EMBROCATION BOOKS/MAGAZINES/DVDS
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Were you in your teens in the 80's? Did you flip out for the music no one else listened to? Did you hate the football team -- all of them? If so, maybe you read "Maximum Rock and Roll" magazine. I did. MRR was one of those things -- like the movie "Repo Man", like "Zen Arcade" by Husker Du, like reading "Franny and Zooey" -- that transformed me in the 80's from a goof-without-a-cause boy to a simmering, quick-to-disobedience adolescent. I might've been too young to understand the occasional bit of sexual innuendo. And I was certainly too well-off to authentically channel into the urge-for-anarchy there. But despite the cheap newsprint and the awful photos, reading stories like the saga of Black Flag touring the US (back when Henry Rollins traveled by Econline van, not Gulfstream Jet) was an experience of discovering an identity for myself that finally felt natural. The pages of MRR bled with emotion and importance. It wasn't what they wrote -- it's what I experienced.
Embrocation Magazine is the closest thing to MRR you'll find about bikes. It's glossier, that's for sure. And it's color, not black and white. So where does my déjà vu come from? It's the fervor that goes into it. Like MRR, there's no shortage of typos. And the Adobe Illustrator work -- well, it's not flawless. But the whole point of Embrocation is its celebration: noteworthy bikes, the bike race scene, and the addictiveness of riding. There's a bias for New England, but you get Tour of California, the Handmade Bike Show, and a big dose of Belgium, too. If we had to define the magazine in one word it'd be passion. They have it in spades. They're not trying to win the Booker Prize with their essays. They're not making believe they're Richard Avedon with their photos. Embrocation is an unpretentious effusion of joy and knowledge: It's the bike industry's first real 'zine.
Look at the current bike magazine landscape: There's the corporate schlock of Bicycling; there's the tangible existential uncertainty of VeloNews (are-we-Tour-Magazine-or-are-we-the-print-version-of-cyclingnews); and there's the ethereal Rouleur. Sometimes none of those options fit. Embrocation inspires and it entertains. Sometimes, it just what we need. Published quarterly.
FYI, Issue 2.5 is being published outside of Embrocation's normal quarterly schedule, so it's slightly smaller than a normal Embrocation. It's 4" x 9", 60 pages, made with saddle stitch binding and a matte finish cover. Lots of photos.
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