The Message

The last thing Jean Cocteau ever did was speak to the year 2000.

Bonjour à tous et à toutes,

I hope this finds you well, where ever you are, but especially if you are in Los Angeles. I am lucky to report that I am safe and back home after an evacuation last week. Unfortunately, that is not the case for countless Angelenos, including several friends and a member of my family, who have lost their homes to the Palisades and Eaton fires.

The terror, grief and devastation of the past week has been indescribable, and the fires are not yet contained. It will take months to assess the true extent of the damage — physical, spiritual and psychological — and longer to rebuild.

It is in this spirit that I will comp you a year’s subscription to Sacred Monster if you send me proof that you have donated $80 or more to the fire relief cause of your choice. If you don’t know where to start, I suggest the LAFD Foundation; the Anti-Recidivism Coalition; and the Altadena Girls.

It is not random that Los Angeles is called the City of Angels. I have seen Angelenos come together to support each other in ways truly moving, in ways that give me hope.

I have always and will always be proud to be a native of this city.

à toute,

Chloë Helen America Cassens

A few months before his death, Jean Cocteau released what would be his final project: his “Address to the Year 2000.” He sat before a camera in front of a tapestry he had made to decorate one of the walls of the ‘tattooed villa,’ Santo Sospir, and spoke directly to an audience he didn’t know, and would never meet.

It was 1962, and he was in his 70s. He had survived both World Wars; narrowly avoided being killed by the Surrealists, Nazis, and his own crippling opium addiction; countless heartbreaks, countless illnesses. His life’s trajectory was such that he was mentored by Marcel Proust, and nurtured a young François Truffaud. He outlived most of his contemporaries, in a head-scratching twist of fate not unlike the one which has, as of this writing, kept similarly afflicted icons like Iggy Pop alive longer than his friends and collaborators David Bowie and Lou Reed.

That’s just the tip of the iceberg, really.

And so, he had much to say about the changes to society and to art that he had seen. Ever tuned into youth culture, he had a lot of wisdom to impart upon the baby boomers, who themselves were on the cusp of starting their own cultural revolution. And, as was always in his nature, he had a lot of questions to ask of the strangers of a year that surely sounded impossible to say: 2000.