the destroyer > cheap papers > Meagan Lehr
BRAVERY IN MY BRAVADO—DIARIST STAR WITNESS YEEZUS
Midnight, Day One: We are all Indian pipes in a field, waiting to be blown.
1 am: Kim's rump a hump my stump let's pump.
2 am: I wanna get something going with the girls from Broad City.
3 am: Sontag beef with noodles. I said, yes please I would love a glass of water. Kim said, glass of Jack?
4 am: Jackie O shaped by certain images just like me. Famous pillbox hat, fuck my face mask.
5 am: Are you trying to inhabit me? That’s my point, bitch.
6 am: JUST AWESOME.
7 am: Annie backed out, what a bitch. Bitch fuck-less, fucking redickless.
8 am: Cockroaches afraid of celebrity I guess. I have these gifts for only one life and I gotta just get outta this redickless cage of limited thinking.
9 am: Our failure is one of imagination, of empathy: we have failed to hold this reality in mind.
10 am: Every thought out of my genius head is worth a witness. It’s called self-respect, audience.
11 am: Leibovitz, fuck my dick.
12 pm: Kim’s nipple-less bounce, pounce, tramp, stamp, sink’s full of hair now that we’re married.
1 pm: And I live the feed, I ride the feed, I ride good taste, I ride what’s vogue and Vogue rides this nigga for millionsmillionsmillionsexclusives.
2 pm: There is the satisfaction of being able to look at the image without flinching.
3 pm: Sent this bitch a dick pic and called her on the phone and she saved me, became my equal.
4 pm: Goddamn, Ri’s so good on “All of the Lights.”
5 pm: Because I am a Christian, and I want Christ on stage. Jesus Christ, my dad, and Steve Jobs.
6 pm: To the militant, identity is everything.
7 pm: Kim and Kanye’s wedding photo is the most-liked image ever on Instagram, with more than 1.93 million likes, and more than 35,000 comments.
8 pm: After one performance, Kanye West told the band that it had reminded him of Steve Jobs, who “took something as big as the computer and put it in a cell phone.”
9 pm: She’s a portrait, I mean person. A phone call.
10 pm: #karawalker. Damn, that’s good Bey, just AWESOME with your baby at an art show about slavery in America.
11 pm: Or simply the bemused awareness, continually restocked by photographic information, that terrible things happen.
Midnight, Day Two: I am multiple things, but I am a celebrity, we are treated sometimes like we are rentable.
1 am: Bravery in my bravado. Thank you Jesus, you’re my Yeezus.
2 am: To my credit, I screw the shit out of reddit, who said that? My dick pic.
3 am: To photograph is to frame, and to frame is to exclude.
4 am: I have to work with the No. 1, I can’t work with anyone but Jay Z, I can’t be with any girl but Kim because that’s the girl that I look at her pictures the most and get turned on the most.
5 am: You know, when I take these meanings and shit, [crowd chants “Kanye”] people they talk to you like you’re stupid or something. And then you look back and say, you know, like I’m not gonna call no names out, I’m not going to mention Nike or nothing like that. I’m not going to say no names or anything.
6 am: Photography is the only major art in which professional training and years of experience do not confer an insuperable advantage over the untrained.
7 am: And they say, “No, no, no, nigger. Not no more. [cue Auto-Tune] That’s too much. That’s too much. No, no, no, no, no, no, nigger not no more. That’s way too much. That’s way too much. Stay in your place. Sit in the front of that show and wear this jacket I made you. Stay in your place.
8 am: This photo will determine my flowers forever, and so the world’s flowers.
9 am: I wish I’d thought of Bey and Jay’s way of announcing she was in the way.
10 am: Every thought out of my genius head is worth a witness. It’s called self-respect, audience.
11 am: We're even better than European. Les gueules cassées.
12 pm: violence can exalt some subjected to it into a martyr or hero.
1 pm: If I ask, they sing. Close your eyes and enjoy the crash.
2 pm: Photosensitive epilepsy, that’s what I’m talkin bout.
3 pm: We are like the creatives with teeth … you are creating to make everybody’s lives better.
4 pm: Who gotchyou, who gotchooooooo.
6 pm: the large role that chance (or luck) plays in the taking of pictures, and the bias towards the spontaneous, the rough, the imperfect.
7 pm: They try to control y’all and try to control me. And when I was in my negotiations, they told me, “We don’t negotiate with celebrities.” That’s like a terrorist. They talk to you like it’s fucking terrorist.
10 pm: I believe the world can be saved by design because, what is the most vulgar thing someone could do? Kill someone, so good taste is the opposite of that.
11 pm: The only canonical image of Jesus she could count on most students being able to identify was the Crucifixion.
Midnight, Day Three: The world should not be excluded from matters of my heart. The world is full of lovers, my heart is full of covers. I contain multitudes of live strong love. I will own this wedding.
1 am: I will own Italy, I will own France.
2 am: Not American, not black, not Persian, directions like North. Mythic like North.
3 am: My baby listened to Yeezus and got it. Because she didn’t have a human consciousness. Bravery in my bravado.
5 am: The photographs we are particularly dismayed to find out have been posed are those that appear to record intimate climaxes.
6 am: I bought Kim’s sex tape 7 years ago, told her I was gonna marry her then.
9 am: Beautifying is one classic operation of the camera, and it tends to bleach out a moral response to what is shown.
10 am: Every thought out of my genius head is worth a witness. It’s called self-respect, audience.
11 am: Everyone is a literalist when it comes to photographs.
12 pm: Porn informs the swarm, what’s AWESOME. Lost in the plastic light.
1 pm: I still feel like a boy on the stage: I’m Cobain, I’m King Kong, I’m a punk.
6 pm: The image should appall, and in that terribilità lies a challenging kind of beauty.
7 pm: Douchebags are hygienic products, I take that as a compliment.
8 pm: IN YOUR WILDEST.
9 pm: On how important Kim is to the internet.
11 pm: Kid right, go get your own. She points up to the sky.
Midnight, Day Four: In a system based on maximal reproduction and diffusion of images, witnessing requires the creation of star witnesses, renowned for their bravery and zeal in procuring important, disturbing photographs.
1 am: That was pissing my girl off during the honeymoon, my girl was exhausted on the honeymoon. The ultimate awesome colors of the flowers.
2 am: Put your flowers on me, right?
3 am: In a culture radically revamped by the ascendancy of mercantile values to ask that images be jarring, clamorous, eye-opening seems like elementary realism as well as good business sense.
4 am: Meme-intimacy Celeb-intimacy Net-intimacy. Have a toast for my whole asshole.
5 am: Regard my pain, Instagram. Blow your load. Magpies pecking my whole eyeballs.
7 am: “He’s talking rubbish now.” Sexin with Kim—only that one chick’s photos, truly.
9 am: The image as shock and the image as cliché are two aspects of the same presence.
10 am: Every thought out of my genius head is worth a witness. It’s called self-respect, audience.
11 am: Black people are allowed to wear big chains and name what they have on and say out loud what things cost.
12 pm: WESTISMSAWESOMISMSDISHUMAZISMSLEGITIMIZISMSYEEZYISMS
1 pm: People want to run celebrities, but I won’t fly low. I will be the creator.
2 pm: so permissive are the standards for a memorable, eloquent picture.
4 pm: And how do I like a poet mucking in my whole asshole?
5 pm: How else to get attention for one’s product or one’s art?
6 pm: I think she was, like, scared of the idea of celebrity.
7 pm: There is the pleasure of flinching.
8 pm: Press power, tableaux power—I’m just the first to admit it. HAAAH.
9 pm: Photographs that everyone recognizes are now a constituent part of what society chooses to think about, or declares that is has chosen to think about.
10 pm: JUST AWESOME.
11 pm: And it’s hard not to think that many of the things that happened in my life wouldn’t have happened had I not met Kanye West that night […] I’d like to thank you, Kanye, and let you know that even though you didn’t have time to listen to my beats, you will one day because our time is coming.
Waxed:
Colapinto, John. “Shy and Mighty: A band of introverted Brits finds unlikely fame.” The New Yorker. 30 June 2014: 25. Print.
Jung, E. Alex. “Read Kanye’s Epic Wireless Festival Rant (With Auto-Tune) in Its Entirety.” www.vulture.com. Web. 7 July 2014.
Madison, Jason. “School Spirit: How meeting Kanye West at 16 made me a college dropout.” www.wineandbowties.com. Web. 7 July 2014.
Smith, Emily. “Kanye West blasts Leibovitz, says wedding Instagram took 4 days.” Page Six, www.NYPost.com. Web. 7 July 2014.
Sontag, Susan. Regarding the Pain of Others. New York: Picador, 2003. Print.