what you can do with white-out
and rubber cement
"...and that Fritz Lang." is a zine I used to make before I was any kind of designer. It started during my junior year of college when a friend who was dropping out of Harvard and moving to Albequerque showed me a carton of recycled paper and said he was going to use it to publish his own magazine. I'd never heard of anyone doing this and it seemed like a good idea and it was only much later that I found out how many other people were out there doing this very thing. So, in 1990, secretly in my dorm room, I made the first issue of "...atFL." with some scissors and a few scraps of text. Between that first issue and 1997, I made a total of six issues. By the end, through somewhat unrelated events, I had become a book designer at a large publishing company. From there I went to school for general graphic design and since then have been working as a designer. In the process, I've undergone a sort of progressive accumulation of the professional condition — that is, of knowing too well the inside of how things are made. Paradoxically, this improvement of technical skill can very easily come at the cost of distracting one from the heart of what makes anything wonderful, at least it can too often, in my own case.
Still, there remains in these six issues something that I'm grateful to have captured and given form. There are no themes, no clear plan from issue to issue: "Without schedule, without production consistencies, charmed by luck and unconscious accident, it just goes, a matter of keeping moving" as it says in the Letter from the Editor in #5. But each "Fritz Lang" somehow managed to sound an obscure note of something personal and mysterious but nonetheless right. Much of this is due, I believe, to not knowing what exactly the thing was even as I was making it — in other words, to remaining somewhat innocent of the process that I was in the midst of. That is probably the opposite of the professional condition and so these six little zines maintain a purity of intent that sets a standard now, as a professional, for me to live up to.