E d i t o r ’ s L e t t e r
The “coming” is loaded. As a kid, I used to lose it when the “back to school” campaigning would start in, on the tube and out of home, vainly perverting my otherwise tanline-soaked and sugar choked pre-teen summers. I hated it. How dare they? How dare they ask of me to plan, to suspend the harmonic thrust of no accountability? Of course, come late August I’d have the b-side AirMax-on-sale sleeper hit, the cleanly screen-printed SoCal street/surf export by way of Midwest mall gaming, Pacific Sunwear, the freshly shorn locks, ready for a first day diagnostic—one which was routinely slain by moi (ahem). Then there’s religious comings, premature comings, E. E. Cummings, in-law comings and goings, the passage of expectance, the expectation of passing. Life moves. So we find ourselves here, on the eve of our 20th anniversary, the much anticipated Volume 1, The Prelude Issue in hand, wondering if we’ve sharked the best looks, castled our stateliest rooks, and hooked the right crooks into our editorial rigmarole to truly shake it down when the balls drop to signal it’s finally here (and the oily middle-aged spread is not just a sprouted hummus recipe). Oofta! A young issue indeed (Bill Skarsgård, page 166; Sasha Lane, page 174), or so says prelude, lead by music (“In the Unlikely Event of a 20th Anniversary” on page 126), which could be said to be the most supremely seemly take on celebration, or at least its green room (page 50) creativity to loom, since our first printed effort back in the late ‘90s, when fiber optics were a thing and we all thought data would be toppled by another ball drop, this one more famous but less cool, and known as Y2K. Finally here, at a moment when our internal rhyme scheme is more preoccupied with well-balanced consumer hints (in our wine as it relates to cinnamon and a market edit as it relates to cash) than what actually prints. Enjoy this effort to get the joints loose before the juice gets anointed, fearful of what’s to come but fresh and clean come kick-off, tip-off, or any other dumb sports-enthused word that might stand in for this otherwise senseless run-on of descriptors and EIC quipsters.
Thanks for getting us there.
Matthew
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