Travelogue by boicozine

Stuff from Above: Thanks Côme!

Côme de Bouchony [comedebouchony.com] has helped launch the Boicozine cultural exchange programme by very kindly swapping a bunch of ace Ephemera from Paris with your humble author/blog enthusiast… actually there isn’t really any sort of official exchange thingy… I made that bit up. Sounds like kid of a neat idea though, huh.

From the top, clockwise: Côme’s business card × Social Club is a new… er… club for Paris [parissocialclub.com]. As reported in a recent issue of Grafik ’still no website’ Magazine [grafikmagazine.co.uk] Laurent Fetis [laurentfetis.com] has been changed with producing their flyer which is lush A3 size 12 page colour colour affair featuring contributions from Will Sweeney [alakazamlabel.com] and Gaspirator [myspace.com/gaspirator] × Magazine magazine is a magazine about magazines. It’s totally rad, near impossible to find outside of Paris and guest Art Directed by a different creative group each issue. For this edition the creative reigns were passed to Florence & Johann [florencejohann.com] × Côme may have to decipher this one for me. It looks like an ace two colour flyer announcing new publications by a publishing house but I’m not sure. The front image is a bit saucy isn’t it. × Programme produced for Tram [tram-idf.fr] which looks like some sort of Art Festival covering a number of areas and venues. Designed by a couple calling themselves Camping Design [campingdesign.com] × This is Sportswear is a ‘Icon Book Remix’ produced by Nike Sportwear for Clark magazine [clarkmagazine.com]. It’s one of a number of lush publications Nike have been producing in a push to reconnect with the creative community. Designed by ill-studio [ill-studio.com] × Lastly this is an ace little programme from this year’s Chaumont Poster and Graphic Design festival. Printed in metallic gold and reflex blue and designed by Frederic Teschner Studio [fredericteschner.com]

Paris Reading List

Having fully blown magazitis means the first thing you have to do when visiting a new city is seek out the city’s finest purveyor of magazines in order to get your fix. I had a few leads in Paris. OFR [ofrpublications.com] has always been a place for mag worship although the quality and regularity of their titles has been somewhat lacking since they decided to focus on vintage clothing. Palais de Tokyo [palaisdetokyo.com] is a great place to visit and has a fab bookstore, they have also started publishing their own magazine which I’ll talk about below. Colette [colette.fr] was pretty darn awesome for mag shopping this time around. I managed to pick up a Japanese version of Tokion, a catalogue of the recent PMKFA [pmkfa.com] exhibition, ‘A Bag of Grease’, as well as a few other gems there too… Here’s a brief run down, ‘mag your way around Paris’ style…

032c [032c.com]
032c comes from one of my fave cities, Berlin, and makes an excellent travelling companion full of fun yet meaty articles for reading inbetween city hopping. With Issue 13, they have taken a new design direction which can only be described as ‘challenging’. Jeremy over at MagCulture discussed it in detail a little while back [magculture.com].

Tokion [tokion.jp]
Relax maybe be long gone now but the Japanese editions of Dazed and Tokion seem to be taking up the slack after it’s departure. Well, to these western eyes anyway. I’ve been itching to see a copy of Tokion since they took the plunge to create a unique version of the Japanese edition and so far it doesn’t disappoint with some snappy typography that enhances the already well established title.

Wallpaper [wallpaper.com]
It’s been all change at a couple of well known British titles this month. The former editor of Wallpaper has moved house to Esquire and given the mag a complete overhaul (it looks great, new size and all, but it wouldn’t have been had to improve upon it’s previous formulaic incarnation). The Editor’s position at Wallpaper has been filled by former creative lead, Tony Chambers. Therefore Wallpaper has a new creative lead and, this issue, a new look. I had to check it out. The new look is worth having a flick through at for sure. Nice choice of type.

Magazine
Wandering about Paris, you think the locals weren’t really bothered about magazines and magazine culture. Sure, there are a handful of decent newsagents (including an ancient-old WH Smiths), specialist mag stores and the newsstands are pretty neat but often few and far between. Then you stumble upon Magazine magazine, a magazine about magazines… natch! It’s a lush publication, which each issue designed by a different ‘cutting edge’ creative team. It’s free too, which is good because it’s also way hard to find. No website and only stocked in a few random stores around town, this mag was like golddust at Colophon2007 earlier this year and for good reason. Read an interview with the editor in the latest edition of Nico [nicomagazine.com].

Technikart / GoGo Paris Guide [gogoparis.com]
GoGo Paris used to be a magazine, then it became a website and then the magazine disappeared, which was a shame because it’s a near indispensable English language guide to all that’s hip to do and see in the capital. French entertainment mag, Technikart [technikart.com] have teamed up with GoGo for a one off guide to Summer in the City. It was like bumping onto an old friend in the street, seeing it back in print again… although they failed to mention that most of Paris shuts down throughout August, we did uncover a number of ace places to go or at least note down for next time.

Palais [palaismagazine.com]
I didn’t get the idea behind Palais magazine when I first saw it but now I’ve been to Palais de Tokyo to see one of the shows it talks about, it all makes sense now. Palais works as a new sort of exhibition catalogue. See the show, buy the mag. It’s kind of ace when you put the two together. It’s also a kind of interesting new avenue for consumer publishing too.

Zero Duex
This is free art mag I picked up at Palais de Tokyo and it’s ace. Everything in it is based around the letter ‘B’ and includes Bee Beards, a co-operative called Bank and their collection of amended press releases, pics of Blown Out windows, Bono singing at Balthus’s funeral and loads more. For an art magazine it’s rather jolly (apart from the funeral bit, obviously).

Posted by Michael on August 14th, 2007
in Publications / Reading Lists / Travelogue
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Fat Children Took My Life

As seen in the new Surface to Air [surface2air.com] store on Rue Charlot… the new 7inch single for Jarvis Cocker [myspace.com/jarvspace] takes the original cover from the album and messes about with the artwork, creating an allusion to the single title, Fat Children (it’s a top track too!) and a rather bloated version of our Jarv’ (although he’s part Frenchy these days, and all the better for it). Rather spiffy re-artworking by design stalwarts, The Designers Republic [thedesignersrepublic.com].