We like things. We like to talk about things. We like to write about the things that we talk about. This is a constant. Something new: this semester we've actually started doing things.

This February, in partnership with the Alternative Media Center we co-sponsored the Lost Film Festival, a traveling showcase of independent and underground film. In April, WAKE and Yale Radio brought the free-noise post-apocalyptic psych-folk No Neck Blues Band to campus. In early May, we will host the first annual WAKE Student Documentary Film Festival, to create a forum for Yale students examining various aspects of culture, here and abroad. We have also expanded into the electronic frontier, establishing a website on the Internet with a page on the wide world of the worldwide web (www.yale.edu/wake). The site will boast (should we boast? why not...) archives, artifacts, and souvenirs of our collective cultural endeavors.

But back to the artifact in hand. This issue we have wandered into unknown territory, gotten seduced by cars and guitars, guns and girdles, heroes and heartthrobs. Maia Jasper takes us for a ride with The Flaming Knights, the first pan-ethnic motorcycle club, while Megan Pugh keeps us safe, arming us with the experience of the Memphis Gun Show. Samantha Culp welcomes us to Little World, a Japanese theme park that encapsulates anthropological fact and fiction, while Alex Nemser exposes the rock-star fantasies that syncopate guitar advertisements. Tom Isler also drives into the realm of advertisements, examining the line between art and ad in a series BMW-sponsored "films" that even Cannes is questioning.

But we don't only question abstract ideas: cultural-collagist and musician-cum-artist DJ Spooky answers to James Sumner, while Rebecca Honig speaks to renowned Israeli author A.B. Yehoshua. In her faux review of the nonexistent art film, Cremaster 6 (an extension of artist Matthew Barney's five part Cremaster Cycle), Anne Weber weaves a fictitious web of art historical dialogue around a transcendent narrative orgy. Bodices rip and members throb in Ana Nersessian's celebration of her childhood fling with romance novels. And in the end, all the WAKE staff is swooning for Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore, whose interview is rendered with all the reverence of a teenage fan's scribblings.

In this issue, WAKE responds to the barometric flux of a constantly shifting contemporary stratosphere.