What a damned shame that the song was never released. I've been only peripherally aware of Cat Power, but clearly I need to check out more of her work, as I love this snippet as well. Space Oddity is probably my favorite Bowie song ever, which I dearly loved as soon as it was released.
Of course, as a kid, I was all about NASA, and the space program, so it's not surprising that it really spoke to me.
My former spouse was a fellow space cadet, who had watched the Apollo 11 launch with his brother from their surfboards in St. Petersburg, and had wound up on the cover of some French newsmagazine as a result, complete with a headline to the effect of how blase Americans had gotten about the space program. Ironically, in later years, one of their relatives worked for NASA for many years. ;-)
He and I went to multiple shuttle launches from the Cape, which were always wonderful, as there were literally hundreds if not thousands of people all willing success for the astronauts and their mission, with such an incredibly warm and loving vibe all around. And the delay between watching the rockets fire up, and when the roaring sound and vibration reached us across the river, was always thrilling.
Year later, after the 102nd Avenue bridge was built over Lake Seminole, in Seminole, Florida, we could watch them from the bridge without leaving home, as the bridge was two very short blocks from our condo. Pretty cool, even though there wasn't that sense of shared camaraderie as when viewed from the Cape.
The bottom line is that we still live in an awesome country, even if the Grifter-in-Chief gave permission for the worst among us to give voice to their basest impulses, and we're seeing it play itself out nightly on the evening news (which I don't watch).
I've had a saying for years, which keeps bearing itself out in my own experience, as well as that of many friends and loved ones -
Most people are mostly good most of the time.
Yeah, you can catch anyone on a bad day, and God knows I've had moments when I didn't treat others the way I would want to be treated, and I own that. I was raised to be kind and polite, and do my best to default to that, but I have had people push my buttons past the point where I was willing to just take it silently.
That's on me. My job is to keep myself balanced, to keep myself calm and practice kindness, but also to be kind to myself when I fail to live up to my own admittedly high standards. We're all human.
Thanks for the wonderful comment.
I have a FB friend who lives in that area and goes out to see all the launches. I'm of the generation where we watched the Challenger explode live on TV in school. What actually gives me that feeling of oneness and excitement is actually the original Cosmos series with Carl Sagan. I watched the updated remake with Neil DeGrasse Tyson and it was pretty good, but just nobody has Sagan's vibe and love of teaching. Also the animations in the new one annoyed the bejeezus out of me. 😂
Yeah, I was at work when Challenger exploded, and didn't even hear about it until that evening, when a waitress at the restaurant where my dad played piano asked if I'd heard about it, and I said yes, because I did know about the launch.
But then she added about what a tragedy it was, and I said "Wait, what? What tragedy?," upon which she told me about the explosion, and I was dumbfounded, and profoundly saddened.
I also remember the explosion of Apollo I, which caught fire during a pre-flight test, and in the pure oxygen atmosphere inside the capsule, the fire killed all three astronauts aboard within minutes. And, many years later, I remember touring the NASA facility at Cape Canaveral, after the name was changed back from Cape Kennedy, and seeing the remains of the capsule, which brought it all back again anew.
I was eight when Apollo I caught fire, and I remember being devastated at the time, as it felt as though we had lost members of our family, the astronauts were all so familiar to us all at the time. And the following days in school, and at home, we were all in mourning, and even more concerned about the remaining astronauts.
RIP to all of the astronauts, Cosmonauts, and others, lost in the pursuit of the dream of manned space flight, all over the world.