Wisdom

C A R S O N

So, here comes new magazine on the block C A R S O N. ”Dedicated to quality in design, fine art, illustration, photography and writing”, edited by Alex Storch, with creative direction from Carson.

Before I go any further, a disclaimer. I’ve been offered a free subscription to C A R S O N in return for blogging about it. I wouldn’t normally do that, but David Carson has been a pretty major influence on me over the years (for better or worse), so I don’t mind selling my soul just a teensy bit in return.

I’m honestly, non-soulsellingly, quite excited about C A R S O N. As a nineties teenager, David Carson’s work seemed to be everywhere. His Nine Inch Nails sleeves were quite unlike anything else, and really made the most of the smaller canvas of CD packaging. His monograph The End of Print pissed plenty of people off, but was massively influential. Even McDonalds got in on the act. And his last major foray into magazine publishing, Ray Gun (or Raygun, or R A Y G U N, or whatever he fancied calling it that month), sat messily and proudly alongside The Face on the shelves of WHSmith to define nineties pop culture.

(I’m already getting a bit irritated by having to type shift-c, space, shift-a, space … etc. This is the nature of the beast.)

Will it actually be any good? It could be fantastic. It could just be a messy Elephant. Storch denies it’ll simply be Ray Gun Part II, but would that be so bad? Just look at the popular reaction to Blur, Pulp, everyone reforming – if anyone’s going to bring a bit of the nineties back to print, why not Carson?

  1. eyeam reblogged this from swisscheeseandbullets
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    *** This is spot on.
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