Campbell High School Rocks

Kudos to the students, teachers and principal of Campbell High School in ‘Ewa, who protested at the state Capitol today to get air conditioning. While the DOE talks about its progress toward air conditioning the public schools in recent years, I just have to note, the fact that Leeward classrooms get unbearably, ridiculously hot is hardly news. Those conditions existed 30 years ago, when I was a student at Waipahu High School. DOE—improving facilities one generation at a time!

(Theoretically, Waipahu and Campbell are rivals, fighting annually for possession of the Cane Knife in their homecoming football games, but intolerable working and learning conditions transcend all scholastic rivalries!)

Here's to cooler schools, sooner.

On Political Wisdom

"Politicians depend on good guesswork, not on understanding, in steering the state on the right course. They are just like soothsayers and prophets, who say much that is true, but understand nothing of what they are saying."

—Plato, lived 427 BC-347 BC, as quoted in A Cabinet of Greek Curiosities: Strange Tales and Surprising Facts from the Cradle of Western Civilization, by J.C. McKeown

Getting Childhood Wrong

A facet of modern life that troubles me is the way today's adults seem to micromanage their children, often out anxiety, to where the childhood I had in the ’70s and early ’80s has become unimaginable. School would get out at 2:15, we'd go home, drop off our books, then head right back out. On foot, on our bikes. We knew to be home by dinnertime, but otherwise, this was all unsupervised fun. No parent knew exactly where we were.

Why, at Halloween we would knock on the doors of strangers' houses, ask for candy, then eat it!

Unthinkable today. Now kids go from car seats to pre-school, to after-school activities, to AYSO-this and piano-lessons that, chauffeured from appointment to appointment by white-knuckled parents who are just sure that if they turn their heads for a moment, disaster will befall their little one.

It's all about safety. All the time. And self-esteem. No skinned knees allowed and no bruised feelings, either.

So has all of this made kids safer?

Clinical questionnaires aimed at assessing anxiety and depression, for example, have been given in unchanged form to normative groups of schoolchildren in the US ever since the 1950s. Analyses of the results reveal a continuous, essentially linear, increase in anxiety and depression in young people over the decades, such that the rates of what today would be diagnosed as generalised anxiety disorder and major depression are five to eight times what they were in the 1950s. Over the same period, the suicide rate for young people aged 15 to 24 has more than doubled, and that for children under age 15 has quadrupled

Quadrupled! Read the whole thing at Aeon Magazine. It explains beautifully why unstructured play is actually better for children.

HT:  Instapundit.com

September 11 and Honolulu Harbor

Though the events of September 11, 2001, happened 5,000 miles away from Honolulu, that day's aftereffects still linger in the urban landscape here. Shown here is the security fence that went up along the Honolulu Harbor waterfront. Projects like these happened in cities nationwide after September 11, as they sought to "harden" their infrastructure from terrorist attacks, which back then seemed like they could happen anywhere, at any time.

The low concrete guardrail used to be the only barrier, now there's this forbidding, black curtain of metal, maybe nine or 10 feet high. I took these photos on a drive today. I don't even remember exactly when after Sep. 11 this got built, it now just seems like it has always been here.

Granted, it's more attractive than chain-link and barbed wire, which fences off other waterfront areas along Ala Moana Boulevard and Nimitz Highway, but when you're driving by, seeing it at an angle, it does block the view, shutting us off from the waterfront.

Then there are those knifelike points topping each baluster—pointed inward, as though the intent is to keep us from escaping the island. There's a friendly face to present to all the tourists driving this road from the airport to Waikiki! 

I have no idea what the fence actually does for us 12 years later. It shows up in stretches, here and there, but doesn't form a solid barrier around the harbor. In between the gaps there are plenty of ungated driveways and old, flimsy chain-link fences, all of which could easily be breached. Who decided which lots would get this severe fence and which wouldn't?

And who will decide when we can tear it down? Which official will admit it's a useless eyesore?

OK, those last two were rhetorical questions. Quite likely this fence will outlive us all.

Wait, there's WHAT in my bourbon?

Turpentine.


HT: Instapundit.com

Is Hawaii Safe?

That is, do we think about safety? I happened to drive by the Atkinson Plaza on Wednesday as it was surrounded by fire trucks and police cars, later finding out the reason for the commotion: a 3-year-old child fell out of a window by the elevators onto the concrete awning over the entryway.

How are windows that wide open even possible in a building's common area? I don't know. Kama‘aina can't agree on whether or not we should be allowed to ride in the back of pick-up trucks. The Honolulu Police Department scolds us with $92 tickets for not wearing our seat belts. Pedestrian safety is a joke. The Hawaii Bicycling League offers workshops that include safety advice, since cyclists feel menaced. We require motorcyclists to wear some sort of eye protection, but not an actual helmet.

A Canadian friend of mine asked me what I make of all this. I kinda shrugged. I've ridden in the backs of pick-ups. It's fun.

Canada is appalled. Back home, helmets are mandatory, as are seat belts for adults in the back seat ("They become missiles in an accident otherwise"), so are helmets for cyclists, and no one would be foolish enough to ride in the back of a truck or consent to drive a truck with people in the back and exterior windows of high-rises don't open widely enough for 3-years-olds to crawl through.

Perhaps we have more fun than Canadians. But perhaps we're not immune to the kind of delusion that leads tourists to take risks here they wouldn't take at home, getting into trouble in the ocean or while hiking. It's such a beautiful place, how could anything bad possibly happen to us?

Fly Like a Falcon

Apparently I'm still standing at the busy intersection of Film and Design, because I find myself admiring the fanaticism of Chris Lee and his friends in Tennessee, who have dedicated themselves to building a life-size Millennium Falcon, as seen in the original Star Wars and The Empire Strikes Back. Stats:

7—number of people in Lee's core team
88—number of acres of land Lee owns, on which the Falcon is being built
114—feet, the length of the Falcon when completed

What a puzzle they've set out to solve, as they smack right into the difference between designing models and sets for a film and designing an object for the real world. The short version: nothing seen in the films of the Falcon's exterior and interior actually fit together. But they never had to. They just had to look cool—and at that, every ship and set built for those films was wildly successful.

So much so that I believe George Lucas' real contribution to our culture was not his own derivative, overcooked (or is half-baked?) mythos of the Skywalker clan. It was the designers he hired, who, in crafting compelling, believable things out of plywood and sound effects, inspired a mass awakening to design itself. These designers and builders made us want to design and make cool things.

My lifelong interest in film, design, architecture, even fonts, started there, with a childhood obsession for the blueprints, deck plans and technical manuals published in the 1970s for the Star Trek and Star Wars universes. Not only did their precision lend weight to the illusion that these ships were real, somewhere in space and time, they showed me that the art of representing design on paper is beautiful in its own right. They even gave me an unconscious appreciation for how the form of visual communications itself has a narrative—how a hasty pencil sketch conveys a totally different meaning from a formal, authoritative blueprint. They definitely taught me how visual storytelling can enhance and extend written storytelling.

As for fonts, it was the 1970s Star Trek Technical Manual that taught me the name "Microgramma" for the typeface used on the Enterprise's insignia. I've long since moved on from thinking much about Star Trek, but I do still think about fonts and what they mean quite often.

Example 1: It drives me crazy when the numbers on a speedometer are italicized. Is that supposed to make me feel like I'm going really fast?

Example 2: With everyone going gaga for Mid-century Modernism, I eagerly await Microgramma's second coming. Seems slow to happen. I have to content myself with the leftover examples in Honolulu from its first go-around. Did you know the house rules for Century Center, built in 1978, still require Microgramma for business signs? Century Center, I like your standards.

HT: Huffingtonpost.com video on the Falcon crew, via the new HuffPost Hawaii site.

My Science Fiction Twin

It feels right to launch this column with a little gratitude, in this case to Ben Trevino and Michael McDermott, for inviting me to be part of Discontinuities, their Science Fiction film festival held last week at Interisland Terminal's real world location, R&D. I joined in with some other film lovers in Honolulu to write essays on the five featured movies and participate in panel discussions.

If you missed it, don't worry, the festival echoes on at theoffsetter.com, the new online publication devoted to Honolulu's cultural life. I especially enjoyed the chance to explore the meaning of the architecture in Gattaca and that essay joins the others written for Discontinuities at the offsetter. Mahalo to offsetter editor James Cave (himself a contributor to the festival) for hosting those essays.

And speaking of being grateful for new things, it was our good fortune that Christian Self opened his new bar, Bevy, on the same block as R&D on the same week as the festival. I think we closed the place down every night with long, Moscow-Mule-fueled discussions about the elements of great Science Fiction films. Cheers, Christian, and best of luck to you! (Read more about Bevy here, at Martha Cheng's blog, Biting Commentary, at my old HONOLULU Magazine stomping grounds.)

On the first night of the festival I asked the audience how many of them had already seen Gattaca. Nearly every hand went up. I hope to see more festivals like this, there's definitely an unrequited appetite for them in Honolulu.