Three Magazines

I still buy magazines. Three or four a week, whatever looks interesting enough. Last time it was SPEX, Nero, and something called Total tierlieb! that turned out to be almost entirely pictures of animals.

SPEX is the serious music magazine—intellectual, self-serious, the kind of publication that treats pop music like it’s philosophy. The writing is genuinely good. Clean, thoughtful, better reported than what passes for music criticism most places. This issue has something on Blumfeld for their twentieth anniversary, apparently pretty intimate. But the second I see their band name my brain checks out. I get tired. Fall asleep. It’s not the magazine’s fault or the band’s fault, just something that doesn’t click between us. Always has. So I end up respecting SPEX completely and being unable to actually read it. Smart writing about music that doesn’t make me want to listen to anything.

Nero is different. Japanese-English magazine, aimed at young women mostly, and it’s one of those rare things where you can feel the editorial intelligence in every decision. Interviews with HAIM, photo essays from Tokyo, Sky Ferreira on some manifesto idea, illustrations, concert photography, profiles of kids with actual style. The design is clean. The pacing works. Everything feels chosen. It’s feminist in the way that matters—not announced, just in what gets space and how. As a designer I can see the work. As a reader it just feels right.

Total tierlieb! is mostly pictures of cute animals. Baby foxes, guinea pigs, dogs. Little photo stories, profiles, merchandise. It’s completely sincere and completely pointless, which somehow makes it better than the rest. I actually wanted to staple myself into it, live permanently on the page between the baby foxes. It exists in that strange space where the least necessary thing becomes the most honest.