We Love You So – Where The Wild Things Are – Spike Jonze

It’s like some essential law of nature: as long as amazing people exist, there will be amazing magazines to collect and codify their thoughts and projects. Such is A Public Space, the Brooklyn-based magazine of literature and culture founded in 2005 to bring essays and fiction and poetry of all kinds to the reading public. Issue #9 features Nicholson Baker, Ichiro Suzuki, Love Letters, The Third Street Promenade, and a whole bunch of other stuff, all wrapped up in a suavely-designed package of goodness.

Also not to miss: The magazine is hosting an event on February 21st in Santa Monica, CA featuring the great raconteur T.C. Boyle, Carla Gugino, Joel David Moore and miscellaneous performances. Start arranging your carpool!

Miss Manners, aka Judith Martin, began writing her syndicated column in 1978. Emily Post was penning etiquette advice as early as the 1920s. Both provided reliable guidelines on how to act politely in this complicated modern era––neither, unfortunately, had much of an interest in the contemporary art scene.

This is where I Like Your Work comes in. Art journal Paper Monument has produced a tiny (but information-dense) booklet with features from 38 artists, critics, curators and dealers on the “sometimes serious and sometimes ridiculous topic of manners in the art world.”

Tuck it in your own back pocket or slide it under the studio door of someone who really needs it.

“Just when you’re thinking you’re intellectually alone in the world, something like n+1 falls into your hands,” wrote Jonathan Franzen in The New York Observer, and the description is a pretty accurate one.

n+1 is a twice-yearly print journal devoted to the best writing and thinking of our time. Sounds like a robust claim, but then again, the magazine delivers big-time. Mingling all-star contributors with stellar unknowns, the magazine’s editors combine a sharp sense of humor with bone-crushing smarts and a flair for the unusual. Don’t be fooled by the magazine’s super lo-fi website––they keep it that way on purpose. The magazine itself is a beauty.

Past topics have included the concept of hype, a philosophy of pop music, the internet, hedge funds, neoliberals, dating, Bolaño, and a summer in Uzbekistan. No telling what the future will bring, but it ought to be good. Anyone who thinks that our country is getting dumber should get themselves a subscription, stat, and correct the impression.

Reorienting your reading habits toward the internet makes for a certain reduction in clutter (no more Wall Street Journals to recycle; no more Betty Crocker cookbooks moldering on the pantry shelf), but there’s something to be said for keeping a reserve of printed materials on hand. Occasionally you want to read without a phosphorescent machine lighting up your face and toasting your lap.

CapGun is a poetry magazine out of Brooklyn. Tidy, well-curated, and filled with young writers of note, the magazine is produced in limited editions that tend to sell out quickly. For good reason, too. CapGun is far too lovely to outsource to the internet.

Good art shouldn’t require explanation, but it should benefit from analysis. In other words, if you can look at a piece for two seconds and comprehend it entirely, there’s something wrong with the work. Or with you.

Paper Monument, a journal of contemporary art, makes for a prime supplement to art-viewing. There are sharp essays (”The End of Carnality is the Beginning of Facebook”), a cultural analysis of YouTube, pieces about design, Deleuze, sculpture and Laurel Nakadate. Consider the journal your secret weapon.