EDITOR’S LETTER
long before the high - flying hullabaloo of high fashion and hollywood hijinks , i was a Subway Sandwich Artist on the Great Plains. One night, the local tornado sirens wailed, and we were advised by our manager, via landline of course, to take shelter in the walk- in refrigerator, where the whole wheat and Italian footlongs were thawing ahead of their bake session. After some giggles and some pepperoncini nibbles, I became curious and tip-toed back out onto the floor. Through the floor to ceiling glass panes, I could see, in the east of town, a giant funnel cloud, bruise-colored and agitated, trying to make contact with the corn fields. At once, the all-powerful wind arrived, and the large windows, with which I viewed the wannabe tornado, began to wobble and do a sort of slow motion belly dance without freeing their panes. Needless to say, I returned to the fridge, and the funnel moved on. Storms are beautiful and mysterious. They’ve driven culture and lore, destroyed lives and delivered salvation. And it’s only when you’re face to face with a storm’s unequivocal power that you realize there is poetry in their disruption, that yours is a particulate and vulnerable granularity in a larger cosmic scheme. We engineered The Tempest Issue because storms, more than ever, are grabbing head- lines and unmooring livelihoods. Because destinations are encountering storms that ha- ven’t historically. And because, symbolically, the tempest is within all of us... and one of the many challenges we face here on earth is whether to ride it out, or concede its conse- quence. Along with pictorial homage to storms peppered throughout, we consider other types of atmospheric calamity—from the social upheavals in Iran (pg. 58), the imperative to re- think our diets in the face of inclement food patterns (pg. 56), the seven psychological stages of the tempest (pg. 204), the eye of the LA nightlife storm (pg. 310), and more. Enjoy The Tempest Issue, and we’ll leave you with this Hunter S. Thompson quote a friend happened to send me while in the heavy rain of this issue’s final push (minorly modernized): “So we shall let the reader answer this question for themselves: who is the happier person, they who have braved the storm of life and lived, or they have who have stayed securely on the shore and merely existed?”
Sincerely, Matthew
A
Made with FlippingBook - PDF hosting