Three Words on a Berlin Cover

There’s a confidence in naming a magazine I Love You. Not ironic distance, not a knowing wink—just the declaration itself, sitting on the cover like it means it. Berlin puts this thing out, which tracks. The city has a particular relationship with earnestness: it surfaces in the strangest places, between the concrete and the nightclub flyers and the general studied detachment, and when it does appear it lands harder for all the context around it.

Independent magazines occupy an awkward position right now. The argument for their existence has to be made against a medium that is simultaneously free, instantaneous, and inexhaustible. And the argument that print keeps making—texture, permanence, the fact that you can hold it—is mostly true but also sounds a little defensive when you say it out loud. I Love You doesn’t seem interested in making that argument. It just exists in the way good objects exist: with some intention and not too much apology.

What draws me to magazines like this is the editorial decision at the center of them. Someone looked at a blank cover and a stack of possible content and made choices that reflect a specific sensibility. You can feel that sensibility either way—when it’s present, the thing coheres; when it’s absent, you get a catalog dressed up as culture. The Berlin independent scene tends to produce the former more than it should statistically, which probably says something about what that city selects for in its creative people.

I don’t remember the first time I picked up a magazine that made me feel like someone understood exactly what I was interested in before I’d fully articulated it to myself. But I remember the sensation. That’s what independent publishing, at its best, still does.