Burl Burlingame

I had one of those dreams that seem to grip you all night long. I was watching the new sitcom “Shit My Dad Says.” Seemed pretty normal (and lame) but there were colored dots floating in front of the characters. Turned out they could be manipulated. One color controlled the character’s emotional state, one the amount of interaction with other characters, another the speed with which the character moved from scene to scene. A kind of on/off switch floated on the right. Flip it, and suddenly you were IN the scene instead of watching it on a screen.
It was very much like one of those immersive video games in which an artificial world was rendered around you in three dimensions. There was a certain amount of randomness in the environments, but they stayed true to the show’s (presumed) plot line, which I could monkey with by dialing in more characters and environments. It all seemed pretty real. You had to look carefully to find the rendered seams. At one point, whilst floating down an endless, tree-shaded canal, I just lay back and looked up at the trees, comparing them to each other. Turned out there were just six tree “designs,” placed in random groupings and angles to present an impression of a complex forest.
OK, it was just a dream. And it was interesting that, even in a dream, I was aware that it was an artificial world. Still something I haven’t figured out, though.
Why “Shit My Dad Says”?

Here are a couple of pencil sketches I made some time ago to illustrate a story about the Japanese aviator who crash-landed on Niihau, an event that is still much debated. P/O Shigenori Nishikaichi wiped off his landing gear and belly tank by striking a barbed-wire fence. He was taken captive by the island Hawaiians, but managed to convince residents Yoshio and Irene Harada to help him escape. They pulled the machine guns out of the plane before burning it. After several days of terror, Nishikaichi and Harada were killed by Hawaiian paniolo Ben Kanahele, after shooting the Hawaiian several times. Click on the sketches for enlarged versions.

This piece by the tireless Wayne Harada was the first time any of my books got a newspaper review. He liked it. About a month later, Pierre Bowman of the Star-Bulletin hated it. Shrug. The book came out in 1977 and it’s now out of print. I might bring it back as a print-on-demand volume with added material. It goes for about $50 to $90 at used book stores.

Da Kine Sounds good
By Wayne Harada
Advertiser Entertainment Editor
Aficionados of Hawaiian music, performers, and even sociologists and historians will find delight and charm in a new book dubbed “Da Kine Sound.” It is a collection of 12 interviews with local troupers, liberally illustrated, and lively with savory morsels.
Its release last week came amid a shroud of secrecy — intentional, according to its authors. It also was a long-distance marvel: One of the trio involved in writing the book is a transplanted Hawaiian who now lives in Toronto.
“We’ve been very quiet, very silent about this book.” says Burl Burlingame, a freelance photojournalist, who helped conduct the interviews with his out-of-town partner, Robert Kasher, who made frequent trips to Hawaii in the past year to gather material for the book. Burlingame’s wife, Mary Poole-Burlingame, served as editor of the 176-page paperback volume.
Why the secrecy?
“We didn’t want a cheap rip-off version,” says Burlingame. “It took us a bit longer than we anticipated, and with Bob an ocean away, we had some physical problems.”
The book is a marvelous word-and-picture folio of some of the leading entertainers in town, kind of a print version of a “Home Grown” album. Though one can question some of the omissions among the interviewees, there’s no denying: The cross-section represents the mixed complexion of Hawaii’s musical scene, from Gabby Pahinui (the lead-off interviewee) to Kahauanu Lake (the concluding subject).
“Da Kine Sound” is essentially an examination of the musical climate today, with rap sessions (interviews were conducted via tape recorder over a year’s period, and printed in Q&A form) that result in a breezy, candid style. The format of the book is crisp and clean: Large type, plenty of fresh photographs of the personalities, and lots of insight into what makes ‘em tick.
Each interview is smartly and aptly subtitled; Pahinui, for example, is labeled “The Legend,” Genoa Keawe is “The Auntie,” Carole Kai is “The Show Biz Kid,” Hokule‘a is “The Concept Band,” Charles K. L. Davis is “The Golden Voice,” The Brothers Cazimero are “The Male Duo,” Nona Beamer is “The Teacher,” Loyal Garner is “The Spiritualist,” and so on.
“We started out thinking we’d do a magazine,” admits Burlingame. a former staff member of the Sun Press. “After we conducted the interviews, we discovered we had a book.”
The chief appeal of the book is its candor, its currency. There are oodles of chuckles and a smidgen of fresh insights via candid quotes.
Samples:
Pahinui: “My reflexes are slower now. My voice is just about-shot to hell. I got no teeth. Every time I go to L.A. I lose about two teeth going down, two teeth coming back.”
Garner: “If I can bring just one person to a higher vibration, if I can just make one person smile, then I’ve done my job and I can go home satisfied.”
Kai: “I’ve been labeled the ‘Lala girl.’ Only because I’ve been afraid to jump out of my Oriental self and say, ‘This is me!’ … I worry that people might not believe me.”
Jerry Santos of Olomana (dubbed “The Recording Artists”): “The new interest in the music is tied to the diminishing factor of the Hawaiian life-style. With the buildings and the condominiums and the thousands of people, a lot of the older things vanish very quickly. There is more of an urgency to remember the old values correctly.”
And so on.
The book also spotlights Ke Kai (“The New Band”), Kahauanu Lake (“The Influence”), and Moondance (“The North Shore Sound”).
The Burlingames and Kasher envision perhaps two more follow-up volumes of “Da Kine Sound,” though work has not yet begun on future projects. The new book retails for $5.95, and is published by Press Pacifica.

My little girl just turned two years old, a passage she noticed only because Mommy and Daddy made such a fuss. She’s a big, strong girl, very verbal, has good problem-solving ability and is able to interact well with others, if somewhat shyly. These are the things educators say they look for, so we didn’t anticipate any problems when she started school recently.
It’s a day-care center close to where my wife and I work, where I can drop her off and her Mommy can pick her up. It seems to be ideal. In terms of distance, she’s closer now than she’s ever been.
I miss her.
Something’s going on in her life now that I’m not a part of. When I drop her off in the morning, she still clings to my leg and watches the other kids play. After a while, she ventures away and slyly picks up a dropped toy, or climbs up a vacant slide, or stands to one side as the other kids noisily splash paints or pound Play-Doh or something equally exotic. She’s fascinated.
I’m fascinated too, watching her begin to learn the ground rules of society. But that’s my cue to slip out. If she sees me going, she cries and runs to get me. She wants me to be there with her. I want to be there. But she has to learn, even in these little steps, to be her own person.
The teachers say that, like most kids, she cries when the parent leaves, and when she realizes the parent can’t hear her, stops and does something else.
Crying, according to all the child-raising books, is just another form of communication. The child quickly learns the specific pitch and tone and volume guaranteed to jangle a parent’s nerves. But I don’t think of that when I leave her surrounded by strange children. I imagine I can hear her sobbing even blocks away, until the street noise swallows her up.
That’s dumb. When I come home at night, she stops what she’s doing and says “Hi, Daddy!” Then she runs pell-mell at me, angling for a hug. She gets it. She’s just fine — a smiling, sunny little girl.
I know I’m in second place on her list of priorities. If she can’t get Mommy, Daddy will do. (Followed by Grandma and Grandpa, then her sitters and teachers, then perhaps by anything that looks like a large fuzzy dog.)
When she wakes up in the night, yelling from a nightmare, only Mommy can calm her down. When she skins her knee, Mommy’s kisses heal it faster than Daddy’s. It’s Mommy who can convince her that sleeping is a good idea.
There are compensations. Daddy gets to see all the new tricks, over and over. “Watch, Daddy, watch!” she insists as she does this week’s special, sliding on her belly in the bathtub and making a small tsunami. It’s something that she watched other kids do at school, but waited to test at home.
It’s Daddy whom she imagines is a jungle gym. She likes to scale up my back like a mountain. She likes to sit on my shoulders like an elephant mahout. She likes to sit on my foot and ride it up and down, and yell, “Pony!” She misses us during the day, so she climbs all over us at night.
Then she tells me what happened that day. I can’t figure out the details, usually, except that it involved “kids at school” and “big mess” and “eat,” accompanied by a lot of body English. The excitement comes through, though, and I wish I’d been there to see it. According to my little girl, it was the most amazing thing ever witnessed.
Then the adrenaline burns off, and she goes to sleep, fighting it every second.
I like to look at her when she’s asleep. It’s been a long time since my days were so exciting I resisted the advance of night.
In the morning it starts all over again; the school, the good-bye, the tears. But lately, more often than not, she barely peeps when she goes into the class. It’s an exciting place. I’m just her Daddy.
But I can be at work, and I imagine I hear her cry. It’s just imagination, but there it is, insistent against the clatter of office noise. And all I want to do is run to her, and pick her up, and hear her say “Hi, Daddy!” soft against my ear.

This piece originally ran in the Honolulu Star-Bulletin in 1987. My little girl is now 24 years old and living in New York City, and has turned out just fine.

The greatest fanboy project ever — completely refilming “Star Wars” in 15-second segments.