The magic that is Pop-Up Magazine

I was very lucky tonight to attend the fourth, and my first, Pop-Up Magazine.

It's a brilliantly simple idea - a magazine performed live.  One performance;  no recording or documentation. 

The content is like the best issue of The New Yorker in collision with NPR - short provocations, food pieces (the ingredients of beef stew in the 50s vs now), photography, Q&As (with a captain of deepwater rigs) and short movies.  And it's put together like a magazine - lots of short, punchy stuff at the start and longer features at the end.

It works, in part, because the content is eclectic but somehow coherent and pitch perfect.  But it also works because it takes something you think you know and by putting it in a different context turns the familiar into something more unfamiliar and interesting.  

It's fantastic not to be able to flip through it in a fit of ADD.  You have to absorb all the content and absorb the pacing and staging of the editor and curator.  And in a world of an abundance of content, it's rather fantastic and special to have something so perishable and scarce.

(Thank you Christian, terrific ECD at GSP and author of San Francisco's finest food writing, for the ticket!)

Comments

[Eva Hasson]

Sounds like an amazing experience!

[neilperkin]

Gosh. What a fantastic idea. When I was at IPC, editors and other people a lot more creative and clever than me used to talk a lot about the 'pacing' of magazine content. They'd often have flatplans of whole issues laid out in a giant panorama on a big wall, even though with some of the IT and design systems that were introduced they didn't need to. It was the only way you'd get a sense of the pacing throughout a whole issue. Turning that kind of thinking into an event is a genius thought.

[malachy walsh]

How is it "performed"? Do tell.

There's a group in SF called Word For Word which "performs" works of literature like plays, using every line from the story, as written.

It has created some interesting and imaginative staging that you might be interested in.

[Pablo Edwards]

Sounds like a great time. Great stuff!