For Expozine this year, John and I pulled together this small zine consisting of two hard-wrought poems. The poems were composed/written by us over the course of 4 days and nights, addressing our tried and true themes of love and loss, gentrification and war, isolation and community, solidarity and suicide.
Despite the short timeline (we were stapling and folding into the wee hours of Saturday morning), I’m really proud of these little poems and the elegantly restrained format and typography. The zine was published in a limited edition of 50 copies.
This year’s issue of Four Minutes to Midnight is dedicated to our favourite festival here in the city; Expozine, Montreal’s annual small press, comics, and zine fair. Celebrating it’s tenth anniversary this year, Expozine has always provided John and I with an amazing venue for us to showcase our work, and welcomed us into a lovely community of support and inspiration. Our seventh issue won the first ever Expozine award for Best English Zine (the first year I was back in Montreal), and since then we’ve been honoured to be a part of the festival, with me hopping on board the organising committee a couple of years back. The DIY ethic of the festival has always appealed to both the aesthetic and politics of 2356, and it has acted as the catalyst for many dear friendships and allies. Given all this, it only made sense that for their tenth birthday, we bake them a Four Minutes to Midnight zine-cake, complete with a gold-foil stamped cover.
The bilingual issue features interviews with Expozine co-founders Louis Rastelli and Billy Mavreas, long-time co-organiser Pascal Fioramore, two essays exploring the independent cultural scene in Montreal by Sebastian Hell and Stefan Christoff, and a 70+ page collage of selected works extracted from the thousands of zines collected in the Expozine archives. Given the immensity of the festival, our selection is obviously biased (ahem, curated…), reflecting themes of personal interest (eg. social anxiety, cats, sex/love, and revolution!). Still, one of my favorite parts of the issue is the near complete list that we compiled of the 1100+ exhibitors that have tabled at the event over the years (set in 5-point type).
As I was going through my archives tonight, I realised I had never properly posted about this small pamphlet we produced and distributed back in 2008. Lately, I’ve been thinking a lot about the new directions I want to take the magazine in (and the 2356 project generally), and this is a telling touchstone from the past to some of these ideas.
The pamphlet is a transcript of the speech delivered by cultural critic Brian Holmes at the Democracy in America exhibition, presented by Creative Time in New York in 2008. In it he compellingly argues for artists to engage with the radical opportunities presented by the financial crisis. A message as relevant today as it was then.
I first met Brian as part of the Declarations of Interdependence and the Immediacy of Design conference at Concordia University almost ten years ago. It was a heady time for me, with a lot of thinking about the relationship between design, art and activism. As a decade since then rounds out, I find myself thinking deeply about this again, and the position I’m now in to enact those ideas. So, many thanks Brian, for inspiring me in the first place, and allowing us to publish this important work!
2009 marks four decades of me being a published poet
in this once greatest country so try and find any of my
books in your local bookstore and you’d be shit out of
luck yet if I had similarly wasted my life doing
almost anything else I could be retired by now with a
modest check and better teeth but all I’ve got to show
are consequential words across an empty white space
– Happy Hour’s epigraph
The eleventh issue of Four Minutes to Midnight is a radical break from the format of the last four issues, consisting of Happy Hour, a book of 60 poems by F.A. Nettelbeck, lavishly illustrated by Sophie Jodoin, and Fugue XI, printed and bound as a slim edition of 28 pages. Production details include a double bump of silver ink on black cardstock covers, bright pink endpapers and a hand stamped bellyband holding the books together. Interior pages are printed on Rolland Enviro100 paper (FSC 100% post-consumer fibre, chlorine free process using biogas energy). The double-issue is printed in an edition of 350 copies.
Four Minutes to Midnight issue 10 has just been reviewed by the reknowned design critic Kenneth Fitzgerald as part of his Chronological Survey. Kenneth has recently reviewed books by Stefan Sagmeister and Debbie Millman, and was a regular contributor to the late, great, Emigre magazine, so needless to say, I’m humbled by the company. I’m inspired and honoured by his critique, not (simply) because of the considered praise from someone I highly respect, but moreso by the depth of his analysis and the revelatory insights of his interpretation.
His understanding of what we’re trying to do with the zine is frighteningly accurate, to the point of spotting the genesis of this project in Steve Baker’s article from New Perspectives: Critical Histories of Graphic Design. Even I had forgotten about that! While studying at Post St. Joost in Breda, I found a stack of the three issue Visible Language series in an old locker, devoured the articles, and shortly thereafter began the process that led to FMTM as part of my MA thesis.
In reading Fitzgerald’s review, I’m reaffirmed that what we’re doing is relevant and has the possibility of genuinely connecting on an aesthetic and emotional level. I’m also challenged by his criticism of its stylistic codification and the danger of commodification. There’s much more work to be done.
you,
dressed in a formica yellow flower-print skirt
dark eye’d long leg’d, sweet lip’d,
took a pull from the bottle and
blew a line of smoke into the sky,
laughing “fuck them!”
(it didn’t really matter who)
and I fell into it then…
The tenth issue of Four Minutes to Midnight explores the idea of radical beauty (a theme inspired from this year’s Memefest) interpreted through the words and images of over 30 artists. Our ‘anniversary’ issue is the thickest (and prettiest) one yet, clocking in at a tidy 180 pages.
Some of my personal favorites among the diverse work featured in the issue include a selection of poetry from American ‘outsider’ poet F.A. Nettelbeck, two collaborations between myself and Montreal photographer Dita Kubin, a series of beautiful, seductive portraits painted by Kevin Ledo, and the surreal illustrations from my former student Ilinca Balaban.
For the ninth issue of Four Minutes to Midnight, we sent out a call for submissions with the tentative theme of “conflict and silence” and were happy to receive responses that explored this relationship through personal and autobiographical perspectives. Gathering these together alongside numerous fragments found along the way, the issue was crafted over the course of a year in the margins of our days and nights. It was truly a labour of love to produce and we hope that it shows…
Featuring the work of over 25 contributors, FMTM 9 is filled with 112 pages of radical textual & visual stimulation. Without a doubt, our sexiest issue yet!
you,
For the ninth issue of Four Minutes to Midnight, we sent out a call for submissions with the tentative theme of “conflict and silence” and were happy to receive responses that explored this relationship through personal and autobiographical perspectives. Gathering these together alongside numerous fragments found along the way, the issue was crafted over the course of a year in the margins of our days and nights. It was truly a labour of love to produce and we hope that it shows…