Cannot Wait For Monocle...

“Almost everything you see, read, wear and do has been influenced by Tyler Brule” ran the quote in Guardian on Monday. As I sit here in my Brule inspired outfit of ill fitting jeans and ill advised cardigan, I’m becoming more and more obsessed with the return of former Wallpaper* man to the world of publishing. The announcement of a new venture from Brule (see how much funnier the name gets the more you repeat it?) has seen the kind of frenzy one would expect to herald the Second Coming. There must be a press kit of telephone book proportions just from the pieces that have run in the past few days alone. The magazine that will invariably change our lives is called Monocle. It launches tomorrow. I know this because I couldn’t avoid the interviews, I feverishly read them all with a slack jawed disbelief that so many column inches were being devoted to such bunkum. Also I know this because the website for the magazine (of course I’ve logged on!) has a clock counting down the weeks, days, hours, minutes, seconds until Monocle hits the streets of Planet Earth (yes, it’s a global release – W.H. Smiths in Newport train station just isn’t glamorous enough these days). Now, as far as I know, though I might be wrong, Brule has yet to find the cure for cancer. What he has done, by the sound of it, is launch a straight-faced version of Sugarape, the magazine at the heart of Channel 4’s ‘Nathan Barley’. Features include a “deconstruction of the outfits worn by world leaders, (Iran's President Ahmadinejad is the first subject)” (as mentioned in The Observer) – not really that far removed in the insanity stakes from the Sugarape feature on 15Peter20’s portraits of celebrities urinating. When Brule justifies the magazine by saying ‘sometimes people just want to see a nice picture of a helicopter’, I can’t help but think of the imaginary Sugarape editor, Jonathan Yeah, sizing up the preacher man outfit in his Hosegate offices, feet on the desk, self satisfied rictus grin across his slappable face. Basically, I have to see this magazine and fast. Which is fine, because, all the time I’ve been writing this, the clock has kept ticking down and we’re closer than ever to this momentous publishing event. Roll on tomorrow…