Paper Cuts
There’s something I still love about buying a magazine I didn’t need. The smell of a kiosk, the weight of a new issue, the faint guilt of spending money on paper when the content exists in some form for free. I picked up three last week and read them in sequence, which is its own exercise in contrast.
NEON is a Munich magazine occupying the exact space between BRAVO—Germany’s long-running teen bible of puberty, pop stars, and frank questions about sex—and the cultural commentary you’d expect from someone who spent four years studying something they’re not using. The magazine of the perpetual student: still reads horoscopes, also reads Nietzsche, usually simultaneously and mildly stoned. The October issue carries stories about writer Helene Hegemann (four years high on Nietzsche), a woman eating as much as former chancellor Helmut Kohl who doesn’t look it, and the experience of sleeping with a stranger sober at three in the afternoon. Every two years or so the themes cycle back: love, friendship, money. Which is either a failure of imagination or an accurate diagnosis of what anyone actually cares about.
The photo series on masturbation is the kind of thing NEON periodically borrows from VICE and delivers with somewhat more product in the frame. There are breasts and some pubic hair and captions like "Alixe masturbates in her apartment in Friedrichshain; Stefan tells his girlfriend when he’s jerked off" and "Emily fantasizes about Fifty Shades of Grey sex." That people touch themselves to reach orgasm, sometimes with assistance, is not a scientific discovery in 2013, but texts about wanking beat the cover story about unknown young people who believe it’s now their turn for something. It is always someone’s turn for something.
The essay I resented most was a piece by Alard von Kittlitz arguing that voting is pointless because his two ticks won’t change anything. This opinion gets rediscovered by a new cohort of prospective journalists every election cycle and published with the confidence of original thought. Who should you vote for, whether to vote at all, what voting even means—a guaranteed topic for anyone with a deadline and no ideas. I don’t particularly disagree with von Kittlitz, but I’ve now read the essay seventeen times and I’m done.
VICE—co-founded in the nineties by Suroosh Alvi, Shane Smith, and Gavin McInnes and now a global network of agencies, publishers, and branded content units—used to be more genuinely unhinged. You can feel the investors in it today, the pressure to stay transgressive within acceptable parameters. The print magazine, where everything started, shows the strain most clearly.
But the best piece in Volume 9 Number 9 is a gut-punch. In a rural Mennonite colony in Bolivia, a group of men had been entering homes at night, sedating women and children with a spray normally used on cattle, and raping them while they slept. The documentary reporting is close, careful, and completely unsparing—the kind of journalism VICE used to do reliably and now manages only occasionally, and it makes every other piece in the issue look thin by proximity. It also makes the website’s daily churn of current-events takes look like what it is.
The problem with VICE is that the headlines are always interesting. "Cambodia’s Pre-Pubescent Spider Hunters," "Sweden’s Shit-Sludge Debate," "A Nine-Year-Old Romanian Bodybuilder and His Very Angry Father." I will read every one of those on a cover and then feel completely unchanged after finishing the article. The subjects go by so far outside ordinary experience that nothing sticks. I’m not sure if that’s me or the magazine. Probably both.
Then there’s Kinfolk. Volume Eight. Twenty-five euros in a select bookshop—there is a specific tax on wanting beautiful things—and worth every cent. This issue is about Japan: not the tourist-track version, not Harajuku or neon arcades, but an alternative Japan of wasabi farms and cherry blossom macarons made with black sesame, of old proverbs that function better as life instructions than most self-help books currently in print. The photographs have the quality of rooms you wish you lived in.
I know the objection. After reading VICE, you open Kinfolk and wonder where the blood went, where the drugs went, where the sex went. The answer is that it was replaced with something slower and more careful, and the absence of violence is not the same as the absence of content. Kinfolk doesn’t want your adrenaline. It wants the part of you that knows how to sit still.
I can’t pull out a worst piece because Kinfolk doesn’t operate in discrete articles—it’s constructed as an experience rather than assembled as content. Somewhere between the wasabi harvest piece and the photographs of lacquer bowls, something in me genuinely slowed down. In a world full of loud things competing for your attention, that’s not a small thing. It might actually be the whole thing.