Animal Hospital‘s Kevin Micka makes beautiful music. His luscious soundscapes mesmerize as they dig deep in with loops that dig deep and wailing riffs that cut. Long ago, we were lucky enough to put out one of his albums, Good or Plenty, Streets + Avenues, and have been following his career since with a keen interest. One side project of note is his Animal Hospital Ensemble, in which a group of players come together to perform under Micka’s direction. Enjoy the performance!
Confessio Fraternitatis
Manifesto of the Month
Chapter I.
Whatsoever you have heard, O mortals, concerning our Fraternity by the trumpet sound of the Fama R.C., do not either believe it hastily, or willfully suspect it. It is Jehovah who, seeing how the world is falling to decay, and near its end, doth hasten it again to its beginning, inverting the course of Nature, and so what heretofore hath been sought with great pains and dayly labour He doth lay open now to those thinking of no such thing, offering it to the willing and thrusting it upon the reluctant, that it may become to the good that which will smooth the troubles of human life and break the violence of unexpected blows of Fortune, but to the ungodly that which will augment their sins and their punishments.
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My Asinine Life: The Heart is a Sphincter of the Mind
in Article, My Asinine Life, Series
Gabriel Boyer
Have you ever truly lived, my pock-marked asterisk of a friend? Have you ever walked into a room and made out with the leading lady of your dreams? Or dove into the darkness with the eagerness of an action hero? Or been there to save the most important person in your life from what would otherwise have been the worst mistake ever? Have you ever openly wept? Or looked out from your hopeless meandering moment to instead be filled with awe when facing the incomprehensible absolutes of your life? That all who you love will decay and die before you, and that you will be one of these people? Unless of course you feel nothing, and then it’ll all happen behind your back while you’re always rummaging in corners looking for shiny objects to distract you from this ever-expanding horror. So. I’ll ask you again.
What about, have you ever truly died? You over-sized prawn-powered muttering device. Have you ever slipped into unconsciousness convinced that you’re never ever going to ever wake up again ever?
I say this in all seriousness as I simultaneously split my tongue with a straight edge razor and eye the dribbling blood with an inconvenient hilarity. For I have tried to do both of these unfortunate things—this living thing and this dying thing I mean—at different times but always in the same backhanded passive aggressive fashion. And all because of you.
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This is Not a Review: of Lies, Untruths, & the Art of Play
Gabriel Boyer
I had recently arrived back stateside from China. Ben & Jerry’s seemed like something you should only eat on your wedding day, and the idea of a pile of meat between two pieces of bread seemed just gross. American supermarkets looked like the supermarkets of royalty, so pristine, so many beautifully packaged and meaty cuts of meat. There is something about the absence of fat in the marketplace. It says, This is a country where no one starves.
I had flown into San Francisco, and from there to Oregon, then Missouri and Chicago, but right now we’re at the True/False Film Festival, and I am staying with my brother in Columbia, MO, because there are three films I want to discuss from that festival. If you have not seen these films, you may want to cease reading this article now as there will be spoilers. How is it possible for there to be spoilers in documentary films? This is one of the things I have learned! The three films are, Stories We Tell, The Act of Killing, and The Institute.
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Archibald as a younger man in Shanghai.
Episode 17
Archibald has disappeared, but we learn a bit about his backstory and the cage he spent his adolescence in. Jack has a new invention that the Headmistress finds dirty, and Boo Boo has just stormed in the room holding up the cuddliest parasite the world has ever seen. Are panty-holes the solution? What’s happened to the Grammar Instructor’s hands?
A new episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies aired on a semi-weekly basis.
Diaries of a Garish Amateur: Richman in the Park with Heartache
John Wilmes
Millenium Park, Chicago, in the bandshell seats. Jonathan Richman on stage.
Nearby a small boy is flailing his arms and legs almost imperceptibly, with his Hummingbird energy; I believe he is attempting flotation, and my roommate, next to me on my right, is talking about how important it is to observe these young kids dancing this way, while they’re still willing to do it. The little boy’s smile is the biggest thing in sight but his father isn’t amused. ‘When he’s thirteen, he’s not going to want to dance that way anymore. When he’s twenty-three, he’ll have to get *really drunk* to do it.’
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A Purposeful Mistranslation of the Tao Te Ching (2 of 4)
Gabriel Boyer
(The author believes the only “true” translation of the Tao must be a mistranslation, for, as 老子 himself said, 道可道非常道, or ‘Tao as Tao not eternal Tao’. Enjoy this ongoing mistranslation!)
25.
Something formless and complete, from before the universe was born—silent, empty, independent and unchanging—taking careful steps yet with no danger lying in wait—it can be used as the mother of the universe. I don’t know her name, that character we call Tao, but the force that comes from that name is called “Great”. This Greatness is known when it departs from us, and as it departs is seen as a vision in the distance, and from a distance is known as its opposite.
Therefore, just as the Tao is great, the sky is great, the earth is great, human beings are also great. Within the region’s midriff can be found these four greats, yet people alone encompass all the rest.
Humans obey the law of earth. Earth obeys the law of heaven, while the Tao’s method is that of nature.
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New Mutable Author Explains Spiny Retinas!
Here I am explaining what SPINY RETINAS is.
It is an epic poem, or if you prefer, a narrative poem, or perhaps still if you prefer, a “hybrid text piece” that was compiled slowly over the course of the last six years (2006 – 2012). Perhaps you do not prefer. I love you just the same.
It was constructed using automatic writing technique and addresses and/or speaks to war, politics, and religion (stereotypes and cultural myths explored through use of military and theological hierarchical titles); rape culture, gender roles, and sexism; and pop culture in general. The following books, films, and/or television shows were used as reference points to create SPINY RETINAS: I Dream of Jeanie episodes, John Ashbery’s Girls on the Run, David Lynch’s Lost Highway, Jennifer Chambers Lynch’s Boxing Helena, and Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America.
This piece was created using aleatoric method/approach and poetic language was used carelessly, unabashedly, often with such extreme force the author found herself shaking simultaneously with utter pleasure and despair. It was a freeing exercise, like running around nude in a random suburban neighborhood at 2 a.m. with a clear squirt gun or picking the first cucumber of the season or even hanging upside down on the monkey bars.
Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
60 Pages
$12.00
Now Available
Lawrence & Gibson
Lawrence & Gibson is a publishing cooperative hailing from New Zealand who have released the work of satirical rake, Richard Meros, wry short stories by William Dewey, the mysterious and notorious Urlich Haarburste’s novel of Roy Orbison in Cling Film, and of course A D Jameson’s Giant Slugs.
Some time ago, a Skype conversation was had between the offices of Mutable and our friends down in Wellington. Hopefully our numbers will only grow! Soon, the world will be full of small publishers holding hands across the globe as they change the very fabric of thought using the tools at their disposal, the printed word in all its pristine glory!
Please, go to their websiteand learn about them and who they are!
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.
What madness is occurring in the infirmary?
Episode 18
A man is face down in a puddle out front. A boy stuck in a crib has somehow worked his way through the doorway. Simone is lost in some other fantastical realm full of trees grinning stupidly. Jack continues to ramble on incomprehensibly as he whispers his concerns to the Grammar Instructor. Will he be shipped off to Zimbabwe?
A new episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies aired on a semi-weekly basis.
LEAVING THE VIRTUAL GHETTO, OR THREAD BARING ITSELF IN NINE POSTS
Mark Amerika
1.
There have been tons of discussions over the last 25 years about The Future of The Book, The Death of The Novel, and the End of Writing As We Know It, but what really concerns me most is the freedom of speech in a multinational, corporate-driven world marketplace. Is our ability to freely express ourselves to the people out there who might want to read us always already predetermined by the economic cronyism of Big Money, Mass Media and Military Might? A reigning market terrorism and globally exclusive mass media culture have disembodied our voices to the point that we no longer find it necessary to communicate on an intelligent basis.
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Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies
in Product
Gabriel Boyer and the Eugene City Players
The year is 1903 and the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies is closed for the summer session, the windows empty, gargoyles and latin script cut into the arched doorways, the buildings now abandoned but for a few who have no other home, a handful of teachers, administrators, and orphans.
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A Mutable Decade
in Product
It was ten years ago this month that we here at Mutable put out our first product, a green vinyl record called, A Journey to Happiness Island. It was just a little joke of an album we wrote and recorded over the course of a weekend with a roomful of friends in a loft in Greenpoint, New York. We had no idea we would still be putting out records and books ten years later.
Mutable began in a diner in Brooklyn Heights over a conversation between myself and Zach Katz. It began in a projectionist’s booth when a local filmmaker gave us the name. It began when we put out a run of books called Seven Short Plays for the Bedroom using Kinko’s and our own efforts at binding. It began when we put out our first album in conjunction with Mr. Records and began when we put out our first professionally bound book, Manifesto I, a collection of manifestoes. It began when I spent a summer performing plays in bedrooms across America and placing Mutable products in bookstores and record shops.
Mutable Sound, which was Mutable Press, and will always be Mutable. Which has become as much a part of me as I am. Which has been a source of uncertainty and rage and adoration and affection, which has brought people together and given me hope when I was otherwise hopeless, through which I have come to know so many wonderful and interesting writers and musicians, has now come to define an entire decade of my life. And so I must commemorate this moment, even if I’m alone in doing it.
Of course I’m not alone. There’s Zach my co-founder and Malcolm Felder my current partner. There are also all the people who have been involved in Mutable projects over the years, or had their projects released through Mutable and by so doing have become members of the Mutable family, artists from across the seas, and writers with a distinctive vision. We continue to experiment with sound and narrative, and continue to entertain ourselves first, and everyone else second.
To commemorate this moment, we have put out a mix of some of our favorite Mutable moments from the past ten years.
-GBoyer
SIDE A
The things that you do (Beta Male); Xylocaine (Paplib); Eyeball one bird none (Beta Male); do that (((plural))) (Crank Sturgeon + Lineland) ; What's Gonna Happen (Box Kites); We Dont Like Cats (The Mice Rock Group Band); Segment from Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies; Fish Cake Attack (Monkey Time Band); Happiness City (Happiness Island); March And June (Animal Hospital);
Problems (Liszts)
SIDE B
Ramses (Rrretrograde) (Swan Dive with Chuck); Night and Day (The Mannerists); Cotton Undergarments (Gabe Boyer & The Thousand Eyes); The French Song (Gabe Boyer & The Thousand Eyes); 5-4-3-2-1 (Gabe Boyer & Malcolm Felder)
Will Grammar Instructor Gundrun accept Jack’s advances despite his invention of pantyholes?
Episode 19
Gundrun must once again announce her absolute and complete lack of interest in Jack and any and all romantic plans he has concocted. Archibold is himself concocting a plan of revenge with his recently resuscitated telepathic monkey. And Headmistress Ursula? Even as she relates intimate details from her past, she continues to weave a web of mind control and other illocal elements.
A new episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies aired on a semi-weekly basis.
Swan Dive With Chuck
Mutable Sound of the Month
Ramses (Retrograde)’s Jason Allen—also of ComoRevi Butterfly and the Blank Bankers—who played on and produced Mutable’s No Place to Die—who has been affiliated with FROG (FRiends Of Gamelan), is a great lover and student of Indonesian music, and is friends with Alex Yoffe among others—has graciously shared his library of casio compositions, and we here at Mutable chose this as one of the saner options. Enjoy!
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.
Luo Brothers, Welcome the world famous brand (2000)
A Purposeful Mistranslation of the Tao Te Ching (3 of 4)
Gabriel Boyer
(The author believes the only “true” translation of the Tao must be a mistranslation, for, as 老子 himself said, 道可道非常道, or ‘Tao as Tao not eternal Tao’. Enjoy this ongoing mistranslation!)
46.
Those who have Tao retreat before horses depositing their excrement upon the neighbor’s lawn. Those who are without Tao are themselves military horses giving birth in the suburbs. The harm is not great for those who are not yet content, and the blame is not great for those who have already obtained their desires.[1] Causing contentment to actually indeed both be enough and always almost but not quite yet sufficient.
47.
You don’t leave your front door yet have knowledge of everything under heaven. You could never spy into the window of enlightenment and still face the heavenly way like an unraveling tongue of light. This journey fills the far reaches, but its knowledge fills few. According to the sacred person, not walk but know, not see but understand, a shell of a man yet become complete.
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Revelation
in Product
“In Revelation, Colin Winnette sets fire to the world, and in the aftermath, characters wander through smoke, struck dumb by devastation. A forceful book — stripped down, cool, and painful — about the absolute peril of desire.”
—Ben Marcus, author of *The Flame Alphabet*, *Notable American Women*, and *The Age of Wire and String*
“Colin Winnette has… made a provocative work by framing the ordinary in the unfathomable.”
—Rosellen Brown, author of *Before and After* and *Civil Wars*
Revelation, Colin Winnette’s debut novel is a startlingly simple, fresh and audacious retelling of the famous biblical apocalypse tale. Winnette’s Revelation is, on the one hand, a very everyday and modern story, in which desperate characters wander and slip from one year to the next, but behind what would otherwise be a mundane detail lies an architecture of the supernatural — a father carries his son to his grandfather’s retirement community, but does so across a parking lot consumed in a plague of locusts, two childhood friends construct a fort from the hull of an enormous ship abandoned by the oceans as they recede, a body falls from the sky as a warning, but only demolishes the deck of a character’s lakeside home.
To us here at Mutable, Colin Winnette seemed to pop out of nowhere a year ago to instantly become a force of some renown among the indie literary world. A Finalist for the 1913 Press First Book Award, Winnette has stirred up notice from all corners for his innovative and striking stories, as well as his various narrative experiments of larger size. However, Revelation is more than just a stylistic exercise, it’s a powerful emotional document.
Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
208 Pages
$12.95
Out of Print
Wonder Woman and The Hammer meet at Thalia
(A S Hamrah, known to us affectionately as “The Hammer”, as in, “And the hammer came down…”, has always astounded us with the precision of his observations and the general power of his critical punch. Recently, he interviewed Lynda Carter, better known as Wonder Woman. The first few paragraphs of this interview can be found below.)
“You look hot.” The first words Lynda Carter spoke to me were a variation of the same ones I had spent more than 30 years waiting to say to her. But Ms. Carter did not mean “hot” that way. What she meant was that I was a mess, and sweating. By the time my long wait to meet her was over—it ended at the Thalia restaurant in midtown on a humid afternoon last Wednesday—I was in rough shape.
I had had a few decades to prepare for this interview with Wonder Woman. When I finally got the chance, the one superpower I possess kicked in—my ability to melt when the dew point hits 60. The closet thing I resembled to a superhero was Frosty the Snowman, in warm weather, two eyes made out of coal swimming in a pool of water.
I had just gotten off a delayed flight at J.F.K. Sitting at the bar waiting for Ms. Carter, wearing the same clothes I had been in for the past 28 hours, during which time I had not slept because the guy sitting next to me on the plane spent the flight jabbing me with his elbow while playing video games on an iPad, I could not be trusted to hold a door for her, much less coherently discuss her days as Wonder Woman on television, her singing gig at Jazz at Lincoln Center’s Allen Room or her new recording, Crazy Little Things. Where was the bartender with that soda water I ordered?
Before he could deliver it, Ms. Carter appeared in the doorway of the restaurant, silhouetted by the noon sun streaming in from Eighth Avenue, outlined like a four-color drawing in a comic book but in 3-D.
[The rest of this article can be found at The New York Observer.]
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 Headmistress’ mind control techniques are very effective.
Episode 20
Confronted by trans dimensional beings, Gundrun at last lets down her guard with Jack. But what is going on back inside the infirmary? And out in the world beyond?
A new episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies aired on a semi-weekly basis.
The Performative Indoctrination Model (2 of 2)
Ray Langenbach
As proclaimed by General Maxwell Taylor: „The lesson of Vietnam was that we were too late in recognizing the extent of the subversive threat. Every young, emerging country must be constantly on alert, watching for those symptoms which, if allowed to develop unrestrained, may grow into a disastrous situation.
„We have learned the need for a strong police force and a strong police intelligence organization to assist in identifying…the symptoms of an incipient subversive situation.“
Corporations and government joined to fund a flock of propaganda and surveillance agencies involved in trade and espionage. **A divided Berlin was the hot focus for these agencies.
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