Issue 4
HoW just can't seem to shake the trans-Atlantic habit. Recently, we were on a train between Milan and Venice. We got in an empty compartment on one of the cars, the sort of compartment like in A Hard Day's Night. Soon, we were joined by three young American students studying in Heidelberg. They'd bugged out for the weekend on their student train passes to travel around Italy and sleep in the train station. Ah, youth.
It was a guy and two girls, and we were rather jetlagged, so HoW slouched down and eavesdropped on their banter. They ate their lunches, which for each consisted of a large can of Heineken and an apple. Their conversation veered from potential romances back at school, to studies, to Current Events. One girl kept asking, ohmigawd, you guys, do you think we're going to war? And they'd yammer about that for a bit in a rather uninformed way until the topic shifted back to who's hot in the dorms.
But they kept coming back to Iraq and the threat of Saddam, and finally HoW couldn't keep silent any more. In that way that we do, we started sharing with them some of what we've read on the matter in recent months, mostly suggesting places on the web they should start looking to find out things for themselves. One of them actually took notes. We made it brief and sunk back in our torpor.
So, here's a follow-up to our train-car conversation. HoW is featuring in this issue an interview with Stranger, the artiste of the Flash Movie, as seen on his indispensable website Blah3.com. Dave Zauhar nails the problem with the "counter-culture" as a right wing bogeyman and shows how Allen Ginsberg is a truer inheritor of Matthew Arnold than Hilton Kramer could ever be. Jeff Purdue surveys several recent magazine articles that take a look back over the last year, post 9/11, in the first offering of an occasional series called "The Popular Press." And, fresh from the pastures, the shepherds Corydon and Battus take umbrage with a recent review by Anthony Lane of Jean-Luc Godard's latest film In Praise of Love. Perhaps they also remind us of what Raymond Williams said: that "culture in all its early uses was a noun of process: the tending of something, basically crops or animals."
