Heavy Traffic Magazine Launch
Mast Books
East Village, NYC
3/8/2024
It behooves any artist of any stripe to move through their milieu with mind questing to understand. One may and should have their precious personal project, their vision which no general trend or contemporary taste stands to shake them from, but always an artist keen to make work for the world around them and yet to come must cultivate a base of knowledge concerning the environment they occupy. It is in this spirit that I continue to go to literary events in NYC. It this spirit which led to my being turned away at a Forever Mag party a week ago, and it is in this spirit yet again that my partner and I attended the launch event for Patric McGraw’s Heavy Traffic Magazine — another of the few glossy lit mags to have cropped up out of the downtown scene in the last few years.
Forever and Heavy Traffic draw from the same crowd — uber-hip, secretly moneyed, too-cool-for-school-post-grads, a crowd of internet micro-celebs and ‘theory’ inflected gossip bloggers. Heavy Traffic’s publication is much more austere as an object. Mostly black and white throughout, the spin being McGraw’s penchant for typographical and layout experiments — stories spill over and off of the pages, single sentence cross the splayed valley, random phrases enlarged. There’s something here that’s interesting, and McGraw’s intro to the volume hints at it: words as image and image as word.
The event itself amounted to 18 plastic-wrapped copies of the magazine, laid out and hovered over, and a few display copies to flip through. That’s about the long-and-short of the launch. No performances from the writers featured, no music — no refreshments of any sort. Almost impressive how unfussy the whole thing was.
Of course, with that comes a different sort of pretense. Where the Forever Mags of the world wish desperately to make literature clubby, cliquey, and dramatic, Heavy Traffic’s allegiances seem to lie within the camp of fine art — or, worse, the worlds of high advertisement/design.
The choice of venue was fitting. Mast Books, a little art book shop on Avenue A, keeps itself stocked with books that are first and foremost interesting objects. Design is the name of the night and I, for one, can really appreciate a good book cover.
Though I once again found myself milling about in a crowd that might not be exactly my people, I have no small amount of respect for an idea executed fully., And if there’s anything that Heavy Traffic seems to do, it’s do whatever it is they’re doing without explanation or half-measures.
