Tuesday, December 1, 2015

Rise Again! (We Are All Astronauts)

I felt low and useless yesterday. It was grey and slushy, and I didn't feel up to facing Andrew Jackson and his anger issues again (the ms having just came back from its outside read), 
so I went home and watched the final episodes of Due South, during which Mountie Fraser (Paul Gross) sings a couple rousing songs by a musician I'd never heard of---Canada's (famous) Stan Rogers.
                         Great song!       ^         [and... sung by Stan Rogers]

So instead of working, I spent the afternoon listening to Rogers, and when I heard this song with its rousing chorus, "Rise again!" I thought, OK, I can face Old Hickory:
 "The Mary Ellen  Carter" [starts at 1:40, after a sailor tells how the song saved his life]. 



And this one, the amazing a capella "Northwest Passage" (which shapes the end of Due South) makes you want to head out on an adventure in spite of yourself, like Bilbo Baggins:
It's inspired by Franklin's lost expedition.




NASA played Stan Rogers's "Take It from Day to Day" --about working far from home--for astronaut Chris Hadfield in 2001, when he became the first Canadian to walk in space. 

What do astronauts listen to in space?
This makes fascinating reading:
NASA's list of wake-up songs.

photo by Vincent Fournier: General Boris V., Yuri Gagarin Cosmonaut Training Center (GCTC), Russia, 2007--via

"We are all astronauts" --R, Buckminster Fuller, Operating Manual For Spaceship Earth (1968), in which he compared Earth to a spaceship

3 comments:

ArtSparker said...

Thanks for the tunes.

In reference to the astronauts, I had been thinking today "We are all from somewhere else", star nurseries and all that.

ArtSparker said...

Not a privateer, a mutineer (featuring the very beautiful David Lindley):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6r0dVfaZxvw

Fresca said...

Hey--wow, that's cool cover of Mutineer---thanks! --and a cool instrument---is that a steel guitar?

Star nurseries---yes.