Post #88024 by bigbrotiki on Sat, Apr 24, 2004 11:54 PM

Crazy Al, you ain't crazy. I love doing visual Tiki genealogy, tracing back designs like that, vintage and new.

Big Al, thanks for the pics, the feather helmets were not on display last time I was there, that feather Ku image is one of my faves!

The Ku Kitsch display is there thanks to DeSoto Brown, my man at the Bishop Museum Archives (see BOT credits). DeSoto has been trying to make the academics there recognize Polynesian Pop for years, and he is slowly getting somewhere.

DeSoto is a pioneer in discovering Hawaiiana, having published the very first book on the subject as early as 1982. His "Hawaii Recalls" was the first book to show Eugene Savage's and McIntosh's Matson Line covers, which subsequently became such icons of Hawaiian nostalgia that they have become clichees twice.

He owns THE most extensive collection of Hawaian sheet music covers, menu covers, movie stills and general Hawaiian ephemera anywhere, and has written several other books, like "Hawaii at War", also a book of vintage Waikiki postcards, and recently co-authored a book on Hawaiian shirts. He also wrote an article about the Ku image in one of the last published Tiki News.

Here is a Honululu arts article that mentions him:

http://starbulletin.com/97/03/06/features/story1.html

and he also had his own opinion on the recent artifact removal controversy:

"Staff that speak out reprimanded

Last week, well-known Bishop Museum archivist DeSoto Brown was suspended without pay for speaking out publicly about the artifact controversy and criticizing the museum’s actions. Both Purnell and DeSoto Brown are authors, respected in their fields and well-known in the community."

He's back there now, and things are settled. I'd like to ad that he is a very private person, and nobody, not even I, have ever gotten to see his whole collection.