We Built a City, We Enthroned a Queen, and She Provided the Words, in Her Own Hand.
In our fair city of CALIFUK, the threat of drones, falsity, cyber-desecration, and malicious propaganda abound. Survival here is a weighty effort—not for the insincere, the weak. For our success as a supercity isn’t pegged to the yuan, to seasons, to buying. This is not Manhattan Island, not a fashion’s fight out. This is a movement—not available for streaming, or indices—about place-making and cultured fissure. And abandon. And intimacy. And her.
See: CALIFUK’s throne ascension by phenomenon, Beyoncé. There she sits, unwilling at the moment to invite distraction of the fundamental mission of her rule: to shape culture, to inspire the hip parade as well as the fringe, to rehearse, rehearse, rehearse, to drop filthy, filthy tracks on this swelling, warring, cap-melting planet. To make an impact.
And so we’ll see a new venture this fall with Topshop boss, Sir Philip Green, still unnamed, specializing in global athletic street-wear. We’ll see her headline—a few days from our printing this CALIFUK beast—the Budweiser Made in America Festival in Philly, which her husband Jay Z curated, and which will dump a bunch of dough into the local United Way. We’ll also see her headline the N.Y.C. Global Citizen Festival at Central Park—taking place during the UN General Assembly (chief topic to be addressed amongst the 193 representatives: an end to global extreme poverty). We’ve watched her visit Haiti this summer, which no doubt influenced these mission-driven performances.
We’ll watch Beyoncé. On stage, on her Instagram, in the form of rug-cutting, colorific phosphates behind our eyes as we sleep. And because she’s our CALIFUK queen supreme, we’ll conduct a brief, yet thought-stirring psycho-analytic exercise, conclusions of which we’ll allow you, the reader, you the citizen, the fan, to draw—following our cover star’s photo session poolside in Los Angeles.
