I guess you've heard about Apollo 11.
It took them an unusually long time to get ready to step out. It was a school night, but my dad let me stay up late to watch. Some time well after 11 PM, they actually made it out the hatch and I could barely keep my eyes open.
As a kid, I was utterly consumed by the space program. I had a huge scrapbook of newspaper articles and I read every one of them. I was not utterly consumed by music. That didn't come until later.
You can read elsewhere all the historical stuff. I'm fascinated by an oddball thing I learned recently.
One of the least known works in the Pink Floyd catalog is called Moonhead. It seems that the BBC program Omnibus commissioned the Floyd to provide a soundtrack to the landing. For seven and a half minutes, with the occasional BBC announcer breaking in, they did just that.
This was not the world famous Pink Floyd. That would come later. This was the psychedelic cult act Floyd, only recently divorced from Syd Barrett. Barrett had been the primary song writer, producing science and science fiction oriented jams like Astronomy Domine and Set The Controls For The Heart Of The Sun. Barrett descended into mental illness and massive LSD abuse, and became impossible to work with. He was known to stand on the stage doing nothing for entire shows.
Moonhead is early in the career of David Gilmour as the lead guitarist, and Roger Waters' transition into main song writer. Moonhead is largely improvised, a spacey 12 bar blues, with an ominously descending bass line, guitar effects, and flurries of percussion. Its eerie ambience was perfectly suited to the event. Especially if you were stoned.
Gilmour later commented “It brought it home to me, powerfully, that you could look up at the moon and there would be people standing on it. It was fantastic to be thinking that we were in there making up a piece of music, while the astronauts were standing on the moon.” According to Gilmour, the song also marked a turning point for the band—the point at which outer space ceased to be Pink Floyd’s preoccupation as Waters piloted the group inward. Even the group's 1973 megahit The Dark Side Of the Moon (which for me is the greatest all around album of all time) used lunar imagery as a metaphor for introspection and meditations about lunacy.
Moonhead was on a few bootlegs over the years but it never appeared on an official release until the box set The Early Years was released in 2016.
As it happens, there was another obscure, unknown artist who was contracted to provide music for the Omnibus special. He created a mashup of Apollo capsule communication and Kubrick's 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey. David Bowie's A Space Oddity became a huge hit and completely overshadowed Moonhead.
$466 raised of $20010 days left
On this day in 1940, Leon Schlesinger Studios (later to become Warner Brothers Animation) invented Bugs Bunny.
The rabbit had a prehistory. A rabbit with some of the personality of Bugs, though looking very different, was originally featured in the film Porky's Hare Hunt, released on April 30, 1938. It was co-directed by Ben "Bugs" Hardaway and an uncredited Cal Dalton (who was responsible for the initial design of the rabbit). This cartoon has an almost identical plot to Por...
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A few years ago, Equifax had a major security breach that exposed the names and Social Security numbers of millions of Americans.
There was a settlement reached this week between Equifax and the FTC. If you go here:
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Dahlia Lithwick:
" This exchange {between Robert Mueller and Adam Schiff] has nothing to do with the pee tape or whether the fact that the president’s underlings refused to follow his illegal demands frees him of culpability for obstruction. It was merely a sad recitation of unrefuted facts: Donald Trump prioritized his brand over American national security during the election, and he gave foreign interests ample opportunity to exploit and capitalize on those actions, both during the campaign and after. His campaign prized winning and, if he did not win, his ability to still build a hotel in Russia over American interests. Nobody disputes any of this. Republicans in Congress admire it. Half of the American electorate forgives it, sold on the dream that to be “successful,” i.e., to make money freely, is the ultimate expression of American aspiration. The Trump campaign exposed and continues to expose the country to foreign meddling, and it continues to make itself vulnerable to foreign blackmail. And the GOP is unbothered, because it is prioritizing party over patriotism, and party over national election security.
"For anyone hoping for a made-for-TV denouement, this wasn’t it. But anyone seeking a physical tableau of two men who love their country, from different parties and different eras, agreeing sadly that it was not “ethical” or “patriotic” or “right” for the president of the United States to sell the country into electoral oblivion for a hotel deal, the ending was sober and kind of perfect. Schiff and Mueller landed the plane on the tragic mutual agreement that whether or not the president committed a crime, he sold us all out . . .
"In these final moments, Robert Mueller and Adam Schiff weren’t worried about scoring points. They worried about the future of free and fair elections in a country that doesn’t seem to have noticed that free and fair elections are vanishing before our eyes. As Mueller warned of the interference, “they’re doing it as we sit here. And they expect to do it during the next campaign.” That is what Mueller was investigating. This is his warning. It’s easy to tell ourselves that all of the corruption and self-dealing and the purposive cruelty to immigrants and enrichment of the wealthy can be cured in November 2020. The problem is that this solution is precisely that which is under threat, and that which we may never quite realize was lost."
It was on this day in 1788 that Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart entered into his catalog the completion of one of his most beloved works, and my favorite of his works, the Symphony Number 40 in G Minor. It was written in the final years of Mozart’s life, when things were not going well. An infant daughter had died a few weeks earlier, he had moved into a cheaper apartment, and he was begging friends and acquaintances for loans. But in the summer of 1788, he wrote his last three symphonies: Symphony Number 39 in E-Flat, Symphony in G Minor, and the Jupiter symphony. It is not known for sure whether Mozart ever heard any of these symphonies performed.
It has been argued that these were conceived as a single piece, since the middle one, #40, does not really have an introduction or a real finale.
Pianist and music scholar Charles Rosen (in his book The Classical Style) has called the symphony "a work of passion, violence, and grief." That certainly would have appealed to Beethoven, who copied out 29 bars from the score in one of his sketchbooks. The copied bars appear amid the sketches for Beethoven's Fifth Symphony, whose third movement begins with a pitch sequence similar to that of Mozart's finale. Franz Schubert likewise copied out the music of Mozart's minuet, and the minuet of his Fifth Symphony strongly evokes Mozart's. A passage late in Joseph Haydn's oratorio The Seasons, a meditation on death, quotes the second movement of the 40th Symphony and was included by Haydn as a memorial to his long-dead friend.
The 40th symphony exists in two versions, differing primarily in that one includes parts for a pair of clarinets (with suitable adjustments made in the other wind parts). Most likely, the clarinet parts were added in a revised version. The autograph scores of both versions were acquired in the 1860s by Johannes Brahms, who later donated the manuscripts to the Gesellschaft der Musikfreunde in Vienna, where they reside today.
Yesterday, Donald Trump gave a speech to a conservative student group. Behind him was the Seal of the President . . . .
. . . . doctored to replace the bald eagle with the double headed Russian eagle, clutching 13 golf clubs instead of arrow and with a banner reading (in Spanish) "45 is a puppet" instead of E Pluribus Unum.
Thank you all for the birthday wishes, and especially for the donations to Old Friends Sanctuary. It's the old dogs that really get me, the ones who were thrown away or had the misfortune to live longer than their companions. The fundraiser is still open for another couple of weeks so please spread the word!
It was on this night in 1967 that a riot broke out in Detroit, marking the beginning of the decline of one of the greatest manufacturing cities in the country. An all-white squadron of police officers decided to raid an unlicensed after hours bar in a black neighborhood where there was a party to welcome home two recent veterans of the Vietnam War. The police stormed the bar, rounded up and arrested 85 black men. While they were arranging for transportation, a sizable crowd o...
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One of the most rewarding experiences of my life in recent years happened several years ago when one of the resc...Continue Reading
$466 raised of $200
One of the most rewarding experiences of my life in recent years happened several years ago when one of the resc...Continue Reading
$466 raised of $200
One of the most rewarding experiences of my life in recent years happened several years ago when one of the rescues I work with received an inquiry from an elderly woman in suburban Atlanta. She had terminal lung cancer, with only a few months to live, and she was desperate to find someone to take care of her companion of 14 years, a sweet old border collie named Peg. We found Peg a home with a veterinarian so she had concierge vet care for the rest of her life.
Peg was lucky...
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One of the most rewarding experiences of my life in recent years happened several years ago when one of the resc...Continue Reading
$466 raised of $200
It’s the birthday of writer Ernest Hemingway , born in Oak Park, Illinois in 1899. It's also the birthday of his first novel. In July of 1925, he visited Pamplona, Spain, for the Festival of San FermÃn, a weeklong celebration that included bullfighting and the famous Running of the Bulls. Hemingway and his wife arrived a few days early to get tickets, and he needed a way to spend the time; so on this day in 1925, on his 26th birthday, he began his first novel. He said, “Every...
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