Letter from the Editor

Or, How I Learned To Stop Worrying And Love The Deadline

I am a world-class procrastinator. Case in point: I paused to take a nap between the “world-” and the “class” in that last sentence and only got around to finishing it three days later when I could no longer handle the accusing look of that dangling dash. If there were a World Series of Procrastination, I wouldn’t even get there until several weeks after they demolished the stadium. I have a clever sentence to finish this paragraph floating around my head, but I’m sure I’ll paste it in long before we go to press.

Anyway, idiotic boasting aside, it’s a miracle that you’re reading this, our second issue of The High Hat. Welcome! We were shooting for a (HA!) monthly publication schedule, but, hey, 8-10 weeks is ok, too. Make no mistake: this is a ’zine, and we’re on ’zine time. But, luckily, we have an absolutely brilliant issue here, with our first-ever special feature (on Sam Peckinpah, no less) in the Nitrate section. (1)

So, delve in and enjoy! We’ll try to keep this coming out on a semi-regular basis (every two months seems possible, but we’re not making any promises), and please feel free to join our yahoogroup if you want email notices. Also, all writers with ideas are more than welcome to pitch articles & essays to us! Can’t have a good web ’zine without brilliant articles.

OK, this is the part where roll out the thank-you list. Our writers are giving us top-notch work for nothing, so they get the first thanks. Superbig thanks to Don Slutes, who joins our editorial staff as a copy editor and coder for this issue. Thanks to the people who linked to us all over the web, from Yahoo to SXSW to lots of great blogs. Thanks to you for reading The High Hat.

Oh, and thanks to PinkStainlessTail at Metafilter for this: “The High Hat: The Magazine That Treats You Like Some Guinea Fresh Off the Boat, Even Though You're Too Big for That.” That cracked me up but good. If we could afford commercials, we’d hire Jon Polito to say that for us in a heartbeat.

Hayden Childs
Editor-in-Chief

1. To those of you who haven’t figured out our oh-so-clever section names: “Pops & Clicks” = Music, “Nitrate” = Movies, “Static” = TV, “Marginalia” = Lit/Art, “Detritus” = Personal Essays, and “Screeds” = Politics.