Even though I was planning on going, I missed out on Paper Sky‘s “Bicycle Club” event this past Saturday at the farmer’s market in front of the UN University, but the magazine’s Lucas Badtke-Berkow has posted a few photos from the day, both for the bicycle event and the booth the magazine had at the market. Above on the right, Lucas and his carrots!
Dec 22, 2009
The new issue of Paper Sky (31) is a special one, marking a major renewal for the magazine. The most obvious change is the cover design, but you’ll find English content creeping back into the magazine as well — for now, mostly with intro paragraphs to each article, but Cameron Allan McKean‘s article on sento bathing in Tokyo is published entirely in English.
The Paper Sky website is also about to get a major revamp, and is set to launch within a week or two. The new site will now have a strong English component, of which I’ll be a contributor (but more on that once the site launches).
The other day I had the great pleasure of finally meeting the magazine’s founder, Lucas Badtke-Berkow, who also founded the original — and truly great — TOKION. Seems like this should have happened ages ago, and it was great to have a nice long chat with Lucas about where Knee High Media has been, where it’s heading, and on the state of print media in general. After checking out the KHM office in Shibuya, we ended up getting coffee at this amazing little retro cafe nearby, which I hate that I can’t remember the name (but I’ll be going there again).
Above, the label for Lucas’ new Luke’s Carrots line of organic products — I had a taste of the carrot jam, which was delicious. You can currently buy it at the weekend farmer’s market in front of the UN University in Aoyama, where he and his wife are manning a booth this month. Next weekend they’ll also be offering free rides on some very cool bicycles, as part of the new Paper Sky Bicycle Club.
Update: The cafe’s name is Aoyama Ichibankan, and here’s a map that shows the location. Make sure to get the honey toast!
Dec 13, 2009
Plants+ is the web spinoff that came out of the now-defunct Planted magazine, and here’s a video (via Click Opera) of Ito Seiko and Lucas Badtke-Berkow (founder of TOKION and Paper Sky) talking about the web venture, with English subtitles.
Dec 13, 2009
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.
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.
