Out now: Port, Oh Comely, Flamingo, Fantastic Man, Fire & Knives
A quick Friday look at five magCulture indie favourites with newly published issues. Starting with the ninth issue of Port, which as trailed here a few weeks back is a film special guest edited by man-of-the-moment Daniel Day Lewis.
As usual the creative team have commissioned a set of numerical section openers. Keeping with the film theme, Bread Collective have devised filmic sets that Philip Sinden has lit and shot to look like movie stills (above).
As well as cover star Paul Thomas Anderson, the issue includes actor Dai Bradley, best known as the boy in Ken Loach’s Kes; title sequence designer Pablo Ferro; Argo producer Graham King; stuntman Bronco McGoughlin and Brit actors Ray Winstone, Kathy Burke and Richard Grant, as well as some spectacular fashion photography from Joss McKinely. The modernist lines of the page design are broken by the handwritten headlines, provided by Day Lewis. Not every guest editor gets that involved in editing. (This new issue is available via the magCulture online shop).
Handwriting moves us nicely on to the fifteenth Oh Comely, whose masthead is redrawn each issue by editor Des Tan’s mum.
As ever, the magazine follows it’s own eclectic path, asking a beautician, a taxi driver and a nurse about making conversation with strangers...
...providing a quick insight into eighties food packaging courtesy of some out-of-date foods discovered in Yorkshire...
...and featuring plenty of illustration, including an interview with Nick Sheehy aka Showchicken (above). Also in the mix: fashion for the fifty plus and a photo shoot by Timo Klos covering the fake bus stops placed outside German care homes for dementia sufferers. Like I said, eclectic.
Flamingo celebrates doing it yourself, with issue four boasting plenty of illustration and craft. There’s gardening, stitching and a look at specialist tools. Samuel Wilkinson, designer of the Plumen lightbulb, discusses the project...
...and Simon Goode from the new London Centre for Book Arts talks about making books...
...while five artists portray their own work spaces (above).
The choice of cover stars for Fantastic Man perhaps gets overshadowed by the women featured on sister title The Gentlewoman as they are so different to other women’s mag cover subjects. But Fantastic Man do their bit with their covers too, as issue 17’s subject Jeremy Deller demonstrates. Alasdair McLellan’s acid-coloured portrait of ‘The Popular Artist’ (recently selected to represent Great Britain at the Venice Biennale) is a classic F Man cover, right down to the small scar on Deller’s cheek.
Inside we get a quick look round Apartamento co-founders Omar Sosa and Nacho Alegre’s Barcelona apartments (above, below).
Plus plenty of irony, including the renaming of sections as Nonsense (below), Greatness and Discipline.
Issue 14 of Fire & Knives continues its unique graphic journey around the cultural edges of food, as colourfully as ever.
Just when you think there’s nowhere else for the mag to go, up they pop with another great mix of what might be termed the obvious (above) and the less obvious – such as Clair Strickett’s analysis of the economics of food blogging/writing in the digital age (below, with beuatiful graphic from Rob Lowe).
So – five very different magazines, all worth tracking down for your weekend’s relaxation. Enjoy!