Diaries of a Garish Amateur: Disinherited of the Earth

January 12, 2021 in Article, Diariesofagarishamateur, Series

John Wilmes

My friend Bradshaw’s been out of a home for some weeks now. A year or so ago, the owner of the building Bradshaw rented in, in Chicago, was foreclosed upon—and not just in Bradshaw’s building. The owner was held up to a debt in the range of thirty million dollars, spread across many foreclosed-upon properties, and he thus fled to his native Ukraine.Success, that indomitable wall of my imagination. It’s a wall I so want to climb, however hard it may be, however long it may take, however much blood it spills from me to scale it. I so want to publish plentifully, to perform my thinking and craft for a living; I so want to be something like my own master—I want this more than anything. But I’d have to know where this wall even is, first. Because as things stand, I can’t be quite sure that I’m even running in its direction; I’m shrouded by the fog of not knowing, handed down to me by my working-class family, and extenuated by the lack of ambition that’s defined most of my young life.

The Subgenius Manifesto

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

J.R. “Bob” Dobbs

“Time Control? You’ve come to the right place…”

ARE YOU ABNORMAL?

Then you are probably BETTER than most people!
IF you suspect that things are much worse than you ever suspected—

IF the only thing you’ve been able to laugh at for the last 5 years is the fact that NOTHING is funny anymore—

IF you sometimes want to collar people on the street and scream that you’re more different than they could possible *imagine*—

IF you can possibly help us with a donation—

IF you see the whole universe as one vast morbid sense of sick humor—

IF the current “Age of Progress” seems more like the Dark Ages to you—

IF you are looking for an inherently contradictory religion that will condone megadegeneracy and yet tell you that you are “above” everyone else—

Then…
THE CHURCH OF THE SUBGENIUS

could *save your sanity!*

This is Not a Review: of Henry Green

January 12, 2021 in Article, This is not a Review, Feature

Gabriel Boyer

Henry Green was the pseudonym for Henry Vincent Yorke, and the author of ten books, most of which are truly remarkable, all short and each one written in its own distinctive dialect. His writing lives in a remarkable place, between the outlandish experiments of Joyce and the everyday exactitude of Graham Greene. He has been categorized as a WWII British voice, but I like to think of him more as a candle in the dark?

Why a candle in the dark?

Henry Green does something that we here at Mutable are very fond of. His books contain experimental elements, but they are framed as traditional storytelling of the Graham Greene variety. This is what makes him such an anachronism.

Amazing Adult Fantasy by A D Jameson

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Jonah Vorspan-Stein

Originally Published in the Noo Journal, Issue 13

AD JAMESON’S Amazing Adult Fantasy opens with a brief indictment: “Fiction may be the worst thing about the 21st century.” The stories that follow—fabled, sardonic, sharp—venture to strip fiction of its conventions, substituting in their place a new narrative logic: one that brandishes an acute playfulness and grandiose sentiment, one of mustachios and infatuation, the most mature kind of absurdity. These are stories about obsessions and deficiencies, about people who glare every bit of themselves, who feel the world on its largest scales. In these stories, astronaut Buzz Aldwin falls into the bad graces of NASA, a girl shares her various and mutually exclusive truths about Oscar the Grouch, and Bronx monkeys devote themselves to preserving earth’s aurora borealis. While these are certainly stories of insistent and shifting forms, they are also stories that always endeavor to a literary beauty.

*Archibald keeps appearing in the strangest places. Will he ever find the gymnasium?*

Episode 7

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

Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies

The girls have a lesson in logic soon, but why did Simone’s mommy and daddy have to die? Archibald’s head pops up in the center of the pond and disappears. The Grammar Instructor suddenly appears to be sporting a goiter. “You all disgust me,” she shouts.

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.

Pelog Quarrel

January 12, 2021 in Podcast, Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature

Mutable Sound of the Month

Alex Yoffe looks like someone who grew up on a farm. He also happens to be a composer of the weird and the inexplicable. His compositions are bound by no tradition, from the Far East to experimental electronica. We here at Mutable first discovered Yoffe in a church in Hyde Park.

We were attending a night of gamelan music put on by the Friends of the Gamelan in Chicago, or FROG. Yoffe plays with the group and one of the compositions was his. It was during his composition a certain highly-strung Mutable Sound editor started literally hyperventilating as result of the sheer wall of emotion brought on by the piece.

Of course most of Yoffe’s compositions are not strictly in the javanese tradition, but do utilize aspects of this genre of musicmaking as well as others, but for our Mutable Sound of the Month, we did choose one of his more Javanese compositions, although don’t be fooled. He also performs his own brand of electronica under the moniker Bode Radio in bars around Chicago. Of course his various projects all bleed together as even a cursory glance will show you.

Written for a full Javanese Gamelan Ensemble in the Pelog tuning system. This is a recording of the premiere performance which took place in Hyde Park, IL at the Hyde Park Union Church from Sounds (headphone friendly), track released June 15, 2012Thanks to Friends of the Gamelan for making this performance and recording possible!

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.

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Video: Lookwell

January 12, 2021 in Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

This amazing show was co-written by Conan O’Brien and Robert Smigel, and never got beyond the initial pilot. Adam West stars as a washed-up TV action hero—who at the peak of his career was ceremonially deputized by local law enforcement and now falsely believes he can solve crimes in real life. Check it out below!

Rejected TV Pilot that would have been hilarious if smarter people were in charge.This is from an actual Network Screener which I cleaned up even more and ma...

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.

Last Week's Broadcast

January 12, 2021 in Excerpt, Story, Series, Bedroom Theater

Gabriel Boyer

[The excerpt below is from Mutable’s most recent release, a memoir of the summer Boyer spent touring America with a woman named Jill, performing plays with strangers in their bedrooms as the two made their way south to New Orleans, west to LA, and north to Seattle, the madness that ensued, and how it all began.]

Bedroom Theater began when my roommate changed the light bulb in my bedroom, or rather, it began when he pointed out to me that he had changed the light bulb and for a moment I thought the bare bulb made my room look like an experimental theater space or heroin den, and then I thought that I should do that someday (start an experimental theater in my bedroom not start doing heroin) and then I forgot, for I was constantly slipping in and out of depression in those days, or rather, mostly slipping in and very rarely slipping out of the yearlong depression I was at that moment in the middle of. Most days it would take me a good half hour to put on one sock and even when I was fully clothed in socks, I would still spend hours sitting in the dark of my room contemplating literally nothing while staring at the brick wall facing my couch and the word “Safety” painted on it and above my queen-sized bed.

From the Language of Form and Color

January 12, 2021 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Wassily Kandinsky

To begin with, let us test the working on ourselves of individual colours, and so make a simple chart, which will facilitate the consideration of the whole question.

Two great divisions of colour occur to the mind at the outset: into warm and cold, and into light and dark. To each colour there are therefore four shades of appeal — warm and light or warm and dark, or cold and light or cold and dark.

Generally speaking, warmth or cold in a colour means an approach respectively to yellow or to blue. This distinction is, so to speak, on one basis, the colour having a constant fundamental appeal, but assuming either a more material or more non-material quality. The movement is an horizontal one, the warm colours approaching the spectator, the cold ones retreating from him.

Two Things Struck Me: A Review of Jameson's Amazing Adult Fantasy

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Jeff Bursey

Originally published at The Quarterly Conversation

We’re in an unimaginative period when many readers prefer memoirs to fiction. Perhaps there’s something in Canadians and Americans that demands fiction to mirror life, to provide a perspective on how to live, like one would download an app designed to locate chain restaurants in foreign cities. Imaginative writing, so newspaper reviews would lead one to believe, has its best home in science fiction and fantasy titles. The serious novels—written by Philip Roth and James Ellroy, for example—don’t stray far from realism, unless you’re Spanish, South American or Salman Rushdie. When was the last time you picked up the local paper and saw a long review of a book that didn’t pretend to tell you exactly how this or that occupation was carried out in the 1540s, or describe minutely the way clothes were worn in 19th-century Wales? When was the last time an author’s style, above all other elements of a book, received praise in that same paper for its vocabulary, fresh metaphors, complex sentences, and the use of adverbs and adjectives, without once mentioning plot?

*This is how Grammar Instructor Gundrun sees all of you.*

Episode 8

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

Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies

The year is 1903 and Jack just had a strange notion. He is sweet sometimes. They may even munch on some lettuce. They will leave out the back door, but their play is doomed to be interrupted by the very illogical Simone. And what of Archibald? Is it true he is performing his obeisance in a less than private place? Is Gundrun become unhinged? And what is it comes from the wound?

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: For Bradford, Saint of Me

January 12, 2021 in Article, Diariesofagarishamateur, Series

John Wilmes

Success, that indomitable wall of my imagination. It’s a wall I so want to climb, however hard it may be, however long it may take, however much blood it spills from me to scale it. I so want to publish plentifully, to perform my thinking and craft for a living; I so want to be something like my own master—I want this more than anything. But I’d have to know where this wall even is, first. Because as things stand, I can’t be quite sure that I’m even running in its direction; I’m shrouded by the fog of not knowing, handed down to me by my working-class family, and extenuated by the lack of ambition that’s defined most of my young life.

Moon Child's Dream Dictionary

January 12, 2021 in Story, Feature

Lesley Dixon

[Appendix: Recurring Nightmares]

Knife

(See also: Mack the Knife, teen dance craze, penetration.) Knives symbolize power. The knife is a phallus. If you are cut with a knife, you are afraid of a man in your life. If you are stabbed with a knife, you feel intimidated by a work situation. If you are chased down an alley into a dead-end and stabbed with a knife, you are afraid of the death of your parents. If you cut yourself with a knife, you are looking for release. If you cut yourself with a knife and you do not bleed, you are lacking in vitamins. Moon Child suggests drinking tart cherry juice, and calling your father on the phone. Note: in non-American cultures, the knife may symbolize entirely different vital organs, and this guide should be translated into other languages only at great risk to the Dreamer.

Interview of Colin Winnette in The The

January 12, 2021 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

(Author Colin Winnette, whose novel, Revelation, was put out by Mutable last Fall, is interviewed below by The The’s Brian Chappell.)

Brian: What authors and styles have shaped you?

Colin: Influence is a tricky thing to talk about. I can say that Ben Marcus’s work was extremely important to me. It still is, but at one point it totally saved me. Or, reinvigorated me. I was finishing up undergrad and I was in love with writers like Beckett, Proust, Chekhov, Joyce, Kafka, these iconic figures who did what they were doing so masterfully that there seemed nowhere to go at all after that. That was also the result of my age at the time and what being in school can do to you. I didn’t realize it then, but I had a pretty narrow vision of what it meant to be a writer and what one could do with fiction. But then I picked up Age of Wire and String and Notable American Women and I was just totally blown away. It was an entirely different approach to working with and examining language than I had ever encountered before. Those books led me to Gertrude Stein and William Gaddis and all of these authors who were breaking language apart, yes, but also reclaiming it, making it do new and fascinating things. And, I mean, they had been doing this for a long time and in different ways, and here was Ben Marcus doing it still in his own way and just killing it. So I suddenly felt very free again. It’s interesting the difference between grad school and undergrad. In undergrad I was constantly being told what good writing looked like. It looks like Carver. It looks like Chekhov. It looks like Pynchon (and indeed it does!). It looks like Austen. Etc. Workshops were little help because they were often the same kind of thing: I think you should do this, or I think this should happen, etc. Initially I lacked the confidence to assert myself. Then, when I gained a little confidence, I asserted myself by just ignoring pretty much everybody and only listening to the 2% I thought made sense or seemed to come from a good place. I started to tune a lot out. So I left undergrad fed-up, but with a lot of energy. I wrote and worked and traveled and didn’t write and two years later I went to grad school with a much different attitude. I used that time to write as much as possible. I listened to people and read as much as I could, but took the whole thing less…personally, I guess…than before. I took it seriously, but I knew the conversations we were having in class were often selfish in that we were all interested in enhancing our work by discussing the work of others. Helping one another wasn’t exactly the point, although we certainly did help one another from time to time. And I should say I think all that’s great. The two most important things grad school gave me were time and a sense of purpose. I felt encouraged to work and I had the hours in the day to do it. Or if I didn’t have them, I made them because I knew my time was limited. I taught myself how to make time to write. I was writing a lot on the train and in bed my first year. I wouldn’t let myself sleep until I had done a certain amount of work. I’m not sure I would have had that kind of discipline at first if I weren’t in a program. Now, it comes much more naturally. I had to learn how to kick my own ass.

The End of the World: A Review of Colin Winnette's Revelation

January 12, 2021 in Press, Feature

Steve Himmer

Originally published in the Steve Himmer Blog

Revelation, a novel by Colin Winnette, is a story about the end of the world in which, somehow, the apocalypse isn’t the biggest thing going. The story follows a core of three friends (Marcus, Colin, and Tom) from youth to old age as they lead ordinary lives in the midst of exploding trees, vanished oceans, plagues of locusts, and the Four Horsemen. Mundane traumas like a lost teenage girlfriend are more devastating to these characters than a lost ocean, and the vast wasteland of dead, rotting fish left behind as it dries are taken as a wretched novelty but not much of a warning.

Episode 9

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

Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies

The thing dug into her flesh and she had to cut it out, but what happened to the other boys? And a dark cloud has consumed the school. Perhaps Archibald is at the bottom of this. When last we saw him he was covered in monkey guts and murmuring in a strange tongue. Headmistress Ursula will deal with this.

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

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.