O Tiki God, Why Hast Thou Forsaken Me?
Most of us have irrational, inexplicable enthusiasms. (I say “most” because as far as I can determine, marketing types appear to have no inner life whatsoever. Probably has something to do with the lack of a soul.) One of the least explicable is an obsession with Tiki bars. It’s an obsession I happen to share.
Those of you familiar with my personal history may be mildly alarmed at this confession of Tikimania. I am, after all, a notorious former drunk, and a fixation on venues serving rum and fruit concoctions in a pleasantly bamboo-festooned tropical atmosphere may seem a bit unwholesome. Well fear not, my friends, for I fell in love with all things Tiki a good fifteen years before my first Mai Tai.
In 1962 my grandparents drove to Los Angeles to resolve the marital problems my mother was experiencing by dragging everybody but Dad back to Uvalde, Texas. Domestic violence aside, I had liked California, and even though I was only five years old I greatly resented being dumped into Hicktown, USA. Naturally, I looked back on my time in Los Angeles much as people of good will now remember the 1990s: as a lost paradise sinking into a reeking, vermin-infested swamp crawling with disease-ridden, inbred cretins and vicious predators without conscience or honor. But enough about Bush.
Los Angeles was absolutely covered with Tiki gods in 1962, and since it was the last place I’d been happy (something that wouldn’t change until 1978 when I finally escaped that goddamned ugly fucking stupidity-worshipping stinking horseshit-factory Texas*), Tikis became a personal symbol of my banishment from the realm of light.
So that’s why I love Tiki bars despite the fact that I can’t drink in them.
There have been a number of Tiki bars on the internet over the years. I even tried to set one up myself back in 1997 called “Casa Tiki.” Most have been complete failures. But last night, while doing a serendipity search (I’d been reading a Salon article on fugly which mentioned the word “velvet,” and it struck me I knew nothing whatsoever about how it’s made) I turned up the following site: Club Velvet. It’s funny, it looks cool as hell, and it’s got maybe the only in-depth piece ever done on Exotica master Les Baxter.
* Some have wondered about my boundless antipathy toward the Lone Star State. Let me put it this way: in Los Angeles, I would have been considered a bright, talented kid with an enormous appetite for learning. In Texas, I was considered a subhuman freak by the people who inspired the movie Deliverance. To quote Ahab (and Khan): “From hell’s hot I stab at thee, for hate’s sake I spit my last breath at thee.” Not that I’m bitter or anything.
