Chorographing

Working on another mystory (a la Ulmer). Detroit still factors in heavily, though this time constitutes a different popcycle--the personal--and plays out across at least one of the others. Here's how this recipe begins:

• School: Cass Technical High School--I am/was a "Technician"
  
• Discipline: The academy--composition and rhetoric, in two parts: "techne" (Aristotle and Janet Atwill), an interest of mine as a concept/means of invention; and technical writing, a discipline within the broader field of comp and rhet
  
• Personal: Detroit--birthplace of Fordism, the perfection of
  routinized "praxis" (at times antithetical to techne)

So, my mystory beginnings recall my being a "Technician" from Cass Technical High School. But I am a "humanist" now--my discipline is in the humanities. I start from the binary narratives of academic ideology (humanism and sciences), and write the chora between/out of which the two emerge.

For a little while I've struggled with where an entertainment popcycle would open an area for me to work through. The times I've thought of this in relation to the mystory, entertainment always begins as music for me. I consume plenty of other media...TV is probably the grains and cereals of my media-diet pyramid. And yet, I think of music first....

Driving home from school the other day, I heard London's Calling by The Clash (damn, it's been years). My eureka moment. Probably more than any other band, they were the mainstream icons of punk rock. Yeah, I know...the Sex Pistols were more punk, more nihilistic, underground, counter culture. But nevermind the bullocks. The Clash were the bigger irony in that they were so identified with the punk scene but were so much else--including a moderate mainstream success.

As my mystory begins with the recognition of my intellectual collisions of the technical and the humanist, The Clash set the other socio-ideological binary against Fordism and the drive of Detroit industry. The socialist/communist and the free market capitalist ideologies.

Where do we see this ideological intersection in Detroit? Diego Rivera. The mural at the Detroit Institute of Arts. Creation from the metaphysical to the physical. God makes man, man makes commodities. Production is there, but what's getting invented? The tribute here is to the proletariat, the laborer, the doing. But in the inversion of this ideology, the parallel of industrial labor with the creation of life becomes the manufacturing of the individual spirit with the creation of Fordist mass production. Keep making the masses. We'll keep consuming them.

Edsel Ford commissioned Rivera to paint the Detroit Industry mural for the DIA in 1932. At that time southwest Detroit already had a moderately substantial Latino (mostly Mexican) population, most of whom had come to Detroit because of employment opportunities emerging from the auto industry. Folks worked for Ford. My wife's great-grandfather had been in "the neighborhood" for over a decade. Rivera, interested in a commemorative gesture for Latinos in Detroit, came to the community with an offer to paint a mural in southwest Detroit. For free.

Rivera was by then a world famous muralist. He was also a world famous card-carrying communist. He was received with hostility by many who had left Central and South America because of destitute economies and oppressive political regimes. Capitalism was working for them, and Rivera was sent not-so-kindly on his way, leaving no mark on the future Mexicantown.