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.

WHITE FUNGUS

An erudite brunette in Newtown SC cafe in Melbourne pulled this Kiwi treasure on me – a stranger flogging my own quiet effort – and suggested I should look them up. At a flip I meditated discreetly of incredible publishing orgies where we'd all be chanting the spelling of 'erudite' and feeling each other's stuff in the dim light of weather balloons projected with gusty enchanted South Island river banks. I never saw her nor White Fungus again, until I was alleviating myself of a couple of kilos in my studio bathroom, which I share with a few geniuses and nonsense purveyors alike, and there it was. White Fungus. 'PROPERTY OF THE TOILET 24 FRED ST'. Sorry Leigh, I'll just pop that in my bag for a bit.

The seductress was right. I should have looked it up. White Fungus is a fucking great magazine. It, like most magazines reviewed on this excellent blog, should be available at all nerd-orientated outlets throughout the universe and Australia. It may be a pleasure to find a gem in a loo but it's bloody sad there isn't a more organised distribution network so that all publishing perverts can touch themselves to stuff like this all the time. Diatribe fini.

White Fungus is great. It looks awesome, tailored like the best zine you've ever seen (stapled spine et al) but with the filling of a very expensive sandwich (colour, long historiographical articles, excellent international visual art, classy interviews, intelligent poetry, roquet and aioli). Its design is in the classic literary journal arcadia – a real or imaginary place offering peace or simplicity. Nice lines, although the swapping of fonts irks me so. But this is meant to be the positive paragraph.

This one is the critical paragraph. White Fungus tends to lean close to ra-ra anti-establishment rant and forecloses too much of its heart. Sure, it was hard for me to hear in the editorial that "Obama has truly proved himself a reliable chip off the old block", i.e. Bush block (for Obama is my husband although we have not yet met nor married but will very soon, when he can make it to Redfern which he ESPs me is November), but it gets a bit over the top at points. While political dissertation is great, giving the local council the finger and not offering any potent POV is boring. Don't ever end an article with "No brave or bold decision-making to be found here." Slit slit, bleed bleed, see you later.

As I am currently trying to make an honest woman of myself by organising advertisers into a relatively offensive-free constellation, I find White Fungus all over the shop. The ads appear like epiphanies – so integrated that you don't know they are selling something. Confusion abounds. Check this one out: white page, half page list:

"1. The artist must construct the work
2. The work must be fabricated
3. The work need not be built.

Each being equal and consistent with the intent of the artist the decision as to condition rests with the receiver upon the occasion of receivership. – Lawrence Weiner 'Declaration of Intent' 1969

[Tiny font] Adam Art Gallery, address."

Fuckin what the fuck? How the fuck is an artwork not fabricated? And how the fuck is an artwork not built? Does Adam Art Gallery love pieces of pine chucked in a corner with some unopened lube tubes holstered to the waists of the moronic art students who are undoubtedly the only people that come to see and circle jerk to this hogwash? Now White Fungus, I dig you a lot, but don't present your sponsors as advertorials. You bear the brunt of their idiocy and it's confusing and it makes me cross. Delineation, my friends. Unless it's funny, make an ad section.

There's nothing that funny about White Fungus. They love to be serious. But they are serious about serious things that are very serious. Like how capitalism is theft and money is worthless and confused women should choose a better idiosyncrasy than getting cummed all over all the time. But for christ's [purposefully uncapitalised] sake, lighten the bejesus up.

That all said, it's an excellent magazine. It's strong, real, effortless and enjoyable. If you can get your hands on a copy, walk out of wherever you are with it.

MONU

Monu – or 'Magazine On Urbanism' – has the same feeling of potential magic for a magazine-lover that a pouch of gemstones at an incense stall at a country fair might have for a ten-year-old girl (sticking pretty close to home with that analogy). However, one of those things ends up covered in dust and the other actually aids you in channelling Jeff Buckley.

It's not a great magazine, but it's an interesting one. It comes out of an architect's firm in the Netherlands (though it is in English), it's biannual with a very small print-run (2000 copies), it's entirely black and white, its paper stock is compellingly thick and its pages are filled with messy design – multiple typefaces, white font on black squares, lots of tiny photographs. Ultimately it begins and ends with its design. And I'm not convinced that I even like its design.

Perhaps I am being harsh. They are doing pretty great things with their content. Monu explores different facets of, yes, urbanism, and it is a clever way to themetise a magazine. Previous issues have included 'Beautiful Urbanism', 'Middle Class Urbanism', 'Denied Urbanism' and 'Political Urbanism'. The issue I bought is the most recent, 'Holy Urbanism'. Contributors are mainly architects, urban planners, designers, and any given title in between, which is fantastic, and the content reflects these interests.

I was mildly engaged. Some essays were incredibly long, dense and without pictures, and I often caught my eyes reading the words as my brain crept into the forbidden zone of my recently defunct relationship – the perfect ruse.

There were a few very tasty bites. One was a short article on the 'eruv' of Manhattan. An eruv – meaning a legal aggregation of property – is basically a clever invention by Jewish community leaders to loosen the law of carrying on the Sabbath. And when I say carrying, I mean carrying. Kids, bread, anvils or feathers – you can't pick a thing up lest the fate of eternal damnation be placed upon your soul. To circumnavigate this biblical heeding, Rabbis have strung wire around the borders of Jewish communities so that people can carry stuff around (within that perimeter) by claiming it is for the greater good of those inhabitants: he's carrying bread for everyone. A really great article for this theme. Another good one was a piece about Mormon churches, and the expedient measure of global building due to the streamlined design of the actual church. "In 2000, for example, 28 of the 34 temples built are identical, then there is no 'original' in any sense." Accompanying this article are thumb-sized pictures of the facades of the 128 Mormon temples as of August 2008. I really enjoyed that one, too.

The inter-nationality of Monu's contributors gives it a brilliant array of perspectives, and their respective fields of interest makes for great reading. This is a magazine for people in those industries or people with a general interest in the way communities create towns and cities. It's a great idea and often executed with aplomb.

But then there were the eight pages of inexplicable designs of space in 2100 slash Escher rip-offs that had the infuriating narrative of a stoned spoken word poet trying to recount last night's dream. I just couldn't do it. But then again, maybe it was pure genius. I'll never know.

"The Demiurge ruthlessly throws his highways around. Hippocrits only manage to loop his gigantic vertical roundabouts when launched through the AcceleraTor. Hippocrits race to the loop park and descend into the underground. They take their seats. Mother 9 leaves her vehicle and becomes a normal pig again. Naked, she hobbles her last metres towards the finish and enters the rocket. Behind the black ClubClub twin, she breaks through the ground and launches into space like fireworks. All Hippocrits return to the surface, mount their steel studs and race back to their generic villas and compounds."

Jesus Christ, Speedism! Wind it up! And also, what was your mum thinking, calling you Speedism? With a name like that of course you'll end up a cyber goth Alan Ginsberg.

As an editor-geek though, I became increasingly frustrated with the terrible editing. Perhaps it's because the editors are not native English speakers, but it got down to punctuation marks, man. Decide if you're gonna use an en-dash or an em-dash and space them consistently. Decide if you're using English spelling or American spelling. Do a find for your double spaces and delete them. And for christsakes spell the name of your sponsors correctly, because some of us don't even have any. God I'm a crank.

I was happy to come across Monu and I'm glad a bought a copy. I won't be buying another in a hurry but I would recommend it, if that makes sense.



www.monu-magazine.com