REVU is the Vernacular Social Club’s triannual periodical. This is a thematic and collaborative review gathering contributions from members of the Vernacular Social Club. REVU will be shipped directly to members of the Vernacular Social Club three times a year. It will be available in an electronic version in the members’ zone. It will also be available for sale in carefully selected bookstores, exhibition galleries, and museums.

Become a member and receive REVU. Submit your contributions to the next issue whose theme is “War and Peace”.

#1 REVU / REVIEW

Brave New World  This is not a utopia.

The theme chosen for this #1 issue, entitled “The Brave New World”, is inspired by the dystopian anticipation novel of the same name, written in 1931 by Aldous Huxley.

See the tower of Pisa perfectly erect without any hallucinogenics. Look at the ape aping the apeman. Dreaming beyond the walls. Live blissfully under the benevolent gaze of a WASP manufactured Jesus. Become rich as a church mouse….

All of them like theatre stages on which a part of Life is played out, those acts and scenes that make you dream, cry, fantasize, that make you blush, from shame or pleasure or giddiness. To live in the best of worlds, but the best for whom, for what?Irony oozes out of this antiphrasis. How sweet it is to sugarcoat reality, glazing it in a semblance of joy, in playful images. It makes the satire that much more delicious. Twopenny-halfpenny icons, trifling photos. They exude complexity onto human nature, onto the vision of happiness, of life, of society, of freedom, of power, of the State… Here, there are no aesthetic codes: the brave new world is home to faceless people who show us their universe, sometimes chilling, sometimes fiery. When the absurd depends as much on Man as on the World, it all jibes. Here they are, joined, creating a caustic vision of what surrounds us. Albert Camus wrote “This world in itself is not reasonable”. And that is all that can be said.