We here at Mutable are old enough to remember a time when performance art was everywhere you went. Maybe not everywhere YOU went, but everywhere we went. In every loft and coffee shop of 90’s Boston, on the loading bays of Brooklyn, and in the pizza parlors of Cleveland. It was inescapable. Then one day it vanished, and instead the world was waiting in line for the latest iPhone update. But M. Lamar, with his remarkable fashion sense, idiosyncratic sensibilities, impressive musical abilities and often poignant commentary, is keeping this tradition alive, and our hats go off to him. Below is a video of his performance, Re-Memberments / The Demon Rising.
Feature
Return to the Secret Fort
Scott Rucker
The Woods, 1909
Our secret fort deep in the woods, was a real work in progress. It smelled like piss. Our gang was made up of neighborhood riff raff. Roger was the oldest, then came Benny, myself, and a boy we referred to as, The Jew. Each of us had our own special gift. Roger had charisma. Benny had the strength of an ox. I had the smarts. The Jew was a talented artist. For a penny, he would draw you whatever you wanted.
We kept our dirty pictures and a series of cuss words in a hole we had dug where we also kept our communal cigarettes, and cologne which we used to cloak the scent.
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A day about the British Museum
James Mansfield
I remember visiting the British Museum as a child, when I must have been around five or six, with my father. I say this, but actually can remember nothing from the visit apart from my insistence that we make the return journey by taxi, as I was bored of not seeing anything on the underground. I have since then been to the Museum countless times, and now having founded my own Museum of Imaginative Knowledge, had a strong desire to try and spend some time there for the purpose of what I call pure research, or simply just hanging out. What would it be like to spend an entire day in the British Museum?
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Places Outside of Place (1 of 2)
Luther Philips
1.
Places and People: Adam, Eve, & Prometheus
“And I wish that I were not any part / of that fifth generation / of men, but had died before it came, / or been born afterward,” (Hesiod. Trans. Richard Lattimore. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969; p. 39).
~
Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. The true and honest experience of their former idyllic lives was now sullied by a pervasive internal vision. They knew that they were and they became conscious.
There’s that old adage that people are gods that shit. We can envision this as the story of an Adam and an Eve happily shitting away in Eden day in day out until that moment they discovered the God in them (i.e. the moment they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil), and never again would they be able to so blissfully vacate their bowels in the bosom of nature as once they had done. This is the quintessential tale of the noble savage—in which humanity is pure, ignorant and blissful—but there is a snake in this garden.
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Toward an Apocalyptic Literature
Letter from the Editor
We have officially entered the Apocalyptic Age.
And as we sit in our rooms writing our precious notes—our lists of what we’ll miss most and how we want our survivors to dress the corpses we leave behind—scrawling these thoughts on bits of paper and the odd receipt—as we wait for the door to be knocked in by the stormtroopers of the future—we must not look away from this dark rising. Rather than censoring ourselves, we must take this opportunity to speak the most terrifying of truths, for this may be the last moment we get to say anything at all before the duct tape is slathered across our snot-slick lips and we are bound to the particular vision of reality the cruel and heartless among us want to seer upon our skulls. Which is not to say that we should stare into the coming darkness with the timid paralysis of deer, but to stand with a pathetic confidence that we can withstand this blow of history even if it means everything we thought to be true turned false, and everything we hold dear crushed to dust by the oppressors among us. This is the literature for the end times.
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S**theads: In the Mutableye
The Captured Project originated as an online collection of drawings. In each portrait was depicted some person of note who should be in prison, and each of these portraits were themselves drawn by current prisoners. The project has since come to a close and a book has been printed of these many remarkable works of art, capturing such notable criminals as Ryan Gragg of Goldman Sachs and of course the Koch brothers. Please feel free to click through to look at more for yourself, and consider purchasing a book. All proceeds go to the Brooklyn Bail Fund. You can learn more about the project and how to purchase the book here, and can click on the image to find out what crimes have been committed by Rex Tillerson.
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.
Through the Eye
Kate Perruzzi
You are at a BBQ in your uncle’s backyard. Scores of tiny blonde cousins filter around table legs like frenzied fish in a shallow pond. One of them catches their chin on your knee and glares at you. You do not recognize her.
Your uncle is seated in a low lawn chair beside the buffet of mayonaised foods: potato salad, with and without egg, macaroni salad, chicken salad. None of these are salads, you think, and swig hard on a warm Miller Lite. Your uncle is quiet, transfixed, watching the sky. His eyes are cloudy security glass and the man working the space behind his face is a bank teller on qualuudes.
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Straightest Lines
Mutable Sound of the Month
We here at Mutable are psyched to share a song from John Bellows’ amazing new album, long EP, out now from Planted Tapes. We’ve been into John Bellows’ work for a long time, but this album really seems like a culmination of his on-going aesthetic. These songs are lushly produced, beautifully written and rendered. Enjoy the track below, and for more awesomeness, watch the video of River’s Deceit here!
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.
Kafka and Credibility in the Age of Trump
Matt Rowan
Franz Kafka had a pretty good read on people. He recognized, among other things, the strange but vital interpersonal rules that enhanced one’s credibility or diminished it, depending on the circumstances and the individuals concerned. If you’re at all familiar with Black Mirror, the Channel Four and Netflix sci-fi / horror series, you might have caught the premiere episode of the third season. It concerns people living in a society where social media popularity translates to real societal value, and affects things as mundane as how people respond to you in passing to those as significant as where you’re allowed to live and work. The human dynamic of this scenario, abandoning the technological component, is quintessential Kafka terrain. One wonders what a depiction of social media would look like in his methodical and capable hands.
No more is Kafka’s talent for descrying nuance in just this sort of human behavior, the concept of what makes one a credible source, on display than in the story, “The Village Schoolmaster [The Giant Mole].” In it, readers are offered information regarding the piquant discovery of an abnormally large mole in the unnamed region’s countryside — hence the bracketed auxiliary title. But the brackets are a much better touch than one might first be given to assume. They hint at the kind of compartmentalization into which the mole is relegated throughout the story’s telling. At first blush it’s a story centering on a peculiar and inexplicable phenomenon not unlike other Kafka stories, such as “The Metamorphosis” and “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor.” Instead, though, it is crafted to speak of issues very different, far less surreal than a giant mole, and much more characteristically human.
Accordingly, the story’s title does not bury the lede. It is, indeed, about the village schoolmaster who discovers the giant mole’s existence, first and foremost. Even more awkwardly it’s told through the first-person narration of a “Mr. So-and-So,” as designated by the village schoolmaster but this is according to the narrator, an individual also referred to as a businessman, and therefore of a rank suggesting he’s held in some esteem by society, esteem it’s safe to presume a lowly schoolmaster is beneath. And so the story begins to show its true nature, describing the contrivances of credibility and those possessing the means to adequately and convincingly argue their case, with all the superfluity accompanying any and every overture or public gesture. The truth can be manufactured, and it often is.
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Overland II
Bal Kaur
The above painting by Bali Kaur is a masterful expression of her on-going and ever-evolving aesthetic. Kaur began her work as a printmaker but over her twenty-some-year career has explored a variety of techniques and media. We here at Mutable are excited to see how her vision and her masterful understanding of space, color, and the dynamics of place continue to change and grow. Overland II is just one of several pieces currently on display at Silson Contemporary, 17 Harlow Oval, Harrogate, HG2 0DS. The gallery is open Fridays 10.30am – 4.00pm, and one weekend a month, 10.30am – 4.00pm, on Saturday and Sunday.
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.
Not Available (2 of 2)
D Howland Abbott
There are several long-standing theories regarding the identities of the Residents. One of the earliest (and most amusing) is that the Residents are in fact the Beatles. This was an appealing notion to listeners in the early 1970s, who were still reeling from the sudden self-destruction of the collaborative effort between those strange, beautiful boys. It didn’t help that the Residents’ first full-length record, Meet the Residents, boasted artwork lifted directly from the Beatles’ album Meet the Beatles, with the faces of John, Paul, George and Ringo having been altered with a marker so that they had crossed eyes, nose rings and devil horns. Some fans held onto this belief for many years, but most eventually abandoned it when they were forced to acknowledge that the Residents’ output simply didn’t sound like it could have possibly been made the same group of people.
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Video: Terminator 24
Speakers’ Corner is a place where anyone can get up on a soapbox and preach it, and Terminator 24 has been a fixture there for over four decades. A self-styled “symbolic ironic play striving to dream, explore, question, learn and live compassionately without fear, prejudice, hate and abuse,” the character of Terminator 24 [or T24 as he is sometimes called] came about as the result of one man’s questioning spirit as well as through his genuine efforts to interact with a wide variety of diverse tourists and visitors. I first saw this video probably more than 20 years ago, and Terminator 24’s remarkable brand of Socratic method struck me at the time and it strikes me as remarkable to this day.
The film found below [by David Napier and Paul Dionne] features many of the characters you would have found at Speaker’s Corner in 1994, but it settles on Terminator 24, who is still there today, and if you ever make it to London, you should definitely take the time to visit Hyde Park and visit Speaker’s Corner to learn how this business of learning is done from the master himself. For more on Terminator 24, please feel free to visit his website.
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.
The Manifesto of Surrealism
Andre Breton
So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life—real life, I mean—that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.
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Avocado Forcefield
Mutable Sound of the Month
We here at Mutable are a little bit in love with this track and the accompanying album. It’s a bit of off-kilter improvised synth-y and drum-driven beauty from the duo Ruben + Monte Cristo. If you’re into what you hear, you can check out the whole album here. But for now, check out the bit of awesomeness below!
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.
Video: Existence
One man realizes that he might just need a little help from an unlikely place to figure out how to be happy dating in a futile universe in this video by artist Jeremy Franklin-Ross.
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.
Not Available (1 of 2)
D Howland Abbott
One night in the summer of 2000, I found myself standing in the corner of a tiny room which served as the broadcast booth for the college radio station at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. I had been dragged there by my girlfriend at the time, a woman named Bethany, who had developed a crush on the night-time DJ. It was 11:00pm, and as far as I could tell the three of us were the only people on campus.
“This is B.C. Sterret, and you are listening to Oddity Rock Radio on Weber State Eighty-Eight.” The DJ was speaking into the microphone, and partially obscured behind a wall of tape racks and soundboards. “Welcome once again to the single oasis in the vast cultural wasteland that we call the Beehive State.” I flinched. I had used those precise words in the moments before he went on the air, and he had stolen them.
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The Hyperobject & the Artifice of Me
Letter from the Editor
In this age of cultural criticism, punditry, general micro-blogging and endless gaffes, shock, and outrage on the Internet and beyond—although mostly on the internet, perhaps in part because it’s a place that exists nowhere, like the Na-koja-abad of muslim mysticism, the Persian term for utopia, which literally means, “the place that exists nowhere”—but also because it is currently the primary means through which we interact with our society and is furthermore the average American’s primary means for self-expression in general. This bodiless heaven, where we can instantly and immediately be gratified of any unbodily need we have while our actual bodies fester in the increasing hell of our actual room, is an interiority exposed and the internal uploaded into the closest our technology has come to mind, with servers as stand-ins for the more mundane ganglia of people and people as stand-ins for the more mundane mind of the masses.
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CrimethInc. Manifesto Part 72-A
CrimethInc. Workers’ Collective
What is Crimethink?
Crimethink can be reached from the subway station only by means of a daring double somersault. It is only a multiple orgasm away from the checkout counter of the grocery store, and a mere lobbed brick distant from the witness bench of the courtroom, but it is much harder to access from the closed playpens of your homes, schools, workplaces, and punk rock clubs—only a mystical revelation or masterless revolution will suffice. Crimethink riots rather than diets, so as to love itself body and soul.
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Sorry, Kale Drinkers: Trump’s Rampage Isn’t a Resurgence of American Bigotry or a Reichstag Fire—The Problem’s Less Sexy, More Fundamental
Thalatta Twice
The Praetorians, apprehensive that, in this private contract, they should not obtain a just price for so valuable a commodity, ran out upon the ramparts; and, with a loud voice, proclaimed that the Roman world was to be disposed of to the best bidder by public auction.
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HBD Katharine
Mutable Sound of the Month
Mutable’s posting a little early for Valentine’s Day. This lovely ballad by Mutable’s own Animal Hospital is one of a series of songs Micka has recorded for his one and only Katharine. For more from Animal Hospital you can go here and for Good or Plenty, Streets + Plenty, out now by Mutable, you can go here.