Learning about the world, what that lump on your leg means, and what your star sign represents in Japanese is all too easy these days; come a cropper on the internet and you're 'learning' about yourself. You can learn about others too; you can haphazardly social stalk until a lazy finger 'Like' has you cowering under a pillow until your laptop battery runs out, you can find out how many cigarettes Johnny Cash smoked a day and you can probably, most likely, go back on Facebook again, but let's be honest, it looks a lot prettier like this:
Yup, another indie publication with noted Instagram hues. But The Quarterly seems to have a dose of stories that really keep 'em coming. I started buying smaller publications a little way back, but I was having a few issues. Some kept filling pages with obviously necessary adverts (this medium doesn't come cheap), whilst others buffed up pages with sparse art that felt hollow for the sake of a white Instagram generation. When did editorial start skipping the stories?
Then there you were, The Quarterly, pulling me in with your roller skaters in suede and your Harajuku rockabilly renegades. Diversity is key in almost everything, it saves you from doubling up on dinner at a restaurant (don't go making the 'same food as your friend' faux pax), it makes sure that no two fingerprints are the same, and well, okay, your doppelganger is probably waiting for you out there somewhere. But that's where this 'Tribes' issue comes in. Documenting groups of people dotted about the globe, Editor Sanj Sahota and his own page turning tribe have put together a collection of faces, batches of folk and tenders of tradition for a magazine about what it means to be human, to humans.
Tribes are something we’re all a part of whether we choose to recognise them or not. From your family to your friends, to those you work alongside or interact with directly or indirectly on a daily basis. Issue Three of The Quarterly is a celebration of the ties and connections which bind people together.
Turn from page to page and your met with tales of the 'Roller Gang' of Tokyo's Harajuku as they put on a public homage to all things Presley, you continue onto an artistic dose of 'weapons' such as fishing catapults being brandished by British schoolchildren before being confiscated, all before landing on coverage of the 'Ladyboys of Los Angeles', the rhythmic roller dancers of The High Rollaz, and tales of the clackety Mariners Arms, a pub that pubs probably once remember being like. Talk about a collection. I absolutely love learning what it is people adore about something that I know little to nothing about. You spend so much time figuring out who you want to be, that sometimes you can miss the pockets of people around you. Here's a magazine acknowledging that, and buffing up your noggin with what it means to belong. I'd likely slow clap if this wasn't the internet.
No comments:
Post a Comment