Month: May 2008

TB.Pensar 14

What is TB.Pensar? Find out here.

I couldn’t very well let this day pass without mentioning that it’s my birthday, although I think vanity is finally going to prevent me from disclosing what number I’ve now hit (not that a quick search won’t reveal that anyway).

Every year on this day I tend to look at where I am with things. It’s certainly been an interesting, and very productive, year. I made the move to full-time freelance writer, and there’s been no regret on that decision. The big change for me right now, starting Monday, is that my role at Wired’s Game|Life is going to increase to what amounts to pretty much a full-time gig. This continued move into the world of game journalism is one I’m quite happy with, and that I embrace fully. That’s not to say that my links to design are getting cut, but it’s turning into an interesting expansion of my activities. Even better, I finally have an excuse for my wife when she asks about my excessive, maybe even obsessive, game playing: “It’s research, honey…”

I posted the other day about Tokyolife: Art and Design, and I’m also incredibly excited about the game book you all know I’ve been working on for Kodansha since last year. I think a lot of people are going to be very surprised by how good this thing is going to be — and that it will be of interest even to those who don’t really consider themselves to have an interest in gaming — and I can’t wait to see everyone get access to it.

So today, I’m taking things easy. I think we’ll get lunch at Rigoletto in the Shin-Marunouchi Building — I love their pizza — and then tonight it will probably be a feast at home, courtesy of Seibu’s depa-chika. Here’s looking forward to the start of another great year!

Otaku Kaidan

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Otaku magazine’s next issue, their fourth, is titled Otaku Kaidan, and covers all things horror in Japan. From their site:

KAIDAN is the term used for the Japanese ghost stories, and, extensively, for the J-Horror culture. The Buddhist moralizing stories were rapidly transformed into international shockers; people wanted more frightening monstrosities and oddness, with no direct connection with the Western horror. Manga, anime, movies and the subcultures developed around them competed in shicks and panic. If you really want to know why on the Japanese horror movies is written 18+, take a look at the next issue of Otaku Magazine. Nevertheless, is our duty to warn you that all who looked inside certain pages of this issue have disappeared shortly after. Still, it might be just a story to send the children to sleep for good.

You can order the issue from the magazine’s official site. Thanks, Tim!

Tokyolife: Art and Design

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I’ve very happy to announce that today marks the official release of TOKYOLIFE: ART AND DESIGN, a beautiful new tome from Rizzoli that covers Tokyo’s creative output of the past few years. I have the great pleasure of getting a project coordination credit in the book, and hope that you get a chance to have a look or even pick it up.

The main contributors to the book are Ian Luna (author and editor of many books on architecture and design), Lauren A. Gould (art director and writer, currently working on a Bape monograph), Tom Mes and Jasper Sharp (co-editors of Japanese film site Midnight Eye), and David G. Imber and Mika Yoshida (writers for BRUTUS and CASA BRUTUS, and other magazines). The cover is by Chip Kidd, quite possibly my favorite book design (and if you haven’t, you really need to pick up CHIP KIDD: BOOK ONE).

Below, the official description for the book:

Tokyolife is is a lavish, whip-smart insider’s guide to the last few years of cultural production in one of the world’s great centers of creativity, and is organized around the physical city, and the role of the megalopolis itself as both the site and inspiration for an unprecedented explosion in design and the visual arts.
Tokyo and its avant-garde occupy a disproportionate role in the creation of global culture. Represented in this book is the work of over eighty creatives: painters, architects, interior designers, industrial designers, fashion designers, filmmakers and photographers, many highly influential, and some as yet unknown in the West. Announcing a generational transition, the divergent personalities profiled in the book have collectively engineered entirely new ways of seeing, expanding their influence well beyond Japan and into the arts of Asia, Western Europe, and North America.