On Hiatus: the Friday Peace Vigil

I just found this out:

http://malu-aina.org/?p=6668

Hilo’s weekly Friday Peace Vigil postponed till further notice

Published by jalbertini on April 3rd, 2020 in Vigil leaflets.


Due to Covid 19, Hilo’s weekly Friday Peace Vigil at the downtown Post Office/Federal Building is postponed until further notice. I’ll continue to write a new weekly peace leaflet and post on our website www.malu-aina.org. Please sign up and encourage your friends to do so to receive our weekly posts. Mahalo. Be safe and Hang in there.

Jim Albertini

Attack at June 30, 2017 Hilo Peace Vigil

I just found this while browsing:

http://malu-aina.org/?p=4782

Attack at June 30, 2017 Hilo peace vigil

For the record. At approximately 3:30PM June 30, 2017 a late model 4 door Honda, dark grey or black was parked at the curb near the Hilo Post office with a male driver (white, long haired and beard. Looked similar to Dog the bounty Hunter.) As I walked on the side walk back to my corner leafleting post from using the Post office rest room the man held up his middle finger inside his closed window. I didn’t react at all just kept walking. A little while later the car pulls up to the traffic light. I noticed the same man driving and holding his middle finger up again inside his closed window. I saw a woman in the passenger seat. The car was first in line at the traffic red light with me on the corner sidewalk. Then the man’s power window came down. and he said in a strong southern accent. “Since you hate America so much why don’t you just leave the country?” And then he opens his car door and I immediately moved north back down the sidewalk toward the post office. The man proceeds to yell (unintelligible) and then kicks down our plywood sign that says “Stop the Bombing.” He then gets back in his car and drives off. I didn’t get the license #. Malie Sellers and I were the only two there at the vigil at the time. Others had not yet arrived. Malie was down under the shade tree sitting in a chair quite a distance away and did not see what happened.

The times they are a changing and for the worst. I urge all who can to come join the weekly Hilo peace vigil 3:30 -5PM on Fridays at the downtown Hilo Post office with set up at 3PM. There is more safety for all in numbers.
Mahalo.

—

Jim Albertini

Work

I finished a big job last night (my column) and though I still have other things to do, I plan to take it easy. Kawate Seed Shop closes tomorrow so I hope to go there later today, depending on the lines.

The big news that broke last night: Peter Boy's parents charged in his death.

A glance at the headlines: I see a weasel has caused a shutdown of the Large Hadron Collider.

"Crazy hack" (Nancy Nall's term) Armond White on Prince here and here.

Prince and the other great pop musicians of the 1980s — Michael Jackson, The Smiths, Public Enemy, Pet Shop Boys, Scritti Politti, Kate Bush, the Au Pairs, sometimes Madonna — were part of the texture of Reagan and Thatcher realities. They responded to the policies of that era in ways that Prince mourners now ignore by trading the thought-provoking complexities of yesterday’s cultural arguments for the non-thinking conformity of today’s politically naïve pop culture. It’s as if personal politics (the only politics a pop artist can honestly proclaim) didn’t matter.

An Opening and a Closing

When Island Chevrolet closed in mid-2009 I took some photos of the empty car lot. It didn't stay like that for long, becoming a base for several food trucks, including the famous Gina's. Now WikiFresh is open in the building.

Meanwhile, Kawate Seed Shop will close its doors permanently on 30 April.

The Tsunami: Seventy Years Ago

Tomorrow is the seventieth anniversary of the tsunami. The two big tsunamis affected different parts of coastal Hilo. There used to be many buildings along the makai side of Kamehameha Avenue. When the 1946 wave hit, most of them were smashed up, but the mauka buildings largely escaped damage.

This is perhaps the most known photo from the tsunami, of people running up Ponahawai Street.

And this is one of many buildings along Kamehameha wrecked by the tsunami.

Twenty Years Ago Today

The paper published my first opinion letter, about the lack of "quality films" playing in Hilo theaters.

Sometime soon, I'll look at how things have changed, movie-wise, in Hilo.

On another note, Kunstler goes into full head-spinning mode about Ferguson. I'll post a link soon.

Flickr

This is an example of photos I've taken and posted to my Flickr page, as Brandon of Hilo.



My Flickr Photostream.

Kress Cinema Closed Last Night

Kress Cinema closed last night. It will be renovated into a pace for Church on a Sure Foundation, which is in the Prince Kuhio Plaza across from IHOP. However, Pier 1 Imports is taking over that space and the church has to find a new home.

Kress opened in early on 8 December 1995 (5 December, I think, but let me confirm that) as the fanciest theater in town. In context: The Waiakea Kai three-screen theater had been operating since 1981 (again, let me check) and the Prince Kuhio Plaza theater was still a two-screener. The Palace hadn't yet reopened. When the Kress opened, it was a big deal, and for a few years, was the premier theater in Hilo. The Palace reopened to great fanfare in November 1998 as an arthouse, but in late 1999 it was Prince Kuhio theater's renovation and expansion from two to nine screens that turned things upside down. Since its reopening, the Kuhio theater, also known as Prince Kuhio Stadium Cinemas (after its stadium seating inspired by the Palace's own), has enjoyed status as the top cinema in Hilo. Waiakea Kai theater was relegated to bargain showings of second-run movies until it closed in the early 2000s (when exactly, I'm not sure).

That left the Kress: As ticket prices rose over the years, the Kress showed movies for around a dollar. Some of the movies shown were already on video but people went to the Kress to watch films they missed at the Kuhio or to save money. I classified movies to watch as ones to rush out and see, wait till it comes to the Kress, wait till it comes on video, wait till it comes on TV.

The Kress grew shabbier over the years but no one expected it to close.

More later.

Yelp reviews.

BAD Plans

Wednesday's Tribune-Herald had a front-pager about the Naniloa Resort and its new owners' plans for it, including a three-story-high sculpture of a whale! Because a lot of art and artifacts will be on display throughout the hotel, the owners want to play up the museum aspect, to the point where visitors can't tell whether it's a hotel or a museum. To that end, bellhops will be called "curators", and instead of keys, guests will open their doors with so-called "museum passes." If Ken Fujiyama turned the Naniloa into a bad hotel, the new owners will turn it into a BAD* hotel.

(*See Paul Fussell's BAD: Or, the Dumbing of America, which in fact deals with BAD hotels.)

22 December update: The 5 February 2012 edition of the Tribune-Herald had an article titled, "Rebirth: Can Naniloa Reclaim Former Glory?" splashed across the front page. It began: "With a little imagination, the Naniloa Volcanoes Resort has the potential to be great." The article reveals that only one of the hotel's three towers, the Mauna Kea, was fully refurbished.

Colorado Flooding and Hilo Sprawl: A Potential Essay

This morning I left a comment at Hattie's post about the Colorado flood and the words just flowed. I may develop the comment into a short essay here. The popular image of global warming, of melting ice caps and the subsequent flooding of coastal areas, enables complacency among those who live inland, especially in mountainous regions like Colorado. But the effects of climate change are not yet fully known, and some, like more severe snowstorms, appear to discredit its very existence in the eyes of deniers and skeptics.

I noted the inland movement of Hilo, not as a precaution against rising sea levels, but as a result of two tsunamis that destroyed swaths of coastal Hilo. Post-1960 development in particular occurred after the advent of mass motoring. Wide, multilane highways and vast parking lots discourage walking.

In my comment, I mentioned this piece by Alain de Botton, on a world without planes. My plan is to research the effect of mass aviation on the environment.

And here's a not-too-recent but still informative article on aviation and greenhouse gas emissions.

Wikipedia has an excellent
article on the environmental impact of aviation.

20 September update: There's much to write about. I'll post some more on Hilo's development and its tendency toward sprawl, and maybe on the Hilo airport, and what happened when the Kona International Airport opened. This will all take a while, but it should clarify the recent history of Hilo. For one thing, why is the Waiakea Villas all run down, when in the early eighties, it was thriving? Did you know Hilo had direct flights from the mainland? This post is basically writing things down, before I organize it into something coherent.

29 September update: Statistics on airplane emissions.

Kunstler: Scale Implosion (and My Own View of Local vs. Mainland-Owned Businesses)

Today's Kunstler column is on a topic--mass retail--I can understand better than the machinations of high finance. Hilo has a Wal-Mart (open since 1996), a Target (opened in summer 2011), and a few other semi-big box stores (Ross, OfficeMax, etc.) Hawaii, this island in particular, has never supported big box stores and chain retail in the same way the mainland (or Oahu) does. In some ways, our retail environment, especially restaurants, has actually become more localized. This deserves a more thorough treatment, but for now, let me say:

Target and Wal-Mart are lucrative in Hilo, but many local businesses are holding their own against them. I haven't been gone to Wal-Mart in years.

We have a larger (appx. 61,000 sq. ft.), fancier Safeway. But KTA has a nearly 100-year presence and strong customer loyalty. Longtime Hiloans remember Sure Save and Food Fair.

Borders is sorely missed, but there are still Book Gallery and Basically Books, as well as CD Wizard, Hilo Bay Books, Big Island BookBuyers, and Still Life Books.

We have McDonald's and Burger King but not many of the casual dining restaurants that Hattie does not like. We have innumerable small places, including two Indian restaurants. (Akmal's, which has existed in one form or another since its beginnings in Frankfurt in 1974, opened in Hilo in 2005 at the strip mall on Lanikaula Street. It was the first Indian restaurant not only in Hilo but on the island.)


http://hawaii2050.org/images/uploads/futures_scenarios.pdf

Scale Implosion
By James Howard Kunstler
on February 18, 2013 9:06 AM

Back in the day when big box retail started to explode upon the American landscape like a raging economic scrofula, I attended many a town planning board meeting where the pro and con factions faced off over the permitting hurdle. The meetings were often raucous and wrathful and almost all the time the pro forces won -- for the excellent reason that they were funded and organized by the chain stores themselves (in an early demonstration of the new axioms that money-is-speech and corporations are people, too!).

The chain stores won not only because they flung money around -- sometimes directly into the wallets of public officials -- but because a sizeable chunk of every local population longed for the dazzling new mode of commerce. "We Want Bargain Shopping" was their rallying cry. The unintended consequence of their victories through the 1970s and beyond was the total destruction of local economic networks, that is, Main Streets and downtowns, in effect destroying many of their own livelihoods. Wasn't that a bargain, though?

Despite the obvious damage now visible in the entropic desolation of every American home town, WalMart managed to install itself in the pantheon of American Dream icons, along with apple pie, motherhood, and Coca Cola. In most of the country there is no other place to buy goods (and no other place to get a paycheck, scant and demeaning as it may be). America made itself hostage to bargain shopping and then committed suicide. Here we find another axiom of human affairs at work: people get what they deserve, not what they expect. Life is tragic.

The older generations responsible for all that may be done for, but the momentum has now turned in the opposite direction. Though the public hasn't groked it yet, WalMart and its kindred malignant organisms have entered their own yeast-overgrowth death spiral. In a now permanently contracting economy the big box model fails spectacularly. Every element of economic reality is now poised to squash them. Diesel fuel prices are heading well north of $4 again. If they push toward $5 this year you can say goodbye to the "warehouse on wheels" distribution method. (The truckers, who are mostly independent contractors, can say hello to the re-po men come to take possession of their mortgaged rigs.) Global currency wars (competitive devaluations) are about to destroy trade relationships. Say goodbye to the 12,000 mile supply chain from Guangzhou to Hackensack. Say goodbye to the growth financing model in which it becomes necessary to open dozens of new stores every year to keep the credit revolving.

Then there is the matter of the American customers themselves. The WalMart shoppers are exactly the demographic that is getting squashed in the contraction of this phony-baloney corporate buccaneer parasite revolving credit crony capital economy. Unlike the Federal Reserve, WalMart shoppers can't print their own money, and they can't bundle their MasterCard and Visa debts into CDOs to be fobbed off on Scandinavian pension funds for quick profits. They have only one real choice: buy less stuff, especially the stuff of leisure, comfort, and convenience.

The potential for all sorts of economic hardship is obvious in this burgeoning dynamic. But the coming implosion of big box retail implies tremendous opportunities for young people to make a livelihood in the imperative rebuilding of local economies. At this stage it is probably discouraging for them, because all their life programming has conditioned them to be hostages of giant corporations and so to feel helpless. In a town like the old factory village I live in (population 2500) few of the few remaining young adults might venture to open a retail operation in one of the dozen-odd vacant storefronts on Main Street. The presence of K-Mart, Tractor Supply, and Radio Shack a quarter mile west in the strip mall would seem to mock their dim inklings that something is in the wind. But K-Mart will close over 200 boxes this year, and Radio Shack is committed to shutter around 500 stores. They could be gone in this town well before Santa Claus starts checking his lists. If they go down, opportunities will blossom. There will be no new chain store brands to replace the dying ones. That phase of our history is over.

What we're on the brink of is scale implosion. Everything gigantic in American life is about to get smaller or die. Everything that we do to support economic activities at gigantic scale is going to hamper our journey into the new reality. The campaign to sustain the unsustainable, which is the official policy of US leadership, will only produce deeper whirls of entropy. I hope young people recognize this and can marshal their enthusiasm to get to work. It's already happening in the local farming scene; now it needs to happen in a commercial economy that will support local agriculture.

The additional tragedy of the big box saga is that it scuttled social roles and social relations in every American community. On top of the insult of destroying the geographic places we call home, the chain stores also destroyed people's place in the order of daily life, including the duties, responsibilities, obligations, and ceremonies that prompt citizens to care for each other. We can get that all back, but it won't be a bargain.

On Travel in the Age of Peak Oil and Climate Change

Reading Hattie's post on air travel and global warming has led me to start this one on travel, aviation in particular, in the age of peak oil and climate change. This is a post in progress, and I'll add new links and writing as I refine it.

http://www.airliners.net/aviation-articles/read.main?id=81

A Week Offline

We had to take in the computer last week Wednesday for routine maintenance and for software updates. Though I was without a computer until this afternoon, I didn't miss it as much as one would think, mainly because I've been busy at home.

But I've been catching up with blogs, especially Hattie's Web. The retail situation in Hilo is something I'd like to think about more, because I've seen countless stores come and go. The enormous Safeway Hattie mentions is the third incarnation of that market in Hilo, the first being the present site of Ben Franklin Crafts.

But a lot more later.

Rush Limbaugh: No Longer on KPUA

Who could have thought today was the last day The Rush Limbaugh Show would air in Hilo--at least for now? KPUA became the first radio station in the United States to stop carrying the program. This New England station soon followed suit.

KPUA's announcement

http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/breaking/141474943.html

I wonder if this will make tomorrow's Tribune-Herald.

(6 March update: Full front-page treatment. An article by John Burnett incorporating content from the Associated Press, and a large color photo of station manager Chris Leonard.)

And check out HFP for this pungent rant, headlined CENSORSHIP:

(Make one nasty comment about an abortion activist and you will be silenced. Meanwhile UH Hilo Faculty is infested with 9-11 trooothers and anti-Semites. And they are PAID to spout their filth.)

==
11 March update: Rush scrubbed his website of "slut" comment and demand for sex videos.

Dropping Rush Attracts Support Across Nation (10 March Hawaii Tribune-Herald)
==
14 March update: Michael J. Smith at StopMeBeforeIVoteAgain takes it in stride.

Breakfast at Wailoa State Park

Busy at home, but I had a nice breakfast (from Hilo Lunch Shop) with a friend today at Wailoa State Park. The ducks and other fowl came right up to our pavilion. I found that Hilo Lunch Shop serves generous cups of coffee, and ogo salad. (Recipe for ogo salad if you want to make it yourself.)

Stephen Yamashiro is Dead

More soon.

Big Island Video News

KHON2

Honolulu Star-Advertiser

Happy Motoring Still in Effect

What I wrote in May 2009. People were still driving around this past Memorial Day, and showing off their cars on the Fourth of July, so Kunstler's prediction did not come to pass. Incidentally, the empty Shell on Kam. Avenue is now a mini-used car lot. Old gas stations tend either to become mini-car lots, or cafes, like the one on the corner of Waianuenue Avenue and Keawe Street. But Island Chevrolet is still empty.

Traditionally, people drive around on Memorial Day. Kunstler implies that this is the last one for doing that.

Island Chevrolet closed its Hilo and Kona dealerships last week, and I plan to post some photos of the Hilo lot, empty but not yet desolate. For that, there's a gas station on Kamehameha Avenue, closed for several years now. I think it was a Shell.

Cold, etc.

I'm battling a cold, hence the lack of regular postings. The Hilo weather has often been overcast this summer (consistently clear, sunny days are a hallmark of winters here, especially December through February). People have to get serious yet maintain a sense of joy and lightness.

LewRockwell.com reprints an Iranian interview with Kirkpatrick Sale on secession.

And I'll see what ABC's take is on America's addiction to oil.

Island Chevrolet Pictures

Restaurants in Hilo

Domino's Pizza in Hilo recently reopened under new ownership, soon after the Kona branch reopened. And according to the sign pictured below, Bueno Burrito is soon to open in the Keawe Street space that housed Subway, which moved down the street.



Morgan's Deli, across the street from The Lyman Museum, has apparently closed.

20 March update: Bueno Burrito (969-9955) opened just this morning. It's open Mondays through Saturdays, 9 A.M. to 9 P.M.