Issue Nine is out now. It should have popped through your door if you're a subscriber. Here are some things we're excited about.

If only our landlord would let us keep bees on the roof. Frances Ambler, our features editor, met Camilla Goddard, who's a beekeeper in London. She heard how sprinkling hives with icing sugar can keep the dreaded parasite, Varroa, at bay. Camilla's house was piled high with bits of hive, soaps made of wax and pots of honey, and Fiona Essex took photos of them.

Five illustrators drew some of the best bits of advice they've had. This one below by Ben Javens made us smile. He said, "My gran is a very slight woman and she told me that this is what she would do on windy days."

Finally, there's a trio of recipes made with Guinnes from Charlotte Humphery: garlicky, earthy mushrooms-on-toast, a hearty stew, and the richest, most Guinnessy chocolate cake you'll ever have the pleasure of eating.

We have some new indepedent stockists, so don't forget to go and say hello if you're in the area. In Greater London, there's the colourful Shipshape Studio near Harrow, Camden Arts Centre in Camden. A new menswear boutique in Dorset, the Journeyman Union, looks like an interesting place to visit. Down in the southwest, Tate St Ives and Here Gallery's Falmouth branch are now stocking the magazine. 

Check out the issue's contributors here.

This is issue nine as we've been looking at it for the past two months: a rather rough-and-ready flat plan showing what's going where. Soon, it'll be arriving in shiny, printed form. It'll be with subscribers by Monday and in shops later next week. 

We had a lot of fun in issue nine trying out Brownie and Girl Guide bagdes. This is an amazing blanket with someone's old badges sewn onto it. We wanted to include in the magazine, but couldn't think where. The blanket stayed in the office for a while, and we took to huddling up in it when the weather got really cold.

When you look at Nicolas Cage, what do you see? Is it a talented actor who once used his trademark intensity to moving or riotous ends in films such as Leaving Las Vegas and Raising Arizona, who has become an expanding mass of tics so repetitive that his portrayal of a New Orleans cop (Bad Lieutenant) seems identical to his portrayal of a 14th Century Teutonic Knight (Season of the Witch)?

Or do you see an actor whose performances are a unique pleasure in cinema, who has forsaken traditional projects in order to star in bizarre genre films that are often terrible but occasionally brilliant and certainly never unmemorable, giving performances so large that they would look out of place in anything half-way decent or sane? Regardless, your response to Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance is likely to be the same: dissatisfaction.

For those in the first category, they will see yet another wasting of Cage's talents - a poorly written, unimaginative superhero film where he descends ever further into self-parody. Those in the second category will finally appreciate the disappointment of the first group: if you're someone who enjoys "Nicolas Cage" as a distinct cinematic persona then Spirit of Vengeance had lots of potential. Mostly this was because of the film's directing team, Nevaldine/Taylor, who direct as if they've snorted a bin liner full of sugar before every take and as a result have made some of the most interesting, awful, brilliant films of the past few years.

The film's premise is that a stunt motorcycle rider called Johnny Blaze sells his soul to the devil and becomes the eponymous superhero with a flaming skull for a head. Together with Nevaldine/Taylor and late-period Cage this suggests all manner of headache-inducing goodness. Instead, Spirit of Vengeance ends up as something of a bore, despite the occasional good moment and the presence of Idris Elba, who walks around as if he’s in a better film. 

The characters are dull, the script is tepid and the plot reheated and largely free of incident, but the film’s problems go deeper than that. Fundamentally Ghost Rider doesn’t work as an idea. When Blaze becomes Ghost Rider he doesn’t pull on a mask, he’s possessed by an all-powerful, immortal spirit. This makes the Ghost Rider sequences almost impossible to feel invested in: it’s difficult to root for a superhero when he has become an entirely different person, one who is unstoppable and able to make his enemies combust within seconds of meeting them.

It's easy to feel sorry for Cage, whose penchant for buying remote islands and dinosaur skulls means he has to star in worse and worse films. Perhaps the biggest comic book fan in Hollywood, he's ended up with a distinctly second-tier superhero. What might work in the pages of a comic book becomes curiously unmoving on the screen. Even if it's actually Nicolas Cage playing Ghost Rider, you're still just watching some random spirit with a CGI skull going around exploding things for almost no reason. It's a concept that's only cool if you're a 12-year-old boy, or Nicolas Cage.

Happy Valentine's Day, everyone. To mark it, we've put up last issue's stories of love, obssession and longing.

There are crushes that were meant to be, and crushes that weren't. There's a case of mistaken identity and a story of mistaken intentions. 

Valentines Day is coming up, and if you're in the mood for a cosy market to celebrate, and something other than roses to give, head over to Lovely Merchants this Sunday.

It's happening at the Victoria Pub in North London so expect a pint, natter, a really nice lunch and hand-made pressies. More information is on the Lovely Merchants website.

Built on the shores of Califonia’s Salton Sea, Bombay Beach has somehow endured long past its 1950s heyday to become a shell of its former self. A ghost town in the poorest county in the State, its residents scratch out bleak existences amidst extreme poverty and unbearable temperatures. Music video director Alma Har’el has made her feature film debut documenting the lives of three of the people who linger in Bombay Beach, whose desperate stories are as oddly inspirational as they are depressing.

Buoyed by a soundtrack from Beirut and Bob Dylan as well as some beautiful dance sequences, Har’el’s film is undeniably powerful, if intellectually troublesome. To mark the film's release, we spoke to Har’el.

What made you want to tell these people’s life stories?

I wanted to make a documentary that had dance sequences in it, but I put it in the back of my head because I couldn’t find people who I thought could really do it. Then I came and saw Bombay Beach for the first time in the middle of shooting a music video with Beirut. I thought the place itself was so haunting and had such a specific mood. I was really curious about who lives there  I thought they had to have interesting stories because they live off the grid. It’s so hard to survive there  it’s tragic on one hand and yet so freeing. It’s very post-apocalyptic. It’s like this place gave up on society, or society gave up on it. I’m not sure who did that first.

All photos: Stills from Alma Har’el's Bombay Beach.

Considering how fragile the people you were documenting are, did you feel a responsibility to portray them in an accurate manner?

Oh, definitely. I felt a big responsibility to portray them in a way they would feel comfortable with, but at the same time I saw this project as a much more artistic endeavour than purely a documentary, even though it captures how they got pushed away by society into a trap. The town is a great case study of what happen to the weak in society, but it’s a complex situation and the film is more impressionistic than purely political.

I ended up calling it a documentary because it documents the lives of incredibly real people, but the purpose of it was to engage in something that was more artistic, to externalise thoughts that are internal and not necessarily factual. Like with the dance sequences, I was trying to say something that isn’t verbal and have the people in the film express feelings that maybe only dance can portray.

Do you think it expresses a truth about its subjects?

For me the whole concept of truth is something that is so bogus when it comes to film. Documentaries are obviously from the point of view of the filmmaker and they choose what moments to show and they use editing and music to emphasise things. Also, if you’ve ever had a camera directed at you, you end up “playing yourself”, and this is what my subjects were doing in this film. At the same time I think the film reflects how it feels to be around these people and how it feels to be in their lives.

Even though certain scenes were dramatised or you’d give them directions beforehand?

I didn’t script anything, but I created situations that I feel make the film more cinematic or that allowed them to improvise and explore the themes that I wanted to bring out. I also told them never to look into the camera which is a direction which immediately creates an awareness that you’re performing. It is a more controlled environment than the usual documentary but I feel that all of these ideas are more fascinating for film festival programmers than for actual viewers. I don’t know, I think it’s much more interesting to have something cinematic and interesting than just engaging in documenting something. That doesn’t leave a lot of space for me as a filmmaker. I have interests and fantasies and mythologies and tastes and a connection to people and experiences, and I want to explore that too. I’m not a documentarian.

What would you hope that people take away from the film?

I don’t want to impose anything on anyone, but I hope they get a certain insight into a side of America that they don’t know and meet characters that they otherwise wouldn’t meet and just have a cinematic experience that is different from what they usually see.

I think it depends on the person. When you see a film it’s how it echoes with your own history and tastes. It’s up to the chemistry you have. I have this one great fan who saw the film with his girlfriend and wrote to me. He said that after they saw it they separated because he realised they didn’t have real intimacy and that there was something he was missing. He was feeling so many things when he saw the film and didn’t feel like he could share them with her. So that’s something I could have never imagined happening. You never know how someone will experience a film. All you can do is make it. I tried to create this thing about how I feel about this place and these characters. And it has its own life now.

For more information on Bombay Beach, visit the film's website here.

We'd just started daydreaming about and planning oh comely when Borders closed down. This was bad news for independent magazines, because it was a great place for them: there was a large, almost bewildering range of magazines, plenty of space for each title and pleasant space to browse in.

It's pretty tricky for many smaller magazines to be distributed in the UK: there's big jump between selling in a small number of select shops (like our wonderful independent stockists) and distributing to Tesco. This is why Borders was great, and why we're excited about Paperchase. Paperchase is only selling magazines in their flagship Tottenham Court Road store for now, but if things go well they're planning to sell magazines in their shops across the country. 

So, Londoners, do go along and say hello to Paperchase. Here are three of my favourite magazines from their range:

Apartamento. A lovely interiors magazine that is a genuine celebration of home, rather than a selection of glossy furniture. 

Wrap. Great illustration magazine, each spread of which doubles as a gorgeous sheet of wrapping paper. 

Anorak. It's called 'the happy mag for kids', and does just what it says.