DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

We took a day trip to the northwest coast of Maui, to the “most beautiful beach in the world,” according to no less trustworthy a source than the free guidebook we’d found in the back of the rental car. The beach is called Kapalua Bay, and it’s hard to find unless you know the sekrit sign to watch for, and no I don’t mean the common blue “public beach access” sign because that one was hidden behind a shrub.

It is a nice beach. It was under-crowded, as are most Hawaiian beaches. It’s family-friendly, too; the beach slopes so gradually into the water that kids can ride boogie boards 20 feet into the bay and back simply by laying at the edge of the surf. Also there’s a large shady area at the south end of the beach, perfect for pale-skinned Midwesterners less familiar with SPF ratings than with the ABCD’s of melanoma.

Continuing north, we found lots of amazing scenery, about which I’d write moving and passionate descriptions if I had the time and if this document hadn’t been sitting open on my laptop for about 10 days, inspiring not much scintillating prose but a whole ocean full of writer’s block.

So, just look at the pictures: Northwest Coast of Maui

In case you missed the good news: SUV market slows to a crawl

• GM’s sales are off 7.6% in November.
• Ford’s sales fell 15%.
• Toyota’s U.S. sales rose 13%.
• Honda’s sales rose 8%.

The failure of a U.S. industry is not something I normally celebrate, but I’m making an exception here. U.S. automakers claim they’ve been producing huge luxury trucks because “that’s what Americans want to buy,” ignoring that they’ve manufactured that market. The reality, as documented in High and Mighty, is that SUVs were designed to reduce costs by exploiting loopholes in federal safety and emissions laws, yet be enormously profitable, e.g. $12k for each a Ford Expedition and $15k for each Lincoln Navigator. Whatever pain these duplicitous U.S. SUV makers are feeling has been in 15 years in the making.

If it’s really true that American consumers are recovering from the big-car brainwashing administered by a dozen-plus years of Detroit ad campaigns, maybe the auto makers will begin offering smaller, more fuel-efficient vehicles, such as Toyota’s Prius or Honda’s Insight.

No, probably not: GM Keeps Its Greener Cars Out of North-America

While GM is in big trouble and ready to do anything to get people to buy its huge SUVs (employee discount, releasing the 2007 models in late 2005, etc), it has many perfectly decent vehicles that it only sells outside of North-America …
Yet GM doesn’t seem interested in importing [the 47 mpg Opel Meriva] or some of its other designs at a time when it’s clearly the direction the market is headed in.

Yes, we ate piles of fruit on Maui. Pictured are five of them: apple-banana, mango, the ubiquitous passionfruit or liliko’i (those things are everywhere, and thank goodness for that), pineapple, and something that may or may not be papaya. Anyone know what color papaya is, or whether it resembles spam from a distance?

Another of the local delicies is a seaweed called ogo or limu loa, depending on whether you’re from Japan on Hawaii respectively, or, failing that, on the nationality of the elderperson who answered your question, “what is that gunk you’re scraping off the beach every morning?”

Our hosts had a half-dozen different recipes for ogo, also collected on the beach in the morning (delivered in a half-dozen different Polynesian accents), including various combinations of garlic, ginger, soy sauce, vinegar, chili oil, tomatoes, onion, etc. We tried two of them and I regret not staying longer, or getting up earlier in the day to harvest more.

If all this raw produce is making you twitch, click the link below to see the best fish tacos in the entire hemisphere.
More Maui Photos

At the recommendation of friends, we reserved a table for dinner at Mama’s Fish House in Paia, on the north shore of Maui. I called several days in advance from the mainland, and even so, prime time seating for the weekend was fully booked. I took a 6:00pm seating on Sunday night.

We arrived an hour early, our day trip truncated by persistent drizzle. The staff graciously accomodated us; they seated us immediately at the best table in the restaurant, at the railing, facing the beach. In retrospect our timing was serendipitous, for we were able to enjoy the view for an hour before the sun set. After dark, the beach is lost to shadow.

The service began with an unexpected amuse-bouche, a shot of tasty crab bisque in an espresso cup. I was delighted to see that they brought one for Raphael as well, and more delighted when he made an icky face after the first taste. More for me.

Mama’s menu takes the high-end dining practice of naming the source of every ingredient, e.g. the French Laundry’s “Cloverdale Farms Rabbit” or “Wolfe Ranch Squab,” to a new and somewhat ridiculous level: naming the fisherman that caught each fish! For my entree I selected the “Mahimahi caught by DeWitt Lickle along the north shore of Maui.” I can tell you that Mr. Lickle catches one hell of a mahimahi; it was as good as the best fish I’ve ever eaten (the Dover Sole at the French Laundry).

The restaurant’s setting and decor are a visual treat — open-air dining a few dozen feet from the surf, decorated inside and out with Polynesian memorabilia. My companions were gaga for the Lotus flower arrangements. I don’t understand flowers, but I was digging the reprinted advertisements from WWII-era weapons makers in the men’s room. Strange but true.

Our server was helpful, offering honest recommendations and guidance, steering us toward his favorites. From beginning to end, the service was excellent, with one exception: the food was slow to arrive. Between the toddler-chasing, the architectural tours, the appetizers and so on, I didn’t notice how much time had passed until someone mentioned it. I doubt this is typical, but our Mama’s dining experience lasted two and a half hours.

The desserts were excellent. I was as stuffed as my mahimahi, but the server talked us into splitting the banana crisp and the chocolate mousse. Four forks flew… two fingerprint-smeared plates remained. I won’t admonish you to “save room,” because it’s senseless. Eat a bunch of fish first, but have dessert anyway. What the hell; you’re on vacation.

One of my dining companions commented that Mama’s serves the best food on Maui. He’s an accomplished chef, and he spends a month on the island every year, so this is saying something. I hope to return frequently to continue my personal comparison of Mama’s to every other fish house on Maui; until I’m finished, I’d be inclined to agree with him. It was truly great.

Here’s a long-exposure, post-sunset panorama of the view from our table.
See all photos from Mama’s Fish House

Writing his own birthday message in the sand was no problem… erasing his own footprints, that was the trick.

One of the best things about writing on the web is hearing back from readers. Sure, sometimes I hear from the readers’ lawyers instead, but I’m learning how close I can come to the line without stumbling across it and into the courtroom.

My periodic pokes at Ricardo Montalban and Chrysler’s “Corinthian Leather” ad campaign, the first of which dates back to October, 2001, finally reached the person responsible, more or less anyway. I received this anonymous message via the website’s feedback form:

I was forwarded your site by my sister after a recent lengthy family email conversation about “Fine Corinthian Leather”. My father and a coworker are mainly responsible for the campaign and term “corinthian leather”. I thought you might like to know as ad men working for Young and Rubicam in the 60’s-70’s, they were faced with the age long dilemma of making something look like a must have desirable item… much like everything in America. They needed a tie-in name to go with their “Spanish” Cordoba, and so, Corinthian sounded like a name that would conjure up something exotic, timeless and elegant. It’s hilarious that it has held on as one of the most remembered catch phrases in media history. I don’t see it as being any different than JCrew using names like “light pacific” or “bright butternut” to depict colors such as blue or yellow…and I certainly wouldn’t refer to it as a 25 year old deceit!

I wish the writer had provided some contact information, for I’d love to hear more about the Corinthian Leather campaign.

I’m not sure I agree that inventing a type of leather is the same as inventing a new name for a color; the Corinthian Leather campaign suggested that the leather had qualities differentiating it from lesser, non-Corinthian leathers, when in fact no such qualities existed. Maybe a better comparison is the Folgers “Mountain Grown” campaign, or Claude Hopkins’ famous Schlitz beer campaign. But even there, claiming differentiation where none exists falls short of actually naming the thing.

Monday nights on Maui, the place to be is Mulligan’s on the Blue. A band called Gypsy Pacific has a standing gig, and they’re worth the drive. They play “gypsy jazz,” the music of Django Reinhardt — not a name that appears in my CD collection, but that will change now.

Their website describes them as a string quartet, which is technically true, but if that conjures images of a cello or old white guys with powdered wigs, think again. And pass me another Guinness while you’re at it. The instrumentation is upright bass, rhythm guitar, lead guitar, and violin, 20 strings and 40 fingers in all, and most of them were a blur. These guys have some seriously fast hands.

See some good pictures of the band on Mulligan’s website.

“I need to get a photo of Spam Sushi. Is there any way to do that without actually eating it?”

“Sure, although you’ll have to spend the $1.75 to order it.”

“Oh, well, I hate to waste food.”

“It’s not really food.”

“Good point.”

The Maui Flea Market is a combination street fair and farmer’s market. From handcarved Koa utensils to passionfruit-flavored butter to knockoff Nike swoosh T-shirts to heaps of organic fruit, the 50¢ entry fee covers a lot of ground.

My favorite booth was staffed by an enormous Hawaiian woman and her equally huge machete. Piled on a table to her front, and filling the bed of a pickup to her rear were hundreds of young coconuts. The woman’s partner, an elderly man sacked out in the front seat of the pickup with his flip-flops hanging out the driver’s side window, prepped the nuts by whacking off the green husk with a large carving knife… but only after being bellowed at by the woman, who was running out of stock.

$3 buys a coconut, served with one tip expertly chopped off, and two straws. Most customers simply drank the water and ditched the coconut, but we stuck around to have the nuts split open (no extra charge) so we could scrape out the meat with a sharp piece of shell. If you get a really young one, the insides are still jelly.

Photos from Maui

Most musicians will tell you there are good days for tracking and bad days for tracking. I remember, back in 1994 or so when JAR was in the studio, one of the engineers made a passing comment about “one-take Jake,” the mythical musician who could nail his part on the first pass, with all the energy, magic, and spontaneity that that implies. The concept became a sort of grail, although I’m not sure any of us achieved it. I remember starting one song three times; I couldn’t even nail the first downbeat.

Digital recording has done for music what digital cameras have done for photographers; tape, like film, is free. So the material cost of doing 30 takes is a lot lower, and even if the time consumed is just as long, at least we’re not paying $100/hr.

But still, if you play something 30 times in a row, you won’t want to hear it again. Ever. Nothing robs a melody of its subtlety and passion like playing it badly a bunch of times in a row.

I was thinking about this the other day, at about take #12. My main musical collaborator, Andrew the six-fingered bassist, had pitched me a song we’d recorded rhythm tracks for in 2000. He’d ordered a dulcimer line, momentarily mistaking me for a composer. Despite my relative inexperience, though, I came up with a cool line for the verse. Andrew liked it. I liked it. The only problem was I couldn’t actually play it.

It was a 16th-note pattern that required crossing one hand under the other to hit the low A, blind, about a foot away from the rest of the melody. My success rate was about 50%. The strings on this dulcimer are less than an inch apart; even the pros have to watch their hands.

This provided little consolation, though. I gave up for the day before deciding that the best way to cope with my progress would be by putting a foot through the dulcimer’s soundboard.

The ultimate solution came in two parts. First I swapped right for left, relearning the pattern with opposite hands. Next I realized that the top half of the melody could be played lower on the instrument, physically closer to that hard-to-reach A. With that, and a night off, I was able to track the final version quickly:

Domino, final dulcimer take (verse 2, prechorus, verse 3, prechorus) (Copyright © 2005 matthew mcglynn)

The ATA flight to Maui offered “snack service.” The snack turned out to be a shrinkwrapped box of name-brand junkfood, a six-course feast of chemically-enhanced salted fats. Not that that prevented us from decimating it, of course; I hadn’t managed to convince myself that paying $9.99 for a plate of reconstituted eggs at the airport cafe would provide anything resembling sustenance.

Here’s a breakdown of what ATA considers a suitable snack:

The snack service was followed up with another snack, in case anyone needed a little refreshment, a little pick-me-up after becoming torpid and logy following the artificially-colored and -flavored assault of the first round. But this snack was nearly as bad: a 2-pack of cookies (refined flour, sugar, butter) and a foil pouch of pretzels (refined flour, salt, partially hydrogenated heart stopper). To be fair, the second round was healthier than the first, but only because it was just one-third the size.

So, altogether, less toxic than the stonner, but still not something you’d want to make a habit of. I was beginning to have lustful thoughts for those powdered eggs.

I became a customer of PhotoAccess.com in January, 2003, based on numerous positive reviews of their photo print quality and their ability to print 4.5''x6'' photos.

(Most digital cameras create images with a 4:3 aspect ratio. 4x6'' prints can’t fit the full 4:3 digital image — you’d have to either shrink the image, leaving white borders along the short sides of the print, or crop the long sides off the image. Or, print the full frame on 4.5''x6'' paper.

Some photos can be painlessly cropped to 3:2, but in my experience nearly half the shots I take actually work best at 4:3. I relied on PhotoAccess’ “6D” print size — which measured 4.5''x6'' — to reproduce these images.)

In March of 2005, PhotoWorks bought/assimilated/wrecked PhotoAccess. Print prices came way down — from about 42 cents a print to 19 cents — but the new ordering interface was confusing and difficult to use. The UI wasn’t bad enough to make me leave the site, but it was a sad step backwards considering how well the PhotoAccess site had worked.

But, this week, PhotoWorks removed the 6D print size option. This means that most digital images (which have a 4:3 aspect ratio) will have to be cropped or shrunk. The print is compromised in both cases.

It’s sad to see this devolution. PhotoAccess seemed to be a high-quality outfit with somewhat exclusive pricing. In contrast, PhotoWorks seems to be going after the mass market, and they’re shedding features and quality to do it. If my experience is any indication, they’re shedding customers too — I was once a fan and advocate of PhotoAccess; now I’m writing bad reviews of PhotoWorks for the world to see.

Also I’m looking for a new digital photo print service. I’ve found the Printers and Printing forum at dpreview.com, which should lead to some new vendor recommendations.

If you have a favorite, let me know.

UPDATE, 2006-05-01: I went with MPIX.com.

No, I haven’t been around here much lately.

There’s something new and exciting in the works. Something involving both fish oil and noni, which, if combined in a metabolic reactor, generate a colossal — well, I can’t talk about it. But rest assured, it’s going to be great. Despite the smell.

What part of “do not bend” did you not understand?