SOUNDTRACK: SPACEFACE-Christmastime is Here (2018)
Spaceface is a project of one of the musicians from The Flaming Lips, Jake Ingalls. I’m not sure which guy it is (I’ve seen them several times when he has played, but I can’t really tell all the dudes apart). Spaceface has played a few shows near me but I have yet to be able to get to one. I’m told their lives shows are amazing (especially given their budget).
They’ve released an album and a bunch of EPS and now they released this Christmas single.
This is a pretty trippy version of the song from A Charlie Brown Christmas. It’s slow and with a decidedly Flaming Lips vibe (which makes sense). There’s a second version on the bandcamp site which is all instrumental.
Depending on how much you like the fuzzed out and echoing (but not harsh) vocals, you can pick one or the other–the music is memorable either way.
[READ: December 2, 2018] “Snatching Bodies”
Once again, I have ordered The Short Story Advent Calendar. This is my third time reading the Calendar (thanks S.). I never knew about the first one until it was long out of print (sigh). Here’s what they say this year
Fourth time’s the charm.
After a restful spring, rowdy summer, and pretty reasonable fall, we are officially back at it again with another deluxe box set of 24 individually bound short stories to get you into the yuletide spirit.
The fourth annual Short Story Advent Calendar might be our most ambitious yet, with a range of stories hailing from eight different countries and three different originating languages (don’t worry, we got the English versions). This year’s edition features a special diecut lid and textured case. We also set a new personal best for material that has never before appeared in print.
Want a copy? Order one here.
Like last year I’m pairing each story with a holiday disc from our personal collection. Although this weekend, I’m pairing them with recently released songs from bands I like.
This is a story that uses Invasion of the Body Snatchers as a central frame of reference. Interestingly for me, I didn’t know that there was a version before the 1978 version that I know (although not well). Fresán is referring to the 1956 version which his narrator says he knows by heart, like Shakespeare.
The epigram even comes from the movie: At first glance, everything looked the same. It wasn’t.
The story opens with the narrator saying that his father glowed in the dark– like a deep sea fish or a model kit advertised in the back of Famous Monsters of Filmland. He loved old movies (“and there is nothing more irremediably old than that which happened before you were born”).
He loved the monsters and noted how in sci-f films they changed from monsters to creatures. Monsters don’t really suffer, they aren’t concerned with humanity per se–usually they are defeated by problems of adaptation. But creatures are often changed humans. His father’s skin and bones seem to be losing density like The Incredible Shrinking Man. His voice is even growing metallic as if he his being eaten by a robot. Although his father did not respond when he muttered into his sleeping ear: “Gort! Klaatu barada nikto.”
The middle of the story talks about the film. How in the movie, after the pod people snatched people, the victims looked exactly the same. They go to sleep and wake up looking the same–but they are utterly changed, He notes that the movie was originally 76 minutes long and ended darkly (with a man looking at the screen and yelling You’re Next!” but that the studio tacked on the 4 minute happy ending.
As he grew older he wanted to ask so many questions he never asked. Why did his father glow? Did he work on an atomic bomb or was his glow his way of denouncing something. Or was he just depressed and tormented? Had he found out my mother was cheating on him Did he have cancer? Was my father an extraterrestrial? Was I a snatched body?
He says the best remake is the 1978 version which ends so badly. He insists it is not a political film as some claim. Rather, the moral is “other people are never truly who or what we thought.” He also saw the 2007 remake featuring “that Australian actress who for a while was married to the being from another planet who smiles too much, baring his teeth, smiles that bite.”
Even now there’s always someone running in the streets saying “You’re next!” But no one believes it.
I didn’t always “get” this story, but it was a great metaphor for many things.
Of this story, which was translated by Will Vanderhyden, Fresán said:
I wrote it as a sort of bonus track/hidden passage to my novel The Bottom of the Sky. I just took a paragraph out of the novel and expanded it. But wait… Maybe I wrote the short story first and then the novel… Who knows? Who cares? Anyway, now I like to think of it as a small but important moon orbiting the novel-planet.
Read the rest of the Q&A with Rodrigo Fresán.
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