Tom Clemmons, Frank, & the Found

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

Letter from the Editor

Those of us who are ourselves involved in manufacturing the sorts of weirdness showcased in the award-winning film Frank are prone to be a little over-sensitive that others are chuckling darkly in corners at our futile efforts. We are the sensitive children others beat with mounds of dung. We are the ones who wore the dung-shirts for the sake of something greater than just coins of refined dung, but rather for the sake of the greater dung god in the sky sort of thing. Even while screaming silly that this omniscient dung being could never exist. What is Frank?

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas on Spiny Retinas!

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

Gabe, you are writing to me from Tokyo.

Whenever I think of Tokyo, I can’t help but think of the film Lost in Translation. And I’m going there now (mentally) because Bill Murray starred in that film, and one of his great contemporaries, Robin Williams, tragically removed himself from this planet this past week. This also transitions into the questions you’ve asked me about my work, most relevantly, Spiny Retinas, because before Williams’ death, he was interviewed specifically about the perception of the “sad clown” archetype: what did mean to him, how did he relate (sadly, he fully committed to that life role).

I think of this specifically because I often use humor to confront personal challenges and I use it in my work to address the “darkness” of our times, which is what I believe Spiny Retinassomewhat deals with. In past work, I have let this sardonic voice come through a bit (e.g. my e-book from 2012, HONEY IS A SHE, often trails off into dark humor [it deals with going through a divorce]). More so with Spiny Retinas.

Our Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Jonathan Adler

We believe that your home should make you happy.

We believe that when it comes to decorating, the wife is always right. Unless the husband is gay.

We believe in carbohydrates and to hell with the puffy consequences.

We believe minimalism is a bummer.

We believe handcrafted tchotchkes are life-enhancing.

The General Disaster

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

In recent years there have been many disasters, but what about the general disaster? “Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices — and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect,” (Hannah Arendt; The Origins of Totalitarianism, page 352). This is the quote found on the opening page of Quotilator, C. Cooper’s remarkable game of computational free association, in which various hyper-linked words lead to other quotes, with blue hyper-links being scored at the bottom. You can click the winner button at any time and type your number in to see if you’re a winner, but the answer will always be, “You may be a winner.”

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.

This is Not a Review: of BJ Thug Life

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

Gabriel Boyer

I wanted to know what’s the deal with BJ Thug Life, and so recently I went to a metal show in Beijing with thirty-thousand Chinese stuffed down my pants. By which I mean the currency, not the people. Why I was carrying this brick of cash next to my penis is my own business, but what happened that night is everyone’s business.

Now, I want to be clear about something right from the start. I know nothing about metal. Everything I know about metal, I learned from Wikipedia or overheard in the bars of Oregon. And really, the only reason why I was there that night is because my brother wanted to see some metal, and BJ Thug Life is all I could find.

We were at Yugong Yishan. One of those really swanky really dingy joints, housed inside one of Beijing’s many historic walls. With the classic Chinese lion statue by the door and just a few feet from the gate of the mammoth and presumably ancient estate housed behind that wall. And the room was full of what appeared to be the Chinese version of nerdy seriously overweight ipad-obsessed auteurs, scrawny undergrads, and beefy jocks. (I did catch sight of one or two other actual honest-to-god foreigners. The one near us seemed to be genuinely-ironically getting down with the locals over some serious shredding in downtown Beijing, and the other one I only caught sight of for a moment in a long line of banging heads. He looked malnourished and prone to violence, a scrawny good old boy getting his kicks the only way he knows how, but I’m sure he was a very nice man.) And that sock full of cash was weighing down my crotch. And neither of us had any idea what BJ Thug Life really was or where this brotherhood of hoodlums could be found.

Operation Garden Plot

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Manifesto of the Month

The United States Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2

The following information was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The original printing was of June 1, 1984. The information herein is UNCLASSIFIED and does not come within the scope of directions governing the protection of information affecting the national security.

In this document signed by the Secretary of the Army, is hereby assigned as DOD Executive Agent for civil disturbance control operations. Under Plan 55-2 he is to use airlift and logistical support, in assisting appropriate military commanders in the 50 states, District of Columbia, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and US possessions and territories, or any political subdivision thereof.

The official name of this project is called “Operation Garden Plot.”

Ziggurat!

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature

Mutable Sound of the Month

The first track of Jonah—of Devil Music Ensemble and Debo Band fame—Rapino’s aptly named and under-appreciated album, High, is a ten-minute meditation that revolves around a reading of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. It has the driving power of Crystal Method—although a Crystal Method that has matured to a more Brian Eno level, a more spiritually complete vision of the musical workings of the universe. This is a music built on the foundation of a JRR-Tolkien-level logic and with a serious psychedelic overbite, and it is a powerful piece of music. It stands out on the album and is a current favorite of mine!

released December 1, 2010 Recorded & mixed at Hardcore Studios JP MA by J Rapino - Mastered by B Wood Instruments Casio SK 1 - Yamaha DX 11 - Yamaha CS 15 - MicroKorg Violin - Lapsteel Guitar - Electric Guitar - Acoustic Guitar Oberheim DMX Drum Machine - Vibraphone - Glokenspiel Guest Artists Farhad Ebrahimi playing drums on Ziggurat Rafi Metz reading Ovid's Metamorphoses on Ziggurat Sebastian Paulson playing drums on Cloud Horse All Songs Jonah Rapino Music ASCAP www.massdist.com www.jonahrapino.com MD95

Mutable is pleased to present a unique musical experience every month or so by ourselves or someone we’ve been introduced to. These are from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world. Send tracks to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

Strange Relations

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

Space Canon

This book is about alien sex.

Not imperialist, colonial sex, with human male astronauts dominating winsome green-skinned babes à la Captain Kirk. Nor is it bestial. This is real mutual discovery and understanding between sentient beings. It’s not something you see much in science fiction — in Tiptree’s short stories, admittedly, and to a lesser extent with Heinlein and Delany, although that’s mostly human-on-human stuff. Not that I’m a connoisseur.

Rock Albany!

January 12, 2021 in Story, Feature

A D Jameson

Rock Albany laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. His windswept hair was neither blond nor red, but black, as black as a melon. His face was like a law of nature, like the call of the herd. He had the mouth of an executed saint.

Rock laughed and shook his head, then dove into the lake far below. He swam easily to the far shore, where he dressed, then strolled down a path. He walked swiftly, with a loose, lazy expertness of motion. He walked down the long road on the sun, the sun’s only road. The sun was his home. He had lived there for seventeen years. Most men would die if they tried to live on the sun. They would burn up at once. Rock laughed at this thought. He found the sun charming. The sun, he thought, has been waiting here just for me. Waiting to be ripped apart by my dynamite and drill. Waiting for the new shape my hands will give it. He would paint it pigeon blue. He would install a Pekinese buttress. He would hand-raise pudgy canaries. Rock liked canaries. Their eyes never missed a thing. They made a man feel as though he did not exist. They stared with a sudden resentment. They knew that they were naked in their cage. They suffered in this world. Rock knew that the canaries would suffer to live inside cages on the sun. He didn’t know how long they would hold out, staring at him with their damned eyes, before they burned up. He would go through a lot of canaries. He’d have to skimp and slave to afford so many. He would need them at once. He resolved to call his best friend and supplier, the Duke. But then he forgot. He didn’t give a damn.

Trinity: A Review of Colin Winnette's Revelation

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

herocious

Originally published in The Open End

For some reason three is a good number. There’s a balance to three, a symmetry that seems to establish an axis. Three is triptych, three is trinity. With a title like REVELATION I feel like trinity is the more applicable to Colin Winnette’s first novel.

It’s a good book. There’s a weight to it that sits heavy and savory, like the first book you ever read.

*Still from the Turin Horse by Béla Tarr (2011)*

Remodernist Film Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Jesse Richards

1. Art manifestos, despite the good intentions of the writer should always “be taken with a grain of salt” as the cliché goes, because they are subject to the ego, pretensions, and plain old ignorance and stupidity of their authors. This goes all the way back to the Die Brücke manifesto of 1906, and continues through time to this one that you’re reading now. A healthy wariness of manifestos is understood and encouraged. However, the ideas put forth here are meant sincerely and with the hope of bringing inspiration and change to others, as well as to myself.

2. Remodernism seeks a new spirituality in art. Therefore, remodernist film seeks a new spirituality in cinema. Spiritual film does not mean films about Jesus or the Buddha. Spiritual film is not about religion. It is cinema concerned with humanity and an understanding of the simple truths and moments of humanity. Spiritual film is really ALL about these moments.

Amazing Adult Fantasy

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Paul Kincaid

Originally published on The SF Site

To begin with, these short fictions are funny.

They are also experimental, wayward and surreal, any of which might make them seem far more serious and “worthy” than they actually are.

They are not stories in the conventional sense. Some of them may offer a narrative, but if you try to follow them too closely you will find characters change, chronologies wander all over the place, and an obsessive interest in something mundane and irrelevant will suddenly intrude into the text. They take risks with what we expect of our fiction, which is a good thing, but not all the risks pay off, of course. This means it is all too easy to linger over phrase-making or ponder construction, or otherwise consider the success or failure of the individual pieces in some drily academic way. But that would be to miss the simple joie de vivre, the devil-may-care insouciance of the pieces.

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Video: Harpya!

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

A dapper mustachioed man is walking down a dark street when he hears the cries of a woman who is about to be bludgeoned by an axe in a nearby fountain. The man knocks out her assailant only to discover that she is in fact a harpy, a harpy that looks like a bald Klaus Kinski with apple-sized marshmallow-colored breasts. Fascinated, the man takes the beast to his home to shelter and feed it. He soon discovers the Harpy’s insatiable appetite.

This is Harpya! Directed by Raoul Servais, and starring Will Spoor, Fran Waller Zeper and Sjoert Schwibethus. It was introduced to Mutable recently, and quickly went on to become our favorite belgian animated short of 1979. The film can be found below.

HarpyaRaoul Servais metWill Spoor, Fran Waller Zeper, Sjoerd Schwibettus, Palm d'Or Cannes

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.

I Think I Still Remember

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature

Mutable Sound of the Month

Some time ago we did a shout out for song poems. Song poems as in song lyrics that have been set to music for a fee, although in our case there was no fee. We simply wanted to recreate a similar outsider aesthetic as can be found in such classics as “Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush” and “Blind Man’s Penis (Peace and Love)”.

We got exactly one response from a fellow name of Colin Williamson, and when we did I had completely forgotten about our little post requesting poems to be transformed into song and said, “Well, what do you expect me to do with this? How about sending me some more poems, and then we’ll see.” Only later, did it occur to me that he might have intended his poem to be transformed into a song, and it turned out this was in fact the case.

Some time ago we did a shout out for song poems. Song poems as in song lyrics that have been set to music for a fee, although in our case there was no fee.

Mutable is pleased to present a unique musical experience every month or so by ourselves or someone we’ve been introduced to. These are from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world. Send tracks to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

*We Live in Public (2009), a documentary by Ondi Timoner*

The Cluetrain Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Rick Levine

1. Markets are conversations.

2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.

3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.

4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.

5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.

6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.

7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.

8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.

9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.

Elon Musk, China, & the Multiverse

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

Letter from the Editor

[Our sci fi films are like ads for future Apple products and propaganda for a reductionist view of the present, in which our end is inevitable, and the toys of the rich will become prettier and prettier while the rest of us drown in our own filth. In this letter from the editor I wanted to write about this sci fi present of ours. About the figures who fill it and what functions they serve, the places we’re going and the places that are taking us there, and most importantly about the one thing that is driving it all.]

I. Persons

There are certain persons who contain our fantasy—who, it seems, exist only to act as avatars for those who believe in them and the ideas they represent. Most obvious of course would be your standard everyday politician. In becoming public figures, they also become icons that can then spread in a meme-like way. Or Jesus. But Walt Disney also comes to mind.

Layered Ekphrasis Collaboration

January 12, 2021 in Article, Feature

Lina ramona Vitkauskas

Delve into the article below by Mutable’s own Lina Vitkauskas, and at the bottom you will find a string of poems that were inspired by a chapbook that was inspired by a film.

I first saw Fando y Lis in 2001. The film is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which the main characters—lovers Fando and Lis—search for a mythical land, Tar, where it is said that all dreams come true. The film documents the journey to Tar—lays before the viewer a series of exquisitely odd and profoundly symbolic experiences; if dreams come true in Tar, it is no matter if we ever arrive, for dreams are fulfilled simply observing the unfolding excursion. The film itself is a poet’s dream—a grand pageant of formidable imagery: burning pianos and high-society aristocrats wandering barren landscapes littered with demolished structures, once beacons of culture/civilization; marionette shows illustrating the rape of innocence; canned peach-testicle metaphors and gaggles of erotic women and transvestites tempting the characters away for moments of sensual curiosity; mud nudes meshing with one another in the soft earth: flower consumption, body-painting, and melodramatic, reclining graveyard poses—a whirlwind of remarkable hallucinations strung together, coupled with intriguing and affected dialogue.

*Illustration by Dorothy P. Lathrop for Walter de la Mare's Three Mulla-Mulgars (1919)*

The Three Mulla-mulgers

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

Walter de la Mare

On the borders of the Forest of Munza-mulgar lived once an old grey fruit-monkey of the name of Mutt-matutta. She had three sons, the eldest Thumma, the next Thimbulla, and the youngest, who was a Nizza-neela, Ummanodda. And they called each other for short, Thumb, Thimble, and Nod. The rickety, tumble-down old wooden hut in which they lived had been built 319 Munza years before by a traveller, a Portugall or Portingal, lost in the forest 22,997 leagues from home. After he was dead, there came scrambling along on his fours one peaceful evening a Mulgar (or, as we say in English, a monkey) named Zebbah. At first sight of the hut he held his head on one side awhile, and stood quite still, listening, his broad-nosed face lit up in the blaze of the setting sun. He then hobbled a little nearer, and peeped into the hut. Whereupon he hobbled away a little, but soon came back and peeped again. At last he ventured near, and, pushing back the tangle of creepers and matted grasses, groped through the door and went in. And there, in a dark corner, lay the Portingal’s little heap of bones.

The Subgenius Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

J.R. “Bob” Dobbs

“Time Control? You’ve come to the right place…”

ARE YOU ABNORMAL?

Then you are probably BETTER than most people!
IF you suspect that things are much worse than you ever suspected—

IF the only thing you’ve been able to laugh at for the last 5 years is the fact that NOTHING is funny anymore—

IF you sometimes want to collar people on the street and scream that you’re more different than they could possible *imagine*—

IF you can possibly help us with a donation—

IF you see the whole universe as one vast morbid sense of sick humor—

IF the current “Age of Progress” seems more like the Dark Ages to you—

IF you are looking for an inherently contradictory religion that will condone megadegeneracy and yet tell you that you are “above” everyone else—

Then…
THE CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS

could *save your sanity!*

This is Not a Review: of Henry Green

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

Gabriel Boyer

Henry Green was the pseudonym for Henry Vincent Yorke, and the author of ten books, most of which are truly remarkable, all short and each one written in its own distinctive dialect. His writing lives in a remarkable place, between the outlandish experiments of Joyce and the everyday exactitude of Graham Greene. He has been categorized as a WWII British voice, but I like to think of him more as a candle in the dark?

Why a candle in the dark?

Henry Green does something that we here at Mutable are very fond of. His books contain experimental elements, but they are framed as traditional storytelling of the Graham Greene variety. This is what makes him such an anachronism.

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.

Mutable is pleased to present a unique musical experience every month or so by ourselves or someone we’ve been introduced to. These are from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world. Send tracks to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

herocious

Paul Kincaid

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.

Mutable is pleased to present a unique musical experience every month or so by ourselves or someone we’ve been introduced to. These are from the reel-to-reels and tascams of the garages and basements of the world. Send tracks to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

Chris Locke, Doc Searls, David Weinberger, Rick Levine

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