HOLY WOWS and happy Monday. The Rhymesayers have a full album preview of Aes Rock’s new album up!
Folks have already started checking and interpreting lyrics over at RapGenius. Definitely check those out – and the behind the scenes videos of AR talking about the songs. It’s just him and a dog in a field. Cutest thing on earth.
I found this huge paste-up hidden away in the overpass between platforms at the DeKalb stop.
I follow Renee’s blog and she’s helped me out by summarizing all of the newsroom.
I assume this sampling makes sense to those of you that watch and that it is perfectly accurate:
MAGGIE: Jim and I are too busy not falling in love with each other, and also vetting the prom date lady.SLOAN: But I have some actual important stuff to tell you guys! Economic stuff. About currency manipulation. If my grasp of Mandarin is accurate, that is.MAGGIE: Ugh, here we go.[MACKENZIE RUNS IN, BREAKS THE HEEL OF HER SHOE, ACCIDENTALLY STEPS ON NEAL’S PRONE BODY]
I have to share this new band I’m into. First watch the best new video I’ve seen in dog years.
I KNOW. Shows you that Memento could have been a hell of a lot shorter.
But that’s not my favorite song. Here’s the one that Chris and Sheep Robby have both picked up on:
Here’s a quieter one, but still great.
So this is just a post to let you know that I am now subscribed to the alt-j channel on youtube and http://soundcloud.com/alt-j/. And I’ll be seeing them live next time they are in town. I have it on excellent authority that they know how to play instruments in front of a crowd. Go ye forth and listen and share!
Chris Restrepo has uploaded photos, so you should be checking them out. He’s a pediatric ER doctor, wakeboarder and snowboarder. And he takes amazing photos. Last time I mentioned Chris. I particularly love when he turns buildings into geometric patterns.
![[Electric chairs.] Digital ID: 814385. New York Public Library](http://www.morelightmorelight.com/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2012/10/mercy_seat.jpg "[Electric chairs.] Digital ID: 814385. New York Public Library")
The Mercy Seat is a changeable beast. The song is very simple. A man is waiting to die in the electric chair, he is not afraid, he says he is innocent. He is executed and goes to his reward. The song is complex. The man may or may not be innocent, he is unreliable and crazy, he is not unafraid. He calls on the mercy seat that God sits on and is not heard.
Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds play this song at every concert, changing the performance and the lyrics. Sometimes it curls up sweet and sad and slow.
Sometimes it roars like a lion and shakes the earth.
I like it loud like that. I feel the madness and bombast – it blows me away every time. One day I went on a mercy seat binge, listened to tons of versions and covers on youtube.
Johnny Cash made it his own. When Johnny Cash sang your song, it became his song.
The covers flowed and changed like the versions the Bad Seeds played live. Some were intimate and pushed against the base of your gut.
This Dresden Dolls cover is like a hammer banging onto a hammer banging onto a skull. Those DRUMS are so huge!
Shouldn’t ALL drum solos just be part of the song?
I found out there is a gospel song of the same name by an artist named Vicki Yohe. I love this version of it – the passion, the build, the weird guy clapping in the background! It really starts kicking at 3:10…
It has that same structure – the slow build and the giant pounding crescendo. They both deal with the Mercy Seat and I’d love to hear a mashup that builds them off of each other, trading despair and hope. Hell, let’s see what happens when we play them right over each other. IF I knew anyone who made mashups I’d totally log time helping or pay them to create this. Then I would listen to it until my ears fell off.
| YouTube Doubler |
Or maybe not. Not every bright idea works.
Far McKon points out two more kinds of free besides “Free as in speech” or “Free as in beer”: Dirt or Kittens. Both are often free and that kind of freedom has a special peculiarity. Far explains.
Sometimes I get stuck. Enough things creep up in my life and I stop creating. I’m simplifying again, cleaning up so I can get moving.
Georgia writes really well about momentum:
But another issue is momentum. I have always felt wildly prone to inertia, in the law-of-physics sense: objects in motion tend to stay in motion, objects at rest tend to stay at rest. When I am in motion, man! I never want to stop. Here was my last week:
Monday — Went to yoga, made risotto
Tuesday — French class fail, dinner out
Wednesday — Special date with my sister: high tea and a walk through Central Park!
Thursday — Dinner out again before going to a friend’s awesome reading
Friday — Packing and figuring out what to wear to…
Saturday — A wedding! Followed by…
Sunday — Hungover, post-wedding brunch and movie-going, then taking the train back home from the beautiful Hudson Valley.
This sounds insane. I’m rolling my eyes at myself as I’m writing it. And it’s not — NOT — a typical week. It’s a crazy busy week that was a lot of fun. So you know what I wanted to do this week? MORE OF IT!…
It’s easier to be one thing or the other, to only have one place to focus my energy — in or out. Making the switch is the hard part, which is maybe why a wide-open Sunday holds such potential. Lots of time to travel from external back to internal. I’ll have to make more time for Sunday writing in the future.
So here is the engine starting. I had a laptop die on me and I’ve resurrected it. The tools are sharp again. Time to get moving and then finish a project or two.
I’m starting to get so many ideas and experiments I want to try, I need to finish some things so I can get on to the new fun.
But before that, I’m taking Sam for brunch to Shopsins and then off to see Beautiful Evidence at the Foley Gallery. And the Brooklyn Book Festival is Sunday!
As part of my hacking on WordPrss, I got to a point where I wanted to let folks import and export OPML files.
Exporting a file from a WordPress plugin doesn’t seem to be very well documented. I found an older article about it – here’s my take.
This file isn’t getting included in through the normal wordpress mechanisms, so it has to do some more work than the rest of your plugin does. If you want to use the $wpdb or other handy wordpress items, you have to include those in.
I was about to hack up a way to include wp-config.php or wp-load.php when I ran across the simply named Don’t Include WP-Load, Please. He recommends a clever way to handle it all within wordpress, which I quite like. See below.
Now you can build out your export file – in this case export_opml.php – knowing that all of the WordPress utilities are there for you to use.
My boss Mike needed to move his wine review blog from a friend’s hosting on lunarpages. I suggested he try dreamhost and he liked it – in a few minutes he had signed up for a free trial and used their 1-click install to set up a new install of wordpress.
Before he moved his domain to point from lunarpages to dreamhost I got him to prep by writing down a few important pieces of info. I’m trying to make sure I make this easier for other friends like I did when I helped Tove’s Thread For Thought move from WordPress.org to her own host.
I wrote a python script that does this for you.
Make sure your system supports python. Next install BeautifulSoup – a great html parser for python.
Once that’s done, download this little script and change home and filesUrl to be your domain name.
Run the script, it should crawl your domain and download all of the images you host. Now follow the same steps of editing your export if needed and upload it all into your new blog at your new domain.
Hope that helps!