I am the Little Red Rooster, Too Lazy to Crow for Day: A full day after returning to Portlandia, and now through the thresold, the Camino Mafioso is underway, well, almost underway. It all depends on what we mean by ‘underway.’ The Camino Mafioso is the gangsta approach to curating a conference, where you are very intentional in your approach to gathering outstanding contributors from a whole range of communities. In the past 24hrs I’ve reached out to members of the American Association of Applied Anthropology, the Ohio Valley Philosophy of Education Society, the John Dewey Society, the Philosophy of Education Society of Great Britain, the American Educational Studies Association, the American Education Research Association, the Institute of Education - London, Haifa University Faculty of Education, and the Rock and Soul Museum in Memphis. Not bad for the first 24hrs! I’ve also completed the CFP Flyer (see below).
So what’s the soundtrack choice of the day? I figured, since it’s the first day of the Peregrinatio Memphis, I should reach back in the existential archives, to the beginning of my journey in music-making philosophy, April, 1996, Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Sciences, New School for Social Reasearch, 65 Fifth Avenue, NY, NY, the defense of my doctoral dissertation, titled, “Beyond Fragmentation: Toward Polyphony.” The roster on the committee: Richard Bernstein (advisor), Agnes Heller, and Axel Honneth. Setting the scene was none other than Howlin Wolf! That’s right, in order to introduce my dissertation I turned to Howlin Wolf, specifically his London Sessions, which featured this all-time great Chicago bluesman with upstarts Eric Clapton, Steve Winwood, Charlie Watts, and Bill Wyman. Recorded May 2-7, in Olympic Sound Studios in London, the sessions represent to me the pedagogy of the blues, and capture a moment of transcendence, and the ecstatic power of music to form community. The history of transatlantic slavery, which began in the same city of London hundreds of years earlier, is sublimated in those five days of music making. And, for me, the pedagogy of the blues is no more evident than in the recording of “Little Red Rooster,” which features Howlin Wolf ‘teaching’ the song to the upstarts! Check it out:
3.0 - Of course I remember the notorious Camino Mafioso, which captured perfectly the audacious road to Memphis 2015. What I can only appreciate now, 10 years later, is how much Memphis 2015 was propelled and compelled by this project, the generative energy flowing from B&L 2.0! No coincidence this energy returned again during B&L 3.0 and pushed me into and through Salt Lake City 2024!
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