Monday, May 14, 2012
Saturday, January 15, 2011
New Website!..Future Postings will be on www.frederickluisaldama.com
Monday, September 6, 2010
Query about Latinos in Video Games
Working on a piece on Latinos in video games and coming up super short. Got the usual suspects (with only a couple of exceptions, all non-player) like GTA, Gunslinger, Fighter games, SingStar, DoA, Mex Am. War, Red Dead Redemption.
Any others that you all might have come across? Would greatly appreciate any leads.
G...racias
Any others that you all might have come across? Would greatly appreciate any leads.
G...racias
Tuesday, August 3, 2010
Over a Peet’s coffee—black and no sugar--I chatted with Angela Becerra Vidergar, co-founder of the Graphic Narrative Project at Stanford, about end-of-days novels and films, Latin American Boom authors, and, well, comic-books. Since my days at Stanford in the mid- late- (nineteen)nineties, it seems there’s more interest in this storytelling form beyond the literature departments (English, Comparative, and Rhet-Comp); even there it was few and far between. Now it seems all sorts are taking more than a passing interest, including faculty from Archeology, Engineering, Math, and the Arts—including Scott Bukatman and John S. Knight Fellow Dan Archer.
Comic books on any syllabus seem to be drawing the undergrad crowds. Angela’s Rhetoric of Comics even teased out of an engineering student a paper that used the kind of research I’m partial to from the cognitive- and neuro- sciences. And, with some Humanities Center dollar-backing, Angela along with co-founder Haerin Shin’s Graphic Narrative Project will bring to Stanford various (2010-2012) invited guests to run colloquia and as well as host a series of speaker events; if I’m lucky, there might even be one on cognitive approaches to comics and another focused on Latino comics.
The brushfire that’s happening at Stanford’s been going on elsewhere, too. Of course, we have this all going down at OSU not just in my classes, but also with my colleague Jared Gardner’s Mario-X-sized popular course on comic books; so big that he had to move twice to get a lecture hall super-sized enough to fit them all. After talking about Angela’s possible dissertation focused apocalyptic narrative fiction, I learned of Argentinean Hector Osterheld, his sci-fi comic El Eternauta, and his joining Montoneros leftist guerilla that led to his kidnapping and disappearance during the Dirty War. And, we both agreed that while the so-called Boom put Latin American authors on the map—Cortázar, Fuentes, GGMárquez, and the like—in the glorying over the novel, a glare left out the short story. So we know Cortázar for Hopscotch and not for his mind-blowing moebius-strip fictions; we know of the Buendias, but not of GMárquez’s formidable Geneva-set fact-fictions of ex-dictators. We do know of Latin America as homo faber in the realm of the short narrative form, but only in the single, solitary Borges. Had he published a novel, those north of the Tortilla Curtain would probably know little of his ficciones.
In El Defectuoso (the megalithic D.F.) and also Buenos Aires and Caracas authors and theorists are tearing it up with the flash fiction form (a.k.a microcuentos, microrelatos, or minificciónes constrained by 250 words), only seemingly recently “discovered” by US practitioners like J.E. Wideman, Junot Díaz, Juan Felipe Herrera, Luis Rodriguez, Luis Urrea, Ana Castillo, Sandra Cisneros.
In a tetris-game shuffle that moves edges to centers, in the US academia comic books--and now flash fiction--are here, and seemingly to stay.
Saturday, July 31, 2010
Stanford's Graphic Narrative Project
Check this website out!
http://www.stanford.edu/group/gnarp/cgi-bin/drupal/
http://www.stanford.edu/group/gnarp/cgi-bin/drupal/
Friday, April 23, 2010
Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle
Sunday, April 18, 2010
The Lantern - Professor lectures on Latino comics
The Lantern - Professor lectures on Latino comics
Professor lectures on Latino comics
Published: Wednesday, April 14, 2010
Updated: Wednesday, April 14, 2010
 "Photo: N/A")
Frederick Aldama
A small crowd scattered among a classroom in William Ox;ley Thompson Memorial Library to see professor Frederick Luis Aldama’s presentation on Latino comic books and graphic novels.
The presentation, titled “Your Brain on Latino Comics,” takes the same name as Aldama’s book, released in 2009 and published by the University of Texas Press.
“Nobody knows about Latino comics, and yet there are a lot of these guys doing this work and a lot of people reading the stuff, it just hasn’t been archived,” said Aldama, 41. “People haven’t made an academic attempt giving it visibility like Faulkner and all these guys when you mention their name everybody knows about.”
After engaging the crowd and finding out what its favorite comic books and graphic novels were, Aldama went on to speak for more than 45 minutes about things such as the history of Latino comic books and the representation of Latino characters in mainstream comics and graphic novels. The entire lecture was accompanied by a PowerPoint presentation and was followed by a question and answer session with the crowd.
Some of the many items discussed by Aldama included the Hernandez Brothers long-running series “Love and Rockets,” El Dorado, a character in the popular comic series “Super Friends,” and Vibe, a product of DC Comics.
This is not the first book written by Aldama, whose other works include “Postethnic Narrative Criticism, Brown on Brown,” “Why the Humanities Matter: A Common Sense Approach” and 2008’s “Dancing With Ghosts: A Critical Biography of Arturo Islas,” which received an MLA award.
“His work in general is just really strong,” said Evan Thomas, a 23-year-old graduate student studying English. “He’s got an interdisciplinary that gives him a strength and adaptability that will really serve him in the long run.”
Aldama also spoke about the academic merits of comic books and graphic novels being used in the classroom. Not only does Aldama use them as a part of all of his classes, but in the past few years the university has introduced several classes with curriculum based upon comic books.
“Comic books, just like novels, can be simple minded or they can be completely complex and interesting,” said Aldama. “By writing books and publishing them with academic presses, what it does is it works sort of top down to give legitimacy to it as a very carefully crafted storytelling mode.”
Nancy Courtney, coordinator of outreach and engagement for the libraries, said that the event was put on by OSU Libraries as a part of its ongoing Humanities series.
Monday, April 5, 2010
ReadAloud Special : Latino Comics Program
Your Latino Comics Program
The Ohio State University
Thompson Library Room 165
April 13, 2010 4-5 pm
I will be discussing my work by and about Latinos in comics based on my book, Your Brain on Latino Comics. I will lecture on mainstream comic book representations of Latino superheroes from the late 1970s till today as well as how Latino author/artists working today use the visual and verbal elements of the comic book medium to affect the cognitive and emotional responses of their readers.
http://library.osu.edu/blogs/outreach/
The Ohio State University
Thompson Library Room 165
April 13, 2010 4-5 pm
I will be discussing my work by and about Latinos in comics based on my book, Your Brain on Latino Comics. I will lecture on mainstream comic book representations of Latino superheroes from the late 1970s till today as well as how Latino author/artists working today use the visual and verbal elements of the comic book medium to affect the cognitive and emotional responses of their readers.
http://library.osu.edu/blogs/outreach/
Full-spectrum comics An encyclopedia of graphic cultura
SAN ANTONIO CURRENT | 9/2/2009 Print
Courtesy Photo
Art from Love and Rockets by Jaime Hernandez
Art
Full-spectrum comics
An encyclopedia of graphic cultura
by Patricia Portales
(Available http://www.sacurrent.com/printStory.asp?id=70495)
In 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency recommended that comic-book publishers censor their amoral and violent storylines — thanks largely to the findings of
psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who believed Batman and Robin’s relationship was suspicious and Wonder Woman’s lifestyle was anti-masculine — lest they corrupt the children.
If Wertham interpreted Wonder Woman’s rescue missions, which often interrupted her secretarial duties, as a threat to male authority, I wonder how he would have responded to Laura
Molina’s 1996 comic book Cihualyaomiquiz, the Jaguar, in which law student by day/superhero warrior by night Linda Rivera fights California’s militarized police and corporate capitalists. And he probably would have been alarmed by Ivan Velez’s Tales of the Closet, which illustrates the closeted life of Tony, Scotty, Ben and other LGBT teenagers who experience
alienation and violent hate crimes in and out of their school in Queens.
In Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez, Frederick Luis Aldama examines the ways in which Latino author-artists contributed to the reemergence of the
comic-book industry following the restrictive 1950s, when it was rare for Latinos to be represented by anyone other than a heavily accented caricature. Latino comic-book auteurs,
many of whom started their careers in the alternative and underground comics of the 1980s, have developed psychologically complex characters who have smashed Latino and other stereotypes, “radically extended[ing] the alternative-comic-book storytelling mode in various ways while they detail the everyday firmly located within a larger society.”
Aldama profiles several comics populated with highly complex characters who suffer alienation in societies plagued by equally complex problems: crime, violence, rampant consumerism, racism. Wilfred Santiago’s ultra-morbid In My Darkest Hour, published by Fantagraphics, illustrates the life of anti-hero Omar Guerrero, who self-medicates to endure the psychic trauma of living in a violent society: “We all rot. Soon I’ll be nothing. Why bother with the triviality of ethics that are nothing more than man’s invention?” His musings are followed by a morose
contemplation of each cigarette he smokes: “It will take me seven minutes to finish this cigarette. Each cigarette snuffs eleven minutes out of you.”
Citing Los Bros Hernandez’s Love and Rockets, Molina’s Cihualyaomiquiz, the Luna Bros’ Ultra, Anthony Oropeza’s Amigoman, and Rafael Navarro’s Sonambulo, among others, Aldama argues that each author-artist’s innovative techniques developed the visual and verbal narrative available to characters of color. In part one of three, Aldama offers a history of Latino and African-American characters — often short-lived and stereotyped — such as DC’s El Dorado in Super Friends and Marvel’s Sam “Snap” Wilson, the Falcon in Captain America. Crediting the influence of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Culture Wars of the 1980s, Aldama
tracks the rise of realistic, multidimensional characters of color in the 1990s in Milestone’s Blood Syndicate, Azteca Productions’ El Gato Negro, and Jose Martinez’s Chosen Comic’s The Chosen, which first appeared at ComiCon in 1995.
Twenty-one interviews with the author-artists comprise the book’s third section, and what a gem it is. Gus Arriola, author-artist of the 40-year-old strip Gordo, shares his beginnings as Columbia Screen Gems illustrator for the series Krazy Kat and other minor cartoons during the Great Depression. El Gato Negro creator Richard Dominguez discusses Marvel’s and DC’s buyout of distributors and its effect on his work. Roberta Gregory, currently working on her novel Mother Mountain, admits that writing and illustrating a graphic novel would take too long. El Muerto creator Javier Hernandez relates the story of the one-and-a-half minute NPR interview that led
to the film adaptation featuring Wilmer Valderrama in the title role. Aldama focuses largely on comic books and devotes very few pages to comic strips, seemingly because Latino produced
comic books outnumber strips, but he does include Dupie: The Life and Times of a College Student as Seen through the Pen of Campus Cartoonist, Gil Morales, which ran in the Stanford Daily for four years, Lalo Alcaraz’s politically charged La Cucaracha, and David Gonzales’s comic-strip-turned-plastic-figurines Homies. Still, the book is a storehouse of information for any would-be comic aficionado, and like Aldama, urges the reader to further his or her own study of Latino comics.
Your Brain on Latino Comics:
From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez
By Frederick Luis Aldama
University of Texas Press
$24.95, 331 pages
© 2010 San Antonio Current
San Antonio Current http://www.sacurrent.com/printStory.asp?id=70495
2 of 2 4/5/10 11:09 AM
Courtesy Photo
Art from Love and Rockets by Jaime Hernandez
Art
Full-spectrum comics
An encyclopedia of graphic cultura
by Patricia Portales
(Available http://www.sacurrent.com/printStory.asp?id=70495)
In 1954, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency recommended that comic-book publishers censor their amoral and violent storylines — thanks largely to the findings of
psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, who believed Batman and Robin’s relationship was suspicious and Wonder Woman’s lifestyle was anti-masculine — lest they corrupt the children.
If Wertham interpreted Wonder Woman’s rescue missions, which often interrupted her secretarial duties, as a threat to male authority, I wonder how he would have responded to Laura
Molina’s 1996 comic book Cihualyaomiquiz, the Jaguar, in which law student by day/superhero warrior by night Linda Rivera fights California’s militarized police and corporate capitalists. And he probably would have been alarmed by Ivan Velez’s Tales of the Closet, which illustrates the closeted life of Tony, Scotty, Ben and other LGBT teenagers who experience
alienation and violent hate crimes in and out of their school in Queens.
In Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez, Frederick Luis Aldama examines the ways in which Latino author-artists contributed to the reemergence of the
comic-book industry following the restrictive 1950s, when it was rare for Latinos to be represented by anyone other than a heavily accented caricature. Latino comic-book auteurs,
many of whom started their careers in the alternative and underground comics of the 1980s, have developed psychologically complex characters who have smashed Latino and other stereotypes, “radically extended[ing] the alternative-comic-book storytelling mode in various ways while they detail the everyday firmly located within a larger society.”
Aldama profiles several comics populated with highly complex characters who suffer alienation in societies plagued by equally complex problems: crime, violence, rampant consumerism, racism. Wilfred Santiago’s ultra-morbid In My Darkest Hour, published by Fantagraphics, illustrates the life of anti-hero Omar Guerrero, who self-medicates to endure the psychic trauma of living in a violent society: “We all rot. Soon I’ll be nothing. Why bother with the triviality of ethics that are nothing more than man’s invention?” His musings are followed by a morose
contemplation of each cigarette he smokes: “It will take me seven minutes to finish this cigarette. Each cigarette snuffs eleven minutes out of you.”
Citing Los Bros Hernandez’s Love and Rockets, Molina’s Cihualyaomiquiz, the Luna Bros’ Ultra, Anthony Oropeza’s Amigoman, and Rafael Navarro’s Sonambulo, among others, Aldama argues that each author-artist’s innovative techniques developed the visual and verbal narrative available to characters of color. In part one of three, Aldama offers a history of Latino and African-American characters — often short-lived and stereotyped — such as DC’s El Dorado in Super Friends and Marvel’s Sam “Snap” Wilson, the Falcon in Captain America. Crediting the influence of the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and the Culture Wars of the 1980s, Aldama
tracks the rise of realistic, multidimensional characters of color in the 1990s in Milestone’s Blood Syndicate, Azteca Productions’ El Gato Negro, and Jose Martinez’s Chosen Comic’s The Chosen, which first appeared at ComiCon in 1995.
Twenty-one interviews with the author-artists comprise the book’s third section, and what a gem it is. Gus Arriola, author-artist of the 40-year-old strip Gordo, shares his beginnings as Columbia Screen Gems illustrator for the series Krazy Kat and other minor cartoons during the Great Depression. El Gato Negro creator Richard Dominguez discusses Marvel’s and DC’s buyout of distributors and its effect on his work. Roberta Gregory, currently working on her novel Mother Mountain, admits that writing and illustrating a graphic novel would take too long. El Muerto creator Javier Hernandez relates the story of the one-and-a-half minute NPR interview that led
to the film adaptation featuring Wilmer Valderrama in the title role. Aldama focuses largely on comic books and devotes very few pages to comic strips, seemingly because Latino produced
comic books outnumber strips, but he does include Dupie: The Life and Times of a College Student as Seen through the Pen of Campus Cartoonist, Gil Morales, which ran in the Stanford Daily for four years, Lalo Alcaraz’s politically charged La Cucaracha, and David Gonzales’s comic-strip-turned-plastic-figurines Homies. Still, the book is a storehouse of information for any would-be comic aficionado, and like Aldama, urges the reader to further his or her own study of Latino comics.
Your Brain on Latino Comics:
From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez
By Frederick Luis Aldama
University of Texas Press
$24.95, 331 pages
© 2010 San Antonio Current
San Antonio Current http://www.sacurrent.com/printStory.asp?id=70495
2 of 2 4/5/10 11:09 AM
Monday, February 1, 2010
ReadAloud Special : Latino Comics Program in Thompson Library
Tuesday February 16, 4-5 pm
Professor Aldama will be discussing his work by and about Latinos in comics and graphic novels-mainstream and alternative-that appears his book, Your Brain on Latino Comics. He will lecture on mainstream comic book representations of Latino superheroes from the late 1970s till today as well as how Latino author/artists working today use the visual and verbal elements of the comic book medium to affect the cognitive and emotional responses of their readers.Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University where he uses the tools of narratology and research in the cognitive- and neuro- sciences in his teaching and scholarship on Latino and Postcolonial literature, film, and comic books. He is the editor of five collections of essays and author of seven books, including most recently A User’s Guide to Post-colonial and Latino Borderland A User’s Guide to Post-colonial and Latino Borderland Fiction.
http://library.osu.edu/blogs/readaloud/
Tuesday February 16, 4-5 pm
Professor Aldama will be discussing his work by and about Latinos in comics and graphic novels-mainstream and alternative-that appears his book, Your Brain on Latino Comics. He will lecture on mainstream comic book representations of Latino superheroes from the late 1970s till today as well as how Latino author/artists working today use the visual and verbal elements of the comic book medium to affect the cognitive and emotional responses of their readers.Frederick Luis Aldama is Arts and Humanities Distinguished Professor of English at the Ohio State University where he uses the tools of narratology and research in the cognitive- and neuro- sciences in his teaching and scholarship on Latino and Postcolonial literature, film, and comic books. He is the editor of five collections of essays and author of seven books, including most recently A User’s Guide to Post-colonial and Latino Borderland A User’s Guide to Post-colonial and Latino Borderland Fiction.
http://library.osu.edu/blogs/readaloud/
Wednesday, January 27, 2010
Esai Morales is Back!!!!!!! : Freudian avatar Vatos in Caprica (2010) by Arturo Aldama
I was channel surfing in my usual brain dead procrastinate want to reach a light alpha brain wave mode to wind down from a busy day at campus and the name Caprica caught my attention. I read the description and saw avatar, Esai Morales and apocalypse and I was piqued enough to set the DVR to watch it and fast forward through commercials.
Esai Morales, the Boricua by birth, icon of Chicano themed cinema as seen with Mi Familia and the mimetically racist NYPD Blue, and the vato loco brother in Ritchie Valens among others, is back with the brand new series of Caprica (a type of prequel to Battlestar Galactica that starred an even more iconic figure in Chicano themed cinema, Edward James Olmos in recent seasons).
So in a not too distant future 58 years before the Battlestar Galactica flees man made cyborg annihilation, we first see Esai, a Tauron, in a turn of a century Italian mafia style suit with black dainty gloves and Stetson fedora with hints towards the Godfather working as a lawyer. His fellow Taurons are morenos and mestizos and have tribal markings, and Esai (his characters last name is Adama, if it had the L in the name it would be a full narcisisstic moment) plays a subdued and assimilationist figure, trying to blend in and be low key as he defends his fellow Taurons in the court sytem. The judge, an African-American women, lets off his client who is smugly guilty only to find that she was happy to be bribed. (So I guess folks of color in positions of judicial are untrustworthy—hmm?) The future is more interpellated with a growing consumer use of military grade artificial intelligence, the coloniality of power between white Eurocentric controllers of technology and capital and the Taurons like Chicanos continues to play itself out at all levels. Taurons deal with and in some cases reinforce the imposed baggage of criminality: savage, untrustworthy, deceitful, stoic, folkloric, and simplistic. So what remains in city scapes that look like white washed and only upper class Seattle and Vancouver (no homeless folks and no evidence of abject poverty, a type of Starbucks fantasy of happy bourgeois consumers enjoying the hustle bustle of clean living city life).
The tropes of Eurocentric privilege remain, applied cognitive science and capitalism create new markets and desire remains strictly Freudian and repressed. People maintain their surface lives living as consumers of the coloniality of power and act out their ids in a full avatar sensorium with hacked holobands. Rather than the digital anime like avatars we see in current gaming circles, these avatars are identical human replicas of their users with sexy SM like couture. They enter into a type of Caligula like night-club with stages, lofts, and reserved lounge areas seen in most mid to high end clubs in most cities. Teenage group sex is rampant, unfettered drug use, the hard stuff, real time virgin sacrifices to one of the few African American women who transmutes to a demonic figure, and literal shoot to kill fight clubs, and bare knuckle brawling with orgiastic religious fervor crowds. Sex and violence is the mega church of repressed desire.
The terrorist tactic liberators from the moral outrage of these avatar Freudian pits of unfettered sexual violence are now bomb carrying messianic evangelical disciples of the one god who blow up trains to prepare for the coming. So far in this episode they are deeply privileged kids, mainly white, and the only E. Indian and/or Pakistani kid is the actual bomb detonator on a subway train.
The tropes of Freud and his now famed incest taboo complex is given even deeper rein in the avatar worlds where fathers (a highly successful biomedical technocrat with a house that looks like Bill Gates’ on the Seattle environ shorelines and Esai who as a good stoic Chicano in the colonialist gaze eschews technology and prefers old school ways of power, bribery and knifing for honor) can act out their repressed desires for their teenage daughters. Grieving the loss of their “real” daughters because of the one G..d bombing, they work towards embodying their Avatar daughters and making what will be a Stepford wife version of the teenage chicas. Where they will, I imagine always want to hold the remote control on their daughters brain chips. It is interesting that the “forbidden” and “repressed” gets full holographic range in the avatar nightclubs and state racism towards to Taurons is still considered part of respectable above ground society? Hum? Muy interesante?
So in the grand Puritan traditions of the American Empire, public culture represses desire to the forbidden and the grotesque, and is released without filters in avatar pits. Racism, capitalism, privilege and Freud seem atemporal, Latinos if that is what Taurons are, the state defined others, are, are not only atemporal but stuck in 1910 America with the great waves of immigration and values from the old country: we continue to exist in different chronotopes.
Can’t wait to see the next episodes as Freudian desire becomes cyborg revenge on their literal patriarch creators. I wonder what would Freud would say about that?
Esai Morales, the Boricua by birth, icon of Chicano themed cinema as seen with Mi Familia and the mimetically racist NYPD Blue, and the vato loco brother in Ritchie Valens among others, is back with the brand new series of Caprica (a type of prequel to Battlestar Galactica that starred an even more iconic figure in Chicano themed cinema, Edward James Olmos in recent seasons).
So in a not too distant future 58 years before the Battlestar Galactica flees man made cyborg annihilation, we first see Esai, a Tauron, in a turn of a century Italian mafia style suit with black dainty gloves and Stetson fedora with hints towards the Godfather working as a lawyer. His fellow Taurons are morenos and mestizos and have tribal markings, and Esai (his characters last name is Adama, if it had the L in the name it would be a full narcisisstic moment) plays a subdued and assimilationist figure, trying to blend in and be low key as he defends his fellow Taurons in the court sytem. The judge, an African-American women, lets off his client who is smugly guilty only to find that she was happy to be bribed. (So I guess folks of color in positions of judicial are untrustworthy—hmm?) The future is more interpellated with a growing consumer use of military grade artificial intelligence, the coloniality of power between white Eurocentric controllers of technology and capital and the Taurons like Chicanos continues to play itself out at all levels. Taurons deal with and in some cases reinforce the imposed baggage of criminality: savage, untrustworthy, deceitful, stoic, folkloric, and simplistic. So what remains in city scapes that look like white washed and only upper class Seattle and Vancouver (no homeless folks and no evidence of abject poverty, a type of Starbucks fantasy of happy bourgeois consumers enjoying the hustle bustle of clean living city life).
The tropes of Eurocentric privilege remain, applied cognitive science and capitalism create new markets and desire remains strictly Freudian and repressed. People maintain their surface lives living as consumers of the coloniality of power and act out their ids in a full avatar sensorium with hacked holobands. Rather than the digital anime like avatars we see in current gaming circles, these avatars are identical human replicas of their users with sexy SM like couture. They enter into a type of Caligula like night-club with stages, lofts, and reserved lounge areas seen in most mid to high end clubs in most cities. Teenage group sex is rampant, unfettered drug use, the hard stuff, real time virgin sacrifices to one of the few African American women who transmutes to a demonic figure, and literal shoot to kill fight clubs, and bare knuckle brawling with orgiastic religious fervor crowds. Sex and violence is the mega church of repressed desire.
The terrorist tactic liberators from the moral outrage of these avatar Freudian pits of unfettered sexual violence are now bomb carrying messianic evangelical disciples of the one god who blow up trains to prepare for the coming. So far in this episode they are deeply privileged kids, mainly white, and the only E. Indian and/or Pakistani kid is the actual bomb detonator on a subway train.
The tropes of Freud and his now famed incest taboo complex is given even deeper rein in the avatar worlds where fathers (a highly successful biomedical technocrat with a house that looks like Bill Gates’ on the Seattle environ shorelines and Esai who as a good stoic Chicano in the colonialist gaze eschews technology and prefers old school ways of power, bribery and knifing for honor) can act out their repressed desires for their teenage daughters. Grieving the loss of their “real” daughters because of the one G..d bombing, they work towards embodying their Avatar daughters and making what will be a Stepford wife version of the teenage chicas. Where they will, I imagine always want to hold the remote control on their daughters brain chips. It is interesting that the “forbidden” and “repressed” gets full holographic range in the avatar nightclubs and state racism towards to Taurons is still considered part of respectable above ground society? Hum? Muy interesante?
So in the grand Puritan traditions of the American Empire, public culture represses desire to the forbidden and the grotesque, and is released without filters in avatar pits. Racism, capitalism, privilege and Freud seem atemporal, Latinos if that is what Taurons are, the state defined others, are, are not only atemporal but stuck in 1910 America with the great waves of immigration and values from the old country: we continue to exist in different chronotopes.
Can’t wait to see the next episodes as Freudian desire becomes cyborg revenge on their literal patriarch creators. I wonder what would Freud would say about that?
Tuesday, September 29, 2009
What's Your Story? Faculty Lecture Series
What's Your Story?
Faculty Lecture Series
Please come out and join us for our very first lecture in our inaugural faculty lecture series! This series will highlight Ohio State faculty and their research around social justice and identity. Each lecture will be complemented by a book authored, co-authored, or edited by the lecturer. The books will be distributed on a first come first served basis to students who rsvp and attend the event.
Dr. Frederick Aldama will be lecturing on Latino representation in comics. Supplementing this lecture will be his book titled "Your Brain on Latino Comics." This event is FREE and open to the public!
When: MONDAY OCTOBER 5TH 2009
Time: 4:00pm
Where: Younkin Success Center Room 300
1640 Neil Ave, Columbus, OH 43210
*A limited number of books will be distributed to students on a first come, first served basis. You must present your Buck ID to receive the book.*
If you have any questions feel free to contact TJ Stewart at the Multicultural Center:
614-688-8449
tstewart@studentlife.osu.edu
http://mcc.osu.edu <http://mcc.osu.edu>
Thursday, September 3, 2009
Frederick Luis Aldama: Latino comics explored
At some point in childhood a kid makes a choice about his comics: Is he a fan of Superman? Or does he prefer Amigoman, the Latin Avenger?
Or does he read both?
The preference is a central question asked by Frederick Luis Aldama, an English professor and author of "Your Brain on Latino Comics: From Gus Arriola to Los Bros Hernandez," a book that analyzes Latino artists and their work, yet also explores why younger readers like the stories they like.
Aldama calls the early "cultivation of taste" - whether from reading children's books or comics - among one's first introductions to art and storytelling. The kids who later reach for the DC-superhero genre may neurologically seek out the thrill of escapism in leaping buildings and avoiding bullets; others, like Aldama, may be attracted to the latest issue of Gilbert Hernandez's "Love and Rockets" for its day-to-day narrative and complicated characters.
Drawing out a character's complexity and nuanced backstory has become a hallmark among Latino comic artists, Aldama said. "Even though the characters are still fighting social injustices," Aldama said, "there's a bigger range of character types and more background on each character. There's a real sense of responsibility to the cultural particulars."
When a large comic book publisher attempts to tackle those cultural particulars, it can make for clumsy handling, Aldama said. One wince-inducing flub occurred in 1981 when Marvel introduced the Latina character Firebird. The female superhero (born Bonita Juarez) from New Mexico showed up in an Incredible Hulk series and saved the day for a group of Anglo characters, Aldama noted. Firebird was accompanied by Red Wolf, the first American Indian superhero in mainstream books.
"They're asked to stand aside while the team finishes the business," Aldama said.
Since then, mainstream publishers have developed more thoughtful Latino characters, and to their credit, Aldama said, they're characters of depth and moral complexity.
Araña, a half-Puerto Rican, half-Mexican teenager, fights crime for Marvel at night but is also beset by the troubles of young adulthood. DC revived the Blue Beetle (born Jaime Reyes) who lives along the Texas-Mexico crossing and tackles the moral troubles of the border.
"You get a real sense that it's not enough to create Latino characters anymore, but there's an attempt to also make it interesting," Aldama said. "Because the younger generation today who's reading it won't settle for it."
5:30 tonight. University Press Books, 2430 Bancroft Way, Berkeley. (510) 548-0585. www.universitypressbooks.com.
- Justin Berton, jberton@sfchronicle.com
Monday, August 10, 2009
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Skater extraordinaire--John Paul
John Paul from Hercules Got Word that Your Brain is only 16 bucks from the UTexas Press website and couldn't resist. This is John Paul after skateboarding from Hercules to San Pablo--for those not in the know, that's one heck of a ride!
Thank JP for keepin' the faith
Lecture & Book Signing on Latino Comics
Vino, queso, and some Superlatinos at University Press Books Sept. 3
Time:5:00PM Thursday, September 3rd
Location:University Press Book, Berkeley, CA
“What Happened to the Vatos sin Fronteras”
Up front and center disclaimer: It’s not that I object to folks of all shades and walks of life making knowledge. Knowledge is for the taking—by all and for all. It’s just that for some doggone reason, when it comes to things Brown, we’re stepped over. A case in point: Viking’s recent publication of Willie T. Vollmann’s 1,300 page tome, Imperial—and his follow up power-House publication of photographs.This forest of paper follows Willie’s odyssey as he moves back and forth along the California/Baja border. He thrills voyeuristically while peeking through its rusted gloryholes.
He waxes lyrical on Brown Buffalos on both sides of the iron wall struggling to survive. Drips that pale-skin guilt all over those uncountable souls who grab and claw across hell with the promise of stinking greenbacks. Snap shoots away at the life that the rotten-to-the core capitalism lays to waste; those with arms wrenched backward forced out of dire economic need to unclutch from loved ones only to end up buried in a field of clotted dirt and with a cross: “No Identificado”.Aesthetics aside—I mean the guy’s not exactly getting contracts for his looks—this is no fault to the author here.
It seems he’s done his homework. During the 12 years it took him to experience and write (oh,
and photograph) the Brown borderlands, he seems to have left no stone unturned: he’s licked toxic salt-water lakes and irrigation ditches; Brown-faced to infiltrate maquiladoras.Maybe he’s in the limelight because people can pronounce Vollmann better than, I don’t know, Rodriguez, Grijalva, or Urrea. Say with me: "Oo-Ray-ah"—how hard can it be?
Think back to when Luis Alberto Urrea published his first-hand research of living in the dumps in Tijuana .
Across the Wire picked up the “New York Times Notable Book” but do you think he made a full spread in the New York Times? Not. Spread across today’s Arts section: “William T. Vollmann: An Author Without Borders.” Where do we sign up for his passport?
I mention Urrea ("Oo-Ray-ah") but he’s hit the mainstream media jackpot relatively speaking. Think of all that research by Brown scholars that serve up knowledge our history, politics, culture. Wouldn’t it be nice to see names cranking out on mainstream media ticker-tapes such as:
“ARTURO ALDAMA” (Disrupting Savagism)
“RICHARD T. RODRIGUEZ” (Next of Kin)
“PANCHO MCFARLAND” (Chicano Rap),
“Guisela Latorre” (Walls of Empowerment)
Across the Wire picked up the “New York Times Notable Book” but do you think he made a full spread in the New York Times? Not. Spread across today’s Arts section: “William T. Vollmann: An Author Without Borders.” Where do we sign up for his passport?I mention Urrea ("Oo-Ray-ah") but he’s hit the mainstream media jackpot relatively speaking. Think of all that research by Brown scholars that serve up knowledge our history, politics, culture. Wouldn’t it be nice to see names cranking out on mainstream media ticker-tapes such as:
“ARTURO ALDAMA” (Disrupting Savagism)
“RICHARD T. RODRIGUEZ” (Next of Kin)“PANCHO MCFARLAND” (Chicano Rap),
“Guisela Latorre” (Walls of Empowerment)
“Marcial Gonzalez” (Chicano Novels)
Vollmann’s not the only one willing to go that extra mile for knowledge about our world. We’re curious as all hell and a few of us, even, are able to spend the necessary time to research and write to get the word out. While those border-patrollers on the payroll of Bertelsmann Inc. like the Vollmanns of the world, we seem forever doomed to mark the earth: no-identificados.
Vollmann’s not the only one willing to go that extra mile for knowledge about our world. We’re curious as all hell and a few of us, even, are able to spend the necessary time to research and write to get the word out. While those border-patrollers on the payroll of Bertelsmann Inc. like the Vollmanns of the world, we seem forever doomed to mark the earth: no-identificados.
Sunday, July 26, 2009
Friday, July 24, 2009
Gidget, the Yo Quiero Taco Bell Chihuahua died of a stroke today!
Gidget, the Yo Quiero Taco Bell Chihuahua died of a stroke today, but the “hallucination of the Mexican”, as my number one carnal Bill Nericcio calls it in Tex{t}-Mex, is very alive and kicking.
Spin a radio dial, flick on a t.v. remote, pony-up for a summer blockbuster, scope a billboard, chomp a (Mc)Chipotle burrito, anywhere in the US and more than likely you'll either hear, see, taste, and/or smell Brownness. With 35 million plus potential Latino consumers out there (that's the official census), this pre-packaging of all that is Brown in America isn't all that surprising.
Now this massive Browning process doesn't spring from corporate p.c. benevolence. Let's not kid ourselves. We know how capitalism works. With dollar profiteering as the bottom line, Browning to diversify and complicate ethnic and racial yesteryear's cardboard cut-outs doesn't make first place on CEO agendas.
It's usually the opposite--even in today's day and age. So we're blitzed with a "Run for the Border" ad campaign and a Spanglish accented Chihuahua barking up a ¡Yo Quiero Taco Bell!
It's usually the opposite--even in today's day and age. So we're blitzed with a "Run for the Border" ad campaign and a Spanglish accented Chihuahua barking up a ¡Yo Quiero Taco Bell!
On network t.v., we're served up healthy helpings of hot and bothered Latinas whose only agency plays out in the bedroom and in getting that open credit at Saks. I think here of Tejana actress Eva Longoria transplanting her soap-star melodramatic skills onto her gold-digging, sexed-up character, Gabrielle Solis, in Desperate Housewives. 
Careful to temper such hypersexualized figurations, in recent episodes producers have reverted back to the Brown-Mammy type, casting her pre-pubescent daughter with the rotund Madison De La Garza. There's also the dominatrix (very vanilla) styled Sofia Reyes (Salma Hayek) in Ugly Betty.
And when Latinas appear with more on their minds than Prada and bubble baths, they're asexual and more than ready to serve: the beautiful and smart America Ferrara made into 
wide-eyed for the American Pie, frumpy ("ugly") Betty Suarez.The guys, as we all know, aren't given much more play on their leash. Latinos are either psychotic (and usually psychotic and queer together), perennially turned on, underhanded, harmful, and deceitful, and/or buffoonish. On the network (and now syndicated), for instance, in The 70s Show, we have Miami-born Colombian/Venezuelan, Wilmer Valderama, cast not as a Latino (as if there weren't any in the mid-West in the '70s), but as "Fez" the generic Brown (Persian?) foreign exchange student. As second-fiddle to the clean cut, chisel featured white guys (including the character played by ex-model Ashton Kutcher), he gets the giggles with his malapropistic bumbles.
And, you might recall NBC's flash-in-the-pan Kingpin where Latinos are either shooting each other, doing and/or pushing drugs, or feeding human appendages to pet tigers. What were the producers thinking when they had Jacob Vargas (Michoacan, Mexican) play the role of Ernesto--a wildly irrational and glaringly crass, gold-medallion and cowboy-hat wearing, whip-carrying, man-child who lives lavishly in a Liberace-styled garish mansion; his hot tempered flashes and violent acts (he feeds a DEA's body parts to his pet tiger, for instance) are seemingly calmed only by the paternal embrace of the clean-cut (and Caucasian featured), Ivy League educated Miguel Cadena (played by Colombian/Puerto Rican Yancey Arias); unlike Ernesto's crass kingpin ways, Miguel uses more "respectable", corporate savvy means to infiltrate new drug markets. (Notably, to garner maximum profits, NBC-owned Telemundo dubbed the series into Spanish.) Before I continue, let me step down off my academic high horse a minute. I watch these shows--some more than others. For all its clichés and stereotypes, a show like Kingpin or Desperate Housewives satisfies, to a certain extent, my craving for fiction. And I laugh, too--at some more than others. And, while I'm not going to forgive by cleverly reading between the lines, a character like Longoria's Solis actually has a certain refreshing clarity about the economics of sex: she's not at all romantically deluded about what the coupling sex-for-money contract means in the marriage institution. When (ugly) Betty wears that poncho to the Christmas party, the t.v. mise-en-scene clearly asks us to read this with a good deal of irony. And, while I don't laugh or even find interesting The '70s Show, there's some prime-time like "The George Lopez Show" that can be pretty funny; his Latino-directed stand-ups are, of course, even more fun. I don't know any Chicanos who don't laugh with Cartoon Network's Minoriteam and the creating of the character Richard Escartin, a.k.a El Jefe (Mexican mixed with 1/8th Viking) who wears a ten-gallon cowboy hat/sombrero and uses the deadly super-weapon, the Leafblower 3000 to battle villains. 
But I haven't finished, yet, with being up on that high horse. I mentioned network t.v., but of course, the Silver Screen also cranks out Latino cut-outs. It has Eva Longoria, increasingly omnipresent, playing a nagging, upwardly mobile Chicana, Sylvia, in David Ayer's Harsh Times. She wants her hubby, Mike Alonzo (played by Freddy Rodriguez), to grow up and get a job, instead of hanging out with reprobate, Jim Luther Davis (played by Christian Bale).
But I haven't finished, yet, with being up on that high horse. I mentioned network t.v., but of course, the Silver Screen also cranks out Latino cut-outs. It has Eva Longoria, increasingly omnipresent, playing a nagging, upwardly mobile Chicana, Sylvia, in David Ayer's Harsh Times. She wants her hubby, Mike Alonzo (played by Freddy Rodriguez), to grow up and get a job, instead of hanging out with reprobate, Jim Luther Davis (played by Christian Bale).
In the grand tradition of the Silver Screen, the film invests the Anglo character with psychological complexity and charisma and gives the Mexican/Chicano guy a need-to-be-guided sidekick sensibility; the Chicana, Sylvia, is given throw-away lines like "grow-up" and positioned as homosocial threat. Here, too, Ayer pulls out of that old bag of tricks, a romanticizing of Mexico and its women (Jim's love-interest enchants him with folkloric riddles) as innocent, untouched, and dreamily utopic. Hollywood, even in this day and age, still goes for the Brown-face--if it'll insure better box office returns.
In Jared Hess's Nacho Libre, Jack Black plays the Mexican priest by day luchador ("Nacho") by night; Browned up and spilling his lines in a truncated Spanglish, certainly brought in dollars: its opening weekend tallied 30-plus million bucks.
Around the same time, but in a much more metaphysically serious vein, Darrin Aronofsky's The Fountain hit the big screens. Here, we have yet another unreeling of Anglo fantasy make-believe: modern-day oncologist, Tommy (Hugh Jackman) morphs into X-Box super-humanly fit Spanish conquistador, Tomas Creo, who is attacked by a marauding, tattooed to the nines, dagger wielding Mayan high priest.
Not one to short change the details, Aronofsky spent part of his thirty-plus million dollar budget to capture that authentic Mayan feel by transporting Mayan peoples to Montreal as extras on the set. The film's end tells all: Tommy/Tomas reaches some sort of Nirvanic bliss, Yoga lotus positioned in his New Age styled biospheric spacecraft, he's enveloped in a blinding white light.
In Jared Hess's Nacho Libre, Jack Black plays the Mexican priest by day luchador ("Nacho") by night; Browned up and spilling his lines in a truncated Spanglish, certainly brought in dollars: its opening weekend tallied 30-plus million bucks.Around the same time, but in a much more metaphysically serious vein, Darrin Aronofsky's The Fountain hit the big screens. Here, we have yet another unreeling of Anglo fantasy make-believe: modern-day oncologist, Tommy (Hugh Jackman) morphs into X-Box super-humanly fit Spanish conquistador, Tomas Creo, who is attacked by a marauding, tattooed to the nines, dagger wielding Mayan high priest.
Not one to short change the details, Aronofsky spent part of his thirty-plus million dollar budget to capture that authentic Mayan feel by transporting Mayan peoples to Montreal as extras on the set. The film's end tells all: Tommy/Tomas reaches some sort of Nirvanic bliss, Yoga lotus positioned in his New Age styled biospheric spacecraft, he's enveloped in a blinding white light.
Don't ask. Of course, nothing comes close to Mel Gibson's condescending, sophomoric, and racist Apocalypto--a film that, among other things, overtly celebrates the arrival of the Spanish conquistadores, collapses about a century and a half of Mayan history into a day in the life of (Jaguar Paw), and, depicts Mayan society as (human) hemoglobin lusty, and not as the sophisticated agricultural (traces of their incredible and extensive irrigation systems can be seen from satellites) society.
And, if you thought it was just the whites churning out the primitivist schlock, think again. In Babel Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu reveals an unabashed Anglophilia: the white middle class American characters (played by Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett) are bathed in a radiant luminescence--halo-like, at one point--and the Brown characters (Mexican and Moroccan) a flattened light at best.
Think of the lighting in the sequence when John Smith (Pitt) carries his wounded wife (Blanchett) from village hut to Red Cross helicopter (that la pieta comes to mind isn't incidental, Gonzalez Iñárritu had the crew take this shot 30-plus times) in contrast with the majority of shadowed and flat lighting that follows the Mexican nanny/maid, Amelia (he requested that actress Adriana Barraza put on 30 pounds to look more the part) whose irrational "incompetence" leads to the near death of the golden niños in a US/Mexico arid no-man's land.
I was asked in a recent radio-show interview (MARFA www.marfapublicradio.org.) if there were any Latino superheroes in films today. With the exception of Bryan Cox’s adaptation of Javier Hernandez’s comic book, El Muerto with Valderama playing the Latino superhero, I had to answer with a definitive, NO.
While Latino comic book authors are tearing it up with their resplendent array of Latino characters (superhero or otherwise), we are still haunted by a rather slim portfolio of iconographic imagery in the cultural mainstream: the nagged-to-the-bone, ESL stuttering Ricky Ricardo's (Mike Alonzo), lascivious, comical arriba-arriba Speedy's (Jack Black in Frito-Bandito Brown face), blood thirsty savage, irrational man-child (Ernesto), the hypersexualized dark and dangerous (Soderbergh's casting of Benjamin Bratt as cartel kingpin, Juan Obregon, in Traffic), and the effeminate and/or psychopathic queer (the assassin, Francisco Flores, in Traffic); media conglomerates still get a lot of play out of those age-old stereotypes of Latinas as either child-bearing hipped virgins (America Ferrara as Betty Suarez), money-grubbing whores (Eva Longoria as Gabrielle Solis), or too-well fed mammy-types (De La Garza and Barraza as Amelia).
Saturday, July 18, 2009
San Pablo Califas Fans
The Your-Brain-on-Latino-Comics Crew
Making it Real
No only are these guys fantastically cool, down with comics and neuroscience, but they make a kick-ass Chai-Latte!
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