Levi Fuller, who played in the little-known soul band Extra Play with Kevin Micka, Gabriel Boyer, and Malcolm Felder, all members of the Mutable universe, and played everything from stand-up bass to saxophone on A Journey to Happiness Island, has released a new album, Colossal. You can buy the vinyl at sonicboomrecords.com or buy the mp3s from iTunes, or read more at Levi’s website, denimclature.com.
Isstillcools**t
S**t Happens When You Party Naked
Dmitry Samarov
Dmitry Samarov is a local cab driver and artist who puts out a semi-regular blog called Hack, stories from his hours spent driving a hackney through the streets of Chicago. His most recent entry is about waiting out late-night revelers with a man who’s been driving a cab since ’73, the man’s scraggly white beard yellowed around the mouth from the nicotine who we learn, through the course of the entry, has been writing science-fiction stories on a manual typewriter for years, the latest involving a human-sized insect who’s also a detective. At the end of the post we learn that the detective has discovered ‘the remains of a person’s arm, chiseled to the sharpest point ever detected on his planet…’
Samarov was born in Moscow in 1970, emigrated to Boston in ’78 with his family, studied art at the Parsons School of Design and the Art Institute of Chicago, and has been driving cab for god only knows how long. The story of his first days as a cab driver is some of my favorite stuff, both awkward and lude, the drawings crude and poignant, full of vignettes with hookers and undergrads. Samarov is like a cross between Bukowski and Scorsese as seen through a murky watercolor-drawn world.
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 second Is Still Cool S**t, we wanted to showcase an unknown artist & author who has been lurking in the taxi’s of Chicago and all the while recording this seedy world through words and images. Welcome to the universe of Dmitry Samarov!
SP Weather Station: September
Fake is the new real
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)
Solar Alignment Walk (2011
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
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.