“Chocolate Angel”
“Chocolate Angel” is the nickname given to Lou Jing, a bi-racial Chinese/African American idol contestant and television anchor major at Shanghai’s Theater Academy. Things went particularly bad once the internet responded to her presence on the show, in the all too typical racial flame war. “When asked if she regrets appearing on the show, Lou replies: ‘If you beat me to death, I wouldn’t take part in that competition again.’” She is still a guest host on television but has not received any job offers since being an idol contestant and aims to leave China and study abroad at Columbia. Read the full article/interview here on NPR http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=120311417
Live from Australia: the Warumpi Band!
Warumpi Band, Black Fella White Fella (1987)
Warumpi Band, My Island Home (1988)
The Sly Stone of Australia?
A Primer for Ponce De Leon the Band.
I have an ongoing art band/project called Ponce De Leon. This band was started as a kind of joke between Greg McKenna, Dave Reich and myself in 2002. A friend wanted us to play his art opening and our “real” bands couldn’t make it, so we made this tongue-in-cheek band up by recycling beats/songs that Greg had composed on his computer and lyrics I made up about Ponce De Leon and buying clothes (the original band was called Ponce De Leon Commes De Garcons, or PDLCDG). Despite all logic, the Ponce De Leon “brand” has persisted for years.
This project has afforded me great opportunities and unexpected privileges. One of those privileges was working with asianjew’s own Audrey Chan as she acted and sang back-up in this band during our West Coast years. The following is an attempt to describe and explain what Ponce De Leon is all about.
Part 1: What We Are.
In the period between Sept. 11th and the second war in Iraq, an “electroclash” music scene developed in New York City wherein open sexuality and hedonism were celebrated with a vengeance after years of mopey and/or stoic straight-male indie rock dominance.
This new music scene encompassed, at least in theory, a broader racial and cultural spectrum than the mostly-white indie rock scene. This is in part due to the influence of Miami bass and minimal techno. Aesthetically, this movement was also influenced by London punk fashion and ‘80’s pop product like Miami Vice.
With the hottest subcultural trend in years having its roots in Miami rap and dance music, and with the results of the traumatic 2000 Elections being decided in FL, with Camp X-ray opening just off its shores in Cuba, it became apparent that the fate of the U.S. was at the mercy of the 27th state.
In the meantime, NYC intellegentsia types were laying the groundwork for the rationalization of Operation: Iraqi Freedom, inspired as they were by sustained terror.
Ponce De Leon the band, based in Brooklyn, observed this and sought to reconcile the sexualized hipster death drive with the liberal establishment’s need for order. PDL intended to allow for the underground art/music scenester to face his/her imperialist impulse directly.
PDL operated under the idea that, if we have a collective need or will to impose our belief system on others, we should at least acknowledge, accept, and confront it without guilt or shame or insincere self-reproach. Thus, PDL promotional e-mails would include a call to “Come celebrate your colonialist impulse.”
Musically, the songs are inspired by baroque music, progressive rock, electronic dance music and early hip-hop. Most of our lyrics are about Florida, Ponce de Leon, colonialist encounters and conflicts with Native American tribes. Some of the songs are about fashion and class privilege and two songs are about the undead.
Ponce de Leon the explorer was chosen as our namesake because, as a historical figure, he is considered both a despised conquistador and a quixotic fool who searched fruitlessly for the Fountain of Youth only to die at the hands of local natives. In this way, Ponce de Leon is the consummate millennial American.
What we have done and are going to do…
The members of Ponce De Leon reloated to opposite sides of the U.S.A. in 2004, but continued to make music, and even perform, with a rotating cast of absent members. I moved to Los Angeles to go to grad school. While out in L.A., we were able to perform at Fritz Haeg’s K48 Is An Animal Sundown Salon.
In 2005 Ponce De Leon released an album with Thorn 01 records. One of the songs from this album is listed as “Snap Goes the Gator Jaw” but a version of it entitled “Gator Jaws” has found it’s way onto the tracklist for the big-time video game Skate 2, thus affording them 9 hardcore 14 year old fans.
For my thesis project at CalArts, I wrote a musical comedy entitled The Island of Florida: A Foundation Myth to be performed live by a cast of nine “Ponce De Leon Players”. This was a work of historical fiction wherein Ponce De Leon and a Native American medicine woman have an illegitimate child named Delian Ponzales who is cast into the ocean and raised by dolphins, only to search for his long lost parents years later. The music was written by Ponce De Leon as a band. The complete soundtrack to The Island of Florida is expected be released in late 2009.
Ponce De Leon players before performing "Island of Florida" at Velaslavasay Panorama Theatre, 2007.
For more information on Ponce De Leon check out these myspace pages:
Ponce De Leon’s official site: dolphinstrickedoutwithsubwoofers
Ponce De Leon’s core members: John Hogan, Greg McKenna, Dave Reich
Thanks and goodnight.
-John Hogan
Introduction to Representations of Africa
My most esteemed friend Audrey invited me to share my thoughts on representations of Africa on this blog. I am so honoured, I blushed. I also have a feeling that she may regret this because I have so much to say. Reams and reams of the stuff in fact.
Like most other people from African countries abroad, I have been shocked, then outraged, then indifferent about people’s ignorance on African countries. So much so that I hesitate to use the word Africa because it reinforces one of the biggest and dumbest misrepresentations, that Africa is this big ole place where we are starving, warring, or striving against all adversity (starvation and war) to be happy villagers. There are also lions and big game in Africa.
Le sigh, I already veer into rant mode. My goal shall be to keep it together for at least two paragraphs before I begin to rant 
.
But enough with the talk, on with the show. Today I take the easy way out by using two articles as examples. The first I found hilarious; an interview with Wilbur Smith, that manly chronicler of White men loving women and killing lion in the African bush. It’s the stuff that seeps into the silt of the brain and bubbles forth when I get asked questions like “So what kind of animals do you have in Ghana?” Perfectly harmless, but I either have to struggle to tart up my country’s one crocodile lake (actually its more like a little watering hole) as a game park full of marauding wildebeest; or I have to deliver a lecture on geography and how far Ghana is from East and Southern Africa (where game parks are actually located). It’s a small thing but its one of the threads of the “starving, warring, diseasing, lion-hunting” Africa tapestry.
The second article I find a whole lot more disturbing and also more complex to explain. It is an article on the new Resident Evil game that takes places in villages in West Africa. Following the Resident Evil theme, the locals are zombies and the protagonist goes about killing the zombies….Ok still with you there, nothing special just another violent video game. But then the player has the option of killing the zombies by hacking limbs off (I kid you not) and can collect rewards like gold. There is one brief mention that these are “ the same kind of weapons that were used in atrocities in places like Rwanda and the Congo” but the thrust of the article is about race, “Is it ok to have white people shooting hordes of black people in video game?” Read the rest of this entry »
Selling a contradiction
European fantasies of the Americas, steamboats, and the pursuit of dreams deferred through glorious song…the crossovers are uncanny.
Trailer for the film “Fitzcarraldo” by German director Werner Herzog, starring Klaus Kinski, 1982.
Fitzcarraldo (a.k.a. Brian Sweeney Fitzgerald) is a would-be Irish rubber barron who has to pull a steamship christened the Molly Aida over a hill in order to access the rubber territory. With the anticipated riches gained from tapping the rubber, he dreams of building an opera house. He recruits the local indigenous population to execute the manual labor demanded by his quixotic mission.
Spanish version of the music video for “Karma Chameleon” by the British band Culture Club, 1983. This version adds a layer of language and gender ambiguity because in the translated lyrics, “man” becomes “mujer” (woman). Click here for the original.
In the meantime, the inimitable Boy George sits atop a small mound serenading blacks and whites in post-Civil War, Reconstruction-era Mississippi. The carnivalesque crowd boards a steamship christened “The Chameleon”, where various antics ensue including a heated Poker game between the other members of Culture Club. As a joyful ending, the motley crew chugs away towards a harmonious utopia upriver. Nobody gets hurt (besides getting tossed in the river), and it’s a great party.
Homo Homini Lupus
Guest post by Tavia Nyong’o of Kenyanthropus on the subject of “alterity”:
“Man is wolf to man,” the saying goes. After listening to Carla Freccero’s provocative and disturbing talk on the subject of cynanthropic becomings (becoming dog-like) last night, I’m tempted to add an addendum: and “wolf is man to man.”
It is through our partnership in the crime of evolution, Freccero argued, citing Donna Haraway, that dog and human devour one another. Dog into man, man into dog. Freccero is a polymathic early modernist, and her talk ranged from Mandeville’s Travels to today’s prison-industrial complex. Violent dogs as a cipher for (in)humanity provided the bright red thread through her theoretical and historical peregrinations. Dogheaded cannibals as early modern emblems for geographic peripheries, which become the borders for the species. Dogs as figures of nostalgia for a ‘carniverous virility’ we fetishistically disavow everytime we affirm (pure, innocent) dog nature against the lapses of (aggressive, incompetent) human nurture that produces ‘red zone‘ dogs who kill.
If “wolf is man to man,” that is, if it is through the animal other that we (un)make our pretentious claims to humanism, then what do we make of the recently completed Battlestar Galactica, in which animal alterity was exchanged for a robot alterity that was nonetheless revealed, by series’ end, to be a metonymic displacement of our canine co-evolutionists?
I’m stretching a little here, insofar as the final plotline arcs towards, not premodern dog-men, but a human-cylon hybrid revealed to be ‘mitochondrial Eve.’ There was even a “No Dogs Allowed” sign posted around the re-imagined Battlestar scenario. The pre-finale cast special mentioned in passing that Battlestar’s creators banned dogs from the new show, no doubt in terror of the insufferably cute robo-dog on the original 1970s version.
Muffit II -- the Daggit robo-dog from the original Battlestar Galactica
Cute is precisely what the “naturalistic science fiction” of the new series sought to avoid. But in another sense, given the new series’ obsession with breeding, bloodlines, and hybrids (that is, mongrels), and given its general air of brutal survivalism and the dehumanizing effects of permanent war, cynanthropic becomings are the return of the repressed. Rather than cuddly companion species for adorable children, the dog-men now are the viper pilots themselves, with names like Hotdog, and Starbuck, whose “dogtags” become a key cipher for her increasingly ambiguous humanity as the series wended its way toward its conclusion.
Battlestar Galactica culminates with the ragtag band of survivors of “humanity” landing on the planet we call Earth, and deciding the start over again by abandoning their technology, weaponry, and embracing their inner noble savages. And yet, the child among them who goes on to birth the line of modern humans (us) is herself a human-cylon hybrid. The liberal post-humanist message of this resolution means to disclose our narcissistic attachment to homo sapien specialness as a cosmic joke. Mortal enemies, human and cylon live on, in and through each other.
This trans-humanism, however, comes through a partial disavowal of the intra-human alterity of racial difference, a disavowal we confont in the standard Hollywood science fiction fetish of whiteness, which Battlestar is not exempt from (despite important minority actors). Although the show points to the origins of modern humanity in East Africa, the cradle of mankind, this genesis is mythically rewritten as issuing forth from a predominantly light-skinned alien race, accompanied by their equally phenotypically white cyborg others (each with their tokenized black and brown exceptions). Humans-cylons generously ‘blend’ themselves with the primitive race they encounter in Tanzania, a race only glimpsed once from afar but who looked, to my eye, like white folks painted an Amazonian blue. Racial alterity is ultimately domesticated on Battlestar, a suggestion of the ideological limitations of the culture industries at this particular moment in time, certainly, but also suggestive of a contradiction in modernity that is both longer and deeper.
For the “ontological autism” Freccero laments in the Enlightenment division of nature into discrete species, while indeed part of what has consigned mythic dog-men to the irrational outskirts of fable, did not simply install a border between man and animal. It installed that border transecting the human, consigning the racialized other to what Paul Gilroy has called infrahumanity, or humanity on the lower frequencies. To account for modernity and humanism, not simply as that which elevates “mankind” above the animals, naturalizing dogs as cute and quaint companions in the process, but also as that which savagely tears mankind asunder, is to reckon with “The Reason Why the Colored American Is Not in the World’s Columbian Exposition,” as the title of an 1893 pamphlet by Ida B. Wells and Frederick Douglass puts it. Their reason, curtly put, was slavery. Slavery not (just) as a pre-modern but as a quintessentially modern (and now post-modern) phenomena.
The exclusion of the wretched of the earth from the self-representation of civilization’s feats of technology, which was Wells and Douglass’ complaint, is part of the deeper logic that still excludes a multihued humanity from co-eval participation in speculative futures like Battlestar.
As the show’s creators noted, in explaining why the first time they showed the ragtag survivors discovering planet Earth (at the end of Season 4 Episode 10) they had to make sure the North American continent was prominently centered: they weren’t confident their audience would recognize it as Earth otherwise.
Kanye West Breaks Color Barriers & Takes Hold of Fine Art
On next months cover of Complex:
“When you look back at these four and a half years, who’s the icon at the end of the day? Who broke down color barriers? What other black guy would a white person use as a fashion reference?”
– Kanye West
(from an interview with Details, February 2009)
Problematic Rock #1
He's actually Jewish.
Problematic Rock will be a new thing where I call attention to songs or music videos that are “wrong” according to the dictates of the politically correct or postmodernly correct position on things, but which may have something to teach us after all. The first installment is a song I actually like for it’s honesty. This is pretty much a warts-and-all representation of the way unconsciously self-hating liberal white dudes feel when they decide to pursue women of other races.
“Black Girlfriend” by Porno for Pyros
The lyrics say it all:
“Ever since the riots,
all I really wanted was a black girlfriend….
Lookin’ out her window
It’s so exciting and foreign
but I’m staying
with my black girlfriend.”
Either Perry Ferrell is ignorant of the idea of exoticizing the Other, or he doesn’t care (I’m banking on the former). Say what you will, this guy, and this band, are not ones to shy away from miscegenation, musical and otherwise.
—And yes, I realize I have yet to comment on anything from this decade.
