Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #953 - Black Panther soundtrack and trailer

Hey, Mom! Talking to My Mother #953 - Black Panther soundtrack and trailer

Hi Mom,

I am getting excited for the release of Black Panther this Friday the 16th of February.

So, here's some materials.

KENDRICK LAMAR'S SOUNDTRACK FOR BLACK PANTHER - io9

KENDRICK LAMAR SOUNDTRACK PHOTO RELEASED

I previously blogged about BLACK PANTHER two weeks ago with this T-shirt reprint:

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2018/01/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-939-black.html

Before that, I posted the first movie trailer last year in July when it was released.

http://sensedoubt.blogspot.com/2017/07/hey-mom-talking-to-my-mother-732-black.html

I had some new content in that post, a bunch of videos on Black Panther, but also my list of  favorite "non-flagship" Marvel superheroes, a list on which Black Panther ranks third after Doctor Strange and the Silver Surfer.

I also reprinted my Black Panther t-shirt content in that post, which I didn't realize until just now. So I have reprinted that twice. Sue me. I am going to post my Valentine's Day post tomorrow that I have posted at least twice before if not three times.

Here, for new content, in addition to trailers and the amazing soundtrack, there's also this article from the New York Times and some key passages on the importance of Black Panther and Afrofuturism.

I have been reading Nnedi Okorafor and I have Octavia Butler on my to read list. I am also put it in a mind of reading some Samuel Delany, one of the great African-American SF authors, whose Dhalgren is on audio is close to the top of my stack.

And speaking of Nnedi Okorafor:

https://www.themarysue.com/preview-black-panther-long-live-the-king-marvel-comics/

She wrote this great thing for Marvel!

Anyway, check out all this great stuff.

And go see BLACK PANTHER. Mom, I know you will join me.

Good excerpt from WHY BLACK PANTHER IS A DEFINING MOMENT FOR BLACK AMERICA - NY TIMES


Can films like these significantly change things for black people in America? The expectations around “Black Panther” remind me of the way I heard the elders in my family talking about the mini-series “Roots,” which aired on ABC in 1977. A multigenerational drama based on the best-selling book in which Alex Haley traced his own family history, “Roots” told the story of an African slave kidnapped and brought to America, and traced his progeny through over 100 years of American history. It was an attempt to claim for us a home, because to be black in America is to be both with and without one: You are told that you must honor this land, that to refuse this is tantamount to hatred — but you are also told that you do not belong here, that you are a burden, an animal, a slave. Haley, through research and narrative and a fair bit of invention, was doing precisely what Afrofuturism does: imagining our blackness as a thing with meaning and with lineage, with value and place.





MORE EXCERPTS FROM - WHY BLACK PANTHER IS A DEFINING MOMENT FOR BLACK AMERICA - NY TIMES

Until recently, most popular speculation on what the future would be like had been provided by white writers and futurists, like Isaac Asimov and Gene Roddenberry. Not coincidentally, these futures tended to carry the power dynamics of the present into perpetuity. Think of the original “Star Trek,” with its peaceful, international crew, still under the charge of a white man from Iowa. At the time, the character of Lieutenant Uhura, played by Nichelle Nichols, was so vital for African-Americans — the black woman of the future as an accomplished philologist — that, as Nichols told NPR, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. himself persuaded her not to quit the show after the first season. It was a symbol of great progress that she was conceived as something more than a maid. But so much still stood in the way of her being conceived as a captain.

The artistic movement called Afrofuturism, a decidedly black creation, is meant to go far beyond the limitations of the white imagination. It isn’t just the idea that black people will exist in the future, will use technology and science, will travel deep into space. It is the idea that we will have won the future. There exists, somewhere within us, an image in which we are whole, in which we are home. Afrofuturism is, if nothing else, an attempt to imagine what that home would be. “Black Panther” cannot help being part of this. “Wakanda itself is a dream state,” says the director Ava DuVernay, “a place that’s been in the hearts and minds and spirits of black people since we were brought here in chains.” She and Coogler have spent the past few months working across the hall from each other in the same editing facility, with him tending to “Black Panther” and her to her much-anticipated film of Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time.” At the heart of Wakanda, she suggests, lie some of our most excruciating existential questions: “What if they didn’t come?” she asked me. “And what if they didn’t take us? What would that have been?”

Afrofuturism, from its earliest iterations, has been an attempt to imagine an answer to these questions. The movement spans from free-jazz thinkers like Sun Ra, who wrote of an African past filled with alien technology and extraterrestrial beings, to the art of Krista Franklin and Ytasha Womack, to the writers Octavia Butler, Nnedi Okorafor and Derrick Bell, to the music of Jamila Woods and Janelle Monáe. Their work, says John I. Jennings — a media and cultural studies professor at the University of California, Riverside, and co-author of “Black Comix Returns” — is a way of upending the system, “because it jumps past the victory. Afrofuturism is like, ‘We already won.’ ” Comic books are uniquely suited to handling this proposition. In them the laws of our familiar world are broken: Mild-mannered students become godlike creatures, mutants walk among us and untold power is, in an instant, granted to the most downtrodden. They offer an escape from reality, and who might need to escape reality more than a people kidnapped to a stolen land and treated as less-than-complete humans?

At the same time, it is notable that despite selling more than a million books and being the first science-fiction author to win a MacArthur fellowship, Octavia Butler, one of Afrofuturism’s most important voices, never saw her work transferred to film, even as studios churned out adaptations of lesser works on a monthly basis. Butler’s writing not only featured African-Americans as protagonists; it specifically highlighted African-American women. If projects by and about black men have a hard time getting made, projects by and about black women have a nearly impossible one. In March, Disney will release “A Wrinkle in Time,” featuring Storm Reid and Oprah Winfrey in lead roles; the excitement around this female-led film does not seem to compare, as of yet, with the explosion that came with “Black Panther.” But by focusing on a black female hero — one who indeed saves the universe — DuVernay is embodying the deepest and most powerful essence of Afrofuturism: to imagine ourselves in places where we had not been previously imagined.

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Reflect and connect.

Have someone give you a kiss, and tell you that I love you, Mom.

I miss you so very much, Mom.

Talk to you tomorrow, Mom.

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- Days ago = 955 days ago

- Bloggery committed by chris tower - 1802.13 - 10:10

NEW (written 1708.27) NOTE on time: I am now in the same time zone as Google! So, when I post at 10:10 a.m. PDT to coincide with the time of your death, Mom, I am now actually posting late, so it's really 1:10 p.m. EDT. But I will continue to use the time stamp of 10:10 a.m. to remember the time of your death, Mom. I know this only matters to me, and to you, Mom.