T A B L E_T A L K Is Philadelphia the weirdness capital of America? Discuss the city of brotherly love in the Wanderlust area of Table Talk R E C E N T L Y Sex, death and beauty in South America By Melanie Goldman Week Two of the Camel Trophy (08/24/98) Oh when the gays come dancing in By Rebecca Bryant The physical -- and emotional -- revelations of Amsterdam's Gay Games V (08/21/98) The view from Japan By Dave McCombs It's the economy, not the morality (08/20/98) Everest controversy Weston DeWalt's latest response The co-author of "The Climb" responds to Jon Krakauer's most recent comments in Salon about the Everest tragedy of May 10, 1996 (08/20/98) The view from Europe Clinton's Achilles penis and other reactions (08/19/98) Browse the Wanderlust Feature archives		----------------M y --------H a w a i i a n --------------H o n e y m o o n Of a 1,300-pound pop-ukulele star, teenage bikini-queens and the best wave on earth. - - - - - - - - - - BY CINTRA WILSON | I could paint you a postcard of Kauai with a swirling pineapple-grenadine sunset over an ocean of hammered platinum foil, discuss the wet red soil under the sugar cane and the fine sand like non-dairy creamer and the lizard-jade hills that fold like cake batter over the tangling floss of waterfalls, but that's for tourist brochures. Suffice to say the place is one of the most dazzlingly lush in the world; the kind of exquisitely heightened color and visual harmony you generally only find in big hotel florists or on a lot of mescaline. That's why we came here on our honeymoon. Instead of doing the sultan lifestyle and getting a hotel for 10 days and eating room service French fries for $8.95, we decided to rent a condo, feed ourselves and live here for a month. Kauai, if you're not a surf or hiking zealot, is a haven of down-tempo relaxation, something we desperately needed after the all-pervasive stresses surrounding the act of holy matrimony. Your blood turns into a thick amber sap here, and you tend, like a lazy eye, to focus accidentally on whatever happens to be right in front of you; since we arrived, I started and finished "Anna Karenina," the husband is finishing up "Moby Dick." This would have taken six months in New York. Hawaii offers places to go if you want island living without the third-world pain -- there is plenty of infrastructure. There are quiet beaches and vast stretches of high jungle, but you can also buy software and instructional yoga videos. There are T-shirt shops and brick-oven pizza. These aspects may destroy the vacation experience for the more hard-core and adventuresome anthropologist types, but the Hawaiian islands are the place to be if you're so worn out it would make you sob inconsolably if your luggage got eaten by wolves, or if legless infants started urging plastic necklaces into your chest, or if you were abandoned on a dirty hillside at 3 a.m. by a sinister bearded rickshaw driver, with nothing visible in the moonlight but a terrible three-story iron crucifix and some indifferent wild goats. Legitimate island culture is something you can deal with or avoid at will -- most of it has been boiled away into tourist quaintliness anyway. There are hula shows at the mall, and indiscriminate, professional luaus advertised on big printed oilcloth banners along the road. Otherwise the remaining "native" habits are findable but not ubiquitous, which is just as well: The Hawaiian stuff that isn't homogenized into Americanism is best left to the Hawaiians, who organically like it, and the strange white people who have expatriated to this removed outpost of their own country and adopted all things island: the consonant-lazy surf-pidgin English, hard-core native lunches of gray Kalua pork wrapped in leaves, driving without shoes. And, of course, poi. When you look at a bag of poi, you see this gelatinous, gray-brown blob of paste, and you think, "How can anybody eat this shit?" Then you empty it wiggling and sinister into a bowl, pinch a little bit off between your fingers, and roll the glutinous taro mash over your tongue for the sour-potatoey grit of it, and you think, "How can anybody eat this shit?" Kauai is a place that is American yet doesn't really have anything to do with America. The locals don't care a jot about Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt. They have their own circles and semicircles of fame here -- most notably, the cult of the recently deceased "Iz," pop-ukulele star Israel Kamakawiwo'ole. Iz was one of Hawaii's favorite singers. He weighed, at the time of his death last year due to hyper-obesity, close to 1,300 pounds. It was really hard not to get morbidly caught up in the Iz mystique. The wall-sized mural that is featured on the omnipresent Iz displays at book and record stores is a photo taken from his last live performance, where he looks like a behemoth dune of poi, with little black empty holes where his eyes should have been. N E X T+P A G E | Screaming in ecstasy - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - ILLUSTRATION BY ANNALISA VIVARELLI