This week, join Sean Carman on a magical voyage.

How I First Met Lana the Tigress.

"Is there anything else you need?"

The eggs were fine. I hadn't had to wait long, and they looked like they always did — a fluffy yellow cloud sprinkled with bits of ham.

It was the waitress who was unusual. She had swung the plate over my shoulder, and as I looked up and said, "No thanks," she stayed where she was and stared.

There was a beat.

"Are you sure?" she asked, her gaze fixed on mine. "Are you sure you don't need anything?"

Continue reading Fire — "Sky Max" here.

The Saturn Bar in New Orleans' Upper Ninth Ward is regularly talked about as one of America's great dive bars. A quick Google search will tell you that. Recently, it has been through some hard times. The long-time owner, O'Neil Broyard, died in December. He had sat in front of his bar with a shotgun in his lap after Katrina, according to the Times-Picayune, and only evacuated to Illinois with his two dogs when state troopers forced him out.

Today, his nephew is trying to revive the bar. Eric, his wife and their kids have been cleaning like crazy to get ready for this Saturday. The family will have a celebration there from 11 am in honor of O'Neil.

The Saturn's next big event is hosting us and the launch of Do You Know on Feb. 16 from 6 to 9 pm. We are very excited to be able to launch our book in this fabled New Orleans watering hole. And once Eric sees how much beer the Rutledge brothers can down, he'll be very excited too.

The Press Street Organization is largely responsible for making this happen. As far as I can tell, this is a group of people in New Orleans who are passionate about rebuilding their city and its culture. I talked with one of the members, Anne Gisleson, today and she said they haven't had time to worry about building a website and that sort of thing. They are just too busy fixing their city. We're very lucky to be connected to them, and of course, to Rebuilding Together.

So folks, come to The Saturn (3067 St.Claude Avenue) on Feb. 16. We hope to see you there.

Cross-posted on Voices of New Orleans

There's just one week left in our Do You Know campaign. For those of you who are just tuning in, we've pledged to donate all the profits from early orders of Do You Know to a relief organization in New Orleans. We named that relief organization on our Voices blog today: Rebuilding Together New Orleans. For more on this organization's work to rebuild the homes of low-income people in the Big Easy, check out this post.

And for you publishing otaku and IRS agents among our readers, here's a rough outline of how the money works:

Orders of DYK as of 1/24 = 89
Total revenue raised = $1,646.50
Shipping and handling costs = 356
Cost to make & market 89 copies of DYK = 579
Money raised for Rebuilding Together = $711

There you have it. Each book sold makes about $8 for Rebuilding Together. If we sell another 23 copies or so, we can raise $1,000 for them.

PS We also appreciate the infusion of cash. It keeps us going. Thanks. And you're gonna love this book.

The Hurricane Poster Project is a beautifully designed site housing delicate and emotive posters on New Orleans. The Hurricane Poster Project looks to raise funds to help rebuild a city that us CMPers have grown deeply connected with these past few months. I urge you to poke about the submissions. If you order them by price you can get a pretty good idea of the amount of talent and effort put into this project.

Marxy brings us a dialectic on a can of coffee caught between two cultures.

I hear stories from Costa Rica that the coffee bean farmers divide up their crop by quality and send the highest grade beans off to their most demanding international market — Japan. Whether in petite cans or freshly procured from an espresso machine, Japanese coffee is first-class, and most everyone on this island nation is well aware of that fact.

So what kind of poor soul steps up to the neighborhood vending machine and intentionally buys a can of DyDo's "American Coffee"?

Continue reading Marxy's review at cannedcoffee.com.

Notes about our New Orleans blog:

* The RSS Feed for the main blog is here. Subscribe to this to get updates on the main posts.

* The RSS Feed for the "On the wire" section is here. Think of this like a Google Alerts for the keywords "New Orleans" and "rebuilding" ... except, unlike with Google Alerts this feed is being filtered through editorially experienced humans.

* Also, as always, if you want to keep abreast on all the New Orleans news happening worldwide, you can't beat periodic visits to Buzztracker.

For everyone wondering what the hell an RSS feed is, it's a way to "subscribe" to some stream of content — in this case, blog entries. If you have an RSS-aware web browser (Safari, Firefox, etc.) or dedicated reader software (NetNewsWire for example) or subscribe to some online blog aggregator (Bloglines for example), you can collect the RSS feeds of all the blogs you regularly browse in one space. Then, instead of having to go to the sites directly to check for updates, you check your RSS reader and it shows you all the new content. This saves a lot of time if you follow a lot of sites. It may sound a bit complicated, but it's a very small input_energy:time_saved ratio in the long run. I will now remove my dork helmet.

We have a clear philosophy when it comes to print and online publishing: They enhance each other. This doesn't come from any high-minded artistic concept; it's much more about money — online publishing is a lot cheaper than print and allows us to extend our discussions without breaking the bank (see Kuhaku and cannedcoffee.com, for example).

But this choice is also about the medium — books seep into the culture over time, taking years to bubble up in some cases; blogs hit instantaneously and often dissipate quickly. And that's why we've just launched our Voices of New Orleans blog to complement our upcoming book, Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans.

The book is weeks away from America's store shelves. We hope that Voices adds some spice to the battle for New Orleans. And we also hope that the book creeps into the public sphere, reminding everyone of what is at stake in the Big Easy. Cause it's a lot more than conventions and crawfish, y'all.

As a follow-up to my recent post on digitization of The New Yorker, I'd like to point you all to a recent article by MIchael Bierut at Design Observer. Having received the digital collection of the magazine as a Christmas present, he takes a moment to reflect on the unchanging nature of its design. He discusses almost nothing about the experience of using the archive and instead extols the power of having so much history at his fingertips. It goes to show that even though the package is less than perfect, the content — all 75+ years of it — is still king.

I have to admit that I'm beginning to eye the collection more and more. At a mere $62, having every single page of The New Yorker in its original form sounds really delightful. This coming from someone who grew up in a family of self-confessed information junkies and pack-rats — a trip to the basement of my childhood house in Connecticut will reveal stacks of National Geographic magazines dating back to the 30s and 40s.

Where I drank Ryusendo Coffee — “Original Blend” and what I was thinking at the time: a fictoir
I drank it in the living room, while thinking I should take guitar lessons to help me snap out of my funk. I drank it in the kitchen while talking to my mom on the phone. She sounded good and said Ben was still in Guatemala and was doing well. I drank it while looking for the Spiderman 2 DVD, which was overdue. I drank it standing up, because I swear to you that there are no chairs in my house.

Keep reading David's review here.

Looks like friend and long-time Japan resident Mark Schreiber has another hit on his hands. His latest effort, Tabloid Tokyo, was the No. 1 selling "nonfiction on Japan" book at Tower Records in Tokyo recently. The book, compiled by Mark, features translations of some of Japan's wildest tabloid and weekly magazine articles. Mark also edited Tokyo Confidential and has written or contributed to too many publications to list here.

Mark, from Pittsburgh, has been living in Japan since 1965, when I was still in diapers. He is a walking encyclopedia of street culture (he's also fluent in Mandarin, for what it's worth). He is a superb translator and has an uncanny knack for the offbeat, whether it's in finding the wildest stories in Japan's weeklies or in his quest to find someone who had actually dined on monkey brains.

Congrats, Mark, on another hit.

I'm proud to announce that our very own art director, Craig Mod, has been selected as a judge in this year's Art Directors Club awards.

Craig is responsible for the look and feel of everything we make. The ADC made a great choice — it seems Chin Music's secret weapon is not so secret anymore.

Postscript: Craig informs me that he is technically on the jury of the ADC awards and not a "judge." So probably no gavel ... but still a big honor.

Gills are forming on my neck. I've grown unaccustomed to the sun. I've braved Ohio winters without a decent coat, sweltering Tokyo summers wearing a suit and tie and commuting on crowded trains — but this Seattle rain ... since December 19, it has rained every day in Seattle. And we haven't even set a record yet. Today, the sun burst through and I realized why Seattle sells more pairs of sunglasses per capita than any other American city: the glare takes you by surprise. After three weeks of grey and drizzle, the sun comes out, and you feel like a bar fly emerging from your favorite watering hole at 9 am. Your eyes hurt; you shrink from the sun.

But then, a few seconds later, you adjust and bathe in it, knowing it will soon go away.

I've lived in Seattle for just three-plus years now, and I have to say I always thought the talk of rain was overblown. But this year is different. I've been reading Raymond Carver throughout the rain streak. I never thought of him as a Northwest writer, but now I'm beginning to understand the dark world he inhabited. This poem seems especially apropos.

If it rains for another week, I'll turn to H.P. Lovecraft.

Jessica Helfand of Design Observer remarks on hand-drawn type. How in certain instances the air of its awkward inelegance can imbue something with much more character and genuineness than computer typeset reissues. Important meditations in a time when it's so easy to do it on the electric box.

It struck me that in the misguided spirit of (technological) improvement that seems to characterize just about everything, Al had gotten himself and his dead deer to a computer, going from Taxidermy Gothic to Times Roman Bold in one huge, sad sweep. And it's remained with me, this tale of lost typographic innocence: did someone come along and allege that Al's handwriting wasn't up to snuff? I noticed a different phone number: did he sell the business? And why did he retire the rarified four-headed logo from active duty? Maybe he sold it to pay for the deli-slicer.

Khoi Vinh provides an astute user-end account of thumbing through the DVD collection of the past 80 years of The New Yorker.

Due to copyright issues, many usability and otherwise outright obvious features have been removed from the digital archive — things like full-featured searching, copy and paste, and ascii (text) versions of the documents. Apparently, according to this Wall Street Journal article, The New Yorker had little legal wiggle room in how it could have delivered the goods:

When Congress revamped copyright law in 1976, it said magazine publishers retained the right to print collections and revisions of past issues. But when a magazine wants to republish a freelance work in a new and different format, the freelancer must be compensated accordingly, two more-recent court rulings have found. That means when republishing articles on DVD or other digital formats, magazines must pay freelancers again, get their permission to republish free — or preserve the original print context. The New Yorker's solution was to scan the original magazine pages onto DVDs.

These are like the issues Google Books (Print) and similar services have faced during the past year. Here's hoping that we'll see a well-balanced solution — good for both those perusing the archives and those who have provided the content for the archives — in the near future.

Cannedcoffee.com reaches back to the 1830s for this week's dose of coffee lit. French novelist Honore de Balzac's essay is a must-read for all who crave caffeine.

Coffee is a great power in my life; I have observed its effects on an epic scale. Coffee roasts your insides. Many people claim coffee inspires them, but, as everybody knows, coffee only makes boring people even more boring. Think about it: although more grocery stores in Paris are staying open until midnight, few writers are actually becoming more spiritual.

Keep reading Balzac's The Pleasures and Pains of Coffee here.

Love him or hate him, you can't deny his prolific presence in information design. Anyone who's a fan of thoughtful, insightful graphics knows of Edward Tufte. His first three books — books I'm sure I've mentioned here countless times — have become so standard that saying one should own them has become cliche. Everybody from the 16-year-old web designer down the road to the 60-year-old book designer in the woods has them.

Nine years in the making, his highly anticipated Beautiful Evidence is just about done.

While not popping out until April, us poor folk can start pinching pennies to save up for it. It must be nice to know you can probably push out a 10,000-copy print run and sell out almost immediately!

From Café Scandinavia with Love ~ For Café Apres-Midi (2001)

Hideki Kaji is the official heir of Shibuya-kei pop. He started his career as a bassist for Bridge, a band that played cutesy Brit-colored pop music pioneered by Flipper's Guitar. He went solo in 1996 and became a very successful brand as a singer/songwriter/producer after a string of hit singles, commercial jingles and collaboration with celebrities such as Feye Wong, Sarah Cracknell (of Saint Etienne) and Hiromix. He sings about his love of girls, football and Scandinavian pop music (which makes me think of A-ha and Ace of Base, but apparently that's not really what the term refers to these days). Like his senpai Cornelius, he's rather small, slim and cute, though he is close to 40 now.

This rather windily titled work by Kaji-kun (as he is affectionately referred to by his fans) is a concept album. Café Apres-midi is a series of bossa nova and jazz compilation albums issued in Japan and coveted by Shibuya hipsters. This is Kaji's tribute to the popular series and sort of his best-of album, as many titles featured here are reworked versions of his previously published songs.

As it is "café music," the music here is very unobtrusive and nonchalant, almost to the point of being bland and muzak-like. The soundscape reminds me of Bacharach, Mancini, O'Sullivan and more recently, Kings of Convenience. Though with repeated listens, Kaji's bouncy hooks and quirky personality do shine through. The melodies are hard to resist humming along to, and the crisp arrangements are easy on the ears. In its essence, the album shows off Kaji's strongest skills as a sophisticated, sensitive pop music geek with a knack for great packaging.

The pop references —"Wallpaper" (the mag), "Marimekko," "Ramlosa" (a water brand, apparently originating from Sweden) — get a little contrived, but it's oh-so-oshare. The last song, titled "A Small, Good Thing," is a sly homage to Raymond Carver (translated to Japanese by — who else? — Haruki Murakami). If you grew up in the 80s in Japan adoring all things imported, as I did, this is a potently appealing mix. For a bit of Shibuya-kei nostalgia, there's even a cover of "Coffee Milk Crazy" by Flipper's Guitar.

Even if you don't care at all for J-pop or all the pop-product references, this is good chill-out music. Put it on for any Sunday morning with the New York Times Magazine, hand-ground coffee and some knackebrod with lingonberry jam.

Just a reminder for all of you outside of the US and Canada: This is the final day to receive free shipping on an early order of Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans?, our new book coming to stores in February.

We've decided to extend the pre-order campaign to the end of January. Shipping to the US and Canada will remain free for that period, but with US postal rates going up this Sunday, we couldn't justify extending the free global shipping offer. So, if you're overseas and on the fence about whether to buy DYK, you've got a few hours left to decide and still qualify for free shipping.

Of course, profits from early orders through January will still go to a soon-to-be-named relief organization in New Orleans.

On a linguistic note, one of our writers has expressed his annoyance with the term "pre-order." In his words, "You either order it or you don't. You may be ordering early, but you are not 'pre-ordering,' whatever that means." Should "pre-order" be taken out back and shot? Let us know.

Here are a couple of links for the new year:

The most important music video ever.

A beautiful visualization of the Mississippi River.

and finally, Jack Handey letting us know just how much this isn't a game, goddammit.

Happy New Year!

Or as they say here in Tokyo, "A Happy New Year!"

How that fragmented phrase came to be the standard English greeting at the flip of the clock is beyond me. All I know is it's all over the place — ads, cards, my cellphone inbox. Maybe it's just short for something like, "Have a happy new year!" or "A happy new year to buy more Louis Vuitton!" or "A Happy New Year!? Hell Yes!!"

My brain is still stuck over the Pacific. And now I've gotten a bit of a cold. And yes, that was me riding around Tokyo at 3 am on January 2nd. 30km? Of course. It was freezing, or close to it, but windless and after a good push up around some back streets of Yotsuya, I'm covered in so much sweat it's more gross than bitter. I probably need expensive, tight underwear. Or outterwear that looks like underwear. To compound things, I pour freezing cold water over my hands at Yasukuni Jinjya and ride out under the huge metal torii,gloveless, to prove my manliness to this shrine of war.

Cops are everywhere but nobody stops me — probably because I look like such a serious rider, steam billowing off me as I ride past them.

I swear to God I know these back streets, but things go hazy at Ichigaya and a left turn second guesses itself right and now, completely confused — with frozen knuckles — I'm birthed out of some back canal at the top of Iidabashi. So I say fuggit and ride full speed down the bridge and up the street that becomes Waseda-Dori into the heart of Kagurazaka. The street lights are blazing in front of the station and I cancel out — in an OCD sort of way — my pact with the war shrine by saying a prayer at Akagi Jinjya. This, of course, allows me to put my gloves back on.

Nothing like bringing in the new year with jet-lag-induced hallucinatory night-riding.

Happy New Year folks!

One of the jobs we do here at CMP when not publishing cutting-edge books or innovative websites (can you tell my New Year's resolution is to be a more aggressive promoter?) is translate news stories from Japanese to English. One story Yuko translated recently dealt with literature distributed via the cellphone. Here's a snippet:

Leading publisher Shinchosha Co. is among the first to distribute stories over the cellphone with its 2002 release of "Shincho Keitai Bunko" (Cell Phone Pocket Edition). The publisher's initial plan for the cellphone was to build an online literary magazine that featured new writings. Publishing a literary magazine can be costly, and circulation tends to be limited. The Internet-based cellphone project would solve both these problems.

But other questions persisted. Who would read such small print on the cellphone screen? Would any author contribute his or her work? The cellphone project was launched with very few of these questions answered. Fortunately, with the help of writers interested in digital publishing, the project came to life.

Popular writer Asa Nonami ... contributed "Anata," an original piece. For 210 yen a month, readers have unlimited access to stories. Series are updated every week from Monday through Friday. Subscribers currently number 30,000, 70% of whom are women in their late teens to 30s.

"The great thing about cellphone literature is that one can get a quick reading fix, even while standing," said 36-year-old freelance writer Kayoko Fujino. She now has a separate cellphone just to read from. "Reading Mika Naito's series on the train coming home from work is now an important daily routine," she said.

That's our translation of a Nikkei story that ran over the holidays. This seems like one of those examples of something that works in Japan but would be next to impossible to replicate in the US. Still, the service is bringing more than $50,000 a month to the publisher, based on the numbers in the story. If we could make a tenth of that, we'd do it in a heartbeat.

Happy New Year everyone! Freelance writer Leroy Blanks kicks off the New Year with an American tale of redemption, renewal and canned coffee.

So it's a brand friggin' New Year and I'm buying a cold can of Kona Espresso at the Cafe Solmar in Ballard, trying to keep my mind on positive things for a change. The redheaded barista looks at me quizzically as I put the can on the counter. "No one's ever bought one of those before. I don't know if they're any good," she says apologetically. Well dammit, honey, I'm on assignment for cannedcoffee.com, and I'm about to find out, I say to myself. What I say out loud is: "Someone's got to try it, I suppose."

Keep reading "Kona Espresso" at cannedcoffee.com.