Editor’s Letter
Dear Reader—
We are in your magazine. We are out on the streets. We’re publishing and not publishing. We’re putting on shows. We’re climbing twisted ladders. We’re biking through Amherst, Allentown, the West Side. We’re walking down Chippewa on a Saturday night with Lucy. We’re being mistaken for ghosts in the Outer Harbor. We’re standing four stories tall and looking out over the water. The sun is setting, and the windmills turn endlessly. We have been silent. You have forgotten our name. We haven’t forgotten yours.
I am the co-editor of Rocket Lawn Chairs. Or was. For one good year, I spent every minute I should have spent studying herding artists, designing posters, handing out zines—why? I first came to Buffalo four years ago. I was eighteen years old and knew what everyone who’s never been to Buffalo knows about Buffalo: that the winters are harsh, something about hot wings, close to Canada, etc. Before I came here I thought of it as a place I’d go to and then leave immediately when school was over. And yet—here I am. I fell in love in Buffalo. Three times. I got my heart broken twice. I’ve met people on the street, in parks, in basements or attics, at galleries and open mics and art shows and museums that frankly couldn’t exist in any other place. Where else do mass mobs of bicyclists take over the city’s streets at midnight? Where else do they do it every Sunday? I’ve climbed up nearly every object and structure in this city that I’ve looked at and, on a whim, decided I wanted to climb. You can’t do that in Chicago. You might, in some rare instances, be able to do that in New York. In Buffalo, there are community gardens. In Buffalo, there are guerilla gardeners. You meet people who’ll come to your open mic with a bottle of wine they made themselves from fruit trees growing freely in the city. You meet people who’ll help you fix an attic for no particular reason at all,
other than that they know how to and they like your project.
This is a city that was built on D.I.Y. There is a machine in Buffalo, but it’s not like the machine in Chicago. If there’s something you think needs done and nobody’s doing it, you can almost certainly just do it. You will probably not be stopped. And if you are, there are people around you, a community, who’ll be there to back you up. In the summer, my girlfriend and I would bike down a single street and she’d be recognized by three to five different people. This is not a city where it’s worth it to be invisible. And then there’s you. You’re stuck in Amherst. Maybe you’ve come from abroad. Maybe you’ve grown up in the suburbs and rarely, if ever, go into the city. You go to class. You go back to the dorms or maybe some compromise-version pseudo-apartment. You watch Netflix. You do homework. On the weekend, maybe you go to some bar on South Campus, or drink in the dorms, or, if in the city at all, beeline to Chippewa St. You think Buffalo sucks. You think the winter never ends. You are why I did what I did. I implore you: come to the city. Come to Allen Street and see local bands and artists and poets. Go to the Nature Reserve at Tifft near the Outer Harbor. Ask a punk about a show. Hang out in Delaware Park or Bidwell and Elmwood. Come to the West Side. No, it’s not “the ghetto”—where in god’s name have you been living that makes you consider the West Side a ghetto? Come to the West Side! This city is waiting for you. This life—your life— is waiting for you. The world is waiting for you. Don’t wait for the school or your parents or the television or me or any damned thing at all to give it to you, because they won’t. Tag. You’re it. --Metonymically Meta-anonymous in Chicago
STAFF 2013 Editor in Chief Keighley Farrell Managing Editor Angelina Bruno Creative Director Emily Butler Assistant Creative Director Babita Persaud Photo Editor Steve Bernhardt Web Editor Gabi Gosset Copy Editor Audrey Foppes Associate Editors Laura Borschel Jori Breslawski Sushmita Sircar Circulation Director Matt Benevento Business Manager Nick Robin Assistant Ad Manager Adinda Anggriadipta Contributing Staff Adam Johnson Cara Shelhamer 05