”

“So whaddaya say we swill some brewskies, listen to our Cure vinyl and read the new issue of Clockwise Cat?”

CATATONICALLY SPEAKING

Fall may very well be that time of year when things commence their decay, readying themselves for a recycling back to life after a stay in oblivion’s glacial climes. But I say, let fall be a time of rebirth! Especially where Clockwise Cat is concerned – but also, I just really freaking love fall, and its purgatorial place between the “heaven” of summer and the “hell” of winter. (But frankly, summers in Atlanta are far too sweltering to be considered heavenly in my book, and winters here are too mild to be branded as anything negative. But I digress, and digressions are BAD. Or so I’m told.)

The point is, fall is a deliriously beatific season, both aesthetically and temperamentally. Aesthetically, fall is nature’s mercurially impressionistic/surrealistic painting, with its softly shifting muted hues, ghostly light, and shedding trees whose floating shapes like tiny chromatic creatures drift languorously into other worlds. Temperamentally, fall is subtle, not brutal like winter, nor scarring like summer. It wraps you in garments of cool caressing winds, so that you are not bitten to the bone, and shocked into sleepiness, as in winter, but, rather, soothed and awakened – alert.

Clockwise Cat is experiencing an alert reawakening, of sorts, during this fall season. For seven years we have been housed at Blogger (at www.clockwisecat.blogspot.com), that dastardly beast of a blogging venue. Actually, Blogger was fine for a while, but when it updated its format, it contained too many glitches, and I just got tired of dealing with it. It was time for a new look and our own domain, anyway. So we scooted on over to WordPress, and enlisted the help of multi-talented Ezra Letra, whose graphic overhaul of Clockwise Cat perfectly pinpointed the quirky-edgy aura of the zine. Then we done bought ourselves a domain name – and Violin! We gots us a new home.

So yeah. What better way to celebrate a rebirth than to launch the new zine close to the advent of Halloween and Dia del Los Muertos, where nattily attired skeletons tap dance with the ghosts of yesterday and the free-wheeling spirits of tomorrow – those generously gifted, visionary scribes who help make Clockwise Cat what it is.