Photographer Yohei Morita stopped by my shop last week and dropped off a copy of COG magazine, a magazine devoted to the machines and culture of fixed gear, with a authentic Japanese influence. The current issue featured an article about pro keirin racers and the online edition features a collection of Tokyo messenger portraits.
I swear to God I remember seeing some of these riders last summer when I was in Tokyo. My friends lived in Akasaka, so I’d get food and groceries from Roppongi which was rife with messengers.
The article in COG talks about the address system in Tokyo, which I assure you is just as confusing as the author suggests. I didn’t know that bike messengers as an institution are rather recent in Tokyo.
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I really want to like COG magazine, but the copy-editing gets in the way. Issue #1’s writing was vintage high school journalism, and this article opens up with three incorrect uses of “it’s”. I don’t mean to be a grammar nazi, but poor writing, like poor typography or acting, is incredibly jarring.
You could rip on most of my posts!
hey man, we are NOT bicycling magazine!!! sorry if we made a few mistakes! after all we are human. and we dont have the largest budget for a whole editing department. we are three city cyclists that decided to do a magazine that no one has ever done before. In the process we have met and talked with some amazing people. thanks for your opinion. i hope you enjoyed the FREE mag. high school journalism? ha! thats a good one. its more of a visual magazine anyways. ....
In print always makes the grammar and punctuation errors worse—I noticed a glaring typo in a Deepak Chopra book on the plane today. Regardless, good for you to get a mag out and do it your own way. At least with a blog, we can push the edit button, as I often do.