If you learn anything from these posts, that’s great, but really I just like sharing cool shit. That’s also the vibe I get from Adrian Bianco’s Sabukaru, a giant, expensive magazine filled with interviews and sub culture treasures.
Printed on heavily glossy paper with metallic, shimmering inks makes this magazine feel expensive and otherworldly, but it’s just ink and paper. It’s the kind of magazine you have to read on a table. It weighs more than most computers. It begs you to spend real time with it. Put your phone away. Put a record on. Read about tattoos.
The Sabukaru lens is directed at a Western audience, and it’s right at the centre of an evergreen debate about presenting cultural stories alongside brands vying for attention. This is nothing new in the world of magazines: throw a rock through print history and you’ll see this intersection over and over, placing something cool next to something a marketing agency would like you to buy. One might say that’s the whole ballgame.
Sabukaru the website has been doing this a long time, and now so goes Sabukaru the magazine. Flipping through it made me want to write down the names of so many people and look them up (Aya Takano, Nobuyuki Kitamura, Poison Girlfriend, Shyzi; the list is legitimately very long). Good magazines are curiosity fire starters. This is the beginning of the conversation with the editors of the magazine and myself the reader that later on ends in commerce or shared culture. I’m probably going to buy stuff based on what I read here. And I’m going to be enriched by what I learn.
Leave a Reply