THE TRIMMER
“My mom got me trimming when I was 14,” says Ann, a college graduate who doesn’t smoke marijuana. As long as marijuana is grown and sold there will be a place for trimmers like Ann. She makes $15 per ounce, or $240 a pound. “I’m fast so if the buds are good I make $15 to $45 an hour. Trimmers are lucky because when the price of pot goes down the growers don’t adjust the trimming pay. “You gotta have good scissors, razors for scraping hash off the blades, good lighting, and rubbing alcohol to clean the scissors,” she says. “It’s an awesome supplemental income. I went to California to trim a couple seasons ago and I made four grand in eight days.”

THE DEALER
“I started dealing at Punahou when I was 16. I’d break ounces down as small as 0.8 of an ounce for $20 and sell it like crazy to the kids at school,” says Matt, a recent UH Mānoa Ph.D. graduate. He’s under 30 and remembers the year he made $45,000 in two semesters dealing at a prestigious California college he attended. “I get pounds for $4,000 shipped over from California via a middle man making a big profit. I turn each one into $7,500. I’ve got a variety of weed I sell for different prices and weights. I try to keep something for everyone.”

Looking around his workroom, it’s apparent he takes his job seriously. It resembles a mad scientist’s lab. A slew of clones, only inches tall, sit in saran-wrapped bins waiting to root, and an array of organic fertilizers clutter the shelves. A homemade “bubbler,” a device that oxygenates his water and removes chlorine to bring the plants to their healthiest, stands nearby. “I’m really lucky it’s this good and I’ve got people with connections I trust to sell it for me. They get me top dollar. If your weed isn’t super good looking, smelling, and stoney, it can be months before it sells,” he says. “The market’s changed. It’s a hell of a lot tougher to sell weed these days.”

There was a time when selling marijuana in Hawai‘i was a grower’s market. “Five years ago everything would move,” remembers the Big Island grower. “O‘ahu guys would fly over all the time, pick it up and cash us out up front. It’s different now. They all want me to front it to them because they don’t know how long it’ll take to move.”

Marijuana travels the same way people and their belongings do, by commercial planes and boats. “It was a lot easier pre 9/11,” recalls the Big Islander. “You’d just stuff a few pounds in a carry-on and run it through the X-ray, or strap one or two under a sweatshirt and hop on a plane. But security’s higher at every angle now, in the post office, airport, at the boat ports. We’ve got a be a lot more crafty and sly.”

Growers and dealers both agree three main elements have changed Hawai‘i’s cannabis industry: legalizing medical marijuana (In 2000, Hawai‘i became the first state to pass a medical marijuana law. Under Hawai‘i law, users with a medical marijuana permit can cultivate up to seven plants and carry three ounces of the dried smokable form.), low-priced pot imported from California, and what Hunt calls, “cash croppers growing what’s usually sub-standard weed in bulk. They don’t smoke, and they don’t strive for quality. They don’t appreciate good weed. They’re in it for the money.”

Steven Marks is a cash cropper. He has two grow houses, 12 lights in one, and 18 in another aptly nicknamed, “The Factory.” Hundreds of plants fill several rooms, the hum of numerous A/C units serve as background music in an otherwise quiet house. The living room is empty, except for a single bed and couch. Take-out boxes are piled up, and a heap of clothes leans against the wall. Marks doesn’t live here, and none of his grow houses have ever doubled as residences. His partner lives here, a younger guy with no girlfriend, kids or day job. He’s the perfect person to disappear for two months at a time, rarely leaving in return for a significant cut of the profits.

Marks doesn’t look like the stereotypical pot grower. He’s clean cut, well-spoken, middle age, and doesn’t smoke marijuana. “Pot doesn’t work for me. I used to smoke, but I’ve moved on,” he says as he inspects his plants. Marks has been growing for about 15 years, only the latter half of which he’s been producing at the level he is now. “It’s a somewhat gradual progression,” he says as he removes a few yellowing leaves. “You don’t just one day decide to go stick 20 or 30 lights in a house, figure out how to ship it off island to sell. It just doesn’t work like that.”

The two houses pump out around 25 to 30 pounds of buds every two months and Marks admits it’s “pretty good but not the best.” “When you’re pumping out this much product, it’s hard to make it 100 percent, top of the line.” Marks says he sells it for a bit lower than other growers. “I’m a wholesaler running a business, and I need to move it.” The tradesmen-turned-grower says he sells a pound for as low as $2,800 on the Big Island, and up to $3,500 on O‘ahu. Marks makes anywhere from $70,000 to $80,000 a harvest.

He acknowledges his factory-like approach to growing makes it tougher on other growers. “I know it makes it harder for the guys pulling off three or four pounds every crop. Their sales are going to change. There have been some competitive moments. There are people bringing loads in – and I mean loads – from California and have staked their claim to parts of O‘ahu. They go to California, find what they want, and ship hundreds of pounds home. They’ve been doing it for a long time. Dealers get territorial, and they don’t like competition. But we all have to pay our bills, right?” Marks levels.




Northern California’s medical marijuana laws currently allow people with prescriptions to grow up to six mature or 12 immature plants and possess 8 ounces of processed marijuana legally (except where local guidelines specify more). According to Nancy Black who’s been growing in Humboldt County for three years: “Everyone’s growing here. It’s just what you do. Humboldt’s producing thousands of pounds all year long, and right now it’s involved into a codependent relationship with Hawai‘i.” Humboldt County guidelines allow patients to grow up to 99 plants legally.

Hawai‘i’s been an outlet for California-grown marijuana for years. A pound can be bought for as low as $1,800 in Humboldt or Mendocino County, leaving plenty of room for price markup in the islands. It’s not just on the selling end. Each harvest season, Northern California sees an influx of trimmers from Hawai‘i spending several months prepping the pot for sale. Rose Thomas is an O‘ahu resident who will be heading over for her fourth consecutive season this October. “I usually just quit my job at home when Cali time comes and head over for a few months. I make more money in two months there than I make at home in a year. I’d say about 30 girls I know from Hawai‘i go over each season, and that’s just people I know.”

Black says it’s not only medical laws, but the method of growing that enables Californians to cultivate such large amounts of cannabis. “In Hawai‘i most people are growing indoor with clones that get only about two to three feet tall. If you’re lucky you get an ounce per plant. Here, everyone’s got a hundred plants or more that are six to eight feet tall and yielding four pounds each.”

Marks and Hunt are pleasant people. They’re friendly. They’re family men. Neither exude the menacing personality stereotyping drug dealers, and the healthy green plants don’t invoke a sense of danger. It’s easy to forget that in Hawai‘i, growers in Marks’ league face up to 20 years in prison for cultivation of 100 plants or more, and the same sentence for selling five pounds or more. Even people like Hunt, who grow on a much smaller scale face five years in jail for cultivating up to 50 plants, and ten years for selling one to five pounds.

Making a living as a grower may be more lucrative than the average 9-to-5 job, but growers risk everything, family, freedom, and all they’ve worked for. Trust is a grower’s biggest asset. Marks knows the risks, but he’s an optimist. “I know it could all be gone in a second. But you do what you can to be legit in every other area in life. Keep your name clean, have a cover business. I believe you get what you give, so I’m always fair in life and business. All the people I know who’ve been busted, it’s always someone ratting them out. It’s about trust, and most importantly I never put a crop in my own home,” he says.

Hunt, who has a crop in his home, agrees it’s about trust and laying low. “I try not to deal with anyone new, not trimmers, dealers, nobody. I’ve got my tried and true people to work with me and sell it, and keep their mouths shut. I’ve got to be modest too. It’s not a good idea to be flashing wads of cash, or have too many big toys.”

As Hawai‘i’s marijuana market and laws continue to change, growers concur that one thing seems to be certain: The demand for weed isn’t disappearing. “The market’s flooded and prices are lower, but people still want their pot,” says Hunt. “Even in a slow economy, people make sure they get stoned. And we’re not just dealing with one type of person or demographic. Teachers, parents, professors, tourists at high end hotels, even the occasional movie or sports celebrity – everyone smokes weed.”

“Who knows what the future holds for us,” says Marks. “Medical marijuana has changed a lot, a multitude of people are growing their own, and it’s easy to get clones and lights. Eventually, maybe everyone will be legally growing their own marijuana, and growers won’t be needed. I might have to find a new job, but I don’t think consumption will ever decrease. People love their weed.”

*All names have been changed to protect the identities of the sources.

My contact into the glamorous world of fighting chickens was Benson*, an unpretentious, stocky fellow who despite cultural shifts toward altered racial nomenclature, is still quite comfortable self-defining as “Oriental.” Fight scheduling can be a sporadic endeavor as attendees and organizers have very real concerns about avoiding detection and prosecution. For Benson and I, our first trip to an event was a three-hour mission from town to the back roads of Wai‘anae Valley, near to where “that Samoan pig farmer got convicted of slavery,” a friend later pointed out. Although unsuccessful and dispersed due to fears of a police raid, Benson delivered a three hour master’s course in fighting chickens, from the two year preparation (every day) and the cost of feed (it can add up), to the careful, almost loving attention placed on a dying bird by a trained handler during a fight. It was then that I learned the local nuances of a practice as old as chicken-and-rice-for-dinner. We rescheduled for the next weekend.

Six days later, there was little chance of catching any sleep as I was up free-associating and googling the various ways people are injured or killed in gambling here on the islands: One guy burned in his car for deserting a debt; one guy shot on the side of the road after a big win; an old man whose calf was “butterflied open” by a wayward fighting chicken with a customized razor affixed to its leg. The threat of being maimed or killed took all the joy out of participant observation methodology. I attempted some self-motivation by remembering one of life’s inconvenient truths: that if you follow all the rules, you probably won’t have any fun. ** Summer heat rose up from the road as we took off for the fight. Honolulu’s fringes progressively crumbled in the rear-view mirror, from high rises to mid-century suburbs to sodden fields of dense vegetation. These in turn gave way to a flanking of undeveloped private property and the onshore sea. The land became spare enough to where one could actually imagine a dark, mysterious spot on the satellite map, some far away place on this densely populated island where our phones’ service indicators would be out of bars. Then the windmills began to rhythmically slash at the horizon – New Age shining Pololu protecting the northernmost point of the island – and we took a hard turn down a dirt road.

Even after the previous trip and all I had read, I still had in mind that a cockfight would be an after-dark, furtive affair: squatting men betting and drinking and sweating out the brutal suspense under the cover of night. Benson cut the wheel sharply, taking us off the road and down a dirt one-lane in the broad daylight, navigating by an instinct that removed us from the state highway. “I bet it’s there,” I said like an idiot as we passed a thicket and a herd of pickup trucks parked at odd angles came into view, like nervous horses ready to bolt.

Once one knows what to look for, a derby fight in the country is one of the worst kept secrets on the rock. We walked with half a dozen other local guys through the property, passing poi dogs loosely leashed to hand-built sheds and feral cocks who kicked up the alkali dust in their wake. Dozens of triangle-shaped pens were in neat rows, with chickens leashed by the leg to their bases, just long enough so they could jump to the top and crow their gizzards’ content. Men in surf trunks and work boots carried coop boxes holding three chickens each, the size of a disco-era subwoofer. There were several tailgates open for party mode in the field, and the unmistakable tang of pork adobo lingered in the air. Seemingly innocuous as a country picnic.

Beneath the surface of the country gathering, I sensed a deep well of transgressive danger. Maybe it was the ruddy local boys exiting a lifted truck that looked like something driven by a Libyan rebel? The flash of 3-inch blades being attached to strutting chickens? The row of men resembling an outdoor police booking station waiting for action? In retrospect, the veil of lawful safety was lifted when I caught sight of a thin, elderly Asian woman who sat in a plastic chair in the center of the ring, lazily smoking a Marlboro and eyeing the entrants as the sun slanted over the pit. I avoided eye contact with her as I did most everyone else, half expecting her to point a long bony forefinger in my direction like something out of a Stephen King novel, outing me as a writer and causing my fact to melt.

At the weighing tables, I caught sight of the fighters. These “chickens” are not the banal type embroidered on aprons or playfully painted on a pack of thighs at Sac-N-Save. More than anything they are war birds, bred with decades-old stud books for strength and streamlined for combat. To the uninitiated, the cocks all look the same until they start dying differently. But to the handlers there were differentiations in breed, height, weight and ability that determined the matches for the day, thousands of dollars riding on each bird.

As things got going, there was a definite code of accepted conduct to the rowdiness, and one would have to be diagnosed with something out of the DSM-IV-TR (ie: crazy) to pick a fight. Though loud, the betting was far from crazy. It seemed that everyone there was picking up on the nuances of chicken, handler and referee that intuited how to direct funds, not unlike a low-end stock exchange. The yells of “jes! jes!” interlaced with harsh Ilocano accents raised the level of claustrophobia significantly.

More than racial signifiers, there was a certain hardness to the crowd: working class, middle-aged local men, with the occasional facially tattooed drug dealer mixed in for third world effect. After feigning an interest in sharing a smoke with someone a few chairs down, Benson later told me that the fellow I was chatting with was the owner, and that “he knows your face now, so you’re good to sit there.” Oh great. Off to the left, an excited better told me, “My P.O. told me this is healthier than drugs. I didn’t go to a fight for three years and I didn’t know what to do with myself. Brah, stay so excited!” As he spoke, I could not help but notice that he was thumbing more hundred-dollar bills in his hand than he had teeth in his mouth. 

For those of us with a modern life unaccustomed to the casual nearness of death and violence, the pit appears to be a brutal environment. For some handlers though, working chicken looked as easy as operating a remote control. An elegant, white-haired Filipino man in black wranglers, a spotless sweater, and blood-spattered tan cowboy boots looked like everything a chicken cutman would be. As he entered the pit with the underdog cock, he looked much more composed than the young braddah in slippers nervously cradling his big red. As the elegant man’s fighter began spitting up blood, he held it upside down just long enough to suck blood out of its beak and encourage it to bite its opponent. He spat the purple clot onto the dirt, searing an image onto my mental retina that I’m sure to recall anytime I fear dinner is not cooked through enough. Although doomed, his cock won the fight with his veteran skills.

After a few quick rounds, the elegant Filipino man re-entered the pit, and I almost got into the spirit of losing money. That was until Benson informed me of the quick hand signaling required to enter the fray. He explained: “A finger up means ‘jes,’ which today is $100. A finger down means $1,000. Two fingers down: $2,000 … so umm, maybe best if you just don’t use your fingers.” With that in mind, I kept my digits neatly folded on my lap while the dust flew and the toothless ex-con to the left of me made it rain Benjamins after winning an upset against a 300-pound heavy across the pit. “We all going eat good tonight!” he exclaimed, with me nodding in silent approval, careful not to give a thumbs up for fear of owing someone the rent under enforcement of the syndicate.

By the fourth fight, I had grown tired of the bloodshed. So too had the blonde cock being handled to attack his already critically wounded opponent. Despite some clever flicks to attempt a reaction, he stopped biting back and began to peck the ground, looking like he wanted nothing more than to go back to being a humble, big-boned chicken from Waimānalo. The Waimānalo blonde, like all the other chickens, had no idea this was a fight to the death. Although cocks have a natural bony spur at the back of their feet, there is no Darwinian advantage in killing an opponent of the same species in a matter of minutes. Chickens are existential creatures, somehow forgetting an experience right after it happened. Although they fight, cocks without knives attached to their legs quickly determine a pecking order and continue on their dumb way, forgetting the whole affair and going back to scratching for scraps.

There are such things as stupid questions, and the stupidest one a cockfighter hears usually has to do with what happens to dead birds. Benson told me on the way home, “Everything that goes down in human fights goes down in chicken fights. So you’ve got some guys who try to cheat, there could be poison on the blade or in the bird – definitely something you don’t wanna eat.” As we parted ways, Benson mentioned another fight next weekend and asked if I wanted to go. “No thanks,” I replied, digging my fingers into my pockets to signify no bet.

The paths artists choose to take, most times, do not follow a straight line. They curve in and around school, personal projects, personal demons – work – but inevitably the paths they take are intertwined with other artists around them. Though they may not know it, they have somehow influenced, been affected by one another. These are some of the archetypical artists on those paths.

Photos by Aaron Van Bokhoven

THE MATRIARCH
Pegge Hopper
Excerpted from Women of Hawai‘i

My career as a professional artist began in New York City. My father made a trip to the Art Center to talk to my teachers to see if I really had talent. He had to be sure I was going to succeed and wouldn’t end up starving in a garret. My teachers assured him I was going to do fine. I remember he paid $99 for the plane ticket.

New York didn’t intimidate me. I think because I was sure I had received a good education. I felt good about my portfolio, and I knew I could depend on myself to work hard. I tramped around town looking for a job wearing my high heels and white gloves. I was 21 years old when I was offered a job at Raymond Loewy Associates, an industrial design firm, even though I really wanted to work for a magazine as an illustrator. I accepted.

While there I met my future husband Bruce, a graphic designer. In late 1960, we decided to go to Europe, and after traveling and living in our VW van for four months, we decided we’d better look for jobs. We took our portfolios to La Rinascente, a department store in Milan, and we worked there for two years. That’s when I started to take myself seriously as an artist and, I believe, when my style began to develop.

A desire to start a family eventually brought us to Hawai‘i. Everything seemed so vibrant and lushly organic. While Bruce worked hard to establish a graphic design business, I worked as an art director at an advertising agency and took care of the children.

In 1968, I began to visit the state archives to study old photographs. I was intrigued by the faces of the Polynesian people. Their open and unself-conscious gazes stared at me from another era, and I was inspired to paint them. My first paintings were sketchy and rough, but they attracted the attention of my friend Mary Philpotts, who commissioned me to do 22 paintings for Kona Village on Big Island. My career as a painter was launched.

My first experience creating serigraphs, or screen prints, was in Sand Island at a signmaker’s shop, where signs such as “No Parking” were printed. It was a makeshift, jury-rigged sort of operation. Termites would be flying around the shop and falling into the ink. We’d get an edition of about 120 out of every 300 sheets of paper. The mortality rate was incredible. But the serigraphs sold well, and that encouraged us to keep going. My serigraphs and posters caught the eye of Larry Winn, a mainland publisher of fine arts. He helped me understand how to combine business and art, and my work began to get widespread distribution outside the Hawaiian Islands.

When I first started to paint Hawaiian women I felt they had not yet been depicted in a contemporary style. So I used my drawing skills in combination with graphic imagery to portray the fortitude and some of the sadness that I had seen in the old photographs. Although I don’t know many Hawaiian women personally, their beauty has become etched in my mind. I know them from the outside only, and have never dared to invade their privacy.

Since I have lived in Honolulu for more than half my life, I feel like kama‘aina in spirit. I realize how fortunate I am and how much support this community has given me, both as an artist and as a woman. I hope that through my art I have given something back.





THE INSTRUCTOR
Linda Yamamoto, sculpture lecturer, UH Mānoa
By Lisa Yamada

It’s the first day of spring break at the art building at the University of Hawai‘i and for the most part the campus is quiet, absent of the normal hum of students milling around in between class. I’m here to interview art student Dana Paresa, and we’re looking for a good spot to photograph her portrait, an area with nice lighting. “Linda’s probably here in her office,” she says. We head up to room 204, and sure enough Linda’s there with two other students working around her.

“There’s some gems here, like some teachers that make going to UH worth it,” says Dana. “Like Linda, who’s working today because it’s her free day – stuff like that inspires me.”

Linda Yamamoto has been teaching sculpture in the art department since 1992. Her class, kinetic sculpture (sculptures that move) and 3-d sculpture are among some of the school’s most popular. “Everyone tries to get into her class,” says Timo Lee, a former student of Linda’s. “Her class is always one that fills up the fastest!”

Timo recalls a project she worked on for kinetic sculpture in Linda’s class: “I wanted to make dancing elephants, but I was having a hard time calculating the measurements, like how tall the legs have to be. Linda totally helped me in trying to make the elephants dance, although it didn’t come out so good anyway.”

In an art imitating life kind of way, Timo (a travel industry management major and art minor), like her elephants, didn’t quite dance like how she or Linda envisioned she would after college. But she’s doing something even better. As a popular deejay on KTUH and along the local club circuit, Timo’s managed to find something she’s passionate about: making people dance.

Linda recalls when Timo was a student at UH: “I remember when she was just talking about applying for a spot at KTUH, and now, how she’s progressed, has made me really proud.”

Currently, Linda is working on a project that involves 70 bronze-cast frogs teaching a chubby bronze baby about life. “But the story is that you shouldn’t trust frogs to mentor your baby because they’ll teach a baby about anything,” she says. There are frogs smoking cigarettes, running with scissors, holding condoms, gambling, and even two frogs wedged in one cup.

I guess sometimes art doesn’t imitate life, at least not in terms of Linda as an instructor. “You know that joy you get out of making art?” she says to me, already knowing the answer. “I know not everyone can continue it because real life kind of sets in, but I always hope my students find that niche for themselves that gives them the same sense of accomplishment and joy, even if they’re not physically doing art.”

THE STUDENT
Dana Paresa, Art history major
As told to Lisa Yamada

When I was in elementary school, boys would ask me to do drawings for their girlfriends, and they would pay me in candy. I guess my first major “art” project was in preschool. I remember drawing a comic, and it was getting printed in the school newsletter or something. And they lost it, so I had to draw it again real fast. As far back as I can remember I have been doing art.

Now with my art, I like changing my face so that I don’t look like myself. You know who Leigh Bowery is? Or Amy Sedaris, how she can warp her face to look even 50 years older or like a dude? I’m really interested in changing identities. A lot of people do political art, but I’m just not into making art that has that kind of statement. I like more of a personal change rather than an outside one.

My biggest worry right now is not finding a job after I graduate. Since The Contemporary Museum and The Academy of Arts are merging I don’t know if there’s going to be that many opportunities. I eventually want to work in a gallery, so I’m taking a museum interpretations class, where we go to galleries and talk about how we trick people into thinking that things are important. You’re really getting into people’s heads and trying to assume what they’re going to do by placing something a certain way. You’re just considering their next step and making it easy enough for them to swallow the concepts.

I feel there’s always that decision artists struggle with after graduating: Do you want to cop out and make money because you know you can just paint a palm tree on a beach and sell that? I don’t want to feel stuck having to make touristy arts, though, because that’s not why I’m doing it in the first place. It’s not like I think I can make a lot of money after this anyway.

I’m pretty confident, though, that I’ll find something in my field. I’ll just keep trying until I do. I’m not going to just say, “Oh well, I guess I’ll just work in an office or a restaurant.” I don’t like that whole Picasso thing either, you know, like the I’m-pained-by-my-paint kind of thing. I don’t feel like you need to be a tortured soul to create art. I think you just have to step out and try something different. Regardless, I don’t think art should be made for anyone else but for yourself. If people like it, they’ll like it because they can relate to it. I think having that kind of connection with art is more fulfilling than doing it for any other reason.

Ted De Oliveria’s collaboration project with visual artist Joe Pa‘ahana.

THE TORTURED ARTIST
Ted De Oliveira, musician, artist, storyteller – (Is there anything he’s not good at?)
By Sonny Ganaden

To hear Ted De Oliveira play his set late on a weekday evening comes as something of a shock, especially if you know him. After spending the last several years making friends and simultaneously ostracizing them with his occasional demons, the raw emotive power of his talent onstage conveys the occasional transcendence of someone who’s actually experienced the content of the lyrics, of an artist working through personal history. 

For Ted, that history includes moving to Mānoa Valley at the age of 6 from Rio De Janeiro, Brazil with his two siblings and musician parents. “At some point my mom got me to stop playing Mario Kart and into guitar lessons with this gypsy guitarist that looked like Leonardo da Vinci, long white beard and everything,” says Ted. “Back then I was just playing lots of bar and hippy chords, trying to sound like Fugazi or Rage Against the Machine. I played a lot as a teenager, with everybody I could too.” In his teenage years, he also began experimenting with electronic music, amongst other things. 

–To find out more about Ted’s EP Front Business, CLICK HERE–

Those other things have gotten De Oliveira in trouble. To say that Ted’s music is worth a listen without presenting a full picture of him would be like recommending Dr. Jekyll for your annual checkup without mentioning all that pesky Mr. Hyde business. As he says it, “After I graduated from high school, there was a slow descent into the O‘ahu club scene. For a while I was breaking, beatboxing and playing guitar in Waikīkī. When I’d get too high, my dad, who was driving a taxi at the time, would come by and force me into the taxi.”

Now, a few busy months out from a recent stint locked up, Ted has taken charge of his future. “I’ve been sober now for one year, three months, and a little change. For me, it’s both a burden and a badge of honor. If I make addiction bigger than it is, then it’ll just snowball and overtake me. But if I say I’ve been there and don’t demonize it, then it won’t grow on my shoulders and come back.”

The music De Oliveira has been releasing on the web has been anything but simple. In March he released Front Business, an album combing electronics over haunting vocals. A legitimate music critic could spend paragraphs attempting to corral the album into terms like chillwave, glitch, whatevz. We may have reached the event horizon where musical stimulus can be anything that a skilled artist can conjure using zeros, 1s and modified voices colliding in an infinite number of possibilities. A few of the instrumentals sound like Japanese nuclear engineers programmed one of those three foot tall humanoid robots to do something useful, like skateboard, and it was at A‘ala Skate Park doing 50/50 grinds and kickflips on a First Friday.

De Oliveira certainly has not burnt all bridges on his road to recovery. Local artist Landon Osamu has been creating some fairly hilarious images to promote Front Business, with posters up around town of Ted as a smoking Pee Wee Herman, Ted as the man with the golden voice, Ted as a giant chain-smoking baby. Designer Joseph Pa’ahana created the cover art with a space-age, jump-suited Ted receding into a rainbow galaxy. With his upcoming EP Halfway House, so titled because it was written in an actual halfway house, De Oliveira may use more of the brilliant guitar and vocals of his live shows. In May with the blessing of his parole officer, he will have taken a trip to mainland China to record the soundtrack of an indie documentary about traveling and changing. 

Knowing he’s still on the edge, Ted’s been careful to keep his hands far from idle. “Look dude, being in a cell means a lot of time, too much time, to think. So since I’ve gotten out, I’ve had a lust for working, almost panic working. And I think the work is good for us.” In keeping the demons at bay, those busy hands are making work far better than good.

As one gets older one sees many more paths that could be taken. Artists sense within their own work that kind of swelling of possibilities, which may seem a freedom or a confusion. – Jasper Johns

To truly understand a painting, one must contextualize the painter. Despite my repeated mentioning that I would be paying for breakfast and a few subtle hints to dine somewhere with air conditioning, 28-year-old contemporary artist and expatriate Jasper Wong insisted we do our interview at Ray’s Cafe in Kalihi. Past the last few buildings in the state still used as both auto body shops and apartments, time moves a little slower at Ray’s. The ambiance suggested that if you asked for decaf, brown rice, or even green salad instead of the house’s potato-mac, the cook would wince as if you’d lost your mind somewhere on River Street. The little room was packed, and after settling in, we shared a table with a few local guys in steel-toed boots who were apparently related to everyone there. When it took too long to get the coffee we ordered, one of the uncles took a break from what looked like his morning ritual of two eggs, spam and toast to pour us a cup, returning to his meal only after he refilled everyone in the room. 

Discussing the international art market over 9 a.m. fried fish, industrial strength coffee, and dripping plates of french toast in Kalihi explains a bit about Jasper. He grew up in the neighborhood, helping his mom out in her Chinese butcher shop. Joking often, the guy is absolutely serious about his vision – one gets the sense of someone deeply committed to the undertaking of creating something new.

Pow Wow, from the Narangasett term referring to a gathering, has been Jasper’s idea from the beginning. After graduating from Kalani High School, Wong spent time in San Francisco and Seattle essentially teaching himself design work. In 2008, he moved to Hong Kong, staying in his grandmother’s apartment and turning an old restaurant into an art gallery he called Above Second. While working on projects for Adidas, Hurley, DC Shoes, the Yerba Buena Art Center, and more, Wong thought to bring the friends he’s made over the years to his studio for a collective creativity spree. Noting that in the digital age actual face time has increased in value, Jasper explains that “these days the focus has unjustly been placed on the final product. It’s this imbalance that creates a finite sense of our relationships with a product as often it evokes no meaningful connection.”





The second Pow Wow in Honolulu went down in Fresh Café’s warehouse-turned-multimedia space “Loft in Space.” The collective was truly international and included Canadian artists 123klan and Jeff Hamada, Hong Kong-based Suitman, Will Barras from England, Yue Wu of France, Meggs of Australia, American Aaron De La Cruz, and Hawai‘i-based artists Kamea Hadar, Prime and Ekundayo. Jasper even got in a painting. Envisioned as a week-long event in which international artists converge to create together, Pow Wow succeeded in uniting these artists for a common purpose on O‘ahu, the gathering place.

As for thematic unity, all of the works aggressively assert themselves as fiction. Colors are distorted and keyed up, images are washed out or sprayed over, giving a take-it-or-leave-it quality that appreciates craft insomuch as it looks good. Australian artist Meggs makes a real argument for the spray can as a legitimate tool of art with effective imagery coming from the American canon of comic books. Using spray cans the way they were meant to be, the splatter and block out effects create hero masks and explosions on top of each other, targets and tagging orient outside the frame of the canvas to extend the story in a way that would make Jack Kirby, the comic book artist famed for his contribution to Marvel and DC, proud. Young Kim, an international artist better known as “Suitman” had attendees pose for portraits wearing a smock that gave the appearance of being a shirt, tie and suit jacket. It went on like a flak jacket or the lead vest one wears prior to getting an x-ray at the dentist’s office. The end result on Suitman’s website are both intimate and flattened, like René Magritte’s mid-century paintings of an apple over the face of a suited man. Like Magritte, here is an artist capturing an image in order to remove it from its context. Outside, a massive mural was worked on all week partially obscured by scaffolding, a work of enough complexity to deter explanation.

Pow Wow may be modern in ideology, but is grounded in the recent American tradition of hip-hop. The genre’s tendency to create new analysis using the artwork of others with samples, remixes and re-visions in the post-everything world that keeps it a fluid and malleable form found itself here in paint form – a self-referencing act that collects and spits out imagery with equal indignation at all forms of authority. Critics might see the ghost of Basquiat in the collective, along with the realization that somewhere in the 21st century hip-hop got older and wiser. In that context, I must articulate a slight objection to some of the work. Fetishes and sexual hangups of boyhood continue to be celebrated- the subject matter remains juvenile even as the artists have grown up and their technical skill having grown with them. In the paintings for this year’s Pow Wow, female lips, breasts and objectified bodies abound. For the quality of the work, women continue to to be mindless conveniences, 21st century muses splashed in acrylics over canvas. For better or worse, the men are treated no better. A closer inspection of Wong’s piece shows the head of Mr. T on the body of a toddler with an erection, ejaculating onto the rest of the canvas.

I don’t think my apprehension with the content was without artistic intent. Jasper has received several homophobic emails regarding his stylized work. As he explains: “For me, art shouldn’t bore you. You should get an emotional response, whether that be positive or negative. I guess I’m attacking masculinity in some way. That’s why you see a dictator as a baby painted in pink, maybe lasers coming out of his eyes or something.” Looking closely, there is some actual analysis of social structure in the work. Alienation, childhood cartoons and indiscriminate iconography tell the story of a young man separated from America, experiencing it as a state of mind. The images of Hitler or Mr. T in the work aren’t referring to the actual men and critiquing them, but rather references a TV version of them as characters within a fiction, the visual remix.



Regarding the arts scene in Hong Kong, “The place sucks man. It’s populated with highly educated people, and it has a western infrastructure. The British were there for so long, that the environment created a certain capitalism for art. The galleries are there for the high-end market. They sell old items, showing the same thing over and again, oriented towards sales. It’s a difficult place to progress.”

As Wong carves a space for American street art in once-British Hong Kong, the unheeded capitalist changes in China have reached the contemporary warehouses in Beijing, turning that historic city into a global hub of human creativity. Massive amounts of money are being traded as the Chinese government continues to chasten artists. In October of 2010, imprisoned poet and politically-minded intellectual Liu Xiaobo became the first Chinese Nobel Prize winner, “for his long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China.” The Chinese government’s denial of the prize and continued repression of any coverage highlights where the country’s leadership stands socio-politically. As of the writing of this article, world famous Ai Weiwei, after the successful run of his Sunflower Seeds exhibit at the Tate Modern in London, is being detained for unspecified reasons in a Hong Kong airport, prompting major art institutions around the world to use Twitter and Facebook to reach out to the community in signing a petition for his release. It seems that in this part of the world, art really does have the capacity to change everything.

Speaking days before the event, Wong explained that “Hawai‘i is similarly distrustful of art. I have been trying to secure better funding for Pow Wow, and local companies have found it hard to go in with me because they don’t see Hawai‘i as a lucrative market. So for this event, we’ve had very little funding. I mean, I depleted my checking account to make this thing happen. I’m not worried though. I’m excited. I’m not scared.” Wong might not be scared, but there is certainly scary talk of the closing of The Contemporary Museum, and/or its merger with the Honolulu Academy of Arts. As in most instances of the arts through history, funding has originated from wealthy benefactors. Here in Hawai‘i those wealthy benefactors hail from a uniquely hamajang history. The descendants of those first missionaries who sailed from Boston Harbor on creaky wooden ships in the early 19th Century were some of the originating patrons of world class art in the Pacific, another of American Protestantism’s lasting provenance on these islands. In this city, missionary names still affect power moves in town well past the days of royalty and sugar. There is only so much that provenance can provide however, and arts at all levels, from the third grade teacher to the contemporary thought-provoker, have been affected by the downturn in the economy.



No great victory will be claimed by the shuttering of a place designed to showcase humanity’s creativity to a requiring public. But as the Great Recession settles into the new status quo for museums, they have had the difficult task of choosing between projects that used to mean economic security and those that represent artistic risk. Such security may go the way of the telephone landline, diminishing in a new era. In attempting to do art par excellence on a Top Ramen budget, they are missing out on the work that actually excites. To fill space with art for an educated bourgeoisie and the occasional ‘ohana (accounting formulas and egalitarianism), they have picked a version of madness induced by economic uncertainty; doing the same thing over and over again while expecting a different result.

In American form, Pow Wow got by with a lot of help from friends. Instead of waiting for authority (and money) from on high, the organizers willed the gathering into existence. Artists stayed at Kamea Hadar’s family residence, drink sponsors came through, and several local friends took the week off to see it go down. The success of the event stems in no small part from the audacity of its organizers, willing to sacrifice a false sense of security for a vision.

Certainly these young artists enjoyed themselves, understandably, taken with the task of their work while on Hawaiian holiday. They commandeered a warehouse in Honolulu to form their own republic of joy – a parenthesis within the city’s contentious art world and the schizophrenic Chinese scene – a paradise within a paradise. This is American contemporary art in Honolulu, and Jasper Wong is seeing to it that they will be back next year.

Text by Bridget Mullen

Images by John Hook

So Joey, what exactly is a mixologist?

A fancy term for a very experienced bartender. The person who creates the signature or specialized cocktails for the bar. Or maybe another word for a kick-ass DJ?

How do you develop a new drink?

There are no new drinks! Yikes, bold statement! But, there are variations and techniques that take existing drinks to the next level. I always start off with the base of a drink, like a Bloody Mary, and then I slot in and out different flavor profiles to create a tasty base. So instead of Tabasco for heat, I’d use Sriracha, and in the case of horseradish, I’d use wasabi. Then to fortify the drink, I could switch to TY KU soju, Bombay Sapphire or even a great tequila instead of the usual vodka. It’s not a new drink. It’s just a twist that delivers a completely different flavor profile, mouth-feel and finish.

How do you name your cocktail creations?

I’m really bad at naming drinks, so I usually stick to the components. Like if I don’t want to say, “mojito,” it would be an “herbaceous citrus and rum sparkler.”

Describe the art of pairing cocktails with food.

The pairing comes in the flexibility of manipulating flavor profiles, acidity and balance to work with the protein or sauce. Sometimes the cocktails are great on their own, but their brilliance comes out when they are drank with the food they are paired with. It’s like how a good table wine is OK on its own, but eat some cheese and fruit with it, and it moves to a whole new level.

Why does something like Munch work well at a place like Apartment3?

Apartment3 continues to be pioneering and innovative for the nightclub and restaurant scene in Honolulu. The venue itself is intimate and cozy, fun and unpretentious. Munch has created a cult following of diehard foodies and cocktail aficionados.

How do you come up with a Munch menu?

In a nutshell, the chef comes up with the menu, and then I create interesting drinks that complement or contrast the flavors in the dishes.

What has been your favorite Munch so far?

Tequila Munch was my favorite. It really crushed the paradigms that most people think tequila cocktails are all about.

And your favorite drink?

The Tennessee mai tai, a complicated cocktail that contains Jack Daniels poured over the rocks.

Since you get so creative with your cocktails, do you find simple drinks boring?

The brilliance of a simple cocktail comes from making it properly. A beautiful manhattan, the cosmopolitan, or a properly made margarita are absolutely delicious when made perfectly. That’s not boring at all.

What are some common flavors that go well together?

Jack Daniels and Cheerios, Grey Goose and everything. Oh! And of course loco moco with a large fruit punch.

What is the craziest cocktail you’ve ever made?

Squid-ink martini, clarified quail-fat cocktail and, of course, the smoked mai tai.

What’s the craziest drink you’ve ever had?

On my 21st birthday, I had a Tequila Suicide: Sniff the salt, shoot the tequila, squeeze the lime in your eye.

Get you Munch on every fourth Thursday. Call Apartment3 to reserve your spot at 808-955-9300 or visit www.apartmentthree.com.