I had lunch with Nadine of Tokyo Shoes earlier this week at the very cool Cube Zen in Aoyama, and she gave me this little horse from the Kubrick and Baby Milo collaboration. Gotta get me a soldier or a general to ride him.
Oct 31, 2003
I’m waiting for my copy of the first issue of Douche Magazine. I can’t say much about the magazine before reading it but since teefactory.com is featured it’s gotta be good. Except in North America you will only find the magazine at me jolly favourite store in Paris; Colette.
Oct 31, 2003
Yesterday’s Daily Yomiuri also featured a great article on one of my definite guilty pleasures, pop-rap duo Halcali. I’ll remind you also that you can see a live performance by them in the fourth episode of the BBC show ADAM AND JOE GO TOKYO. I really need to pick up their debut album, BACON. And I promise to eat crispy bacon as I listen to it.
Oct 31, 2003
A couple of articles appeared in yesterday’s Daily Yomiuri covering the Tokyo International Film Festival, one covering the festival in general, and one taking a look at the Fantastic Film Festival part of it.
By the way, this is the first time I’ve actually read articles from that paper online. As of yesterday I’ve cancelled my subscription, which I’ve had for my whole time in Japan. I just started feeling like I wasn’t reading most it anymore, and that what I wanted to read I could get online (at their own website, as well as those of other papers, like The Japan Times and the Mainichi Daily News). The only thing I’m really going to miss is the English TV schedule. Now I need to train myself to read the Japanese schedule in TOKYO WALKER.
Oct 31, 2003
The new issue of online magazine Cozytone is very tasty indeed. Includes a contribution by Joshua Davis, who wrote the great Flash to the Core, which I picked up earlier this year.
Oct 31, 2003
For those wondering what’s up with boingboing.net (one of my fave blogs on the net), the following message by Cory Doctorow was posted at Joi Ito’s site:
Boing Boing has been down for a couple of days. We’re having server problems and working on them — I hope to be up in a day or so again, but it’s exacerbated by my crazy travel schedule.
Please direct your friends to this note, and ask for their forebearance in sending email asking what’s up with Boing Boing. I’m getting several hundred of these a day, and it’s gotten so that answering those messages is actively interfering with my efforts to reestablish service.
In the meantime, we’re still blogging, and the mailblog still works:
Oct 31, 2003
Paul at IN-duce recently went to the Tokyo Motor Show 2003 (he’s a designer working for Honda) and he just updated his site with tons of pics he took. Have a look at the future of automobiles.
Oct 31, 2003
Dunno if this is old news, but still news to me. “AM3 Adapter Allows Viewing of Movies on Game Boy Advance. AM3 (Japan) announced that it will release an adapter and movie card set to allow viewing of movies on the Game Boy Advance. Both Anime and standard movies can be viewed with the adapter and movie card combination. Several movies and anime will be available in November and December, including episodes of Conan (a popular Japanese anime/manga). The adapter and movie cards will be available in November for around 3,800 Yen.” from Akibalive.com
Oct 31, 2003
A different, more beautiful perspective on the fires in California. Totally terminating the state. Check out a bigger picture here
Speaking about beauty. Check out the semi-new video by White Stripe; Hardest button to button. I like conceptual videos following the beat of the music. Cornelius seems to succed with this quite often.
Oct 31, 2003
A poster for an AV (Adult Video) contest. Make pornos and win big bucks! Sorry for the flash, I should have tilted my camera or something. I took another picture without the flash, but it ended up too blurry (couldn’t tell on the viewfinder at the time).
Oct 31, 2003
It’s the end of the month, so time again for a look at the top searches for the month. Looks a lot like last month, except for the top.
1. kill bill poster – Certainly a result of my excitement for Tarantino’s new film.
2. kill bill bootleg trailer – Which I quite enjoyed.
3. kill bill bootleg – And I’m already thinking about seeing it again.
4. steamboy – Ah, the Katsuhiro Otomo film that just keeps getting pushed back, and pushed back, and pushed back…
5. rah xephon – Damn, I really need to watch this series.
6. happatai – Still getting my happatai regulars I see.
7. battle royale cosplay – I wonder who’s interested in this, Japanese people or Westerners.
8. woori bank – Poor, poor Woori Bank.
9. bibimbap – Reminds me that I need to go out for some. Maybe this weekend.
10. takeshi’s castle – As I write this, there’s another crazy Takeshi show on TV. He’s dressed like a doctor, and a foreign woman is pushing a Japanese guy on a cart.
11. ganguro – I was in total shock the other day when I saw a couple of them walking down the street. I thought
they had all disappeared.
12. kimchee – Don’t come here to talk about kimchee. I don’t like kimchee.
13. zatoichi trailer – When will this damn movie come out on DVD!
14. ikko tanaka – I’m still sad that I didn’t get a chance to go see the recent exhibit. This weekend I’d like to check out the new Mori Art Museum in Roppongi Hills.
15. japanese smileys – I’m surprised to always see this show up. One post goes a long way.
16. lost in translation posters – I thought it was cool to see Tarantino do the promotion of KILL BILL in Japan while
wearing a LOST IN TRANSLATION t-shirt the whole time.
17. chikan – They are bad. When Yuko comes home late at night from the university, I usually walk down the street to meet up with her because she’s afraid of getting confronted by one.
18. infernal affairs ii – Great film, and worthy follow-up to the first one. The next sequel should be interesting as well, and it comes out in December.
19. penis festival – And what a celebration it is!
20. juon 2 – I still get creeped out everytime I see the poster.
Oct 31, 2003
Readymade International, Yasuharu Konishi’s record label, released a trio of singles/EPs on vinyl last week that I’ve been giving quite a few listens to (and thanks to Patrick for those rips, I do hope these will come out on CD in the near future). First up (and in order of the images that you see above the text) is a single by DJ 440 (pronounced “yo-shi-o,” as the jacket cover tells us, and supposedly an alter-ego of Konishi himself) called DJ 440′S INCREDIBLE MAMBO BAND that features lots and lots of bongos. I’ve actually been enjoying those bongo beats, more than I expected. Next is an EP by Halfby (someone I’ve never heard of) called AND THE COATI MUNDI EP. It’s rather good club-pop, definitely in the style of old Readymade releases. Last, and the release I was most looking forward to hearing, is a new EP by Karia Nomoto, ARIA, KARIA, MARIA EP. There are 5 tracks, but the first 2 are purely instrumental and serve as somekind of intro, but they’re quite good. Another track is actually a very different version of a song she did on the latest Hair album, SEE ROMA AND DIE. I absolutely love the track, and it sounds like something straight out of a 60s musical. When I hear it I imagine Karia traipsing alongside Catherine Deneuve in LES PARAPLUIES DE CHERBOURG. The last track on the EP is one I have the most trouble with, mostly because of the extremely lame lyrics. It also has a techno-ish beat that I don’t care for, although it does remind me of HAPPY END OF THE WORLD era Pizzicato Five.
Oct 30, 2003
Found this article from THE JAPAN TIMES that covers one of the Tarantino press conferences for the promotion of KILL BILL in Japan.
Oct 30, 2003
PauseTalk is a regular series of events that take place at Cafe Pause on the first Monday of every month, with a start time of 20:00. The idea is to create a forum where Tokyo-based creatives can get together and discuss their own projects, as well as cultural currents of the city. The next edition is March 5.
We hereby define a new term, that of the magaziner, described as a person who exerts an unhealthy amount of love for all things magazine. The Magaziner is a site that mostly focuses on the intersection between magazines and the digital frontier, and what it means for the medium. This does not preclude the inclusion of a healthy amount of print love.
Jean Snow is a contributor to Arcade Mania, your guide to the arcade gaming scene in Japan (Amazon US/Amazon Japan). He also provided assistance on Tokyolife: Art and Design, a guide to Tokyo's cultural output of the past few years, covering the works of over 80 influential creatives.
He will be contributing to the upcoming fifth editions of The Rough Guide to Tokyo and The Rough Guide to Japan, due for release in 2011.
Jean Snow is Executive Director of the PechaKucha organization. He also helps run the PechaKucha Night in Tokyo -- please get in touch if you are interested in presenting at a future event. For a more intimate salon-like discussion group, join him at his monthly PauseTalk event.
A longtime resident of Tokyo, he lives and breathes design, pop culture, and gaming, sustained by an unhealthy addiction to magazines and frequent visits to his favorites cafes. He has reported on these obsessions for various online/offline publications, including the following: Time, Inside (Australian Design Review), Gizmodo, Gridskipper, Kotaku, 1UP, Tokyo Q, Superfuture, OK Fred, Arthur Frommer's Budget Travel, I.D. (International Design), Metropolis, Azure, MoCo Loco, Kateigaho International Edition, Wired's Game|Life, PingMag, CNNGo, Phaidon, and The Japan Times.
You can subscribe to an RSS feed of this site, and also follow him on Twitter and Facebook, or get in touch by email.
He serves as editor-at-large at Néojaponisme, a web journal covering social and cultural aspects of Japan. Read the manifesto, by founder and chief editor W. David Marx.
He also writes a monthly column covering Japanese product design for The Japan Times, called "On Design." It appears on the last Tuesday of every month, in both the print edition and online.
