How the Boston rock scene grew up, got real jobs, and became — Freemasons?

Lifestyle Features

They’ve got issues

The bookworm’s gift that keeps on giving

By CHRISTOPHER GRAY | December 12, 2007

As newspapers and magazines slim and shift their focus to online content and revenue streams, it has become sadly commonplace to overlook the unique capabilities of periodically printed matter. You don’t find many books printed on handsome, glossy paper. You don’t find many webmags without chaotic sidebars of links and ads. You don’t find many URLs or publications that cultivate both an image and an intellect while considering wildly disparate content.

The following magazines and journals triumph on all these fronts. Beautifully designed and aggressively thought-provoking, this is reading you’ll want to save for the bookshelf rather than pitch in the recycling bin. They’re also a fine option for that elusive Gift That Keeps on Giving, a semi-regular present in your mailbox.

Each of these periodicals is available at Longfellow Books in Portland. Scoop one up, wrap it up, and go online and make that lit-friendly relative of yours a subscriber to one of these excellent fledgling publications.

n+1
biannual | $28 per year | nplusonemag.com
Consider this leftist New York literary journal the anti-Believer: no one gets off easy and quirk is an enemy to progress. It’s unfailingly elitist in its anti-elite editorial content, but after five issues it has become smart and provocative enough to stake a claim in the City’s intellectual climate. Issue 6 (likely available by press time) offers long-form essays on Seung-Hui Cho (the Virginia Tech killer), the history of the cubicle, the NYC gossip site Gawker.com, and a call to lower the voting age. Snobby but humane, academic but fluid, it’s an addictive and essential read.

"Reading is fundamental Last-minute items to toss under the tree." By Portland Phoenix Staff.

Cabinet
quarterly | $28 per year | cabinetmagazine.org
Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Zizek and I have one thing in common: Cabinet is our favorite magazine. Impeccably designed and well-researched, the Brooklyn mag gives rare philosophical depth to subject matter both arcane and overlooked (movie theater snacks, for instance). Each issue devotes one section to a broad theme (currently “Mountains,” recently “Bugs” and “Magic”), and regular columns are consistently engrossing. In the current issue, Leland De La Durantaye’s “Readymade Remade” — about the uproar over Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” the urinal-as-sculpture that began post-modern art — achieves the suspense of a great thriller.

Esopus
biannual | $18 per year | esopusmag.com
The contemporary art mag is exorbitantly expensive to print, but relatively cheap to purchase (it relies largely on grant support), and a treasure trove of goodies lies in each binding. The current issue’s pullouts include: a portfolio of blonde celebrities from teen magazine covers; a faux-Victorian composition book for practicing penmanship; a reproduction of an 1940 installation blueprint from the Museum of Modern Art; and a full-length CD featuring hot indie artists (Black Moth Super Rainbow, Dirty Projectors, and Califone in this one alone). Add to this special textured pages and the script to an unfilmed Andy Warhol biopic, and all you wonder is: how do they do it?

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Ignoring the void
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Fuming through the dog days
In preparation for another three months of endless days and sweaty nights, here are five new albums to get you through the summer.
Letters to the Portland editor: July 20, 2007
Christopher Gray’s sidely worded dismissal of The Humble Farmer was offensive, elitist, and arrogantly uninformed.
Reading is fundamental
Some of the books I enjoyed most this year were written for an audience more than 10 years my junior.
Deal with It
When I was seven, I had a winter coat with flashes of neon so bright they glowed in the dark.
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Brain strain
Those of us aching for a 300-page treatise about the crippling implications of the "build your own scramble" at Local 188 won't, at first glance, find a great deal of solace in Jonah Lehrer's second book, How We Decide.
Glorious bastards
Few bands could serve as a better case study on the influence of Internet hype on mainstream media and popular acceptance than Deerhunter. Before the band "broke" in early 2007, to a glowing Pitchfork review of their album Cryptograms , the Atlanta four-piece were virtual unknowns nationally.
Nighty-night
It’s 1 am and Cowboy wants to go to sleep but I’ve still got the light on and the new In Style Weddings in my hands and I’m starting to freak about all the things I should have done already as per the In Style in my hand.
Brain gloss
The merger of thought and glossy spreads of girls in streaming, DIY couture.
After Fort Thunder, the zine lives
Last week, friends of the zine Taffy Hips gathered at Ada Books on Westminster Street to celebrate the sixth issue: robot comics, prints of giant tsunami waves, and an interview with Chicago-based cartoonist Anya Davidson.
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