The Thousands

As we know, but are embarrassed to admit, technology has not improved things: digital photos are never printed, our DVD discs freeze, MP3 files shwoosh, internet phone is like an echo chamber, and news and text on screen fries our eyes. That is why PETER ARKLE NEWS is a rare anachronistic gem. Concerning itself only with the minutiae and mind of New Yorker Peter Arkle, P.A.N. is an all drawings/all handwriting newspaper weblog, without the web part.

**You can only get P.A.N. via the post, but that’s half the fun; the latest edition, sent via international mail from Avenue C, arrives thin as a MacBook Air in a similarly-packaged yellow envelope with grand American stamps. Between its twelve newsprint pages Peter Arkle documents the joyous banalities of his life: Peter goes to the post office; Peter cleans his coffee machine; Peter muses on the contents of his neighbour’s trash, etc. Navel-gazer Marcel Proust may have gone on to do something like this had he been able to draw a good likeness of himself, and didn’t die of a pulmonary abscess in 1922.

P.A.N. is funny, hilariously-drawn and, dare I say, borderline existential. As an object of design it’s beautiful and, unlike an iPhone, when you’re done with it you can wrap chips in it.