One afternoon in mid-June, a mysterious package arrived at my apartment. Inside I found a letter from Enzo The Magazine, scrawled in pen on notebook paper, accompanied by two full-sized print issues and a handful of zines. A snapshot of Enzo’s three co-editors was also enclosed, taped to cardboard, beaming beneath an all-caps: THANK YOU. “We like making things and are truly interested in seemingly everything,” the letter read. “Alex started this five years ago in Michigan and Leeban and Chet joined soon after. If that phrasing begins to make you question who’s writing this letter, it’s a combination of all of us.” Whoever wrote it concluded: “We try really hard on everything we make.”
This line, an earnest admission of their collective efforts, echoes often in the kaleidoscopic world of Enzo, a project that sometimes takes shape as a print magazine — that is, when it’s not manifesting as a film festival, documentary, news show, Instagram video articles or even a live event featuring: “Super Smash Bros, a clown, friendship, chess contests, a bubble artist, rewards, people you know, art installations?, water, people you don’t know, and whatever else shows up.” Enzo likes to embrace the element of surprise.
While the project was hatched five years ago in the Midwest by Alex Sovoda (26), Enzo’s core team has since grown to include co-editor-in-chief Leeban Farah (25) and co-editor-slash-lead producer Chet Oshima (22), who both grew up in California. These days, they all split their time between New York City and Los Angeles. When they’re not developing whatever’s next for Enzo — a name Alex chose after hearing Tyler, the Creator talk about how nicely four letters fit on stuff, then hearing the word “Enzo” in a song and running with it — they also freelance in photography and film (Leeban), strategy, and production work (Alex and Chet).
‘The Magazine’ functions as a malleable container for Enzo’s editors to explore their rotating interests, anxieties, hypotheses, questions and hyper-specific social dynamics, as filtered through an equal parts self-deprecating, self-aware, off-the-wall sense of humour. The three of them bond over what Leeban describes as a mutual “aggressive curiosity”, whether they’re delving into the phenomenon of awkward small talk via what they call ‘video articles’, or going all-in on an ill-fated (albeit fascinating) month-long nutritional efficiency experiment turned into a documentary called The Food Brick. As Leeban explains: “We are very determined to, like, seek out the truth in whatever thing that we’re trying to unpack.”
For Chet, there’s something inherently appealing about working on a project that, like him, exists in a state of transformation and embraces the unknown. “The age that I’m at, I genuinely don’t have anything figured out life-wise.” But, he remarks, “I do know the feeling and fulfilment that I get by attaching myself to projects like this that also don’t really know what they’re doing, but know what they want to be.”
A devotion to DIY — to making whatever you want, without seeking validation— shows up across Enzo’s output. Their print mags, published on a sporadic basis — Issue 8 marks their first in 15 months, and the theme, as of press time: “uh, I don’t know” — provide an open-ended space for them to bounce fresh ideas off each other and onto the page that frequently end up resurfacing in other forms and contexts. Paragraphs run long, annotations are everywhere, words get crossed out; there’s a blank page for you, the reader, to draw or write whatever you want. One of their mini-zines features Greg Aram and Zach Michel of the LA-based band Junior Varsity running three miles on a treadmill, simultaneously interviewing each other. There are hand-drawn doodles and fuzzy visuals alongside dream-like, cinematically charged photo series that could only come from the brain of someone whose favourite photographer is Gregory Crewdson; plus there are charts and graphs and unnecessary visual aids galore. In other words, letting everyone see the tape-and-glue construction of the thing itself, in all its anxious, funny, weird human messiness, is the point.
When I ask the trio what making a magazine means to them, Alex replies: “I don’t know what ‘a magazine’ means. I just know that we like making stuff.” Thinking expansively about format, he says, offers them a sense of freedom. As Zach Michel, Enzo’s head writer, tells me on a phone call: “I kind of see Enzo through the lens of how I see Alex, which is someone that wants to do everything possible — or wants to be able to have an idea, and then execute it fully and completely.”
Alex cites Big Brother, the unruly early-90s independent skate magazine (and a precursor to Jackass), as one source of inspiration, specifically the way its editors ran headfirst into doing everything you’re not supposed to do. The Big Brother crew was, to be clear, “much gnarlier and like profane and dumb, very male jokes”, he tells me by text — not exactly what they’re going for. But the parallels in attitude, the sense of fearlessness, still resonate: “They were a skateboard mag with barely any skating. They were just having fun with themselves and trying stuff.”
Leeban embraces a similarly freeform expression, and says he’s glad he didn’t go to art school or formally study film or photography, two of his chosen mediums. “I don’t want people to, like, put this rigid structure in my head that I feel like I have to adhere to,” he says. “If you start from nothing, you’re probably going to make something new and creative, and then you can go in and refine whatever craft you’re working in afterward with technical knowledge.”
For Alex, who grew up in the suburbs of Detroit, Enzo informally began between 2018 and 2019 as little more than a bunch of Photoshop files in print form, made with the help of local friends. While it was a 75-page “magazine-shaped-thing”, he’s quick to note it was “not a functional, proper magazine in any way”. In summer 2019, he traveled to LA for a month, funding the trip with money from his grocery store job. A friend-of-a-friend invited him to THE GATHERING to “meet young creative people”, given he only knew a couple people in LA at that point. He showed up, film camera in hand and while making new friends from behind the lens, Alex met Chet, who was producing the event. While their budding friendship was briefly interrupted when Chet moved to Hawaii for college, followed by the pandemic, the two stayed in touch as Enzo eventually morphed into something more ambitious.
In 2020, Alex and a friend started a massive group chat and added everybody they collectively knew — which included Leeban, a stranger to Alex at the time — as a way to ward off quarantine loneliness. “I remember our first call. We were on FaceTime, and then everybody dropped off and it was just us two,” Leeban recalls. “Dude, I remember just thinking you were this like Michigan ‘Willy Wonka’ figure,” he says to Alex. “Like, his bedroom was white-and-red striped.” (Alex points out it was a tribute to The White Stripes, who also hail from Detroit). So began their friendship, ongoing collaboration and eventually, time as roommates — Alex and Leeban live together in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and Chet is a bike ride away.
Chet and Leeban began working with Alex on Enzo’s fourth and fifth print issues, while Alex and Leeban were living with a group of friends in LA, collaborating remotely. By Issue Six — whose inside cover reads “THE ONLY MAGAZINE THAT’S NOT A MAGAZINE” — they were operating as an editorial and production team of three, and navigating all the dynamic shifts that come with expanding one’s vision. Lucky for them, genuine chemistry and trust in each other’s perspectives is something Alex, Leeban and Chet have in spades. According to Courtni Poe — the Nashville, Tennessee-raised, now bicoastal founder and editor-in-chief of GASP ZINE, and friend of Enzo — “I think the three of them have the best creative chemistry I’ve ever seen. It’s like a boy band for journalism,” she jokes.
Whenever Courtni comes to New York and crashes at Alex and Leeban’s place, she’s amazed by how their “level of sarcasm and creativity and chaos — but like in the best, most creative way,” as captured in the pages of Enzo, translates to their day-to-day dynamic. Having already joined forces in February 2023 with “the Enzo boys” to co-host a show at LA’s Good Mother Gallery, which saw nearly 700 attendees, she looks forward to the forthcoming launch of GASP ZINE and Enzo’s creative agency: a joint endeavor to showcase their growing community of younger, emerging-artist friends with the goal of connecting them to bigger opportunities.
One of the best parts of expanding Enzo’s lens, for Alex, has been the equal levels of care, attention and investment his friends bring to realising its full potential. “Leeban came in and was like, ‘You got something here, but like, this and this and this is kind of corny and sucks’,” Alex recalls. “He’s the first person who worked on it that had his own thoughts that contradicted mine.”
Same goes for Chet, who now contributes his logistical know-how to make the magazine’s events come to life, including the West Coast edition of The Enzo Film Festival, which took place at LA’s Wilshire Fine Arts Theatre on 7 October. In May, they piloted the festival in New York. As advertised, the event included screenings of eight short films made by friends. But the films, themselves, were only one reason to show up to SVA Theatre in Chelsea, and the room was anything but movie theatre-quiet. The evening (recorded for posterity and available on YouTube) was interwoven with literal mimes acting as ushers and silently greeting guests upon arrival, a virtuosic piano player to set the scene, a round of spirited live trivia (with McDoubles as prizes), a friend singing Adele’s “Rolling in the Deep” and a scene performed by two Shakespearean actors.
“If you call something a thing — ‘a film festival’ — people are going to go in expecting stuff that way,” Alex tells me. “We intentionally didn’t tell anybody [what] we were doing.” “We’re not like ‘in the scene’ either,” Leeban notes, and none of them drink or do drugs; they prefer, instead, to dream up environments of their own eccentric design. For all the inside jokes that freely travel across their work, they want everyone — even if you’re only finding out about Enzo as you read this — to feel welcome.
With Issue 8 now out in the world, following a whirlwind summer of development and production, the pressure’s on as the Enzo team prepare for their further back-to-back launches, not to mention their big-picture plans to develop their video articles into a TV series. “It’s [the] proverbial 6pm,” Alex says. “It’s gonna be over soon; that’s how the year feels right now.” Earlier in the day, I texted Alex a Substack post by the writer Catherine Shannon, where she talks about her sense of “a pervasive cultural apathy, a permeating numbness,” and pinpoints the way that people seem to be “checking out of life in their 20s and 30s without reaching any profound conclusions about the point of it all.” He responded an hour later: “This is exactly everything I am at war with on a daily basis.”
Far from gradually sliding into a state of too-cool-to-care-ness, there’s still so much Enzo wants to make and do — they’re still finetuning their elevator pitch, and they need sponsors and sustainable funding to keep going because, as Alex puts it bluntly the first time we chat, “none of us come from money whatsoever, none of [our] dads are Ewan McGregor”.
But they don’t want to numb out, either. “I just want us to be doing more of the best work that we know we can,” Leeban says, attributing their high expectations-of-self — or at least his own — to suddenly being in his mid-twenties and facing the impermanence of it all in a newly piercing way. That and realising how good they have it: three friends who found each other through sheer dumb luck, who believe in each other’s ideas and potential so much that they spend countless hours making Enzo The Magazine something they can all be proud of.
“Every time he brings that up,” Alex says, “I’m just like, ‘fuck off’. Because I know what he’s saying: ‘These are going to be the good old days’ kind of thing.”
“That’s — I mean, yeah, that is the joke,” Leeban retorts with affection.
I remind them of an early Enzo Instagram post from May 2019, one year after Enzo emerged, before Leeban and Chet had even entered the picture. In all caps, it reads in part: “WE’RE NOT STOPPING UNTIL THE EARTH EXPLODES.” They proceed to absolutely howl with laughter. I ask if that’s still the plan, and they all nod, marvelling at life’s absurdity, and themselves, and each other. “That’s the plan,” Alex says.
Credits
Photography Jacob Consenstein