GRABBINGSAND

Saul Williams wants you to have his new album. For free. Or for five dollars. Your choice.

The album, entitled The Inevitable Rise and Liberation of NiggyTardust!, is produced by Trent Reznor (Nine Inch Nails) and mixed by Alan Moulder (Smashing Pumpkins). As this is Saul’s first official release since his self-titled second album, I’ve nothing but the best of expectations. With any luck, he’ll tour this album — actually, he will have to tour — and possibly return to Atlanta.

So why offer it for free?

“The ballot or the bullet for Mohawk or the mullet is a choice between new times and dying days. And the only way to choose is to jump ship from old truths and trust dolphins as we swim through changing ways. The ways of middlemen proves to be just a passing trend. We need no priests to talk to God. No phone to call her.”*

An intercessory analogy. Nice. Of course, the proof is in the predecessor and the producer. Shortly after Radiohead made their initial announcement about In Rainbows, Trent Reznor went on record to say that his next Nine Inch Nails release would be offered in much the same way. It stands to reason that Saul Williams is simply picking up the same banner and marching forward.

What’s the difference between free and five dollars? Pick the free option and you’ll be greeted electronically on the morning of November 1 with a link to download a ZIP’d pack of mp3s encoded at 192kbps. However, if you fork over the fiver, you’re given the choice between receiving a ZIP’d pack of mp3s encoded at 320kbps, or another pack of lossless, album-quality FLAC files.

So there you have it. And even if you’ve never heard Saul’s work before, you know you’re tempted. Do it.

More convincing evidence …

• Saul Williams – “Coded Language” (Live @ University of Colorado in Boulder)
• Saul Williams – “List Of Demands” (Original Music Video)
• Saul Williams & Nine Inch Nails – “List Of Demands” (Live Voodoo Festival 2005)
• Saul Williams – “The Pledge Of Resistance (Not In Our Name)”

Me as Ger-guin-at-scorpian, originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

It’s a bat! It’s a penguin! It’s a … I have no idea.

But Scrivener made one, so I’ve made one. Now it is your turn.

Kanye West wants you to have a mixtape. Really. How do I know? His blog says so. The Graduate is “hosted” by Kanye and produced by Mick Boogie, Terry Urban and 9th Wonder.

Now, I’ve got some serious doubts that Kanye West plants himself in front of his Mac on a daily basis, just so he can post his witticisms and observations. I may be seriously wrong, but we’re probably looking at the product of a relatively lucky intern. I say “relative” because this is the kind of job you can’t easily brag about. “Oh, hey … yeah, I write Kanye’s blog … really.”

Is the mix any good? Apart from being free to download (as in beer) and broken up into its component tracks (as opposed to one long, continuously-mixed mp3) and encoded higher than even the recent Radiohead revolutionary release (224kpbs, instead of 160kpbs), the music is all either unreleased work or remixed versions of known songs. And while I’m only a few tracks in, I’m liking what I’m hearing. The redo of “Never Let Me Down” (from Late Registration) more than makes up for 50 Cent’s obscene mumbling* in Mick Boogie’s remix of “Flashing Lights” (from Graduation). And the unused verse from the Daft Punk-ified “Stronger” is interesting.

Of course, if you’ve availed yourself of freely downloadable mixtapes before, you know the “price” one must pay for a stack of good tracks. As with other mixes, The Graduate is peppered with a whispery woman’s voice audibly oozing the name of producer Terry Urban. Another spectral voice repeats the name of the mixtape after every other track, just in case you forgot. But the most annoying sample, one that must be a Mick Boogie staple, is this giggling girl saying “Mix it up!” — often right in the middle of a break.

All that aside, it’s a free download. It’s decent music. So why not avail yourself? I’d do so quickly, however, as Mr West is depending upon SendSpace for the file hosting. Unless he has some kind of magic arrangement, in only a week more or so, SendSpace will forget the mix ever existed.

* – Note to 50 Cent: Using “CPR” in a forced attempt at innuendo isn’t sexy. It’s creepy.

Had to play the snitch this weekend.

We were heading west on 120, Marietta Highway, and our reaction to what we saw was immediate and unanimous. The instant the three of us — Nikki was driving, Alyssa was along as well — saw a row of sprinklers blasting full on at the shopping center where Coleman hits 120, we let loose a chorus of “Oh, come on! What the …?!?” To add insult to injury, the five or six sprinklers were offering more water to the highway than to their assigned narrow strip of roadside grass.

(Fulton County is under a strict watering ban. If you’re local, you know this.)

Nikki suggested we call the police, so I called the Fulton County Non-Emergency phone line. If you don’t have your local non-emergency number programmed in your mobile, I recommend it. Not everything merits 911, after all. So I spoke to their operator, told them I wasn’t entirely sure if they were the people to call. The operator was kind enough, but sure enough, there is another number to call for reporting watering ban violations. (770-640-3040)

So I called the official snitch line. The first couple of times, the line was busy. But the third was the charm. I gave my name, my phone number and told them what I saw. They said they might need to call me back, but most likely, they’d be able to take care of the problem. Not sure what they did, but after we’d finished dinner, we had to pass the shopping center on the way back. Their sprinklers were silent.

It felt a bit ridiculous, really, ratting out a shopping center for slinging water recklessly. And let’s be honest here. This whole situation is ridiculous because our elected state representatives are ridiculous. Say it out loud and see if it doesn’t make you mad. “Atlanta has two months worth of water.”

Oh, come on! What the …?!?

It’s because they’ve been spending their time in session spouting off the diatribes and talking points that serve only to grow their own agendas. Really, they’re all behaving like those pointless sprinklers, wasting words instead of water on the cultivation of their own private concerns. And the first one of their number to say that this is all a big surprise is a liar. So will be the second and the third. How do I know? Because if there is a current report that claims a scant 80 days or less for Lake Lanier, then there must be archived reports reading 180 days, 280 days, 380 days and so on.

Let’s not place all the blame on the Army Corps of Engineers either. They’ve been here all along, doing their federally mandated assignment for years, but our politicians are behaving as if the Corps are a pack of unruly teenagers that snuck into our garage in the dead of night.

Oh, nose! They be stealin’ our buckits!!

Of course, there is the additional problem of defining our terms. While the common parlance of panic is declaring we’ve only 80 or so days of water remaining, the Corps claims instead that we’ve 80 or so days until we reach the bottom of Lanier’s “conservation pool.” At that point, water levels in Lanier will be down to 40%, but nobody will be going thirsty and the taps will still run, at least for a few more months.

I’ve no answers here. Other local bloggers have hit the topic and hit it well.

• “Waters Woes” (GriftDrift)
• “If the water goes …” (Through A Glass Darkly)

For now, I’m plugging the snitch line into my phone. The other morning, one of the local morning radio crews were playing some of the initial recorded messages released by Fulton County’s ban line. They were working it for laughs, of course. But right after, through his laughter, one of the on-air personalities says, “Oh, I could never do that.” He could never call. He could never report a neighbor for wasting our precious water on their “precious” lawn.

Obviously, I could.

Update: Numbers for other cities/counties:

• Alpharetta: 678-297-6300 (24 hours a day)
• Cherokee County: 770-479-1813 or 770-720-6193 (Monday through Friday)
• Cobb County: 770-423-1000 (770-419-6278, after hours)
• DeKalb County: 770-270-6243 (770-621-7200, after hours)
• Forsyth County: 678-513-5893 or 678-513-5854
• Gwinnett County: 678-376-6800
• Sandy Springs: 404-658-6500 (business hours)

Orange Must Be The New Black, originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

Spotted at the Porsche dealership in Roswell.

As Rusty has pointed out, Atlanta has yet another new slogan. Forget all that “Opening Day” nonsense and start ordering your “City Lights, Southern Lights” commemorative koozies.

Of course, what you don’t know is that “ATL” — Dallas Austin’s classic tribute in song to our fair city — is due for replacment as well. It’s two years old, after all. And so, it is with great humility and pride that I present to you our new Atlanta anthem, one that echoes the deep sentiment of our new slogan. Enjoy.

Yesterday, my iPod and my iTunes had a fight. All of the gory details are detailed elsewhere. In the end, I reinstalled iTunes, reformated my iPod and as of this morning, all is well. I’ve much fewer songs on my iPod, only the tracks I really wanted to have today, but the rest of the music is backed up and available whenever.

But when iTunes did its initial search for locally-housed music, it pulled a bunch of video as well. And right there in the mix were several little movie files that I thought I’d lost. They were all these short clips I recorded with my Kodak DX3600 during a trip to London in 2002. I never really knew what to do with them at the time, though I did have them available for download on a previous incarnation of this site. It was in a subfolder of that old site’s backup that iTunes found them.

So after a little stitching one to another, I’ve uploaded the result to YouTube. Is it groundbreaking? No. But for a nostalgia-addicted Anglo-phile like myself, I’m quite pleased.

What are you watching? I’ll tell you (as best as I can remember).

• 0:00 – Britrail – Egham to Waterloo Station (My brother’s family was living in Egham at the time.)
• 0:15 – Swiss Cottage Tube Station (?) – Escalator Up
• 0:31 – Crossing the street in Hampstead
• 0:50 – Outside the BAFTAs – near Odeon Leicester Square)
• 1:23 – Busker singing “El Condor Pasa” in the Tube station, John and Janice are walking just ahead of me.
• 1:36 – Taking a break in Covent Garden
• 1:48 – London Transport Museum – a model train
• 1:58 – Juggler in Covent Garden
• 2:22 – String quartet in Covent Garden.
• 2:53 – Outside St. Paul’s Cathedral – Memorial to the people of London who died in the blitz 1939 – 1945.

Nikki and Me and Pastor Makes Three, originally uploaded by grabbingsand.

Nikki doesn’t believe me when I tell her, often looking at me like I’m just being silly and/or sentimental, but I’ve never been so happy in my life as I’ve been ever since the day we met.

Never underestimate how much a cup of coffee (and a shared interest) can change your life.

I decided that my old theme was much too busy. Once that was decided, I started to resent it.

So, here we are. Spartan.

And I think I like it.