Okay, Listen up Daddy-O's. Raise your coconut shells if you've grooved on the following: The Tonga Room at the San Francisco Fairmont and its sporadic fake rainshowers; The Audio-Aniamatronic Enchanted Tiki Room at Disneyland; And any of the surviving Trader Vic's Restaurant (Beverly Hills, Vegas, Emeryville).

If your hand is up, then it wasn't the grub (rarely is) but the kitschy props (nets, fish, spears, bamboo, totems) that floated your Bahama Mamas. Let's face it, jungle fever has a place in design, as resurrected in the new decor book, Tiki Modern, by Sven Kirsten.

First of all, you must click on the book at the Taschen publishing site because it pulses to the crazy-like sounds of the Sixties tiki pop beat, complete with exotic bird sounds. You'll be swaying and snapping your fingers as you preview pages reflecting primitivism in the modern world, from the animal print revival to the shack-like backyard bar.



The author, a music video director and tiki artifact excavator, hunted down props for his productions and emerged as the country's reigning tiki style expert. One of his unearthed treasures, the two-story high fireplace (below) at the Kahiki Restaurant in Columbus, Ohio in 1961.




Kirsten illustrates how the retro craze (who could forget the bar and bongo lounges in the Gidget movies?) has caught the wave in current trends of mid-century modernism and the opening of tiki-style bars from the beaches of Waikiki to Tokyo.

Mural of Vintage ...Read More

The olive tree has been around to witness monumental moments throughout history. Ancient Egyptians offered their leaves to the gods as symbols of benediction and purification, victors were crowned with their branches at the Olympic Games in early Greece and its sacred oil was used to anoint the kings of old. It was further immortalized through ...Read More

T. Boone Pickens has been putting his fortune to good use, it seems - and he's certainly putting himself in the limelight. Mr. Pickens supplied $7 million to victims of Katrina. Since then he's made a huge splash in the green energy debate.

But you may not know that his wife, ...Read More

Is there an ocean lover in your family? A budding marine biologist, ocean protection activist or surfer? Then we’ve got the perfect eco-gift for you (and them). Oceana – the largest global organization dedicated to ocean conservation – is offering ...Read More

An overgrown city is a healthy city. Plants regulate temperatures, scrub the air, provide a haven for urban wildlife and lift our mood sky-high. But all too often, parks and tree-lined boulevards have been regarded as cosmetic frills worked around the basic ...Read More

Corn is everywhere, it’s undeniable. Most American cows are corn-fed (even though their grass-digesting stomachs suffer greatly when fed with grain), high fructose corn syrup seems to taint every processed food and drink, and many American rural areas are ...Read More

Corn – it’s an American favorite. We love it popped, roasted, processed into chips, baked into corn muffins, liquified into soda, hydrogenated into crackers – the list goes on and on. And what would a great American picnic be without hot buttered corn on the cob?

And really, what would Mexico be without the tortilla, ...Read More

Once upon a time, cows lived in pastures and grazed on grass, living a life that was as quiet and peaceful as their bovine nature. But then, somebody discovered that feeding cattle cheap, subsidized corn would fatten them up two to three times as fast as grass and that you could raise hundreds of cattle in the same pastoral space that would only ...Read More

The great controversy of so-called "frankenfoods" continues. Results from an Austrian study have just been released showing that laboratory mice fed genetically modified ...Read More

My editor said, "Emily, slow down with the spiritual/personal development articles!" But it's hard not to let my mind go there as I just read Eckhardt Tolle's A New Earth. Between us, I'm just going to indulge a sentence or two.

As we are evolving our consciousness in many ways and ...Read More