Not much time this week, which doesn’t explain why I chose a song that would need a lot of exposition to make it even come close to being a valid geoMp3 of The Week. So here are some fragments and you can piece it together if you want. If you care.

Obama elected despite old-timey shouts of “socialism” and “red” from opponent. Real socialist Che Guevara celebrated in song written for WNYC’s Soundcheck radio show songwriting contest. Song is a clever alternative scenario where Guevara pulls up lame, well short of any real revolutionary action. Song is beautifully, languidly performed by One Ring Zero (Want proof? Witness the song performed by its original author and you’ll see a big difference between a band that crafts songs and a guy who overenthusiastically mimics acoustic pop riffs.) Song being placed at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave, where the cool demeanor of the song itself reflects much more the demeanor of the new president than the rabid, aggressive, reactionary demeanor of the last one. Want proof? Ask those confused, dumb fuckers at Guantanimo or those dead, dead fuckers who used to be at La Cabaña Fortress before they got squelched by Guevara. Ask them how much they think Obama resembles a dangerous, socialist terrorist. If Obama is really a dangerous Guevarian maniac, it sure looks like he’s been waking up on Che Guevara Mondays lately. (Convincing?)

“Che Guevara Monday,” from the Soundcheck songwriting contest.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

…Which I may need to look up in the beginning of 2009, as I just heard from an intern who wants to sign onto my mobile community inventory project (and — get this — to volunteer in advance of next semester).

Turns out I’m a cynical gloomist. This week saw a momentous rebuttal of the great rightward veer of the last eight years and the still inexplicable approval of that track in 2004. Kerry was no prize pig, of course. That was easy to see. But to vote for Bush in 2004 meant you either A) hated gay people so much you just had to have somebody in the White House who would stack the Supreme Court and hopefully disallow even the proclamation of gayness, or B) really, really wanted the U.S. to be renowned internationally as a fundamentalist Christian army involved in a global pseudo-holy war. Oh, wait, C) would be that you were one of the no-bid contractors that made out like a bandit in Iraq as soldiers in Afghanistan looked around and wondered what the fuck they had done to anger their commander-in-chief so much that he abandoned the only potentially just military effort in the Middle East.

But, oh, we’re still embarrassingly right, it turns out. So this week’s track is going to be a song that in 2006 expressed a very specific kind of anger — about why the fuck our government officials were worrying about rolling up their shirtsleeves without actually rolling up their shirtsleeves following Katrina. So let’s presume we’re not going to see a gaggle of white dudes laughing at the plight of poor black people in New Orleans, and let’s instead keep this song around and transfer its anger to another injustice that apparently even black people don’t mind participating in — the approval of Prop 8 in California and similar measures in Florida and Arizona.

The song itself is a protest, obviously, and originally written by Blind Alfred Reed. This performance is Springsteen’s, who obviously likes to dress up like Woodie Guthrie for Halloween, but it’s really good. But in terms of its relationship with place: the song’s uprising spirit goes in Grant Park, because of the information that scene should put into George Bush’s dark little brain (and my crush on Michelle Obama). But the anger that once belonged in the lower 9th Ward or some other disaster scene in Louisiana should now go out West (well, all over, really). And you bastards in your bloodless and uneven marriages should ask yourselves why your precious, divine overlord will ordain a black man as president (What? Palin herself told James Dobson [who else?] that God would make the right decision on election day) but why that son of a bitch doesn’t want two loving adults to be able to marry.

“How Can a Poor Man Stand Such Times and Live?,” from a Sold on Song show broadcast on May 13, 2006.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Starting out I knew that if we made any progress at all there would come a time when the real GeoNetwork is updated and we would want to fold our changes right into the improved version. In an attempt to ease this process, one decision made right away was to alternatize the stuff we changed. And since that really isn’t a word, I’ll explain:

Most of the changes to the home page happen in file “main-page.xsl,” which gets called by the main.home service (defined in config.xml). I’ll get into the changes to this file below, but let’s jump ahead to us having a (severely) altered “main-page.xsl.” In order to not have to keep original copies around and start changing filenames in order to safely roll back to native GeoNetwork, I saved a copy of main-page.xsl with a pseudo extension that could be used to mark all of the files we change (or add). So “main-page.xsl” becomes “main-page_pugo.xsl,” and in fact this pseudoextension will be the norm for changes the rest of the way out. So we do two things; add “pugo” pseudoextension to the file to make an obvious copy and simultaneously mark edits inside of the files with “pugo” comments. For those files in GN whose file name could not be changed, it was obviously especially important for us to mark our edits with “pugo” comments. Worse comes to worse we can do searches for “pugo” to locate all of our edits, elisions, and additions.

So to begin live-editing and testing main-page.xsl we make a copy and name it “main-page_pugo.xsl.” Then to make GN actually use this file we need to configure the main.home service to load ours instead of the native. In config.xml, then, we change that service’s block from

to

This results in two distinct benefits. 1) we avoid having to diff twenty files (or more) every time the main GeoNetwork is updated, and 2) we can easily swap out our altered GeoNetwork with the native, allowing us to test how things are supposed to work and how they are (or more likely are not) working in ours. What it also means, however, is that any time we change a file to add a “_pugo” pseudoextension to a file, we need to be damned sure that all of the files that call the original now call our new copy. This is tedious one time for each file, but will save us a lot of heartache in the future. Get a text editor with file search or use Spotlight or something similar if you want it to be easy to find all files that call a given file. If you always make copies of files you edit (when possible) and point all files that use that file to your new copy, you end up with a cascading effect which is perfect — to turn on “our” GeoNetwork with all of the _pugo versions of files working together, we use config.xml as described above. To remove practically every change we make and run GeoNetwork natively, we remove the pseudoextension “_pugo” from the config.xml block quoted above, and everything is instantly back to normal.

…Not a thrilling entry, but so far this method is serving us very well. In the next entry we start really slicing up that home page, so don’t give up.

And as we wait for a 0.6.0 release of WWj that purportedly has native CSW support (so it can be a stand-alone client for the catalog), my GA has gotten pretty far so far, able to get external page controls to act on an embedded WWj globe. I’ll post about this again when we’re further along (it will be part of my GeoNetwork series), but for now here are two rendered wms layers in an embedded WWj:

Well, I couldn’t care less about baseball, but I’m very busy and need to phone this one in. It’s Woodie Guthrie giving it to a “Philadelphia Lawyer” who made a little love to a cowboy’s “Hollywood maid.” There’s actually a lot going on here that I could get into if I had the time — not least of which is that I think I could pretty easily tie this to the anti-intellectualism that has taken deep root in the modern socio-political scene and the complicated mythos of westward expansion, frontierism, and…wait for it…maverickism (seriously) — but I ain’t got no time (is that better? Does that make me seem more patriotic?)

Anyway, because Philadelphia’s been in the news, because I’m swamped, because it at least mentions places, and because it always helps to have Woodie Guthrie around, feel free to do with Guthrie’s “Philadelphia Lawyer” what you please. But I’m dropping it wherever TeleAtlas tells me “Philadelphia” is (also because I’m too lazy to research the story that supposedly inspired this song).

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Ordinarily, heavy-handedness ain’t my bag. In any sphere, but especially in music. So, yeah, I would like to have seen a little more subtlety from Warrant with “Cherry Pie.” But Roger Waters is one who almost always gets a pass from me. Something about his anger appeals to me. So bulky metaphors like “the wall” in the old days and those obnoxious backup singers and saxaphones he tours with these days — all of which are usually wont to disqualify an artist from my library and, by extension, the geoMp3 of The Week — are given the go-ahead because they’re in service of a bad-ass flood of vitriol and frustration.

So this week’s track is a live cut from Waters’ recent Dark Side of the Moon tour, specifically from the stop in Santiago, Chile. It’s a song I had never heard before (I’m not a great follower of Waters’ is the truth), but I love it for all the reasons we should all hate Warrant’s…well, everything from Warrant and all of Warrant’s kin. The song is bold, not in any real way innovative, and in no way whatsoever nuanced. It will be placed in Beirut, Lebanon, the site of the song’s nominal story arc, which centers on a family that once took in a young, wandering Waters and showed great hospitality. Waters, now singing this song many years later, wonders aloud about the fate of that gracious family of — gasp! foreigners — who showed a shaggy Englishman real, genuine, old-timey (do I go against everything I know and say “Biblical”?) hospitality back in 1961 in “that cauldron that was Lebanon.”

Anyway, this performance (I’ve never heard the studio version) starts out strong with “But now an Englishman abroad is just a US stooge.” Okay, so the scene is decently-set: we’re outside of the U.S., post-9/11, taking in some of what the Bush Doctrine has begotten. If you can let your ears bleed out during the synth parts, you’ll eventually be treated to a rousing condemnation:

Are these the people that we should bomb?
Are we so sure they mean us harm?
Is this our pleasure, punishment or crime?
Is this a mountain that we really want to climb?
The road is hard, hard and long
Put down that two by four
This man would never turn you from his door
Oh George! Oh George!
That Texas education must have fucked you up when you were very small

I warned you about the instrument. Don’t blame the player. But that part I can take or leave. Bush himself is an easy target. It’s the part that addresses the U.S. itself and the promise we’ve drawn a big scar over this last decade that makes me choose this one. As vicious the condemnation, the plea (to us, Americans) is more intense still:

Is gentleness too much for us?
Should gentleness be filed along with empathy?
We feel for someone else’s child
Every time a smart bomb does its sums and gets it wrong
Someone else’s child dies and equities in defence rise
America, America, please hear us when we call
You got hip-hop, be-bop, hustle and bustle
You got Atticus Finch
You got Jane Russell
You got freedom of speech
You got great beaches, wildernesses and malls
Don’t let the might, the Christian right, fuck it all up
For you and the rest of the world

It’s a protest song at a time when nobody seems to give a shit about protest songs. But you’re not likely to hear a more direct, honest, deserved request than that one verse. Except for maybe “Cherry Pie,” second stanza.

“Leaving Beirut,” from the 50,000 Lunatics on the Grass bootleg (Santiago de Chile, March 14, 2007.

And the kml for all mp3s of the week.

Edit for an important reminder:
Vote and prove you’re not anti-American.
(It wouldn’t hurt if you also vote for a ticket that doesn’t support anti-intellectualism and jingoism.)