R snapped this photo just before she left for work this morning. Phoebe, as you can see, was already at work, doing her job of holding down the couch with expert precision and attention to her craft.
[saveagrey]
by James Brush
Year: 2010
How many snakes swim below
your forty feet of rain?
The park where we flew kites
lies below your fathoms.
Our kites become flying fish.
They break the surface of your lake
now filled with dislodged rattlesnakes.
Cars slow on the bridge.
It’s easy to get lost in this swift mystery
we once called sky.
So the airplanes fly a little higher now.
Beyond lowering clouds, their engines thrum,
toward El Paso, toward California.
I pick earthworms off the porch,
toss them writhing
back toward the wet grass.
Given time, you’ll fall apart.
The latest, and sadly last, issue of ouroboros review is out. I’ve got a photograph in there. Look for “Rolling Bottle” on page 4 (you can read it online). The photo first appeared here at Coyote Mercury back in 2006 along with some others I took in Gruene.
Dave Bonta’s Woodrat Podcast is back. The first two episodes of this season are well worth the time. He finds very interesting guests and their conversations are always worth a listen, especially his interview with Lorianne DiSabato where they discuss nature writing, old school blogging and zen practice. DiSabato blogs at Hoarded Ordinaries, a site I’ll be checking out.
Remember that video I made for “drylung” from Clayton Michaels’ chapbook Watermark? Well, Watermark is available and it’s fantastic. You can read it in its online form or even better buy a copy. You can also listen to his interview on the Woodrat Podcast.
While you’re going around listening to the web, stop and have a listen to the poems at Whale Sound a mesmerizing project where NS reads poems written by other poets. She does a brilliant job with these pieces. I’ve listened to her reading of “At Ruby’s Diner” by Sherry O’Keefe several times and it just gets better and better each time.
And, finally, it appears there is another James Brush out there and I’m not talking about my dad. Count him and it seems we’re everywhere. Check out the other James’s site and dig his art at jamesbrush.com.
When I decided to move Coyote Mercury to a new host, I figured I’d take the opportunity to make a slight change in the URL. When I started blogging almost five years ago, I already had Coyote Mercury running as a static site and installed WordPress in a sub-directory, which made the URL coyotemercury.com/blog1. Eventually, the blog became the whole of the site and when I decided to change hosts, I wanted to get rid of that /blog1. It wasn’t a big deal and I could have lived with it, but what I really enjoy is the puzzle of solving problems I create for myself and this looked like a perfect opportunity to do just that.
The main issues would be making sure that all those links from all those other bloggers who’ve been kind enough to link to my site would redirect to the correct pages as well as all of my internal links. I also needed to make sure that the /blog1 rss feed would redirect. What follows is mainly a summary of what I learned and where on the web I found what I needed for anyone attempting a similar move.
Moving My Blog to a New Host & Changing the URL
1. Before doing anything, I used the WordPress export tool to download my WP database to my computer as an XML file. I then FTP’d all my files from my old host to my hard drive, making sure to maintain the exact file structure as it appeared at my old site.
I decided I wanted a clean install of WordPress along with a clean database to start with. There were some things that didn’t work at my old site like pingbacks and my old host didn’t allow the use of .htaccess so I wanted to make sure that everything was installed in such a way as to work well at Bluehost.
2. Bluehost has a one-click WordPress installer and so I used that to start with, installing WordPress in the root directory. Once that was done, I went into cPanel, found the file manager, deleted the new wp-content folder, and uploaded my old wp-content folder (which contains all the plugins, themes and uploads) into the root directory.
3. At this point I had a temporary URL and so I logged into my new WordPress install, went to tools and imported that XML file from step 1. Foolishly, I did not check the box that asks if you want to import and upload attachments. This would come back to haunt me, but I would eventually figure out how to fix it.
4. Once all my posts were imported, I opened up my blog’s dashboard both at my old host and on my new host (where it was running on a temporary URL) and went through each screen to make sure that all my plugins and options were configured the same way. The only difference was on the General Settings page where the WordPress address and the site address on the Bluehost installation were the temporary URL.
This is also wheb I discovered that the media library was empty even though the files were all in the right place. It was a result of the mistake I made in step 3. Keep reading to learn how I fixed it.
5. The next step required me to venture into phpmyadmin and make some changes to my database so that WordPress would function on my URL rather than the temporary URL supplied by BlueHost.
(Disclaimer: If you’re using this post as a guide to moving your own WordPress, please be very very careful with phpmyadmin. Your database is your blog’s memory and it is very easy to perform a lobotomy if you’re not careful. Check your spelling. There is no undo in phpmyadmin. I am not responsible for your site’s database if you try any of this and it doesn’t work for you.)
Using phpmyadmin, I ran the following SQL command, which is based on what I found at My Digital Life:
UPDATE wp_options SET option_value = replace(option_value, 'http://temporary-domain.com', 'http://actual-domain.com') WHERE option_name = 'home' OR option_name = 'siteurl';
If I had decided to maintain the coyotemercury.com/blog1 URL, I would basically be finished. All I would need to do now would be to point the domain name servers from my old host to my new host, but because I was changing the URL, I would need to run a couple more SQL commands in phpmyadmin, both of which came from My Digital Life, where you can find more detailed explanations about the whys and wherefores of all this.
The next SQL command would change the URLs of all my old posts and pages so as to get rid of the /blog1:
UPDATE wp_posts SET guid = replace(guid, 'http://old-domain.com','http://new-domain.com');
The final SQL command rewrote all of my internal links so that they would still point to the correct posts:
UPDATE wp_posts SET post_content = replace(post_content, 'http://old-domain.com', 'http://new-domain.com');
6. Once I was finished running these commands, I logged into my old host’s control panel and pointed the name servers toward Bluehost and waited. For a few minutes nothing worked, then everything was jacked up and then… my site looked right. The images were there. The internal links were correctly rewritten, things looked right. Now, it was time to redirect inbound links.
Redirecting Inbound Links
7. The next thing to do was to make sure that all inbound links still went to the right place. I put a /blog1 subdirectory in the root folder and then used the text editor to write a simple note indicating that the site had moved. I saved it as index.php and put in in the /blog1 folder in case my redirects didn’t work.
8. Permanent (301) Redirects are properly done using .htaccess, which is completely new to me. I read a lot about it at Codeleet, Cats Who Code, and Expression Web, where I learned that Bluehost has a nice redirect feature in cPanel that writes and inserts the .htaccess code for you. I did that and it worked well. I went to a few sites that had links pointing to some of my posts and pages, including the home page, tested them out and it all seemed to work.
Redirecting the RSS Feed
9. Redirecting the RSS feed from /blog1/feed/ was a bit more challenging. I used the redirect feature in cPanel, but it didn’t redirect the feed. This could be a problem since many of my regular readers seem to come via the feed. Without a redirected feed, they might not realize I had moved. I did some research at Cats Who Code, Nanny Goats in Panties, RSS Advisory Board, Advertising Age, Radio Userland, and The RSS Blog where I found the code for an XML level redirect.
I added a sub-directory into my mostly empty /blog1 folder and called it /feed. Then I opened my text editor and pasted the following code from The RSS Blog (with http://domain.com/feed/ changed to reflect the address of my new feed):
<?xml version="1.0" ?>
<redirect>
<newlocation>http://domain.com/feed/</newlocation>
</redirect>
I saved this file as index.php and uploaded it to /blog1/feed/ and my feed started redirecting.
I’m not sure why, but it seems there needs to be both redirection code in the .htaccess file and an active file from which to redirect.
Making the Media Library Work
10. Like I said back in Step 3, I forgot to tell WordPress to import the attachments from the XML file I had exported in Step 1. The result was that while images displayed in posts, the media library appeared to be empty and when I clicked on images, I got 404 errors instead of attachment pages. After doing some research, I learned that the attachment pages were kept along with posts and pages in the wp_posts table of the database.
To fix things, I went back to phpmyadmin at my old host and exported the wp_posts table to my hard drive as an SQL file. Then, I went to phpmyadmin at Bluehost, dropped (which means deleted) the wp_posts table and then imported the wp_posts SQL file to my new host. Since I had now undone some of what I had done earlier, I had to re-run those last 2 SQL commands in Step 5.
Now, the media library was populated and the attachment pages worked, except where thumbnail images were involved. Wherever thumbnails appeared such as on galleries, they were displaying at full size. I checked to see that the thumbnails were in fact on the server (they were) and then began researching which part of the database contained the info that connected the thumbnails to the attachment pages. Turns out that was in the wp_postmeta table.
11. I went back to phpmyadmin at my old host and exported wp_postmeta as an SQL file to my computer. Then, I went to phpmyadmin at my new host, dropped wp_postmeta and imported the wp_postmeta SQL file from my computer.
Now, I had to run one more SQL command, this one of my own creation, but based on the ones I ran in Step 5:
UPDATE wp_postmeta SET meta_value = replace(meta_value, '/blog1/wp-content', '/wp-content');
And, it worked. For me. Be careful if you try this yourself since your blog may have a different file structure. If it does and you try this, you could damage your database. Of course if that happens you can always go back to Step 1, start over and remember to check that box about importing the media library.
And now I’m done and looking forward to getting back to blogging.
I’ve changed to a new host and in the process decided to change my URL by dropping the /blog1, which I’ve never cared for. Hopefully, I’ve done this in such a way that inbound links will redirect as should the rss feed. We’ll see. Things might be a bit wonky over here while I get settled in.
Here’s the new URL for those inclined to update your blogrolls: https://coyotemercury.com/
and for those using feed readers, here’s the new rss url: https://coyotemercury.com/feed/
It will take 24-72 hours for the changes to propagate across the internet so hopefully things will be working by the weekend.
Let me know if you notice anything jacked up around here. I appreciate it. Thanks.
When the headlights
struck the stars
and the radio de-tuned
to static songs,
the highway dropped
away and clouds
grew shapes across
the galaxies below my tires.
And though my hands
still gripped the wheel,
I was now a passenger.
This is the videopoem I made for “drylung” by Clayton Michaels. It comes from his chapbook, Watermark, winner of the 2010 qarrtsiluni chapbook contest.
About a month ago, Dave Bonta and Beth Adams, co-managing editors at qarrtsiluni asked if I would be interested in doing a video for one of the poems from Watermark. They sent the manuscript, which proved to be an embarrassment of riches. I read it a few times, went back and forth with a few and settled on “drylung.”
What will the world “look like when all the water leaves?” Last Summer we were on the tail end of a two-and-a-half year drought here in central Texas. The lakes were drying up. The aquifers were emptying. Austin and San Antonio were imposing harsh water use restrictions and through all those 105°F days, there was the underlying sense that this was the future. Those in the know—politicians and policymakers, the few who try to think long term—claim that water will be the issue in Texas in the 21st century.
Parts of Lake Travis that hadn’t seen the sun in decades were exposed, and docks and boats were marooned hundreds of yards inland. Everything shriveled as the ground compacted and cracked so slowly it could almost seem normal at times.
In October, the rains came and the drought ended. We had one of the wettest, coldest winters in a long time. Memory of such things is short and so water, or the lack thereof, was soon forgotten.
What will the world “look like when all the water leaves?” Mars.
Ever since I was a kid in the ’70s in Washington, DC where the Air & Space Museum was my favorite place, Mars has fascinated me. I can scroll endlessly through the images beamed back by NASA’s rovers. Mars is beautiful and stark. It is the subject of a few of my poems, one published earlier this year at qarrtsiluni and another here at Coyote Mercury. I’m even writing a novel (slowly, too slowly) set on Mars, that world from which all the water really has left (actually, it’s possibly still there, trapped below the surface in a layer of permafrost, but I digress).
Texas and Mars collided in “drylung.” In my mind, it sounded like prophecy such as one might hear between channels on a weather radio. This summer had been (it isn’t now) unusually mild. Mid-90s and regular rain. It was easy to forget the previous year. “drylung” forced memory and took me to Mars where ancient water likely flowed.
I thoroughly enjoyed the opportunity to make this video. Thanks to Beth and Dave for inviting me to do this and for their suggestions on improving the final edit. Thanks to Clayton for his wonderful poem and reading and for allowing me to interpret his work like this.
Watermark will be published August 30th. You’ll be able to read it and listen to Clayton read his poems at watermarkpoems.com, and you can order it from Phoenicia Publishing. I’ve got a few of Phoenicia’s books, and they’re tip-top all the way and speaking as someone who’s had the privilege of reading Watermark, I recommend buying a copy. It’s an incredibly good read, the kind that makes me want to be a better writer.
This is my first attempt at making a cigar box guitar. In last Sunday’s Austin American-Statesman, there was an article (can’t find it on the site so no link) about 2 guys who make and sell cigar box guitars under the name Bobby Taylor Guitars. They’re based here in Austin, and the article made the guitars sound so cool, I thought about going out to find one. The article also mentioned a few websites with plans for building your own, which sounded like more fun than buying one. Thus building a cigar box ax became my project for the week.
The plan I used was for a simple 3-string fretless guitar that relies more on parts from Radio Shack and Lowe’s than anything from a music store. The plan for this simple guitar is available at Cigar Box Guitars, though I used many ideas and relied on a lot of insights in the forums at Cigar Box Nation, especially for wiring.
I’m a rank amateur when it come to carpentry. My dad is talented in woodworking and though he taught me the “measure twice, cut once” rule, I’m still at the “measure twice, cut twice, screw it up, fix it, and improvise to get it right” level. Because of this, I decided I wasn’t going to worry too much about how it looked and hell, it’s a DIY cigar box ax: if it looks kind of jacked up, then that just makes it look more punk. Fine with me. I just wanted it to work and sound cool.
On Monday, I gathered all the supplies. I got the wood, a 3-foot 1×2 of poplar, and various bolts and nails at Lowe’s. I got the pickup (a piezo transducer) and 1/4 inch output jack at Radio Shack. The tuners and the volume pot came from Strait Music. The cigar box came from the Twin Liquors down the street and seemed to be the only empty cigar box in town. I’d have preferred a deeper one, but in the spirit of use-what-you-got, I took what I could get.
Cutting the neck to fit the box was the trickiest part. I went to my parents’ house to get some help from my dad since I don’t even have a workbench. We experimented with a bandsaw, jigsaw, coping saw and various weapons of sanding. In the end, and for future reference, the jigsaw was fine for most of the cutting, followed by various files and a pocket knife to finish and get the cuts just right.
I read about fretting the neck and understand the principle, but a guitar has around 20 frets and that sounded to me like 20 opportunities to screw up the neck beyond repair and so I decided it would be a fretless ax and moved on to staining the neck.
Once the stain was dry, I put it together. My cuts in the cigar box weren’t perfect and so I nailed the neck to the box lid with small finishing nails (rather than gluing it). Then I strung it up and wrestled with physics, one of the more unforgiving teachers. Here is where I had to go off plan. The first issue was that as I tuned the strings to pitch, they dug into the wood of the tailpiece. As they cut the wood, they lost tension and so I couldn’t tune them. I needed some metal to stick into the string holes.
I went back to Lowe’s and wandered up and down the aisles looking for something that might work. In the plumbing department, I found some little pieces of copper tubing with flared ends. They weren’t as thick as the tailpiece and it looked like the balls on the ends of the strings might not go through them. I bought a few, widened the string holes and glued them in.
That solved the strings cutting the wood problem, but the balls on the ends of the strings could slide up the tubes, so I used this solution, which I saw in a picture on Cigar Box Nation:
You can see holes, where I tried staples, but that didn’t work as well as the nail. This works, though, it does mean that changing even one string will require me to de-tune all three in order to release the tension on the nail.
The other string related issue was the fact that the middle string wanted to be too close to the low string. Because I’m using bolts instead of a “real” (ie: cut) nut and bridge, the strings will slip into the most natural groove, but I needed the middle string moved slightly downward. I remembered the string guides on Stratocasters and figured I could just drive a fat screw in there and perhaps it would work. It did, and now I have a nice ugly DIY-looking headstock:
Believe it or not, it works and the thing stays in tune.
Next up was the wiring. I haven’t soldered anything since 7th grade electronics class so this took some practice. The plans I used say to just hook the piezo transducer to the output jack, but I wanted a volume pot in there so I had to search around, but I found a simple wiring diagram at Cigar Box Nation. I wired it up, but could never get the ground wires soldered onto the back of the volume pot. After reading that real electric guitars use the bridge as the ground, I decided to just run the ground wire out of the back of the box (that black wire in the detail photos above) and wrap it around the bolt I’m using for a bridge. To my surprise, it worked.
Now it was time to tune up. I tried acoustic strings hoping to get more volume since the box is so thin, but they kept breaking. Electric guitar strings, however, work quite well. They’re thinner and require less tension. The source of the breaking turned out to be scale length (the distance between nut and bridge, aka, the 2 bolts). A longer scale equals more tension. I measured the scale length and found it was almost 2 inches longer than the scale length on my other guitars, but shorter than bass scale length. Had I known about this, I would have cut 2 inches off the neck, so that info will get filed away for the next one.
The thing turns out to be playable. The action is kind of high, so next time, I’ll use a slightly thinner bolt for the nut. Not having frets will take some getting used to; my fingers generally know where to go, but with the longer scale I have to spread them slightly farther than I would on a regular guitar. Fretless guitars are best played with a slide so I’ll learn how to do that.
I initially tuned to E-A-D like on a standard guitar and while that was fun, I think I’ll get more mileage from an open tuning, which is what a lot of the cigar box guitar sites recommend. Right now, I’ve got it tuned to open G (G-D-G) which lends itself to slide playing. Still, it’s a new beast and now that it’s built I get the fun of figuring out how to play it.
Coming out of my amp, it sounds old fashioned: tinny and mid-rangey like an A.M. radio. I like it. The piezo doesn’t pick up a whole lot of vibration since the lid is thicker than an acoustic guitar top and the box is thin. A pre-amp would probably be useful (there are kits to make your own) but I plugged it into an overdrive pedal and that works for now.
In all, this was a wonderful experience. I was telling a friend just last week that wish I knew how to make things. He said, “You make poems.” I nodded and while I love making poems and stories and content, there’s something immensely satisfying about the making of things. Especially things that work. I don’t know why, but it makes me happy. I don’t know how many hours I spent sanding and soldering (and re-soldering) but I really enjoyed the doing of it.
I plan to make more of these. I have a very cool cigar box that I didn’t want to ruin on my first build so I’ll be making it into a guitar one day. I’d also like to build one with proper electric guitar pickups, maybe a nice, growling, dirty humbucker. That will however be a project for cooler weather. One thing I vowed never to do again is build a guitar when it’s 103°F outside. In the shade. Thank goodness for TopoChico.
Now have a listen. The clip is about a minute or so. The 1st 30 seconds are acoustic and the rest is through the amp. The buzzing and crackling you’ll hear is the amp, which needs some work. The slide work is clumsy (you can hear me knocking it against the neck). I’m just guessing at the fingering since I don’t really know how to play a fretless instrument yet. Anyhow, enjoy (if that’s the right word):
I’ll be learning to play by watching this guy.
Yesterday, whilst engaged in some offline analog projects, two literary sites were kind enough to publish some of my work.
The first, Poets for Living Waters, “a poetry action in response to the BP Gulf oil disaster,” featured 3 of my poems. The poems “A Necklace for the Goddess of the Empty Sea” (thanks for the prompt, Deb!), “The Desert Years,” and “Galveston, Last Summer” all appeared in slightly different form here at Coyote Mercury.
And, one of my micro poems, “The sun, threaded with clouds,” went up over at a handful of stones.
Thanks to the editors of these fine online journals for publishing these poems, and as always, have a look around. There is wonderful work to be found at both of these sites.
Well, look at that. We made us some art.
Last Friday, R and I took a painting class for adults at Marmalade Skies here in Austin. The class is called Pinot Picasso and it’s geared toward people who have never painted before. People like R and me. Actually, I have painted a few houses and I’m pretty good at it, but I don’t think it’s the same thing. At all. For one thing, this was fun.
The instructor was great, letting us explore and helping us out of holes all while talking about Roy Lichtenstein and his technique as well as general painting technique. We started with photographs—everyone else did people but she let us try dogs, which was new for her. In the end, much to our surprise, R and I had a couple of cool looking paintings of 2 of our favorite people (though I’ll need to go back and do one of Simon some time before he gets jealous).
What amazed me was how quickly the time went. How lost we both were in what we were doing. The instructor said, “We’re closing in 15 minutes,” and I looked around saw that it was dark outside and I had a nearly finished painting and an empty bottle of TopoChico in front of me.
I love making things, and even more, I love the act of making them. Most of what I make comes out in the form of pixels or food, but it was a thrill to make something I can hold and hold on to as I don’t do enough of that.
It’s the most fun I’ve had going out on a Friday night since I can remember, and I couldn’t wait to get home and show the dogs who weren’t interested once they realized they couldn’t eat the paintings.
The Pinot Picasso classes at Marmalade Skies at 183 and Anderson Mill in northwest Austin are held every Friday from 7-9:30, and each week they teach a different style of painting. We’ll be going back.
[saveagrey]