SOUNDTRACK: THE FLAMING LIPS-Christmas on Mars (2008).
Title aside, and despite the Lips’ love of Christmas, there is nothing Christmassey about this recording.
It’s a soundtrack to their film and it is composed of 12 instrumental pieces. The disc (which is short) sounds like interstitial Flaming Lips pieces–songs that might appear at the end of or in between songs.
The tracks run the gamut from spooky outerspacey dirges to pretty choral numbers. But the overall tone of the soundtrack is dark and foreboding (the movie isn’t very happy after all).
Some of the tracks (3 and 4 in particular) are prettier than other–with pretty harps and tubular bells. But do not put this in your Christmas music rotation unless you really dislike Christmas music.
[READ: June 21, 2017] Adios, Cowboy
Hot on the heels of the depressing Sorry to Disrupt the Peace come this depressing story by Olja Savičević Ivančević (her full name according to Goodreads) translated from Croatian by Celia Hawkesworth. In Peace, the narrator’s brother killed himself and the narrator wants to find out why. In Adios, Cowboy, the narrator’s brother kills himself and she want to find out why.
The difference is that this book is set in Croatia, has multiple characters, multiple stories and a huge amount of confusion.
Dada (the narrator) lives in Zagreb, but she is called home to Old Settlement by her sister to help with their aging mother. She is intrigued at the thought of going home again after so many years. But when she gets there, her mother has been taking all kinds of pills, her sister has pretty much given up as evidenced by her chain-smoking, their long-dead father’s shoes still lined up on the steps, and their dead younger brother’s cowboy posters of are still on the walls. (The dead brother’s name is Daniel. The fact that one of the characters in the previous book also about the suicide was also named Daniel really didn’t help this much).
So Dada wants to investigate what drove her brother to suicide. Each of the things she does to investigate make sense–she goes to a bar and buys contraband (a video of someone–I think in a porn she saw as a child and maybe her brother is in it? Or maybe the man in it is the man who was supposedly friends with her brother? Well nothing seems to come of that for some reason).
We find out that Daniel jumped off a bridge in front of a train–he wasn’t kidding around.
We also find out that her father was really into Westerns, and her brother had a poster of Ned Montgomery on his wall. This is significant because by the end of the book Ned Montgomery is making a film in Old Settlement (I think).
There’s also a local boy, Angelo, and maybe Dada has or had a crush on him.
She keeps thinking she is getting to the bottom of why Daniel committed suicide but then some other horrible story pops up–like that he was constantly beaten up by local thugs.
As the book comes to an end, she discovers a whole bunch of unsent or un-received emails that reveal a side of her brother that she didn’t know (just like in Peace)
The one difference is that Dada has a lot of sec while Helen hated it
The end of the book talks about the film starring Ned Montgomery. It’s a western but there are real bullets. So maybe it’s not a Western. Extras shoot chickens but thy are the neighbors chickens and she is super angry. And what the hell this has to do with anything, I have no idea.
There were certainly some enjoyable sentences and phrases in the book but I really had no idea what was going on and really struggled to get through it.
For ease of searching, I include: Olja Savicevic Ivancevic.
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