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Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Apr 24, 2005

This Week in Magazines

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  • As mentioned yesterday, a new issue of ART iT (7) is now out on newsstands, featuring a look at “180 creators ‘with the jolt factor,’ together with lists of outstanding venues and books hints at Tokyo’s current cultural life.”
  • There’s a very cute magazine out called CAMERA BIYORI (LIFE WITH CAMERA). Obviously aimed at girls, it sets out to cover photography in a very attractive manner. It looks like those zakka-friendly magazines, with lots of keitai-sized images throughout. It does get technical though, featuring camera suggestions and the like, even giving tips on how to photoshop your digital images into looking like Lomo shots. Vol. 2 is out now.
  • Graniph has put out GRANIPH VOL. 1: CREATORS INDEX MAGAZINE (cover image here), and like the title suggests, it offers up short creator profiles with examples of their work. The thick magazine is relatively cheap (1000 yen), and entirely in English.
  • This months’s issue of SWITCH (May 2005) covers Shimokitazawa, something that a lot of magazines are doing lately, related to the plans to build a highway in the area — last week’s issue of METROPOLIS had an article on the topic. It’s your basic “celebrities list their favorites shops/cafes/bars/eateries” kind of thing.

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PauseTalk

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.
PechaKucha

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.

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