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Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Dec 27, 2007

This Week in Magazines

Trip, Casa Brutus, Mac Power, Tokion

  • CASA BRUTUS (94) takes us on a tour of “Hot Places to Visit 07/08,” with destination ideas both in and out of Japan. I always enjoy these, but wish they would put out some guides, like the WALLPAPER ones, that would compile all of these tips, because I’m not about to start taking notes on every city they cover, in case I get to one of them.
  • PEN (213) also has traveling on the agenda, in this case an issue dedicated to “Musées à Paris” (museums in Paris). The previous issue (212) covered “Eco Ideas 30,” with Assistant‘s Timberland Shibuya store renovation coming in at #10.
  • REAL DESIGN (20) has a terrific look at product package design. I also quite liked their “Super Market Goods Design” feature — I love seeing food package design from different countries.
  • BRUTUS (631) offers up another guide to books — how many of these do they publish every year?
  • TRIP (January 2008) is a new travel magazine — or mook — from the Brutus family, and one that seems to hit all the right notes. The oversized format is great, as well as the raw spine (nice aesthetic). It includes an insert with suggestions on 6 possible trips, and has a few summaries in English of some of the articles.
  • The new issue of TOKION JAPAN (66), with a feature on Jun Takahashi and UNDERCOVER, is the magazine’s final one. Seems like the magazines hasn’t been doing so well for a while now, so the end doesn’t come as a big surprise. The final page seems to suggest that they are only going away temporarily, but that could mean that only the possibility of a return is there.
  • You should also really be on the lookout for the latest issue of TITLE (96), which I write about here.
  • I was wondering what happened to MAC POWER, with no new issues for the past few months. I finally got around to checking their website, and it seems like they’re back with a new look and a new frequency (quarterly). I’ll reserve judgement until I leaf through the issue, but from the cover, it’s looking like they’ve unfortunately turned into a regular Mac magazine, instead of the culture magazine of old.

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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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