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Honolulu Lite
Charles Memminger
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Bidding booming for isle junk
You have to figure that tourists have lugged several thousand tons of tiki tacky stuff home from Hawaii over the years. Lava ashtrays from ABC stores, hula girl salt and pepper shakers from Longs and monkeypod nut bowls from Ala Moana Center. The fact that a lot of that stuff wasn't even made in Hawaii didn't stop visitors from snapping up precious little reminders of the islands.
The question is, where did all these quaint collectibles end up? Because, you know when the tourists got home and discovered that they really had no need for a monkeypod nut bowl, it had to go somewhere. (My wife and I received as a wedding gift a multistoried monkeypod nut bowl stand, an eyesore of staggering proportion. Needless to say, it never saw the light of day in our house, and we have yet to figure out which relative or family "friend" hated us so much as to unload the grotesque object on us.)
Anyway, I have discovered where all this wayward faux Hawaiiana ended up, and it's not the Island of Misfit Memorabilia. It's on eBay, the Internet auction site where it is masquerading as collectable "vintage" Hawaiian objects d'art. I'm no expert on d'art, but I know d'crappola when I see it. And eBay has a mother lode.
The weird thing is that this junk is apparently being sold for big bucks. A hula girl salt and pepper shaker that you probably could have bought in Longs for $1.29 in 1970 is being auctioned on eBay with a reserve price of $69!
The word "tasteful" does not pop up in the text describing most of these items for sale. And it doesn't even matter if some of the doodads and gewgaws go past tacky and into the realm of offensive and possibly even racist. They still command mucho dinero.
Bidding on a "vintage" nude hula girl figurine, for instance, was at $255 at the time of this writing. To understand how weird that is, would you consider buying a naked farm girl figurine the next time you visit Iowa?
There are many, many monkeypod bowls for sale on the site, which makes me feel pretty stupid for secretly throwing away our wedding present when my wife wasn't looking. That monstrosity would probably bring in a thousand bucks at auction today.
There are strange things for sale, like a "Hawaiian War Club" head for $29 that looks suspiciously like a lava-rock fishing weight.
Bidding on a pair of "art deco" tiki lamp shades with butterflies and leaves, pieces of d'art best abhorred from afar, has reached $300. And a rattan sofa that might have been at home in the lobby of one of Honolulu's seedier hotels circa 1953 has drawn a bid of $280.
This isn't to say that there are not some legitimate collectibles from Hawaii to be had at auction.
I often bid on vintage Waikiki postcards. It is the nature of Hawaii collectable postcards that they have to be bought from the mainland or other countries because they generally were mailed from Hawaii to those places. I have a black-and-white postcard of Waikiki Beach with Diamond Head looming in the background that was mailed in 1913. The sender wrote on the back of the postcard, "they tell me this is a rather famous landmark."
A black-and-white postcard is currently for sale of two guys riding wooden surfboards at Waikiki. Bidding is already at $49.
But the real Hawaii objects d'art cost a lot of d'money. Bidding on a Hawaiian quilt was at $8,000 when I checked, and the reserve price hadn't even been met. A vintage rayon aloha shirt had been bid up to $1,499, which I don't get at all. I mean, this shirt is ugly. It looks like Walt Disney threw up on it.
Hawaii auction items are truly a case of "buyer beware," though. A "koa" chair allegedly made in the 1920s had only attracted a bid of $34 so far. Thirty-four dollars for koa? I'm thinking it's actually d'monkeypod. Plastic d'monkeypod. From d'Taiwan.
Charles Memminger, the National Society of Newspaper Columnists' 2004 First Place Award winner for humor writing, appears Sundays, Tuesdays, Thursdays and Fridays. E-mail
cmemminger@starbulletin.com