I have met the waffling, indecisive and insecure woman. And that woman is me, a sugar addict, ordering an afternoon latte.

Even as the words "tall vanilla latte" spill out of my mouth to the smiling face behind the counter, I'm on the verge of changing the order. I crave that sweet vanilla in my coffee, and yet I am also petrified by the journey those added calories make straight down south to the hips and thighs. They don't even make a detour. I know; I once overheard them arguing about who will get there first.

When I was a college student, ordering a cup of coffee meant nothing more than just that. In the absence of the fancier twists available today, a typical order at a no-frills coffee shop in Japan then was "the American" — a watery espresso. To that, I would add lots of milk to achieve that creamy, beige look and heap on about 10 grams of white, refined sugar. It was disgustingly sweet, like liquid candy, and I loved it. It went so well with the Mild Sevens and the Caster Lights I used to smoke at Denny's.

Read more at cannedcoffee.com

I'll be the first to admit that my approach to the creative process is as scattered as anyone's. Perhaps most detrimental to me getting anything done is that my "on" and "off" modes are so polarized and intense that when I'm "on" and working, I usually work until physical exhaustion takes me down over the course of a week or a month. And when I'm "off," attempting to get back on track is like trying to push a buffalo onto a ski-lift.

I'd like to think there is some way to achieve a balance, but I'm beginning to give up hope on that idea. Still, to just go with what comes, riding the waves until they break or push me back up, can be frustrating and unproductive.

With cannedcoffee built and David handling all the editorial, and with little need for immediate updates or backups at buzztracker, I finally have some time in front of me to dedicate to designing our second physical book.

I don't purport to be any sort of expert on designing books in any conceivable sense of the word. Nevertheless I'm going to try, somewhat masochistically, to document the design process of Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans. I know that even just mentioning the goal of this series upfront is a recipe for failure, a jinx. Much like saying that it's a jinx is a jinx. Let's just hope I've double jinx-nullified the jinx and that watching me stumble through making a book will be entertaining and fruitful.

Comments/discussions are now active on cannedcoffee.com . Enjoy!

With the Internet positioned to be one of the most empowering mediums for small businesses to spread their gospel, Google's AdWords program — a service of Google allowing you to buy certain keywords and have ads for your products and services appear in context-sensitive searches and relevant websites — seemed superficially like the lever that could move the earth for us small guys. That was, until we actually used it. The lever, as it turns out, was rotten on the inside, and we don't have enough time or ducktape to fix it.

The idea is simple — you bid on a few keywords relevant to your product — in our case, a book (Kuhaku) — set the maximum price you want to pay for a click and then, when the ads appear in contextually relevant spaces, you hope to get a few sales. This is nice because it isn't as brutal as random advertising and one assumes Google's geniuses have done a good job with the algorithm that chooses when and where to place your ads. We've always thought that Kuhaku sales were stifled only by a lack of marketing. We hoped AdWords would be an economically sensible way to bridge our gap between product and consumers. It turns out it's all more complicated than we had hoped.

Teddy Wayne has this week's canned coffee review. Enjoy!

Boss "Cafe au Lait" is made by Suntory, of Lost in Translation’s “For relaxing times, make it Suntory time” fame. Indeed, the small print on the can advertises “Mild and creamy taste for a relaxing moment in your everyday life.” What is Suntory’s fetish for relaxation? And how, exactly, would a highly caffeinated and sugary drink facilitate it?

More relevant, is Lost in Translation racist, as many critics charge, or is it simply an innocuous, comical look at two Americans’ personal and cultural alienation in a foreign land? I have not seen the movie since I saw it perhaps a year ago twice in a row on a long flight, but off the top of my head, here are some scenes that were racist and some that were not though they may have appeared so:

Read more at cannedcoffee.com.

Robert Juppe brought the novel Gadsby to my attention. Can't imagine how I missed it, loving odd literary things as much as I do. Turns out that Ernest Vincent Wright published this novel in 1939. It's over 50,000 words and it never — repeat, never — uses the letter "e."

Why? Wright says he did it because everyone said it was impossible. He even went so far as to ban Mrs. and Mr. because when spelled out, an evil "e" would appear in the reader's mind.

Try reading one of the Gadsby chapters. It's tough to get through. Shows you how much work our little friend "e" actually does.

Chin Music Press turned three yesterday (after the annual cake, champagne and Cohiba breakfast, we weren't in shape to post). It dawned on me that the four principals — David, Craig, me and Yuko — have never been in the same room at the same time. We made Kuhaku, buzztracker and cannedcoffee.com without ever sitting down together for a four-person chat. Three of us have been together plenty of times, but never all four. Can any company beat that?

I know you'll think I'm making this up, but it's true. The second after I opened the can of Georgia "Emblem Black," as I was bringing it to my lips, it said something extremely rude to me.

"Unclefucker," it said in a well-modulated voice, uncanny in its likeness to my own.

I jerked my head back and frantically slapped my hand over the mouth of the gold and black monster. Moving only my eyes, I scanned the plaza where I stood, checking whether anyone else had heard. Men in suits ate curry at outdoor tables, women with brittle hair grimaced as they smoked under a row of young willow trees. No one, it seemed, had noticed. Slowly, I lifted my right hand from the top of the can, revealing a neat red circle pressed into the center of my sweaty palm. "I'm drinking you, buddy," I whispered, readying my mouth for engagement.

Continue reading Coffee Mondays.

Ten (2005)

These guys dress like art school students and play like art school students. The band name is taken from a fictional character in a short story by Kenji Miyazawa, a giant of a writer from the early 20th Century specializing in phantasmic stories for children.

Seems that having a three-piece band that's focused on its intricate interplay and jazzy chord progression, in a pop music format, was a new idea in Japan, and their quirky sound and look caught on. Along with margin-dwelling friends Hanaregumi, Polaris and Nathali Wise, Clammbon now is a major force to be reckoned with in Japan's growing alternative music scene.

Ten, their sixth and latest full-length album, meanders through jazz, j-pop, acid rock and electronica, but somehow comes together uniquely. Their music is a lot more eccentric than, say, The Dreams Come True (another three-piece with a female vocalist with a bunch of gold-disk hits in the late 80s), and the voice of singer Ikuko Harada is more akin to Bjork than Ella. Clammbon's songs are very intelligent yet accessible and sound heat-packed, yet smooth.

The Canned Coffee site is a sort of like a wooden box with a toilet in which we can contain Mr. Cady and his coffee madness. However, on the business side of things it's a laboratory of online publishing experiments for us here at Chin Music Press. It's an experiment in selling electronic publications, it's an experiment in using advertisements on a site, and it's another piece of our grander experiment in building an online CMP-based network.

Putting ads on a site is understandably a big deal for a grass-roots type organization. Will it undermine the message of the site? Will it drive away readers annoyed by anything commercial? Will it muck up and overwhelm the content in undesirable ways?

With these questions in mind, we applied and were accepted into the Yahoo beta publishers program. We decided to go with Yahoo ads (over Google) on the Canned Coffee site for several reasons:

Worker drones, caffeine addicts, we apologize for leaving you strung out for so long without a single Coffee Monday. The rank imitations we pawned off in late summer and early fall were like so much watered down decaf, but now Coffee Mondays is back and better than ever. Ladies and gentleman, feast your eyes on the best melding of coffee and lit since Starbucks decided to put those quotes on its walls: Cannedcoffee.com.

You may now slump back and let your eyeballs roll into the back of your head.

At Neumos, Sept. 27, 2005

The band sounded part psychedelic jam session, part spaced-out drum circle, part world-music noise. But mostly it was a guitar-effects and synth-driven wall of sound. If Sun Ra got together with Jimi Hendrix and they travelled east in search of enlightenment, they might have sounded like this.

Acid Mothers Temple is a musical collective that counts almost 30 members in its ever-changing roster. It is, according to the official website, "a place of refuge, a hometown for all those excluded by mainstream society who find some resonance in the slogan, 'Do Whatever You Want, Don't Do Whatever You Don't Want!!'"

The current five-man lineup is actually called "Acid Mothers Temple and The Cosmic Inferno." It's distinct from earlier incarnations such as "Acid Mothers Temple and The Melting Paraiso U.F.O.(Underground Freak Out)" and "Acid Mothers Temple mode HHH." Personally, I don't really care for their penchant for long and deliberately vague names. But hey, they are indie; the leader is Makoto Kawabata, a seasoned mogul who's been self-releasing his work since the 70s. They can do whatever they want.

Ryan Armstrong has followed the path of Kobo Daishi not once but twice. Kobo Daishi founded the Shingon sect of Buddhism in the ninth century and was said to reach enlightenment as he visited on foot 88 temples on the island of Shikoku. The trip is about 1,200 kilometers long.

Ryan has chronicled his second pilgrimage, completed in 2000, on this website. He told me that '"one of the most surprising things was when I put on the pilgrim's clothing -- people stopped speaking to me as a foreigner (Where are you from? Can you use chopsticks? Nihongo jozu desu ne). Rather they talked to me as a person (Where are you going to sleep tonight? Aren't you cold? Gambatte, kaze hikanai you ni). It was a very strange experience to have in the traditional Japanese countryside."

Most of us have a desire to take a pilgrimage at some point in our lives. My friend Ken and I cycled from Tokyo to Sapporo in the summer of 1989, and the trip is etched deeply on my mind. I also became obsessed soon after that with taking only trains and boats to get from Tokyo to London via the Soviet Union (I finally got on a plane from London to New York, and while I was in the air, the Berlin Wall came down). I also have a friend who last summer visited every Major League Baseball stadium in North America -- a pilgrimage with hot dogs and beer, no less. But Ryan's journey is particularly interesting. If you like what you see, check out more of his photos of Japan here.

I'm intrigued by Amazon's latest attempt to expand the marketplace for literature. Amazon Shorts delivers little e-books containing an original essay or story for 49 cents. The only conditions are that the essays offered here have never been published before, range in word length from 2,000 to 10,000, come from an author with a book available on Amazon and are exclusive to Amazon for the first six months.

I just ordered this essay by Mark Crispin Miller and, with tax, the total came to 53 cents. For a 25-page essay!

Being someone who often reads just one or two essays in a magazine, this sort of reading appeals to me. Plus, I could see this format presenting provocative ideas (the offerings now are pretty tame and too often reek of quick money-making schemes � "Five Ways to Write a Short Story!" "Seven Ways to Spend Two Quarters!").

Amazon Shorts neatly sidesteps the question of whether people will read a whole book electronically. Many of us are already reading essays and news online, so reading a Short is not much of a stretch. And with these longer essays, we have the option of printing them out.

Amazon lets us keep the Shorts in little digital lockers. It all sounds very good. However, I keep getting an error message when I try to open my locker. I'll save a critique of the e-book's format for another day, when they let me into my locker.