Three Magazines
Snuck to the kiosk in Neukölln and bought three magazines because The Spiegel is out there arguing print isn’t dead, so I figured I’d contribute. Three dead trees. Three different visions of what matters.
Spex is the magazine for music people who think. Casper’s on the cover—a German rapper promoted from person to myth, credited with making hip-hop matter again. He has a blog that runs on their website or they cover him because of his blog—the cause and effect aren’t clear, and it doesn’t matter either way. The Sofia Coppola piece on The Bling Ring
is actually good. Esther Buss doesn’t do the usual magazine thing. She moves through the film, writes about what Coppola does, gets an interview, ends. Clean. But then there’s the Arctic Monkeys interview, and it hits different because this was a band I listened to when they mattered. The View from the Afternoon,
I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor,
When the Sun Goes Down
—songs that were genuinely good, songs that meant something in that moment. And then one day they didn’t anymore. They know this. They’ve known for years. But they keep touring the old festival circuits, keep releasing albums, keep showing up in magazines like zombies of a generation that’s already gone. The magazine doesn’t explain why it published the interview, and I’m not sure they had an answer either.
ZEIT Campus is the student magazine. This issue is about finding somewhere to live, which apparently is the only question students ask besides where do I drink cheap
and who will sleep with me.
Makes sense. There’s practical advice about roommates and landlords. Veronika Widmann writes about celebrity memoirs—Miley, Bieber, Küblböck—and it would be forgettable except someone ran an enormous kitten photo across half the page. That choice is worth more than weeks of reporting. Obviously. Then Simon Hurtz has a five-step decluttering guide that assumes students have money to donate their stuff instead of selling it. Weird, because a few pages back the same magazine is writing about student debt.
Mädchen is the girls magazine, the thing for teenagers between childhood and adulthood. This month it’s all cheap makeup under five euros—lipsticks, eyeshadow, nail polish, good quality on no budget. You only live once. I grabbed a copy out of curiosity. It works. There’s a Sally Fitzgibbons surfer poster that captures something real about summer and freedom and the feeling of having waited too long to learn this. The rest is the same: a photostory about an exchange student falling for two boys on a South African beach, a diary entry from a girl who rides horses every day, a firsthand account from a girl who stopped four sharks. Every page is bright and generous, full of photos and short pieces. Nothing tries too hard. The One Direction movie ad on page 15 oversells. But otherwise it just works.