A Shortcut Back To 1969 -"The Lunar Module"

This is the week that was. My family and I rented a black-and-white TV and couldn’t take our eyes off the event 240,000 miles away. In a Colorado mountain cabin during July 1969 we listened to Neil – not “Neal” as sadly misspelled in this program’s liner notes – Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin say their first words and take their first moon walk.

Forty years later Michael Jackson’s dance is associated with that term. How fast four decades have replaced lunar dreams with terrestrial hard knocks. Hardly anyone nowadays recalls that “one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” were watchwords meant to be prophetic. Hardly anyone today in D.C. cares about manned space operations. What JFK famously said, “We choose to go to the moon,” is now no more than a footnote.

Which makes Peter Bochan’s “shortcut” all the more important to hear this Week of the Lunar Walk. One of the best facets of Bochan’s medley is that it’s easily capable being edited and used in excerpts. Jam-packed with sound bites of voices and musical squibs from the Sixties, the first half of this piece pretty much sums things up. I found the mid-section a bit slow, and the rest spends quite a bit, perhaps too much, of itself on David Bowie’s superb “Ground Control to Major Tom.” Bochan’s “shortcut” becomes a tad longish.

No matter. This is still a valuable auditory collage. If, as somebody says here, “1968 was a disastrous year” – with assassinations and an ever more meaningless war in Vietnam – 1969 was fantastic. One issue now is to see whether the Week of the Lunar Walk is, for us in 2009, a science fantasy we dare not hope to replicate – or whether Neil Armstrong’s words and the deeds of Apollo 11 represent something we may again aspire to.