Video: Dr. Doowop

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

Below is a short film about Mutable author, William Levy (1939, Brooklyn, New York), and his notorious radio show, The Dr. Doowop show. Levy is an author, publisher and pioneer of independent erotic media, who currently lives in Amsterdam where he has the only doowop radio show in Europe. We have been honored to reprint his writing on Otto Muehl and Christian Loidl, and now we are honored to showcase the above documentary about the life and times of William Levy, and his radio persona Dr. Doowop. It’s a film about radical media, loneliness and eternal love, absurdity and close harmony music. ‘There’s nothing that makes you feel so alive as getting a death threat.’ Indeed.

'There's nothing that makes you feel so alive as getting a death threat.' What do cigarettes and erotic literature have to do with close harmony music? They come together in The Dr. Doowop Show, the only doowop radio show in Europe. This documentary shows the Dr.Doowop in his habitat in Amsterdam.

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.

William Levy (d.2019) was more than an author we were privileged at one time to know. He also would on occasion give us well appreciated advice. He will be missed.

A Statement of Principles

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Twelve Southerners

The authors contributing to this book are Southerners, well acquainted with one another and of similar tastes, though not necessarily living in the same physical community, and perhaps only at this moment aware of themselves as a single group of men. By conversation and exchange of letters over a number of years it had developed that they entertained many convictions in common, and it was decided to make a volume in which each one should furnish his views upon a chosen topic. This was the general background. But background and consultation as to the various topics were enough; there was to be no further collaboration. And so no single author is responsible for any view outside his own article. It was through the good fortune of some deeper agreement that the book was expected to achieve its unity. All the articles bear in the same sense upon the book’s title-subject: all tend to support a Southern way of life against what may be called the American or prevailing way; and all as much as agree that the best terms in which to represent the distinction are contained in the phrase, Agrarian versus Industrial.

Excerpts from My Time: Using Men's Words Against Them

January 12, 2021 in My Time, Series

Dagmar Ottenham

Ingredients for this My Time: Barbeque chips (the diet CANCEROUS-BUT-WHO-CARES-YOU-CAN-EAT-MORE kind), vodka, listing, and humor that straighter men won’t find funny.

After something called a “Progressive Dinner Party” that people who eat delicious food LIKE IT DOESN’T HAVE CALORIES in it invited me to—a lovely affair of the most civil, dignified kind, where the women’s lipstick and shoes were above par from other social gatherings I’ve endured—then, a later look around the bar for a swarthy yet religious man that might be pillaged for his credit cards and body… (I do love the look of religious garb.)

The Other Way Around's Sado Okesa

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature

Mutable Sound of the Month

The Other Way Around is a local Chicago underground musical phenomenon comprising Jason Allen, Patrick van Slee, Dan Katayama, and Piotrek Wereszczyński. Among their current repertoire, this song stands out as a truly weird and wonderful thing. It is a cover of a traditional Japanese song. Pat, who knows no Japanese, transcribed the lyrics as best he could, and Dan, who knows a little more Japanese, says it’s fairly accurate. But we here at Mutable are not interested in cultural accuracy, but in psychedelic ridiculosity, and regardless of its truthful rendering of a wonderful folk song, this thing certainly cuts my brainstem a new peephole if you know what I’m saying.

The Other Way Around Sado Okesa, released 23 April 2013

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.

Episode 10

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Series, Twilight at the College

Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies

A “bear” nursery is a very solemn place. The narrator knows these fantastical creatures in disturbing detail. Beware!

Mutable Sound Chicago, Illinois Mutable Sound is an online gallery for sound and word located in Chicago, IL. We are dedicated to publishing works in all genres, from the dense and inextricable to the light-hearted and absurd, and release albums that are experiments more than anything else, without being particularly experimental.

A new episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies aired on a semi-weekly basis.

How PKD is the New World Order?

January 12, 2021 in Article, Letter from the Editor, Feature

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?

Diaries of a Garish Amateur: Retail Therapy

January 12, 2021 in Article, Diariesofagarishamateur, Series

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.

The Fourth Way

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Series

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.

Illustration by Dorothy P. Lathrop for Walter de la Mare's Three Mulla-Mulgars (1919)

Ten Thousand Faces

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

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.

Building Innovative Teams: A Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

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?

*What witchery has Headmistress Ursula performed upon the young scholars?*

Episode 11

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Series, Twilight at the College

Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies

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

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Series

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.

Hyperresolution

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Series

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.

My Asinine Life: What Spirit's Hidden in this Unraveling Brain

January 12, 2021 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.

Excerpts from My Time: Put a Horn on It

January 12, 2021 in My Time, Series

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).

Episode 12

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Series, Twilight at the College

Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies

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

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, Series

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.

Colin Winnette reading from Revelation!

January 12, 2021 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!

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

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.

We Live in Public (2009), a documentary by Ondi Timoner — *Consider Your Grandmother's Stays, Mina Loy (1916)*

Mina Loy's Aphorisms on Futurism

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

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.

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.

William Levy (d.2019) was more than an author we were privileged at one time to know. He also would on occasion give us well appreciated advice. He will be missed.

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.

A new episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies aired on a semi-weekly basis.

Kaylea Hascall

A new episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies aired on a semi-weekly basis.

A new episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies aired on a semi-weekly basis.

Michael S. Judge

Paperback Book8" x 5.25"208 Pages$12.95Out of Print

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.

Product

Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
208 Pages
$12.95
Out of Print