Gigi Garmendía

I can’t handle this. Just get into it right now. Enjoy.

In The Know: Should The Government Stop Dumping Money Into A Giant Hole?

hi

I am on a train right now! writing you “from the road.” I am using my phone and a 4″X 2″ screen to do this. each letter is appearing roughly 2-3 seconds after I type it.

Enough wasted words, look: I’m on a train. The slate-grey sky outside and the rushing leafless trees made me want to write you. Why does everything feel so desolate and industrial? I’m going to try and put below some photos I just took that express this ambient feeling.

In Flanders Fields

by John McCrae, May 1915

In Flanders fields the poppies blow
Between the crosses, row on row,
That mark our place; and in the sky
The larks, still bravely singing, fly
Scarce heard amid the guns below.

We are the Dead. Short days ago
We lived, felt dawn, saw sunset glow,
Loved and were loved, and now we lie
In Flanders fields.

Take up our quarrel with the foe:
To you from failing hands we throw
The torch; be yours to hold it high.
If ye break faith with us who die
We shall not sleep,
though poppies grow
In Flanders fields.

I: Le Jeu

have you ever critically encountered chris burden? the idea of him? the memory of him? doesn’t matter if you have no memory, or if you can’t formulate even a primitive thought.  you need to get into him right now.

Chris Burden is an American artist concerned with personal danger in artistic expression.  He’s kind of like a predecessor to our darkly eye-liner friend KA, only way more serious and dangerous.

A few of his pieces:

• Shoot, made in F Space in Santa Ana, California in 1971, in which he was shot in his left arm by an assistant from a distance of about five meters. Burden was taken to a psychiatrist after this piece.
• Doomed, another danger piece in which Burden lay motionless in a museum gallery under a slanted sheet of glass, with a clock running nearby. Unbeknownst to the museum owners, the concept of Doomed was that Chris was prepared to remain in that position until someone from the museum staff interfered in some way with the piece. Forty-five hours later, a museum guard placed a pitcher of water next to Burden, thus ending the piece
• Ghost Ship, a crewless, self-navigating yacht which docked at Newcastle-upon-Tyne on July 28, 2005 after a 330-mile 5-day trip from Shetland

Chris Burden is featured in David Bowie’s song Joe the Lion (about which I am not entirely crazy but thought it was an interesting reference).

This picture details his art piece that made me burst out laughing and also, be solemn.  The piece is called 747.  His sole description reads, “at about 8 a.m. on a beach near the Los Angeles Airport, I fired several shots with a pistol at a Boeing 747.”

I think this artist’s Kafkaesque solipsism and comedy are what really get me.  There is something endemically humourous in the stark, simple and seemingly insane pieces.  There is a lonely poetry in his simple, visual words.  There is the idea that a “performance” can be firing a round of shots from a pistol at a passing airplane filled with passengers.  The danger here is clearly more to Burden, who probably faces greater risk of the bullet falling back down to earth somewhere near him and hitting him than even penetrating the plane.  But I am interested in the loftiness of the effort (quite literally) and the generation of the thought. 

The embrace of randomness and of chance also draws me to this.  Like the piece where he lays down in a museum and it ends only when an unwitting attendant places a jug of water next to him.  Why a jug of water? – this makes me think of The Castle when K. enters a classroom only to find his nascent girlfriend lying in a pool of water and giggling.  Situationally incongruous but fascinating in its aleatoriness.

II: L’hasard

Finally, internalize this: hazard, the English and French (l’hasard) word for potential danger or threat, also means completely random and given to chance.  But you, you who love Richard III, you know this.  For how could you ever forget those final words that burn still in your memory: “Slave, I have set my life upon a cast,/ And I will stand the hazard of the die. ” (1594; Shakespeare, Richard III, Act 5, Scene IV)

Yet, hazard also means fate.  L’hasard is that ineluctable destination to which you hurtle, albeit unknowingly, regardless of the autonomy or arbitrariness that catapults you.  Don’t pretend that you don’t remember discovering the birth of the subject in Albert Camus’ novel, l’Etranger.  L’hasard drives his encounter of Marie, his encounter with the Arabes, his encounter with justice.

(note: hazard also is a Victorian term for an Irish cab-stand.  from the OED: 1882 Times 9 May, Being on a car ‘hazard’ (stand) at Parkgate-street on Saturday evening.)

Perhaps there is more inextricably linked to Burden’s apparently nutjob schemes.  It certainly isn’t the first time someone intertwined standing on a precipice with openly accepting the venture of the universe.

Regarding your analysis: (from my dear friend and esteemed compatriot austin)

Given the gendered inflections of your reading of the “i’m so paid” passage, might it not prove a frutiful line of inquiry to delve into the ramifications of the citational chain implicated in the title’s invocation of Wayne’s “daddy” and his attendant “stunts”? 

not only is there a generational (and racially coded) inheritance of a need to achieve legitimate social standing through feats of material acquisition, but the fact that the injunction to do so comes from the example provided by a constantly reinvoked but ever-absent father figure lends a certain wistfulness to the incessant claim that wayne is in fact paid.  given his status as a multimillion-dollar-making rapper who drops 50 “stacks” on the caddy, one would assume that the fact of his paid-ness was obvious.  why then the need to tell us over and over again that he is paid, and in being thus remunerated, has therefore achieved status worthy of comparison with the stunts of the father that came before him?  what insecurities, what lacunas of desire and memory are being worked out in this pose of ever-assured manhood?  having told us that his “paid” proclamation is “all he has to say,” why does wayne feel the need to keep telling and telling us?  is it really to us that he is speaking?  certainly it doesn’t seem to be the “b*tch” in question.  is it then, his “daddy?”

perhaps, in this vein a comparative analysis to the clipse’s “trill” might prove fruitful.  in a similar register of masculine insouciance, pusha t and malice proclaim “b*tch, i’m trill, n***a i’m so trill.”  in this case, the invocation of material status is similarly conflated with a performance sexual desirability and an identical trope of condensation and elision is used to negate the status of the (listening) female subject’s autonomy.  only, in this instance the male figure of the “n***a” is also invoked as a necessary counterpart to the interpolated figure of the “b*tch.”  why the need to frame trillness within this symmetrical mode of address?  what added signifying valences does said trillness take on when addressed to the male ear that it did not have to the female?  why does the b*tch come before the n***a?  and finally, if we accept the claim — manifest in the clipse text — that the male and female audience are bonded together as necessary counterparts to the braggadocio proclamations of material status, that indeed the (necessarily unspoken and therefore uncontesting) assent of both audiences is necessary to give sanction and legitimacy to that status, then is not the notable absence of an explicit address to the father in wayne’s text made all the more glaring? 

wayne speaks of his father again and again, but never *to* him.  he speaks, then, only *of* his father and only *to* b*tches.  the figure of the co-equal n***a is thus entirely effaced.  by displacing the position of the male listener from a present and (presumably competetive) peer to the absent, judging father, who can never be directly addressed and can therefore never give either voluntary or coerced consent (as in the case of the b*tch), wayne assures an uncontested claim to superiority in the eyes of an audience that can not speak back.  but by tipping his hand in the chorus to reveal the deep underlying anxieties regarding the father figure, wayne suggests that the only consent he truly desires is that for which he can never actually ask.

is not this speaking silence the great and momentous thrust lying under the surface of wayne’s lyrical bombast?  above and beyond the celebrated tattoo, are there not tears lurking beneath the trademark raspy growl?