A “bear” nursery is a very solemn place. The narrator knows these fantastical creatures in disturbing detail. Beware!
What is happening to us?
How PKD is the New World Order?
Letter from the Editor
It’s Saturday night and I’m drinking alone while contemplating drones and metadata; complacent celebrity culture staring its own collapse in the face with remarkable calm and indifference and the various potential proofs for a multiverse I’ve been reading up on lately; wars over natural resources and increasingly more extreme weather all the time and the civil unrest that goes along with it and the NSA just trying to plan ahead with its massive domestic surveillance program we’ve all been hearing about recently thanks to Mr. Edward Snowden. And in the back of my mind, there’s always Philip K Dick, like a critic in the corner. Specifically, how PKD is the New World Order?
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Diaries of a Garish Amateur: Retail Therapy
John Wilmes
on above me, at all times, humming and gaudy through all of my hours on this MacBook. I’m searching desperately for the magical link, to get the least fuzzy, least choppy, and least commercial-addled illegal stream of a pro basketball game. My team the Bulls is in even worse sorts than I am. I’d tell you about it, if it didn’t completely debilitate my soul.
I smoke as much weed as I can find, but I can’t find much.
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Ouspensky’s mentor, Georgy Gurdjieff
The Fourth Way
P. D. Ouspensky
BEFORE I BEGIN TO EXPLAIN TO YOU in a general way what this system is about, I want particularly to impress on your minds that the most important ideas and principles of the system do not belong to me. This is chiefly what makes them valuable, because if they belonged to me they would be like all other theories invented by ordinary minds—they would give only a subjective view of things.
When I began to write A New Model of the Universe in 1907, I formulated to myself, as many other people have done before and since, that behind the surface of the life which we know lies something much bigger and more important. And I said to myself then that until we know more about what lies behind, all our knowledge of life and of ourselves is really negligible. I remember one conversation at that time, when I said, ‘If it were possible to accept as proven that consciousness (or, as I should call it now, intelligence) can manifest itself apart from the physical body, many other things could be proved. Only it cannot be taken as proved.’ I realized that manifestations of supernormal psychology such as thought transference, clairvoyance, the possibility of knowing the future, of looking back into the past, and so on, have not been proved. So I tried to find a method of studying these things, and worked on that line for several years, but the results were very elusive; and though several experiments were successful, it was almost impossible to repeat them.
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Ten Thousand Faces
E C Large
It is an eerie and a horrible experience to be in attendance on a stand at a Flower Show, day after day, and to watch the staring faces that come to rest before my exhibits and then move on. From right to left, from left to right they pass, these faces, propelled with hesitating pace and starkly turned towards me. I watch them, because I cannot help but do so, and in the day’s reckoning I have looked into perhaps five, perhaps ten thousand human faces.
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Building Innovative Teams: A Manifesto
Kaylea Hascall
Imagine: One fine morning, the boss walks into your office and says “I need your group to be more innovative.” Hmm. What does she mean by that statement? How are you supposed to go “be innovative”? What questions do you ask her about this new mandate? Can you do it? Can your staff?
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What witchery has Headmistress Ursula performed upon the young scholars?
Episode 11
Archibald the Professor of Arcane Knowledge and the Headmistress Ursula are currently facing off in the bowels of the school. The boy has returned to himself only to find he is trapped in a crib, his thoughts on a girl with a polka dot brassiere and how he will never see her again. But what of Jack? Does Simone know some secret to this seemingly innocuous handyman?
A new episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies aired on a semi-weekly basis.
Imagining Privatised Parts
Richard Meros
Privatised parts would look something like this: an individual surveys her preferences and enters her desires as data into a machine that is apt at recording and memorising all intimate ideas. Her mind will be recorded in various qualitative sessions, her data stored as vast quantitative sweeps, and her energies directed towards a lover, or a group of lovers, who satisfy her present condition and who are likely to parallel the trajectory of her expected desires. A primitive system named Lex Sexualis will try the formula of ultimate availability for one citizen for any other citizen, but the project will derail other concerns of the state. Abandoning Lex Sexualis means abandoning all idea that the individual instinct should be able to choose their lovers. Lovers will still choose their lovers, and any other one human will be an option, but the choices will be made from the results of a vast survey of the human body and mind. Without intimate specialised knowledge this part of the love finding sounds difficult, but it is merely technique.
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Hyperresolution
Clark Cooper
Technology has advanced again, and your father feels out of date having all his boxes of old photographic slides sitting around when you could scan them for him and keep them electronically. You are scanning the slides. If you scan them at very low resolution—say one pixel per image—the job will be very efficient and quick but you get more or less nothing; a plain block that averages the colors of the whole picture. As you increase the resolution you get images that look less and less chunky, then less and less blurry, then more and more like the picture, and pretty soon you have something that to any unaided eye pretty much is the picture.
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My Asinine Life: What Spirit's Hidden in this Unraveling Brain
in Article, My Asinine Life, Series
Gabriel Boyer
I’m sitting in an abandoned department store on a Thursday night and listening to the Bee Gees and Danny Elfman and feeling very confident of the future that keeps rolling around and around before my eyes like a perpetual motion slot machine. The future is a snake trying to walk backwards. And in the eye of this storm of second sight, I can see so clearly how I will be married and go back to school, and my wife and I will have children, but will I become a warlord in the Middle East at some point in my later years? This has yet to be determined.
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Excerpts from My Time: Put a Horn on It
Dagmar Ottenham
Ingredients for this My Time: an elk horn, a whale abalone, 3 shaken vodka martinis, super glue, a hammer, shells (pref abalone).
Every elegant lady knows how to make a lot out of a little, but it’s finding that time to show such class in one’s home that is hard to learn how to do. This is why multitasking was invented in the 1970s (along with a widespread use of cocaine combined with a pre-AIDS/post-BirthControl era; indeed, there was much multitasking).
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He remembers Jack well.
Episode 12
Jack grew up as a carny in the circus and was well-loved by the tattooed lady. But what happened to his sister? What strange meats did he consume in the forest? Did he indeed fall in love with a clown? Find out!
A new episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies aired on a semi-weekly basis.
Ubixic
Michael S. Judge
ubixic [ubi’∫ikʔ], n.: the “reading” or signification of a sign
(Quiché Mayan)
Diviners are semioticians by profession; they start from signs (etal), in this case signs that take forms other than those of spoken words, and try to arrive at a “reading,” as we would say, or ubixic, “its-being-said” or “an announcement,” as is said in Quiché.
—Dennis Tedlock, The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2011), p. 132.
~
Black boughs etch the nightblue’s magnet fluid. A fleshed lithograph: how wasp-star veined our eyes.
The photographs of undeveloped cities still lie in wellwater’s black feather-silt. Compost of river-birds and what of river they managed to take with them. This is a linguistics: etymon was water cutting through the continental shelf, and now syllable will molt, and now vowel’s bone or system of cartilage locks will spread out the homology of wing drowned in the meat of different hands.
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Colin Winnette reading from Revelation!
in Podcast
Colin Winnette, Mutable author, recently informed us that he got engaged in Prague and to celebrate we’re putting the first chapter of his remarkable novel, Revelation, up for audio download.
Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
208 Pages
$12.95
Out of Print
Video: Smash putt!
In the Mutableye
The industrial artists of The Department of Culture re-apply and reinvent their practiced predilection for mechanized mayhem to the humble sport of miniature golf. Forget everything you would normally expect from this national past time and be prepared for innovative chaos teetering on pure bedlam. Smash Putt, originally opened in Seattle, has since moved on to Portland, and soon Denver, CO.
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Consider Your Grandmother's Stays, Mina Loy (1916)
Mina Loy's Aphorisms on Futurism
Manifesto of the Month
On the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, various poets read from their favorite Futurist Manifestos. Charles Bernstein chose to read from Mina Loy’s Aphorisms on Futurism.
Before Valerie Solanas coined her S.C.U.M. Manifesto, Mina Loy was writing on the emancipation of women, specifically in her Feminist Manifesto, a call for social and economic reform in the lives of women. Lifelong friends with Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein and one time lover of Futurist leader Filippo Marinetti, Loy is known primarily as a striking poet, artist, and thinker. The below reading was recorded on February 20, 2009 in the public space of MOMA’s Garden Lobby.
Download or listen below.
The manifesto as a literary art form is often forgotten, but we here at Mutable have had the audacious notion of collecting these remarkable objects for our Manifesto of the Month series.
We Don't Like Cats
Mutable Sound of the Month
The Mice Rock Group Band consists of Ray Davis (vox), Gabriel Boyer & Danyel Johnson (synth), and Mike Tolman (drums). It has had other members in the past, but always with Mr. Davis on lead vox, and Mr. Davis was always the inspiration and the reason for the rest of us to be there. His ideas, always versatile and pinging about the room, about whatever thread of thought he was stringing through his fingers.
That we could capture this moment with Mr. Davis is truly a blessing, and although we here at Mutable have not seen him for many years now, he should know that he is often in our thoughts, his delightful banter, and his occasional back seat serenade. If I had my way, Mr. Davis’ songs would be popping up on every radio, crackling through the fuzz as the car veered a corner down some blue highway. It’s a tragedy that he’s been lost somewhere in the sticks of Oregon, but he is not forgotten. His vision lives on!
The below recording is from an afternoon in May in which for once we all were able to bring it together and capture Ray as he freewheeled from song to song. Here is one of the highlights from that afternoon.
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.
What happened to Simone’s parents?
Episode 13
Boo Boo has gone rushing off into the marsh and has found a strange nest of unnatural things. We learn secrets of both Jack and Simone that we do not know. For the most part, Archibald’s colleagues have been very kind and courteous about his new tentacle arm, bu not everyone!
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: Happy Hour
John Wilmes
I’m playing piano at a bar. It’s just 7 PM on a summer Tuesday in Chicago, and I’m sort of drunk in my sky-blue tie.
I don’t really know how to play piano, in any sort of academic sense, but I know that if you’re hitting, exclusively, the white keys, and that if you’ve got a sense of rhythm, and that if you’ve got anything like a ‘feel’ that then—then you can’t really go too wrong. This much has gotten me dates with girls I didn’t really like, at this bar in the near-northwest side of Chicago; this much is keeping me company with myself in this bar, with two old men and a blaring TV screen.
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An Excerpt of Revelation
Colin Winette
From the cliff, it looked like an enormous pecan shell. As they climbed down the rocks, Marcus could better see the soggy outline of each broken plank. Below them was a wooden hull, flipped on its side.
The old water had worn a smooth stone grotto into the cliff set. It also left pieces of a ship there.
Most of the planks came loose with a tug. Marcus removed four pieces and laid them beside one another on the stone at their feet.
“This ship,” Colin said, “was a model ship.”
“How do you mean?” Marcus rearranged the boards into a square, brought together the corners. “It was a battleship or something.”
“Someone built it like a battleship. Someone built this thing to look exactly like a Roman battleship. See, these are the oarlocks, below deck, because warriors didn’t row. Slaves did.”
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