In the Realm of the Senses

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Psychedelia has an image problem. At least that’s what editor and journalist Hillary Brenhouse realized after she saw through the haze.

Both in art and literature, psychedelia was way more than tie-dye t-shirts and magic mushrooms. Instead of letting that idea fade into the mist, she kept thinking about it. And the more she looked, the more she realized maybe she should create a magazine to address this. And so she did.

Elastic is a magazine of psychedelic art and literature. It says so right there on the cover of the beautiful first issue that just launched. So this is not your standard issue lit or art mag. After all, this is one backed by … Harvard, and UC Berkeley, and a couple of major foundations. 

Hillary Brenhouse has learned a lot about the craft and the business of making and selling magazines this past year. Lucky for us, she and her team are quick studies. You can see it on every page of Elastic. And she also may have redefined the literary magazine. Without a single tie-dyed t-shirt or magic mushroom in the lot, man.

 

Run to the Light

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A monochromator is an optical device that separates light, like sunlight or the light from a lamp, into a range of individual wavelengths and then allows …

… Sorry. I failed physics the last time I took it and I would fail it again. I’m not telling you about my shortcomings for any reason, because a podcast about my shortcomings would be endless.

But I thought I’d look up the word when confronted with Monochromator magazine, which aims to “deconstruct selected films under a shared monochrome to reconstruct them for social relevance.” Look, that’s what it says on the website.

But when you read the magazine, you get it. This is politics and social issues filtered through big movies. How big? The first issue uses Barbie and Oppenheimer to examine the rise of American power (hard and soft).

Having said that, it’s very interesting reading and not heavy. And editor Alex Heeyeon Kil is not even sure she’s editing a film magazine. She sees Monochromator as a discussion about the real world using fictional stories, in this case movies. And her team, divided between South Korea and Germany, publish this annual magazine knowing they might step on more than a few landmines.

Strap in. Or turn on a lamp and take a look at the light and maybe you’ll understand what you’re seeing better than I ever will.

 

Every Day is Mother’s Day

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If The Full Bleed’s second season had a theme, it just might be “We Made A New Magazine During the Pandemic.”  Listen to past episodes and you’ll see that our collective and unprecedented existential crisis ended up producing a lot of magazines.

Melissa Goldstein and Natalia Rachlin met as coworkers at the lifestyle brand Nowness in the UK. Later, with Melissa in LA and Natalia in Houston, they bonded over their new status as mothers: they had given birth a day apart. 

And they both found that magazines aimed at mothers were barren. These titles spoke of babies and parenting and the decor of the baby’s room, but they rarely spoke of the moms as … people. 

So they created Mother Tongue, a fresh look at womanhood and motherhood, and a kind of reclamation of both terms. The magazine functions as a conversation between like-minded moms from everywhere. Plus, like all modern media brands, Mother Tongue has great merch. 

The election looms large, of course, over the magazine and our discussion—we spoke a week after it—and let’s just say both Melissa and Natalia were still processing the results. But Mother Tongue is not going to shy away from talking about that either.