Matthew Kinlin: Five years on since the original publication, what motivated you to return to and expand the book into Midnight Double Feature: Director’s Cut?
Kenneth M. Cale: Sweat Drenched Press, its original publisher, asked me a couple of times to expand Midnight Double Feature, but I turned them down. However, we noticed there was an issue with the print-on-demand version of MDF, and, as we would have to do another proof anyway, I reluctantly said I would try to do something with it. Soon after that, I hit upon a structural idea which really excited me, and this version of MDF grew from there.
In the original, there were two cinemas, a sci-fi one and a horror one, with a double-bill playing in each. In the expanded version, the two new screenings doubling the length of the book. These are not new genres, though. These are the familiars of the original cinemas, and they share stylistic and thematic elements with the original ones. This gives a symmetry to MDF’s overall shape which wasn’t present in the original. It’s palindromic almost. MDF feels like a complete, finished work to me now. I was so glad C22 wanted to put it out after the demise of Sweat Drenched.
MK: You’re known mainly for digital collage and glitch art. Midnight Double Feature: Director’s Cut combines both handmade and digital collage. Can you talk a little about that?
KMC: A lot of the doubles in MDF are intentional, but something that wasn’t really planned was that the book marked an important change in my work, my transition from analogue collage to digital. The book is almost exactly is half and half. “Trapperkeeper” and “Time’s Wound” were the first wholly digital pieces I did. I remember being struck by the possibilities of glitch and digital and really excited by them. I’ve been exploring those possibilities ever since.
MK: I liked the neon ENTER at the start of each section. It felt perverse and nocturnal, akin to something like the opening credits to Gaspar Noe’s Enter the Void or Club Silencio in Mulholland Drive. We are being ushered into a secret space. What were your intentions here?
KMC: A threshold for the dweller. The turning of a page as the opening of a door. Besides, what poet can resist a liminal space or two?
MK: In The Poetics of Space, Gaston Bachelard writes, “When the image is new, the world is new.” The bookopens with the beautiful line, “At night, these images slip through the skylight of the mind.” Can you speak about this impressionistic approach?
KMC: I guess the idea comes from Jess Walter’s novel, The Zero. In Walter’s novel, which is about the aftermath of 9/11, the main protagonist suffers from amnesia. The gaps in his memory echo the great holes in the ground where the Twin Towers used to be, and the events of the novel take place in the vicinity of Ground Zero. With MDF, though, it’s more the imagined trauma around a series of events may or may not have taken place. And as we move from cinema to cinema, we’re mapping out this psychic terrain. And as were in among the shadows and the fragments, an impressionistic approach felt the way to go.
MK: In The Book of Disquiet, Fernando Pessoa writes, “Everything around me is evaporating. My whole life, my memories, my imagination and its contents, my personality – it’s all evaporating. I continuously feel that I was someone else, that I felt something else, that I thought something else. What I’m attending here is a show with another set. And the show I’m attending is myself.” What are we watching in Midnight Double Feature: Director’s Cut?
KMC: The detritus of memory. Guilt or denial ravaging the mind like fire through a forest. The refusal to acknowledge your own actions and culpability. The mind has a way of revealing itself to itself, and if we choose to look away, it will find more engaging ways of bringing things to our attention. Here, that’s through the cinemas. We often watch shows or films as a distraction. But we can only distract ourselves so much for so long.
MK: I kept returning to this short line, “Now is collapsing.” It seems to capture the disruptive elements of your work. You later describe being, “Caught between non-word and non-thought. Between non-thought and non-image. So I linger.” How are you exploring the present?
KMC: The “Now is collapsing” line comes from “Outer Malad”, and that poem was partly inspired by Phillip K Dick’s novel, Martian Time-Slip. The present, or the very fabric reality as we know it, suddenly giving way like a sinkhole is a very PKD concept. Where he would externalize the exploration of that idea, I went internal. With MDF, when I was writing these poems, I felt a growing sense of darkness on the horizon and within us as a society, and I think these poems are exposing that darkness to the light in that hope of exorcising it. Sadly, our daily lives have only accelerated further since these poems were written and that darkness has deepened. The information overload keeps in a constant state of flux, a low-grade feverishness too. I wonder what effect all that has on our psyches. How does this horror and chaos and misinformation we experience as we scroll through image after image on our devices impact us? We all know we could do more to stop these terrible forces who have wormed their way into power – how does our subconscious cope with our own complicity in their actions? These are interesting questions, and ones without easy answers. “Between non-thought and non-image” could be us continuing to hide; but it could also be the last sanctuary we have from the reach of these dark forces.
MK: Laura Palmer in Twin Peaks: Fire Walk with Me looks at the ceiling and replies to Donna Hayward, “Why are you so interested in who I’m going to see at night? Night-time is my time.” What is your relationship to night?
KMC: An ambivalent one. I’ve always been attracted to cityscapes at night. I spent about five years living in Asia, and one of my favourite things was exploring cities like Seoul and Osaka when the sun went down. I loved the neon and night air, and I think that’s had a huge impact on my collage aesthetic. On the other hand, I’ve suffered from periodic bouts of insomnia for as long as I can remember, so I’ve spent many nights lying in bed unable to shut off the thought-tap. It’s probably why I’m such a fan of Beckett. I see a lot of Beckett and insomnia in MDF.
MK: William Gibson opens Neuromancer with, “The sky above the port was the colour of television, tuned to a dead channel.” Your writing has a dayglo feel with descriptions such as, “u were a fever of fever of brilliante, minarets, coin slots.” There’s a similar blurring of the biological, technological and erotic in your glitch art. What is the appeal of these accelerated elements?
KMC: I’m not sure. I never go into the creation of collages with a preconceived idea of an overall composition, or even with specific images in mind. Usually, I’ll just flick through photos until I come to one that grabs me, then work quickly and instinctively from there. Of course, there will be things you gravitate towards more than others – certain images, colours –but I really try not to question or overthink things. I’m often surprised by what I come up with. I attempt a similar thing with the poems, but the process is slower and more exploratory, the editorial voice harder to please.
MK: The goddess Venus appears throughout Midnight Double Feature. What is her role?
KMC: Right now, I see Venus as a kind of Virgil figure to whoever our Dante is in MDF, guiding them towards integration, or oblivion, or both. But my thoughts on Venus change each time I come back to the work.
MK: This expanded Director’s Cut of Midnight Double Feature features an ending that substitutes J.G. Ballard’s Marilyn Monroe, scorched with radiation burns in The Atrocity Exhibition, for Michelle Williams. You describe, “Michelle Williams supine across Martian landscape. Michelle Williams as landscape.” Can you discuss the coda?
KMC: “Coda” came from watching a film called My Week with Marilyn. In that film we are watching Williams, who experienced the tragic loss of her husband Heath Ledger only a year or so before filming this movie, playing another tragic figure, Monroe, shortly after she suffered a miscarriage in her own life. There are many echoes and reverberations going on there, but I think the poem is mainly about our relationship to the 20th Century. In The Atrocity Exhibition, it’s important to remember that Monroe and Reagan and Kennedy were all contemporary figures when Ballard wrote it. Reagan, for example, wouldn’t even be president for another decade or so after those chapters were written. So – why not use a contemporary actress like Williams for the landscape instead someone like Marilyn Monroe, who died decades earlier? We need to investigate contemporary figures imaginatively to make sense of the world around us, to fully understand what we’re dealing with. Also, I think there’s a need to get out from under the 20th century and its ideas, “the doldrums of past imagination”. Although we’re 25 years into the 21st century, it feels like we are still operating within the framework of the 1900s, still playing by its rules in material ways. It’s like we’re so spooked by the present, we’re afraid to look to the future, and so we end up looking backwards, and holding onto these mid/late-20th Century cultural icons like Monroe or The Beatles like talismans, hoping that they will somehow how lead us unscathed to the 50s and 60s in this century, rather than properly confronting the past as it manifests in our present. Obviously, by heavily referencing The Atrocity Exhibition, a book written in the late 1960s, there’s a fair bit of irony going on in “Coda” too.
MK: Lastly, if you could screen a double feature at the end of the world, what two films would you show?
KMC: Tarkofsky’s Nostalghia. Jim Henson’s Muppet Treasure Island.
Matthew Kinlin lives and writes in Glasgow. His published works include Teenage Hallucination (Orbis Tertius Press, 2021); Curse Red, Curse Blue, Curse Green (Sweat Drenched Press, 2021); The Glass Abattoir (D.F.L. Lit, 2023); Songs of Xanthina (Broken Sleep Books, 2023); Psycho Viridian (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) and So Tender a Killer (Filthy Loot, 2025).
from Symphony No. 13 (deconstructed idyll idol) from Insignificant Figures
A form extant a slow movement through dissonance sonorities sought in faces staring from inside the framed photo uncertain partitions terminating a past in a blur the eye returns to observe a door open intermittent light and other faces unravelling sparrows caged in memory threadbare fragments leaving forms tenuous if barely discernable footsteps and voices orchestrating the environs a room surrounding a quantum fog greyed out embers iron filings and a blank wall as a presence to reflect the edge of a frame eschewed time aligned to gravity’s passage to synergistic perturbations of a theoretical singularity cosmic veils in flesh and bone stalemates in blood and cellular stigmata and to define this space as elemental to observe an open doorway light traversing corridors a sift through sallow interiors windows as grey overtaking the blue or to speak of one who is immune to these changes surpassing the blood brain barrier to usher in speculative destiny a surrounding spatial waste a singularity sought in all but a physical constitution a palliative depth that remains the unplumbed hinged mechanism rusted over … +++++++++++++++++
Substances to differentiate a vase a ledge a table of chairs an unopened door holes in the floor and sun elongating
two rectangular voids in a brick façade “and that we have found
ourselves here again removed into an intimate echo’s effacement of days landscapes and the horizon a world of imaginary numbers having only half heard a parody of voices a colloquy of memories a dissolving into worlds indistinct and made nameless by fate” in this a song reaching beyond touch maybe another dimensional plane abstract musings dissonance and counterpoint a Bach fugue resonating sublimity points and promontories of relativity a widening berth to turn the ship unobserved through the window a crescent moon arisen silhouetted winter branches and hearts given the confines of loneliness assembled in rooms two by two talking of worlds that intimately refuse to cohere to sight to repeat the many words that have since been deemed as inarticulate as shadows angled on walls of flaking paint
The glimpses of a nothingness conceived in flimsy husks of faith fated nocturnes recalling a logos lost behind a fence -line’s torso -moon drift altering the presence of a Sunday morning where they are talking of the dead rising on the final day where a relative measure is to be achieved with the intervention of myth or fact negating Einstein’s law or in a garden of olives where Christ is said to have wept here a variable has been removed from an equation the perpetuation is an unknowable hypothesis as the sun recedes on the ecliptic the season draws down a solo oboe through the fabric constituting an aspect in a continuum hidden in plain sight another anomaly of presence a synthesis of elements flowers in a vase ocean through a window aspects of objects sooner seen dispersing on a landscape or through the alcove of a room prayers to invisible demigods
penitent rags of fleshly supplication clinging to internal deserts and this draining aridity surrounding every heartbeat its reticent ocean a choral ecstasy hymns to the unborn held in limbo’s cellular memory a non -terrestrial realm coalescing forms in a stasis of voices … ++++++++++++++++ from Fractal Labyrinth
33
Descriptions forged in temporality hazy sun through grey clouds each moment’s duration a change in perception too many variables where place names abandon a landscape where the lay of the land follow s contours through lines of sight through annular spaces in the flux of the irredeemable quantum occurrence or the mnemonic concretions that travel from the past an altered awareness negating the clockface and its ageing manifestation the habituated intransigence of place now in an oblique presence…the present
returning through the (r)evolving door hazy sun through grey clouds
34
This window seems less comprehensible for all it refuses to let in though there is no mystery to this no clock to denote the arrival of entropy entering the terrestrial environs no hesitation to exit through the doorway to emerge onto an empty landscape to know no objective reality observation cannot resolve no primordial beat of the heart at birth leaving only conjecture to work through the physicality of space the atoms existing in the absence of thought in the opacity of images in the subtle echoes sounding in the slow drain through clutter and accumulated debris through the inaudible illusions sufficient in their being apart from what the eye can resolve
35
Noting these clouds …
before the sun sets and that there will be no equilibrium to the visions entering the darkening room no transparency allotted to the opaque eye moored to the precision of a physical existence and in this room there are stains on the wall facing north one can detect magnitudes in flux complications of structure dimensional boundaries that ebb and flow and grayed spaces retained for faces of the dead… toward what end is it needed to return here again to extinguish the candle to bleed an intoxicating breath into a sacrosanct realm to feel beneath the epidermis fractal bits of vibratory echoes a consciousness of voices without breadth without blood without a physicality of decay
The Purity of Vivian Maier
Vivian D. Maier (1926–2009) was an American photographer whose work was discovered and recognized only after her death. During her lifetime she took more than 150,000 photographs. She is not known ever to have shown them to anyone.
No hail to fame, not even a shy
nod to sharing, it would seem.
Just her own small delight;
the tough love of light.
A photograph?
Not a serious thing
when she was young and taking,
as they say, pictures:
mere proof of fact,
magnet for fashion magazines,
hook on the local newspaper stand,
damning piece of evidence,
tool for advertising,
and glamour’s sinuous liar;
captive in a web of shadows,
bare, brutal, impossible
almost to deny.
The only one invisible,
the photographer,
capturing reality
in a little black box.
Maybe that was why
Vivian Maier, governess,
lover of children,
caregiver, one of the
perpetually invisible,
slightly awkward
with her black magic box,
took all those photographs—
the crowds, the streets, the mansions,
the disillusioned sidewalks,
the phantoms of the alleys,
the secrets blazoned to every sun,
the hands, the faces, the entire world—
in secrecy and stealth even
the shadow of herself;
the ephemeral caught
in amber—
to capture, to master,
in pure little rectangles of joy
with her invisible eye.
_____
Christopher Bernard’s book The Socialist’s Garden of Verses won a PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Award and was named one of the “Top 100 Indie Books of 2021” by Kirkus Reviews.
Creation does not begin with a word, but with stillness a pause, before the rush, before the world insists on speaking. It begins with the quiet observation of a world moving without permission a leaf, stubborn in its fall, a cloud folding into another, a glance exchanged across crowded streets, never to be remembered.
Stories live in what is not said. The visible is but a fragment what matters lies hidden, beneath the surface. Like an iceberg, its strength resides in the unseen, where shadows move in silence and thoughts drift like forgotten tides.
To write is to observe, not merely to see, but to feel the weight of a shadow on a hot afternoon, the ache of silence between words, the whisper of wind through ordinary things, the sigh of trees that have witnessed lifetimes.
Language is not decoration. It is the pulse of the soul. Every phrase must earn its place, must be sharpened against the stone of truth, must tremble with meaning each syllable a heartbeat, each line a breath caught in the throat.
An ending should not close it should linger, softly, like a thought that refuses to fade, a door left ajar, letting the mind wander, finding its own way out.
There is no beauty without attention no truth without the courage to face it. No art without the risk of vulnerability, the surrender to what we do not know.
What we create is not for applause, but for connection so that someone, somewhere, feels less alone, when they find their own heart hidden in the spaces between lines.
The work is not to impress it is to remember, to reveal, to reach.
And if nothing golden is found, then let the ink bleed honestly. Let the silence speak. Let the page carry the weight of what we dared to feel.
Because in the end, what matters most is not how beautifully we wrote, but how deeply we made someone stop breathe and remember that they are not alone in this vast, unspoken world.
— Author Haroon Rashid
ABOUT HAROON RASHID
Haroon Rashid is an internationally celebrated Indian author, poet, and humanitarian whose soul-stirring words transcend borders, cultures, and languages. Revered as “a movement of thoughts” and “a soul that breathes through verses,” he is a global ambassador for peace, education, and sustainable development. Through literature, he fosters empathy, cultural harmony, and a collective vision for a better world.
KEY LEADERSHIP ROLES • Global Ambassador & International Member, Global Federation of Leadership & High Intelligence A.C. (Mexico) • SDG Ambassador (SDG4 & SDG13), World Literary Forum for Peace & Human Rights • National Vice Chairman, Youth India – Mother Teresa International Foundation • Peace Protagonist, International Peace Forums – Mexico & Greece • Honorary Founding Member, World CP Cavafy
AUTHOR & LITERARY CONTRIBUTIONS • We Fell Asleep in One World and Woke Up in Another – poetry book, translated by 2024 Nobel Peace Prize Laureate Eva Petropoulou Lianou • Author Haroon Rashid Quotes – A soul-deep treasury of reflections • Works translated into: Greek, French, Persian, Urdu, Arabic, Chinese, Tamil, Hindi, Sanskrit, German, Indonesian, Bolivian, and more.
GLOBAL HONORS & AWARDS • Diploma de Honor al Mérito – Mexico (2025) • World Art Day Honor – Indonesia (2025) • Friedrich von Schiller Award – Germany • 4th World Gogyoshi Award – Global Top Vote (2024) • 1st Prize – Silk Road International Poetry Exhibition (2023) • Golden Eagle Award – South America (2021 & 2023) • United Nations Karmaveer Chakra – 2023 & 2024 • REX Karmaveer Chakra – Silver & Bronze – India • Global Peace Award – Mother Teresa Foundation (2022) • Cesar Vallejo Award – UN Global Marketplace • Honorary Doctorate in Humanity – La Haye, France (2021) • Sir Richard Francis Burton Award – European Day of Languages • Prodigy Magazine USA Award – Literary Excellence • Certificates of Honor – Greece, Serbia, Indonesia, Mexico • Honorary Award for Literature & Arts – Trinidad & Tobago
GLOBAL PRESENCE & RECOGNITION • Invited Guest on The Oprah Winfrey Show • Featured in O, The Oprah Magazine • Speaker at: • International Peace Day – Mexico & Greece • 3rd International Congress of Education – Mexico • Paper Fibre Fest – Represented India in China, Greece, Mexico, Peru • UN SDG Conferences, Global Literary & Peace Forums • Work featured in education campaigns, peacebuilding initiatives, and cross-cultural literary dialogues • Admired by global celebrities, educators, artists, and policymakers
CULTURAL AMBASSADOR OF INDIA • Embodies India’s timeless storytelling, spiritual ethos, and peace traditions • Bridges Indian philosophy with global consciousness • Revered as an ethical thought leader, visionary poet, and global voice of unity
PHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL VISION
Literature, for Haroon, is a sacred space for: • Healing, empathy, and consciousness • Advocacy for: • Mental Health Awareness & Emotional Resilience • Climate Action & Sustainability • Spiritual Depth & Interfaith Harmony • Youth Leadership & Cultural Preservation
He aims to inspire changemakers, dreamers, and peacemakers across generations.
GLOBAL PRAISE & LOVE
Described as: “A movement of thoughts.” “A soul that breathes through verses.”
Celebrated across Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas, Haroon is loved for his: • Authenticity • Emotional depth • Literary brilliance Honored by governments, universities, and global literary councils.
TITLES & GLOBAL IDENTITY • Global Literary Icon • Award-Winning Author & Poet • International Peace Advocate • Global Educator of the Heart • Cultural Diplomat & Ethical Leader • SDG Voice for Education & Environment • Voice of Peace, Passion, and Purpose
QUOTE BY AUTHOR HAROON RASHID
“It’s our responsibility to create a better world for our future generations.”
CONNECT WITH HAROON RASHID Follow and engage across all platforms: @AuthorHaroonRashid (Facebook, Instagram, X/Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, Threads, and more)
