Editor's Note:

Feminists and other animals? I've been finding them in my wanderings, looking to them in various guises to stave off what the drama queen in me would like to call despair, but seems closer to comfortable apathy. Recently I took my copy of Angry Women (Re/Search, 1991) down off the shelf. Freaky parallel universe! The book is full of technowar in Iraq & anti-Bush protest images. Here we are, 15 years later, flailing along towards disaster, saying Iran and Iraq in the same breath, under Bush the Decider... In an interview with Andrea Juno, Avital Ronell says (with alarming perspicuity), "America has been emptied of the desire to know."

Two walks with Alan Moore and Nick A Demos in Cabbagetown and Atlantic Station (2 amazingly different post-mill ATL realities) have felt like reconnections with some part of this desire, with the "unprogrammed awareness that at times becomes directed serendipity" John Stillgoe writes about in Outside Lies Magic, an extended meditation on the power of paying attention to ordinary local landscapes. In an unbusy and playful state, all kinds of observations and possibilities arise. Why is that statue of Justice telling me to shut up? Did the City of Atlanta paint those pink plaster titties battleship grey because they're graffiti, or because they were naked? How does a Sales Exhibit of sculptures from Zimbabwe fit into this Mallstravaganza? If I tried to make work in this environment, what form could it take? Are there any signs of non-corporate expression here? What is being assumed about me in this space?

This issue marks the 2nd anniversary of the Rat and close to the end of my time living here in ATL. I've just accepted a tenure-track teaching job in Painting at Sewanee & will be moving to Tennessee this summer after getting hitched in New Hampshire. But I'll be back for visits to ATL & will also be spending time in New York, as my husband-to-be will be at NYU for the year. So stay tuned for more Ratsalad soon...

JP