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Your Guide to Design and Pop Culture in Tokyo

Wallpaper’s The Director’s Cut Is Out

Wallpaper's The Director's Cut

When the latest issue of Wallpaper came out, I posted about the plans to also release an accompanying iPad app featuring works by the issue’s two guest editors, David Lynch and Robert Wilson. Well, it’s now out as a free download, and you should go and take a look.

It’s quite simple as an app, but does what it should do well — give you some extra video content by each creator, with the only other extra a brief intro to who they are after you click on each name. Wilson contributes quite a few “video portraits,” but I was especially interested in Lynch’s section, which is comprised of a short that revisits the main character from his seminal film, Eraserhead.

Wallpaper's The Director's Cut

Every time I hear that song (“In Heaven”) I can’t help but think of the great Pixies cover, which is still one of my favorite b-sides from them.

Expanding Magazine Content on iPad

Expanding Magazine Content on iPad

You may have noticed the latest issue of Wallpaper, featuring guest editors David Lynch and Robert Wilson — it even has a fancy interactive cover. Although Wallpaper doesn’t have a proper iPad edition — they only have an iPhone app that acts as an interface for its website’s content — this issue will introduce an iPad-only supplement, the Director’s Cut, featuring video content by Lynch and Wilson.

I would still rather Wallpaper go and launch a proper iPad version of the magazine, which could then include these extras — just like Wired has recently been including more and more video content — but the idea of a supplement is not a bad one. The app is not out yet, and there’s no word yet on whether it will be free — it’s “presented by Tudor,” so I’m assuming it will be — but there is something to the idea of releasing supplementary content in iPad form, especially when it works as it’s own thing (like the Lynch/Wilson collaboration).

Wallpaper City Guide: Osaka

Wallpaper City Guide: Osaka

First Tokyo, then Kyoto, now it’s Osaka’s turn to get the Wallpaper City Guide treatment. As I wrote when I covered the Kyoto volume’s release, I really like what these book’s represent. No, they’re not intended to be a thorough travel guide to the cities they cover. Instead, they act as handy compendiums of the types of spots you see highlighted in Wallpaper, but end up forgetting about (unless you cut them out and paste them in a notebook).

Wallpaper City Guide: Osaka

As with the Kyoto edition, regular Tokyo-based Wallpaper contributor Gordon Kanki Knight is the author , and I have to say that he’s come up with a very cool collection of stylish spots I never knew existed in Osaka, and I’ve already marked a few I plan on taking in on my next visit — and don’t you know you it, as with all of these Wallpaper guides, you have extra blank note pages at the end in which to write down all those things.

Wallpaper City Guide: Osaka

The official release, as indicated on its Amazon US page (or even Amazon Japan), is December 9, but Gordon tells me that the book should be popping up in some shops around mid-November. As for what’s next for the City Guide series in Japan, I hear that Sapporo is on the horizon.

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 is March 5.

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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PechaKucha Global Cities Week

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.

Neojaponisme

He serves as editor-at-large at Néojaponisme, a web journal covering social and cultural aspects of Japan. Read the manifesto, by founder and chief editor W. David Marx.

He also writes a monthly column covering Japanese product design for The Japan Times, called "On Design." It appears on the last Tuesday of every month, in both the print edition and online.

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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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