(edited to correct Murris’ name in body: commenter [Murris himself, unfortunately] is right that it’s “Patrick Murris” and not “Patrick Harris.” I clearly had on my mind — as we are all often wont to do — the Patrick Harris who appeared as “trucker” in 1988′s Assault of the Killer Bimbos)

I wouldn’t say there is fantastic insight in Patrick Murris’ interview with Patrick Hogan, but Hogan does make a concise case for WWJ at a time when everybody is falling all over each other to A) give their stuff to Google, and B) get their stuff into kml to be seen in Google Earth. I particularly like the answer to question 10, in which Hogan states:

Making data accessible, the data delivery mechanism, is where the information experience begins. The World Wind Server delivers data according to the Open Geospatial Consortium international WMS standards.

He’s actually underselling it here, talking about boring old WMS. Every indication is that upcoming versions (even pre-1.0?) will have support for CSW, allowing people (and by “people” I mean me and my crack team of GAs) to use WWJ as a standalone client to metadata services. Already, we have a decent (albeit unfinished) pairing of GeoNetwork and WWJ that will allow us to throw GeoNetwork metadata search results and dynamically render them on an embedded globe. Plus most of the layers will be pre-cached, speeding things up significantly and avoiding the horrible bore of trying to direct-render WMS streams.

And by the way: I’m with Hogan in not worrying for one second that there won’t be a nice, single package available for downloaders (#9). There should be hundreds.

Eesh. I was hoping it wouldn’t turn out this way. I am what you would call a Bruce Springsteen apologist. He can sure be full of shit sometimes. But in the same way that The Statler Brothers can nail the awfulness of adult regret and acute sting of nostalgia, Springsteen is able to stuff otherwise unfaceted concepts (concepts!) such as hope and truth and rightness and sacrifice into three or four minute packages and they suddenly apply. They make sense. You’re able to see them and for even those few minutes you — just some poor slob driving a car down the road — can make an instant connection to something that you hope against hope you’re implementing day-to-day but you sort of don’t have time to sit down and examine. Because you have a job, for one thing. People with jobs and kids and mortgages don’t get as many opportunities to sit down and pen anthemic rock poems in favor of or rebellion against redemption and iniquity, respectively. I want to, don’t get me wrong. I just have an iron-caked heating element and a leaky ballcock to sort out.

That’s what she said. Anyway, the draw of Springsteen is that he’s been able to make it okay for dock-working brutes to well up about stories of salvation, redemption, sacrifice and all of that other bullshit he preaches. And goddamit, man, when he gets it right it’s really great. Fulfills the promise of rock and roll, it does. To this day, even. Granted, another Born to Run or The River isn’t likely, but even on 2007′s Magic he was wrapping some awesomely windy shit around details that could be true of the lives of dopes like me:

Pour me a drink Theresa in one of those glasses you dust off
And I’ll watch the bones in your back like the stations of the cross

Get it? She has to dust off the glasses because her days of entertaining company are over? But there’s still grace and nobility and angelicism in somebody that is otherwise showing some signs of wear and fatigue? That’s vintage Springsteen, and if you’re not a pretentious, Sonic Youth-loving dirtbag you shouldn’t mind letting that stuff get to you.

But that’s if he’s getting it right, and unfortunately this last batch he found crumpled in the bottom of his bag and taped together as Working on a Dream has a particularly glowing example of how narrow that line is between the magnificence of the workaday life and the glorification of what is, in truth, ordinary.

Oh, before I get started: “Working on a Dream?” Scout’s honor? You’re not pulling my…alright, alright. No, I know it’s your album but…No, I know. Okay. Fine. It’s fine. It’s great. Very clever.

But the title isn’t the biggest dog on this album. It’s “Queen of the Supermarket,” which is an ode to some hapless slob at Bruce’s local grocery. (Or is it your local grocery store? Get it?) This one tries very hard to push some poor local high school kid up into the pantheon of Springsteen characters who dream so big they actually work up to takeoff speed ascend to some sin-absolving Elysian field (sorry, Elysian highway). But this poor teen (you know she’s a teenager, right Boss?) is in all likelihood just some surly local slob who misbags your clementines or chats with Braden the produce stocker while your leeks silently yearn to be weighed.

Under ordinary circumstances he could probably pretty easily pull this off. I think the trouble is that he starts out in the hole:

There’s a wonderful world where all you desire
And everything you’ve longed for is at your fingertips
Where the bittersweet taste of life is at your lips
Where aisles and aisles of dreams await you
And the cool promise of ecstasy fills the air
At the end of each working day she’s waiting there

It’s…the supermarket! As metaphor for the promise that a good woman represents. But A) good woman? Bruce, you have to know it’s just some prickly emette from Rumson High scraping together enough dough for smokes and a ticket to see Hawthorne Heights this August. And B) “aisles and aisles of dreams” don’t await a person at “the supermarket.” Let’s not let it go that far.

He goes on about this affected fop and thinks it’s “wonderful and rare/the way she moves behind the counter/beneath her white apron her secret remains hers/as she bags the groceries her eyes so bored.”

Oof. It’s just awful, really. A miss for which I cannot apologize. Go listen to The River to hear about how broken people cope or fail to cope. Or track down his 1996 solo show in Freehold if you want to hear songs about noble-but-regular people performed in a way that makes you actually give a shit about them.

Okay, so anyway this one I’m putting down in the closest grocery store to what is purported to be Springsteen’s Rumson, NJ home. At the very least it will be placed at a grocery store in Rumson where The Boss’ “Queen” will be doing after-school shifts and smoking on shoppers during her break as they enter or exit.

“Queen of the Supermarket,” hijacked from NPR’s advanced stream of 2009′s Working on a Dream.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

capture from Dylan GEO

You would think I would be ecstatic to discover that bobdylan.com now has geographic access to a wealth of Dylan data. It’s called “Dylan GEO” and it provides interactive globe access to “over 40 years of Bob Dylan touring history.” It even uses a well-done retro film theme (wait, why, because he’s old?). And I guess I’m happy. I suppose. I mean…it’s nice, yeah.

But here’s my problem. There’s nothing geo* about it. It’s fake geography. They’ve essentially geocoded 40 years of Dylan touring data, integrated a nice social media module that allows people to comment about the shows, and made it all available online to the world, right? But they did it as a graphic. It’s a Flash app with no discernable geo component at all except that the graphic upon which the pins have been placed looks like earth (until you zoom in and it looks like overextended pixels — could be a LIFE photo of George Custer or Joey Buttafuoco, for all you know, since it’s not tiled geospatial imagery). Never mind that it makes my fan run like Miley Cyrus from a Roman Polanski photo shoot on Mulholland (Just kidding, Miley would stay. [Too much? Agreed.]), my problem is that Dylan GEO is a completely self-enclosed Flash app when it could have been a very, very welcome contributor to the geoweb.

Okay, let me disclose that I don’t know for a fact that they haven’t built this app around a truly geospatial heart. It’s possible that behind this little movie there is a heaving, fully gist-indexed PostGIS the_geom column that feeds this stuff into some format Flash can use on stage. And if that’s true, I expect any day that an API will be published so that mashers the world over can pipe these Dylan shows into their app or publish comments and incorporate a piece of Dylan GEO into blog posts and such. I mean, that’s the spirit and ultimate promise of the web these days, right? So obviously that will be possible, yes? I secretly hope the Dylan site people will respond and tell us all, but I’m sure they’re busy building the rest of what really is one of the better big-time musician sites out there.

My point is that the tools exist to do this correctly but they seem to have not been used. These points could pretty easily be made available via WFS (an open OGC standard, see), or geoRSS or geoJSON or Fire Eagle or…what the fuck, there must be a hundred ways to make this stuff useable by the community and therefore used anywhere. Can I think of something to do with them? Well…not really. Not right now, anyway, as Dylan’s Theme Time Bloody Mary recipe is too good for my own good, Plus, professionally I’m busy with other stuff. But that is decidedly not the point. I couldn’t think of what to do with a video of two chicks dropping their soft stuff into a cup, either, but somebody else did. Yeah, I stand by that example because my point is clear — if the Google thing has taught us anything it’s that you make tools available that do even just a couple of things pretty well and people will use them to do additionally cool shit. And then if that cool shit is done with a sense of community and — preferably — open standards, then still more people will do decently-awesome things with it. And you’d have to be a four-star nincomp. to not realize that Dylan data would be useful. Mash it with Dylanbase; mash it with bobsboots; mash it with dimeadozen; do a comparative mashup with Wallflowers tour dates, for all I care. Aren’t there billions of Deadheads out there? Do something with that! Listen: you shouldn’t have to even try to predict what people can do with a dataset. You developed it, so just let them try, for fuck’s sake. Not to mention that sweater-wearing nerds like me can use this kind of stuff when they teach geoinformatics courses or do guest lectures in media/communications courses about the burgeoning geospatial component to a hitherto flat, 2d www.

why not just do this within the app?

Even if I weren’t a tiresome, open source, open standards, hippy dippy librarian type, I would still be hotter than Ted Knight after Ed Asner argues in favor of gay marriage about this (No, you’re right: I’ll quit. I really don’t want to be a Dennis Miller wannabe). Why? It doesn’t even work that well. Unfortunately. Specifically, the navigation is a little jumpy. You’ll expect this to behave like WorldWind or Google Earth but it won’t. It will lurch and twist on you. It will spin “east to west” (I use those terms loosely) when you pull “down” (that’s more like it). So why didn’t they just use WorldWind or Google Earth?

Maybe the excuse is that they would have more control over how content is rendered? Then why does the “Show Details” throw a popup? Why not keep it inline? If it was a Google Earth app maybe I would understand, as there’s less control over how you can present data “on” the globe (less true now with the GEarth API). If it was a WorldWind app, I would understand because — although it’s open and technically the only thing preventing anything is the time you have available to write the code — it’s quite frankly more efficient to use something else (although that’s not stopping me, with my stable of 1 java[-ish] developer). But this is Flash, so why not stay within the Flash environment? Maybe I’m naive (you can be critical and naive at the same time, yes?).

I don’t know, man. I don’t get it. All the effort that went into Dylan GEO is just going to stay in Dylan GEO, I guess. Such a waste.

Oh, by the way: look at how many shows Dylan has played in Germany alone. “Neverending,” indeed. Get me a recording of “It’s great to be back in Schwbisch Gmnd!” for my birthday, please.

So, uh, did you know the story of Sam Cooke? I didn’t. Somehow. It’s awesomely seedy, though — rife with controversy and prurience and sadly hilarious.

We’ll start with what makes Cooke honorable (presuming you think someone who’s really good at one thing publicly but is privately quite the glimmering douchebag can still be honorable). Dude can sing, of course. Never minding that he’s responsible for some of the worst ‘oldies’ currently playing ad infinitum in retro diners coast to coast (Twistin’ the Night Away, were you Sam?), he also put some heavy, kickass business down on tape. The heaviest? Probably “A Change is Gonna Come” in 1963. This is a muscular, anthemic (but surprisingly short) record that rightfully still carries a lot of the momentum of 1960s civil rights work.

“Change” is reported to be a response, at least in part, to an incident in Shreveport, La where Cooke and his entourage were initially booked at a Holiday Inn but refused a room upon arrival. Looking past the fact that they even wanted to stay at a Holiday Inn, which is funny, the open racial bastardry of those Holiday Innsters made Cooke, you know, pissed the fuck off. So he honked his horn and probably yelled and whatever else you do when you’re denied something because of your race (I wouldn’t know, I’m a whitey). And all the white desk clerks and middle managers panicked, of course, and called the cops and Cooke was shuffled off to the hoosegow.

Following this event, among others, Cooke finished off this frank, curt statement about the plight of African Americans in the U.S. up to the mid 1960s. It’s especially interesting because it essentially says “watch the fuck out, folks,” but does so within a lavish, easy-on-the-white-ears ballad production and arrangement.

I guess things have changed for the better. Your average Holiday Inn desk clerk isn’t likely to engage in open racial hostility at least. (Aside: but what is your average Holiday Inn desk clerk likely to engage in, though? That’s a hard species to draw a bead on. They’re almost always well-coifed and clean. Even prim. So you think they’re okay because they behave like business students or party planners. But they’re still, somehow, just defeated. The rest of us wear our losses on our sleeves, kids. Why pretend everything is okay? If I’m booking a room at a Holiday Inn I already know things could be both better and worse, so let’s just tone down the gold hair and the thin beards and behave like human beings, yes?)

But I digress. The last, most painful joke in all of this is the irony that both of Cooke’s wildest, most signature moments — the resistance at Holiday Inn and his death — happened at hotels. You can look up Cooke’s story pretty much anywhere as it’s evidently still warmly contested. Here’s a brief version: Cooke and sketchy lady friend speed away from a party to the Hacienda Hotel in L.A. (the location for this track, by the way); lady friend claims Cooke gets handsy, so she absconds with herself and a decent batch of Cooke’s wad; Cooke storms around grounds of la Hacienda looking for said lady friend, ends up frightening hotel manager, who makes with the pow-pow-pow and sends Cooke to the floor; at which time she thumps him a few more times with some wooden implement, sometimes reported to be a broom handle. Yowza! Of course the best detail is Cooke’s missing shoe and undershirtless sports coat, but let’s show some respect, shall we?

Anyway, it’s “A Change is Gonna Come,” but not Sam Cooke’s version with the strings and all of that bullshit. Strings ruin songs. Strings ruin songs. Most of the time, anyway, and this is one of them. Imagine how awesome this song would be if Cooke recorded it in a room full of percussionists. Just percussionists and Cooke’s voice. Am I right?

Odd, then, that I would choose a version that’s…strings! Or string, more like it — it’s Ben Sollee doing this song with just a cello (yet another from the excellent Daytrotter series). It’s pretty good, really. Nice and sparse and pretty powerful if you can handle hearing this come from a white NPR darling from Lexington.

“A Change is Gonna Come,” by Ben Sollee at his August, 2008 Daytrotter Session.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Oh, also some citations:
“Soul man who signed in for a violent death,” Western Daily Press: October 11: 2005.
“Soul Man,” The New York Times (Late Edition): November 20, 2005.
“Rolling on Rock’s Long Road,” The Herald (Glasgow): May 17, 1997.
Capture from “Sam Cooke Slain in Coast Motel: Singing Star Shot to Death in Los Angeles Incident,” New York Times: 1964, December 12.

I guess I’m just a bastard. In 1973 Johnny Cash recorded this quiet, almost complacent little song called “Saturday Night in Hickman County.” It’s really pretty lovely in its reserve, ultimately a paean to the simplicity of small town life and slow, moral living. It’s little more, in fact, than a rural life triptych featuring a bar scene, a teens-at-the-lookout scene, and a collective of elderly people retiring for the evening. Nice, right? I guess, but I can’t help but be judgmental about these jerk-offs.

For example, the “rough and ready” working men drinking at the beer joint on the black top and giving the glad-eye to the girl behind the counter? They should be home with their wives and kids, these dirtbags. Maybe go home and help your child’s mother do some child-rearing, yes? Lest you have a meth bust next Saturday night to spoil all of your down home fun.

Verse two starts out with the ludicrous notion that I would even know our next door neighbor’s daughter. How hilarious to think we would fraternize with our local microcommunity to the extent that we could possibly care what the neighbor’s daughter was up to. Do people still get to know their neighbors? Really?! I don’t believe you.

Nonetheless I bristle at the notion that that “poor girl” is getting into trouble by anybody else’s volition. Just because she’s a girl doesn’t mean she isn’t making her own decisions, John. If she chooses a skeezy good ol’ boy and gets into “trouble” as a result — and by “trouble” I’m sure we mean the wonderful miracle of pregnancy and the sanctified union of forced teenage marriage due to a post-Biblical disbelief in abortion — I think we can all still agree she’s exactly half responsible for the “gettin’.”

And verse three’s cadre of tired elderly? Well, actually I got no beef with them. One could presume they’re home fielding (and falling for) telemarketing calls or silently panicking because this country really was taken over by black people like George Wallace said. But I have no evidence for that. They seem alright, those old people. They’re home on a Saturday night, at least, which means they’re not out engaging in local nonsense like drunk driving or gay-bashing. Plus, I’m home on Saturday nights, too — cordoned off from the loud and frightening outer world. In fact, if I wasn’t proficiently operating a personal computer right now I would begin to wonder if I myself wasn’t an elderly person who just happens to have a full head of darkish hair (and an obviously young, rocking, sexy wife).

So nice try, Johnny, but the harsh realities of rural living can’t be wished away by some soft finger picking. But I do appreciate the verse that is essentially a road map to where I should pin this track — your beloved Bon Aqua community “between Centerville and Dickson on the gravel roads and byways” out west of Nashville. I would put it specifically on the “beer joint on the blacktop,” but there are way too many from which to choose.

“Saturday Night in Hickman County” from the uncomfortably-titled Johnny Cash and His Woman, 1973.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

The schedule for European Geosciences Union 2009 (Vienna) offers some attractive sessions for GIS and geo* librarians. To wit:

*GI4/ESSI7*
General System Design, Image Processing and Data Infrastructures

*ESSI8*
Data Preservation and Long Term Access
Convener: W. Som de Cerff | Co-Conveners: C. Jacobs,  S. Nativi

*ESSI9*
Data and Metadata Models & Mark-up Languages
Convener: A. Woolf | Co-Conveners: B. Domenico, S. Nativi

*ESSI11*
Semantic Interoperability, Knowledge and Ontologies
Convener: K. Stock | Co-Conveners: S. Fiore P. Fox

*ESSI15*
Virtual Globes and Visualization Tools
Convener: M. Ramamurthy

full list at http://meetingorganizer.copernicus.org/EGU2009/sessionprogramme/ESSI

In my opinion – not that anybody asked – there should be a lot more of a librarian presence in these arenas. Researchers and faculty are doing geodata preservation and interoperability and access (you know, the stuff of geo library science) however they can, and usually as an afterthought, so it seems like it would behoove both librarians and domain scientists to collaborate and commiserate on these problems and at venues such as EGU, AGU, Geoinformatics, etc.. Plus with looming requirements for data preservation by NSF and others, domain scientists are likely going to be amenable, eager in fact, to have somebody help solve those problems for them. Why not a librarian, right?

So I think this is the last Christmas post. Only because it’s hard to find Christmas songs that evoke or even mention specific places and geographies. But this one is legitimate. Everybody knows the story of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, of course — that it was a cold and calculated fabrication by Montgomery Ward copywriter Robert May who responded to a callout by the company when they decided to save some scratch on an annual coloring book giveaway by developing their own in-house; and that it was turned into the popular song by Gene Autry; and that Autry’s song pretty obviously led to Frosty the Snowman a year or so later; and that it’s considered by some to be a watershed moment in the commercialization of Christmas.

But you know what’s tired? Complaining about the commercialization of Christmas. Just like nobody should give two shits about the religulization of what was once a very pagan holiday, why care about the commercialization of the holiday? What a boring, wasted concern. We commercialize things. That’s what we do. Big fucking deal. Shut up. Go visit your family and have fun. Tell some jokes. Cut them some slack and tell them they’re okay by you. In fact, try to treat everybody with some respect or at least courtesy. Not everything is about you. You’re probably not so great, to begin with.

Anyway, back to Rudolph. So the song was written by Johnny Marks and made famous by Gene Autry. Evidently this was back when it was okay, even a little quaint and adorable, to be a cynical, cutthroat, soulless business jerk, because it took off. But again, let’s not worry about the crime of commercialization. Instead, the greatest, most heinous crime perpetrated by Messieurs May, Marks and Autry is the legacy of bad, bad versions of that song in the century to come. Most of them are just banal, workmanlike copies of the original (usually with a covey of kids for the chorusy parts). But some of them take all the worst traits of the classic arrangement and add additionally tacky stylings. So here you have your Bootsy Collins and Tiny Tim tracks, among many others. But in 1988 there was a version done by Los Lobos and released on a Warner Bros. compilation called “Winter Warnerland.” It’s moderately clever and, of course, well-performed. And best of all doesn’t require a lot of explanation, so read the title, then listen, then smile softly at the gag.

I’m putting it down in Chicago at Madison & Michigan, since that’s the old Montgomery Ward headquarters in which Robert May toiled day after day, apparently dreaming of one day penning a lightweight fairy tale about a little reindeer who was good at only one thing (and only by genetic happenstance) that makes him useful and productive a total of one day out of every year. Aim higher, kids. One day ain’t going to be enough.

“Rudolph the Manic Reindeer,” from 1988′s Winter Warnerland.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

This is pretty much exactly the kind of song I was hoping to find in every downloaded podcast or packaged collection. Well, not true — I was glad to find great old soul songs and insanely stupid gems like “Christmas in the Stars” and other assorted dreck. Anyway, everybody else apparently knows about it already, but it’s nonetheless a great, sparse, haunting, dark Christmas song that perfectly evokes or creates its sense of place by being, well, sparse, haunting and dark. And I’m pretty sure it’s not “evoke” but “create” in this case, as the location seems to be I-75 between Detroit and Flint, essentially the home base of Frontier Ruckus (as evidenced by their helpful geography reference section of their site). They only explicitly say I-75, so it’s possible that the protagonist could be anywhere along the line, and in fact I’m putting this track down way north of Orion, somewhere in the more rural areas beyond Saginaw. Okay? Okay.

“Driving Home, Christmas Eve,” by Frontier Ruckus.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

capture from pprivermuseum.com

So another little treasure I cam across in my dogged quest for great and awful Christmas songs (nothing in between, please) is “The Silver Bridge Disaster,” by The Three Js. I don’t have good documentation about where I found it, but I presume it was the excellent WFMU blog, since they covered it last year around this time. It was not included on the great People Take Warning! set (too late — 1967), though, so I’m not actually breaking my promise to not use any more tracks from that set.

So the Silver Bridge in Point Pleasant, West Virginia was built with eyebars (sort of like a bicycle chain) to allow the struts to suspend the bed. Small amounts of water pooling in just one of the eyebars caused a small crack to appear, then slowly grow for 39 years. One very cold night in December, 1967, the inner eye fractured and caused intense stress to domino down the rest of the towers and joints and everything dumped straight into the Ohio River, killing 46 people.

There is plenty of information online about this event, but you can start with LeRose, Chris. “The Collapse of the Silver Bridge.” West Virginia Historical Society Quarterly, vol. xv, no. 4: October, 2001. Or open2.net’s collapse re-enactment video (which is how I’m able to sound like I know even a miniscule amount of structural engineering).

So here comes “The Silver Spring Disaster” by The Three Js. And now that I’ve revisited WFMU’s blog again this year, you get a bonus track that they also put up, also about the Silver Bridge event. It’s “Silver Bridge History” by Jim Stout (yes the Jim Stout). Both are placed at the eastern shore of where the bridge once stood.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

And this one’s even later. The thing is, there’s a lot going on, I’m very busy, blah blah. More important, perhaps — evidently more important than finishing that call-to-arms article about library participation in geoinformatics efforts — is that I’ve been listening to a lot of laughably bad Christmas music. No, that’s not redundant. But I’ve developed a hunger for finding the worst stuff around, and while this often (too often) leads into the last concentric ring of Dante’s subscape — I’m looking at you, clip of John Schneider asking for a “strong, gentle donkey” — it will once in a while turn up something for which I should be grateful.

Like this week’s track, Ry Cooder’s “Christmas in Southgate,” from an album I heard a sample of on NPR and then forgot about. Ry Cooder is a justified legend, of course, because of his ethnomusicological leanings and long, long career full of heady and successful collaborations. But one thing that I have always appreciated — I think I heard him first on Chicken Skin Music — is his production. It’s especially true in this track, which is very clear and clean but still rich (as rich as an mp3 can be, anyway). There are six people on this track, and even though one of them is Flaco Jiménez and his track-filling accordion, there’s still room in this. Listen to this and it’s going to sound like six guys in a room playing a song (actually it sounds like fewer, which is a compliment).

And it’s going down on the old Goodyear plant in Los Angeles, from where the narrator was evidently laid off. This album…hm, I mean the music is solid I guess, but I have a pretty negative reaction to an album about a leftist kitty cat as metaphor. It seems a little juvenile, quite frankly. I thought the same thing about Odets’ Waiting for Lefty. It’s just that it’s so thinly-veiled, and in this day and age you don’t really need to veil this kind of talk at all. I know he’s going for a retro thing, but…a kitty cat?

My problems with leftist whining aside, here’s a great track from Ry Cooder, “Christmas in Southgate,” from 2007′s My Name is Buddy.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.