Jo Jo Rockroth has finished his masterpiece. The partially hydrogenated oils are very much to his liking.

Cletus and Jo Jo will now take a much needed vacation. Happy New Year to you all. Yoi o toshi o!

Christmas afternoon: I stood in the corner of our living room, surveying the wreckage from the morning's gift-opening session. Dolls, books, games, stuffed animals and a dozen other toys, torn wrapping paper of all colors and sizes were strewn everywhere. After a minute of feeling sheer horror at the prospect of cleaning all of this up, I slowly transitioned into awe mixed in with a little philosophical envy: Is it possible that a child could receive more gifts in one day than an adult would in a lifetime? I was meeting American culture head-on this day and my head would not stop spinning from the collision. More than the Fourth of July fireworks and peanut butter and jelly sandwiches, Christmas morning with my American family is when I really feel like I have arrived here.

Christmas is serious business in the US, the way New Year's and Lunar New Year are in many parts of Asia. Families congregate, feast, perhaps go to Christmas mass and reflect on a year that's about to pass. Sincere goodwill pervades the nation during this time, however truncated. But it is the economic peripherals of Christmas that reach beyond its geographical borders.

As a child growing up in Tokyo, with faint memories of a few pleasant Christmases spent in Los Angeles, how I yearned to replicate that experience! In my eyes as a nine-year-old, the Japanese New Year celebrations seemed so old and tired, heavy with tradition. I wanted our family to embrace Christmas — tree and all, especially the gifts. I was willing to go to church if we could have a tree in the middle of the house, overflowing with gifts from family and friends. I wanted to revel in the Christmas of my imagination, one that was fueled mostly by the entertainment industry. We could listen to Christmas carols and sing along to "Silver Bells," or my favorite, "Winter Wonderland" — the Johnny Mathis version.

Probably we were a little glib (as in "more voluble than sincere and thoughtful" — someone got a new Oxford English Dictionary for Christmas) in our treatment of Jo Jo earlier. As part of his negotiations with the canned coffee editorial team, he is no longer to be referred to as an "unpaid intern." But you would-be interns with literary dreams, don't plan to get all uppity on us in the new year. Our crack legal staff has crafted a landmark contract that "pays" Jo Jo in partially hydrogenated oils. It's a complex formulation that I frankly do not understand, but we all agree that part three of Jo Jo's review is worth at least one extra large serving of Burger King French fries.

Coffee Mondays on Tuesday? Damn straight. Jo Jo Rockroth is the sort of intern we CMPers love: hungry for clips and willing to work holidays ... for nothing. Thank you, Jo Jo, thank you.

Read part 1 & 2 of his review at our cyber-celebration of America's favorite drug, flavored and canned in Japan.

Jo Jo Rockroth, a writer of undisclosed origins, offers the first of a two-part canned coffee review to help some of us fight off those post-Xmas blues and others kick off Hanukkah.

Her surgery was a triumph. Diamondex had never looked better. Yes, yes, she knew this. And yet. Before the procedure, her handlers at the Institute had concocted jazzy little poems warning her about the possibility of contracting a nasty strain of post-op depression they referred to as "the crilnths."

Keep reading at cannedcoffee.com.

In the spirit of the holidays, we're letting eight-year-old Kimi Rutledge create today's blog entry — the photo of the tree is by her as well. Take it away, Kimi.

Merry Christmas, and a Happy New Year! I took this picture just for Chin Music Press (and the readers of the book too). I hope your Christmas is one of the best days of your life! (Well, it is to me!) Kuhaku would be a perfect gift, well, at least for someone who could read! Well, happy holidays and I hope you get great gifts! ( I hope that I get great gifts too.) ;) Have a great weekend! :-)

Me again. A great piece by David Thayer ran Monday on Booksquare. It's called "Publishers to Readers: We're Not that into You," and it paints a picture of publishers moving more toward brands like Harlequin and away from eccentric works like ... Kuhaku, anyone?

It's the age-old battle: artistic expression versus the demands of power, in this case corporate power. Remember that scene in The Player when Larry Levy brainstorms movie scripts from the headlines of the morning paper? His point is that writers and directors aren't necessary. Well, it seems the publishing industry is out to keep Larry's dream alive.

But we know that it's the friction between art and commerce which can create the most enduring work. Of course there are the geniuses among us on both ends of the spectrum who can either make beautiful art that doesn't sell or complete unredeeming crap that sells millions (which group would you put Michael Crichton in?), but for the rest of us, the process of honing our work with editors, designers, publicists, proofreaders and the rest of the publishing infrastructure is a struggle worth fighting through, one that can make a work stronger both artistically and commercially.

But what if the publishing industry gets so bloated, so sick on itself, that it becomes like the health industry? We all know American medical know-how is second to none, but we also know that our relationship with doctors, hospitals, preventive treatment and insurance has grown wildly dysfunctional. It's frightening, but the patients are not part of today's health-care equation.

The same is true in publishing, I would argue. The way Barnes & Noble, Borders, Wal-Mart and other large outlets buy and return books is analogous to a teenager with a case of bulimia. The binge-purge of retailers (their return rates often hit 40%!) makes as much sense as ever-rising health insurance costs. Readers and patients be damned.

Movie buff andDo You Know contributor Juliette Kernion is the driving force behind Holidailies, an online writing project where bloggers vow to update their blogs daily from Dec. 7 to Jan. 6. Holidailes serves as a portal for all the updates.

It's an excellent idea, allowing you to quickly check out blogs you may otherwise never stumbled across and bookmark a few for further reading.

Check out the banner at the top. We're today's holidailies sponsor.

At least two of the contributors to Do You Know were finishing up novels in Katrina's wake. The first was Toni McGee Causey, who was helping evacuees from New Orleans and elsewhere at the LSU triage, finishing the edits on her first of three novels with St. Martin's Press, running an excellent and frequently updated blog and writing an original essay for us. Oh yeah, she and her husband also run a construction company. One reason she can do all this is she never sleeps. I can send her an email at one or two in the morning — on the West Coast, mind you — and she'll respond within minutes. Amazing.

The other novelist putting the finishing touches on her work when she contacted us was Sarah K. Inman. Her piece for Do You Know presents a rough side of New Orleans that tourists don't see. And it's all from the vantage point of a trapeze artist, or aerialist, alternately getting lost in her art and being rudely awakened by the city below. Her novel, Finishing Skills, also has a strong physical element: it explores the world of female boxing in New Orleans. It has just been released by Livingston Press, and a favorable review ran in the Times-Picayune in late November.

Dan Kennedy, author of Loser Goes First, tipples for cannedcoffee.com this week. We hope he has health insurance.

First, it should be mentioned that I don't advise anyone to go blindly accepting packages from Tokyo then locking themselves in an apartment in downtown New York and ingesting the contents of the package, no questions asked. I especially don't advise taking your quasi-assistant/credit hungry intern person into the lockdown-and-consume mode with you. In your case, this combination could be fine, but in mine we're dealing with one man whose vital organs bear the compromises of two decades of excess and sporadic sleep ... and a younger man who thinks he's going to "assistant" his way to a career in letters. So, both desperate types, both with no business being in close quarters and submitting to a large and sudden infusion of stimulants from the land of the rising sun. Regardless, I opened a package from David Cady, prepared the test environment, then phoned assistant Tim Kell to please come by to ostensibly "make a FedEx run and help me out with a situation." A half-truth, a sting, a fence, a con.

Read on at cannedcoffee.com.

THE HALF-TITLE

Do You Know may finally be off to the printers, but that doesn't mean I'm going to stop talking about its production. Especially considering I didn't really talk about it while designing it.

This is CMP's second physical book. A lot of the decisions we make on how our books should look are based on 1) observations about how we, and others, use books, and 2) beautiful bits and pieces from other books, both old and new. As such, sometimes we include things without really knowing why. Like, for instance, the half-title.

The half-title is the name given to what is usually the first page of a book — the page with the abbreviation of the full title and maybe a small, whimsical typographic indulgence. Following immediately after is the title page, with full title and even more typographical indulgence (or restraint). These two pages form a sort of secret code among book designers. As Hochuli puts it, "Here, on the title page, the designer is revealed."

Not much thought ever went into why we needed a half-title — it was just a piece of the book, like the cover. It had to be there. There was no maybe. A book just isn't a book without starting with this obtuse, somewhat useless and redundant piece of extravagance.

It wasn't until I was thumbing through Designing Books: Practice and Theory by Jost Hochuli that the mere existence of the half-title was brought to my attention. Let me allow Hochuli to explain:

"The half-title derives from the time when books were sent out by the publisher (printer) without a binding. The first page had the function of giving an abbreviated reference to what was inside, and of protecting the title page itself against dirt or damage."

Hochuli also sums it up this way: "If the main title page is the gateway to the book, then the half-title is perhaps the garden gate."

When I read this over the phone to Bruce, you could feel the collective "Ahhhh" in the air.

So now that the mystery of the half-title has been solved, go and grab a handful of books off your shelf and see if there's any particularly elegantly designed half-titles poking around that you hadn't yet noticed.

This September, the Christian Science Monitor published a skeptical piece on lit blogs and their relevance to the publishing industry. Lit bloggers seem to only talk to themselves, the reporter wrote, and it's doubtful whether all their writings amount to book sales for publishers.

Well, Colleen Mondor has written a response to that piece today on a very interesting, new site, Metaxucafe. She relates how she went from getting rude rejections from literary magazines to reviewing for Bookslut, then being published in our soon-to-be-released book, Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans and having her novel read by agents and publishing houses. Colleen is one of the trailblazers on this new career path, but soon, the path will be well worn, I bet.

From a publisher's perspective, do lit blogs help? When we launched Kuhaku with our distributor in April, we were a complete unknown on the literary blog scene. We made some waves on design sites and in the Japan blogosphere, but we were clueless about lit blogs. Sometime during this summer, Colleen found Kuhaku in a local bookstore, contacted us and wrote a glowing review of our press. While we can't give you an exact number, we can say with confidence that the review gave us a lift. The eight or so online sales we received were directly from the review, but we also saw sales through Amazon jump from a paltry two copies in August to 14 in September (the review was posted on Bookslut just after Labor Day). The president at our distribution company sent us a congratulatory note, and the review is now part of our sales kit for Do You Know.

Lit blogs are now a central part of our marketing plans for Do You Know and future books. And when we're feeling pretty satisfied with ourselves (which, mind you, is not often), we like to think of Chin Music Press as a trailblazer in using the web to build an independent publishing house. So, at least for this publisher, lit blogs have created a new avenue for media exposure, helped us sell books and, by the way, introduced us to five of the 14 contributors in our new volume, Do You Know. I'd say that's pretty relevant.

Sitting here with my short, ugly fingernails, I cannot think of a task more annoying than reviewing this shitty little can of coffee. But they told me they would "let me go" if I didn't do a quick write-up of my experience with Dydo "M." So I write. I write naked and sweaty, choking in a miasma of rage that envelops my cross-legged form. My pen trembles as it lurches across the soiled pages of my diary.

Continue reading at cannedcoffee.com.

ANIMAL II (1989)

La-ppisch was one of the most exciting bands to watch in the late 80s. Their live shows were raucous, sweaty and loud. La-ppisch fused the renegade attitudes of punk music with artful musicality culled from a wide range of music styles and appealed to a surprisingly big audience.

During the height of their career, the band worked with Todd Rundgren (popular songwriter and producer of many artists such as XTC, Patti Smith and Meat Loaf) and became the first Japanese band to play a gig at the famed New York club CBGB.

As the Japanese economy went into decline in the 90s, however, the band's popularity waned. The media favored brainless J-pop that was cheery and soft, and La-ppisch's edgy sound was quickly drowned out and its musical legacy forgotten. The band has been largely inactive since 2003.

Buzztracker gets a lot of traffic. It also costs a lot to run. The maintenance cost is mainly in servers — it takes a lot of horsepower to handle 450,000 to 500,000 unique visitors a month. But on top of servers is, of course, my salary (when I'm working on it full-time). We're wary of slapping ads on it for the sake of revenue because it was never initially intended as a direct money-making mechanism. So instead of bombarding people with Google ads, we added a simple link for donations. We figure, if you use buzztracker (and obviously, a lot of people do — regularly), then you could probably afford to give up five bucks.

The thought process was like this: if just 1% of 1% of the people who visit buzztracker.org donated $5 a month, we'd cover server costs and be perfectly happy. 1% of 1% is not a lot. At least, I don't think so. And we have enough traffic where that small percentage is, while not huge, enough to help us along and continue offering the project to the public.

So in the two months we've had the donations link up, how much money has come in? Five bucks.

Which equals 0.0001%. (Our goal was 0.01%)

*sigh*

We didn't expect an outpouring of support but we did expect a bit more than that. Call it what you like — faith in humanity, the impossible optimism you need to run a small publishing company. If anything, this feels like it's been more of a curious experiment than a futile plea for cash. What we've learned is that people don't give money when they absolutely don't have to.

So what are we to do? Making books is expensive. We'd like to make a lot more. In fact, it's rather stupid that we don't make more than we do — and we would, had we an infusion of cash. We have a national distribution network and a small but acutely dedicated team. We also like to think we have a finger on the online and digital publishing pulse. There are lots of interesting things to be put out there in beautiful little packages but not a whole lot of money floating around to do it with. Last year we stumbled through our birthing process; this year has been the year in which we defined ourselves in broader strokes, and 2006 is going to have to be the year we pull all of these bits and pieces — our books, our online work — together and find the cash to take this operation to the next level.

But for now, I'm off to donate a few bucks to all the small sites I frequent regularly.

Do You Know contributor Jason Berry wrote a powerful op ed piece on New Orleans that ran in the Boston Globe today. Berry is exceptionally good at giving the increasingly frustrated and fed-up New Orleanians an eloquent voice. What exactly is our country doing about this disaster? Does anyone know?

For those of you who don't want to go through the signup process (it's free and not too involved), here's an excerpt:

Entire neighborhoods go dark at night — no power, no people. Those clamoring to return — to demolish or rebuild — cannot. No place to live.
Apathy toward the dying neighborhoods stains the Social Darwinists who run Congress. They wear the masks of prolife Christians. As Nero fiddled while Rome burned, these Jesus-lovers yawn at a city on the rack, their pensions safe in the mammoth debt furnished by the worst US president ever.

and a little more:

The ''target neighborhoods," as Mayor C. Ray Nagin calls those that have rebounded, lie on dry ridges of the sub-sea-level terrain, notably the French Quarter, the Garden District, Algiers, and Uptown, where life is seminormal with stores and restaurants. Drive a few minutes and you'll see mounds of debris, trashed buildings, brown water lines on houses, shattered lives.

It's worth signing up to read the complete piece. Powerful and depressing. Are we going to fix New Orleans? This is one of our country's darker moments, I'm afraid.

For those of you who didn't read Bruce's blog entry yesterday (and I don't blame you one bit; sometimes you can just see him sitting there chuckling to himself, thinking he's so damn clever. Hahaha, Mr. T ... Gawd! ... It makes us all a little sick, but hey, he controls the purse strings and Cletus needs his quarterly oiling as much as the next guy), I have a simple announcement:

Our Do You Know section of the website is live.

Also, we'll be expanding this part of our site in coming weeks to bring you more New Orleans news. We'll be announcing new steps here on the blog, so stay tuned.

It's a madhouse over here. We've sent Do You Know to the printer, with the exception of the cover and the map, and those are being sent later today. But there's no downtime, no time to catch our collective breath. Craig is working into the wee hours of the morn getting all sorts of things ready for promoting the book: a pre-order page, a banner ad to run on the holidailies site later this month, galleys for reviewers, postcards for people who buy the book as a gift, press releases, etc., etc. He's also contacting design websites and publications to push them to write about the book. Meanwhile, I'm trying to line up people to review the book, collect comments for the back cover (perhaps the lamest job in all of publishing — "I know you don't have time to read it, but could you say something nice about it anyway?"), print out and mail galleys, scrounge up money to pay the bills and set up readings for February and beyond. The actual editing and designing of the book seem positively serene in comparison (oh, those languorous days when we argued over semicolons...)

If editing a book is at times like savoring a fine bottle of wine, then promoting it is like being jittery on too much Red Bull and coffee. To do it all, one needs to be a bit bipolar — Nan Talese by day; Don King by night.

Right now, I'm Don King and I'm here to tell you that you need this book. If you order today, we will ship this book anywhere in the world at no extra cost. I pity the fool who thinks that's not a good deal! Actually, that's Mr. T, isn't it? Back to Don: Plus, we will donate the profits from these pre-orders to a relief organization working to rebuild New Orleans. So buy the book and 1) help New Orleans; 2) support small publishing; and 3) be one of the few who can say they had their copy of Do You Know before that memorable Oprah appearance made Craig, Dave, Steven, Bill, John, Jason, Steve, Toni, Colleen, Sarah, Miki, Juliette, Dar, C.W., Ray and Rex household names.

Road trip. The words practically cry out for a high degree of caffeination, so I fire up Mom's Krupp and set about pulling a double cappuccino. I put too much water in the machine and four shots worth of espresso dribble out. That's a bit much, so I split the diff and treat myself to a triple.

The resulting caffeine buzz matches that of the Jeep's tires on the tarmac as we leave the Microsoft Greater Co-Prosperity Sphere, the Crate and Barrel condos of Seattle giving way to homes decorated with the more modest comforts of Wal-Mart.

We cruise the star-spangled stretch of highway past Fort Lewis, the place-names ranging from the comfortingly hobbit-esque Mossyrock to the obviously ominous Vader.

Keep reading "Nine shots ..." on Cannedcoffee.com.

My friend Yuki's a painter.

Yuki's second-ever public showing of his works is Monday, December 5th. It's going to be at the restaurant where he and I sometimes work, Aoki, on Broadway in Seattle's Capitol Hill. Anyone who can should come.

I guess it's pretty common to have a friend who paints. Heck, my wife also painted for a while. But I have never seen anyone who's so passionate about it. Yuki loses sleep over something he's working on, and when he's giddy, you can bet it's going well. When it isn't, he's moody. It's like one of those famous tortured artists you read about.

Yuki's completely self-taught, but I think all his love for art percolates through his paintings; they are bold, colorful and powerful. Themes range from pictures or scenes that he's seen, to something abstract out of his head. He doesn't like to talk about his work ("I usually hate my paintings after I am done, though when I am doing them, they're all I care about"), but he once described them as "windows to the world" he doesn't have the means to go and see.

We're racking our brains to come up with a creative ways to transform Aoki into an art gallery. It has incredibly high ceilings, and lots of awkward nooks and slanted walls that make hanging pictures rather difficult, but we hope it will be a unique experience.

Oh, did I tell you the guy can make some mean sushi, too? He will be making some for the evening, and I believe they will go fast, so come early!

Meisai -- Lost Colors --
Oil Paintings by Yuki Omaki
Monday, December 5
6-10 pm
Aoki Japanese Restaurant
621 Broadway East
Seattle, WA 98102

In the last week, we've finished 99.999% of the editing and 98% of the design of the book. We spent Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday last week shooting several rounds of emails back and forth, coordinating editorial changes. Going through this phase with Kuhaku, we only used email to coordinate. This time, in an attempt to bring some organization among four editors and a designer, I set us up with a Basecamp account. We've been using their messaging system to handle the input and discussion surrounding the edits. It's not a perfect solution but it allows us to keep pdf comps, edits, discussions and to-do lists all in one place.

Amidst inputting these edits, working on the New Orleans map and performing final cleanups on the design, I also moved. Eight hours of packing on Sunday. Contract signing on Monday. Movers come Tuesday. Turn on gas, electric, etc., on Tuesday afternoon and install Internet on Wednesday. By Thursday I was working again. This was probably my quickest move ever.

The roadmap was to finish the book before the move — and we almost did — but with one change leading to another and our masochistic knack for taking on laborious acts of research in the name of art, I *just* missed our Monday deadline. Not a big deal because we were still waiting for the final quote from the printers!

The main bits left to deal with design-wise are:

- Insert cover into a template for the printers. You need to make sure the cover art lines up with where the font, spine and back of the book cover will be printed. The whole "cover" is printed from a single file. Since we're doing foil stamping on all pieces I have to make sure everything is in tip-top shape before submitting the final file.