The RickRoll is dead…

You wouldn’t get this from any other guy…

-Rick Astley

You must click play. Nothing in the universe can stop you. It’s amazing.

You’ve been ChuckWagoned! Tell a friend! Sometime in the next 24 hours, something chain letterish will happen and you’ll be completely happy or sad or scared or hungry or something.

 

And now, a little ranting…

You do it to yourself/you do/and that’s why it really hurts/you do it to yourself/just you/you and no one else…

-Radiohead

I recently received a few response papers back with comments. Now I know it’s taboo to talk about comments from an instructor to a graduate student, as all of that is supposed to be kept under wraps, but two things came up. They were “term” corrections.

One was when I said “America” which prompted “Do you mean The United States?”

Another was when I said “Native American” and was told “American Indian.”

Mundane things, right? Yeah… not earth shattering. I’m not going to cry myself to sleep over such “errors,” nor do I feel particularly slighted. But… it reminded me of a presentation I gave last semester on John Locke. The philosopher, not the awesome bald dude from LOST.

Locke had a lot to say for politicians and for other social scientists, but for rhetoric, his grand contribution is his sense of language. Now I’ve been told by some that I’m not reading Locke right, so feel free to slam me in response (as if you’d hold back had I not given you permission! ), but this is what I took away from Locke’s work as being important.

We have words, in our language. We seek, through those words, to express things to each other. But our words lack precision, and our attempts to say things in attractive– or high minded– ways often clouds understanding. As academics we might be the worst offenders of all. We say “heuristic” when we could say “tool” in many cases. We claim something is “structural linguistics” when no one needed to know. We pontificate upon how something has “concrecience” (did I spell that right, Dr. Latour?) or is “polemic.”

Clarity, Locke claimed, would lead us to much easier communication. And to get to that clarity, we had to know what words mean.

Right now I’m having a word war with my own mind over the term “practice.” I know what it means… generally. I also know that in high school I went to both basketball and speech team practice. I know that David E. Kelly wrote a fantastic TV program called The Practice. I know that practice makes perfect. I know that De Certeau is concerned with The Practice of Everyday Life. But when we talk about practices… what do we mean?

The answer– which I find maddening– is that it varies wildly from scholar to scholar.

Which is why it’s funny that “America” and “United States” didn’t parse across a set of two academics.

I think Locke was being idealistic (and that he had lots of other problems), but I’m thinking that the desire to have clear, concise language might be the smartest thing anyone ever asked for.

Or as my tenth grade honors English teacher said, “Phill, brevity is the soul of wit. You witless punk.”

 

What is this?

this is a list of what I should have been/but I’m not/this is a list of the things that I should have seen/but I’m not seeing…

-Counting Crows
I mentioned a few posts back– when I included the two The Usual Suspects clips– that I was doing research for another project. The project is to create one of these cool things that Julie showed me (I’ve lost the initial link– it was on my other laptop). Here’s one, from YouTube:

The author of this one calls it Kinetic Typography.  I think I like that.

But what IS this?

I plan to see if I can make one (using the Verbal Kent/Keyser Soze story). I did some scouring and someone said “use Adobe After Effects!” so… I’ll be learning new software. If it doesn’t kill me, I’d like to teach students to do this as a scaffold into new media composing.

But what IS it?

That’s been troubling me a little. Not in the “oh no! Life is awful!” way, but in the “well, it’s not…”

These are Remixes, obviously, on some level, as most of the Kinetic Typography on YouTube is set to movie quotes. But is it digital poetry? Is it strictly an exercise in visual rhetoric? Are they movies? Is this a new way of ‘writing’ in the ’pencil to paper’ sense?

What is kinetic typography?
 

and why not a remix?

Oh, no! CD repeat:
It’s under, under, under my feet/the sea spread out before me…

-R.E.M. (same song as before! EEK!)

I made this today while I was chatting and made a weird LoLjoke:

 

I have to pepper in a few short ones…

Lump sat alone in a boggy marsh/totally (e)motionless except for her heart…

-The Presidents of the United States of America

Sticking with the theme but leaning toward one of my current projects: Race in World of Warcraft.

The humans, who look human, sound like they have US “recieved prounciation.”
The blood elves, who look like sexy elf people, sound vaguely British
The Orcs, who are big green monsters, sound gutteral

The lanky, tusked, lumbering trolls… sound like islanders (most stereotypically Jamacian).

Hmmm.

The Tauren don’t SOUND specifically Native American, but those teepees, totem poles and dreamcatchers tell a different story.

Hmmm…

*told you, a short one*

I love Aaron McGruder

you just mad cuz your @$$ is old/first thing you do is just pick up the phone..

-Thugnificent, Flownominal and Macktastic, featuring Nate Dogg

I haven’t commented much on the Boondocks of late, but the re-run that ran on Cartoon Network this past Monday got me to thinking once again about how clever Aaron McGruder is. He might be the most effective critic we have of the constructions of “black” in America. While nothing he’s done since has made me quite as giddy as his reflections on Jar-Jar Binks, or the “What if MLK hadn’t died” episode, the “dis” rap about Grandad comes pretty close.

Let me give some quick context, just incase some of you don’t know the Boondocks. It started as (and still is) a newspaper comic strip featuring Huey Freeman (a young radical genius) his brother Riley (who longs to be a “gangsta”) and their Grandad (who at different times is actually “Grandad Freeman” and “Jebodiah Freeman,” and on one occasion “B!tches”).  Grandad, in hopes of saving his two grandsons from the strain of urban life, moves them into a house in the stereotypically white suburb of Woodcrest. That’s a REALLY quick summary, but honestly, if you don’t know McGruder’s work, I’d much rather you picked up a trade paperback of his strips or checked your local listings for the cartoon on Cartoon Network– I don’t think my summation can do the comic/show justice.

In this particular episode “The Story of Thugnificent,”a rapper named Thugnificent and his crew “Lethal Interjection” move to Woodcrest, right next to the Freeman family. Thugnificent is a sterotypical “gangsta”rapper, voiced by Carl Jones and drawing visually from acts like Ludacris:

Image linked from Carl Jones' MySpace page. If you happen to see
this on a back-ping,I LOVED the episode and loved your work.
I hope I didn't get my read on the episode all wrong.  

While I could go on all day about the things I find fascinating from this episode, which sends up “dis rap” and other aspects of rap culture, I want to focus here on one specific instance, the dis rap “Eff Grandad.”

In the cartoon, Thugnificent and his crew throw a party which gets too loud for Grandad’s taste, and Riley– without Grandad knowing– parks a number of the guests’ cars on the Freeman lawn (viewers find out later that Riley also gave Thugnificent a forged letter from Grandad giving him permission to throw the party).  When Grandad calls the police and issues a complaint, Thugnificent and his crew write “the first ever dis rap against an old guy.”

Warning– it’s profane. But here’s a link: http://antfanfare.imeem.com/music/xpiPt8Bp/thugnificent_ft_macktasticflownominaland_nate_dogg_eff/

Grandad, not to be outdone, records his own dis response which he posts to YouTube. But the fallout of the Thugnificent track is that several older gentlemen who look roughly like Grandad are beaten all across the country, presumably due to the lyric “old folks should get their a$$ whipped for getting all crazy,” or any of a host of other taunts in the rap.

This is why I love Aaron McGruder as a social critic:

1. The song is actually good (I’m not as good as I once was with rap, but I can identify Snoop Dogg on the track, and I think one of the others is Xzibit who appears elsewhere in the episide as himself)
2. The fact that it “features” Nate Dogg skewers one aspect of the rap scene, making it highly ironic
3. It functions just like a “real” dis rap (this gets back to point #1). It’s not like someone tried to make a clearly insane example of dis rapping gone too far; it is over-the-top (particularly some aspects of the video) but it’s not surreal
4. It provides a worst-case of one of the greatest criticisms of rap music: as a result of the song, many fans of Lethal Interjection attack old men.
and
5. True to the idea of being a “comic” and a “cartoon,” it’s pretty funny (if one can step away from academia and take it as funny, anyway) 

What does this tell us, then? Part of the reason that I wanted to write this reflection today, in this set of responses, is that I just posted about people writing about who and what they are. I feel a little exposed writing about African American culture, which in a way feels bizarre to me because I grew up in a “black” neighborhood and have been referred to the same way Grandad is here by my African American friends. But I’m NOT African American. As such, is my commentary here valid? Is it okay? Am I out of bounds? I’d like to think I can research and comment on this, just like I researched Baraka and Hughes as an undergrad or MLK and Malcolm X.

But more importantly… Aaron McGruder IS African American. And because of that, and because the Boondocks is well received and beloved by the same community he’s socially commenting on (famous rappers are in the episode), the message changes. I think this is both obvious and critically important to think about. I also love Seth McFarland. I adore Family Guy and always will. But if Peter Griffin and Cleveland Brown had written a dis rap about Quagmire, it wouldn’t carry the same impact that this piece does.

After the episode I found myself laughing at the idea that a rapper would ever record a studio track dissing his neighbor over a noise citation, or that the resulting rap would result in grandfathers across the country being attacked. It seems… less than likely. And that, I think, was McGruder’s whole point. Some of these things sound savage in rap (and are probably shameful on some level), but at the same time the thought that someone would carry out some of the outlandish narratives in these songs is a touch off-center in its own right.

I also found myself roaming around my apartment singing the rap, and giggling as I remembered the numerous ways Riley assured Thugnificent he wasn’t trying to “ride” him.

If entertainment can amuse and inform… and critique… it’s doing something special.

Honestly, this whole post is sort of a long version of me saying “please, everyone, watch The Boondocks. It’s the best cartoon I’ve ever seen.”

 

MacGruber Version Web 2.0

Read the scene where gravity is pulling me around…

-R.E.M. (again)

I bought a new laptop. It’s huge, which is both good and bad. It’s good, because it can handle my digital media demands (I’m still downloading WoW to see if it runs well). It’s bad, because the thing weighs like 10 pounds.

But my reflection here isn’t so much on my new machine (which I’m calling Orange Crush– a big ol’ Gateway PX from Best Buy), as it is on the lack of the machine. I know Lac(k)an talks about the phallic lack, but this isn’t quite the same. I’d compare being a digital rhetoric student without his laptop to the cliche nightmare about being naked in front of a bunch of people.

I have one class, in particular, where I use my laptop as a sort of “defense.” Due to the devisive nature of the people in the class, sometimes in addition to needing my reading notes and the ability to type (I cannot “write” notes anymore– I’ve lost the ability to write quickly enough to keep up with my own thoughts and a professor’s speech), I need a place to sort of hide/shield myself.

But it goes deeper than that. I am not personally a fan of some aspects of current cyborg theory. I think it’s fascinating, and that in some applications it’s brilliant, but before last week I would have called user-to-computer a relationship that cannot be seen as cyborg. I’m rethinking that now.

I read most of my class materials in PDF. I use Microsoft OneNote to record my thoughts while reading, my thoughts from class. I have folders on my desktop for each of my courses and each of my projects. My academic life essentially happens on this screen.

So maybe I AM a little more cyborg than I thought.

I felt an instant comfort when I started configuring my new system. Even if it is really heavy and part of me wishes I’d spent the extra money on the lightweight Mac. Because tomorrow is Monday, and I have a 3 hour class. A three hour class where I’ll have all my materials at my disposal and won’t feel naked in front of everyone.

Because really… naked Phill does no one any good.

 

Man, that’s a weak week

I suffer dreams/of a world gone mad/I like it like that/and I know it…
-R.E.M.

So I’m one step from declaring my life a temporary emergency zone.

I am going to make seven posts in rapid succession to catch myself back up here (I hope). But here’s the deal. My laptop died. I had some major family issues. My girlfriend got sick. *I* got sick (yay, love antibiotics that make me super drowsy). I missed a conference, but luckily I sent my materials and they were displayed via video (I love digital media). I’m embroiled in some sort of dramatic exchange with a professor. It’s… the end of the semester. Yay!

So anyway, enough of me explaining why I haven’t updated every day like I said I would. Let’s get to an actual update. I didn’t have any classes, in the general sense, this week, as all our professors are at CCCC (where my video was sent). My life moved in to swallow all the time, but I did have one really interesting academic conversation with Julie.

We were dining on sushi (well, she was– I’m not that brave when I’m sick, so I had some manner of enormous plate-o-beef stirfry which was delicious) when we started to talking about how people “come out” as academics (all apologies to the GLBT community for using your metaphor, but I’m borrowing it here from another scholar on our campus). We were talking about ourselves, in large degree, when we came to the “isn’t it ironic that…”

I’m part Cherokee. And I do Native American rhetorics. We have a friend who is gay, and he does GLBT.  We have another friend who is African American. She does… yes… African American rhetoric.

So this leads me to more ask a question than to really assert any opinion. We claim in the field that we want open research and for people to not feel boxed in, but is there a sense that we still have to write/research as what we are?

Someone told me a few years ago that one didn’t need to be “black,” for example, to do African American scholarship. But in that class–which was American studies– all of the African American works and theory were written by African Americans. And as I start to learn Native American rhetoric, I’ve noticed that the Indigenous studies works that aren’t written by Indigenous people are automatically viewed with a degree of skepticism (I can even attest to being the skeptic in one case).

So it makes me wonder… CAN someone write accurately about what he or she isn’t on a race/gender/sexuality/spirituality level? And if not, are we sort of kidding ourselves when we think we can look at some other sort of community from the outside and write about it in a way that is fair?

I’m not sure… this is just a thought rattling around in my head. I thought I’d share it.