This is Not a Review: of Transformers 2

January 12, 2021 in Article, This is not a Review, Feature

Gabriel Boyer

Transformers. More than meets the eye. Although in the case of the most recent Transformers film the reverse is true, that everything is in full view, it’s just that there’s so much of it. The camera flits from shot to shot with the agitation of a hummingbird on steroids, thereby leaving the audience no room to question or even think as images wash over them at brainwash speed. It’s like someone’s raping your mind.

Three second cuts with impossibly intricate robot disappearing acts? A bevy of beautiful women? (Every woman in the film is either super-model status or the main character’s mom.) More explosions than I care to count and characters who are always just about to burst an adrenal gland in their excitment? Two gang banging illiterate autobots with large ears and gold teeth who speak in some painfully stereotyped street slang? Welcome to the world of Michael Bay.

From within the Animal Hospital (2)

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

2 of 2

(Below is the second of a two-part conversation we had with Animal Hospital concerning what he [Kevin Micka] has been doing with himself these days, in the distant past, and the elusive future, discussing both his signature sound, and the pivotal part that all variety of metal, from boxes and genres to genres of boxes and boxes of genres, has played on that aforementioned signature sound of his, as well as many other topics of interest. Please do not be alarmed at the shocking content of this interview. Trained professionals were at the ready, as will you be, for this is Animal Hospital as you have never seen him before.)

GABRIEL BOYER: Well, I’m thinking that there’s these two memories, right?

ANIMAL HOSPITAL: Yeah.

GB: You put them together do they? Do they STAY as those memories, but in but in relation to each other, or do they become a brand new thing, or?

AH: Again, I think it was more more like uh an emotion more than a specific, this makes me think of this specific moment.

GB: So, you’re saying at that time you were going through a specific emotion.

AH: Yeah.

GB: You were like swimming through it.

AH: Yeah, I was just trying to get through this.

Providence

January 12, 2021 in Article, Excerpt, Series

R. Sachs

Something about the fact that each of us is the product of several billion years of successful reproduction tempts me to believe that there is a kind of providence at work in mating. That for each of us, our perfect mirror exists. For the fat, the ugly, the hopeless, the deranged there is their compensatory fetishist and mate. Me, I’m lazy—or something like it. I have my interests, but I pursue them with the intensity of one watching goldfish. I think about having a perfect sex life, what it might be like, how it work, but I do little to make it a reality. Do I really want to spend that much time brushing my teeth, washing my hair and combing my pubes? And so I have fallen into a kind of romantic complacency—a sort of challenge to the women of the world that they will have to be more desirable than a night alone, or I will remain, prized gem, undiscovered.

This is Not a Review: of Sheila Heti

January 12, 2021 in Article, This is not a Review, Feature

Gabriel Boyer

On the woman’s first day at work the poet helped her with her boxes, but as he was helping he was looking away.
“Do you know this is my seventieth sick day since I started here?” he asked.
“But you’re here,” she said.
“Yes, I know.” And he went to the bathroom and peed blood.

—from, The Poet and the Philosopher as Roommates

We here at Mutable first heard of Sheila Heti some six or seven years ago, when she went on tour with the event she founded, Trampoline Hall, while promoting her first book, The Middle Stories, put out by McSweeney’s. We were taken by her stories, and she has continued to tickle and tug at our interest both in her own writing and in the projects she involves herself in.

From within the Animal Hospital (1)

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

1 of 2

(Below is the first of a two-part conversation we had with Animal Hospital concerning what he [Kevin Micka] has been doing, what he will do, what he sounds like, metal, and other topics of interest. Please do not be alarmed at the shocking content of this interview. Trained professionals were at the ready, as will you be, for this is Animal Hospital as you have never seen him before.)

GABRIEL BOYER: So there was was was was. What made you decide to start start Animal Hospital?

ANIMAL HOSPITAL: Um. The girl’s dating at the time. We wanted. We were planning a trip. Um. To go to a comic convention and go visit her family.

GB: Mhm.

AH: So we were planning on going to San Diego and Santa Fe.

GB: Mhm.

AH: Um. So. [Clears throat.] Thought I would try to come up with something to do on the tour. On the trip. To play some shows and help pay for some gas.

GB: Mhm.

AH: See some friends and stuff on the way.

GB: Mhm.

AH: So I um. Started booking some shows.

GB: Mhm.

AH: Before I had like a real plan of what I was going to do.

GB: [Enthusiastically] Mhm.

From Here to John C. Lilly & Beyond

January 12, 2021 in Article, Letter from the Editor, Feature

Letter from the Editor

“In the province of the mind, what one believes to be true is true or becomes true, within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the mind, there are no limits… In the province of connected minds, what the network believes to be true, either is true or becomes true within certain limits to be found experientially and experimentally. These limits are further beliefs to be transcended. In the network’s mind there are no limits,” Lilly, J. C. (1974). The Human Biocomputer. London: Abacus.

For this second Letter from the Editor, I wanted to speak about one of my favorite philosophers of the 20th Century, John C. Lilly.

This is Not a Review: of George MacDonald, David Lindsay

January 12, 2021 in Article, This is not a Review, Feature

Gabriel Boyer

We here at Mutable wanted to commemorate George MacDonald this week, and his esteemed lineage. Though he, along with several of his more interesting intellectual progeny are no longer well-known to the world at large, I would suggest that MacDonald is essential in any “secret history” of the industrial and post-industrial mind, not entirely dissimilar to Greil Marcus’ own secret history of the twentieth century, Lipstick Traces, that when we consider the history of revelation in relation to the culture industry and the prefabricated visions it has produced in the form of lighter allegorical fair such as Final Fantasy: The Spirit Within and The Matrix, what we are seeing is a similar degradation of this unacknowledged literary tradition as filtered through Alan Watts’ watered-down buddhism.

It should be obvious to anyone who has read George MacDonald why he has not retained whatever renown he had in the nineteenth century. As vivid and fabulous as the worlds he created are, the message is unabashedly Christian, and not the sort that can live in a suburban library either—like C. S. Lewis would be—a man who called George MacDonald his master. MacDonald is just a little more restrained than Blake in terms of his sometimes bizarre imagery—note the hawthorne tree as an old man in chapter four of Lilith below—and not surprisingly, because Blake was one of his key influences, as well as Novalis, and Swedenborg.

George MacDonald (10 December 1824 — 18 September 1905) may no longer be well-known in the world of fantasy, but besides being the “master” of C. S. Lewis, he was the mentor of Lewis Carroll, it being both Macdonald’s advice, as well as the hearty reception of his daughters, that convinced Lewis Carroll (the pen-name of Rev. Charles Lutwidge Dodgson) to publish his manuscript, Alice in Wonderland. MacDonald was admired by W.H. Auden, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Madeleine L’Engle. G. K. Chesterton cited MacDonald’s The Princess and the Goblin as a book that had “made a difference to my whole existence”. Even Mark Twain, who initially disliked MacDonald, eventually befriended him. (As if genius were solely dependent upon likability.)

This is Not a Review: of Transformers 2

Gabriel Boyer

From within the Animal Hospital (2)

Providence

R. Sachs

This is Not a Review: of Sheila Heti

Gabriel Boyer

From within the Animal Hospital (1)

From Here to John C. Lilly & Beyond

Letter from the Editor

This is Not a Review: of George MacDonald, David Lindsay

Gabriel Boyer

Product

Gabriel Boyer and the Eugene City Players

Enjoymutable.com is the website of Mutable, a loose conglomeration of artists making books, music and other products, as well as sharing their ideas on the web and in the world. You can read more about us here.