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fiction passing as "real-life drama" jockey for the same time slot, where does art fit in? A simple answer: art is a corrective, poised at that knife edge between happening and reflec-tion, both reproducing the truth and adding the sheen that only craft and considered perspec-tive can provide. Truffaut once wrote that Hitchcock had intensified life as well as cinema. The same can be said of art in general. Just as art struggles to find its place in this world, the works in this issue restlessly con-front ideas, places, moments. Some encapsulate a single instant, as in M.A. Schaffner's "Slower Time" or Oke Mbachu's clear-eyed affection for human faces and smiles. Christopher Bernard goes for the longer view in his apprehension of (and with?) Beauty, in the final installment of his "Blind Venus" series, while Anna Sears and 
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E.G. Barrow artfully document worn-and-torn lives as well as sanctuaries and small towns. Rebbecca Brown's "while only" marries the theoretical with the fascinatingly inchoate, and Fred Ferraris's humorously vivid prose pieces are proof that there exists a natural magic that surpasses idols (Amer-ican or otherwise) and Bus Uncles on media-paid binges. As the flood of artifice threatens to over-run the world, we humbly submit this issue as the finger in the dyke. We would be remiss if we did not tip our caps to our own irascible oldster, the inimitable Alfred Robinson, who passed away recently. Christopher Bernard contributes a moving tribute to the "emperor of Id" - good night, sweet emperor. -- Ho Lin
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