BEAUTY
AND REVOLUTIONARY LEANINGS
LETTER FROM THE EDITOR: STEPHANIE BARBER: OCTOBER 2007
Before the sublime culmination of the situationist movement took the form
of mass stoppings in the spring of 1968, Guy Debord and his cohorts would
plaster Paris with propagandistic slogans. My favorite is the phrase "down
with those who do not know why love is revolutionary". leave 'down
with those' -- (the vagueness of this sentence) to perhaps, most generously,
a savvy, artistic adoption of familiar form and concentrate on the 'why'.
love has the potential to shake up a great many regimes. Both the personal
and the political. The answers to questions which care and curiosity,
so often elements of love, beg one to ask such as 'how are you' or 'how
was your day' bear the devastating possibility of a great need for change.
A life
A life
A life
And is it ok? And do you like it?
At first I was aghast at the banality (cruel, I know, forgive me lovers)
of the majority of the letters. Something akin to the suspicion I have
of certain pop songs with crazy pastiche of lines most often used in certain
pop songs. The trickle down theory of love songs -- the end soup becoming
all bean or cooked carrot and no warm broth to swim about in. letters
which seemed uncared for -- haphazardly groomed and with no point of reference
and no specificity.
Nonplussed, nonplussed -- everybody likes to stumble around on this word.
Then I thought of Debord and this lovely sentence and movement and thought
perhaps the mere act of putting pen to paper or finger to keyboard is
revolution enough. Perhaps we no longer need the ins and outs of context
and specificity to convey the meaning of this emotion. Love blah blah
need blah blah want blah blah sad blah blah you. Perhaps this is evolution,
perhaps we all already understand and the signs and signifiers needed
in the past are petty antiquated pretties. Superfluous and ungainly. Maybe
that is it and I curmudgeon.
It is with this idea in mind that I chose my letters at random. Every
5th letter I was given to peruse has been included in my selection in
the hopes of celebrating, not my picky, perverted, poetic preferences,
but the beauty and revolutionary leanings inherent in the act of wanting
to let someone know what you are feeling.
Love, stephanie
Stephanie Barber is a filmmaker and poet who is currently living in Baltimore, MD. She has had solo screenings of her films at MoMA, NY, The Anthology Film Archives, The Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, Chicago Filmmakers and other galleries and museums. Her recent chapbook 'poems by s.barber' is published by Bronze Skull Press.