Space song - a little help?

Bill White · 2004-03-13 21:14:57

There appears to be a tune, "Earth in the Porthole"

And the lyrics include: "Where we dream, we see not the rolling of the launcher, not this icy blue. We dream of the green grass near our house - the green, green grass."

Anyone know more about this?

Palomar · 2004-03-13 22:26:12

There appears to be a tune, "Earth in the Porthole"
And the lyrics include: "Where we dream, we see not the rolling of the launcher, not this icy blue. We dream of the green grass near our house - the green, green grass."
Anyone know more about this?

*You been sipping on the sweet tater vodka, Bill? :;):

I tried for hits on Google. Returns gave links to some really weird Frank Zappa songs (one link produced a prompt I have never seen before -- something about "trojan horse" and I got out of there <pronto>).

I tried a variation of search (the title you give with "green" tagged onto it).

I've never heard of that song (poem?) before, by the way.

"The Radio is Broken" and "The Man From Utopia" by Zappa come as close as I can find. That dude must have been toking up on some serious weed, judging by the lyrics!

--Cindy

::EDIT:: Searching with the word "poem" returns no precise results.

clark · 2004-03-14 07:41:42

The song is a Russian song... so looking for it by English translation will return limited results.

It's a traditional song played in Baikonur (from the Soviet era).

Perhaps one of our Russian members might shed some light on this.

clark · 2004-03-14 08:09:13

To any and all who choose to meander down this path Bill has pointed us... a little game. Perhaps others will play too.

What is "White Sun of the Desert"?

Bonus question, what is the significance related to Bill's original question? :hm:

Bill White · 2004-03-15 10:47:51

A warm up question, much easier than those proffered above:

"Poyekhali!"

Who said this? What does it mean?

clark · 2004-03-15 23:38:15

Bill, the song's name is ?I don?t hear a roaring spaceport.?

SpaceNut · 2004-11-11 13:45:30

Well this seems to be the newest thread for this post on music.

Recently we have talked in other threads about what song represents our desire for space or even our favorite space related songs. David Bowies space odessy comes to mind but to others thought of this artist and gave her a call.

Inviting the Cosmos Onto the Stage

For those that do not want another registration:

OS ANGELES, Nov. 10 - Laurie Anderson has often made futuristic technology a defining feature of her performances. The video for her crossover 1980 pop hit, "O Superman," depicted her trademark gadget: a mouth light that emitted a brilliant beam as she sang in a robotic, computer-modulated voice. "Songs and Stories From Moby-Dick" (1999), one of her most elaborate productions, toured with 40 tons of video, sound and light gear, including digital musical instruments that she helped design.
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So when she received a call in 2002 from someone who claimed to be from the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, asking her to be the space agency's first "artist in residence," she hung up the phone. "I was sure it was a fan who had figured out my secret dream," she said.
Ms. Anderson recounted the episode during a performance of "The End of the Moon" in Los Angeles this past weekend, the creative result of her "secret dream" come true - a two-year stint as the agency's official artist. With a commission of $20,000, Ms. Anderson was given access to the Johnson Space Center in Houston, the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA Ames Research Center in California and more.
For someone with such high-tech inclinations, "Moon" is an unusually simple production. The effects are controlled by a Macintosh laptop. The only flashy gadget visible is a "lipstick camera," a tiny device that she briefly places on the bow while playing her violin. The view from this perspective is projected onto a screen onstage, and the audience sees Ms. Anderson's instrument as if it were a planet of its own, with the bow as a trajectory toward the glaring spotlights as distant stars.
On Saturday at a hotel in Westwood, Ms. Anderson - a waifish, intense 57-year-old whose chaotic hairdo flares like a sun's corona - suggested that her residency was by turns inspiring and frustrating. Wide-eyed, she described her visit to the Jet Propulsion Laboratory to witness the January rover landing: "It was exhilarating, because of the happiness. They were genuinely thrilled with their machine: the beauty of it, as it bounced. It really made you cry. It's very hard to get there."
"There" being Mars.
At times, she said, she found herself so overwhelmed with information that she could not keep up. "I felt like an unprepared journalist,'' she said. "None of the right paper or pencils or tape recorders. They would tell me this stuff - what kind of vehicle and how fast it was - and I would go 'Oh, great. O.K. Well, wow! That was fast!' "
Getting to know NASA researchers was difficult, though. She could not remember the names of any of the scientists that she met during her residency, she said, except for a nanotechnology specialist who canceled his appointment with her after she traveled cross-country to meet with him. "I had a feeling he was super shy,'' she said. "I just wish he would have mentioned that before."
Bertram Ulrich, curator of the NASA Art Program, said in a telephone interview that the agency had long commissioned work from artists in various media. The agency's collection includes pieces by the photographer Annie Leibovitz, the painters Robert Rauschenberg and Norman Rockwell, and a composition by Terry Riley and the Kronos Quartet. All have been paid very modest amounts.
Ms. Anderson, though, is the first performance artist to work with NASA, and Mr. Ulrich said the agency chose her because "we were trying to embrace new art forms and diverse audiences.
"She travels around the country, so she's reaching out to more audiences and exposing them to NASA programs than if she made an object like a painting." The Los Angeles performance, for example, fell near the midpoint of a 36-city tour that will end at the Brooklyn Academy of Music from Feb. 2 to March 6. (Her schedule is posted at www. pomegranatearts.com.)
Yet the nature of NASA's exposure in Ms. Anderson's work may not be what the agency bargained for. In conversation, she diplomatically stated, "As depressed as I am politically, I can still think of NASA's big projects and cheer myself up," but her show is poetically critical of the space program, particularly regarding its ties to the military.
Onstage, in a haunted voice, she pointed out that those next-generation space suits are "being adapted for work on earth. For soldiers. They won't be going to space. Instead they'll being going out into the desert, out into the war."
And the show's title alludes to a scene in Errol Morris's documentary "The Fog of War" (2003) in which former the Defense Secretary Robert S. McNamara disclosed that during the Cuban missile crisis, the United States considered testing nuclear weapons on the dark side of the moon. Sounding flabbergasted, she asked, "Can things like that just happen without anybody knowing?" Her "biggest fear," she added, is to look at the moon and see "a strategic air command."
Ms. Anderson was 22 when Neil Armstrong set foot on the moon, an event she remembers with mixed emotions. Sipping a cup of tea a few hours before her Saturday performance, she said: "This was a military maneuver. It's not like I'm shocked that the military has a lot to do with NASA. They're always the first out on any frontier. So I felt a combination of thrill - just plain thrill: We got there. And fear, realizing that this was a race. We got there because we were competing for dominance."
Mr. Ulrich spoke cautiously when asked how he felt about Ms. Anderson's criticisms of NASA. "The thing with Laurie is, you have to take her within the context of the work that she's doing,'' he said. "And her mind works very much the same way a scientist's would. They're both reaching out to try to understand what's unknown."
Near the beginning of her show, she described a conversation with the NASA official who chose the pink-and-blue color scheme for the Hubble photographs of the universe. (Some of the tints picked up by instruments could not be seen by the human eye.) When she asked him how he had chosen those colors, he innocently said, "We thought people would like them."
She paused for moment, and then continued: "It looked like Tiepolo. It looked like a painting of - heaven."

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#1 2004-03-13 21:14:57

Re: Space song - a little help?

#2 2004-03-13 22:26:12

Re: Space song - a little help?

#3 2004-03-14 07:41:42

Re: Space song - a little help?

#4 2004-03-14 08:09:13

Re: Space song - a little help?

#5 2004-03-15 10:47:51

Re: Space song - a little help?

#6 2004-03-15 23:38:15

Re: Space song - a little help?

#7 2004-11-11 13:45:30

Re: Space song - a little help?

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