Paper Still Bleeds
Everyone declared print dead about the same time they declared the album dead, the novel dead, cinema dead. The internet came and all the social media experts threw themselves into the feed like there was no tomorrow—eyes shut, thumbs first, no looking back. And yet here I am with a pile of magazines on the floor and ink on my fingertips, because quality print didn’t die. It contracted, got more expensive, and got more itself.
Dazed & Confused opens with an androgynous shoot by Karim Sadli that’s doing something genuinely interesting with gender and fabric. Milkshake goes philosophical about what it felt like to be young, which lands somewhere between self-aware and self-indulgent depending on your mood. Front, my reliable guilty pleasure, delivers a meaty Biffy Clyro interview and Melissa Clarke in a state of undress, then has the nerve to tell me to get off the chair and exercise. I resent the suggestion. I’ll probably listen.
VICE does what VICE does—a photo spread on Japanese pussy that lets you decide which kind it means, a fashion editorial built around a sensual French film from the seventies, and a Richard Kern set of girls with cigarettes. Kern photographs women the way certain photographers photograph boxers: something true in the posture, something dangerous in the eye contact. I Love Fake is 244 pages of urban photography from cities around the world and it costs nothing. I’ve been staring at it for an hour and I still don’t understand the business model.
NEON has a long piece on Palestinian smugglers working the tunnels beneath Gaza—the economics of blockade, the pragmatism of people who have decided that tunneling under a wall is just a reasonable way to move goods—and it’s the kind of journalism you don’t expect from a lifestyle magazine. Good surprise. BLANK puts a German tabloid fixture’s son on the cover, which I can only describe as an act of editorial hostage-taking. POP recovers dignity with Abbey Lee Kershaw on a motorcycle and a feature following Tavi Gevinson—the teenage fashion blogger, somewhere around fourteen at this point, already writing circles around most adult critics—through Tokyo.
The undisputed highlight of the pile is Wendy, the horse magazine. Foal posters. New comic characters. Some kind of party planning supplement. It is operating on a frequency I cannot access, and I respect it completely.