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Boing Boing editor/partner and tech culture journalist Xeni Jardin hosts and produces Boing Boing's in-flight TV channel on Virgin America airlines (#10 on the dial), and writes about living with breast cancer. Diagnosed in 2011. @xeni on Twitter. email: xeni@boingboing.net.

MORE: History • Jaw-droppingly awesome • music • News • Space • Technology

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Eurovision 2013: An American in London

The technology that links taxonomy and Star Trek

Anonymous

A nice homage to an amazing song and video – http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f4zV4pJ8MwM
Anonymous

Wow, never heard this version. And the video? Entrancing and silly.
- IronEdithKidd
  
  Anon@2: This sounds like the demo version. It was on the Sound and Vision box set. You can, for some bizare reason, still get new copies of the box set on Amazon.
Ugly Canuck

Of course, if the song is catchy, that helps too.
HahTse

“Unfortunately, this UMG music-content is not available in Germany, because GEMA has not granted the respective music publishing rights.”

AAAAAAAARGH.
Anonymous

Bowie recorded the song in Italian in 1970 (Ragazzo Solo, Ragazza Sola). The production is more like the English version one hears on the radio these days. But it is more haunting in Italian.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q_sPFjgEkto

Translated words sample:
Bowie: Boy Only, One Girl Lyrics

My mind took him flying
Just a thought
I walk while the city sleeps’

The night soui eyes mella
White lights in the night
A voice that speaks to me who will be ‘?

Tell me where the guy just UAI,
‘Cause so much pain?
You have undoubtedly lost a great love
But the city of love e’tutta peine,

No single girl, no no no
This time you are in error
I lost not only a great love
Last night I lost everything with her.
Kwolfbrooks

His teeth seem to get straighter as the years go by…
RyanH

Anyone else ever wonder if Bowie ever stumbles across this old stuff on YouTube and thinks ‘man, I was on some good shit back then’?
- Anonymous
  
  He has actually said he doesn’t remember many albums during his drugged out years…so the odds are he doesn’t!
  - alt42
    
    I saw him in concert a few years ago and he talked about getting zonked out of his gourd with friends and watching children shows. He based a song off it, but right now I can’t remember which song it was, or the show he was talking about.
    - Anonymous
      
      While working on the song Fame, he and John Lennon would get high and watch the Uncle Floyd show. Oogie was one of the puppets from the show that gets mentioned in the song “Slip Away” on the Heathen album.
querent

fucking wow. that was a trip.

my partner and I just dug up his soul train performance. not his best work. he makes both milli and vanilli look like professionals. but this was awesome.
Anonymous

Playing this with the NASA feed in the background is very cool … :)
ChuckTV

I’m fairly certain this isn’t the demo version off of the Sound and Vision box.
- IronEdithKidd
  
  “Sounds like” should probably never be taken as a difinitve answer.
  
  It’s on Dream Anthology and the VCD single for Love You Till Tuesday (cover pic grabbed from the above video).
querent

who’s up listening to the feed?
querent

dude thought he was over the yucatan. lol.
Anonymous

just when I thought I couldn’t possibly love him more, then I see this.
jspmartin

Do you have one really funky sequined space suit, Bowie – or do you have several ch-changes?
- Felton / Moderator
  
  Do you smoke grass out in space, Bowie, or do they smoke astroturf?
Anonymous

This video has got me thinking…
The fact that Maj. Tom has a couple of space harpies with him takes a little of the emotional edge off his plaintive farewell to his wife. Maybe the circut’s not dead, just turned off cause it’s snuggle time?
penguinchris

Hmm… they didn’t separate out the ground control/major tom dialogue as I always imagined it… it seems to me that while they run into and on top of each other, there is distinct separation between who is supposed to be saying each line.

Also I liked that ground control is a stereotypical geek, except a 10-year-old geek from the 80′s – Bowie always was ahead of the curve :)
SamSam

This is wonderful. I think I like this version much more than the more polished one we all know. Way more peppy. And the video is awxome.
Ambiguity

I’ve always thought that Space Oddity was one of the silliest, emotionally manipulative pop songs ever written. On the other hand, it’s also one of the best pop songs every written — sometimes you just have to go for it and let yourself be manipulated.

Cool video.
- Ugly Canuck
  
  “Silly and emotionally manipulative” – that’s a fine definition of any pop song!
  
  At least, of all the good ones, anyhow. For example:
  
  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8zAX5StHD6A
weatherman

Thin White Dork.
Anonymous

What’s a Grouncon Troll? And how did he make radio contact with Major Tom?
Anonymous

Does’nt David Bowie look a lot like Liam Gallagher (or better, viceversa) in this video

http://i2.listal.com/image/1075838/600full-liam-gallagher-%26-..jpg

Space Oddity, David Bowie (1969)

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