Offbeat

Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Feb 26, 2004

This festival-on-a-DVD thing from the 89mm label sounds really cool. Here’s the REALTOKYO blurb: “Launched in 2002 in Berlin, “short film label” 89mm has so far released a number of shorts on floppy disk. In a special project with the e:motion label, this time 89mm presents a DVD containing 13 collaboration pieces by pairs of visual creators and musicians. While films range from B-movie kinds of flicks to cute animation and cutting-edge computer graphics, musical styles include electronica, techno/house, ambient, and electronic rock. With another 12 TV/movie theatre commercials and other films in the “bonus material” section, the DVD offers a rich overview of contemporary creators of sound and image in and around Germany, and to people in Japan it is especially recommended as an appetizer for next year’s “German Year in Japan.”

While on the subject of shorts, I recently got the 3 BEST OF RESFEST DVDs, as well as the 3 DVDs from the Director’s Series, covering Spike Jonze, Chris Cunningham, and Michel Gondry. I haven’t had a chance to check out the RESFEST shorts yet, but the director DVDs are truly great. I was a bit disapointed that the Spike Jonze one didn’t include more of his music videos (he’s done over 40), but the commentary tracks and other shorts are very nice (especially that Fatlip documentary).

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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 happens June 4.

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.

Codex is a weekly music podcast hosted by Jean Snow, recorded in Tokyo. Playlists for all episodes are posted on the site, and you can subscribe to RSS feeds of posts and episodes.

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.

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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.

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The "Jean Snow" logo is written using the free Kirimomi Swash typeface. The "M31" logo is by Ian Lynam, and is part of a series of 31 unique designs. The site's design is based on the Grid Focus WordPress theme by Derek Punsalan.