Warumpi Band, Black Fella White Fella (1987)

Warumpi Band, My Island Home (1988)

The Sly Stone of Australia?

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 N.Y.

Ponce De Leon L.A.

Ponce De Leon’s core members: John Hogan, Greg McKenna, Dave Reich

Thanks and goodnight.

-John Hogan

]]> http://asianjew.wordpress.com/2009/04/25/ponce-de-leon-the-band-explained/feed/ 0 thejohnhogan 57418456_l dj_assault_13dec1 Florida nietzche imperialist 156113549_c61af173b6 207375039_dc59b6a89d http://asianjew.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/introduction-to-representations-of-africa/ http://asianjew.wordpress.com/2009/04/14/introduction-to-representations-of-africa/#comments Tue, 14 Apr 2009 05:15:48 +0000 NaaAku http://asianjew.wordpress.com/?p=252 ]]> 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?”

Well excuse me, but we have a far bigger problem. Let me use an analogy. Imagine the reaction if the game was set in a concentration camp….that sounds awful, terrible. How indecent and insensitive that would be. But why isn’t the same reaction provoked by the idea of using wars in Africa and the horrible events against innocent people? I honestly could not understand how the article could flit by this topic and go on and on about race. Its not about race it is about decency, humanity, using tragedy for entertainment. It is so obvious to me I don’t know how to explain.

And in this travesty, I found again one of the shocking aspects of representations of Africa: the subtraction of humanity. People read or watch or hear about African countries and issues on CNN, BBC, WSJ (article on Resident Evil) and Financial Times (article on Wilbur Smith), and it is always a standard story line. It is one dimensional, there is no empathy…in fact there probably cannot be empathy because there is so little that they can identify with. Disease, hunger, wars, lions, things you never see in your daily life. There are never images of people just living their lives, going to work, going shopping, sitting down to dinner, which indeed is what life is like most of the time. Of course life differs in many ways—language, food, culture, radio shows, mobile phone networks, taxis, buses—but viewers outside only expect differences on certain axes—disease, poverty, safety and wild-life. And of course the idea that these are real conscious people, which if present underpins identification leading to empathy and hence outrage at using horrible tragedy for entertainment, is completely absent.

Lunch with the FT: Wilbur Smith
By William Leith
Published: March 21 2009 01:23 | Last updated: March 21 2009 01:23
When you think of Wilbur Smith, you think of lions, of men shooting lions, of men who shoot lions and have sex with beautiful women. You think of Africa. [Actually I think of Cecil Rhodes running around in the bush of South Africa, Zimbabwe, Zambia, Kenya...not really Accra no]

You think of the great riches of Africa, and the men who squandered those riches, mostly towards the end of the 19th century. You think of men who are so masculine that women turn to jelly, overwhelmed by sheer testosterone. “Of course she had seen a man’s naked body before … but never like this, not healthy and vital and overwhelming like this.” (A Falcon Flies, 1980)

Smith himself, at 76, is still surprisingly healthy and vital, if not overwhelming. He has chosen to meet at Mosimann’s, the scrupulously upmarket restaurant just off Belgrave Square. He has known Anton Mosimann, the owner, since the 1970s, when the latter worked at the nearby Dorchester. “The food never disappoints me,” Smith says. He is wearing a dark, very expensive suit, a patterned tie, and rimless glasses, and has something of Sven-Göran Eriksson, a former England football manager, about him.

No, he tells me, it’s not true that he lives in London, as has been written – though he does have a house in Knightsbridge, as well as places in Malta and Davos, Switzerland. But his main residence is in Cape Town, where he lives with his fourth wife, Mokhiniso, 39 – “the best thing that has happened to me”, as he puts it on the dedication page of his latest novel. He met Mokhiniso in 1999, while shopping for books in WH Smith in Sloane Square, and they married in May 2000.

Smith, who is on a book tour to promote his latest novel Assegai – his 32nd to date – is very twinkly. He says he likes to go to the gym a lot, ideally three times a week. Last year he had a knee operation, though, which slowed him down. He had his cartilage trimmed and it was agony afterwards. He couldn’t exercise much, so put on a bit of weight. You’d hardly notice.

Still, here he avoids the canapés altogether, even though they are marvels of nanotechnology – tiny hollowed-out tomatoes filled with some kind of seafood, and one that looks like a boat built by ants. Smith also passes on the bread.

Mosimann comes over and has a quick chat. Smith tells him he looks like he’s lost weight. Mosimann says it’s something to do with his tailor and shoots off, all smiles. We look at the menu. Smith doesn’t drink at lunchtimes, although he has an apéritif when the sun goes down, followed by a small glass of malt whisky, and a bottle of wine shared with his wife. Pretty much all his male characters drink, though. They slug it down to get them through tough times in the bush, where their lives are threatened pretty much every minute of the day.

We both decide on a crab salad for the starter. Smith says he eats a great deal of seafood, which is terrific in South Africa – “Cape lobster, sole, and king clipper”, whose flesh tastes rather like monkfish. “You never find a king clipper in the stores with its head on, because it’s so goddamn ugly,” Smith explains. “We get mackerel but people don’t eat it – it’s dog food.” He is often plain-spoken, something he has in common with the heroes in his books.

For the main course, Smith orders a health-conscious salade Niçoise (or “fish club”, as the menu has it); I go for fillet of lamb. For a while, we sip our fizzy water and talk about meat. This is a huge subject for Smith, because he regularly shoots the meat he eats, and has an encyclopaedic knowledge of African venison – the antelopes, the gazelles. His favourite meat comes from the springbok, preferably a half-grown animal you’ve shot yourself, preferably barbecued. “Every South African considers themselves to be the world’s greatest barbecuer,” he says. “But they don’t know that I’m the national champion.” He is, I think, joking.

We eat the crab, which is great – bits of crabmeat finely interlaced with bits of vegetable. Smith begins to talk about his father, Bert – short for Herbert – and lots of things become clear to me. Smith’s most famous character, Sean Courtney, a man who can shoot anything, fix anything, and build anything you care to name – that’s Bert Smith. All those books about Sean and his weak brother, Garrick, Sean and his hunting, Sean and his fights – they are, in a way, testimonies to Wilbur Smith’s father.

A GOOD MAN ON AFRICA
The Rider Haggard of our time
Wilbur Smith saw action before he wrote it, which places him in a tradition of male-action novelists from Captain Marryat, bemedalled veteran of the Napoleonic wars, to former SAS soldier Chris Ryan, writes John Sutherland.

Like many of his books’ manly heroes, Smith was brought up a rancher and educated very British. He served in the Rhodesian armed forces in their most embattled years and saw terrible things.
His first published novel, When the Lion Feeds (1964), established the pattern of the 30-odd yarns that follow. Typically, the narrative opens with a big game hunt. His canvas is continent-sized, nothing less would do for Smith’s vision of Africa, and his stories clump, massively, into multi-volume sequences, or “sagas”, in which characters and dynastic families separate and intertwine over hundreds of years. Call them mega-novels.

The geopolitics are complex. But it is easy to see where Smith is coming from in literary-historical terms. He is the Rider Haggard of our time. More particularly, he writes in the tradition of the 15-volume strong Allan Quatermain saga, which began with King Solomon’s Mines (1885) and ran, as bestsellers, for 40 years under the series motto: Ex Africa semper aliquid novi (roughly, “Always something new out of Africa”).

All three of Smith’s great fictional constellations are Afrocentric. The largest is the “Courtney” series, of which Smith’s latest novel Assegai is the 13th instalment. The series follows the foundation, rise and, as Smith portrays it, the fall of modern South Africa, from the 17th- to the late 20th-century. The national narrative is set alongside the career of a family fabulously enriched from gold, diamonds, and whatever other wealth is to be ripped from the country’s soil during the colonists’ brief tenure.

The less voluminous “Ballantyne” sequence (five volumes) follows a Rhodesian colonial dynasty, from slave-trading, through ranching, to post-Mugabe exile.

Smith’s third fictional sequence, the “Egyptian” novels, began with River God in 1993. It is his version of Conrad’s Congo, taking Smith to the heart of the continent and its mystical Egyptian pre-history.
Smith’s overarching motto is: “TIA – This is Africa”. In point of fact, it should be “This was Africa”. His long career as a bestselling author began, historically, with Macmillan’s wind of change, the decolonising gusts of which began to blow in the late 1950s. In Smith’s view, that “wind” has done to Africa what Katrina did to New Orleans.

His novels are permeated by a gloom that gathers as the sagas unroll. Craig Mellow’s failure to recover the family farm in the later Ballantyne novels is symbolic. Now goats graze there, reducing what was once African Eden to desert. Twenty years ago, Smith believed Zimbabwe, Kenya and Malawi had “a fighting chance”. No longer. “Africa”, he has said, “is going back to where it was before the white man intruded.”

“Intruded”, though, is an interestingly loaded word. In its long history, does Africa, ultimately, belong to white, black, brown or all of them? In Smith’s novels there is none of the arrant negrophobia of African male-action novels such as Robert Ruark’s Uhuru (1962), Nicholas Monsarrat’s The Tribe that Lost its Head (1956) or Daniel Carney’s The Wild Geese (1978).

As he reaches the end of his career, Smith has carved out a huge monolithic structure. He deserves more respect for it than his brand of fiction typically attracts. Take him whole, if you take him at all.
John Sutherland is emeritus professor of literature at University College London and the author of the ‘Longman Companion to Victorian Fiction: Second Edition’ (Pearson Education)

Bert Smith worked in the copper mines in what is now Zambia and, when the mines shut down during the Great Depression, he fed his family by hunting game and selling meat. Later still, he bought 12,000 hectares of Zambian farmland and built a ranch house himself. He also built roads – himself! He would chop down a tree and attach it to a tractor and drag it through the bush.

Smith was Bert’s only son. “I thought he was God come down to earth again, an almighty presence in my life,” he says. One of Bert’s hobby-horses was how Africa had been ruined – by people with four-wheel-drive vehicles, by nylon fishing line, by game hunters who went out at night with a torch. “He was very Victorian,” says Smith. “He had these slogans: ‘Spare the rod and spoil the child;’ ‘Small boys should be seen and not heard.’ ”

After the age of about 12, says Smith, “I went through that resentment period, vying with him for my mother’s attention, resenting his success, resenting the fact that people thought he was a success.”
What set Bert Smith on his way, says his son, was a fight he had in a marquee tent with a heavyweight boxer called Bombardier Billy Wells, who also found fame for being one of the people to strike the gong in the introduction to J Arthur Rank films.

I can imagine the scene – a sultry night in the Copperbelt, somewhere near the Congolese border. A bunch of expats, most of them mining engineers. Lots of booze. A big fellow standing in a boxing ring, offering to take on all-comers.

“My dad had had a couple of drinks,” says Smith. “It was, ‘Come on, Smithy!’ So the old man got into the ring and Bombardier Wells hit him right on the nose. Knocked him flat. But he sprang to his feet and punched Bombardier Wells right over the ropes, into the front row. And that’s where the mine’s executives were all sitting. These were top men, and Bombardier Wells was in their laps, out cold. That made them look at Bert Smith for the first time.” Soon, Bert had a contract to provide ventilation pipes for the mines.

This was before Bert Smith became what his son calls a “professional meat hunter”. He gave Wilbur a Browning .22 rifle, at the age of nine. “My job was to shoot hares to feed my father’s dogs,” says Smith. “That’s why I’ve never been able to eat rabbit or hare since – again, it’s dog food.”
In the world of Wilbur Smith’s novels, being good with a gun is crucial. It’s the mark of a man. In Assegai, you can tell everything about Leon, the hero, by the way he handles his exquisite rifle, made by Holland & Holland of New Bond Street. (“He stroked the oil-finished wood of the butt, the polished walnut silky smooth under his fingertips.”) Conversely, you can see that Leon’s American companion Kermit, with his trigger-happy ways – and a .405 Winchester he calls Big Medicine – is going to be trouble.

How good a shot is Smith himself? “I wouldn’t class myself as an Olympic shot but a careful shot, which is the most important. So if I’m shooting game, I want the animal to depart this life without even knowing I was there.” When I ask him what types of game he’s shot, he pauses, almost reverentially. “OK,” he says. “I’ve shot four of the big five. Elephants, lions, leopards and buffalo. I don’t want to shoot rhino. I shot my first lion when I was 14 or so. It was very exciting. You’ve got to be aware of the danger, so your pulse is up. But you have to be totally in control.”

Smith pauses, and says, “The whole trick is to get as close as you can – and then a little closer. Because the first shot is absolutely crucial. You don’t want a wounded animal on your hands. My first lion was shot at a distance of from here to the front door. And at that range it’s pinpoint – you can put the bullet exactly where you want it – unless your hands are shaking.”

In all, Smith has shot perhaps a dozen lions, and between 50 and 100 buffalo, which “cannot possibly be looked upon as an endangered species”. As well as these animals, he’s shot “a number of elephants, and have some beautiful tusks, but enough is enough – a dozen, total”. And then maybe the same number of lions, and the same again of leopards. He may not hunt this year. “But my wife likes to hunt,” he says. “She will hunt the species that I hunted long ago. Wildebeest, eland, large or medium-to-large gazelle.”

I eat my lamb, which is very tender and comes with spinach and pine nuts, and tiny potatoes. Smith eats his salad slowly and precisely. Around the time he shot his first lion, Smith was sent to Michaelhouse, the Eton of South Africa, where the food was, he says, pretty poor – “lots of carbs”. There was also a lot of kneeling in chapel and saying, “Please God, I’ve been wicked.”

Later, he went to Rhodes University, where he studied commerce; later still, he found himself living in Rhodesia, smoking 50 cigarettes a day, and working as a tax collector. That was when he started writing short stories.
Smith’s first story was about two climbers on a sheer rock face. “One knows the other is having an affair with his wife,” he says. His fourth or fifth was about two brothers – one strong, one weak. “If I tried to analyse it now,” he says, “the strong brother is what I would like to be, and the weak brother is what I’m afraid of being. Both characters were me. So when the father rejected the weak brother, those were the times that my father was disappointed in me.”

You don’t have to be Freud, do you? Smith’s father had a ranch, a plane, a herd of cattle. He, on the other hand, had a bunch of tax forms to assess. So he created Sean and Garrick Courtney, the two sides of himself, and this story blossomed into his first novel, When the Lion Feeds (1964). The book was a bestseller. Writing it turned Smith from Garrick into Sean. Then he bought his parents, who had fallen on hard times, a house.

A youngish, attractive woman appears, and chats to us. Our time is almost up, she says. When she is gone, Smith says: “That’s the young lady we were talking about earlier on.” He means his wife. “Full of energy,” he says. “Irrepressible. She never stops.” Smith does not order pudding. He must be on his way, to talk to people about his books. To talk about lions, and about men shooting lions, and about men who shoot lions and have sex with beautiful women.
‘Assegai’ is published on April 1 (Macmillan, £18.99)

Is it racist for white people to shoot black zombies?

[I read this and wept, honestly you think the big issue here is race?!]

This Friday, Capcom’s new release “Resident Evil 5,” from producer Jun Takeuchi, broaches that question. The franchise, which first launched in 1996, has sold more than 12 million units and earned nearly a half billion dollars in revenue, according to research firm NPD Group. It’s even been spun into a modestly successful film trilogy starring Milla Jovovich. The latest entry in the series follows Chris Redfield, the hero of the first game, as he tracks the cause of a deadly virus plaguing villages in West Africa.

View a clip from “Resident Evil 5.”

When Capcom released its first trailer for the game in 2007, it showed Chris unloading his pistol into hordes of African zombies. Critics contended that the imagery of a white man shooting black Africans evoked troubling memories of the age of Western colonialism. The questions have lingered and now that the game is facing an official release, it has spurred a new debate about race in videogames.

Opponents of the new game will have plenty of ammunition. Although there are Arab zombies in “Resident Evil 5,” the majority of the undead are Africans. As a player, you are often forced to use a machete to hack your way through your attackers, using the same kind of weapons that were used in atrocities in places like Rwanda and the Congo over the last two decades. Killing African zombies can earn you gold treasure — in addition to the loot you find in barrels and vases in the different African villages. And while Chris’s partner, Sheva Alomar, is from the region, she’s light-skinned with straight-hair, and is introduced to players during a cinematic sequence highlighting not her face, but rather, her rear end.

Mary Flanagan, a professor of digital media at Dartmouth College, argues that the fact that the game’s zombies are of color is a significant detail. “It’s not to say we can’t allow for transgression, but there are so few depictions of Africans in games,” she says. Though she’s only watched videos of the game, Ms. Flanagan says that to deal with violent images, particularly ones that involve people of color, the game should be nuanced and confront issues of race head on.

“When this issue came up last year, it caught us by surprise,” says Chris Kramer, a spokesman for Capcom. He notes that the franchise has “zombies of all creeps and colors” from many different locales, including Spanish zombies known as “Las Ganados” or “cattle” that were featured in “Resident Evil 4.” According to Mr. Kramer, members of the team went to several towns in Africa during the game’s development process to make the game more visually accurate.

Mr. Kramer also contends that Americans are more sensitive about issues of race in the wake of President Barack Obama’s election. “There are probably some cultural awareness levels that are not there [for Japanese developers],” he says.

Part of the problem is the dearth of people of color in the videogame industry as a whole. While there is no hard data about the racial and ethnic makeup of the videogame industry, the scene at the awards dinner for the Academy of Interactive Arts and Sciences last month was telling. Comedian Jay Mohr, who served as host, joked about the lack of diversity in the room and turned the camera on the “two” non-white people that he saw. One attendee joked that there were more black journalists covering the industry than non-white members of the industry itself.

The main characters in videogames are not particularly diverse either. There have been exceptions; Faith, an athletic Asian woman, was at the center of last year’s action game “Mirror’s Edge.” A 2001 study conducted by Children Now! reported that nearly all videogame heroes were white and almost all African-American males were portrayed as competitors as opposed to allies. In his 2006 paper to “Games and Culture,” David J. Leonard, an associate professor of ethnic studies at Washington State University argued about the importance of looking at race in videogames. “Stereotypes do not merely reflect ignorance [...] through stock racial ideas, but through dominant ideas of race.”

What is so maddening is that videogame creators have immense leverage over the ethnicity of their creations. In “Dead Space,” a horror survival game in the same vein as “Resident Evil,” the player becomes a voiceless, faceless engineer named Isaac Clarke. Little is revealed about Isaac during the course of game, so after he’s escaped an abandoned, alien-infested space station at the game’s conclusion, he shockingly removes his mask to reveal — that he’s an aging white male. He easily could have been any other race.

Glen Schofield, the game’s executive producer, says they spent hours deliberating over Isaac’s appearance, but wanted him to look like “an everyday guy.” He says the choice of race can be difficult and they wanted to avoid stereotypes. “You’ll notice that we have quite few different ethic groups that are represented,” he says, pointing to the African-American and Native American characters in the game. “It’s a big deal you go through every time.”

Some games have chosen to give players more control over their player’s appearance. In last year’s popular action role-playing game “Fallout 3,” players are allowed to choose their ethnicity and are given a set of tools to customize their character’s facial features. “A big part of our games is who you are and what you look like. It gives a level of attachment,” says Todd Howard, the game’s director.

To be clear, “Resident Evil 5″ is not a game about killing Africans. Your job, as a player, is to save villages that have been victimized by a biochemical terrorist group. The first fearsome opponent you face is a blonde-haired female and you are rescued several times by another troupe of African soldiers. And ultimately, the game suggests that the barbarism depicted in the game is a result of your enemies’ zombieness, not their African identity. In short, Africans don’t beat you to death with their hands — zombies do.

But at times, the zombies hardly seem zombie-like when they control machine gun turrets and steer watercraft. Aside from when their faces open up and turn into tentacles, the zombies look like everyday African people, albeit ones that are trying to kill you. That’s the point — zombies are almost people.

In games, cinema and other media, it’s zombies’ near-humanity that creates the dramatic tension. They retain their basic appearance and sometimes memories of the life they once had. In the opening sequence in George Romero’s 2005 film “Land of the Dead,” the zombies attempt to return to their lives before they became undead — a cheerleader still totes her pompoms and a zombie couple walks hand in hand.

In the press materials for “Resident Evil 5,” Capcom strikes the same theme — that zombie life gives us some insight into what it means to be human. When describing the game’s location in Kijuju, set in western Africa, the game’s promotional materials say: “Its citizens led lives before the outbreak, and sometimes you get a sneak peek into them.”

And that’s what makes “Resident Evil 5″ such a difficult game to play. The zombies you face aren’t dressed in suits — they’re poor and shirtless with ragged clothes and red eyes. “They’re using my people as a testbed for their experiments,” Sheva bemoans at one point. Her people have been poisoned by a multi-national corporation and become something terrifying. Mr. Kramer says that the game is actually “anti-colonialist” for that reason — you’re there to overturn a Western injustice against Africans.

But discussions about colonialism are only dealt with obliquely in the game — Chris never reflects on his position as a white male in Africa nor does he discuss race with his African partner, Sheva. The game presents only one option to survive against African zombies: kill every single one.

Write to Jamin Brophy-Warren at Jamin.Brophy-Warren@wsj.com

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.

“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.

“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)

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.

Join hands with other
multicultural person.
Let’s be positive.

Love for The Pinky Show.

And The Pinky Show on YouTube.