We’ve been saying “It’s coming…” long enough.
Finally, we can introduce AUTOCULT magazine: the embodiment of everything we hold dear and love about automotive culture borne of, influenced and made by the American custom car scene. It’s done, printed, packed, shipped and will be hitting bookstores and newsstands next week.
Now, there’s so much to talk about over this magazine and we’ll be telling more stories all week long. But, first, we’ll give you the ‘why.’ As some of you already know, we’ve been in the car culture magazine business for a little more than a decade. And we’ve come to realize that the Automotive category on the newsstand is filled with magazines that lack what we love most about cars: the culture.
And when we say ‘culture,’ we don’t mean ‘kulture.’ Kulture was first widely used back in 1993 when the Kustom Kulture exhibit toured the country and dropped an A-bomb on the hot rod scene of the era. But by 2011, it’s turned into a four-letter word, just like ‘rat rod.’ No, when we use the word culture to describe what we do here, we use it in the context of ‘cultural anthropology.’ That sounds better to us. And when we use the phrase ‘rat rod,’ we’re talking about the first wave of revolution twenty years ago that took the hot rod out of the exclusionary realm of high-end street rod shops and put it back in the home garage, where it all started. More on that later…
So, back to the culture of custom cars. We know this about that: magazines are loved. Sure, online chatboards, catalogs and communities are essential, but this crowd would never forsake its magazines –– its printed word –– for them, alone. We love things. We love collecting. We love tactile experiences. Putting our hands on something makes a direct connection between the physical world and the spiritual one in ways that no iPad, iPod, iPhone or computer monitor ever could (not that we don’t love all our beautifully designed computers, though–and there will be plenty of digital goodies coming, too). We’re hotrodders. We’re car guys. And the feel of a warm valve cover, the aroma of a new set of bias-plys, the sound of a lopey motor under load, the taste of spent alcohol in the air at the track, the sight of a Model T hot rod with the perfect stance…all these things are feasts for the senses and they all mean something special to us. And if a publisher wants to make a magazine for us, he’d better know all about that and how it should translate into the bundled pages covered in ink. To take that a step further, we don’t think any other publisher has made the right magazine about the the artists, writers, builders, photographers, inventors, lovers, haters, fighters, racers, painters and fabricators who made (and make) American custom cars such a cultural force around the world.
So, we got back into the magazine business. But more accurately, we’re building the AUTOCULTURE brand and AUTOCULT is a major force behind it. We’ve designed it to be more of a quarterly museum exhibit catalog –– something meant to be kept and coveted –– dedicated to all the amazing people and things that make car culture one of the most dynamic and beautiful movements of the modern age. Dig on that.
To be clear, this magazine ain’t for everyone. If you get it, you’ll get it as soon as you pick it up. If you don’t…well, friend, there are plenty of other magazines sitting on either side of this one that are doing the same old thing they’ve been doing for (in some cases) decades and they’re doing it for about $5 or $6 less. But we get the feeling that, if you’re here already, you’re gonna get AUTOCULT.
