It was just brought to my attention that Buzztracker has been nominated /shortlisted for a Webby. This is nice news to start Golden Week with, and it just happens to coincide with a chunk of really down-and-dirty glamourless backend rewriting I had been doing lately. More on the backend later.

For now, if you dig Buzztracker, go and cast your people's choice vote. Thanks!

Update: Just 5 hours ago we were listed in the NetArt category. Now we're gone. I took a partial screen shot (originally for the blog). Here it is to prove we're not insane:

I've emailed the Webby people about this ... Will see what they have to say!

If you'd like to email them too to voice your support the address seems to be: techsupport_pv@webbyawards.com.

Update 2: From the Executive director of the Webby awards:

Hi, Craig:

Thanks for your note. I'm really sorry for the confusion. We were doing some work on our database in the late hours of the night and early this morning and that led to a glitch that temporarily displayed some incorrect information for the NetArt category. We were immediately alerted to this by our system and took steps to fix it. I believe the information was displaying incorrectly for about 5 hours, and the glitch was resolved and pushed live at 930AM EST.

The correct and audited nominees for NetArt are:

1. Color of Sound
http://concretethestudio.com/colo...

2. justcurio.us
http://www.justcurio.us

3. PostSecret
http://postsecret.blogspot.com/

These are the three nominees that were announced on April 11th and those results were audited and tabulated by PricewaterhouseCoopers to ensure fairness and accuracy.

Please accept my apologies for the confusion.

David-Michel

I will now humbly bow back to my corner.

Update 3: Some people have been asking why there are only three entries in the NetArt category. I had the same question last night when I saw Buzztracker was removed. Here is the response I got from David-Michel:

Hi, Craig:

[...]

In certain smaller categories, The Academy will sometimes choose to honor less than 5 sites. Blog - Political also has 3 nominees this year.

Best wishes, David-Michel

Does this still mean I can put a "Nominated for Webby for over *five hours*" sticker on Buzztracker?

What's bizarre/funny/sad/implied about all of this is the fact that clearly Buzztracker was close to being shortlisted (unless there were only five entries in the NetArt category). But for some reason they decided not to include it.

Perhaps most telling about how arbitrary awards can be, Buzztracker wasn't even given "Top 20% Official Honoree" status. I won't make any assertions but it's nice to know Buzztracker wasn't overlooked in favor of clearly much more innovative and culturally important sites.

In the words of Ze Frank: "Kill me."

Some people come to Canned Coffee because of the fame and riches implied in David's emails. Others actually like the stuff. JT Leroy is in the latter camp. Plus JT has a jones for Japanese shoelaces and jazz albums. We have Leroy-san in the palm of our hand...

This week, JT tries Wonda's "Glamorous Body":

The craft and ritual expected of barista stateside may not translate through the myriad vending machines in Japan. Yet and still caffeine overdose is quickly becoming the universal tongue.

For the rest of JT's review, head on over to Canned Coffee.

Everyman, Everywhere (2004)

There is such a diversity in Japanese music today. With emerging sub-genres everywhere, from the for-export art punk of Afrirampo and Luminous Orange to the pop-hip-hop of Halcali and Orange Range, and commercial giants such as Spitz, Ulfuls, L’Arc-en-Ciel each insisting on its own category, it's ever more difficult to classify a new band. What happens then is that everything gets lumped together as "Japanese," such as what may have happened to the bands that got lumped together for SXSW music festival.

Grapevine, a rather straight-forward rock band from Osaka, somehow seems to get lost in the mix. The band seems comfortable enough with its semi-obscure status, though; from what I can see online, Grapevine seems to have steadily built a good-sized fan base and a solid and original, if somewhat unvaried, repertoire.

Everyman, everywhere, a mini-album from 2004, exemplify the band's sound, which is a sort of guitar-oriented, melodramatic classic rock.

Colleen Mondor, one of the contributors to Do You Know and the book reviewer for our Voices blog, has an excellent short story in the latest edition of failbetter.com. But don't read it if you're about to step on a plane.

What is A Public Space?

- A well designed literary journal that doesn't feel like a literary journal
- A collection of eminently readable short stories, essays, poems and interviews

I've had A Public Space — the new lit mag project by Brigid Hughes of Paris Review editorial fame — in my hands for a couple weeks now. At 16.5cm x 21.5cm, it's a squat, easy-to-hold tome with a full-color cover and two-colors in between. Distinctly modern in it's design and typography, it snubs other serif-centric literary magazines like Harpers by seamlessly mixing a soft, round-bodied sans with classic serif. And I'm not just talking about the interplay between headers and body text — A Public Space moves typographically to and fro depending on the context of the story or interview. For example, there are the multi-page interviews with Haruki Murakami set in full page-width serif contrasting with the short and punchy Masaya Nakahara interview set in two column sans.

The stories are good. Sharp. I read all of them. Well, most of them. Which is more than I can say of my general experience with most literary magazines. Of particular interest is the Focus section, edited by Roland Kelts of Kuhaku "Father Hunting" fame. He rounds up Murakami, Motoyuki Shibata and Nakahara in a tight and illuminating peek into modern Japanese lit through interviews, translations and never before published in English fiction. From the Nakahara interview:

"You recently announced that you're going to stop writing. Do you think you'll miss it?"

I never had anything I wanted to say to begin with and I'm completely uninterested in what I'm writing about. Doing something I don't want to do has taken a toll on my mental health. It has brought me to a lower level as a human being. I'm tired of it. If I don't quit, I feel like I'll drop dead. I really want to live in another country. I hate Japan.

What is it with modern Japanese writers and running away from Japan?

Other juicy bits include the "Illustrated Guide to Copper Extraction in Bungham Mining District" with note-like pencil scrawlings on the fascinating world of copper. And from "Tutor" by Katia Kapovich in the poetry section (which is overall a great group of selections in my opinion):

My CV would be incomplete without mention
of this Russian kid with Down syndrome
whom I taught English.

So run off and grab this sucker. It's solid, well designed and damn entertaining.

Greg Sharpless of The Big Picture brings us our coffee review this week.

Surfer Joe didn't know what to do.

He sat there, cross-legged in the off-white sand, his chin resting on his fists. His handlebar mustache flapped in the breeze while his surfboard ­­like some great magenta-colored dog ­­ lay beside him, waiting.

Keep reading Greg's review at Canned Coffee.

Belated but still noteworthy — we've kept this blog thing up for two full years now. Not too shabby.

Now back to eating your chocolate rabbits.

The latest issue of the The Simon magazine, an online publication that takes on everything from Altoids ads to California culture in inspired style, includes a piece called "Invisible City: New Orleans Rebuilds by Writing." It's a great piece — and not just because Do You Know is featured prominently. It's the first piece I've seen that looks at post-Katrina literature as a weapon or a tool in the rebuilding process. The subhead sums it up nicely:

In a slew of books responding to Katrina, writers show that the Big Easy is not going to let 125 mph winds, FEMA, or Bush rain on its parade.

It's easy to dismiss this sort of effort, but it is also wrong to do so. Tom Lowenburg of Octavia Books in the Garden District told me in February that the city's residents were buying books about New Orleans in record numbers. People are searching for answers, context, meaning in this mess, and when the government at every level looks indifferent or incompetent or a combination of the two, people search beyond it to find something worthwhile. In this case, this new body of post-Katrina lit is attempting to fill the gap.

On a side note, the piece raves about the latest copy of The New Orleans Review, which I would like to get my hands on. It also quotes good friend Anne Gisleson, who writes about her child seeing X's in the sky. Powerful stuff.

Anyone out there following the AOL email tax debate? If you are, you may have noticed that Chin Music Press was one of the early signatories of the Dear AOL letter, which says quite simply that AOL should not be allowed to profit from a surcharge it wants to put on mass emails.

Well today, AOL hit a new low and essentially proved our point: It stopped delivering emails that contained the www.dearaol.com URL. Here's a snippet from a press release by the Dear AOL Coalition:

AOL is blocking delivery to AOL customers of all emails that include a link to www.DearAOL.com. Today, after this was discovered, over 150 people who signed a petition to AOL tried sending messages to their AOL-using friends, and received a bounceback message informing them that their email "failed permanently."

While AOL may imply that censoring www.DearAOL.com is part of some anti-spam effort, their own customers are witnessing how faulty AOL’s spam measures would be if that was the case. “I forwarded www.DearAOL.com to my own AOL account and it was censored. Apparently I can't even tell myself about it,” said one AOL customer, Kelly from Massachusetts.

Our furtive stalking of the people at 826 Valencia is actually paying off. We're slack-jawed at the result. Never in our wildest dreams did we envision McSweeney's managing editor Eli Horowitz licking a can of Boss coffee for us. But in this week's canned coffee review, he has done just that. We are very proud — seriously, this kind of stuff makes us proud.

Eli Horowitz on our site. MC Hammer in the wings. These are heady times at Chin Music Press. Soon the staff will be up to three meals a day again, and I'll finally get a new can of WD-40.

Mr. Pikatto has some nice things to say about Kuhaku, but he absolutely hates the obi or wrap:

The last gripe I have is with the paper wrap—the white portion in the photo— with the subtitle, ISBN number, and other related information on it. These things are common in Japan. If you’ve ever bought a CD,DVD, or manga in Japan you know what I’m talking about. I absolutely hate these things. It’s impossible to keep them on the book while you are reading it, and if you take it off it will most likely be lost. I would have much preferred that the book either had a standard dust jacket or nothing at all.

I'd respond directly on his blog but the comments are closed. Plus it's probably good to get this out in the open: We hate wraps too! Which is why we want you (as soon as the book passes through the scanner at the register) to rip that obi off and trash it. Please! The reason why we didn't use a cover on Kuhaku or DYK is because we like our books to feel like solid objects — without unnecessary paper to be snagged or fall off or become creased.

However, we have to include basic book information for sales purposes. As such we use wraps, like on Kuhaku. But please, don't feel obligated to keep them on. We printed them on the cheapest paper in the most boring way possible for a reason — so you can happily trash it without guilt once you own it!

Pictured here from the left are Ray Shea, Jason Berry, Toni Causey and Sarah Inman.

Last weekend in Louisiana was successful and fun — with the exception of having brother Dave's rear bumper fall off his car on the highway between Baton Rouge and New Orleans (but then again, Louisiana's drinking-and-driving laws allowed for me and Sarah to share a large can of Heineken while Dave carefully drove the bumperless Saturn along the crowded highway). The Tennessee Williams Festival panel on our book drew some 50 or 60 people — well more than we expected — and a certain erudite book reviewer mentioned to Toni Causey afterwards that she should join the mayoral race.

Baton Rouge also brought a warm crowd of about 25 or 30 — many McGees and Causeys, a few Kernions and Sheas — to our afternoon reading at Barnes & Noble. The readers showed the breadth of the book, from Katrina essays to Mardi Gras hilarity. And the big stack of books on sale shrunk as just about everybody there picked up a copy.

Baton Rouge was the equivalent of dipping our toe into the ocean to see how cold the water is. It was our first foray outside of New Orleans, and as we print another round of books, our success or failure will be dictated by how far we can take the book before we run into that most cruel of phrases: Katrina fatigue.

I'm not sure how we'll be perceived in other cities. I hope and half-expect to be well-received, but the cynic in me wonders a bit about just how much Americans do care. Of course, the cynic will be stuffed in a small box, bound and gagged and shipped to some undisclosed Central Asian country as we promote this book. No time for doubts now. Our path leads from New Orleans to cities beyond, and our long-term success will be dictated by how we are received there.

News flash: The one and only MC Hammer has agreed to write a review for cannedcoffee.com.

Really.

A quick followup to a previous post on this PDF/e-Book by 37 Signals. It seems as if they've pushed out well over 5,000 copies this past month. Nice to see there is a strong, viable market for things digital. And refreshing to see such candidness with numbers from 37s.

I would be very interested to hear how many people are printing this out and binding it themselves for offline reading.

It looks like Kichijoji's little book store that could is moving -- right next door and into much bigger digs.

From the horse's mouth:

Time for a bigger space. Its official. We are moving into a new space just around the corner from our current place. The move should be completed by the first week of May 2006. If you know where the current shop is then it will be easy for you to find our new space; it is literally in the building next to us with the entrance on Itsukaichi Kaido, which will definitely make it easier for people to find us. The space is three times the size of our current shop.

Our range of stock will be expanded in quite a few different ways for the next shop. Expect to see a larger art and photobook section, the childrens book section will also be expanded, more nonfiction, spaces to sit and read and a rare book and first edition section.

Som "Not Sam" Souphanouvong is our guest reviewer this week.

The can’s exterior mimics wood paneling in an attempt to convey comfort and quality. Not so easily seduced, I think 1970s suburban basement porn.

Continue reading at our newly redesigned canned coffee site.