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Transcript

Tiki Talk with Ben Willis: Hand-Carved Gods, Heavy Rums, and High-Octane Surf Beats · Mega Rock On Demand

• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: It's Friday afternoon, and that means it's time to light the torches once again for Tiki Talk on Mega Rock.
• 0:19
  SPEAKER_00: I think it's about that time that we finally address the elephant in the room, or maybe I should say address the tiki in the room, and that is the subject of carving your own tiki.
• 0:29
  SPEAKER_00: Because it's not like you can easily go to an interior or exterior garden shop and find pre-made tiki's that you can use to decorate your tiki room, your tiki bar, or your garden space or something like that.
• 0:41
  SPEAKER_00: Sometimes during the summer you can find resin cast or sometimes even concrete cast tiki's, although they are going for quite a high price in most cases.
• 0:51
  SPEAKER_00: So what are you gonna do if you have a budget?
• 0:53
  SPEAKER_00: It's so much easier just to carve your own.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: Now you may say, well, I have no artistic bone in my body.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: How am I supposed to carve a tiki?
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_00: Well, like any skill, it's gonna take some practice.
• 1:04
  SPEAKER_00: And you might come out with some wonky tiki's in the beginning.
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_00: I know I certainly did.
• 1:08
  SPEAKER_00: You can see up on our Facebook page at Mega Rock PA's collection of my various carved tiki faces and heads of all various shapes and sizes.
• 1:16
  SPEAKER_00: I started very small, handheld in fact, and worked my way up to a four-foot-tall Moai.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's the biggest one I gotten so far.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: But if you're just starting out, a lot of tiki carvers had said this, that if you can't draw a tiki, it's gonna be very difficult for you to carve a tiki.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: So at the very beginning, start getting your ideas for your tiki on paper.
• 1:37
  SPEAKER_00: Not only will it help you visualize the final product, but it will also help you deal with things like symmetry if that's gonna be an issue for you.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_00: Second, consider your material.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_00: You don't want to necessarily jump right into a really hard wood.
• 1:49
  SPEAKER_00: Like I did with one of my early tiki's, I carved it out of an old oak log, which let me tell you, as an first-time tiki carver, was a bad decision.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_00: Oak loves to tear more than it does like to cut.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_00: And that's a lesson I learned the hard way.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: You don't even need to use wood necessarily.
• 2:05
  SPEAKER_00: You can use industrial blocks of foam.
• 2:08
  SPEAKER_00: A lot of professionally made tikis, the big, big ones, for example, like at Kowloon in Massachusetts, and even some that were at the Polynesian Cultural Center in Hawaii, were actually made of foam rather than carved from wood.
• 2:20
  SPEAKER_00: And there's nothing stopping you from doing that as well.
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_00: But if you are gonna go with wood, get a nice clean piece of light, easy to cut wood, even pine.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Heck, there are old popular mechanics articles describing how to make a tiki with your power tools in your garage.
• 2:35
  SPEAKER_00: Look that up, it's fascinating.
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_00: And yes, you can absolutely use power tools, or if you really want to get involved, try some chisel carving.
• 2:41
  SPEAKER_00: Start out with a flat chisel and a simple gouge.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: You don't need to get the whole range of chisels right away.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Get used to that concept and that feel of chisel carving with a mallet, and then you can invest in a nice set.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: But as the rule always says, make sure your chisels are very sharp.
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: And finally, when talking about the design of your tiki, remember American tiki design is all about fantasy and being inauthentic.
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_00: Don't feel like you have to duplicate a historic sculpture that you saw somewhere else.
• 3:12
  SPEAKER_00: There are carvers all across the country, in fact the world, who come up with the wildest designs.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_00: But as long as you get the vibe mostly right, it'll still read as a tiki.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: Start simple, work your way up to more complex designs and harder materials to work with, and most of all, have fun.
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: And in the end, you'll have something beautiful and handmade and personal.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_00: And once all the hard work is done, because we don't want you to be drinking and carving at the same time.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_00: Please don't, that's not a good mix.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_00: After a session of carving, you might want to take a nice, refreshing drink.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_00: And for a lot of the people carving, they really picked up their chisels during the COVID shutdown.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_00: So an appropriate drink would be the Quarantine Order.
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_00: Straight from Pagan Isle in San Francisco, California.
• 3:56
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of their signature cocktails, as follows.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_00: In a tin, we're going to take 1 ounce of lime juice, 1 ounce of grapefruit juice, 1 half ounce of cinnamon syrup, 12 ounce of passion fruit syrup, 5 dashes of Angostura Aromatic Bitters, 1 12 ounce of gold Jamaican rum, and 1 12 ounce of dark Jamaican rum.
• 4:23
  SPEAKER_00: Put everything in your blending tin or shaker, add lots of crushed ice, and you can either shake this until it's well broken up or use a blender, or even if you have an old school spindle mixer, those are really fun to work with.
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_00: Dump everything into a snifter glass, top off with more crushed ice, we're gonna garnish with a fresh bouquet of mint, a lime wheel, and a cherry speared onto a bamboo skewer.
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_00: And there you go, it's the quarantine order, perfect for taking the edge off after a long session of carving your new tiki.
• 4:52
  SPEAKER_00: So until we meet another island out there somewhere, this is Ben Willis saying aloha.
• 4:56
  SPEAKER_00: We're gonna leave you off with a vintage track straight from the legendary Dick Dale and his Dell Tones from 1962's Surfer's Choice.
• 5:05
  SPEAKER_00: It's surfing drums on Tiki Talk on Mega Rock.