Compassionate Creator,
Thank you for this new day,
its beauty, light, and possibilities.
Thank you for the chance to begin again,
free from the limitations of yesterday.
Today may I be reborn.
May I become more fully
a reflection of your radiance
and an embodiment
of your transforming love.
Give me strength and compassion.
Show me the light within myself and others.
Help me recognize the good that is available everywhere.
May I be, this day, an instrument
of love and healing.
Lead me in your ways
so that I may know life in abundance.
Ground me in a constant awareness of your presence
so that I may know and embody
your peace, wisdom, and courage.
Amen.
Storms spinning up in late February and March have different characteristics than low pressure systems in January. A higher sun angle and milder temperatures tends to keep freeways wet and slushy, unlike January, when roads are snow-covered and icy. Snow is wetter, heavier, slushier; with a higher water content. Better for snowball fights (and heart attacks).
Be careful out there this morning as the flakes subside. We have about 24 hours to catch our breath and scrape away the snow, before the second storm arrives. Another 4-7 inches of snow may fall late Saturday, bringing the total from both storms up close to a foot at Minneapolis/St. Paul International Airport. By Sunday many towns will be snowier than average, for the first time all winter. That's good news, considering western Minnesota is too dry; we need moisture for spring planting.
As of Thursday [yesterday] snowfall in the Twin Cities was 31.8", or 7.7" less than average, to date (running 30-year average). After last night's snow and what's to come on Saturday I have a hunch we may be a couple inches snowier than average by Sunday. Just a gut call.
Saturday: More snow than last night? Models all seem to suggest a bigger snow accumulation for the PM hours Saturday. Plowable, and if we do wind up with 7-8" possibly the second biggest snowfall of the winter, to date.
Above: Buffy and guitarist Anthony King performing at the Big Top Chautauqua, Bayfield, WI on Saturday, August 27, 2016. (Photo: Michael J. Bayly)
Left: With Buffy after her August 26, 2016 performance at The Dakota in Minneapolis.
[Medicine Songs] is a collection of front line songs about unity and resistance – some brand new and some classics – and I want to put them to work. These are songs I've been writing for over fifty years, and what troubles people today are still the same damn issues from 30-40-50 years ago: war, oppression, inequity, violence, rankism of all kinds, the pecking order, bullying, racketeering and systemic greed. Some of these songs come from the other side of that: positivity, common sense, romance, equity and enthusiasm for life.
[. . .] I really want this collection of songs to be like medicine, to be of some help or encouragement, to maybe do some good. Songs can motivate you and advance your own ideas, encourage and support collaborations and be part of making change globally and at home. They do that for me and I hope this album can be positive and provide thoughts and remedies that rock your world and inspire new ideas of your own.
Above: Buffy, tuning her guitar between songs at her August 27, 2016 performance in Bayfield, WI. (Photo: Michael J. Bayly)
Womb-world paradigm
Understand in time
It’s a sweet investigation
We’re learning rope by rope
Climbing hope by hope
In every combination
And that’s okay
No, it’s not the way it "should be"
But that’s okay
It’s wild and it’s unique
And that’s okay
Yeah, love’s the magic number
And that’s okay
Come on, we’re only getting started . . .
Talking to Buffy Sainte-Marie is listening to thoughts, touching emotions, running into moods before the music inside her finds them too and "the gods tap dance on her head" that night and the next day there's a song. "Until It's Time for You to Go," "My Country, 'Tis of Thy People You're Dying," "Soldier Blue," "Jeremiah," "I Wanna Hold Your Hand Forever." The stuff that her albums, sold internationally, are made of.
But she's not a songwriter she'll tell you. She's just someone who wakes up when the dancing starts, listens to her head, and writes down what she hears. "Songs go by the times when I don't. But it's hard not to get up. Hearing a song in your head in the middle of the night is like trying to ignore a whale in your bathtub. You have to do something with it. You think once it's out, once it's written, it's over. But it's not. You continue to retch."
Be there when she tells the story of man's inhumanity to man, "Now That the Buffalo's Gone," and you'll understand. The message reaches her audience, and the fragile artist's forceful delivery brings them to their feet. But Buffy Sainte-Marie – while the applause thunders – is stilling the storm inside her.
When she performs in concert across the country, records in Nashville, or listens as another artist renders the whales that keep her up at nights, she's angered, she's loved, she's hurt, she's warmed, she's made to laugh, she's made to remember anywhere from her childhood and on all over again.
That's what Buffy Sainte-Marie sings about in fragile whispers bearing love, and anguished, quivering cries that question, plead, haunt, and accuse. She bares her thoughts, her emotions, her moods, her experiences. And because of her sensitivity to the experiences of others, theirs, too.
I close this post with a video of Buffy singing her Oscar Award-winning song that she co-wrote with Jack Nitzsche and Will Jennings. Yes, it's "Up Where We Belong," from the 1982 film, An Officer and a Gentleman. Who knows what tomorrow brings
In a world where few hearts survive
All I know is the way I feel
If it's real, keep it alive
The road is long
There are mountains in our way
But we climb a step every day
Love lift us up where we belong
Where the eagles cry
On a mountain high
Love lift us up where we belong
Far from the worlds we know
Up where the clear winds blow
Some hang on to used-to-be
They live their lives looking behind
When all we have is here and now
All our lives, out there to find
The road is long
And there are mountains in our way
But we climb a step every day
Time goes by, no time to cry
Life's you and I alive today
Over the past decade, the Catholic laity (at least in the U.S.) have consistently polled positively when asked about LGBTQ issues. The people in the pews are obviously leading the way in the church on LGBTQ issues. The change at the grassroots means that eventually change will have to take place at higher levels of the church.
Black Panther has become the first Marvel Cinematic Universe movie featured on the cover of TIME Magazine, with Chadwick Boseman pictured as the new King of Wakanda, T’Challa. The Black Panther movie was always going to be a big deal, but there was no guarantee that it would honor the source material and/or resonate with audiences. Fortunately, thanks to the efforts of creatives like writer/director Ryan Coogler, Oscar-nominated cinematographer Rachel Morrison, and stars like Boseman, Michael B. Jordan, and Forest Whitaker, the Black Panther solo film is well on its way to becoming both a cultural and financial juggernaut.
Black Panther has now broken Fandago’s pre-sale record for first quarter films, as well as that for superhero movie pre-release ticket sales in general. It looks like the film will hit somewhere in the ballpark of $150 million domestically over its 4-day opening frame, giving it one of the MCU’s biggest solo debuts to date. In addition, early reviews for Black Panther praise the movie for being not only a socially and politically important superhero blockbuster, but an entertaining and action-packed one as well. Now, the movie can add another bona fide.
What seems like just another entry in an endless parade of superhero movies is actually something much bigger. Black Panther hasn’t even hit theaters yet and its cultural footprint is already enormous. It’s a movie about what it means to be black in both America and Africa – and, more broadly, in the world. Rather than dodge complicated themes about race and identity, the film grapples head-on with the issues affecting modern-day black life. It is also incredibly entertaining, filled with timely comedy, sharply choreographed action and gorgeously lit people of all colors. “You have superhero films that are gritty dramas or action comedies,” director Ryan Coogler tells TIME. But this movie, he says, tackles another important genre: “Superhero films that deal with issues of being of African descent.”
[. . .] The movie, out February 16, comes as the entertainment industry is wrestling with its toxic treatment of women and persons of color. This rapidly expanding reckoning – one that reflects the importance of representation in our culture – is long overdue. Black Panther is poised to prove to Hollywood that African-American narratives have the power to generate profits from all audiences. And, more important, that making movies about black lives is part of showing that they matter. [. . .] In the midst of a regressive cultural and political moment fueled in part by the white-nativist movement, the very existence of Black Panther feels like resistance. Its themes challenge institutional bias, its characters take unsubtle digs at oppressors, and its narrative includes prismatic perspectives on black life and tradition. The fact that Black Panther is excellent only helps.
TIt's finally here – and it couldn't have come at a better time. Black Panther is an epic that doesn't walk, talk or kick ass like any other Marvel movie – an exhilarating triumph on every level from writing, directing, acting, production design, costumes, music, special effects to you name it. For children (and adults) of color who have longed forever to see a superhero who looks like them, Marvel's first black-superhero film is an answered prayer, a landmark adventure and a new film classic.
But wait a minute: Hasn't Black Panther been around since the 1960s, when Stan Lee and Jack Kirby created him for the comics? So why did it take half a century for Marvel to get him up on screen? Chadwick Boseman already played this superhero in 2016's Captain America: Civil War, a supporting role in a Marvel Comic Universe best categorized as #AvengersSoWhite. That's all in the past. There's no sidekick or second-banana status here. The spotlight is all his – and his stand-alone, solo outing is history in the making.
Thrillingly and thoughtfully directed and written (with Joe Robert Cole) by Ryan Coogler, the film lights up the screen with a full-throttle blast of action and fun. That's to be expected. But what sneaks up and floors you is the film's racial conscience and profound, astonishing beauty. Not just a correction for years of diversity neglect, it's a big budget blockbuster that digs into the roots of blackness itself. Coogler, 31, has proved his skills behind the camera with Fruitvale Station and Creed, but in Black Panther he journeys into the heart of Africa to bring a new world to the screen. The result feels revolutionary.
Yes, Black Panther is another multizillion-dollar installment in the burgeoning Marvel Cinematic Universe. But that is not all that it is. Other superhero movies have dabbled in big ideas – the Dark Knight trilogy most notably, and the X-Men franchise to a lesser degree. But their commitments to the moral and political questions they contemplated were relatively haphazard and/or peripheral. The arguments Black Panther undertakes with itself are central to its architecture, a narrative spine that runs from the first scene to the last.
[. . .] It is notable, too, that so many of the film’s central characters are female. In a spirit journey, T’Challa speaks with his dead father, who counsels him to “surround yourself with people you trust.” T’Challa follows this advice and, as a result, surrounds himself almost exclusively with women. On a brief, Bondian foray to a casino in Busan, South Korea, T’Challa brings along Nakia and Okoye as teammates. A later mission has a still-greater female/male ratio of three-to-one. This is a film that does not merely pass the Bechdel test, it demolishes it. Moreover, there is an uncommon richness to the female characters, in their interactions both with T’Challa – as mother, as sister, as ex-lover, as bodyguard – and with one another.
[. . .] In T’Challa’s spirit dream, his father also offers the advice that “it’s hard for a good man to be king.” Which raises the question: Is it hard for a good movie to be king? If the formidable box office predictions for Black Panther are remotely accurate, the answer will be a resounding no – and quite rightly so. All hail the new king.
Black Panther, the latest entry in Marvel’s shared cinematic universe, is a remarkable feat of world building and visual craft. Its setting, the fictional central African nation of Wakanda, is a technologically advanced wonderland light years ahead of the rest of the world that lives and breathes unlike anything we’ve seen from Marvel Studios or the superhero genre at large. Its protagonist, King T’Challa – who fights in defense of his nation as the Black Panther, equipped with a bulletproof suit and imbued with enhanced strength, speed, and agility – is played with both regal confidence and real vulnerability by the versatile Chadwick Boseman.
But what drives Black Panther isn’t its visuals or superheroics. What drives the film is its pursuit of the idea that arguably defines the superhero genre, best articulated in 1962’s Amazing Fantasy No. 15: “With great power comes great responsibility.” And what makes Black Panther unique is that it pursues this in the context of its characters and its setting. It asks not just, “What is T’Challa’s responsibility to Wakanda?” but “What is Wakanda’s responsibility to the world?”
[. . .] Of course, Black Panther isn’t a political thriller. [Its] conflicts and tensions play out in action as much as dialogue, and the ideas come naturally. There are no mouthpieces speaking on behalf of the writers. But it is fair to say that Black Panther is the most political movie ever produced by Marvel Studios, both in its very existence – it’s the most expensive movie to have ever starred an almost entirely black cast – and in the questions its story raises.
Evan Narcisse, who co-writes the miniseries Rise of the Black Panther with Ta-Nehisi Coates, says he views Wakanda as the representation of an “unbroken chain of achievement of black excellence that never got interrupted by colonialism.” Narcisse’s work also filters Wakanda through the prism of Haiti, the revolutionary home of black liberation in the New World.
Even before his modern rejuvenation, T’Challa and his comic-book homeland offered up the same kind of representations of difficult concepts. As Jamil Smith writes for Time, the character of the Black Panther — the first black comic-book superhero — was created in 1966 during the civil-rights movement and very much represented “a vision of black grandeur and, indeed, power in a trying time.” His creation also coincided with the interconnected rise of both the Black Power movement and a second wave of Pan-Africanism and nationalism. Though created by white writers and shepherded through eras of embarrassing racial stereotyping and caricature, Black Panther the comic has always been notable for the cultural valences of creating a bulletproof, super-rich, erudite, and aggressively independent black hero, and for its willingness to fathom black geopolitical power.
In almost every facet of production, from wardrobe and costume design to the film’s score, Coogler’s Black Panther takes that thread of power and spins it into a diaspora’s fantasy.
As for the allegations of the film being “too militant,” I wanted to just list the many action and war films that are comfortable with putting hundreds of dead brown bodies in the backdrop for a white character, but my editor pointed out that would probably take about a year to type out. Basically, if you think the superhero movie Black Panther is too militant but didn’t react the same way to say, American Sniper, you’re not concerned about militancy.
To be clear, I’m not saying these two films are equivalent to one another. Rather, I’m suggesting that many white movie viewers seem fully comfortable with violence when it’s on the side they recognize (white, imperialistic), but are suddenly outraged by any hint of strength from the side of the traditionally marginalized, regardless of context. Black people, especially, are expected to take on the pacifist, peace-making and non-violence route to the extent that self-defense becomes radicalized. We see this in the way people talk about police brutality (“Why didn’t they comply?”) to the rhetoric of activism (“MLK wouldn’t want this!”) to the way we write history. It’s the same mindset that paints the Black Lives Matter movement as a terrorist group, instead of a group fighting for their lives.
Also, I’ll be the millionth person to point out that Huey P. Newton and the Black Panther Party carried guns for defense and in full compliance with laws at the time. If the Black Panther cast acts like the Black Panther Party in the film, they’ll be spending a lot of time running free breakfast programs and medical clinics (which, to be clear, I’m not opposed to as watching that sounds lovely). Here especially, this declaration from the Panther Party’s Ten-Point Program rings especially true: “We want education for our people that exposes the true nature of this decadent American society. We want education that teaches us our true history and our role in the present day society.”
As comic book lore dictates, Wakanda is rich with a valuable material, known as vibranium, that many other countries would aim to exploit if it weren’t for T’Challa’s fiercely protective father, T’Chaka, who enacted a strict isolationist policy for the country. Black Panther’s early appearances in the comics depicted a Wakanda that holds steadfast to specific African tribal traditions (he’s referenced as a “hereditary chieftain” in Fantastic Four No. 52, where he first appears), yet T’Challa still enjoys the comforts that being the leader of an uber-wealthy nation brings. Wakanda is imagined as a country that is untouched by the evils of colonialism, quite literally hidden away.
This aspect of the fantasy is key. White America’s ongoing obsession with British royals remains oddly prevalent. The marketing of (mostly white) princesses and happy endings remain a lucrative machine for Disney. But this isn’t either of those things. For decades, black people have been left to wonder what might have been were it not for the ravaging influences of colonialism. Invoking kings and queens is often a defiantly political act, and Black Panther is an exaggerated exploration of pride in something that has been taken away.
Black Panther, an adaptation of the iconic comic book that has been decades in coming, proves to be more than worth the wait. This lush, impressively well-acted film, about an African king learning how best to marshal the superpowers with which he’s been endowed, comes draped in anticipation, not only from hardcore fans of the source material, but also from filmgoers already steeped in breathless hype. Director Ryan Coogler, working with a script he co-wrote with Joe Robert Cole, doesn’t just meet but exceeds those expectations, delivering a film that fulfills the most rote demands of superhero spectacle, yet does so with style and subtexts that feel bracingly, joyfully groundbreaking.
[. . .] The difference with Black Panther is that, while observing the outlines of the traditional comic book arc, Coogler and his creative team have enlarged and revitalized it. Drawing on elements from African history and tribal culture, as well as contemporary and forward-looking flourishes, Black Panther pulses with color, vibrancy and layered textural beauty, from the beadwork and textiles of Ruth Carter’s spectacular costumes and Hannah Beachler’s warm, dazzlingly eye-catching production design to hairstyles, tattoos and scarifications that feel both ancient and novel.
Although the comic-book-movie universe might not seem to need yet another origin story, this one possesses urgency and genuine propulsive interest most others lack. Once T’Challa’s true challenge is revealed, Black Panther becomes something deeper than the mere formation of one superhero, engaging such subjects as: the legacy of colonialism; collective memory and interior geography; the tension between autonomy and social conscience; and the need for solidarity within an African diaspora at political and cultural odds with itself.
Make no mistake: Coogler doesn’t use Black Panther as an awkward delivery system for such Deep Ideas. Rather, he weaves them in organically and subtly.
How should we understand the arc of the film? How should we read this final pivotal moment? Are these distinctions as clean as they appear? Is Killmonger the villain we are made to hate, and T’Challa the hero we cannot help but love?
For [Christopher] Lebron, the movie sides with T’Challa, reducing the Americanized Wakandan to a “receptacle for tropes of inner-city gangterism.” At a time when black life is under assault, he argues, the movie traffics in infantilizing tropes about black men as angry, irrevocably wounded, and in need of rescuing at the hands of superior Africans. For others, the movie appears to sloppily tie liberation for oppressed people to the efforts of the murdering Killmonger.
. . . [A]rt, however, must bear its own burden, not ours. When we examine the movie from the inside, what emerges is a very different and rich narrative. [Director and writer Ryan] Coogler ask us to see Killmonger not as a stereotype of African-American life, but as a commentary on the wider society from which he comes. The movie demands that we resist the temptation to examine Killmonger through the often distorting and unfriendly American gaze. For those eyes, as we learned so long ago from W. E. B. Du Bois, often look on black people in amused contempt and pity.
Killmonger emerges not as the expression of crude tropes, as Lebron and others suggest, but as a tragic figure with heroic qualities who forces us to see the oppression of others as our own. Killmonger’s vision of the world is animated by loss and abandonment. He seeks revenge, no doubt motivated by the terrible feelings of being left behind by the very people to which he owed his birthright. His resentment comes to be a stand-in for the resentment of an oppressed people without a home. In one of the film’s more jarring moments, Killmonger sneers at T’Challa’s isolationism. When T’Challa tells him that “It is not our way to be judge, jury, and executioner for people who aren’t our own,” Killmonger retorts: “Not your own? Didn’t life start here on this continent? So ain’t all people your people?” Abandoning their own, we are left to think, is what the Wakandans do.
Coogler does not stop there. Killmonger’s feelings of prolonged loss and abandonment are intensified by years of war-induced trauma that personify the dark undercurrent of Western power. This is where his character shifts from the noble to the ignoble, from the heroic to the tragic. Killmonger seeks a version of the very tyrannical rule that he sees as so central to black oppression across the globe. Dreams of liberation for Killmonger, oddly imagined through the prism of empire, set in motion the condition for his ultimate downfall. The desire to liberate is marred by the will to tyrannize, a vocabulary that he seemingly learns from those with whom he has lived. In a moment of irony, Killmonger reclaims Christopher North’s famous 1829 remark about the British Empire—“His Majesty’s dominions, on which the sun never sets”—as a vision for the African diaspora: “the sun will never set on the Wakandan empire.”
Herein lies the lesson Coogler ask us to consider. T’Chaka is partly responsible for Killmonger’s distorted sense of justice in the face of loss and abandonment, but the audience is made to understand and feel that it is the United States and the West that deformed him. It is no wonder, then, that when the Wakandans ask who this man is, sitting at the border of their lands with the dead body of Klaue, they are told (by a CIA agent, no less): he isn’t from Wakanda, he is one of ours.
Here the movie excels, and, with this framing in mind, the final scene takes on powerful meaning. Black Panther is a piece of literature rendered in cinematic form. Coogler does not treat the movie as a pure imagining of the revolution we long to have, but as an allegorical representation of what happens to a vision of freedom when forged through resentment, loss, abandonment, and deformation. This is what we are forced to reckon with.
But how gay is [Black Panther]? It’s not. But it almost was.
[Danai] Gurira’s [character] Okoye, who is canonically gay in the Marvel World of Wakanda comics, was written as such in early drafts of Coogler and co-writer Joe Robert Cole’s script. In the final film, however, Okoye is with W’Kabi, and the scene first noted as particularly queer in the original screenplay is gone. Cole confirmed that the gay love story was in there at some point, but was unclear as to why it was removed.
It’s an unfortunate removal from a movie that is boundary-pushing in so many other ways — one that so effortlessly talks about colonization, the obligation for the powerful to help the powerless, radicalization, and so on. To finally see LGBTQ representation in a Marvel movie would have added another powerful layer to an already powerful film. Black Panther isn’t a worse movie for the removal, but the choice does disappoint.
[In] bringing Wakanda to the screen [production designer Hannah Beachler and costume designer Ruth E. Carter] reached across the whole continent for inspiration, painting with a wide brush that shouts out to a broader African heritage with cultural roots scattered by the transatlantic slave trade – not necessarily speaking directly to any individual culture or real-life African country. There’s the Maasai beadwork, the Basotho blankets, the lip plates, the architecture inspired by ancient buildings from Timbuktu and Mali. What they built is a pan-African, afrofuturistic ode to the wider notion of African heritage, diaspora and all. And it’s all packaged in a massive superhero film that is undeniably the first of its kind.
There is a long history of Western portrayals of Africa conflating its thousands of incredibly diverse cultures, creating the false sense of Africa as a monolith. Through Black Panther, Marvel seems to have found a small loophole: Center the story on a fictional country built off the migration of tribes from all over the continent. Put it in the hands of a mostly black, already beloved creative team deeply invested in creating positive portrayals of blackness. Give them the resources and power to make something colorful, aspirational, epic in scope, and truly ambitious. Then welcome it into the world and take note of where it lands in history. If we’re lucky, this is only the beginning.
