What’s Still Worth the Paper
Print is dying the way old people die in good novels—slowly, with dignity, occasionally saying something brilliant. Five magazines on my desk right now are making the case for paper better than any think piece about journalism’s collapse.
Dazed & Confused gave its current issue over to Japanese and Korean pop culture—Kyary Pamyu Pamyu, AKB48, the whole high-velocity sugar-rush of it—treating the region not as a trend piece but as a creative universe worth taking seriously. Robotics researcher Shigeo Hirose gets space, photographer and director Mika Ninagawa gets space, the food-and-culture blog Eat Your Kimchi gets space. If you’re tired of the Western pop monoculture, this is the issue.
Cooler is technically made for teenage girls into extreme sports—snowboarding, surfing, skating—but its reach keeps surprising me. There’s an interview with skater Helena Long, a travel piece on Melbourne, and Finnish snowboarder Enni Rukajärvi grinning across several pages alongside a cast of people who look like they’ve spent their lives outdoors. You don’t need to own a board to find it interesting. That’s harder to pull off than it sounds.
Front, Britain’s most cheerfully obscene lads’ mag, is what it is: Keith Lemon and Jack Whitehall reviewing the year, Roll Deep talking party tracks, Ghostface Killah and Sheek Louch getting their column inches—and 73 nipples, which you can count at your leisure. I respect its total absence of pretense.
VICE went to Syria—not as foreign adventure, but as documentation. Assad’s victims, a Disneyland that somehow still operates inside the wreckage, refugee camps in Lebanon absorbing the overflow. The kind of reporting that doesn’t make the morning news because the images would make people feel something before breakfast.
Then there’s Purple, Olivier Zahm’s monument to beautiful perversity. Zahm is a man who once live-blogged his own romantic dissolution in meticulous, mortifying detail, which tells you everything about his editorial instincts. Purple isn’t a fashion magazine the way Vogue is a fashion magazine—it’s more like a confession with excellent lighting. This issue: Rei Kawakubo, Peter Beard, Richard Prince. Not friendly, not reassuring, exactly as intended.