The sad irony here is that, with one television commercial, Nick Drake's iconic song gained greater interest and popularity,
That happened years ago, also with a car commercial, but with a very different result. Cat Powers did a cover of Major Tom (the David Bowie song) for a Lincoln car commercial:
...and I went, wow, that sounds awesome, and looked it up. So did half the internet. There was no song to be found. Because apparently, Lincoln owns the rights since she did it specifically for their commercial, and so there was no release of the entire song by Cat Powers. F**king tragic.
passed a bill to PAY TO HAVE KILLED NINETY PERCENT OF THE GREY WOLVES IN THE STATE.
RAWR!!! I am so sick of these short-sighted, wrongheaded, willfully ignorant people getting to literally destroy the ecosystem at their whim. Just. RAWR.
As the LGBTQ community has already said, I'll take a hard pass.
Yeah, Caitlyn can stuff it. I've thankfully so far not seen anyone doing the "but representation" with her. No, my trans arse doesn't care that she's trans. I care about her policies and ethics and I'm sick of people who seem to think that all that matters for social justice is to have POC/women/queers being the lapdogs of the exploitative class instead of old straight white guys doing their bidding. Honey, I don't care who is wearing the boot, I care about the fact that there is a boot holding us down in the first place!
Life is wonderful, and is getting better, better, and better.
That has been very hard for me to see of late. I am fresh out of hope. I hope you are right. :)
I love Cat Power. I saw her play once many years ago. Moon Pix is one of my favourite albums of all time. She went out with Bill Callahan from Smog, also one of my favourite artists of all time - Knock Knock my fave album.
I'm sorry you are out of hope. I feel that way too, though I don't feel sad in my own life, just for the world. It's a credit to your empathy, and people like you GIVE me hope.
Awwww. Thank you. <3
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.