geoLibro.org

Spatial Sustain notes that NASA has awarded South Dakota State University’s Geographic Information Science Center of Excellence (an ESL student named it, then?) with a five-year, $3.29M grant to shore up gaps in Landsat coverage and availability. GIScCE? Could you please not just make this “available” online (i.e. downloadable or connectable via ArcIMS), but rather make it available in really useful, open ways like (WMS, naturally) WCS? That’d be great.

Last week’s track was the gloomy, haunting “Strange Fruit,” performed by Billie Holiday. It reminded me of this week’s track, which is much more up front with its bad-ass indictment of the shenanigans going on in the 1960s. (And by ’shenanigans’ I mean the deflating murders of Medgar Evers in Jackson, MS and four little kids in Birmingham.) It’s “Mississippi Goddam” by Nina Simone and it’s both a kick-ass song and performance. It will sound a little like something out of Oklahoma! but…it ain’t. Over that 2/4 beat you’ll hear a woman raging about the crazy shit going down in a country that was way too old for such things.

Anyway, part of its inspiration comes from the murder of Medgar Evers, who was shot down in his own yard in Jackson. I have not seen Ghosts of Mississippi, but if I had directed it I would have Scorcesed up that mutha by playing this Simone track over a procedural scene of Evers routinely driving home, disembarking his car with a box full of shirts, then being shot dead. The song is full of hot, sweaty, Mississippi anger, and by the end of its 5 minutes there’s no mistaking it for some moon-eyed piece of garbage from Rodgers or Hammerstein.

The track is positioned at 2332 Margaret W Alexander Drive, Jackson, MS, the humble, sad, still-extant site of Evers’ slaying.

So it’s Nina Simone growling out “Mississippi Goddam” in 1964.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Bernhard Jenny of jenny.cartography.ch just released a 1.0 of his QuickLook plugins for Leopard’s Finder. These are really nice additions to the OS X GIS experience, which is becoming increasingly more fluid and enjoyable thanks to standup muthas like Mr. Jenny.

(backdated to 2008.June.23)

Shit. I remember as a child being legimately horrified and scared at this image:

(context for this copy)

Imagine my terrific additional horror, years later (three weeks ago, in fact), when I learned that the event took place in Marion, Indiana, a scant hour’s drive from where I live now. Oh, by the way, this occurred in fucking 1930, which is most certainly not long enough ago to be dismissive about it in that kind of oh-well-we-all-did-crazy-things-in-historic-times kind of way (aside: why don’t we apply that same logic to the spooky science fiction of religion?). I learned this when I picked up a copy of IU professor James H. Madison’s A Lynching in the Heartland: Race and Memory in America, which isn’t a great book I don’t think but a decent social history.

Anyway, Madison references the connection between that event in Indiana (which is in the north, by the way) and the song “Strange Fruit” made famous by Billie Holiday. Please see Madison’s book for more about the connection (or discussions of this important song at PBS or BBC or LOC’s National Recording Registry or AllMusic.com or David Margolic’s book). All I’ll say here is that the live version I’m posting (attached to Marion, Indiana) is particularly gripping and dark and overwhelmed by the hopelessness of Holiday’s knowing that such things had happened (and would continue).

So it’s Billie Holiday performing the legendary “Strange Fruit” in 1946 (from Jazz at the Philharmonic Vol. I released in 1994). Are you listening, current and future Indiana racists? Your gross wrongness will be born out by history.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

(backdated to 2008.June.16)

Catching up from the trip to Germany for Geoinformatics 2008. I mentioned that the conference was great, Germany good (maybe not the disintegrating spargel, but certainly biking through Berlin), but that the trip home was a comical exercise in everything that’s wrong with air travel. And because I rediscovered Lou Reed’s Berlin, I haven’t listened to much else save for T-Bone Burnett’s new Tooth of Crime which, while a decent album, hasn’t revealed anything terribly locatable to me.So to wrap up the Germany trip with one more musical ode to Deutschland, this week’s track will be U2’s “Zoo Station.”

…For obvious reasons, I suppose, since we rode into and out of the real Zoo Station (Bahnhof Berlin Zoologischer Garten), busing from and to our miserable flights. Of course U2 didn’t just write a song about a train station; they were at the beginning of a period where they thought it wise to examine the band itself and by extension what it meant to be “rock band U2.” Zoo Station, then, where the train of time makes the future the past, was perfectly iconic of what the band was trying to do – carry U2 and, presumably, rock and roll full-force into a future that was already looking awfully inhospitable to conscience rock of the sort that certainly flew in the 60s and 70s but was waning during the grossly misproduced 1980s.

But back to me: Zoo Station proved just the opposite for us. Our travels refused to make the future the past, in fact Continental Airlines seemed uncannily able to keep the future – when we would return to the U.S. and our jobs and lives – at a safe distance.

What I learned: if you’re a rock star Zoo Station will take you to new heights of unabashedly oversized rock and roll deism. If you’re me and wife idiolecto, you’re a couple of lumpy suitcases full of bones that go where you’re put and you’d best just let the body endure it while your brain checks out to happier times.

So it’s U2’s “Zoo Station,” performed live in Berlin in 2005. Sound quality isn’t great, but I thought it nice to put up a show from Berlin about Berlin./p>

And the kml for all mp3s of the week, and notice the new pipe of the most recent 10 (upper right)

I’m back from Germany, where the Geoinformatics 2008 conference was held (in Potsdam) and as expected there were a number of kicking presentations about clever ontologically-driven systems; lots of portals that don’t quite work yet; long-winded domain scientists; and for the first time I can remember a representative from OGC.

Anyway, I knew I would fall behind on the geoMp3s of the week, so here’s one backdate to two Mondays ago, so June 13.

Naturally, I wanted something Deutschy (aw, come on - you know what I mean), and I’m glad I didn’t just fire off some shit punk track from a group in Berlin. Instead I was led to rediscover Lou Reed’s Berlin, an album that’s really, really good. I’m embarrassed to have sort of forgotten about it, because it played an important part of a summer spent many years ago now.

I’m posting the titular track here, not because it’s the best (though close, I think that might be “Lady Day” or “Oh, Jim”), but because it gave me occasion to rewrite the lyrics to reflect the shit time we had trying to return to the U.S. I don’t want to get into a whole thing here, so suffice it to describe it as a whirling, exhausting torture fest full of mis- or no information and repeated delays, mistakes, and standing in a line. I never want to see my fellow 100+ passengers again, having spent 49 hours of continuous waiting and near-travel with them.

So my coarse re-write of “Berlin”:

in Berlin, after the wall
we flew Continental
we’ll always have the rage
you fuckers kept us in a cage

our first 49 hour day
how is that a delay?
we’ll always have the rage
you fuckers kept us in a cage

And I’m attaching this track to Flughafen Berlin/Tegel, since that’s all I can think about right now. The next back-dated track will probably be U2’s “Zoo Station,” despite the fact that the last time we were at Zoo Station (Zoologischer Garten Bahnhof) we had no fucking idea what was about to befall us.

Lou Reed’s “Berlin,” from 1973’s great, great Berlin.

And the kml link to all mp3s of the week

This site is going to look busted for several days, perhaps. The old Newspaper template doesn’t support enough dynamic stuff and I really don’t care to learn how to edit WordPress themes. I don’t really want this thing to look terribly flashy or colorful, so I’ll be experimenting with several very plain-looking templates. Must be clean.

Oh, oh. This is some rocking dark shit. Think of it as though it’s a scrum between all of the men a man can be; faithful husband, dutiful father, weathered traveler, eager artist, failed adventurer, whatever else you’ve got. I actually can’t quite determine which St. James Hotel the character leaves his girl in (there are many), but I’m guessing it’s the one in New Orleans’ and so that’s where this one gets droppped.

This is off of Dig!!! Lazaraus, Dig!!! which is an excellent album as everybody knows. Cave himself talks about the album on WHYY/NPR’s Fresh Air from 2008 April 28, and I already posted the title track as a featured track here, and that track’s video is still kicking ass after repeated viewings.

So, Nick Cave & The Bad Seeds with “Jesus of the Moon”

And the kml link to all mp3s of the week

Eesh. GeoChalkBoard recently posted about FindGIS.com. I hate to be a full-on bastard about this, but is this “new” site not reminiscent of Homer’s first website from the Computer Wore Menace Shoes episode?

At least it’s offering syndicated content, and one could argue the more access points to geospatial data the better, but…yikes. I’ll bet it looks great in IE, though.

This week it’s the best version of Zeppelin’s “Black Dog” you’ll ever hear. Robert Plant and Alison Krauss are touring in support of their great, great Raising Sand release, and they’re reworking a number of Zeppelin songs. This one is particularly well done, and not only because it sounds remarkably similar to everything Tom Waits has performed live in the last ten years. The rhythm isn’t as engaging without Bonham doing clever things with inverted backbeats and whatnot, but the arrangement is still really good and the song has never had so much mood.

“Black Dog” from a performance at Wembley on May 22, 2008. I’m placing it in Pangbourne, England. John Paul Jones wrote this monster riding a train away from Pangbourne and it’s interesting to me to think of him imagining this performance of the lurching rocker he was basing on Howlin’ Wolf material.

And the kml link to all mp3s of the week