Rebels, Nudes, and the Game Boy Retrospective
Some weeks I come home from the magazine stand with three things that have no business being on the same coffee table. This was one of those weeks.
brand eins is the magazine for people who got their economics degree, became quietly disillusioned with how all of it works, and still can’t stop reading about it. The counterpart is the person who flips through Business Punk for the bold colors and snappy infographics and leaves inspired to launch an Airbnb for caravans or artisanal dog food or their little sister. Both types are real. I know which one I am, reluctantly. The best thing in this issue was an article called "The Revolution of the Sleepers," by Lena Schnabl—about a youth movement in Japan quietly refusing the national script of study hard, comply, drink. Young Tokyoites sleeping late and opting out. Whether that’s philosophy or just exhaustion is left productively open. The worst thing was a competition to win a scooter designed by Steve Aoki with built-in speakers, the prospect of which—a Berliner receiving it, rolling slowly down the street next to me with terrible music blasting—represents a genuine threat to quality of life.
POP is enormous—450 pages, more or less a cultural bible that won’t fit in any bag I own. The writing exists but I couldn’t tell you a word of it. What I can tell you is that there are large, clean photographs on nearly every page, and roughly every third spread features a topless model, which I have zero complaints about. This issue also contains Grimes stickers—designed by Claire Boucher herself, black-and-white, small, wonderful. They are now on my laptop. I am a little in love with Grimes and have mostly stopped pretending otherwise. Every time you turn a page here you fall briefly for someone new—a blonde Eleonara, an Asian Yi, a topless Kasia on the next spread. Four hundred and fifty pages of that is either a profound pleasure or a genuine threat to sanity. I read a biography of Pythagoras afterward just to recalibrate.
Retro Gamer hurts in a way I respect. Games were expensive when I was a kid—a new Super Nintendo cartridge ran about 120 deutschmarks, money we didn’t have, so instead we bought gaming magazines: Total!, Maniac, Bravo Screenfun. Together they cost nearly as much as a real game, which in retrospect was not the saving we thought it was. Retro Gamer has the look and feel of those old publications, and this issue’s centerpiece is a Game Boy retrospective with a top 25 including Tetris, Pokémon, and Super Mario Land 2: 6 Golden Coins. I’ve been on a Game Boy kick anyway, working through the old Zelda titles, so the timing landed well. There’s also a piece about video games from East Germany—Mad Breakin, Jungle, Vollgas—which is historically interesting in a theoretical sense but confirms that the GDR was not secretly harboring a game development golden age. The graphics were not good. Sorry.