoys, Shinwaris, Shiranis, Sikhs, Somalis, Sudanese, Tibetians, Utman Khels, Wazaris, Zaimukhts, Zakha Khel Afridis, and Zulus, to be specific.²

In this they were unremittingly directed by the Duke of Wellington, whose stern dictates shackled the British Army to the conventional methods used in the Napoleonic Wars a half-century prior, half-a-world away. He vehemently insisted the musket to be a far superior arm than the rifle, and that the solider fought best when encumbered by heavy accoutrements, uncomfortable chokers, suffocating stocks and ill-strung knapsacks.³ When confronted with the realities of non-conventional, guerilla-style warfare in harsh climates against an ever-changing enemy, their primary issue was their inflexibility.

Throughout the Victorian era, British cavalry, in particular, were consistantly handicapped by tight and unserviceable clothing, slippery saddles, and unsuitable arms. Dr. Andrew Fergusson, Inspector General of Military Hospitals, ridiculed the “…foreign fooleries so laced and looped and braided of the Hussar; the woman’s muff upon his head with something like a red jellybag on the top and the richly decorated pelisse waving empty, sleeves and all… an abuse and prostitution of the English character.”⁴

In the Duke’s own words on his approach at their dispatch at Waterloo:

“Our officers of cavalry have acquired a trick of galloping at everything. They never consider the situation, never think of manoeuvring before an enemy, and never keep back or provide a reserve.”⁵

This attitude causes a few heads to roll in the Kaffir War of 1852, when the 12th Royal Lancers found themselves under constant assault of a superior number of Basuto riders armed with battle-axes and assegais. The cavalry were encumbered by overalls so tightly strapped that a remount was possible only if a comrade were at hand to hold their saddle in place.

And so, on May 21st, 1858—a day which did not go down in infamy—the true Informal Empire is heralded with an order from Her Majesty’s Adjutant-General:

“With the concurrence of the Government, the Commander-in-Chief is pleased to direct that white clothing shall be discontinued in the Regiments of the Honourable Company’s Army; that for the future the summer clothing of the European soilders shall consist of two suits of ‘khakee’.”⁶

“Khaki” has become term for chief petty officers in the US Navy, due to the historical color of their uniform. Khaki first served the US Army in the Spanish American War of 1898 and has been the semi-formal service dress for naval operations and occupations in the tropics for the better part of the last 113 years.

While the contested matter of the Spanish-American War was one of Cuban “independence” from Spain—American concern being sparked by the suspect sinking of the Battleship Maine in Havana Harbor—the ten-week war was won in large part due to a series of decisive US military and naval actions not in Cuba but in the outlying Caribbean and Pacific islands and waters. This earned the victorious Americans favorable accord by the terms of the 1898 Treaty of Paris. Not only did the US see to the fall of the remaining colonialist threat to American domestic and regional security, it acquired their regional colonial legacy as well. The US was granted temporary control of Cuba, and for the purchase price of $20MM, the United States acquired Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines—the future Pacific arena of World War II.

Service Dress khaki uniforms in the US Navy—widely seen in service from WWII through The Vietnam War—were dropped in 1975 by the Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Elmo Zumwalt in an effort to reduce the number of items in an officer’s sea bag. Then in 2007 Service Dress khaki was reintroduced to petty officers who welcomed the new semi-formal as a more practical alternative to Service Dress whites. The Navy Times, in an article announcing the new uniforms, called the design “a throwback” and sung the praises of khaki’s heritage, saying “by simply donning the khaki jacket…the chief or officer was set to walk into any situation requiring a more formal look—one that doesn’t require a complete uniform change into service dress blues or whites.”

Khaki Gone-Tiki

In lieu of exhaustive analysis of the myriad ways in which khaki achieved its civil sublimation, I will instead draw upon but one instance khaki-ganda: Rogers & Hammerstein’s film version of the musical South Pacific. For it is here that khaki becomes full-flegged exotica. Thanks to the swift economy of the duo’s stereotype-based approach, we need only look to one brief scene between two musical numbers to be inducted to the fetish of khaki and the cult of tiki.

Tiki is a remarkably versatile word in the Maori language. We Westerners are likely familiar with tiki: the carved figure, image, or neck ornament usually made of greenstone or coconut, mug, and carved in an abstract form of a human. Tiki, the verb, means: to fetch, proceed to do (anything), go (for a purpose), go and get, come and get. Reed’s Concise Maori Dictionary defines Tiki, the proper noun, as “the first man, or the personification of man.” In some narratives Tiki was the first man created, while other narratives say he created the first man. Tei Tetua, a Marquesan native and former cannibal cited by adventurer and author, Thor Heyerdahl (author of Kon-Tiki) in his 1934 book Fatu-Hiva – Back to Nature, describes Tiki as “God and Chief, he who led the ancestors to the islands where we now live.”⁷

In the 1950s and 60s, tiki-esque figures began springing-up on mantles and lawns across America. Martin Denny, the proverbial Tiki of exotica music (the sound of Tiki culture,) explains:

Between 1958 and 1960 many people displayed tiki in their gardens and organized Polynesian parties like luaus. They wanted to recreate a piece of Hawaii in their backyards, evoke the atmosphere of the South Seas…I don’t know who thought up this trend, all I know is that Americans couldn’t care less about the religious origins of the tiki.⁸

To the hardy folk returning from WWII, displaying a tiki was a declaration of religious (Christian) contempt.⁹ As they oft-not go much further into paganism, tiki and Tiki-style were to the G.I. Generation a profession of their alternation from Puritanical progenitors to something a bit more Catholic-confessional. Boomers had their hair, free love, and drugs; their parents: the Hawaiian shirt, an exotic fantasy of “free-style” love without the use of contraception, and mixed-drinks.

And cocktails are crucial, for if tiki culture in America can be said to be a cult of anything, it is a cult of drink. So, pull-up those chinos, Skip, and throw on your finest hibiscus. We’re going to a place called Tiki Ti. The bar: rattan. The floors: sandy. The drinks: strong as can be. And as of this April 28th, a full fledged…

Fifty. A mind-boggling thought for a war baby like me. Fifty is not ‘just another birthday.’ It is a reluctant milepost on the way to wherever it is we are meant to wind up. It can be approached in only two ways. First, it can be a ball of snakes that conjures up immediate thoughts of mortality and accountability… Or, it can be a great excuse to reward yourself for just getting there…I instinctively choose door number two.¹⁰

—Jimmy Buffet, A Pirate Looks at Fifty

Just Buffett

No one is more khaki than Catholic entrepreneur, performing artist, author, and aviator Jimmy Buffett. For not does he only wear khaki, he’s also totally tiki, and his khak-tiki heritage is nearly as old as khaki itself. Jimmy Buffet, was urged by descendants of South Fijian and Maori islanders who had encountered his name on posters promoting his Australian Tour in 1996 to visit the tiny and remote Norfolk Island. On his fiftieth anniversary heritage expedition, aboard his Grumman HU-16 Albatross seaplane The Hemisphere Dancer that resulted in his memoir, A Pirate Looks at Fifty, he said of the place, “There was this huge clan of Buffetts…they were all there.”¹¹

BANANA REPUBLICS
Down to the banana republics
Down to the tropical sun
Go the expatriated American
Hoping to find some fun

—Steve Goodman

ON May 5th, 1891, John Buffett died on Norfolk Island, a British Overseas Territory. His fellow 3rd (4th, and, 5th in some cases) Pitcairners—transformed by means of libel spirits and topless, Tahitian women—turned the once brutish British penal colony into a “Pacific Paradise.” (National Geographic, October 1960) Not having read Tales of the South Pacific by James A. Michener, I’ll quote what Steve Eng did, in Jimmy Buffet: The Man From Margartiaville Revealed, calling Norfolk Island “a speck under the forefinger of God.”

Excerpt from “The Great Revolution In Pitcairn”
by Mark Twain, Atlantic Monthly, 1879

Let me refresh the reader’s memory a little. Nearly a hundred years ago the crew of the British ship Bounty mutinied, set the captain and his officers adrift upon the open sea, took possession of the ship, and sailed southward. They procured wives for themselves among the natives of Tahiti, then proceeded to a lonely little rock in mid-Pacific, called Pitcairn’s Island, wrecked the vessel, stripped her of everything that might be useful to a new colony, and established themselves on shore. Pitcairn’s is so far removed from the track of commerce that it was many years before another vessel touched there. It had always been considered an uninhabited island; so when a ship did at last drop its anchor there, in 1808, the captain was greatly surprised to find the place peopled. Although the mutineers had fought among themselves, and gradually killed each other off until only two or three of the original stock remained, these tragedies had not occurred before a number of children had been born; so in 1808 the island had a population of twenty-seven persons. John Adams*, the chief mutineer, still survived, and was to live many years yet, as governor and patriarch of the flock. From being mutineer and homicide, he had turned Christian and teacher, and his nation of twenty-seven persons was now the purest and devoutest in Christendom. Adams had long ago hoisted the British flag and constituted his island an appanage of the British crown.

* John Adams is Jimmy Buffett’s great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great, grandfather.

Footnotes

1. Alliance consisting of the United Kingdom, Prussia, United Neatherlands
2. Featherstone, Donald. Khaki & Red: Soldiers of the Queen in India and Africa. Arms & Armour Press, London, 1995
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Wikipedia.
6. Featherstone, Donald. Khaki & Red: Soldiers of the Queen in India and Africa. Arms & Armour Press, London, 1995.
7. Adinolfi, Francesco. Mondo Exotica: Sounds, Visions, Obsessions of the Cocktail Generation. Duke University Press, Durham, 2008.
8. Ibid.
9. Von Busack, Richard. “Tiki It to the Limit.” Metro http://www.metroactive.com/papers/metro/01.04.96/tiki-9601.html
10. Buffett, Jimmy. A Pirate Looks at Fifty, pg. 9
11. Eng, Steve. Jimmy Buffet: The Man From Margaritaville Revealed.

Additional Bibliography
Hyam, Ronald. Understanding the British Empire, Cambridge University Press, New York. 2010.
Bullock, Christopher. Britian’s Gurkhas, Third Millennium, London 2009.
Moraes, George M.. Mangalore, a historical sketch; Studies in Indian History of the ‘Indian Historical Research Institute,’ St. Xavier’s College, Bombay, Number 2; 1927.

]]> http://dismagazine.com/dystopia/21109/khaki-gone-tiki/feed/ 0