Any good archaeologist — even one who studies urban environments — is always looking for the next big find, a Holy Grail of sorts.
For Sven Kirsten, author of the new book "Tiki Pop: America Imagines Its Own Polynesian Paradise," (Taschen, $59.99), it’s a bamboo tube, used to hold chopsticks, from Don the Beachcomber in Hollywood. The tubes were engraved with celebrity names and used exclusively for screen idols such as Gary Cooper, who appeared in 1953’s "Return to Paradise," and Ava Gardner, who starred in 1957’s "The Little Hut." (Christian Dior designed her grass skirt, notes Kirsten’s book.)
The 384-page tome, with some 900 photos, documents the pop-culture phenomenon, including its crash and recent revival due in part to Kirsten’s work, which inspired a new generation of aficionados.
It is also the catalog for an exhibition of the same name that was curated by Kirsten and is on display through Sept. 28 at Musee du quai Branly, the indigenous art museum in Paris.
Compared with "The Book of Tiki" (2000) and "Tiki Modern" (2007), Kirsten said the latest volume in his tiki trilogy "is an even more complete history of the phenomenon."
The exhibit, as well as the book, is arranged chronologically, tracing the evolution of the Western fantasy of the South Seas as a paradise on Earth that sprang from the voyages of early European explorers such as Capt. James Cook and his French contemporary Louis Antoine de Bougainville.
"I call that Western view of Oceania ‘Polynesian pop,’" Kirsten said in an interview last month at his singular hilltop house in Los Angeles, where tikis are spread across the jungly property dense with palms, flowers and other foliage. In the distance, Silver Lake looms like a lagoon, and the famed Hollywood sign is visible.
With its tapa-cloth decor, carvings and bamboo furniture, Kirsten’s home seems more like one of the Don the Beachcomber- or Trader Vic’s-type restaurants he lovingly writes about than an L.A. abode. The author had just returned from Tiki Oasis, a San Diego convention attended by thousands of aloha-shirt-wearing and sarong-clad acolytes, where he lectured and autographed books.
Born in 1955 in Hamburg, Germany, Kirsten moved to Berlin when he was 17 to study photography and optics and became a camera assistant at Hamburg’s NDR television network. He still works as a cinematographer to subsidize his South Seas obsession.
That the so-called "Guru of Poly Pop" is German is puzzling to those unaware that prior to World War I, Germany had colonized parts of Samoa, Micronesia, the Solomons and New Guinea.
After Kirsten’s 1980 move to California, where he studied at San Francisco’s Art Institute and L.A.’s American Film Institute, his fascination with the Americanized pop-culture version of Polynesia was spurred by images of midcentury Americans posing with "grotesque pagan idols."
He got curious and began looking for more material but it was not to be had.
"It was a time that was forgotten," he said.
Kirsten tried to locate the restaurant whose name was on a tiki mug in his possession, but "it was gone … and that really got me into researching in the late 1980s."
The author describes himself as an urban archaeologist who looks "under the layers of different 20th-century styles and fashions to see what was there before and to find objects that put together pieces of the puzzle of a forgotten culture."
He began unearthing the remains and faux Oceanic accoutrements of the Poly Pop fad that swept bars, motels, restaurants, bowling alleys, apartment houses, theme parks, murals and menus across America in the 1950s and ’60s.
One of "Tiki Pop’s" insights is that "a good tiki bar is like a film set," and Kirsten emphasizes the Hollywood connection.
Following the 1937 release of "The Hurricane" starring Dorothy Lamour, "several bars opened on the West and East coasts that had wind and rain effects to make you feel like you were sitting in the tropics in a palm hut while outside a hurricane was going on," he said.
The 1928 and 1932 screen adaptations of W. Somerset Maugham’s "Rain," starring Gloria Swanson and Joan Crawford, respectively, inspired Pago Pago-themed bars that had rain-on-the-roof effects.
After location shooting on California’s Catalina Island for "Mutiny on the Bounty" (1935) with Clark Gable, who played mutineer Fletcher Christian, the set he lived in during the filming was turned into a bar called Christian’s Hut. Kirsten said it was so successful it was franchised and several opened in Hollywood and Waikiki.
Hawaii’s sway over Poly Pop is covered in chapters on Hawaiian music, statehood and "Tiki TV," highlighting series such as "Hawaiian Eye," which aired from 1959 to 1963. Kirsten believes restaurateur Don the Beachcomber — born Ernest Gant in Texas in 1907 — was influenced by Oahu-based poet Don Blanding and took his name.
Although the Tahitian Lanai and the Waikikian are now gone, Kirsten said La Mariana at Sand Island is "a great conglomeration" of previous tiki restaurants such as Trader Vic’s and Stephen Crane’s Kon Tiki in Waikiki, both of which started out on the mainland.
He said examples of "Tiki Pop" in Hawaii were more restrained than those found on the mainland because of cultural sensitivities, particularly regarding the use of sacred idols.
"If you found tikis in restaurants in Hawaii they were usually more authentic reproductions. Here on the mainland, the designers could really go crazy and let their fantasy run wild because of the distance to the source," Kirsten said.
Those offended by the cultural misappropriation represented by Tiki Pop should realize it was not meant as an insult, according to the author.
"People didn’t do this out of chauvinism or sexism or cultural superiority or trying to make fun of these idols," he said. "They did it because they loved Hawaiian and Polynesian culture and wanted to be Polynesians, ultimately. …
"All of the Westerners were charmed by the islands and took them as an inspiration in wanting to find a way back to the origins of mankind. Nineteen-fifties Americans just didn’t know better and they acted upon an impulse, a love and fascination for Polynesian culture."
Ed Rampell, a former Makaha resident, is co-author of "The Hawai‘i Movie and Television Book," (Mutual, $25.95).
