Listening to music while high (in the sky)
I had a couple of really cool "music moments" while flying to and from these two launch attempts down at Kennedy Space Center.
After the first attempt, which happened on July 13, a bunch of us went home to Atlanta from the Orlando airport the next day, July 14. It was lightning like CRAZY when we got there (around dusk), and we got delayed about 90 minutes because the airport wouldn't send the ground crew out to get our plane when it landed. We finally got to board the plane, and took off northward for Georgia... I dozed off in my seat almost immediately, listening to my MP3 player (not an IPOD) on shuffle.
I was seated in one of those seats that's in the middle of the plane, with aisles on both sides... the plane was probably 8 or 10 seats wide altogether. I woke up when we hit some turbulence, and the lights inside the plane were dim... on both sides of me, the windows were flashing bright blue with LOTS of lightning, and in my headphones, Ian Curtis was crooning Joy Division's "Atmosphere." I got chills immediately, because it looked like a movie scene... one of the advantages of wearing headphones, I guess. :) The shadowy people moving in front of the flashing windows were a gorgeous sight to behold.
Then this week, on Wednesday, we were flying home after the launch. The plane was taking off from Orlando airport, it was gorgeously sunny out, and The Orb's "Little Fluffy Clouds" popped up in shuffle play. It felt very "floating" and happy as the plane lifted off and you get that little feeling when your stomach drops... I'm probably not explaining it very well, but it seemed like a perfect meshing of the music with the moment, with the weather, with my whole mood at the time.
Jeremy and I used to talk about "music moments" like these a long time ago... anybody else have an example that has stuck in their memory?
posted by Lee H. @ Friday, July 29, 2005
2 Comments:
Hm; once we were driving on a grated bridge, and the hum of the car-driving-on-the-grate was in key with the song we were listening to (don't recall the particular song, but it was on Replicas). That's not really what you're talking about, but it was still pretty cool.
I remember Jeremy talking about listening to a song when he got stopped in traffic in his car- there was construction going on, and lots of flashing red lights. I have NO idea what the song was, though.
I think I remember the incident that started our conversation though. This was about ten years ago: I was listening to Moby's Everything Is Wrong on my Walkman (cassette, yet!) one day coming home from work, and had stopped at a train station here in Atlanta where there is an escalator that goes up about three stories, under a dusty, paned glass cover (this is the Lenox MARTA station, for you ex-and-current Atlantans).
I was kind of early in the afternoon, about 4 or 4:30, so nobody was really around, and I was riding this long escalator upwards under these dusty sunbeams, and Moby's song "Hymn" was playing in my headphones. I was absolutely transfixed... the song had this heavenly, benign quality that seemed like a soundtrack to my moment riding that escalator upwards though those dusty sunbeams.
I was so struck by the feeling that I had that I rewound the tape and went down the escalator again, and played the song again as I rode up again. But the feeling wasn't there... that was when I realized that moments like that can't be created, they have to be found. Kind of music geek zen, I guess. And unfortunately, they can never be RE-created, either.
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