Jen Pipp, self-styled spiritual modernist, creates online ceremonies to help the rest of us to manage our minds. “There’s so much spiritual information out there right now, it’s hard to know what resonates with us and what is not resonant with us.” She has a show, The Great Big Infinity, up at the Emerson Contemporary Gallery through May 9th. Gallery hours are Wed-Sun 12-7pm. Zoom Artist talk Tuesday May 4th at 5pm. Stop by and check it out!
Feature
Pisces, Nakrob Moonmanas (2020)
A Review of Coronavirus Manifestoes
Manifesto of the Month
As the number of total recorded deaths from the novel coronavirus also known as COVID-19 slides past the 3 million marker worldwide, we here at Mutable thought we would give you a showcase of some of the manifestoes that have resulted. Due to space restrictions, we have chosen to on occasion present abridged versions or excerpts with links to the original. If you’re wondering how we organized them, they are listed from most manifesto to least manifesto. Although we tried to be as inclusive as possible, there were one or two “manifestoes” that were just TOO academic to truly be understood as manifestoes, or posing ideas (such as that COVID-19 is a hoax) which we felt we could not in good conscience reproduce.
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A Manifesto of Sorts for Covid-19
[This manifesto from the author Zillah Eisenstein appeared on the NYU Press web site a year ago, in March 2020. You can see the original here.]
“We can rise together against COVID19 and make a better world”
A few thoughts to share:
COVID19 like most disease is democratic—it can affect anyone, although with differing options to respond to it. The world, including the US is not democratic. This does not bode well. But we can move forward because simple individualism contradicts the interdependency of this COVID crisis. “We” all suffer when one person circulates with symptoms—and we will flourish if we accept responsibility to isolate/distance and protect one another.
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Bode Radio: Dusk at Reikai
Mutable Sound of the Month
This month, we have chosen a track off Bode Radio’s most recent album, Onosea. We here at Mutable have been watching Bode Radio’s progression with keen interest over the years. Alex Yoffe, the man behind the music, is deeply involved in Gamelan, and was trained in composition, and Bode Radio emerges from all of these interests. Recorded in Chicago, Boston, and Java between 2015 and 2017. It’s a very dynamic album that takes the listener to many places, sometimes more loping and trancelike and sometimes more frenetic, but always masterfully constructed, with layer upon layer of nuance. Enjoy!
Mutable Sound 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. If you have a track you would like us to hear, please feel free to send it on to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.
This is Not a Review: of The Reeking Hegs
Gabriel Boyer
Modernist literature was working to uncover something. It had a purpose. It existed in the age of Freud, back when there was a strong faith in the power of dark truths revealed, and what wisdoms can be found hidden undetected in our streaming consciousness—but ideologies wane and ebb. They surge. They subside.
There was a time when manically playful experimental literature was a mainstay of the art, and the lone scribner penning a piece of madness, comedic or otherwise, was a type. From James Joyce to John Kennedy Toole, writers were treated as a kind of amusing malady of the age, to be found in the cafe’s of Paris or living with their mothers, and sometimes, these madmen and madwomen could actually write. But that idea, of geniuses peering over the heads of their small-minded peers, began losing its definition somewhere around midcentury, and slowly morphed into something more insidious. The MFA student.
Nietzsche was right to mistrust the institution. It has done little good for philosophy. Throughout the twentieth century, philosophy has become an increasingly academic pursuit. These days, our philosophers are either populists (like Sartre) or produced by and for the institution (Lyotard and really the whole postmodern school), and at best a bit of both (Foucault and Žižek). The dangerous exoticism of a lone philosopher pontificating in print seems almost as quaint today as the tradition of prophecy that came before.
And the institution is doing the same thing to literature.
People say that writers who learn at MFA programs and writers who sprout from the sidelines are equally numerous, but that is not the point. The point is that, just as the philosophy being produced today is entirely academic, the type of literature being produced is now wholly commercial. You will disagree, I am sure, and rightly so, but when I say something is ‘commercial’, what I mean is it’s written up to the audience, rather than written to some point beyond the audience. There is no more writing for posterity. The thinking class has lost hope in their grand project, and so the publishing industry has lost its purpose beyond the barest of business models.
Experimental literature itself only exists as a subgenre of the institution. We call it “experimental” because it fits that genre, but actual experimenting is no longer something we envision being done by covens of artists with manifestoes clutched in hand but by grad students who are more articulate at pontificating upon their ideas than in presenting coherent works. Which is why The Reeking Hegs is such an important book.
It doesn’t fit into any of these little holes.
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Gae Bolg: Requiem
I first discovered Gae Bolg more than a decade ego, while touring the Pacific Northwest. We were staying with a friend in Olympia, WA, and after playing us the remarkable composition he’d made from frog recordings, he put on a piece of music that would become a regular for me in the years to come, Requiem, by Gae Bolg.
As with everything from Gae Bolg, in this piece of music of French musician, Eric Roger. It is bombastic and medieval, yes, but in the context of the 21st century, it seems appropriately apocalyptic. It is, the appropriate response to the times we are living. You can listen to Requiem below, or check out their equally amazing Aucussin et Nicolette.
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.
Before the Ghosts Came (2 of 2)
D Howland Abbott
[For the first part of a two-part article go here.]
Dr. Bob wound a chewed pen in his wiry hair and looked at me over the top of his John Lennon spectacles. “So how is your testimony doing these days, David?” I was appalled at the question; he was asking if I was a good and faithful member of the Mormon church, which was none of his business. This question had no place in what was supposed to be a therapeutic relationship; fortunately I knew the language of this particular lie very well. I’d had to recite it dozens of times in my life, and my response was thoroughly scripted.
“Well, doc, I believe that God and His Son appeared to Joseph Smith in the Garden of Gethsemane. I believe that Gordon Hinckley is a prophet, and that God speaks to him directly. I pay my tithing, I attend all my church meetings… My testimony is in great shape.”
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Illustration by Ali Chitsaz
Escape from Mayor McCheese Prison
John Wilmes
In my thirty-first year, what I looked forward to more than anything were my walks. My wife did not know about them. On these walks, I would get McDonald’s—often a shameful amount, double-digit McNuggets and multiple sandwiches. I would take laps around the neighborhood and, while walking, eat it all secretly. The dexterity, the downright athleticism required to do this with my robust pace was considerable. And here we have to add in that I would perversely construct my laps so to pass by our house during them, adding extra levels of hiding complication to the routine. My ingenuity was pushed to impressive heights by the goals and restrictions of my secret McDonald’s exercise; my left forearm grew much stronger over months of doing this, it being so often a tensed narrow table I put all my food on and kept balanced amidst high walking speeds. I was also required to skillfully hold a coat over this mobile dining structure, as cover, when I passed by our home.
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AfroSurreal Manifesto
Manifesto of the Month
I'm not a surrealist. I just paint what I see. — Frida Kahlo
THE PAST AND THE PRELUDE
In his introduction to the classic novel Invisible Man (1952), ambiguous black and literary icon Ralph Ellison says the process of creation was "far more disjointed than [it] sounds ... such was the inner-outer subjective-objective process, pied rind and surreal heart."
Ellison's allusion is to his book's most perplexing character, Rinehart the Runner, a dandy, pimp, numbers runner, drug dealer, prophet, and preacher. The protagonist of Invisible Man takes on the persona of Rinehart so that "I may not see myself as others see me not." Wearing a mask of dark shades and large-brimmed hat, he is warned by a man known as the fellow with the gun, "Listen Jack, don't let nobody make you act like Rinehart. You got to have a smooth tongue, a heartless heart, and be ready to do anything."
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Before the Ghosts Came (1 of 2)
D Howland Abbott
Sit beside the breakfast table. Think about your troubles. Pour yourself a cup of tea, and think about the bubbles. You can take a teardrop and drop it in a teacup. Take it down to the riverside and throw it over the side to be swept up by a current and taken to the ocean to be eaten by some fishes, who are eaten by some fishes and swallowed by a whale who grew so old he decomposed. He died and left his body to the bottom of the ocean. Now, everybody knows that when a body decomposes, the basic elements are given back to the ocean. And the sea does what it oughta, and soon there’s salty water—not too good for drinkin’, ‘cuz it tastes just like a teardrop. Goin’ right into a filter, it comes out from a faucet and it pours into a teapot which is just about to bubble. Now: think about your troubles.
– Harry Nilsson
I have heard it said that LSD, once ingested, remains in your system forever. They say that it sits, hibernating or just bored, somewhere in the gnarl of one’s spinal column; waiting for an inopportune moment to put on its hobnail boots and start stomping around. When this happens, often for no discernible reason (although I have found that certain geographical locations have a tendency to agitate the little devil), it is referred to colloquially as an ‘acid flashback’.
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Lawrence Ferlinghetti RIP
Constantly Risking Absurdity (#15)
(Lawrence Ferlinghetti, perhaps best known as the champion of the Beats, founder of City Lights, a star lost in the lap of San Francisco, was of course something of a poet in his own right, and is now dead. We wanted to mark this moment with a poem from the man himself. To hear more beat poetry, including by Mr. Ferlinghetti himself, go here.)
Constantly risking absurdity
and death
whenever he performs
above the heads
of his audience
the poet like an acrobat
climbs on rime
to a high wire of his own making
and balancing on eyebeams
above a sea of faces
paces his way
to the other side of day
performing entrechats
and sleight-of-foot tricks
and other high theatrics
and all without mistaking
any thing
for what it may not be
For he's the super realist
who must perforce perceive
taut truth
before the taking of each stance or step
in his supposed advance
toward that still higher perch
where Beauty stands and waits
with gravity
to start her death-defying leap
And he
a little charleychaplin man
who may or may not catch
her fair eternal form
spreadeagled in the empty air
of existence
Gabriel Boyer & Malcolm Felder: 5. 4. 3. 2. 1.
Mutable Sound of the Month
For this Mutable Sound of the month, Malcolm and I thought we’d present you with a song we recorded one fateful night many years ago. I will never forget my irritation when Malcolm nudged me to come out to the car to record another pop masterpiece. I remember very distinctly thinking to myself, Oh. God. Do we have to record every time we hang out?
The idea was to record an inappropriate holiday country song using an array of instruments from Malcolm’s stash, like his chinese accordian and autoharp, in Malcolm’s grandfather’s old Chevy Caprice Classic. What we ended up with was a new year’s song about an absentee dad.
Then Malcolm began recording, on a stereo microphone attached to a simple cassette. After each track had been recorded, he would play it back on the car stereo, and we would record over it on a new tape, then put that tape in the car stereo, and record yet again, until our final track was this bizarre blown-out mush. Then Malcolm performed his usual production magic, and voila. Here it is. Another song I love.
Gabriel Chad Boyer
Mutable Sound 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. If you have a track you would like us to hear, please feel free to send it on to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.
The Manifesto Manifesto
Manifesto of the Month
1:There is an art form
1.1 There is an art to manifestos as there is an art to anything. Avoid this art form. Make other forms of art. There is no reason to make unfounded statements into strong declarative sentences. Do not believe yourself. Believe others first. Rather than holding yourself up as somehow a larger life form, remember that your unique perspective is a wondrous fallacy. Instead believe everything and anything. Be credulous.
1.2 When writing your manifesto, find yourself hidden behind a potted plant. At other times be other places. Make sure that you are always somewhere. If you are ever somewhere that is also nowhere, then be warned that this is dangerous. This is the sort of place that happens when a person is walking around without formed thoughts. It can be pleasurable. Some people drink themselves silly to achieve this placeless place on a nightly basis. This has little to do with the art of the manifesto.
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Gloomy Sunday
In the Mutableye
According to one anecdote, the song Gloomy Sunday was originally written by Hungarian pianist and composer, Rezső Seress in Paris in December of 1932, the day after a row with his fiancée over his failure as a composer had led to her departure, this being a Sunday, but then again, Gloomy Sunday is plagued by anecdotal evidence. Mostly having to do with its ability to drive perfectly sane people to suicide, and who and when. Rezső Seress’ now estranged fiancée for example? It became famous in the states as the “Hungarian suicide song” before Billie Holiday ever touched it. However, speculation aside, that it was connected with a rash of suicides in Hungary around 1936 seems uncontested.
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Roy Orbison in Clingfilm
Ulrich Haarbürste
It always starts the same way. I am in the garden airing my terrapin Jetta when he walks past my gate, that mysterious man in black.
‘Hello Roy,’ I say. ‘What are you doing in Dusseldorf?’
‘Attending to certain matters,’ he replies.
‘Ah,’ I say.
He apprises Jetta’s lines with a keen eye. ‘That is a well-groomed terrapin,’ he says.
‘Her name is Jetta.’ I say. ‘Perhaps you would like to come inside?’
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Enter Mister Maurice (2 of 2)
William Levy
“Hello, Bill,” he croaked.
“Hello, Bill,” I echoed.
“Where did you get that manuscript of The Wild Boys?” he asked.
“From Gerrit Komrij.”
“Who’s that?” He cried out with exasperated incredulity.
“He’s Maurice Girodias’ agent in Holland.”
“You mean Maurice gave you permission to publish it?”
“Well, not exactly,” I sputtered. Even back then, Burroughs and I had known each other a long while, over a decade. We had first become acquainted in 1960 and in 1961 at the now famous, albeit then deeply shabby “Beat Hotel” on rue Git le Coeur in Paris, had seen each other in New York at his loft on Centre Street and also often in England, and he had generously given me manuscripts to publish in other magazines I edited, The Insect Trust Gazette(USA) and International Times (London).
“Your book came up at a dinner party. I asked to read the manuscript and Maurice gave his agent, this Komrij, permission to give it to me. I took it on my own to publish it,” I admitted. “Out of admiration for your work, Bill. I wasn’t trying to harm you.”
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Moréas’ Symbolist Manifesto
as translated by C. Liszt
As with all arts, literature evolves: a cyclical evolution with strictly determined returns and which become more complicated of various modifications brought by the step of time and the confusion of circles. It would be superfluous to point out that every new progressive stage of art corresponds exactly to senile degeneration, at the ineluctable end of the immediately previous school. Two examples will be enough: Ronsard triumphs over the impotence of the last impressionists of Marot, Romanticism unfurls its royal flag on the classical debris badly kept by Casimir Delavigne and Steven de Jouy. It is because any demonstration of art succeeds inevitably in becoming impoverished, in exhausting itself; then, of copy in copy, simulation in simulation, what was full of sap and freshness becomes dried out and shriveled; what was the new and the unprompted becomes banal and commonplace.
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Kelly Reaves, Untitled (2019)
All the Unseen Things
Gabriel Boyer
Among the doodlers, portraitists, conceptual artists, and illustrators, there are some who lurk in a kind of indistinct atmosphere. Their works do not so cleanly fit inside the confines of an ideology. Their ideas follow a more intuitive path. They may be stuck between epochs, like William Blake, or they may be describing a taboo world. I am interested in two such artists that form a kind of subgenre of this larger type and kind of marginalized scribbler. Both of my subjects are holy wreckers who annihilate the very thing they are tasked with presenting—who wrestle with the paradox of the seen world and the unseen spirit—the contemporary Kelly Reaves and Hyman Bloom, an until recently lost artist from the height of Modernism.
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Saba Lou: Novum Ovum
Mutable Sound of the Month
Saba Lou, daughter of the infamous King Khan, released an album not that long ago that caught the attention of us over at Mutable Sound. Garage rock at its finest with lyrics that are pure poetry. The music has a classic sound without being kitschy, and a voice that is equally comfortable crooning, growling, or sliding into a deadpan drawl. Occasionally, the song-writing sounds a little derivative of the 60’s garage rock from which she takes her inspiration—like on the chorus of Dirty Blonde—but at its best it transcends its psychedelic roots to straddle the worlds of Black Mountain with its epic sound and a more pared down singer-songwriter sound. Saba Lou likes to play with extremes in her songwriting in general. She has that kind of elastic voice that can play it either way, and this is also where she shines, sliding from sweetness to gritty and back. It is a captivating, even hypnotic back-and-forth, and expertly rendered on Novum Ovum. “Darling, you are the weather.” Novum Ovum is Saba Lou’s second album, and at 19, she’s primed to explode on the world stage.
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: AD Jameson Talks Geek Culture
Mutable author AD Jameson has turned his insights and discoveries regarding geek culture into a fabulous book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing (FSG, 2108), and in the video below discusses the book’s themes and key ideas. Jameson has always been a great advocate of genre fiction, and his passion really shines in this talk. If you enjoy what you see here, give the book a look!
Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
168 Pages
$12.95
Now Available
Sinclair
Talbot Penniman
My name is Sinclair and I live on The Ship. I’ve only got a minute before I’m going to go see a doctor about some surgery I need. I got pretty famous recently. I fully disrupted the ship’s milk supply. Now when I say disrupted I don’t mean I like… changed the way people think of milk… or use milk, I didn’t invent a cheese computer… I didn’t disrupt the milk supply in any innovative sense. I mean we had a ton of milk, and then I lost most of it. I guess it’s sort of my fault, if it’s anybody’s fault. In a sense we still have the milk, it’s in the bilge.
The milk tank is an extraordinarily large cylinder made of bones. The milktank is (or was) a complicated piece of equipment and it is very old. Maintenance records date back over 1200 years, so it’s at least that old. For some reason it will shunt the entire milk supply into the bilge in the event a catastrophic failure. I guess there used to be a way to filter the milk back out from the bilge water… but that’s lost knowledge now. So yeah, the bilge is full of milk now and I guess that’s my fault.
So. Maybe you’d like to hear how this dumb thing happened? Two things: Chromomorphs and Crabgoats.
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