IsSue #3 iS oUT!

Cover picture by Jeff Bark, starring Staz Lindes styled by Simon Robins

Editorial:

Do we need love? There’s a need for love (God knows). Love. What word has been more oft-abused? Ever since man was born, created by the promise of pure love, in harmony with his surrounding nature. And who, for love, would transgress, lose his or her purity… Love antagonists? Hate. Indifference. Fear. Egoism… They can all coexist. They’re the same faces of a single coin. As an extremely beautiful poem by Catullo, entitled Odi et Amo*, acts of love often unknowingly, arbitrarily splash over into acts of hatred. Great gestures of love can lead to actions with exactly the opposite effect. If perfection doesn’t exist, then better retreat to small gestures of daily import.

Cultivating a garden in a city in which to experiment a new model of society, offering free meals packaged with art, oating on limpid waters on a sustainable vessel… Or go off the grid in order to compose love messages on an old typewriter. Repeat “Love Hope Soul,” a mantra that vibrates with words carved in time. Love is also looking, within the hardest, most humble jobs, for protection derived of devotion, not fear. Testifying that in Los Angeles, on America’s legendary West Coast, fty years after the Summer of Love, the ower revolution, and through technological revolution, there’s a new desire to be people and at the same time a tendency toward a truer intimacy, one free of fashions, trends and restrictions. Thus the pansexual, genderfuck generation was born, whose members reject the binary categories of gender: neither male nor female. A designer-poet writes his poetry with clothing, and paints his dreams and desires before sharing them along with his dearest possessions: the fairy tale he tells us is like touching the sky with one nger. But man also fears for his survival, and the respect (love) for that which surrounds him has becoming an impelling need. We can’t let eternal glaciers melt. Lips that offer themselves up like bonbons for a kiss. Passion painted red, brides who paint precious masks on their faces through a ritual designed to honor their future husbands. A love getaway for two famous lovers who want to conceal themselves from the world. An impossible love story between an enchanted cat and the man who has given her his heart. Accumulations of objects, fetishes revealing secret passions; the innocent exhibition of a beauty that doesn’t fear nudity. Elective af nities between him and her, forms become broad, welcoming the embrace. A young actor sets off millions of likes among his Chinese fans, donning traditional clothing onscreen. And in Africa, art is once again the means through which to conduct a new redemption, as an important protagonist of this movement recounts in this issue. But in the end, does it still make sense to talk of love? Enough with sacri ce, we want the impossible! We want a loving world, one that leaves us be and lets us be ourselves. Not easy, right? Make love, not war.