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AMPERSAND MAGAZINE

I don't care that a few certain people might be cruel about me writing an entry on my own magazine. I don't care that it comes across as being shameless. Because it's better than being shameful, which is what those people are. So just have a good think about that thanks.

Let me begin.

Wow what a fantastic magazine this is. I really think it may be responsible for single-handedly changing the face of the Australian publishing industry. This is certainly "one to watch". I am sure if there were ever a profile about it and its editor in the Good Weekend, which I'm sure there will be very soon, they would definitely say that this is "one to watch".

Okay in all seriousness...

Ampersand is an Australian curiosity journal. We are interested in the discussion of any subject matter, particularly that which is unfashionable, unorthodox, illuminating or rare. We have a penchant for history and echoes of the past. We are interested in all modes of visual art. We are political, and interested in the fallout of religion and globalisation. We intertwine it all with absurdity, sex and cheap laughs.

Janus Faces is the second issue of Ampersand Magazine. It took fucking forever to get it out (over a year) because it is almost impossible to anything in life generally except take drugs and procreate, and many people find even those things hard, so if you scrape in with anything creative you're on the winning team. I run this puppy on my own, and I don't own a mint, so I can't do it nearly as frequently as what I would like to, but one day one day.

Janus Faces is a very good issue. It is a step up from the previous, and represents the magazine becoming more and more what I want it to be. Its quality and range of topics is awesome and the art is incredible.

There are weaknesses, though. Things that even as it was going to print I was planning on improving. Things that made me want to eat wasp pie. I think its structure needs to mature.

Anyway I'll leave it there because this is getting weird, but just know you can expect the work of these legends:

Jazz Andrews tells the story of the time he walked into a supermarket and took his clothes off

Warwick Baker photographs

Stephan Balleux pastels and oil paintings Fran Barrett drawings

Suzannah Biernoff discusses Henry Tonks’ WWI pastel portraits of wounded soldiers

Abhishek Chaudary the final installment of the story of a virginal woman’s loss of innocence

Rose Chong generally lets it rip

Jess Cook digital images

Nick Coyle Morris Larb’s eulogy written by Morris Larb

Polly Dedman Janus drawings

Briohny Doyle on the vision of ourselves at the end of the world

Nicky Forster gives us a brief history of interstellar messaging

Simon Greiner time travel industry advertisements

James Harney shapes

Shannon Holopainen on the philosophy of fishing

Erik Kessels found photographs of ria Van Dijk, 1936 - 2008

Bob Log III answers an Oxford Men’s College entrance exam question 1957-67

Denis O'Connor takes us through the great Australian tradition of whipcracking

Lisa Pryor travels to the twin cities of El Paso and Juarez

Sprego fuck you three times for free

Christos Tsiolkas reflects on actor Jack Charles, subject of the documentary Bastardy

Rob Wilson poetry

Willoh S. Weiland and the Yelling At Stars team get their first public release on our DVD supplement.

Buy it online or at shops. Find out where at http://www.ampersandmagazine.com.au/

Okay that's it.

APARTAMENTO

After the comedown of an over-caffeinated late-2009 and the glory of adventuring over the Yuletide period, I ruminated on resolutions and whatnot and I came up with naught on health or volunteering but I did decide that 2010 is going to be My International Year of Business. In 2010 I am cleaning up my act. I am buying new brogues. I am brushing my hair. I am making a magazine and I am making it work. So it was on that note that I shelled out a crazy $31.95 for apartamento because, in hindsight, this magazine is tantamount to a hipster Belle – an aspiration manual that is entirely based on profiles of good looking international people with gigantic salaries and highly enviable jobs in new media that allow them expensive faux-hemian libraries and kitchens. With a sub-head like 'an everyday life interiors magazine' I hated myself for buying it and I read it cover to cover.

It's excellent. It saves the champagne-lifestyle-beer-salary individual (like myself) all the time of making a Secret collage and even occasionally sprouts a genuinely interesting article.

I have little to say about its design or specific content. That's all very good. What was really put into question in my purchasing and reading of this magazine was my own individuality, or lack of it. It is totally on-point with its display of zeitgeisty terror. But between the display of those things all of us ironically dressed, designer-sandwich-eating, sub-culture card carriers desire in life (rooftop gardens, shaggy-haired toddlers, Victorian wallpaper, resplendent dinner tables, pattern clashing wallpaper) there are novelty sized arrows pointing at the contrivances, such as Chloe Sevigny's professionally designed antique book collection.


apartmento is the first successful Gen Y coffee table magazine. It's packed with a late-naughties whimsy and feigned down-to-earthness that anyone who has worn a nature t-shirt or a fawn brooch would immediately identify with.

And from one sourdough lover to another, it's fucking great.