The Jordi cafe’s sign.

Jutton in Ikebukuro. Had a bowl of shouyu-tonkotsu ramen there yesterday. It wasn’t awful, but the taste was just, well, plain. Don’t think I’ll be going there again.

Shot taken with the A5403CA mobile phone.

GENEVEtokyo has two new Takashii Miike t-shirts for sale at their site, as well as the new Travelling Gas Shop at Foret’s Lapnet Ship in Harajuku. The one pictured above is for his film coming out next month, ZEBRAMAN, and the other one is just an orange version of the one I already own.

Want a Cornelius, Kahimi Karie, or Chocolat t-shirt? If so, have a look here. Link via Click Opera.

CHAKUSHIN ARI is Takashi Miike’s new horror film that opens today in Japan. Unlike his other films which usually end up playing in just one theatre in Tokyo for a week, this one seems to be getting quite a bit of push behind it. But no worries, this mainstream entry by Miike still looks like something we would expect from him. From a review at THE DAILY YOMIURI: “Stylistically, Chakushin Ari is one of Miike’s more commercial efforts, as it seems he wants to back up his reputation with a real box-office hit. But Miike’s voice is too loud not to be heard under the flashy visuals of this film. It is his call for all of us, and a rather bleak one at that.” Here’s the review from THE JAPAN TIMES.

And it looks like Miike is really starting the year with a bang, what with another film being released next month. ZEBRAMAN stars supercool Sho Aikawa (the DEAD OR ALIVE series) as some kind of wacky super-hero. My wife, who’s doesn’t watch a lot of movies, was cracking up at the ads and saying that she’d like to see it (she’s never seen a Miike film), so sounds like it could be fun.

Can anyone tell me when Apple’s iLife ’04 gets released in Japan? Today’s the American release date, but I went to Bic Camera and they didn’t have it yet, and had posters announcing it, but nothing more specific than January. I can’t find anything mentioning the release date at the Apple Japan site. I’m really letdown as I was so looking forward to getting it today. Can’t wait to play with GarageBand.

Edit: I sent an email to the Ginza store last night for more info, and got the following reply: “We are expecting to have iLife ’04 in Japan approximately in the end of January.”

A friend in Beijing sent me a link to this today. Last time I went to visit him in Beijing (Summer of 2002), I went there on Iran Air. It was quite the experience.

A blue bicycle.

Magazo is a site featuring info and covers of quite a few Japanese magazines. Includes subscription links, as well as links to the magazines’ official websites. Nice. Got the from Click Opera, Momus’ new Live Journal site.

You absolutely need to check out the “Late at Night” video by Futureshock, done by Neo. Everything is done with stills (except for the people of course). Link via Chad.

And now we see him a few hours later at the Parco Book Center in Shibuya. I never realized that book signings could be so hectic.

Shot taken with the A5403CA mobile phone.

Here’s a larger picture of the Rolly booksigning that I moblogged the other day. Here he’s signing at the Libro bookstore in Ikebukuro, which we passed through to get to the train line we were using to get to Shibuya. As for those who don’t know who he is, I guess you could call him a glam rocker. He’s not someone you see in the charts or anything (maybe he was in the charts in previous decades), but you see him very often on TV, and he’s quite well known.

Shot taken with the A5403CA mobile phone.

Looks like the new Ginza Apple store is doing well. From Apple’s first quarter financial conference call: “Tokyo Apple Store first month sales were highest ever; $1 million per week.” They also announced that an “Osaka, Japan Apple Store [is] opening in Fall 2004.”

I’ve had this in my list of “exhibits to visit” and I thought I’d post it up here (I like to post stuff here as reference, which I can later easily find through the site’s search function). FUTURE CINEMA takes place at the NTT InterCommunication Center Gallery until February 29. Here’s a blurb on the event:

“The visual environment is changing rapidly, as our daily lives grow ever more palpably saturated with images, not only from movies and television, but from computer monitors, video games, cellphones, car navigation systems, cash registers, ATMs, and huge street advertising displays. In contemporary society, such a new type of the image has become a key interface between people and information and already penetrated every aspect of our daily life. The development of multimedia technology may in fact be serving to link everything with some form of visual or cinematic imagery.

The 20th century has been called the century of the image, and films and television were the principal makers of its history. This process gave rise to theoretical discourses concerning cinematic narrative and structure, relations of image production and reception, and the social and commercial significance of these activities. At present, the image gropes for expressive form and definition in the nexus between tradition and the new. As long as the image remains an image there will be methods for conveying it, but as the image takes on new forms, it will become increasingly independent of media such as film and television. For the cinematic image, the present is a period of transformation, a period of confusion-that is to say, a period of opportunity.

In this context artists are working, with all of the imagination and media technology at their command, to express uniquely their perspective on the cinematic experience as it develops into the future. The works on display in this exhibition employ a wide range of techniques, from multiprojection and immersive virtual reality systems to networked, interactive, and database-driven pieces. The artistic visions unfolding via this technology have been produced as examples of “FUTURE CINEMA,” while at the same time representing the varieties of present-tense cinematic expression. There we can see revolution, chaos and possibilities, the nature of the visual image as it morphs from past to present and into the future, with the idea that this will have a transformative effect on our usual patterns of vision.

The exhibition is produced by ZKM (Center for Art and Media, Karlsruhe, Germany), and is currently on a global tour.”

The Opening Cafe in Ebisu is a cafe/travel agency. Didn’t have time to go inside, but it looked nice from the outside.