Song of the Day: Sting – All This Time (March 29, 2019)
I don’t know if I’m supposed to like Sting or not. A lot of people seem to think he’s pretentious and tedious, and some days I can see that, but sometimes he writes something snappy, and rather clever, and who doesn’t like that?
I’ve always enjoyed All This Time, it’s bouncy and tuneful, well recorded, and well arranged, and the ideas it expresses – and listen, at a minimum, it’s no small thing that a pop tune expresses ideas, right? – well suit my predilections and prejudices. The stone atheist in me enjoys the scorn for organized religion, and the morose philosopher with a bent for history just eats this with a spoon:
Teachers told us the Romans built this place.
They built a wall and a temple and an edge of the empire garrison town.
They lived and they died, they prayed to their gods,
but the stone gods did not make a sound.
And their empire crumbled ’till all that was left
Were the stones the workmen found.
Pretentious? Well, I don’t know, it sounds about right to me, and it instantly reminded me of another pretentious fop named Shelley, who wrote a little poem about a fellow who answered to “Ozymandias”:
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”
I’m not sure whether this sort of thinking is comforting or depressing. On the one hand, this too shall pass. On the other hand, so will I, and I’ve got a real feeling that I do before this does.
Anyway, listen to Sting’s bass work. He’s said he models his playing on McCartney’s, whom he calls “the Guv’nor”, and that makes the guy all right by me.
Song of the Day: Billy Bragg – Cindy of a Thousand Lives (March 30, 2019)
A tribute to photographer Cindy Sherman, considered one of the most important artists of her generation, according to what I just found on Google, and a major figure I would never have known the first thing about if I hadn’t tried to figure out this song. I guess this demonstrates what I’m sure Billy would tell me, that popular songs don’t have to be mere entertainment. They can tell stories about things you never knew, and make you curious enough to do some digging on your own.
Billy Bragg first came to my attention in the mid-1980s, in a video of one of his most affecting songs, Levi Stubbs’ Tears, which managed to make it into the rotation on Much Music. This was back when there were whole channels devoted to nothing but music videos, and the form was slowly evolving from the trashy, glossy, empty flash of “artists” like Duran Duran – virtual fast food commercials in which the music, such as it was, was almost entirely beside the point – into something more self-consciously arty and serious. This was the era when U2, the Talking Heads, Peter Gabriel and the like were trying to say something beyond “please buy my record, so that I might be stinking wealthy and buried up to my neck in drugs and hot babes”. Video Art Rock, if you like.
Levi Stubbs’ Tears was serious and meaningful, all right, but belonged to none of the prevailing trends – it wasn’t slick, it didn’t include scenes in exotic locales, or animation, or wild photo angles, or the use of colours and lighting to make it look like a fashion shoot on tape, or anything arty at all – it was just Billy, standing there with his sleeves rolled up, guitar in hand, in a dark empty studio. It wasn’t a video of Billy playing over the recorded version of the song, either, or doing cinematic things while the song played underneath. He just stood there, live and utterly unpretentious, played the song for the camera, and according to legend was in and out in a single take. Thus like the song, the video never ages.
Just your typical romantic ditty assembled according to the familiar formula: worthless lout meets girl/worthless lout marries girl/worthless lout leaves girl to wallow in terrible loneliness/worthless lout comes home and shoots girl full of holes. Moon, June, spoon and all that.
I loved the song from the get go, and it has an extra-special place in my heart because it turns out that my wife-to-be did too, from before I met her, and I think it surprised her that a goof like me could appreciate such a thing. My standing increased further when I was able to explain to her who Levi Stubbs was, and Norman Whitfield, Barrett Strong, and Holland and Holland and Dozier too. I was able to pull the Motown CDs off my shelf and show her, coming on all sage and well-versed in explaining that the woman in the song was consoling herself with songs by the Temptations and the Four Tops. From then on I pretty much had the inside track.
This type of jangly solo guitar ballad was typical of his output back then. Billy positioned himself as a sort of angry young leftist folk singer on a mission, Woody Guthrie with an electric guitar, but so quintessentially British in his accent, slang, and verbal imagery that to those of us on this side of the pond he seemed almost from another world, almost exotic. His output oscillated between portrayals of everyday life, which on the surface, at least, embraced no particular agenda, and outright agit-prop that railed against The Man and all manner of social injustice. One track would be something like There is Power in a Union, or Between the Wars, the latter a moving tribute to blue collar workers struggling for a living wage during the Great Depression, and hoping for help from the 1930s political system. Then the next might drop the dialectic in favour of a poignant coming-of-age tale about young longing and lost romance, like the beautiful St. Swithen’s Day, with its wistful remembrance of days past:
The Polaroids that held us together
will surely fade away
like the love that we spoke of forever
on St. Swithen’s Day
…or the wonderfully honest and self-aware A New England:
I don’t want change the world, I’m not looking for a new England – I’m just looking for another girl. Look, you can’t always be on the front lines throwing Molotov Cocktails at the capitalist oppressors, right mate? A young man has his needs.
Billy’s politics might have put some people off back then, as they did me sometimes, before I clued in a little more and went all lefty myself, but you couldn’t help but be drawn in by the compassion, the vast reservoir of human sympathy that he brought to the music. After a while, you realized that Billy wasn’t so much angry as profoundly saddened and deeply frustrated by the sheer, unnecessary cruelty of the ordinary person’s lot, feelings that are perhaps easier to understand as we look around at what’s become of us here in our new 21st Century Gilded Age.
Don’t Try This at Home, released in 1991, marked a bit of a departure, containing songs set against broad, complex, multi-layered studio soundscapes reminiscent of Phil Spector’s Walls of Sound. Cindy of a Thousand Lives, my favourite, has the vocal riding above the sombre strumming of a small orchestra of acoustic guitars, numerous, insistent, and in perfect synchrony, sounding just as Phil would have liked. For years I took it to be mournful dirge for the lost innocence of a mythical long-gone America, shattered forever in the wake of Viet Nam, Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the plutocratic predations of the Reagan years:
Blue velvet America
half glimpsed in the headlights between the trees
Who punctured your beauty
and invited monsters such as these?
The pig-faced boy
The corrupted clown
The grotesque figure who never comes in to town
Looked at that way, it seems more relevant today than ever, doesn’t it? Yet it isn’t about the political landscape at all, save to the extent that it’s written in praise of the reputedly subversive politics embodied in the photographic work of Cindy Sherman. She’s the pig-faced boy, the corrupted clown, and hundreds upon hundreds of other archetypes and oddballs depicted in her curious, challenging, and sometimes upsetting images, which appear to comment on the way women are portrayed, and thus shaped in real life, by modern media.
This was written in connection with an exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art:
Cindy Sherman (American, b. 1954) is widely recognized as one of the most important and influential artists in contemporary art. Throughout her career, she has presented a sustained, eloquent, and provocative exploration of the construction of contemporary identity and the nature of representation, drawn from the unlimited supply of images from movies, TV, magazines, the Internet, and art history. Working as her own model for more than 30 years, Sherman has captured herself in a range of guises and personas which are at turns amusing and disturbing, distasteful and affecting. To create her photographs, she assumes multiple roles of photographer, model, makeup artist, hairdresser, stylist, and wardrobe mistress. With an arsenal of wigs, costumes, makeup, prosthetics, and props, Sherman has deftly altered her physique and surroundings to create a myriad of intriguing tableaus and characters, from screen siren to clown to aging socialite.
https://www.moma.org/calendar/exhibitions/1154
The most fascinating aspect of her work, about which, let’s be clear, I know nothing – I only started to look into it when doing the homework to write this post – is how hard it is to tell that every single picture is really the same person, as she serves as her own photographic subject across thousands of images that show women in all sorts of settings, postures, costumes, and emotional states – even, in some of them, apparently deceased – each so distinct that it’s hard to believe that every one of them is her. Hence, Cindy of a thousand lives, and Billy calling out “Cindy, which one of them is you”? as the song fades to black. This video, not an “official” release, but put together by an admirer and posted on YouTube, will show you what I mean. Those are all her:
Something broken, something stained, something waiting for the worms to claim.
Here’s further reading, if you’re keen.
https://www.theartstory.org/artist-sherman-cindy.htm
I’m almost sorry I finally understand what Billy was on about. I liked the mystery – before you learn the real story, those lyrics are as perplexing as they are evocative, and somehow just as powerful in a different way, allowing you to attribute your own meanings as if they’re a sort of aural Rorschach Test.
Ever get the feeling that you’re just not perceptive enough to understand, and that all genuine art, with all its many nuanced strata of meanings, is utterly wasted on you? My guess is that Billy, an everyman, yes, but also an intellectual artist if ever there was one, never gets that sense.
Song of the Day: Jane Wiedlin – Our Lips Are Sealed (May 16, 2019)
The only annoying aspect of the huge success of the irrepressible Go-Gos back in the Eighties was the way everybody focussed on the lead singer, Belinda Carlisle, and ignored the group’s far more interesting songwriter, one of the most talented pop composers of her era. You can hear the extent to which Jane Wiedlin owns the Go-Go’s biggest hit, Our Lips Are Sealed, in this acoustic demo. This woman knew her way around a melody, and the clever lyrics, skewering the politics and gossip of toxic high school society, are much easier to discern in this version. Plus, this song boasts a number of clever chord shifts and one of the most sublime middle-eights on record.
When the group split up, Jane had some success, but nowhere close to what she deserved. One assumes she’s set for life, though, just on the royalties from this song alone (even though she has to split them with purported co-writer Terry Hall of Fun Boy Three, with whom Wiedlin had a brief fling). Nobody does pop better than this.
She was prettier than Carlisle too, you ask me.
Song of the Day: The Beatles – Strawberry Fields Forever (May 29, 2019)
Lennon’s masterwork.
Every Beatles fan is familiar with the story, how John liked bits of one take, and other bits of another, and wanted George Martin to splice them together, an impossible request in late 1966 as the two taped versions were recorded at different tempos and different keys; but Martin was able to match them up by slowing one of them down and speeding the other up, bringing them into perfect synch, as if the Music Gods had willed it.
At top is one of the earlier versions, fully realized and gorgeous in its own right, which languished in the vault, a thing of rumour and legend, until released as part of the Anthology project. It’s a much more gentle rendition, and sounds particularly wistful and philosophical when compared to the final track, with its urgent, martial drumming, sawing cello, staccato brass, and Lennon’s weary vocal, its pitch slowed down from the original. Over many takes, and with the almost magical splicing of two versions into a coherent whole, what began as a rather sad remembrance of things past was transformed into something that was much more confused and frustrated, no longer a fond recollection of happier times, but a desperate expression of an urge to retreat into memory and escape the present.
Strawberry Fields Forever was released at the beginning of 1967 as half of a “double A-side” 45 RPM single, along with Penny Lane, two of the first songs recorded for the Sgt. Pepper album. EMI was chafing for a new single, and these exciting recordings were the best new material available, so they were pillaged, thus gutting the album to come – in those days, songs released as singles weren’t included on albums, not in England anyway, on the theory that it was unfair to make the consumer buy them twice. Sgt. Pepper suffered, two of its three greatest songs removed, but at least the world got the greatest single ever released, and Pepper went on to vast commercial and critical success anyway. Still, what might have been…George Martin kicked himself ever after, wishing he’d fended off the rapacious record company executives, and always referred to the pre-emptive release as the greatest mistake of his professional life.
It’s impossible, now, to grasp how astonishing this record was when first issued. It was barely more than three years since the North American public had first been exposed to the Beatles; while there were those, mainly professional musicians and composers, who’d understood what they were looking at that night in February, 1964, none could have imagined it would come to this, not in 36 months, not in a thousand. Something magical was going on, something that should have been impossible, and for a moment everyone was listening, astounded, and wondering what was next.
Over fifty years gone by. When will we ever feel that way again?
Further reading:
Song of the Day: Joel Plaskett – Shine On, Shine On, Shine On (June 9, 2019)
Plaskett, a good Maritime boy from the beautiful Nova Scotia South Shore town of Lunenburg – a UN World Heritage site, don’t you know – is maybe my favourite artist working today, and I’ve promoted his songs in this space before. This is another one from his terrific Three collection, not coincidentally his third solo record, on which almost all the titles repeat themselves three times, and the number three and its multiples are repeatedly incorporated in almost mystical fashion, it being a triple album, broken into three collections of nine songs apiece, while the overall work is about going away, being lonely, and coming back home, a true Maritimer’s trio of themes.
This one’s about being lonely, and expresses emotions that all of we East Coast economic refugees will recognize, feeling lost under the unfamiliar stars of a foreign sky, dreaming of home and trying to forget where you are, and hoping that somebody back home is keeping the porch light on for you, just in case.
There’s a poignant, delicate quality to so many of Joel’s songs, reminiscent in a way of Nick Drake, though sweeter, and if anything even more melodic. Joel’s not depressed, like Drake was; it’s just that sometimes he’s terribly sad, a much different thing that afflicts a lot of us when we’re out here, so far from home. It’s no wonder that so many of us find our way back, just as I did.
Song of the Day: Spirit of the West – Dark House (June 13, 2019)
Mis-identified above as “Darkhorse”, this deeply affecting lament for a disappearing way of life, as flesh and blood is replaced by automated machinery, may come from a group billing itself as Spirit of the West, but it’s pure, Celtic-influenced East Coast all the way.
Released in 1988 on their very fine album Labour Day, Dark House is about the replacement of human lighthouse keepers with electronic devices that could perform all the necessary functions. This was back when lighthouses themselves were still necessary, before the advent of GPS made beacons that mark dangerous reefs and shoals all but irrelevant, taking the process to its logical conclusion. Some of these coastline sentinels still exist, even to this day, but surely they’re not for long, except maybe as historic monuments, and anyway there won’t be any people in them, tending to the gears, polishing the lenses, and looking out over the ocean with a care for the sailors who might find themselves in peril. It’s over with that.
You could argue that looking upon such progress with sadness is merely sentimental nonsense, pointless nostalgia for an inferior way of getting things done, but the group is giving voice to the very human sense that there’s something deeply, existentially threatening about this constant erosion of tradition, and the elimination of living, breathing people from so many roles and functions. It’s not just about paying jobs. It’s about dignity, and purpose. When robots staff the production lines, bank machines serve as tellers, cashiers are replaced by self-checkout stations, cab and truck drivers are kicked to the curb in favour of vehicles that drive themselves, retail outlets disappear as our on-line orders are filled from warehouses staffed by more robots, who might soon send the things to be delivered to our doorsteps by drones – when soon, artificial intelligence answers our questions and even lawyers and doctors may find themselves supplanted by machines – what, then, are we all for? What gives us the feeling that we make a contribution? And will the displaced be looked after if they can find nobody who needs them?
A lot of this was still in the future when Dark House was released, but it seems that Spirit of the West saw it all coming. It won’t be long, now, before the ships that the lighthouses used to warn won’t have any people on them either. Yes, times change. Must they change for the worse? Must we be castaways on a push-button planet, where progress is measured by how much we lose?
Song of the Day: Ben Folds Five – Brick (June 21, 2019)
Oh, this is one full of pain, regret, and loss.
It’s also a beautiful and very tightly constructed little symphony, there’s a formal precision to it that always impresses me. Ben Folds is a piano-based songwriter, a mode of composition which tends, somehow, to produce songs that feel structurally different from those composed on guitar. I’m at a loss to explain it, yet I can hear it. I suppose somebody who really understands music theory could lay it out for me.
Brick is a straightforward and very moving account of a young guy taking his young girlfriend to have an abortion, full of raw emotion, sadness, fear, and yet no sort of blame. No finger pointing, no recriminations, just the inability to really deal with it, or each other, until they both feel more alone than they ever have before. This is personally devastating. They aren’t yet at an age and stage to handle this. They blundered into it, and now here they are, sitting amidst the wreckage of their perhaps over-exuberant, perhaps reckless love, damaged forever, overwhelmed, their relationship in tatters.
I love how, though he’s feeling like the weight of helping her through this mess is drowning him, he fully understands how this is hurting her very badly, how he knows this has done her serious psychological harm. Him too, but her especially, and if she can see this through, then surely he can too. I’m also touched by the narrative in the bridge, how her parents can see something has gone dreadfully wrong in their daughter’s life – and when confronted, the two just break down and tell the truth, they’re just so tired of lying. You can see them in your mind’s eye bursting into tears as they confess all, and it’s wrenching.
There aren’t a lot of songs out there that tell such a story with such emotional authenticity. This is something that really happened to him, you just know it, and the account transcends judgment. You simply feel sad for the both of them.
Song of the Day: The Waltons – Really Beats the Hell Out Of Me (June 24, 2019)
Maybe you don’t like Country music? Yeah, me neither. White redneck nonsense. So why is it that this quintessentially country song beguiles me so?
Maybe it’s a fine song, despite its supposedly disreputable genre?
My Dad was a stalwart proponent of classical music, a devoted follower of Ludwig van, and when it came to popular music he advocated strenuously for the songs he grew up with, the Swing Era hits that in retrospect really were great, but one thing he taught me was that good music can come from anywhere, from quite unexpected places, and there’s no accounting for it, or predicting of it. You had to keep your mind open and your ears receptive. Excellence – even genius – could show up in the damndest places. When I was a kid in the late sixties and early seventies Dad expressed great affection for many acts that were supposed to be on the opposite side of the generation gap, CCR, the Beatles, Simon and Garfunkle, listen, music was music. Now, if there’s any such thing as a “generation gap” any more, those are acts are on my side of the divide, and I try to discipline myself against musical bigotry, whether it comes to era, or genre. I don’t like Country. But I like lots of Country songs. Hell, even the Beatles did Country – look up the tracks on Beatles for Sale.
Beats the Hell Out of Me was one of those songs for which Dad, later in life, developed what might have seemed an unexpected affection, if you weren’t up to speed on the governing principles. Surely after one listen you can see why. It combines so many classic elements, and makes so many deft moves. Plus, it’s one of those hurtin’ songs that makes sense, that isn’t about rage and righteous resentment, or even sorrowful betrayal, but contemplates why the protagonist sticks with this relationship that isn’t working, and wonders about where the finger of blame should properly point. Who’s abusing who here? Who’s he most disappointed with – himself maybe?
Besides, the conclusion is sublime. That, folks, is how you end a song.
Song of the Day: The Rolling Stones – Moonlight Mile (June 27, 2019)
Jimi Hendrix was dead, Janis Joplin was dead, Jim Morrison was dead, Brian Jones had drowned in his swimming pool, and the Seventies were upon us. It seemed like a long, good party was grinding to an end, but maybe not yet, not quite yet. The Beatles had broken up, but there were still the Stones, and Sticky Fingers captured them in their ascendancy, approaching their zenith at a time when it was inconceivable they’d ever lose the thread and fade into mediocrity and self-parody. They were the biggest group left standing, the World’s Greatest Rock ‘n Roll Band, still capable of growth, still maturing, and now, with the final cut of this album, showing a capacity to produce something that punched in the same weight class as Golden Slumbers, if not quite with the same mastery of form.
Moonlight Mile is a bluesy, dark, ambitious and altogether majestic evocation of loneliness and living rough, sleeping under the stars in the cold and the snow (which might not be the powder that first comes to mind), and dreaming of a respite that might just be a ways down the road.
Graced with tasteful orchestration, lovely piano work, Charlie doing some of his best drumming, and generally expert musicianship, particularly during the gorgeous, extended guitar coda in which Mick Taylor’s superb playing brings the piece home, Moonlight Mile is a song best heard in the lightless wee hours, all alone, headphones on, drink in hand, feeling philosophical and maybe just a little bit beaten down. It’ll soothe you, then. There’s a sort of eyes-wide-open hope to it. There must still be a way back home, right? You just gotta press on, one more mile, one foot after the other, and tough it out through the dark, the howling wind, and the snow, whatever sort of snow it happens to be.
Song of the Day: Billy Bragg – The Space Race is Over (June 30, 2019)
A lovely, nostalgic song about a moment that lives on in memory as the high point of a better time to be alive.
On July 20 it will be fifty years since Neil Armstrong climbed down the ladder of the fragile little spacecraft named Eagle and planted his feet in the Sea of Tranquility. It was a moment grade school nerds like me had been anticipating for practically our entire lives, having followed the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs since we were old enough to look at the pictures in Life magazine. For a lot of us it was a fascination bordering on obsession. We pored over the details of the technology, the size of the rockets, how the Gemini capsule was bigger than Mercury but smaller than the Apollo Command Module, and brushed up on details such as how fuel cells manufactured electricity in space. We knew the names and mission titles of the astronauts, and we read up on how the landing would work, with the orbiting Command Module piloted by Michael Collins dropping the Lunar Module containing Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong down to the surface. We familiarized ourselves with the landing zone – I had a National Geographic map of the Moon on my bedroom wall, with a pin stuck in Mare Tranquillitatus. There was a model of the Lunar Module on my bedroom shelf, and a lot of the kids I knew had three foot high models of the entire Saturn V Rocket, a coveted kit that was a little too expensive for me to purchase. I had the stats memorized; the Saturn V was 363 feet tall, weighed almost 3,000 tons, and produced seven and a half million pounds of thrust. To get to the Moon its third booster stage, the S-IV-B, would reach a velocity of over 20,000 MPH for “trans-lunar injection”, and it would take about three days to get there.
July 20, 1969 was a hot day in Halifax, and when the house heated up to the point of discomfort my brother and I sometimes pitched a makeshift tent in the backyard and slept outdoors, where it was cooler. In my memory, that’s where we were when one of our parents – I recall it was Dad, my older brother Mark thinks Mom – came to fetch us, so we could watch the astronauts get out and walk on the Moon on live TV. We both recall being told that in years to come we’d be glad we were there to see it. It was about 11 PM, and the image on our black and white console TV was indistinct, making it hard to tell what was going on, but we were there, our family and hundreds of millions of others, watching it go down in real time. Only the Americans, my Dad said. Only the Americans would do that on live TV. If something went wrong, well, everybody, everywhere, would see it happen, just as we would have if that huge rocket had blown up on launch. But of course the Americans were happy to gamble that nothing would go wrong. It wasn’t even a consideration, really. Only them.
I once heard somewhere that when Neil Armstrong planted his boots in the Moon dust, a wild cheer rattled the walls of Russia’s equivalent to Mission Control, where they’d been following the mission closely. The Soviet Union’s bid to beat America to the Moon had literally gone up in flames with the catastrophic failure of their N1 L3 rocket, almost as big and powerful as the Saturn V, which blew up in the early stages of repeated test flights until the program was abandoned. Up on screen, they were watching the Americans beat them in the Space Race and take the glory, but at that moment, so the story went, it didn’t matter; they cheered.
I don’t know if that story is true, but I’d like to believe it is. The Space Race was a Cold War competition between the US and USSR, no doubt, each holding up its space achievements as emblematic of national superiority. Yet the drive for the Moon was in some ways bigger than geopolitical rivalry. The race was about winning, yes, but it was also about the aspirations of all of humankind, and it was possible to believe that those clean-cut, archetypically American astronauts were going there for all of us. They seemed to think so too – upon landing, they planted an American flag, sure, but the plaque they left behind didn’t talk about the triumph of the United States, or even point out the mission’s country of origin on the map of the globe:
We came in peace for all mankind. Like Dad said, only the Americans.
The Sixties weren’t all great, especially if you weren’t white and middle class. It was a time of social upheaval, student riots, inner city riots, toxic race relations, and a seemingly widening, unbridgeable “generation gap”, when our heroes were repeatedly assassinated and the US military was pounding the crap out of a previously obscure corner of South East Asia. Yet the Sixties also gave us thrills and episodes of wonder the like of which nobody who wasn’t there has ever experienced, and we boomers have missed them ever since. Even a left wing activist like Billy Bragg, who might be expected to take a jaundiced view of all things American, pines for the feeling we all shared about Project Apollo.
What could be more evocative of the shambolic state of post-Trump America, and its lost standing in the world, than remembering Apollo, and how the whole of humanity was taken along for the most inspiring ride of the century? That July night in 1969 we were all pulling for them, and if the Americans were prepared to define themselves for posterity simply as people from Planet Earth, then for that moment we were all Americans. They’d carried all of our hopes and dreams along with them, all the way to the surface of the Moon, and when they got there we all looked back in spiritual awe at the little blue ball where, almost inconceivably, every one of us lived.
That was them, once. For all their flaws, that was them. Now look. Lots of people don’t even believe it any more. If you type “moon landing” into Google all you get back are conspiracy theories that it was all a lie, a hoax, filmed on a soundstage somewhere. I guess it always seemed almost too wonderful to be true, and must appear particularly implausible to younger skeptics looking at America as it is today, with its mean-spirited politics, inequities, violence, fumbling incompetence, and its craven, farcical liar of a President. You mean to tell us that those guys did that? Get real.
It’s enough to make you weep.
I see they’ve reissued that model kit I couldn’t afford when I was eight. I’ve half a mind to get one.
the needlefish 