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For moviegoers, the mere mention of Tim Burton summons up frightful scenes of grimacing jack-o-lanterns, corpse brides and headless horsemen. Yet the director whose very name is synonymous with gothic imagery had never tackled a vampire movie. Nor, for that matter, had his frequent collaborator, Johnny Depp. That has all changed with Dark Shadows , a fresh, comedic [...]

Is it real or fake? Should we care? At first glance, German artist Thomas Demand’s photographs of nuclear control rooms and presidential offices look real. On closer examination they yield small clues that they are in fact cardboard constructions of Demand’s making. In the conceptual artist’s first major exhibition in Japan, viewers are asked to question [...]

Imagine if you could enjoy a famous artwork in solitude. Entered only with reservations, Gotanda’s Louvre DNP Museum Lab is a collaboration between the landmark Paris museum and Dai Nippon Printing that brings this dream to fruition. For its current show visitors get to examine at close reach one of Spanish master painter Goya’s finest works, The [...]

The outdoor festival season gets into high gear with Taicoclub. Each year since 2006 the event has “curated” a connoisseur’s selection of electronic and post-rock acts at a mountainside setting in Nagano. This year’s lineup is by far the most ambitious yet. With a new album rumored to be in the offing, New York’s Animal Collective [...]

“Bootzilla” used to steal the show when he was the bassist for Parliament-Funkadelic, and proved he’s still a show stealer at last year’s Summer Sonic. Now those with a yen for funk can experience Collins up close when he settles into Tokyo’s poshest dinner club for a three-night engagement. Born in 1951, William Earl “Bootsy” Collins [...]

In case you hadn’t noticed, it’s Japan’s year of Madchester. The Stone Roses are headlining Fuji Rock, and Peter Hook just performed Joy Division songs at the Hacienda Oiso festival. But Japan also responded to England’s late ’80s ecstasy-fueled, rock-meets-dance-music revolution with its own Second Summer of Love. For one night, nostalgic fans and the merely [...]

The Gothic TV cult fave of the early ‘70s was pretty out there for its day. Now Tim Burton and Johnny Depp turn it up to 11. Barnabas Collins (Depp) was in 1772 the scion of a successful Maine fisheries family in colonial America. He made the grievous mistake of spurning the love of a [...]

French multimedia performance troupe Systeme Castafiore makes its debut in Japan to perform Stand Alone Zone , a fantastical mélange of computer graphics, dance and music. Garbed in bizarre alien costumes, dancers simultaneously on stage and screen enter an “unknown zone,” a kind of futuristic universe that leads the viewer befuddled as to where the stage ends and [...]

Once confined to expat-heavy districts like Roppongi, shisha bars are now cropping up all over, in various guises, from Persian fast-food bars to hipster hangouts. Here are three of the best: Aladdin in Kichijoji ( http://aladdinshishabar.com), housed in a wooden shack as narrow as its menu of ¥600 cocktails is wide; Galata in Jiyugaoka ( http://shop.jiyugaoka.net/galata), a cosy Turkish-run kebab joint [...]

When mobster Jackie DiNorscio, already serving 30 years, was named a co-defendant in a massive ’80s RICO trial, he decided, to the horror of the prosecution and defense alike, to act as his own lawyer, thus providing his poorly suppressed inner standup comic with a captive audience and the opportunity to point out the absurdities of [...]

A longtime fan is dismayed to find his felt-and-fuzz idols disbanded and the historic Muppet Studios abandoned and threatened by a developer. He vows to get the band back together and “put on a show” to raise money to restore the gleefully insane troupe to its former glory. This, in time-honored tradition, involves a lot of [...]