It is, once again, the last night of the year and all is quiet, not a rocket in sight or in the sky. I am in my blue-lit studio, between the synthesizers and thinking about the passing of time as I suppose one does around New Year's Eve, until finally time is up. I lost a couple of family members this year and other people I knew but I also get to see kids in the family growing up around me which makes me truly grateful, Peter Pan as I am. Recently, apparently, the nieces responded, when being told I was not actually really a kid any longer, that I play just as well as one, which I think is perhaps the most wonderful praise I could ever get.
This year brought a new addition to the live band, Alex Anarki, who had the pleasure - or challenge - of joining in for this year's HCA Festivals. I say challenge because the material we performed, my suite of music based on Hans Christian Andersen's darker tales, is a little more on the complex and compositional side, some of the pieces around ten minutes long, consisting of various parts, changing time signatures and other such things. It all went well, though, and the concerts were very well-attended; a big thank you to everybody who showed up. I recently uploaded a live video from the HCA Festivals concert series with the onstage team of Olivia Obskur, Alex Anarki and Max Kaos, and a couple of weeks earlier also a couple of live videos from our Klub Golem Halloween concert featuring the same team - and thank you of course also to all the people who still keep our Golem alive, the people who help, the people who show up, the people who perform. So if you didn't already catch us live on stage with Alex Anarki you can watch a few videos which can be found both on my own website and of course on YouTube as well. I also finished three text-based adventure games for the Commodore 64 in 2023, the games featured on the cover disk of legendary magazine, Zzap!64 which used to be the leading 64 mag back in the eighties and which is now back in the game. And oh yes, I tell you, making text-based adventure games on the Commodore 64 in 2023 makes you stinking rich. This is my business advice to the next generation. At least it's better than getting into oil. Here it is time for bed; I am aiming for a combi-New Year's celebration tomorrow, later today, technically speaking, first with family, then with friends for en eighties-waiting-for-the-all-out-nuclear-war theme party - some of us are still waiting. And a happy new year!Heimdall and Valkyrie of the Marvel Thor Universe have gone black. Death from The Sandman tales turned black and Hans Christian Andersen's Little Mermaid too. I am not offended; if people feel Disney ruined Andersen's story by casting Halle Bailey as the titular mermaid I would say, if anything, they ruined the story in many other ways. For those of you who never read the actual, original Andersen tale, the mermaid - who was never called Ariel - does so not get the prince. Essentially Andersen's Little Mermaid is a story about never feeling at home, never belonging anywhere. Disney's is not. But you have to wonder, don't you? Super heroes, comic book characters and creatures out of folklore. And black people.
I understand why it would make sense to play around with mythological characters, be they super heroes or folklore, as these are highly fictional by nature and so why might, say, Peter Pan not be black or Asian? I am sure a movie version with a black Peter could be great provided the actor, director and everything else that goes into making a movie did a great job. You could even make the case that the so-called fantastical genres might have a better understanding of the minority experience in that fantasy, horror, science fiction were historically expressions not considered Real Literature, largely shunned by academia. Comic books were seen as, well, anything but books, really. I totally get why these genres are perhaps more open and inclusive than the mainstream, so-called, and I do see the beauty in that. At the same time might we not worry just a tiny bit that ever so often representation in big movies and series are characters out of the Marvel Universe or fairytales? Don't get me wrong; I love comic books, I love fairytales, always did but I can't help thinking it is a worrying trend when actors of basically any other colour than white are so systematically typecast as characters out of comic books or fairytales. What might have started off as good intentions (and pandering to the PC community for better and worse, let's not be naive) seems to be turning into another road to yet more stereotypes.
It is about representation; now finally kids of colour get to grow up and see super heroes of colour on the big screen and on TV. That's important. That's identification, that's inclusion. Well, I get that and I agree in part but not all the way. Kids get to see so many black or Asian versions of characters who used to be white. They see people of their own colour who get the chance to play a role some white actor played years ago. Perhaps a string of white actors. I can't help feeling there is something second-rate about that, despite whatever good intentions. To get the big parts you must stumble in the footsteps of white actors, white directors, white storytellers who came before you. As a favourite band of mine once put it: We must repeat. Maybe it's just me but I'm reminded of the Jordan Peele movie, Get Out, where - spoiler alert - young black people are getting kidnapped to have their bodies possessed by wealthy white old bastards who want to live on in new body hosts. Maybe instead of whites-recast-in-colour, the kids of colour will be better off growing up on Bruce Lee movies, Train To Busan and Yellow Magic Orchestra, Spike Lee, RUN DMC and Billie Holiday. And their future incarnations.
And as a musician I can't help thinking what if this thing had happened in music? What if somewhere in the early seventies Herbie Hancock had been asked to rerecord Sgt. Pepper's if he wanted to get a chance to reach a wide audience? I'm sure Mr. Hancock could have done interesting things with the Beatles material but I for one am happy he did Headhunters instead. I'm happy to live in a world where both those albums exist. What if Prince had to rerecord Eagles albums or if Public Enemy had to do a number of Madonna songs? I think you get the point.
While I think it is perfectly possible to reinterpret stories in different ways, including such things as skin colour or gender of characters, I also can't help thinking some of the representation strategies we see these years seem like lazy and tired efforts, in some cases perhaps downright misguided. We see movies, series, stories taking place in historical periods in Europe where suddenly black people appear in roles they most probably did not appear in in actual history. While intentions may be good this only serves to paint a wrong picture of what certain historical periods were like and if today we want to think we have reached a point where we see issues of racism as wrong we are not making things any better by trying to paint a rosy picture of the past, in the name of inclusion, representation or any other name. Give me Spike Lee's Malcolm X any day of the week instead. I have a feeling some twenty years from now a new generation will look back and shake their heads in quiet disbelief.
Copyright: Ras Bolding 2023