I've been hanging out at magazine racks the past few weeks, and it was time well spent ... pouring over the pages of Canada's best publications for alternative literary and arts. What do these magazines have in common? While they may not have wide circulation and are found mainly in small bookstores and specialty magazine shops, they tend to be very influential within their arts communities.

Arts coverage takes a back seat

First stop on our magazine rack tour is This Magazine, a lefty political magazine with a hidden arts agenda. Now in its 33rd year of publishing, it receives some of its funding from the Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council and is mandated to include some fiction, poetry and arts coverage. That's perhaps why it keeps infrequent high-profile contributors like Margaret Atwood high on the masthead.

Unfortunately, this latest May-June issue doesn't have much arts coverage -- just two pages devoted to one odd piece of fiction near the back, way after page after page on the woes of socialist parties, labour groups, and journalists caught up in a fight with Conrad Black. The cover story on 'Debunking Digital Nirvana' turns out to be the transcript of a five-way conversation by a bunch of whining lefties about business controlling the Internet.

But future issues are bound to have more. This issue has a full-page ad for The Great Canadian Literary Hunt, which offers $750 prizes for fiction and poetry. Poems have to be 100 lines or shorter, and stories can be up to 5,000 words ... so check out the rules, and start scribbling, because the deadline's July 1.

Class Act from an Old-Timer

The Canadian Forum is also supported in part by Canada Council and the Ontario Arts Council. However, it has a longer history (it was founded in the 1920s), and a much richer literary tradition. Publisher James Lorimer has done a fine job of keeping The Canadian Forum on track in recent years.

The June issue contains a fascinating article by Keith Garebian on Canadian theatre's unique interpretations of the plays of William Shakespeare. He focuses mainly on the Stratford Festival over the years, but also considers Canadian regionalism. He takes the case far beyond just accents, discussing a production of Two Gentleman of Verona set in a hockey rink, and while he provides scholarly evidence for his opinions, it's written in an easy, accessible style.

The back of the magazine features a fine collection of book reviews, some of them covering popular books such as Eden Robinson's Monkey Beach and Douglas Coupland's Miss Wyoming. This is good writing, in fact far better than anything I've seen in newspapers the past few months.

Right Choices on the Left Coast

Mid-way through our tour of the alternative scene in mags, we head off to to Vancouver ... Geist touts itself as "The Canadian Magazine of Ideas and Culture," and editor-in-chief Stephen Osborne has transformed this magazine over the years from a rather dull West Coast literary review into a lively grab-bag of hot writing.

The grabber in the latest issue is a poem called "Why I Love Wayne Gretzky - an Erotic Fantasy." But there are many other entries that provide some genuine amusement and a lighthearted approach to CanCult that's missing from the mags we looked in columns earlier this week. This has the look and feel of a genuine literary review, but with some of the zing of a 'Zine. (If you're just browsing at the magazine rack, quickly check out the Geist Pronunciation Guide and the Correspondents List for a sample of the cleverness. And you'll likely spring the 5 clams to take it home.)

Geist's heavyweight highlight this month is a photo essay by Christopher Grabowski. Grabowski returned to his native Poland last year and was shocked to discover an impoverished community of scavengers in a coal-mining district south of Warsaw. "It's hard to believe that these photographs were taken on an afternoon in 1999," one of the captions reads, "and not in Stalingrad during World War II, or northern France during World War I." Grabowski's photo essay is a testament to the power of art in politics, far stronger than the thousands of words spilled into the overtly political pages of This Magazine (which I reviewed in Monday's column).

Geist's fiction, like most on the racks these days, is uneven from issue to issue. But the photography and non-fiction writing is far and above anything you'll find in the new Saturday Night. The back-page essay by Alberto Manguel is always worth the price of the magazine, and The Geist crossword puzzle beats any in the biz.

Now I'm going to turn to something a little more timely in this visual era, and look at two very hip publications.

It's a collective, and it shows

Fuse is the work of a Toronto-based art collective. The editorial decisions are largely made by the board, members of which step in to guest-edit. It's supposed to be a quarterly, but it has no dates and from what I can glean from the ads in the latest issue, they might be a couple of months late on publishing a spring or summer issue. A lot of the ads are for shows back in the early winter months.

But that doesn't mean the content is dated. The cover story, in fact, is a timeless look at the struggles of Inuit artists to create video programming to counter the heavy diet of American and Toronto-centric television they receive on satellite from the big broadcasters. It's a fascinating story of a culture trying to survive, and to say it's a microcosm of the struggle all Canadian artists face almost trivializes the Inuit community's unique problem.

Much of the writing in the mag is heavily laced with artspeak and academic footnotes. While it provides a fascinating view of the little-seen world of alternative visual arts and performance arts, it can be a bit much to wade through. Nevertheless, you read about things you'd never see in the papers, such as a piece about the problems of heavy tourist traffic through Auschwitz, technological art about fears of artificial intelligence. This latest issue features a popout bonus: a postcard with art by Paul Lamothe, who has created a unique mythology for the nickel city of Sudbury.

I don't think magazines like Fuse are ever going to make it in the mainstream, but they sure are interesting to pick up once in awhile.

I've left the best for last ... and I bet you've never even heard of ...

Mixing up words and images, making real art

The spring 2000 issue of this "Independent Art & Culture" magazine features mainstream MuchMusic veejay Sook-Yin Lee on the cover, and the accompanying article focuses on the pop star's life away from the cameras as a multidisciplinary artist. The layout is a visual feast of pictures, art and typography -- all of which make the article a wee bit difficult to read, but a lot of fun to browse.

Again, you get articles on fascinating topics that seem to evade the mainstream media. "Til the Bars Break" is a fascinating piece on an up-and-coming Toronto rap star, Ebony, who was convicted 10 years ago at the age of 19, of second-degree murder. Now, hoping to get paroled in a few years, he is trying to re-establish his recording career from the shabby studios of Collins Bay Penitentiary. The Globe and Mail can keep publishing Stephen Reid's controversial articles from prison, all they want, but I hope to hear more about Ebony, who's renamed himself Manifest and hopes to be on the charts some day soon.

The main focus of Mix is on "artist-run culture," and there's an article on SOF Art House, which is in the business of providing cost-efficient studio and darkroom space to photographers. One of the most valuable articles is by Barbara Gilbert, who explains the artist-dealer relationship, spelling out the benefits and pitfalls to aspiring artists hoping to get in with a gallery.

At the back of the magazine is an excellent listing of artist-run galleries and centres across the country. Throughout the magazine are some wonderful ads and announcements that make this a valuable resource and a pleasurable read.

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