Five Magazines

Sitting through another week of forgettable online content, I’d pretty much given up on print. Then I grabbed five magazines that actually understood something about the world right now.

Dazed & Confused dedicated an entire issue to Japanese and Asian pop culture. Everyone treats it like a passing fad—Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, AKB48, Tempura Kidz, all of it. They brought in the Korean couple from Eat Your Kimchi, the roboticist Shigeo Hirose, photographer and director Mika Ninagawa. It’s what you grab when Western mainstream culture starts feeling like the same thing recycled endlessly.

Cooler is for snowboarders and skaters, not for me. But it doesn’t try to reach everyone, and that’s why it works. Helena Long’s skating story, a long piece on Melbourne, Enni Rukajärvi grinning in photos. The obsession is obvious.

FRONT doesn’t pretend to be anything it isn’t. There’s celebrity content—Keith Lemon, Jack Whitehall, Roll Deep talking favorite party tracks, Ghostface Killah, Sheek Louch in the pages. But the real draw is seventy-three spreads of naked women, and you’re not pretending otherwise. There’s something refreshing about that level of honesty.

VICE sent people into Syria while everyone else was looking away. They came back with pieces on mutilated bodies under Assad, some hellish Disneyland someone built there, refugees scattered into Lebanon. The war doesn’t touch most people’s lives—you’ve got your own falling apart, school calling about attendance, the usual collapse. VICE went anyway and reported what doesn’t make the evening news.

Purple is Olivier Zahm’s magazine, which means it carries his slightly perverted sensibility through every page. I’ve read his breakup blog posts, so I recognize the voice—direct, beautiful, not trying to be friendly. The current issue has Rei Kawakubo, Peter Beard, Richard Prince. It stays with you.