Jean Snow, our favorite design and culture commentator in Tokyo, writes this week's review. And — surprise — it is actually a review!

When I was first contacted about writing a review for the Canned Coffee site, I figured I would just go out, buy one, and write it up. But, "a package will arrive," proclaimed Mr. Cady (Mr. Canned Coffee himself), and so it did.

When I open the Japan Post yuupakku box, which looks a bit large for something that is just meant to contain a can, I am delighted to find it decorated with collages on the inside flaps.

Keep reading "Caferi" here.

Check out Colleen Mondor's review of My New Orleans: Ballads to the Big Easy by Her Sons, Daughters, and Lovers on our Voices of New Orleans blog.

We're planning to add more features and reviews to the Voices site in coming weeks. If you have something to say about the Gulf Coast region, let us know.

Here's a summary of all our New Orleans media from the recent trip:

Videos:
Lower Ninth Video 1
Lower Ninth Video 2

Photos:
New Orleans photoset
The Saturn Reading photoset

There isn't much I can do aside from echo Bruce's sentiments on the New Orleans trip. It was astounding, and the people we collaborated with down there were absolutely amazing. Press Street and Rebuilding Together were pivotal in just how successful our reading event was.

I had a blast meeting everyone involved with the book finally. It's quite interesting to read someone's work on such an intimate level over and over again and then finally meet them in person.

The whole trip was the perfect mix of dive-bars and swanky eateries. I had been to New Orleans once before when I was 19 and had always carried with me a sense of the brilliant food and music of the city, but this trip pounded the reality of that sense into me over and over again. Gumbo? I will crave gumbo back in Tokyo.

I know Bruce will be popping back down for more readings next month, and I only wish I could be there as well. New Orleans is not dead by a long shot — and in fact, if the current New Orleans is considered dead, then count half of the cities in America long since deceased.

As you can tell we really wiped ourselves out from the activities — just finally getting photos up from the event and hell, we even missed a Coffee Monday this week, the first in ages. Time to get back in the media makin' saddle.

What a great party! We had well over 100 people at The Saturn Bar in New Orleans' Ninth Ward last Thursday for the launch of our second book, Do You Know What It Means To Miss New Orleans? We had kosher red beans and rice, seafood gumbo, Carl Causey's shrimp and corn soup, fresh fruit, smoked duck and even a King cake spread out across the pool table; an eclectic crowd sat around the bar and along the railing of the second floor to take in the readings — nicely dressed senior citizens rubbed shoulders with tattooed and dreadlocked students, professors, professional people and at least a few construction workers who were taking a break from rebuilding the city. The goodwill and energy in the room was palpable.

The readers rocked. We had a rookie lineup that made me more than a little proud of our scouting skills. My brother Dave (pictured outside the bar), Toni Causey and Ray Shea all read for the first time. All three of them kicked butt. Dave started out the readings with some excerpts from the preface to give the room a feel for what was inside the book. Toni silenced the room as she read from "Where Grace Lives." It's a heavy piece and a few people looked visibly moved by it. Then after Dar Wolnik gave an inspiring talk about the city's Farmers Markets and how they are coming back, Sarah Inman, Ray Shea and C.W. Cannon filled the room with laughs and applause during their readings. It was a great performance, mirroring the book's slow, sad Dirge and bouncy, humorous Return sections.

Check out the photos here.

We ended up selling 97 books. People were buying four or five at a time, then cornering the writers to sign each copy. It was, in short, a hoot.

The bar owner, Eric, even bought a copy. We promised to come back again soon and run up a bar bill that will more than pay him back. He says he hopes to officially open in a month or so.

The Gambit Weekly, New Orleans' alternative paper, ranks our reading this Thursday at The Saturn as the city's "best bet." Craig and I are off today for New Orleans. More soon from the Crescent City.

Day two of the judging was much like day one but without all of the fat. The entries were lean and for the most part interesting.

The day was split into two sessions — rounds two and three. Round two was where we attempted to separate the excellent from the junk that slipped in. I have to admit I was a bit surprised by how much crap had made it into the second round. And I was also a bit saddened by how some of the pieces I really enjoyed didn't make it. At the end of judging, we found that there were quite a few pieces that didn't make it even though some judges felt passionate about them.

The third round, which began after lunch, was perhaps the most important and illuminating of all the rounds. Discussions were encouraged and, since there weren't nearly as many pieces as in rounds one or two, we could spend more time meditating on the connection between the design and content of a piece. This is more like what I expected the whole show to be closer to in terms of interaction between the entries and ourselves.

In round three some judges rallied for pieces they really loved — often my vote was influenced by an illuminating explanation. Other times many of us, because of lack of description of the piece or lack of time to fully investigate, missed the entire point of a piece. Thankfully we had the chance to go back and re-evaluate in most of those instances. But it did make you think about how many of the earlier rounds' great pieces missed out because of poor documentation or a lack of an immediately obvious point. But when you are dealing with 4,000 entries that you have to personally sift through, these instances of falling through the cracks are inevitable.

Perhaps the most enlightening discussion happened at the end of the day when we were left with a dilemma: the entries to the corporate branding category that had made it to the third round were horrible. I postulate that the entire category had a poor showing and that the psychology of judging things is such that you think *something* should advance, even if that something is only strong in relation to really weak pieces. As such, we had five logos which, had any won an award, would have caused Paul Rand to come back from his grave and slap us.

Sebastian Gallesse last tasted coffee in 1971. Then we sent him a can of "Red Savanna." He couldn't resist.

I drank from the Roots Red Savanna can of coffee. It has been thirty-five years since I drank coffee. I was coming of age in a time when a man could really appreciate coffee for something other than the hallucinogenics we used to add to the brew (or the fact that when you wanted a double shot espresso, you actually got two shots of liquor poured in your mug). The idea of coffee in a can thirty-five years ago might have caused a riot (and still might if canned coffee companies continue to develop the beans from cloned embryos).

Keep reading "Red Savanna" here.

The Times Picayune's Susan Larson has written a beautiful review of Do You Know ... today.

Here's a snippet:

Do You Know What It Means to Miss New Orleans? not only captures the valued and unique facets of our culture; it provides a kind of emotional prism, ways of looking at this time of love and rage, fear and anger, despair and fierce — and I mean fierce — hope.

This is a great review, but if you haven't seen the paper and are only able to read it online, you might not realize how great. In the paper, the review covers about three-quarters of a page. The print "View in Rear of St. Louis Cathedral" from page 53 of the book is reproduced here, as is the cover. Running across the very top of the page is a quote from the book: "'New Orleanians know that a culture is not just something that you look at or something you eat. In this city, culture is something you live.' — David Rutledge." And below that is a different headline from the online version in large type: Defining Moments. Finally, our reading at The Saturn is plugged in a thin column of events running down one side of the page.

Of course, I'm getting this all secondhand, but that gives you an idea of how the book is playing in New Orleans.

This is a first for us: We've never been reviewed in a major North American daily, and it has been one of my modest goals with this launch to make sure that at least one paper would pay attention to us. Thanks to Susan Larson's thoughtful review, my goals for the book are getting a little less modest.

Okay, so I have about three minutes to write this entry.

Yesterday was the first day of judging for the Art Directors Club (ADC). It was amazing and exhausting. There were over 12,000 entries for the entire competition. Yes, 12,000.

The basic format was to split all the judges into groups of five. This was nice because you got to spend all day with four other people and really get to know them. You then rotated between four different stations if you were in the print design category: Broadcast, Print 1, Print 2 and Digital — Digital being digital images and/or movies of interior/architectural design and typography.

We worked like maniacs spending almost the entire day — 9 am to 6:30 pm — doing nothing but looking at entries. For the broadcast and digital categories, the group of five sat in front of a projector or TV and watched the entries and ranked each one "in" or "out" on a small clipboard. For the print —poster, book, branding, etc. — we walked around with miniature Post-its and stickered the backs of the entries we liked. The assistants to the judges then tallied which entries made it to round two, which is today.

Random note about Japan: Wow, the Japanese have a huge presence in this year's show, mainly in print (almost nothing in broadcast or space-design). There were some posters I was really pushing for that I hope made it through to the next round. Generally speaking, beautiful printing and well executed design.

Okay okay, I'm going to be late. More later.

update: Notes from Day 2

Henshin (1999)

Original Love was one of the "big three" of the Shibuya-kei heyday, and today, it's the only one still standing (the other two being Pizzicato Five and Flipper's Guitar, both broken up for years). However, Takao Tajima — the vocalist, composer and the only consistent member of the band since 1995 — always was sort of an odd man out in the Shibuya scene. He was much more of a physical performer than the typical pop-geek/anti-jock persona of the genre (think Kenji Ozawa and Hideki Kaji) and used his sensual voice and stage presence to his advantage much more than his cohorts. It's not much of a surprise, then, that he stuck to his guns while the Shibuya-kei artists moved on, and the term itself lost its meaning. Nowadays, he seems to occupy the place that was reserved for guys such as Yosui Inoue and Kenji "Julie" Sawada, as one of the foremost male vocalists and musicians in Japan.

Henshin ("transformation" or "mutation" in Japanese) is Original Love's first official "best of" album from 1999. It's a good start for anyone wanting to check out the band's varied and numerous tunes, as it does a good job following its musical progression from the indies era up to the album's release.

Craig wrote this last Saturday. he's on his way to New York right now. — Cletus

And so the hectic month of February begins. A traveller from America arrived at my doorstep just moments ago. Sunday we're off to way below-freezing Sapporo to indulge in hot-springs, crab and hot sake. And then on Wednesday I'm off to NYC as a judge for the 85th Annual Art Directors Club Awards. From there it's New Orleans with the CMP gang, but I'll leave that for another post.

I was invited a little over three weeks ago — pretty short notice, I thought — to come out to NYC and judge the print category for the ADC awards. Humbled, but really, really busy, I actually thought about declining. After some schedule-clearing phone calls, I decided to accept, and I think in retrospect it would have been ridiculous to decline.

So, to say the least, I'm excited at the prospect of leaving my rather insulated world of art and design here in Tokyo and branching out. I'm also looking forward to going through all of the submitted entries and getting a good feel for the what's happening in design right now. Maybe take home some good book ideas.

I should have Net access in my hotel room, so I'll be posting updates from the front lines of judging. Or at the very least, depending on my schedule and jet lag, I'll post a good wrapup of how the event went after it's all finished.

I shook off my Seattle Super Bowl funk long enough to realize that I hadn't plugged this week's coffee review by Laila Lalami of Moorish Girl fame. Enjoy!

The idea of coffee in a can seemed as incongruous to me as cheese in a tube or meat in a bottle, but I’m nothing if not adventurous when it comes to food — I will try anything. And so I eagerly expected the package, which finally arrived in the mail a couple of weeks ago. I opened it to find a small, blue can, the size of those cans you get on an airplane.

Continue reading Laila's review at Cannedcoffee.com.

Susan Larson gives us the lowdown on all the Katrina-related books coming out this spring in today's Times-Picayune. Scroll down to see a blurb on DYK, which she calls "an inspired riff on the Armstrong tune." Nice.

The books arrived yesterday. They look great. As you can see, we immediately put our three- and five-year-old publicists to work.

More photos at Voices of New Orleans.