I confess, I have been looking forward to 1999 for a long time. I’m excited about the millennium. As the lunatics, heretics, and cassandras predict the world supply of popcorn popping all at once and penguins suddenly babbling in Portuguese as planes crash towards the ocean, my sense of impending doom is belittled my excitement. This year is the countdown year. I have prepared myself with several calendars, crossing out days with an unparalleled glee. Years from now, I wonder what I will remember in particular about 1999.What will you remember? What will others studying our tribe centuries from now think 1999 meant? What movie, what song, what city, what book will represent this year? Should I hang on to the Divas issue of People for future generations? Does Pavarotti singing with the Spice Girls mean that something has gone terribly, terribly wrong? What painting will represent not only the turn of the century but the birth of a new millennium? But maybe the problem is we want everything figured out before it happens. We assume the movie will have a happy ending because it always does. Now that a major Van Gogh exhibition has reached Los Angeles, fittingly in 1999, there’s an obvious observation that no one wants to miss being part of something great, something out of the ordinary. When Van Gogh was alive and painting, what was Los Angeles? Not much. Look at them both in 1999, and who would have thought? Who wants to miss discovering another Van Gogh? It’s too depressing to think that there is someone out there, talented, unknown. Just one look at the proliferation of home pages on the web and we know that our most ominous fear is obscurity. We want to be "connected" so someone knows who we are. So we’ve launched this magazine, hoping to find people with common interests, hoping for a forum to discuss what’s out there-movies-music -books-art-travel, you name it. It’s digesting and discovering and sharing and tearing apart. Somewhere to complain about things that are too intellectual and simultaneously brainless. Whether moved, bored to tears, impressed, or disgusted, hopefully something will pique your interest.

  Anji Milanovic