Mrs Tsk *

Casual glosses of my journalistic activities tend to mention blogging for Wired and the New York Times, but those jobs ended in 2007 and 2009 respectively. In fact, I haven’t earned a wooden nickel from American magazines since the collapse of design bible ID in 2009.

The new decade has seen me shift from online technology and lifestyle features to paper-printed art and culture features, and from the US to Europe. The magazines I write for now on a regular basis are The Wire (music, UK), Apartamento (design, Italy), Mousse, Frieze and Spike (all art, Italy, UK and Austria). Here’s a gloss of some of my features due to appear in the next month or so. The way I write now, themes tend to clump together and articles complement each other.



The next Frieze runs my extensive interview with Rem Koolhaas, focused on his book about the Japanese architects of the Metabolism movement. This will be my first feature in the paper edition of Frieze, though in the past I wrote occasional columns for their site. The next Apartamento runs a piece I’ve written about John Cage’s methods of improving the world. The next Mousse runs my essay about the Abbey Road webcam, and how smitten we are by overshadowing canonical artefacts and their “iconic” signatures. The next Spike continues this theme with a piece connecting the newly-discovered footage of Bowie performing The Jean Genie on Top of the Pops with Derrida’s Freudian essay Archive Fever, and asks “how can we kill the archive before it kills us?” And the next Wire contains my review of Takeo Toyama’s furniture music.

Several things please me about my journalistic trajectory. I write now for paper, not just for whizzing electrons on a screen. I’m generally free to pick my own topics, so I write only about the issues which are really gnawing at me. I write for the kind of publications — and there are very few of them — that I actually read for pleasure and interest. And they pay me money for it.