FLUX Hawaii / Issue 2

Issue 2

November 18th, 2010

New Works by Jim Russi

Famed surf photograph Jim Russi shows new works on display at Haleiwa Town Center’s Thomadro Art Gallery, Saturday November 20 from 5PM to 9PM.

The ocean is the epitome of artistry and adrenaline for those who choose to participate in it. For the past 30 years, Jim Russi has been capturing these moments, freezing them in time and place, for a snapshot into the spirit of what happens when mortals and mother nature collide.

Russi has been a senior staff photographer for every major U.S. surf publication, yet his imagery might be most well known for the vivacious Roxy ads that have inspired females to get in the water for over a decade now. And beyond surf mags and industry ads, Russi’s imagery now steps on to canvas at the Thomadro Art Gallery in Hale‘iwa. A book is also in the works. Russi does not simply record images, he creates them.

Every role Russi takes on — artist, mentor, father, fellow — is met with fierce discipline and dedication. To see a tattooed and tanned Russi riding one of his choppers around the island, surfing one of his favorite neighborhood breaks on the North Shore, or setting up to shoot on the beach with his face shielded by a trucker hat — always with the enthusiasm of a fresh-faced grom — it seems he has got it wired. But this life was won by many mistakes that he is not ashamed to admit, which is what makes him so refreshing and inspiring.

“I made a lot of life decisions that set me back a lot,” he recalls. “I can’t go back and change it. I would have put a lot more energy into my craft than drugs and alcohol if I could go back. But it’s not as wasteful if I can share that with other young people. I’m not preaching to anyone, but if someone asks. … If you can learn from other people’s mistakes, you’re ahead of the game. At my age I’ve made so many mistakes, I’m not embarrassed to talk about them to help somebody else.”

This year he will make 25 years sober. He hit bottom when a hanai little brother was killed in an alcohol and drug related event. Russi sought a way out. Much like the characters in the movie Easy Rider, he’d been searching for freedom in all the wrong places. “Anybody who has a compulsive personality, which a lot of artists have, can see it go positive or negative,” he explains. “I spent years chasing my tail in photography; that’s a healthy compulsion. The partying compulsion was a negative, and a difficult lifestyle to step out of.” Russi found recovery from addiction in 12-step programs. Later, he found a relationship with his higher power. “Committing my life to Christ, understanding that I’m not perfect and it’s OK when I fall short,” he says. “That healed me.”

Mentors are important to Russi, in personal and professional spheres of life. “That’s how all great civilizations have grown,” he adds. “Any successful society has mentorship.” His artistry is the result of a solid mix of passion and mentors. Growing up in California and loving motorcycles and surf as a grom, Russi got an early start in shooting his favorite activities when his father, an amateur photographer, gave him his first toy camera and constructive tips in fifth grade. After graduating with a B.A. in photography from the Brooks Institute, Russi took a vacation to Hawaii to surf, and like so many, never left. He befriended some guys his age — Jeff Hornbaker, Aaron Chang and Dan Merckel — who would soon become some of the surf world’s most respected and progressive contemporary photographers.

“That was definitely a peer mentorship,” Russi remembers. “We pushed each other. We always helped each other. We raised the bar on surf imagery, always calling each other and checking in, learning. A lot of guys didn’t want to do that. They wanted to be secretive — artists are famous for being lone rangers — but I think that’s detrimental. I think sharing information is important.”

However, times are changing and Russi knows this. His career was built on a time when there were less than a dozen surf photographers on the North Shore, and with the advent of digital photography and a disintegrating economy, he’s unsure of what the future holds. So what is his advice to artists who are coming up currently in less-than-flourishing conditions? “Seek out mentors to help you, professionally and personally. My father always told me to pursue what I love because that will become my job, and I will have to get up every day to do it. You still have to pursue your dreams these days, whatever they are, and the money will come,” Russi urges. “If you just pursue money, you will be miserable.”

New Works by Jim Russi

Thomadro Art Gallery

Haleiwa Town Center

66-145 Kamehameha Highway Unit 7 Haleiwa Town 96712

808-637-8010 Pupus-Libations-Music

Filed UnderBlog Issue 2 / Art Flux Events Surfing

AuthorLisa Yamada

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June 15th, 2010

Save Our Surf

A legacy of waves, friends, and resistance in the Aloha State

In an island community, access to the ocean and the streams defines power. Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, Save Our Surf (the SOS as its members called it) and its primary organizer, John M. Kelly Jr., organized against the overdevelopment of Hawai‘i’s shorelines. Over a generation later, residents and visitors to Hawai‘i have a bit more paradise because of this band of surfing kids and their charismatic leader.

Everyone is local eco-literate now, passing around insider lingo like water table and Environmental Impact Statement, shoptalking about the ahupua‘a and debating the mandatory video for visitors to Hanauma Bay. Local ecology is on the cover of everything about Hawai‘i and inescapable on local television. You’d need to go back a full generation to find a Honolulu mayor or state governor that didn’t say environmental preservation was a significant priority. But it wasn’t always school stream clean-ups, blue-green algae farms, and outlawed plastic shopping bags on Maui.

For decades, Dillingham Company, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the young territory developed and altered the landscape of Hawai‘i against the backdrop of tragic cultural loss. The immense changes Honolulu underwent throughout the 20th century rivals that of any Asian tiger metropolis in recent history; the dredging of land and sea, the pouring of concrete over the land, a superhighway. By the early ‘70s, even the slacker local kids born of the baby boom, who ditched school to surf, saw a whole way of life threatened by the unmitigated approach of business and military interests.

Wednesday Night Revolution

Ed Greevy, now 70 years old, has documented “the movement” in Hawai‘i with his camera since the late ‘60s. “I got written to by Doug Frisk in 1970. Doug was the editor for Surfing Magazine. They were getting interested in environmental work as places were being effected all over, places like Dana Point and Malibu.

He asked me, ‘ever heard of the SOS? Could you check it out for us and take pictures?’ I didn’t know what he was talking about, but the next day I was at a camera store in Waikīkī that isn’t there anymore, and I saw a poster, this handmade thing, telling me about the next SOS meeting at Black Point.”

What Ed Greevy saw at that Wednesday weekly meeting of the SOS was young surfers in revolt, led by John Kelly in his living room. Save Our Surf was planning the first major protest at the newly minted Hawai‘i State Capitol in downtown Honolulu. They were attempting to lobby the legislature for an investment in the city’s first water treatment facility and against the dumping of sand in Waikīkī beach for development, a move that could have effectively destroyed some of the most famous and beloved surf breaks in the world.

“They were planning this big event at the capitol,” Greevy recalls. “It was in 2 or 3 months, all these kids in the living room. There was maybe 20 of them, plus the girls running around the house. One of the kids was a treasurer, he stands up and says, ‘OK we spent $8 for this, $12 for that, and we got a little under $10 now.’ I thought, ‘this is crazy, they want to do this big thing with all these people and they got less than 10 bucks.”

Hot Curl and The Atom Bomb

John Kelly, by that point, a father in his 50s, had already seen enough in his life to know that the SOS could win these battles. Kelly grew up at Black Point, when that part of the island was the lonely fringe of Honolulu’s city lights. He was the only child of famous artist parents John Melville Kelly Sr. and Katherine Harland, creators of some of the first global images of an idyllic Hawai‘i – art that maintains its beauty and masterful technical merit to this day in the upper floors of the Honolulu Academy of Arts and the Hawai‘i State Art Museum. As a surfing kid, his first board was, by modern standards, a ridiculously heavy redwood plank shaped by David Kahanamoku, one of Duke’s brothers.

Fellow surfing pioneer Wally Forsieth charged the biggest swells of the 1930s with Kelly. ”Every surfer knew every other surfer. And, not only every other surfer, they knew every other surfboard. They knew exactly who owned the board. There were boards with initials and names and all kinds of crazy stuff, and everybody had their own design.” Forsieth and Kelly’s own 1937 design was the “Hot Curl,” which was essentially a redwood board he took an axe to at the tail for a trim V, then kept modifying in order to make it down the steep face of his home break at Brown’s and Black Point.

Courage was a hallmark of Kelly’s long life. He was one of the first to charge the point at Makaha, finding the waves after spearfishing off the Wai‘anae coast. As a serviceman of the greatest generation, he eventually found himself stationed aboard a ship off the coast of Kaho‘olawe. There the navy was beginning a decades-long bombardment of the island with ordnance, using a sacred Hawaiian site quite literally as target practice. As a skilled freediver, he retrieved unexploded torpedoes with nothing more than a rope and goggles, a task most of the hard-hat naval divers refused. Although he told the Chicago Daily News War Service that “any islander could have done it,” this and other acts earned him a Navy and Marine Corps medal of honor.

Kelly’s real passion was getting people together and directing young energy and talent. After a post-war move to New York to attend Juilliard with his wife Marion, Kelly came back home to be the choral director at Palama Settlement.

According to Ed Greevy, it was Marion that politicized the man: “He was crazy about her. She was doing work with the ILWU (the historic International Longshoreman’s Union), where she was Jack Hall’s secretary there for a while. I think she said, ‘if you’re gonna keep hangin around, then you’d better read these books.’”

Those politics, along with a character that longtime friend George Downing explains “you couldn’t buy” lost him his job. As a politicized intellectual, Kelly became interested in The Bomb and nuclear disarmament, and in 1959 was set to be a delegate to the Fifth World Conference Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs in Hiroshima. His bosses threatened to fire him if he went. He chose to go.

Save Our Surf

For Kelly, after charging double overhead sets at Makaha on a board he made himself and lassoing bombs from the sea floor, paddling against the current of overdevelopment surely seemed possible. He and fellow big-wave surfer George Downing (now 79 years old, he is the executive director of “The Eddie,” and the sole decider of when it goes), created Save Our Surf in 1961 when they discovered that a planned unnecessary jetty by the Army Corps of Engineers in Nānākuli would destroy a surf site. They won. The army relocated the jetty.

It was almost a decade later, in 1970, that the SOS made history. A moment came where locals met the tipping point, the detritus of city life on an island began to metastasize, creeping up mountains and down streams, cutting off the view of the ocean from the mountain in a vertical sprawl of concrete and stucco. It was an era when students realized they could no longer check the waves from Kelly’s alma mater Roosevelt High School; over the rising city you could no longer see the south swells wrapping towards Ala Moana. The beachboys in Waikīkī noticed the dramatic shadows of newly-constructed high rise hotels, cooling and darkening the sand.

Some professors spoke of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, some students rediscovered Walden. After being denied the ability to print leaflets at commercial printshops due to political content, Kelly, the son of artists, installed his own press in the basement of his home at Black Point explaining, “the only free press is the one you own.” In the tradition of ideological revolution, those fliers spoke truth to power and found distribution amongst the converted.

In 1970, there was still much to be done: Honolulu City and County had no water treatment facility; there were plans to dump tons of sand on Waikīkī to kill the break while making the hotels more lucrative; there was no shoreline setback law; native Hawaiians and farmers were being pushed off the land; there were very real plans by Dillingham Company to dredge much of the east side of O‘ahu and Diamond Head; and bombs continued to explode on Kaho‘olawe. In those SOS fliers, four words stood out, in the drawn script of surf culture: “Unite to Save Hawai‘i” – in the hand drawn script of surf culture.

Until that moment, the local environmentalist movement was disparate and disorganized. That same year the Nixon administration enacted the Environmental Protection Agency on the faraway Mainland, and although the movement was coalescing on the continent, Hawai‘i was in the midst of unprecedented and heedless development. Now, with a paper call-to-arms, the movement achieved real communal consciousness, a sense of youth, morality and necessity. But it was not a blind revelation; the cranes and bulldozers had been employing locals and operating for years.

As John Kelly later wrote, “Hawai’i was in the post-statehood grip of rapid change when Save Our Surf struggles began in the early 1960s. Freeways were beginning to rip up old communities. Waikīkī was turning into a concrete jungle. Familiar landmarks were disappearing. Surfing friends were being drafted for a far-off war and coming home bitter, if alive.” The tipping point had arrived.

The Slam

When Ed Greevy went to his first meeting to photograph surf environmentalism at Black Point, kids had already been taking the bus to Kelly’s house or the Kaimuki library for Wednesday night SOS meetings for months. Kids who were unable to vote were learning about water treatment facilities, preparing fact sheets, and counting the ratio of people on the beach compared to those in the water in order to convey to power the economic and cultural necessity of surfing.

In describing his politicization, local labor lawyer Wayson Chow explains: ”I was a teenager and I wanted to surf, but rich homeowners at Wailupe Peninsula blocked easy access to the beach. I was pissed off and I went to a meeting of Save Our Surf.” His story is echoed by countless teenagers that were handed a bit of analysis, and returned the deed tenfold when they kept riding that wave.

What can party fliers and a crowd of kids do? Can they crack the walls of politics, stop a bomb, unleash the hope of a more verdant community? Or is real change just a weekend delusion, ephemeral drunk talk amidst the party and the bullshit, for sale, like whack honu tattoos and swap meet leis? A’ole, no. It actually went down like that for a generation in Hawai’i- those persistent questions of culture’s influence on structure takes an elegiac tone here, the thought that culture can actually move us is altered by the landscape like an indigenous species threatened by non-native invaders and forgetfulness.

By that point, the scope of events in Honolulu suggested structural changes on a scale unseen since the 1890s.

When asked what that first demonstration felt like, Ed Greevy explains, “It was huge. Nobody had ever seen anything like that. The capitol was only, what, a few years old, and there had never been a big demonstration there. SOS got from what I can remember almost three thousand people, mostly kids. Session wasn’t in yet, and I guess everybody upstairs got freaked out and locked their doors. The kids wanted their signatures on this beach widening and treatment facility stuff.

“Mike Moriarty was the emcee. When he heard they couldn’t get anybody to listen to them, he was on the mic, he said, ‘on the count of 3, we need to make as much noise, jump up and down so they hear us. 1, 2, 3!!!’ So for a few minutes it was pretty intense, all kinds of hooting and hollering. Security, I think the sheriffs came up and said, ‘Hey you gotta stop, the folks downstairs in the basement think the walls are gonna crack.’”

What it felt like was a massive winter set breaking inside Waimea Bay, the boys in the tower taking notice, the sand shifting as chests tighten; the love slam.

Wave of Change

In those first organized protests in the early ’70s, the SOS went forth from modest beginnings to major environmental successes: they defeated a plan for three high rise hotels directly on the reef at Ala Moana; created a 140-acre park plan for a working-class neighborhood on Sand Island where shippers wanted to build an industrial facility; prodded the legislature to pass a law barring development along a 40-foot shoreline strip; scuttled those plans to widen the beach at Waikīkī; and won appropriations for a statewide inventory of existing surfing sites, many of them endangered.

In 1971, Stuart Udall, President John F. Kennedy’s Secretary of the Interior, wrote a description of the group that was printed in the Honolulu Advertiser: “Kelly’s young brigadiers gather facts, prepare broadside handbills, edit crisis newspapers and tangle with leading establishment planners and businessmen in public hearings. SOS, with its relatively narrow focus on a single resource, disproves the contention (heard often these days) that the environmental movement suffers from too many overlapping organizations. Diversity, we believe, strengthens the cause. In any event, SOS is a force to contend with in Hawai‘i – and our forecast is that many more Hawai‘i land speculators and shortsighted public officials will be ‘wiped out’ by the young surfers if they continue their old ways.”

The SOS would have later effects on the Hawaiian Renaissance, including the battles to save Waiahole/Waikane, and the development of an ethnic studies department at the University of Hawai‘i. In working with other groups during the Hawaiian Renaissance, such as the active Life of the Land, the SOS extended its reach beyond the reef breaks.

Kelly continued to fight overdevelopment throughout his life, until his later years were clouded by Alzheimer’s and his passing at the age of 88 in 2007. He maintained his love of the ocean, his lanky frame seen gliding into the water off the slippery rocks at Kaiko’s at an age many never reach. The man behind the fliers in moments and in retrospect can be seen as an almost unbelievable character, and in truth, Kelly remains sui generis. The earned respect for courage, the application of political theory, and the concentration of the SOS kids focused the broader public’s attention on the truth and morality of environmentalism in ways that no movement had done before. The loose yet powerful organizational structure and a refusal to back down bolstered other groups at the outset of the Hawaiian Renaissance, and is both unique and fitting within Hawai‘i’s history of resistance.

The Next Set

The O‘ahu chapter of Surfrider Foundation, one of many active environmental groups in Hawai‘i, holds the John Kelly Environmental Achievement Awards annually. Besides lobbying and organizing in the modern era, the organization promotes environmentalism by giving awards in three categories: Lifetime Achievement, O‘ahu-Based Company and Professional Surfer.

The first ceremony’s Kelly award was given to its eponymous namesake in 2003. Stuart Coleman, Surfrider Foundation Hawai‘i’s director explains, “he was the first of his kind, he’s the father of local environmentalism, especially for surfers. But the world is different now, and we need to work with and encourage local businesses that are making a difference in the environment.” Past award recipients include lifestyle company Patagonia, surf superstars Rob Machado, Kelly Slater, Rochelle Ballard, and most recently, the Malloy brothers.

Many battles have been fought since those SOS days. Coleman explains: “The recent fight to hold off developers at Kaka‘ako (regarding a developer’s plan to fast-track an environmental impact statement process), we brought in hundreds of people in red shirts to let the city council know we wouldn’t let it happen. That was a play right out of John’s book.”

The history of resistance by the SOS has largely been forgotten, the specifics pulled by the current of a lost era of activism. The record of the movement was recently in danger of being lost forever towards the twilight of Kelly’s life.

In an effort to save these essential cultural artifacts, the University of Hawai‘i, the Kelly family and friends digitally scanned the full archive of SOS posters and writings. Ironically, documents once so threatening to state developers are now at our fingertips at a UH Mānoa website. The images from the movement are the stunning design of a generation, the protest of youth as captured in a flier with no year, often the only proof that thousands of people appeared at one place and time to exact change. Ed Greevy, John Kelly, Barry Nakamura, and countless SOS kids took pictures of their time, often to be used as evidence of the environmental degradation that was intentionally hidden from sight by developers, the army, and the state.

Now removed by time and technology from their original intention, they take on the powerful and haunting beauty of art, something more tangible than the postcard pastels we’ve been sold: kids playing in the street because there’s no park, cars rusting into the ocean with a surfer catching a head-high right in the background, tragic bulldozers, kids talking to each other about change in a living room after school.

The modern parallels taken with camera-phones, of West Side homeless encampments and schools closed on Fridays, make you wonder who will revive those Wednesday night meetings. That the SOS actually won so many battles, that an infinity of waves have crashed on shores that were never dredged, that it was kids that really did it, is the SOS legacy. More so it is a call to arms.

The honors bestowed in Kelly’s name say little about the way Save Our Surf has taken its place in history — almost forgotten for a new generation of environmentalists. Problem is, they don’t name buildings for those who advocated no building be built, no forever bronze memorials for the peacemaker-dissidents. Designers of rifles – the Thompsons and Kalishnakovs of the world – see their names used as shorthand in the histories of era. Designers of surfboards, however, fade with the tide.

Although John Kelly wrote at length of his experience organizing Save Our Surf, it’s unlikely he’d be dissatisfied with the absence of a physical remnant of the struggle, another unnecessary scar upon the shoreline he loved and protected.

Filed UnderFeatures Issue 2 / Surfing

AuthorSonny Ganaden

PhotographerCourtesy Save Our Surf

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June 5th, 2010

FLUX Guide to Water Conservation

If we all agree that water is a precious resource essential for life, then why are we abusing the way we use it? A human being needs about five gallons of water a day to survive – water used for consumption and sanitation. The average American uses more than 151 gallons of water per day with a household usage of nearly 370 gallons per day. This weighty number is due to the nonchalant attitude we have toward water – that water is more than abundant, a renewable resource that won’t ever run out. If we continue to practice the misuse of water, however, we will find ourselves thirsty, that once abundant source of water, dry.
Illustrations by Jennifer Yoko Thorbjornsen

The average household uses nearly 370 gallons of waterper day. Here is where it all goes:

Watering your lawn:
Water used: 5 to 10 gallons per minute when hose is on.
Average use: 15 minutes.
Wastes: Up to 150 gallons.
Conserve! Water your garden every other day. Also, water either early in the morning or late in the afternoon when the climate is cooler.

Saves: Up to 40 gallons.

Toilet:
Water used: 3.5 to 6 gallons per flush
Average use: Six times per day
Wastes: Up to 36 gallons
Conserve! Installing an ultra-low flush toilet earns you a rebate. If minor construction isn’t your thing, placing a brick or bending the rod with attached floater ball downwards in your toilet tank will trick your tank into thinking it’s full when in fact, you’ve only displaced the water.
Saves: Up to 18 gallons.

Shower:
Water used: 2.5 to 4 gallons per minute
Average use: The average shower lasts ten minutes
Wastes: Up to 40 gallons
Conserve! Take shorter showers and turn off water when lathering
Saves: Up to 20 gallons.

NEARLY 70 PERCENT OF THE WORLD’S SURFACE IS MADE UP OF WATER, THOUGH 97.5 PERCENT OF ALL WATER PRESENT ON EARTH IS UNFIT TO DRINK, LEAVING ONLY 2.5 PERCENT OF WATER CONSUMABLE. OF THAT, ONE-THIRD IS FROZEN IN THE FORM OF GLACIERS AND POLAR ICE. THAT LEAVES THE ALMOST SEVEN BILLION PEOPLE OF THE WORLD TO SHARE ONLY ONE PERCENT OF CONSUMABLE WATER. LET’S CONSERVE OUR WATER FOR FURTURE GENERATIONS.

Faucet:
Water used: 2 to 7 gallons per minute
Average use: Varies (Brushing teeth, washing dishes, washing hands, etc.)
Wastes: Up to 140 gallons.
Conserve! Turn the faucet off when not in use. Running the water while brushing your teeth or shaving is wasteful. Also, energy star dishwashers are more efficient than hand washing dishes. If you have to hand wash dishes however, fill the bin with hot water and wash all dishes, rinse and air dry.
Saves: Up to 70 gallons.

Filed UnderFeatures Issue 2 / Water

AuthorCody Matsukawa

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April 11th, 2010

Notes From Ed Greevy

Throughout the latter half of the 20th century, Save Our Surf and its primary organizer, John M. Kelly Jr., organized against the overdevelopment of Hawai‘i’s shorelines. Over a generation later, residents and visitors to Hawai‘i have a bit more paradise because of this band of surfing kids and their charismatic leader.

For decades, Dillingham Company, the Army Corps of Engineers, and the young territory developed and altered the landscape of Hawai‘i against the backdrop of tragic cultural loss. The immense changes Honolulu underwent throughout the 20th century rivals that of any Asian tiger metropolis in recent history; the dredging of land and sea, the pouring of concrete over the land, a superhighway. By the early ’70s, even the slacker local kids born of the baby boom, who ditched school to surf, saw a whole way of life threatened by the unmitigated approach of business and military interests.

Ed Greevy, who has photographed “the movement” in Hawaii for every major publication in the state, moved to Hawaii permanently in 1967, after years in New York. He was a good friend of Kelly, and though he is 70 years old now, he remembers the events from that movement in vivid detail.

How did you Meet John?
I moved back for good in 1967 with my first wife. In 1970, I got back into photography after just working at the airport for Pan Am checking folks in. I’ll refer to what I observed and was a part of.

I got written to by Doug Frisk in 1970, Doug was the editor for Surfing magazine, they were getting interested in environmental work as places were being effected all over, places like Dana Point, Malibu. He asked me, “Ever heard of the SOS? Could you check it out for us and take pictures?” I didn’t know what he was talking about, but the next day I was at a camera store in Waikiki that isn’t there anymore, and I saw a poster, this handmade thing, telling me about the next SOS meeting at Black Point.

I was in my early 30s, John and Marion were in their 50s by then. Marion was a good surfer as well, and I know the daughters loved the water too. I met them in their home, a real unique place, you just gotta see it. I just went to one of the regular meetings, which happened every Wednesday. Everybody there was in their teens or early 20s, a lot of high school kids. They were planning the first big event of the organization.

There was a place he carved out of the basement for the big printing press. He was real organized, I remember everything having its place, all the little nuts and bolts in clear glass jars with lines on them. He would try and go to the commercial printing presses, and they would look at his posters and say, “I can’t print this.” So he only did that once or twice and paid too much before he figured out he needed his own press. Somebody donated an old offset lithograph press. He took it apart and put it back together in the basement.

It wasn’t his father’s?
No, he got it second-hand from someone else. It’s this big machine. He used to say, “The only free press is the one you own.”

They were planning this big event at the capitol. It was in two or three months, all these kids in the living room. There was maybe 20 of them, plus the girls running around the house that first meeting. I went too. One of the kids was a treasurer, he stands up and says, “OK we spent $8 for this, $12 for that, and we got a little under $10 now.” I thought this is crazy, they want to do this big thing with all these people and they got less than 10 bucks. But none of them were disenchanted by the lack of cash; they weren’t even worried about it! Really struck me how confident they were. Most of the kids were middle class, took the bus there. That energy was just mind boggling, it was crazy.

Tell me about “the formula.” Kelly sort of synthesized Marxism in his own organizing strategy, right?
Well, he thought that having your own press, along with the people power, was the only way to really get the word out. He had a formula: leaflets handed out individually, 25:1 was the ratio, meaning that for every 25 leaflets you hand out, you’ll get one person to show up. So, like everything, he did the math. He figured he needed 200 people to make a scene, so, he knew how much paper he needed to get and how much he needed the kids to get involved. He had a formula for all kinds of stuff.

In 1970, the City and County didn’t have a main sewage treatment plant. Mililani had one, but that was private. They were setting up the community out there and it wasn’t for everybody else. The only thing they had was a pipe that was two miles off of Sand Island that dumped raw, untreated sewage directly into the ocean. Kids would surf around Sand Island, or even Waikiki during kona winds, and all kinds of stuff was popping up. They closed down Waikiki beach. That made national news, Condoms and all kinds of muck in the water, people getting sick.

The kids – John helped a little – but it was mainly the kids, about 15 of them, they went out and started researching waste treatment facilities. I was at that first meeting, and a few of them made a presentation on the difference between this type of facility and that, and what the city’s options could be. They weren’t even old enough to vote yet, but they were already planning on lobbying the legislature for a new facility.

They were also fighting the widening of Kuhio beach in Waikiki. I mean, they’re planning on doing it now, but it was a big thing then. City was saying that there was not too many people in the water anyways, and it’s more important to have people on the beach. The kids, with John helping out, proved that wrong. They sat there from sun up to sun down and counted. They did this months on end. Sure in the middle of the day with all the tourists on the beach it looks like you need more beach, but if you’re out there at dawn, everybody there is in the water. They proved to the city with charts and stuff that it wasn’t a good idea. A lot of these kids took off school so they could count people! That’s how they stopped the beach widening.

What was that first demonstration like?
It was huge. Nobody had ever seen anything like that. The capitol was only, what, a few years old, and there had never been a big demonstration there. SOS got from what I can remember almost three thousand people there, mostly kids. Session wasn’t in yet, and I guess everybody upstairs got freaked out and locked their doors. The kids wanted their signatures on this beach widening and treatment facility stuff. Mike Moriarty was the emcee, and when he heard they couldn’t get anybody to listen to them – he was on the mic – he said, “On the count of 3, we need to make as much noise, jump up and down so they hear us. 1, 2, 3, Aghhhh!!!” So for a few minutes it was pretty intense, all kinds of hooting and hollering. Security, I think the sheriffs came up and said, “Hey, the folks downstairs in the basement think the wall are gonna crack.” Life of the Land was getting organized around the same time, so they were part of this too.The media really sucked it up.

Tell me about John a little more.
He was an only child. His father moved the family here when he was 3, and built that home at Black Point, which was then the country. His dad was the illustrator for the Star-Bulletin, and all that art he did was really into the culture. There were a lot of Hawaiian families still living traditional back then at Black Point, around the caves. John learned about the ocean mainly from them.

When he was in the Navy, they were shooting torpedoes at Kaho‘olawe, waiting for them to hit the rocks and blow up. A lot of times they wouldn’t, so they’d send a hard hat guy down there to tie a rope and haul it back onboard and see what happened. Those guys apparently didn’t want to do it. Said it was too dangerous. John jumped in and freedived it. I think he got some big award for it later.

How’d he get political?

It was Marion. She grew up here, and he was crazy about her. She was doing work with the ILWU – she was Jack Hall’s secretary there for a while. I think she said, “If you’re gonna keep hangin’ around, then you’d better read these books.” And it was something political, it moved him in that direction. They moved away to New York, where they both went to Juilliard. He was into choral direction, that was his original passion. Colleen was born in New York, I think. This surf thing didn’t come until later. He was the choral director at Palama Settlement, when he got interested in nuclear disarmament. There was this big conference in Japan that he wanted to go to. Palama Settlement said, if you go, we’ll fire you. But he went anyways, and they laid him off. After that he worked at UPW.

Tell me about Waiahole / Waikane. What do you think John would think of his legacy?
That’s part of the legacy I guess. It certainly goes beyond surfing. Farmers in Waiahole, you know, they were showing up to city council meetings and pulling the red book out of their shirt pockets and giving speeches. These older and middle-aged Japanese guys were doing it, not just the students. It was real shocking to see at the time. Students you expected to be radical I guess. They were telling people about Mao’s good book.

Ariyoshi ended up having to buy the valley. It was peaceful, non-violent protest, there was at least 1,000 people living there at the time. There were some rumors out there that I think set the stage. The “syndicate,” as they called it back then, they were threatening to blow up the Likelike tunnel, and the H3 before it got under way if they took over the valley. Some older valley activists said that to me. But the whole state knew what was going on. They practiced corralling the cops when they would show up. There was a bell that would sound, and everybody knew what to do. By the way the bell sounded, they would know where to line up in the valley. The younger ones were practicing to link up arm-in-arm to encircle the police, and physically remove them. I saw it, the older guys wanted to be on the front lines, but the young guys made them wait in the back on the porch! The older folks got to talk to Ariyoshi privately, and he actually had to say, “OK, I’ll buy the place.” It was getting to that level.

Tell me about the walk he and Barry Nakamura did.
Oh that must’ve been in the early ‘80s. John, Barry and I did a little bit of it, I think, because I have pictures. They wanted to know if there was anything from the airport to Diamond head that hadn’t been touched by man, by human hands, so they took a walk. Barry is a photographer as well. So they ended up seeing all of this fill that had been done around Sand Island by one of the subsidiaries of Dillingham dredging. Apparently for years they were just dumping the fill that was extra from dredging in the back of the lot – that along with broken equipment that was rusting back there. So they were essentially building their own land by dumping into the water, filling the lagoon by their property. John went to RM Powell, the aerial photography company, to get shots of what was going on. RM Powell does overhead aerial shots all over, and they were going to charge, but John found their stock stuff. They had old and new photos showing what Hawaiian Bittingtons had been doing. This made headline news for a bit. Dillingham got fined for it quite a bit too. For years, SOS was a thorn in the side of big development, big business. I heard a rumor where Dillingham executives put SOS in their annual budget as a PR thing.

What was his legacy?
Make no mistake, John was not a fan of capitalism. I would go to the Wednesday night meetings, usually at Kaimuki library, but the “theory” meetings were on Sundays. SOS, out of all those groups, was probably the most active. Everything from ethnic studies on campus to Waiahole / Waikane. The apathy nowadays? He wouldn’t like that.

Filed UnderIssue 2 Online Exclusives / Art History Surfing

AuthorSonny Ganaden

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April 10th, 2010

Kodama Koi Farm

Most businesses go to great lengths to draw attention to themselves, employing sign wavers and flashy storefronts to lure customers in.

Kodama Koi Farm isn’t one of those businesses. Blink while driving through Lanikuhana Avenue, an impeccably suburban neighborhood in Mililani, and you’ll miss the narrow entrance that leads to the ten-acre farm. Visits are by appointment only, and one must pass a security guard and a mile long stretch of unpaved dirt road reminiscent of a scene from Jurassic Park, before finally reaching the farm.

“A lot of people don’t even know that the farm even exists,” says Taro Kodama, president of Kodama Koi Farm. “I kind of like it that way. We have to protect it from disease.”

On a windy Wednesday in March, manager Hide Kodama, Taro’s younger brother, takes me on a tour of the farm. Sprawling tents cover 120 ponds that are home to 35,000 koi of forty different varieties.

With a flick of his wrist, Hide disperses koi pellets into each of the seventeen 5,000-gallon ponds. In one pond, a cluster of Kohaku, the most popular variety of koi, darts to the center and tints the surface of the water a hue of fiery red. The koi’s shiny scales glow in the mid-morning sunlight. He strolls to one of the 40,000-gallon ponds, where bigger koi are raised. Some, depending on the size, coloration and texture, command as much as $35,000.

“There are two aspects of koi. One being as pets,” says Taro, 38. “The other aspect is they are art. They are called living jewels. They are beauty.”

A passion for the ornamental carp runs deep in the Kodama family. Mamoru Kodama, Hide and Taro’s father, who is 66, has been working in the koi business for over forty years, and has written two volumes of “Kokugyo” (translation: “National Fish”), regarded by koi enthusiasts as the encyclopedia of the koi world. In Japan, one of Mamoru’s grand champion koi sold for $250,000. Employee Jason Rumbawa, describes working with Mamoru as “like standing next to the Michael Jordon of koi. I feel honored.”

Mamoru’s influence has allowed the farm first pick from breeders in Niigata Prefecture, Japan’s leading producer of koi. All of the Kodama’s koi are bred in Niigata. Coupled with a steady diet of Kodama-patented koi food and an eBay-style business model that allows customers to bid for koi online, Kodama Koi Farm has established itself as a preeminent dealer of champion-quality koi, reaching customers as far as Europe and Asia.

“The only place we can’t ship to is South Africa,” says Hide, explaining that it takes fifty hours for the koi to arrive there, exceeding the thirty hours the koi are able to survive in the oxygen-infused bags. “We’ve had to turn people in Africa down.”

Hawai‘i’s water quality has also played a big role in the success of the business. In 2001, Taro moved to Los Angeles to run the online branch of the business and found that California’s water was tainting the quality of his koi. “The water was just too hard,” he says. “It was affecting the health of koi and the color of koi.” Since moving to Hawai‘i, Taro’s noticed a marked difference, and compares the water quality from the Waimanalo Mountains to that of Niigata.

“These conditions cause less stress for the koi and help them to become more beautiful,” Taro says. “This is part of the reason I moved to Hawaii too—it’s the best place to enjoy koi.”

For more information regarding Kodama Koi Farm and other Koi-related activities visit: www.kodamakoifarm.com www.alohakoi.org

Filed UnderIssue 2 Online Exclusives /

AuthorMitchell Kuga

PhotographerMichael McDermott

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