Page 35 - Flaunt 171 - Summer of Our Discontent - St-John

Dear Readers
Flaunt HQ (featured herein at a moment of pandemic-enforced closure) in the heart of Hollywood, CA has a many years’ homeless encampment in its rear. Perhaps ten tents and a couple of lean-to’s cover the sidewalk, and despite a bit of transience, it’s mostly the same folks there, week in, week out. Days after the initial Black Lives Matter protests in late May, I noticed that someone from the camp—where residents of mixed races, genders, and ages share space—had spray-painted onto the wall above one of their tents: “We Matter Don’t Shoot”
I found this rather profound, at the peak of a period whereby all of California had been told to “Shelter in Place” in order to be “Safer at Home.” Because what if home is the streets? The protests have compounded the fact that the streets are not as safe for some as others. And what if home, should you have one with proper walls, isn’t safe? Domestic abuse is apparently on the rise in the time of the pandemic, and LA, a city that now claims “the least affordable housing market in the USA” sees most of its residents crammed into tiny spaces, even without the pandemic on, met with rising rents and increasingly unaffordable costs of living, wondering when it will be safe to get back out there in order to work nonstop to make ends meet.
It’s a time for discontent. To not be passive. To be pissed or angry at how the chips continue to fall. A time to ques- tion our own conditioning and promulgation of ideologies and ways of being, and a time to exceed our comfort zones.
Flaunt, though not afraid to tackle topics of severity, is not a tonally heavy magazine. Our purpose is to entertain.
To support emerging and established artists through continuous collaboration, expression, and humor. And like most, we’ve been tested by a collapsed economy, restricted mobility and groupings, and bewildering lack of leadership, atop the general challenges of keeping afloat an independent, analog art product in a sea of digitized everything. Alas, we’re here. And you know what I think is unique, in a combinational way that only a magazine might claim? Every subject
in this issue—for the first time in the nearly seventy editions I’ve had the privilege to edit—no matter who they are or where they’re coming from, is talking about and considering the same things. It’s been pretty remarkable to assemble it, and we hope that although it spells discontent—it also speaks to the indomitable capability of community, perhaps the truest antidote to discontent out there.
Enjoy THE SUMMER OF OUR DISCONTENT and remember that those in your surrounds, however few they might be, could probably use a little bit extra at the moment, whatever it is.
Sincerely, Matthew
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