Heart stopper Alex Steed takes Angioplasty Media to the streets BY TANYA WHITON

Angioplasty Media founder Alex Steed is impatient with artifice, but totally seduced by swank design. He’s torn: He’d like to publish work that is aesthetically pleasing, but that has an immediate, documentary, spontaneous feel. Occasionally, he says, beautifully designed print material can look like "it might be something in and of itself: It might not convey meaning. But I’ve been conditioned by professional media," he says. "You have to look at something and think it’s cool before you feel compelled to read it."

From age 15, Steed has been fascinated with disseminating ideas and creative communities: As a high school student, he made stapled and photo-copied zines and hitched rides from Cornish to Portland to hand them out on the street. "Sometimes in the do-it-yourself realm people can get a little self-righteous, but doing zines is a great way to communicate with people," Steed says. Now in his early twenties, he’s ready to do something more sophisticated: In January, 2004, he and designer/collaborator Arielle Walrath launched angioplastymedia.com: "the first thing I’ve molded under one title."

Angioplasty Media attempts to combine artful design with extemporaneous, authentic prose, posting weekly stories, comics, and music reviews, and their next project is a quarterly publication. In Unbroken Masses of Text, contributors touch on a range of topics, from "Keeping Busy: the Middle-American Obsession with Working, Labor & Occupation" to "Heroes in the Public Consciousness: David Bowie, Mariah Carey & Brian Wilson." Within each topic are a series of idiosyncratic subtopics: the notion of the hero in romantic comedy; the inherent connection between heroism and violence.

In "Hero: Against," writer Nate Kautz closes an articulate ¾ though brief ¾ discussion of heroics and identity with the following: "As long as following our appointed heroes’ footsteps takes us off a fucking cliff, let’s find another way okay?"

Angioplasty’s other goal is a "sound journal" ¾ a quarterly compilation of songs by local bands. The first, titled The People in My Neighborhood are Masterminds of Music, includes the Ponys, Extendo-Ride, As Fast As, and the Enchantments, among others, and is slated for release in September. Steed says that in the music community, everyone is really helpful, and he’d like to do from a literary perspective what musicians are already doing: building an interconnected set of relationships that result in greater creativity and productivity.

"But musicians are performers," he says. "You can see them. If I’m looking for a writer for Angioplasty, I have to bait people to come to me." So whom is he looking for? A spell working in a local bookstore left Steed feeling that the more consumed with writerly identity a person was, the less compelling their work: "There’s a buffer between the experiences in the stories and [the reader]," he says. "I met a lot of people who were really into Kafka, or into saying they read Kerouac. I work with murderers, whores, and drug dealers now. [Their] stories are much more interesting."

The writing in existing volumes of Unbroken Masses of Text, and in a small sampler Steed gave out at local hip-hop artist Sontiago’s CD release, is very much in the "man on the street" vein ¾ the style is casual, even if the ideas are complex, as in "Heroes: Against." And the design is shit-hot ¾ really, really nicely done. But what is perhaps most engaging about the material Steed has published so far are the short bios he does on his contributors, which display an obvious love for people, for Portland, and for Maine in general.

In "A Love Affair With Portland Maine," Steed introduces contributor Matt Mowatt: "Matt Mowatt gave me a ride to the barber today. He told me a story about a boy from Northern Maine who was held up for a pack of cigarettes. He later explained he was looking to get his hair cut, too. He couldn’t bring himself to get his haircut at the same place I get mine cut because if he had my haircut," he explains, "I’d look like one of the guys from Kids in the Hall."

"When I was a lot younger, I’d always draw maps of how things were related," he says. "I’d make a center, and then connect everything to the center. [For example] I’d make [a classmate] the center, and then figure out how everyone in the school was connected to him, and then everything around the school, and so on." Steed is doing just that with the local literature scene, and Angioplasty Media will soon be publishing some of their incendiary, funny, and hip-to-look-at content in traditional paper-based format: Stay tuned.

"Print means you have to put your money where your mouth is," says Steed. "It challenges the quality, and if I’m gonna work my ass off waiting tables [to produce it], it better be good."

Tanya Whiton can be reached at twhiton@prexar.com