(bron: The guardian)

Mainstream magazines might be struggling to survive against digital media, but their independent counterparts are thriving

In the basement of a London bar, gathered like a resistance movement or thralls to some secret perversion, 100 people have come together to discuss their passion for magazines. They particularly like the independently made, keep-it-on-your-bookshelf-afterwards type of mag, but organisers have encouraged the aficionados to share any and all new treasures they’ve found, regardless of subject or appearance. So long as it’s made of paper and ink.

Fittingly, the event is known as Printout; it takes place roughly once every two months. On a bench by the entrance, new arrivals – designers, journalists, students, assorted enthusiasts – are asked to put down what magazines they’ve brought along. Fan, Meat, Shoestring, Ctrl+Alt+Shift, Arty, Buffalo… Quickly, the table is covered with colourful titles, and at the end of the evening, after presentations by visiting magazine-makers as well as a bit of boozy mingling and lots of jokes about font kerning and paper density, departing guests will pick the publication that catches their eye and take it home.

Co-founder Steve Watson explains: “When [the chain bookseller] Borders closed down in 2009, the biggest independent magazine retailer in Britain was wiped out. This was a way of bridging the gap between great magazines and those who’d really like them if they knew about them.” Watson, who in his day job runs a magazine subscription service called Stack, and Jeremy Leslie, editor of the blog magCulture.com, launched Printout last year. They’ll host a party to celebrate its first birthday next month. “There’s no problem with the product; the magazines being made are great,” says Watson. If independent magazines face difficulties in 2012, he says, it’s because of a lack of distribution.

Not the internet? Isn’t the problem always the internet when nice, outmoded things are under threat? Actually, the consensus at Printout seems to be that low-flying indie mags are fairly well placed to weather the financial storms that have troubled the larger magazine houses of late. Indies have traditionally been made by tiny teams on tiny budgets: no change there. And loyal, stubborn customers have been made more loyal, more stubborn by encroaching digitisation. It’s very possible to imagine a future, now, in which bound, tangible mags have been replaced by tablet-based alternatives and fans are clinging ever tighter to their copies of Huck and Last Hours, to Anorak with its 75-point Helvetica and Kasino with its textured cover page.

At Printout, the crowd seems mostly optimistic about life in the iPad age; a point about the online threat, put by somebody during the open-mic part of the evening, raises a few chuckles. “Ah,” says Leslie, chairing, “the death-of-print question…” He turns the subject over to his panel of speakers and Paul Willoughby, creative director of independent film magazine Little White Lies, says: “People are always going to have their personal space, their flat or whatever, and they’re going to want to surround themselves with personal things. I think magazines will always have a place on people’s shelves.” Assuming, Willoughby adds wryly, the internet doesn’t somehow bugger up the shelving industry too.

Both Watson and Leslie maintain that an affection for old media needn’t mean standing against the new. Watson cherishes his subscription to the iPad version of the New Yorker. “People like to say, ‘This is dead and that is living,’” says Leslie, who has designed iPad apps in the past. “It’s not as simple as that. As with most new forms, digital will succeed in various aspects. Print will continue to succeed in others.”

What do they think it is that inspires lasting fondness for the printed page? Leslie points to Printout’s three speakers, Willoughby from Little White Lies and the creative directors from Anorak (a colourful title for children) and Wrap (an ingenious thing that falls apart to be used as wrapping paper once it’s read). “Three magazines,” says Leslie, “three distinct worlds. And it’s their physical differences that define those worlds. As soon as those worlds are squeezed on to an iPad they risk becoming the same.”

Watson has a more atavistic view. “As people, we crumple as we get older, we get smelly, bits break off. Something behind a glass screen, protected from being damaged, it’s hard to feel an emotional bond with that.” He picks up the magazine he’s brought along to share, a German design journal with a bright-red cover. “Look – it’s already starting to get bent around the edges. You feel an affinity with that. It’s something that will die.”

He adds the magazine to the array on the table by the entrance. There, frowning people flick through titles: Manzine, Strange Notes, Lick, Meat. Somebody picks up Reason, then Dweeb, then Surfer’s Path, finally selecting Flamingo and putting it in their bag.

The next Printout is at the Book Club in London, EC2 on 2 May. Tickets cost £5; see stackmagazines.com/printout

A documentary about bike couriers in Brussels, the most congested city in Europe with only 4% cycling traffic.
Online soon.

Two years ago, most of the women on the basketball team at the American University of Iraq – Sulaimani (AUIS) had never been running before. Many had never played sports. None had ever been on a team with other women. They came from all corners of Iraq to attend this prestigious school, but many cannot tell family back home they go to an “American” university.

Through traditional interviews and private confessional video diaries, Salaam Dunk follows the ethnically diverse AUIS women’s basketball team as they discover what it means to be athletes. From the joy of their first win to the pain of losing the coach who started their team, the film gives a glimpse into an Iraq we don’t see on the news.

http://salaamdunkfilm.com

Space For Rent is a short skate documentary which examines the creative act and process of reacting to spaces in architecture, as it manifests itself in both performance and sculpture. Street Skateboarders are largely reacting to the excesses created by industrialization and corporate capitalism. Written, Directed by Jeremy Knickerbocker Camera, Edit, and Sound Recording by Jeremy Knickerbocker, Eric Stout, Ginet Ochoa, and Alex Rohloff Featuring: Casey Huizenga, Fehim Velagic, Jeremy Knickerbocker, Seth Juszkiewicz, Jake Keenan, Auttiesh Danger, Troy Martin, Austin Cox, Jonathan Eisenman, and Ryan Kuerbitz Original Musical Score by Matt Finch

http://tjout.tumblr.com

TJOUT is dedicated to the documentation and study of signs,
word fragments, and typography created with utilitarian intent
in urban environments.

OUTSIDE IN is a celebratory and historical look at street art through the lens of the Museum of Contemporary Art’s groundbreaking exhibition Art in the Streets. The film features renowned artists Shepard Fairey, Lee Quiñones, Swoon, Futura, Mister Cartoon, Revok, Martha Cooper, Invader to name a few. Director Alex Stapleton (Corman’s World: Exploits of a Hollywood Rebel) documents the artist’s creative process, their pitfalls with the law, the poetic impermanence of their craft and the artists’ evolution from the back seat of a cop car to the walls of a well-respected institution.

ABOUT THE ART IN THE STREETS EXHIBITION
The Museum of Contemporary Art presents Art in the Streets, the first major U.S. museum exhibition of the history of graffiti and street art, April 17 through August 8, 2011, at The Geffen Contemporary at MOCA. The exhibition will trace the development of graffiti and street art from the 1970s to the global movement it has become today, concentrating on key cities where a unique visual language or attitude has evolved. Following MOCA’s presentation, the exhibition will travel to the Brooklyn Museum, where it will be on view March 30–July 8, 2012.

Art in the Streets will showcase installations by 50 of the most dynamic artists from the graffiti and street art community, including Fab 5 Freddy (New York), Lee Quiñones (New York), Futura (New York), Margaret Kilgallen (San Francisco), Swoon (New York), Shepard Fairey (Los Angeles), Os Gemeos (São Paulo), and JR (Paris). MOCA’s exhibition will emphasize Los Angeles’ role in the evolution of graffiti and street art, with special sections dedicated to cholo graffiti and Dogtown skateboard culture. The exhibition will feature projects by influential Los Angeles-based artists such as Craig R. Stecyk III, Chaz Bojórquez, Mister Cartoon, RETNA, SABER, REVOK, and RISK.

http://www.factmag.com/2012/02/06/how-to-open-an-independent-record-store

“Dumpster diving” doesn’t involve jumping into trashcans from great heights. It’s a form of protest against wasting energy and throwing food and other products away too soon. It’s also part of an idealistic lifestyle called “freeganism,” which sprang up in the 1990s. Freeganism involves using alternative living strategies based on limited participation in the conventional economy and minimal consumption of resources. In this short musical, the camera captures the convictions of five young people in Montreal who go around looking for reusable waste material. The whole kitchen is equipped with it, so apparently everything they need can be found on the street. To save energy, they run the blender with a pedal and bicycle wheel. “The odd thing is that many people take offence at what we do,” one of the guys notes. Perhaps the faultfinders consider freeganism an implicit form of disapproval of their own lifestyle. The young people present their own opinions about this lifestyle in song, accompanied by piano.

Tomoe Yoshihara, Paul Aflalo, Sandro Lombardi

From pagan re-enactors to Scandinavian communes, black metal concerts to Arctic hermits, and the forever Golden Hour to the Northern Lights, A SPELL TO WARD OFF THE DARKNESS is an inquiry into the possibilities of a spiritual existence within an increasingly secular world.

Starring musician Robert AA Lowe (LICHENS) and co-directed by Ben Rivers (UK) and Ben Russell (USA), A SPELL is a feature-length film that lies between fiction and non-fiction, a record of experience that proposes belief in transcendence as a viable outcome of living in the now.

+Coming In Summer 2012+

This trailer features music by LICHENS and LITURGY and was supported in part by PUMA.Creative Catalyst Award in partnership with BRITDOC Foundation – britdoc.org/catalyst