A Brainy Design Magazine: Monocle

Winnipeg-born entrepreneur Tyler Brûlé, the man behind the influential and stylish Wallpaper magazine, launched a new magazine in London 2 and a half months ago.

Monocle aims to meet the demand for serious news, with a mix of articles about culture and style and an international outlook.


Tyler Brûlé says the magazine aims to meet the demand for serious news. Tyler Brûlé says the magazine aims to meet the demand for serious news.(CBC)

The first issue, weighing in at 200 pages, featured a look at Japan's defence forces, a Q&A with the chief executive of Lego and a cultural report about Afghan music.

Brûlé sees the magazine, and its accompanying website, as a product for serious readers, who are tired of celebrity-driven, dumbed-down news.

"I think what people will get when they read Monocle is a truly global title which doesn't live along national boundaries and I think so much media is regionalized today," Brûlé said in an interview with CBC Television.

International Appeal

The more indepth, serious approach should appeal to people dealing with multiple cultures, he said.

"If we actually look at travel patterns — you know despite all of the environmental pressures people are travelling more than ever before — and people are living in multiple cities, whether it's for business, whether it's for lifestyle purposes, and I think we want to be a media brand to reflect that."

Monocle came out in London and Europe on Feb 13th, 2007 and was available in Canada, mostly in airport news agents, selling there for $12.

"I think this magazine will speak to Canadians as much as it will speak to Australians and Japanese," Brûlé said, adding that it's not just for the jetset.

"This is also for someone who might live up in Scotland or someone who lives in Manitoba who just wants quality coverage as well."

Brûlé, who started Wallpaper in 1996 and sold it the following year for $1.63 million, is well aware of the risk of starting a new magazine, but his forecasts are optimistic.

He expects Monocle will be selling 200,000 copies within six months.

MONOCLE:



The Concept:
We believe it's time for a new, global, European-based media brand. With a keen focus, strong reporting, sharp wit and a more classic approach to design, we've dubbed our venture Monocle. At the core there's a monthly magazine delivering the most original coverage in global affairs, business, culture and design. Alongside, there's a web-based broadcast component covering the same areas through a variety of bulletins, mini-documentaries and talk formats. Focused on informing and entertaining an international audience of disillusioned readers, listeners and viewers, it is our intention to create a community of the most interested and interesting people in the world.

Edited out of London, Monocle is staffed by a team pulled from the world's leading news outlets, magazines and broadcasters. Conceived by Wallpaper* founder and International Herald Tribune columnist Tyler Brûlé, the launch team calls on some of his old alumni and new talent from The Independent, the BBC, branches of Condé Nast and a host of other news outlets. Versed in politics, popular culture, business affairs, media, architecture and design, the editorial team will cover the world from its London hub and dedicated bureau in Tokyo, Zürich and New York. Monocle will be driven by offering original, never-before-seen content to an audience of well-heeled, intelligent opinion leaders around the world.

The Magaine's Sections Are as follows:

AFFAIRS
A global mix of reportage, essays and interviews with the forces shaping geopolitics.

BUSINESS
Devoted to identifying opportunities and inspiring the reader.

CULTURE
With a tight group of opinionated columnists, reviewers and interviewers, it delivers the best in film, television, music, media and art.



DESIGN
Bypassing hype, design is dedicated to unearthing emerging and established talent.

EDITS
Bite-sized and thought provoking, Edits are vital life improvements curated in a fast-paced well-researched collection.

Below is a glimpse of upcoming articles:


Subscription details:

* An annual subscription of 10 Issues of Monocle for £75
* As a subscriber, you will also have exclusive access to information on monocle.com Written and reported by our international team of correspondents, it will offer mini-documentaries, bulletins and our 25/25 guide series detailing the best places to eat, shop and sleep in the world’s leading business cities and resorts. Examples of this will be available to all visitors for an intial period, but will soon become subscriber-only.


Wanna Subscribe? click here.

Funky Find of The Week

Chester, The dog-shaped briefcase.

Because sometimes you are too busy working to walk the dog so this way you can do both at once.
Besides, briefcases don't pee on your rug.

Click on the above image for more information and purchase.

Foodie Eats His Way To Pulitzer

For distinguished criticism, in print or in print and online, Ten thousand dollars ($10,000) awarded to Jonathan Gold, food critic for LA Weekly.


Awarded to Jonathan Gold of LA Weekly for his zestful, wide ranging restaurant reviews, expressing the delight of an erudite eater.

Also nominated as finalists in this category were: Christopher Knight of the Los Angeles Times for his pieces on art that reflect meticulous reporting, aesthetic judgment and authoritative voice, and Mark Swed of the Los Angeles Times for his passionate music criticism, marked by resonant writing and an ability to give life to the people behind a performance.



Bio:

Jonathan Gold is the LA Weekly's restaurant critic and the author of "Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles." He began to write about food for the Weekly in 1984, when the paper's former owner admired a piece he'd written about health insurance and invited him to edit the biannual restaurant guide, and the "Counter Intelligence" column first appeared in the Weekly in 1986. He has been restaurant critic for California, the Los Angeles Times, Los Angeles magazine and Gourmet, where he was the first food writer ever to be nominated for a general national award in criticism, and he has won James Beard Awards for both magazine and newspaper restaurant reviews.

Gold also wrote frequently about music and popular culture for Spin, Rolling Stone, Details and Vanity Fair, and contributes to the radio shows Good Food and This American Life.


Below is an interview with the winner reproduced from The Washington Post:
Chewing the Fat With the Restaurant Critic Who Ate His Way to a Pulitzer Prize
By William Booth
Washington Post Staff Writer
Saturday, April 21, 2007; C01


LOS ANGELES Jonathan Gold, who this week became the first restaurant critic to win a Pulitzer Prize, is giving directions to the Mexican food joint he has chosen for lunch. "I'll be the chubby white guy with long red hair," he says. "You can't miss me."

He is, as promised, Falstaffian in proportion, but he carries his girth well. He looks like a man who has eaten professionally, and with tremendous gusto, for two decades. He is wearing a black leather jacket and a faded yellow T-shirt that reads "Evil Taco." He does have long henna hair streaked with gray and a perpetual squint. He'd make a good pirate.

The lunch place, which he is planning to review soon, is classic Jonathan Gold, meaning it is a mom-and-pop dive in the working-class neighborhood of Highland Park, a cafe called El Huarache Azteca, which boasts of its "el Chicano dog," and its sopas, tortas, tacos, pambasos, sincronizadas and platanos fritos. It is next door to an auto body shop. It is classic Gold in that the 46-year-old critic has made it his mission to discover and revel in the kaleidoscopic ethnic culinary delights of Los Angeles, to search out food that is a window into the city's crazy-quilt immigrant soul, and Gold keeps eating and eating and eating, on an anthropological quest to answer the questions: Who are we? And what is for dessert?

Almost immediately he is ordering. You would be wise to just let him go. When this correspondent first arrived in L.A., a source pressed into his hungry mitts a dog-eared copy of Gold's book, "Counter Intelligence: Where to Eat in the Real Los Angeles," a collection of his columns of the same name from LA Weekly, and for many a foodie it's a treasure map to the best sea urchin gonads, grilled chicken knees and cucumber mint gelato in town, and sometimes, in the world. The Pulitzer committee praised Gold "for his zestful, wide ranging restaurant reviews, expressing the delight of an erudite eater."

Today, Gold chooses huaraches (a masa turnover, like a fried bread, shaped like a shoe sole) with a succulent beef brain, a green mole that is zesty and creamy in the same bite, and chilaquilas; and the plates are surrounded with steaming rice, and beans with a little cheese that sigh, "comfort, my friend," all washed down with a gallon-size plastic foam cup of fresh watermelon juice.

Over a leisurely hour, we inhale the stuff, shoving the plates back and forth, shoveling the aromatic meats down with plastic forks as Gold offers, "you gotta try this," and at one moment, produces a wonderful burp.

Gold began his journalism as a classical music critic, as he had studied composing at UCLA. "Opera," he says, "was an obsession." He is an accomplished cellist, and in the punk heyday of the late 1970s, he played in punk bands, including Tank Burial, "which was the heaviest name we could think of."

From his biography on the Pulitzer Web site: "He began to write about food for the Weekly in 1984, when the paper's former owner admired a piece he'd written about health insurance and invited him to edit the biannual restaurant guide." His main perch over the years has been LA Weekly, which his wife, Laurie Ochoa, now edits, though he has also worked at California and Los Angeles magazines, the Los Angeles Times, and Gourmet, under editor Ruth Reichl, a close friend. "If she goes to Cat Fancy magazine, I'd follow her," he says.

What is the life of the food critic? Harder (arteries) than it looks. During scouting trips, Gold may hit six or seven restaurants in a day. "I can tell at the first bite whether or not it stinks," he says. There was a recent L.A. Times exposé on 400 restaurants that had received failing grades from health inspectors. "I'd been to 110 of them," he says.

In how many eateries has he dined, just in L.A.? He can only guess: 5,000? 10,000? He scours the ethnic newspapers of L.A., written in Farsi, Khmer, Vietnamese: "I don't understand a word of it, but they list an address and I go." Often, he just drives around in his pickup truck and swerves to the curb to sample a couple of dishes. Crowds, he warns, can be deceiving. "I know people who will go down the street for a Chinese restaurant because it's 50 cents cheaper."

For a piece on the best Korean food in Los Angeles, he went to 150 restaurants (he thinks there are about 700 in the county). "They are freakin' amazing," he says, "the best Korean food outside of Seoul." He went to a Taiwanese restaurant in the San Gabriel Valley 17 times -- and he hated the food -- "but I could tell what they were doing was impeccable. I wanted to understand that."

In addition to diners and dives, Gold reviews the most expensive food destinations in Los Angeles -- and he has taken some of them down. "And they deserved it," he says. Unlike many food critics, Gold does not give stars or grades. "I'm more descriptive than evaluative," he says. Gold confesses that his lifelong search is to find another word for "salty."

From one of his winning reviews: "Do I love The Lodge for its double-fisted Tanqueray martinis or for the thick-cut pepper bacon put out like peanuts at the bar? For the big chunks of blue cheese in the house chopped salad or for the onion rings as golden as the bangles on a Brahmin woman's arm? For the dripping-rare New York steak or for the bone-in rib-eye as big as some models of compact car? For the sommelier, Caitlin Stansbury, who seems to purr like a cat when you order her favorite Madiran or Spanish Syrah on the wine list?"

His favorites? "I'd eat anything," he says, "though I am particular to Chinese," a cuisine of many faces that soars in L.A., "but my favorite food of all is really, really expensive French cuisine." Oh, and he knows his wine.

The best restaurants in America? Gold says New York, hands down. Best foodie locale in the world? Gold votes for Singapore. But he praises Los Angeles as the best city to eat Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Armenian, Thai, Vietnamese and Mexican (close runner-up: Chicago). He credits L.A. with the invention of Asian fusion, the California pizza, and resurgence of high-end "comfort food," the $26 meatloaf of Wolfgang Puck. He has at home 3,000 cookbooks. "I don't have one Lithuanian cookbook, I have several." He is also a solid home cook. He does Italian (and visits Umbria every year, "best butchers in the world"). "I've memorized Marcella Hazan," he says of the classic Italian cookbook author.


Above: Jonathan Gold celebrates his Pulitzer

After he won the Pulitzer on Monday, he downed several goblets of Champagne. Then he and his wife went to Pizzeria Mozza, the red-hot oven on Melrose run by celebrity chef Mario Batali and Nancy Silverton (of Campanile fame), a friend of his wife's. He recalls a great bottle of Lambrusco. Then on to Lou, a new wine bar run by Lou Amdur, the husband of New York Times film critic Manohla Dargis, "and then more Champagne."

Our bill at El Huarache Azteca comes to $22.13 plus tip. Gold apologizes that we didn't eat at the Italian masterpiece Valentino, where we could have stuck The Washington Post with a $250 tab, minimum. No matter. As we're leaving, Gold keeps the recommendations coming. The most incredible Vietnamese spring rolls? The best taco cart? The finest martini? Here's a critic you can eat with.

Click here to read Jonathan Gold's latest reviews.

Books for the Eyes and Mind From Princeton Architectural Press

What's hip, well designed, informative and affordable?

Meet Princeton Architectural Press.


A week or so ago, I received a request from Princeton Architectural Press to review some of their publications. I happily complied and some days later received some of their catalogs as well as one of their newer publications, Mingering Mike: The Amazing Career of An Imaginary Soul Superstar by Dori Hadar, to review.


Above: Catalog Covers from Princeton Press' 2006 and 2007 collections

The following is how they describe themselves on their site:
In the nearly twenty-five years since its founding, Princeton Architectural Press has become a world leader in architecture and design publishing, both in market share and in editorial and design excellence. With over 500 titles on our backlist, we have consistently sought the best in our field, and are privileged to be able to attract and publish it. We've made our reputation in part by identifying new trends and publishing first books on emerging talents, as well as definitive works on established names, and by creating books of unsurpassed design quality and production values.

We've also successfully broadened the scope of what design publishing constitutes, by publishing everything from theory anthologies to documentation of remote Canadian fishing villages. Crossing boundaries is our strongest suit: we excel at publishing books that defy easy categorization. And in an industry where the average life span of a book is measured in months, if not weeks, we are a committed backlist publisher; indeed, the first book we published, Letarouilly's Edifices de Rome Moderne, is still in print.

Both the Press and our books have won numerous awards, for editorial excellence and for book design. They've been described in professional and popular media as "visually inviting," "elegant and charming," "useful as well as beautiful," "lovingly produced," "authoritative," "thorough and comprehensive," and so on: we try to make books that are smart and beautiful.

Since 1996 we've been distributed in North and South America by Chronicle Books, the successful trade book publisher based in San Francisco, which has dramatically increased our visibility in the non-specialist book trade and specialty retail stores. Our strategic alliance in 1997 with Birkhauser of Basel, Switzerland, strengthened our worldwide distribution and has brought greater visibility for their excellent books to our shores.

In short: we publish the best books on a subject we believe we know best.
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Previously unaware of the large range of books that cover design, architecture and the 'visual' world from Princeton Architectural Press, I was pleased to see that their own catalogues are well produced, nicely designed and laden with wonderful books that cover numerous topics from Typography to Mapmaking.

I would strongly encourage you to request a catalog or spend some time browsing their publications. You won't be disappointed. Just take a look at how nicely laid out their own catalogs are:







In addition to the above catalogs, I took a look at Mingering Mike, by Dori Hadar with a preface by Neil Strauss and an afterward by Jane Livingston. It is an unusual illustrated find, recounting the story of a previously unknown soul superstar.

Author Dori Hadar (a self professed vinyl junkie) found a treasure trove of albums while digging through crates at a flea market.

Complete with folk like illustrations and extensive liner notes, Dori wondered why he'd never heard of him before. Upon closer inspection, he realized she'd uncovered handmade cardboard covers containing grooves drawn on 'vinyl'and thus was born, the story of one man's mythology of his music career.

After some searching, author Hadar actually met Mingering Mike and he retells the story of his unusual childhood and life experiences that were the inspiration for his imaginary superstardom.

The book is poignant and unusual, laden with charming art and heartfelt accounts of Mike's life.


Above: Mingering Mike, one of PAP's latest releases
A nice find for anyone who appreciates anything from folk art to the music industry to history.

Below are some sample spreads:





In addition to their publications, they have a blog about visual culture. On this blog, they also have a good list of art, design and architectural blogs (mine, however, is not yet included..).

Suffice it to say, Princeton Architectural Press is a 'bookmark must' for anyone who appreciates the arts and the world of 'visual' communication and design.

Careful though...with such affordable titles, you'll soon be snapping up their whole library!