WeCheHei

This is another one of those things I can’t explain.

There were several questions at the outset, as always… completion/center/moment - the continued riffing on the decadence theme, which, given where I live, can’t be expected to stop soon. Naming too, continues to be front and center, new names, old names, stage names, group names… I can’t seem to come up with one that isn’t patently ridiculous. I’ve been living with FE for a while now, turning it over, still seems so stupid about ninety-nine percent of the time, but there are those events that make me remember why I liked it in the first place, and still do. Though to be honest most of the time I just write FE and think of iron, you know, the element, Ferrous sulfide or whatever. But to the issue at hand.

It certainly seems a little late for essays, or tributes, or critiques. And I think I believe the visual field to be exhausted, totally spent, beyond the capacity even for pastiche, insofar as there would need to be something like the possibility of parody for us to say, with any certainty ‘pastiche’… (I guess I would like to deny Jameson the privilege of his signifier, even… such an arty gesture, but I mean, here we are) Maybe there is a nostalgia at work... one that I would like to hold onto, I think, for as long as possible. Nostalgia as confession; confess nostalgia!, nostalgic for confession: no one confesses anymore, no one apologizes, I do, but not for the things I should, right? Whose embarrassed? By what? I confess my nostalgia for the time when confessions where made for, I dunno, low culture, for crap, for a time when crap was crap and cool was proud, for Black and white images of places, of a place, in this case, fabricated by me, totally made up, the relationship between this grotesque pretension to meaning and the total novelty of a ridiculous new name: wechehei. Rhymes with buhbyebye. This is the tension that excites me, not just montage but something even more productively unhinged, an attempt to chain a certain memory to the act of legitimating my own shitty ‘hood as uniquely shitty. Plus its pretty.

So yes, it is also a performance of a certain kind of writing or representation, a certain artiste-tic tendency to romanticize and wax poetic about the neighborhood, the placeyness of it all… this part actually bothers me less, insofar as I think I my rent is high enough to cover this particular luxury. That and the place is hell on weekends, trust me.