Internships are a mixed bag: in some cases you’ll be treated with dignity, respect and given “real shit” to do (such was my experience at Dazed some years ago); other times you’ll be treated like “real shit” by your employer and find yourself paying to make (or worse, buy) other people’s coffee. Intern Magazine (a forthcoming biannual) can’t end that culture on its own, but is going out of its way to showcase the talent of those unpaid individuals and offer a platform for debate to deliver a noble ”up yours!”
Art book of the Week: The Marshes - Samuel Wright & Josh Lustig (Tartaruga Press)
Like the eponymous East London landscape itself, The Marshes is a bleak and beautiful thing. Sparse literary prose are intersected with black and white photographs of an inexplicably striking sort of nothing-much-at-all which, without one another, might be more at home on the tumblr of anyone who can just about use a camera or computer. As a hybrid, though – an art project more than a book – it’s more interesting and truer to life than any guidebook.
Tampa - Alissa NuttingPhoto courtesy of Faber & Faber
Novel of the Week: Tampa - Alissa Nutting (Faber & Faber)
In a week that saw six female Greenpeace activists ascend the most absurd phallic symbol in Europe, it seems only right to talk about Alissa Nutting’s Tampa. It’s a brilliant reversal of Nabokov’s Lolita and a much-needed subversion of contemporary sexual culture and gender politics. All this is attested none-too-subtly by its totally nonchalant ultra-vaginal cover, which makes that classic lollipop look like… well, a kid’s sweet, I suppose.
Lolita - the Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design - John Bertram and Yuri LevingPhoto courtesy of Print Books
Design Book of the Week: Lolita - the Story of a Cover Girl: Vladimir Nabokov’s Novel in Art and Design – John Bertram and Yuri Leving (Print Books)
Speaking of Nabokov and that irrepressible sucking candy, it seems like everyone’s at it – so to speak. Bertram and Leving have put together a comprehensive, visually stunning and challenging book that not only presents fifty years worth of Lolita covers but also works to destroy the myth of the teenage seductress in heart-shaped glasses that has penetrated pop culture so deeply.
Lifestyle Magazine of the Week: Cereal
Cereal is, more or less, the British equivalent to America’s Kinfolk - with bells on. Those bells come in the form of content, mind you, as it is probably also the most aesthetically-driven print publication on the market; I even read somewhere that its editor, Rosa Park, lives in a minimalist all-white apartment which did nothing but put me in mind of all those ridiculous Tyler Durden backstories. Anyway, if you’re into travel, food, photography or just a fan of sleek design work then do yourself a favour (issues 1 and 2 are already collector’s items.) And remember: the first rule of Cereal Club is that it makes a nutritious and fibre-rich breakfast.
