Me Time

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Scott S. Greenberger, Globe Staff

A curtain is furled under a pipe that runs just beneath the ceiling, and a spotted cat wanders in. On the makeshift stage there is a ripped couch, a battered metal file cabinet labeled “This Was Your Life,” and a swath of green shag carpet.

Sporting long sideburns and blue Chuck Taylor sneakers, Gabriel Boyer takes the stage and launches into a reading of “Dracula.” The spectators arrayed on the performer’s bed are less than comfortable: The slats beneath his mattress aren’t nailed in, so they tend to shift whenever somebody moves too much.

This is “Bedroom Theater,” freewheeling performances that take place in Boyer’s Jamaica Plain loft every eight days. Boyer, 26, is a frequent actor and the author of some of the plays and skits that have been staged in his bedroom for the past year. He and a friend have even published a guide, “Seven Short Plays for the Bedroom.”

The Manifesto of Negativity

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Harry Polkinhorn

1. Prescript: I have nothing to say.

2. Nothing counts any more; nothing ever did.

3. Culture is dead. It committed suicide because it had become successful.

4. The liberation of language, a poetics of freedom of the word, the Futurists’ parole in liberta, the jouissance of schizophrenic discourse, the transrational zaum of the Russians, all fit perfectly into their preordained boxes, gagging them forever.

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.)

Fake is the new real

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

Fake is the new real contains the artwork and photographs of Neil Freeman. We just liked it, and thought others should check it out. Please do! Some samples below.

New York City block groups (median income)

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In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

Josh Glenn

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

Friend of Mutable Sound, Joshua Glenn, has recently released a book entitled, The Idler’s Glossary, with Canadian publisher, Biblioasis, in which he explores idleness from every angle, with a comment concerning The Situationists here and Hannah Arendt there, he runs the gamut from playful to informative. Throughout, within the confines of his premise, that what he’s offering us here is an amusing glossary of arcane and everyday terms to denote the idle, he has created a very powerful critique of the work-a-day world. From Aestivate and Flazy, to Labor and Dissolute.

Glenn made his name as editor-in-chief of Hermenaut, a subversive magazine of ideas couched in readable and engaging prose. It was inspired by the teen magazine phenomenon, full of intriguing profiles and wry correspondence, and a distinctive world-view cultivated during his time at the Utne Reader. Having surrounded himself with a close circle of editors and authors often groomed by himself into maturity, Glenn went on to capture the imaginations of burgeoning elite everywhere. He rose from the zine culture of the early nineties (along with The Idler and The Baffler, among others) to achieve national reknown at the cusp of the new millenium, going on to develop the Ideas section of the Boston Globe, and continue his forays into the effluvium of culture as a freelance writer, pumping out some truly inspired pieces for N+1, a periodical itself inspired by Hermenaut. As well as continuing his cultural discourse on hermenaut.org, a blog aggregator he runs, he has put out Taking Things Seriously with Princeton Architectural Press, and of course, The Idler’s Glossary.

Mark Kingwell’s introductory essay offers a playful defence of the idler as homo superior, and it is here in this alternate universe, that Glenn has always soared. Idleness is the cornerstone from which this cultural critic has spun a collage-like discourse, his prickly critiques into everything from fake authenticity to camp, all stem from the bedrock of a simple ideology, that there is nothing more revolutionary than doing nothing. Much of his kaleidescopic learning is apparent in miniature within this book, perhaps the nicest example of which being his note about Joe Bousquet in his definition for Beautiful Loser. “My life is externally the life of a reject, and I wouldn’t want it any other way,” Bousquet is famous for saying, his own idea of the homo superior being one in which persons are excellent at what they are born to do, but failures at everything else.

Mr. Glenn paints an amusing, poignant picture, that I personally find proves more emotionally charged than Ambrose Bierce’s classic, The Devil’s Dictionary. More enlightened, less Child of the Enlightenment.

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

Me Time

Scott S. Greenberger, Globe Staff

The Manifesto of Negativity

Harry Polkinhorn

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

Gabriel Boyer

Fake is the new real

In the Mutableye

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

Josh Glenn

In the Mutableye

In the Mutableye is a segment that sometimes showcases something interesting that is happening somewhere in the world at this moment, and sometimes showcases some fad or person from the past that we here at Mutable acknowledge is still cool s**t.

*For our first ever Is Still Cool S**t, we wanted to showcase an author with a profound sense of the worth of leisure, Josh Glenn*

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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.