As my friend and I were working on the revised tiki postings, our friend Gabby was in Panama with Young Emily.  She went to record and understand the saloma (yodel) in Panamanian rural music.  Singers start their performances with a saloma, in essence a warm-up not dissimilar to the manner in which trained singers warm up, but executed in Panama as part of the performance.  With the saloma, a singer reaches high notes and finds their point of resonation.  Young Emily was fascinated by the melodies that are built of disjunct intervals and abrupt shifts of register, for which the employment of falsetto is necessary.

While in Panama, Gabby visited David Fishlow.  He knew David from David’s days as the editor of the UFW newspaper in Delano, El Malcriado.  David had been in Panama with the Peace Corps and went back in the 1990s to open a B&D.

Finally getting to the point – Tiki – in Panama City Gabby came across a Kon Tiki resort.  He thought we might be interested.

But this was not the end of things with our friend Gabby.  After Panama he stopped in Denver for a few days.  Young Emily drove up to Boulder to talk with a professor of Voice, Opera, and Choral Studies about the saloma research she had done.  Gabby stayed in Denver and with nothing better to do set out to build an instant Tiki collection, focusing on paperbacks, magazines, comics, and record albums.

He played with his normal rules – $200, no complete collections bought, Friday afternoon until Sunday afternoon.   He is good at this.  When he was done he packed it all up and sent it to my friend.  You will see that Gabby’s criteria for inclusion might be slightly looser than mine, but, still, great images.

The paperbacks:

Magazines were not as plentiful as he expected.  The street giveth and the street taketh away, right?

At this point, Gabby confessed that he broke one of his rules.  He bought a big batch of South Sea Stories magazines.  He justified the rule violation by (1) pointing out that he found them at a garage sale, not a store, and (2) pointing out that he had not actually bought them, but traded them for a paperback first edition of Kerouac’s Dharma Bums  that he had found somewhere on Larimer Street.  You can decide about the rules – here are the magazines:

Most of the comic books he found were Tales from the Tiki Lounge.  He claims that he did not buy these as a collection, but found one or two at number of different places.

You can see from the number of books as opposed to the number of record albums that Gabby was focused more on books than albums.  That’s okay.  Here are the albums he sent:

I get exhausted when Gabby goes off on his manic collecting binges.  Sure, I admire the limits he imposes on himself.  Sure, I admire his love of the hunt.  And I respect the fact that he sends his friends most of his collections.   But – still – I am exhausted by his hunt here.

My friend went off into memory-land while going through these photos.  I asked him what he was thinking about.

He showed me a photo of his father walking into a pavilion at the Seattle World Fair in 1962.  Packrat that he is, my friend had other photos and postcards:

This was all near the tail-end of his mainstream, straight life.  He remembers it with fondness, no bitterness at all about the fall-out of his decisions a few years later.

What, though, did he think of the Gabby Instant Tiki Collection?