Corny as it may sound ('specially late on the eve of February 14th, when this message will first appear online): there's magic in this issue of Ratsalad DeLuxe. It started way back as a steady stream of exciting submissions appearing mysteriously in the Ratbox, from all over the country, often at the oddest hours of night.

Clearly, there's magic in Austin Heitzman, Jenene Nagy, Charles Lume, Carrie Ann Baade, and Ian Hagarty, doing all kinds of amazing things: taking scrappy Stuff and binding it into Wrightian machines surely designed for journeys elsewhere; creating lost continents from the detritus of a home-crazed culture; tricking scotch tape into confessing the ephemerality of love; cutting into art history to free chimeras long waiting for their turn in egg, copper, oil and pigment; and defying gravity while somehow seeming to maintain cordial relations with the demure conventions of architectural rendering. It's a real pleasure to show their work here. It would be even better to have long, sprawling loop-de-loop conversations in person about all this gorgeous stuff, but these entries are a good start.

My "profession confession" feels a little drab in this sparkling company. Still, since many of the submissions for this issue of the Rat came through an ad I ran on the College Art Association website, I think it might raise some shared questions about what happens when artists get "professionalized." Oh: it's about joy too. You'll see: magic.