Vallium is not the sort of magazine that puts you to sleep. This is a wide awake tribute to indigenous local magazine publishing that reflects a community without ignoring the world at large while giving voice to a generation that finally seems to be reclaiming its voice from MuchMusic and Spin. Now something about that last sentence fits wrong, not because it isn’t true about Vallium, but because Vallium overcomes cultural precepts — of mostly American origin — with a distinctness that belies comparisons to the stereotypes it destroys. Vallium is a magazine that fully realizes the great Canadian tradition of bilingualism. So not only does this magazine give a voice to hipster English Canada culture like Sloan, and Moncton English bands like The Great Balancing Act, but it also gives us insight into hipster Acadian culture. Of course, this is only the case for those who read French, which is a lot of people, but me, I had the unfortunate luck of going to high-school in the Maryland suburbs and not learning my French very well. As a result, I could only splutter and pick out words from the France Daigle interview by Marc Arseneau. This was a real shame, because I recently read her strange, wonderful book real life in translation and was intrigued by the silence of her prose and the way she conveys a innocent desperation into the urban Monctonites she portrays. Anyway, if somebody wants to translate this interview for me I will give them a free subscription to broken pencil. Getting back to the Acadian thing, the photo-essay called Acadia Erotica proved to be a perfectly bizarre celebration of the beauty of things slightly off kilter. What finally convinced me that this was a great magazine was the inclusion of a supposed interview with Tea Party printed entirely in the font Zapf Dingbats. Anyone who fails to appreciate the understated irony of such a maneuver has probably never had the pleasure of seeing Canada’s number one poseur band do their Doors imitation. The first person to decode that interview also gets a free subscription to broken pencil (value: 90,000 dollars). Don’t take pills. Read Vallium.
magazine / #6, 66 pages / publisher: Mario Doucette / main creator: Mario Doucette (editor) / $2.95 / 140 rue Botsford, local 22, Moncton, NB, E1C 4X4