When he arrived in Tahiti, Robert Levy observed that the village of Piri “had the typical Polynesian, South Seas, soft-utopian exoticism of outrigger canoes, coral reefs, lagoons, [and] a few long haired maidens with flowers in their hair …” But the exoticism faded quickly “to mosquitoes, to boredom, to closer views of the longhaired maidens […]