Practice What We Preach. A mystory in progress.

Entertainment:

Parliament/Funakdelic. A collection of almost the same people who innovated funk-rock. “Who says a funk band can’t play rock?”

Motor Booty Affair

On the back cover of Motor Booty Affair is the picture of a cowboy (in hat and clothes) riding a wave with a ghetto blaster to his ear.

Parliament began in Detroit. They recorded their first single “(I Wanna) Testify” with Revilot Records. The B side was “I Can Feel the Ice Melting.”

Groovesville was another local label distributed by Solid Hitbound. Solid Hitbound was owned by Revilot.

Personal:

My personal involves Homestead and Miami, Florida, cowboy imagery and the frontier. I’m from Miami. My father is from Homestead. At my grandmother’s house in Homestead, I would pretend the water pump in the backyard was a horse. Homestead was the frontier for South Florida. Today, it is mostly suburban. In the 1970s, it was largely undeveloped with plenty of farmland and low cost housing. It had a “boonies” feel to it.

In Miami, my father would take me to Robert’s Western Wear so that I could buy cowboy boots. At six, I owned boots. Most likely, the sight of a six year dressed as if he were living in the West was unusal for Miami’s lifestyle (though it hadn’t reached the outrageous fashion conscious scene it is today).  I wore alligator boots with pull up straps. Bootsy Collins was the bass player for Parliament/Funkadelic. If Bootsy is known for anything outside of his playing (or the chant “Go Bootsy”), it is his outrageous attire.

The first image from Motor Booty Affair, then, functions as an emblem within my mystory bridging Detroit and Miami (motor booty and the waves off of South Beach where we would hang out as kids). It also contains elements of the frontier: Detroit bordering Canada; Homestead is the frontier. Cowboys. Case, in the sci-fi novel Neuromancer is a cowboy. He moves through a space we might now recognize as the Internet.

The character in the image, I assume, is Rumpofsteelskin whose name further aligns me with the auto industry of Detroit (STEEL) and technology (my discipline). The directive on the album, which is repeated in several songs and on the back cover, is “Go Wiggle.” This directive repeats in many URLs (on the Internet) as the tilda (~). It is in my homepage’s URL:

http://web.missouri.edu/~ricejr/

Rumpofsteelskin is aligned with Sir Nose D’Void of Funk. They want to kill the cool. “I’m too cool to swim or dance.”

Nose works by blasting his gun “at the drop of a ‘J’.”

Again, I am named.

Discipline:

Rhetoric and Composition. Director of Writing.

In my first book, The Rhetoric of Cool, I drew attention to 1963 and Douglas Engelbart’s invention of the concept of windows: multiple screens a computer user could use at once. Engelbart is well known for making a connection between technology and bootstrapping. The basic idea behind bootstrapping is collective work (intelligence and innovation). Engelbart is also one of the inspirations for the Internet and personal computing as we know them today (Ted Nelson being another).

This postcard below came to my office in my first job and first position as Director of Writing. It advertised Richard Florida’s talk for Create Detroit downtown. The idea behind Florida’s appeal is to bring creativity to the city as the focus of urban renewal. He is aligned with Gov. Granholm’s “Cool Cities” plan. Cool is found in my discipline (my textbook and book). And one figure in the card mentions “corporate cool” a term which reminds me of a recent article I have written called “Cooltown: The Place of Intellectual Work,” a critique of HP’s Cooltown project, WebCT, and managed software. It also reminds me of Wayne State University and Detroit’s Digital Detroit and TechTown projects in the New Center area.

But note the language of this card: “Groove.” “We’re starting a new groove” echoes Funkadelic’s “One Nation Under a Groove.” Florida accidentally names funk as central to his plan, not cool. And, the obvious signifier here, Florida, is the place I grew up in (I am reversing the trend - Michiganers go South; I went North. In the words of Funkadelic, am I creating “Promentalshitbackwashpsychosis”?). During that first winter in Michigan, I could not see the ice melting. I saw snow. And more snow. A backward psychosis indeed. Who leaves Florida for Michigan? Someone who wants to stay cool? “What’s cooler than being cool,” Outkast (a modern version of Funkadelic) asks? “Ice cold.”

I see myself, then, within this card (Florida, cool).

Florida’s basic premise is that a creative collective will rejuvenate urban renewal.

“We can dance underwater and not get wet” - the ultimate call for creativity?

My second book is about space, rhetoric, and technology. Its focus is Detroit. I call it: Digital Detroit.

“Hey, something to blog about.” I did blog it. I am blogging it now in this example. I’m posting this example to the Internet. CATTt requires a tale. The blogpost is my tale.

The mystory is about identity (popcycle produces a sense of identity). At the end of “Deep,” someone asks:

Excuse me, would you happen to be George Clinton?
Excuse me, but would you happen to be George Clinton
could you point George Clinton out to me?

Can you point out the J?

Hip Hop Pedagogy Preview. Temporal Juxtaposition

Temporal Liner Notes:

Blog writing where “passion” or “love of” are not the motivating forces of the composition. Experiments in new media composing is the motivation.

Escape

Some Enchanted Evening

Ridin’ The Storm Out 

To consider:

• Spaces of writing/writings about space
• Methods
• Certainty in claims
• Asking: “How was it done?” and “How can I do that?”

And to consider as well:

• Hermeneutical readings for this course (what do these readings mean?)
• Heuristic readings (what do these readings teach us to do?)

Thus, how do these readings show us four ways we can come up with teaching ideas and four ways students in our courses can write?