Intriguing...

http://www.karmaloop.com/products.asp?ProductID=20504

The jams have been kicked, apparently. And are now available in jacket form.

Damn. Its been far too long since I've posted anything. Or talked with any of you good folk. Exception, Sanjukta (I'ma respond to your email soon. promise). More astounding, Christina is probably within a 5 minute walk of me somewhere around campus on a day to day basis, but I still haven't seen her since welcome week of LAST year (2006). So in other words my communication has been on the weak tip.

Things are alright where I'm at. Four weeks into the semester, my classes are looking pretty neat. I'm in an International and Area Studies course on Global Poverty taught by Ananya Roy, who is easily the best lecturer I've seen so far at Cal. I'm also taking a Women's Studies in Religion course at the Graduate Theological Union (a couple blocks north of the Berkeley campus). The class has only met twice, but so far the reading has been fascinating (bell hooks and Simone de Bouvier what!) and the discussion on point, however I must admit it is a little intimidating to be in a class of entirely grad students, many of whom are working on their P.h.D.s, most of whom are married, and quite of few of whom have kids. Not to mention being one of three men in a class of 25 (one of two last week when one of my comrades failed to show), or being surrounded by a good number of ordained ministers/holy folk in a scattering of different denominations. Good to force oneself into those unfamiliar scenarios.

Today in my comp lit course on Literature and Colonialism the professor passed out a handout (in French) of a scene from the original Tintin in the Congo (Tintin au Congo for you Francophiles). We'd just read Heart of Darkness (and are now on Andre Malraux's The Royal Way, which is an adaptation of HoD set in French Indochina), and it was jarring to see the barbaric history of the Belgian Congo juxtaposed with the unabashed, cartoonish racism of a children's comic. I read Tintin studiously as a kid, and remember reading this book (in Spanish, oddly enough), and being simultaneously repulsed and fascinated by a tension that even then I knew existed in the text. A couple weeks ago, I read an article on Hergé (the creator of Tintin) in a New Yorker from this past May (http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2007/05/28/070528fa_fact_lane). It referenced this same scene that we were looking over earlier today, where Tintin is teaching a geography lesson to a classroom full of black-faced, red balloon-lipped stereotypes of what Hergé imagined Congolese children to look like, and Tintin points to the blackboard and says something along the lines of: here, this is your country- Belgium, with (I'm quite sure, though not pictured) King Leopold off-camera smiling proudly from his personal ninth-circle. That's some bullshit right there.

Never really seen it painted so stark, but these caricatures are the scriptures I used to pore over (along with Asterix the Gaul, who sported similar racialized fantasies), and I can't help but wonder how these comics unconsciously shaped my view of the world and its earthlings (here, with unconscious conditioning, we hook in to my fourth class for the fall, a major pre-req social theory/cultural analysis course on the Self, where my professor is currently worshipping Freud). I mean if you look even at all closely at Hergé's work, you'll find the most simplistic and disgusting stereotypes taken to the extreme (witness his buck-toothed Japanese in The Blue Lotus, or half-naked, tomahawk-wielding natives in Tintin in America). I mean, sure, these books are a product of their time, but I'm a product of that product, and I don't know how much I like that.

In other news:

A Congolese student is trying to get the book removed from shelves... http://www.nytimes.com/2007/08/08/arts/08arts.html
Scroll down to "Tintin Prompts a Suit."

This year is the 100th anniversary of Georges Remi's birth.

Stephen Spielberg and Peter Jackson are directing: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tintin_(film)


... In conclusion ...

I mean, I love me some Tintin, but sheesh... thumbs down to having my mind warped at an early age.

Also, if you want to check a plethora of crazy good music for free, hit up: http://community.livejournal.com/black_man_land/

Its Russian, but in spite of that, or perhaps because of that, as it may be (Sophie), give it a shot, or multiple shots.

And in other other news, my sister Lilly turned 21 last night. Woo!

Also,
Shana Tova! Happy New Year!
A sweet and joyful one to all.

Isaac

P.S. I know we're all on our own respective hypes with individual blogs and other such nonsense, but if I can find some time to post here, I'll bet good money you can find some time too.

P.P.S. I'm not the only one who read Tintin, right?

OI!

I think it's high time for a blogger's reunion...