UPDATE NATION

I have not updated for awhile. Normally I would like to have one specific topic to yammer on about but there’s too much going on. First off, we are completing our December issue, five weeks in the making. Terribly busy. It’s always a process to put out a magazine and every once in awhile you ram your little forehead up against the fence like a goat looking for a clover patch, but every issue, it drops, and you feel pumped. No matter what crapitude you go through to get there, somehow it always feels better once it’s in layout: like your ideas have come to fruition and yo, it’s kind of VERY awesome that you get to do this. Kind of like a dream job? Yes. My first fanzine was when I was ten. I made it on my commodore 64 from PrintShop (old heads know). It was called the Daily Bugle and I distinctly recall one of the pages had a giant tooth graphic and the admonition, in Lucinda font: “DONT FORGET TO BRUSH YOUR TEETH.” (NEW FADER COLUMN!) I meant to sell it to our neighbors for ten cents but I only made one copy. I probably threw it away, embarrassed, once I got older, but let’s just say I’ve been making magazines for a long time. Magazines of sorts. Or wanted to anyway. Moving on.
We put out a new magazine, which I am terribly proud of. The America issue/photo special: It is seeable / downloadable for free on the internet in PDF form here, though I recommend at least flipping through the book in a bookstore… the photos are too phenomenal not to touch on glossy paper. We are having a tiny tiny tiny celebratory party with super secret special guest DJs on Wednesday in Manhattan from 7-10 pm, if you want to come email julianne@thefader.com with the subject header “MY PRESIDENT IS BLACK” in all caps and write me three sentences about why you are voting Obama.
I have been twittering my face off. If you are not familiar, get familiar.
I have become obsessed with /enamored of Mad Men, the only zeitgeistical television show I did not watch until Pete, trying to reference it, said, “That is the only zeitgeistical television show I watch but you don’t.” Hence: I watch it now. The writing is excellent and every episode, I thank god I was not alive and a woman before the woman’s movement. Betty Draper, with her wistful, suicidal appeasing, reminds me so much of a character from a book: April Wheeler, the tragutante from the apocalyptic marriage in Richard Yates’ Revolutionary Road. It’s a book that will send you to the floor in agony. It’s also being made into a movie so read it fast so the characters can be fully formed in your mind before the snipes hit the streets with the real actors who shall not be named here.
I have finished reading graphic novels: American Widow, the heartbreaking memoir of a woman whose husband died in 9/11, when she was eight months pregnant.
And the new Love and Rockets by, as ever, Los Bros Hernandez, the most important graphic novelists of all time at least to me. The new stories have grandmas who are superheroes, which speaks to me culturally and feministically, if that is a word. Los Bros are male feminists from the olden days for real.
Bout to go in on David Heatley’s My Brain is Hanging Upside Down. Kinda feeling like that as I write this–shipping the magazine! long day!–so if the prose is not massaging your brain-face like you’d like it, that is why.
I have been watching this video that Shane sent me about a prehistoric shark discovered off the coast of Japan in 2007, and thinking about how its weird tiered teeth basically wants to rip off all our faces.