This book is about alien sex.
Not imperialist, colonial sex, with human male astronauts dominating winsome green-skinned babes à la Captain Kirk. Nor is it bestial. This is real mutual discovery and understanding between sentient beings. It’s not something you see much in science fiction — in Tiptree’s short stories, admittedly, and to a lesser extent with Heinlein and Delany, although that’s mostly human-on-human stuff. Not that I’m a connoisseur.
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Rock Albany laughed. He stood naked at the edge of a cliff. His windswept hair was neither blond nor red, but black, as black as a melon. His face was like a law of nature, like the call of the herd. He had the mouth of an executed saint.
Rock laughed and shook his head, then dove into the lake far below. He swam easily to the far shore, where he dressed, then strolled down a path. He walked swiftly, with a loose, lazy expertness of motion. He walked down the long road on the sun, the sun’s only road. The sun was his home. He had lived there for seventeen years. Most men would die if they tried to live on the sun. They would burn up at once. Rock laughed at this thought. He found the sun charming. The sun, he thought, has been waiting here just for me. Waiting to be ripped apart by my dynamite and drill. Waiting for the new shape my hands will give it. He would paint it pigeon blue. He would install a Pekinese buttress. He would hand-raise pudgy canaries. Rock liked canaries. Their eyes never missed a thing. They made a man feel as though he did not exist. They stared with a sudden resentment. They knew that they were naked in their cage. They suffered in this world. Rock knew that the canaries would suffer to live inside cages on the sun. He didn’t know how long they would hold out, staring at him with their damned eyes, before they burned up. He would go through a lot of canaries. He’d have to skimp and slave to afford so many. He would need them at once. He resolved to call his best friend and supplier, the Duke. But then he forgot. He didn’t give a damn.
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“But whose mind was it?” They are the terror of all domesticated pets!
It’s the year 1903 and Grammar Instructor Gundrun was asking the Professor of Arcane Knowledge a point concerning gerunds, while Jack must have his fleet of porcelain miniature hot air balloons complete for the Saint Louis World Fair, while all manner of fantastical beings twinkle in the candle light. Much laughter ensues. There are things that can move from rooms to the very idea of rooms.
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.
Originally published in The Open End
For some reason three is a good number. There’s a balance to three, a symmetry that seems to establish an axis. Three is triptych, three is trinity. With a title like REVELATION I feel like trinity is the more applicable to Colin Winnette’s first novel.
It’s a good book. There’s a weight to it that sits heavy and savory, like the first book you ever read.
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Still from the Turin Horse by Béla Tarr (2011)
1. Art manifestos, despite the good intentions of the writer should always “be taken with a grain of salt” as the cliché goes, because they are subject to the ego, pretensions, and plain old ignorance and stupidity of their authors. This goes all the way back to the Die Brücke manifesto of 1906, and continues through time to this one that you’re reading now. A healthy wariness of manifestos is understood and encouraged. However, the ideas put forth here are meant sincerely and with the hope of bringing inspiration and change to others, as well as to myself.
2. Remodernism seeks a new spirituality in art. Therefore, remodernist film seeks a new spirituality in cinema. Spiritual film does not mean films about Jesus or the Buddha. Spiritual film is not about religion. It is cinema concerned with humanity and an understanding of the simple truths and moments of humanity. Spiritual film is really ALL about these moments.
Read MoreOriginally published on The SF Site
To begin with, these short fictions are funny.
They are also experimental, wayward and surreal, any of which might make them seem far more serious and “worthy” than they actually are.
They are not stories in the conventional sense. Some of them may offer a narrative, but if you try to follow them too closely you will find characters change, chronologies wander all over the place, and an obsessive interest in something mundane and irrelevant will suddenly intrude into the text. They take risks with what we expect of our fiction, which is a good thing, but not all the risks pay off, of course. This means it is all too easy to linger over phrase-making or ponder construction, or otherwise consider the success or failure of the individual pieces in some drily academic way. But that would be to miss the simple joie de vivre, the devil-may-care insouciance of the pieces.
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What horrors are occurring in the office of Headmistress Ursula at this very moment?
The year is 1903, and several young scholars are throwing stones at ducks, while boys from the preparatory school down the lane teeter about under the influence of the strong narcotic released when they set fire to the bushes, and all this under the beady gaze of the Headmistress, soon to be joined by Handyman Jack. But what of the Professor of Arcane Knowledge and the monkey on his gurney?
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.
Noctuary (i)
The brass locket, which contained only an empty frame, was the first in a series of ominous love tokens that appeared beneath her window.
*
When he fastened the clasp on her necklace, every nightingale seemed to sing. Their swollen throats and colorless eyes.
*
He reminded her of Petrarch, driven by the necessity of pursuit. The beloved as interchangeable, a vessel. A bird heaving under the weight of an otherworldly song.
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Below is video taken of a rare live performance by Mutable’s mysterious french pop underground sensation, Paplib. The verdict by the e-zine, Subjective: “Paplib : substance extraterrestre dont l’absorption a des effets bénéfiques variés selon le moment de la prise.” [Trans. “Paplib: alien substance whose absorption has beneficial effects varied by time of dosing.”] Paplib’s full album can be found here.
Vidéo : Julien Meynet
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.
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What is Archibald doing to that monkey?
The year is 1903, and Grammar Instructor Gundrun is remembering a time she smoked tobacco products. But what about the monkey? Did Gundrun really squish jellyfish between her toes when she was younger? What is she getting at?
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.
“I want to fall on my face and be done with it, go screeching into an extensive fall, like a car on the outbound direction, the motor on fire and the axle cracked. I want to be so gone that there is nothing anymore to salvage, an old hack at a new game, playing starlings in your direction, while shuddering at myself in the mirror. I want to be the one that they drag from the river in the evening papers and the one that finds you at the gazebo with my tie swaying in the breeze. That’s who I want to be.”
In the summer of 2003, Gabriel Boyer toured America in a 1971 VW Minibus with a woman named Jill. The plan was to perform plays in the bedrooms of strangers from Boston to New Orleans to LA to Seattle and back again—casting these strangers and their friends in an impromptu performance as a deranged neurosurgeon, say, or in an anarchist musical. The plan did not go according to plan.
This book is a journey into the America of a decade ago, and the mind of a single neurotic man and a single unfortunate love affair that never went anywhere even though it went all over America. It was a summer that began beautifully, but what could have been perfect was destined to end in tears. Welcome to Weltschmerz.
A dapper mustachioed man is walking down a dark street when he hears the cries of a woman who is about to be bludgeoned by an axe in a nearby fountain. The man knocks out her assailant only to discover that she is in fact a harpy, a harpy that looks like a bald Klaus Kinski with apple-sized marshmallow-colored breasts. Fascinated, the man takes the beast to his home to shelter and feed it. He soon discovers the Harpy’s insatiable appetite.
This is Harpya! Directed by Raoul Servais, and starring Will Spoor, Fran Waller Zeper and Sjoert Schwibethus. It was introduced to Mutable recently, and quickly went on to become our favorite belgian animated short of 1979. The film can be found below.
HarpyaRaoul Servais metWill Spoor, Fran Waller Zeper, Sjoerd Schwibettus, Palm d'Or Cannes
Some time ago we did a shout out for song poems. Song poems as in song lyrics that have been set to music for a fee, although in our case there was no fee. We simply wanted to recreate a similar outsider aesthetic as can be found in such classics as “Do You Know the Difference Between Big Wood and Brush” and “Blind Man’s Penis (Peace and Love)”.
We got exactly one response from a fellow name of Colin Williamson, and when we did I had completely forgotten about our little post requesting poems to be transformed into song and said, “Well, what do you expect me to do with this? How about sending me some more poems, and then we’ll see.” Only later, did it occur to me that he might have intended his poem to be transformed into a song, and it turned out this was in fact the case.
Some time ago we did a shout out for song poems. Song poems as in song lyrics that have been set to music for a fee, although in our case there was no fee.
We Live in Public (2009), a documentary by Ondi Timoner
1. Markets are conversations.
2. Markets consist of human beings, not demographic sectors.
3. Conversations among human beings sound human. They are conducted in a human voice.
4. Whether delivering information, opinions, perspectives, dissenting arguments or humorous asides, the human voice is typically open, natural, uncontrived.
5. People recognize each other as such from the sound of this voice.
6. The Internet is enabling conversations among human beings that were simply not possible in the era of mass media.
7. Hyperlinks subvert hierarchy.
8. In both internetworked markets and among intranetworked employees, people are speaking to each other in a powerful new way.
9. These networked conversations are enabling powerful new forms of social organization and knowledge exchange to emerge.
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[Our sci fi films are like ads for future Apple products and propaganda for a reductionist view of the present, in which our end is inevitable, and the toys of the rich will become prettier and prettier while the rest of us drown in our own filth. In this letter from the editor I wanted to write about this sci fi present of ours. About the figures who fill it and what functions they serve, the places we’re going and the places that are taking us there, and most importantly about the one thing that is driving it all.]
I. Persons
There are certain persons who contain our fantasy—who, it seems, exist only to act as avatars for those who believe in them and the ideas they represent. Most obvious of course would be your standard everyday politician. In becoming public figures, they also become icons that can then spread in a meme-like way. Or Jesus. But Walt Disney also comes to mind.
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Headmistress Ursula pictured here when she was much younger and wilder.
Handyman Jack has just accused the Headmistress of eating the ears off living pigs, while Archibald is also revealing some unsavory bit of business to the Grammar Instructor. But what of the boy currently under the influence of the psychedelic fumes emitted by the bushes he had set fire to? What of Simone and Boo Boo?
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.
Delve into the article below by Mutable’s own Lina Vitkauskas, and at the bottom you will find a string of poems that were inspired by a chapbook that was inspired by a film.
I first saw Fando y Lis in 2001. The film is set in a post-apocalyptic world in which the main characters—lovers Fando and Lis—search for a mythical land, Tar, where it is said that all dreams come true. The film documents the journey to Tar—lays before the viewer a series of exquisitely odd and profoundly symbolic experiences; if dreams come true in Tar, it is no matter if we ever arrive, for dreams are fulfilled simply observing the unfolding excursion. The film itself is a poet’s dream—a grand pageant of formidable imagery: burning pianos and high-society aristocrats wandering barren landscapes littered with demolished structures, once beacons of culture/civilization; marionette shows illustrating the rape of innocence; canned peach-testicle metaphors and gaggles of erotic women and transvestites tempting the characters away for moments of sensual curiosity; mud nudes meshing with one another in the soft earth: flower consumption, body-painting, and melodramatic, reclining graveyard poses—a whirlwind of remarkable hallucinations strung together, coupled with intriguing and affected dialogue.
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You’re always off and away in the airy confines of your skull, like a sparrow trapped in the tiniest cage—that keeps burrowing deeper into the subatomic field in its effort to escape this unfortunate cage—and in general always searching for another crack to crawl into within that fifth wall delineates the back end of your brain. You got hands behind this aforementioned backdrop of your mental operating theater and they’re messing around with the flickering remnants of your dreams while your one sweetest hope is just to see the light over the hilltop at the end of this long night. You erotic ornithologist you.
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Illustration by Dorothy P. Lathrop for Walter de la Mare's Three Mulla-Mulgars (1919)
On the borders of the Forest of Munza-mulgar lived once an old grey fruit-monkey of the name of Mutt-matutta. She had three sons, the eldest Thumma, the next Thimbulla, and the youngest, who was a Nizza-neela, Ummanodda. And they called each other for short, Thumb, Thimble, and Nod. The rickety, tumble-down old wooden hut in which they lived had been built 319 Munza years before by a traveller, a Portugall or Portingal, lost in the forest 22,997 leagues from home. After he was dead, there came scrambling along on his fours one peaceful evening a Mulgar (or, as we say in English, a monkey) named Zebbah. At first sight of the hut he held his head on one side awhile, and stood quite still, listening, his broad-nosed face lit up in the blaze of the setting sun. He then hobbled a little nearer, and peeped into the hut. Whereupon he hobbled away a little, but soon came back and peeped again. At last he ventured near, and, pushing back the tangle of creepers and matted grasses, groped through the door and went in. And there, in a dark corner, lay the Portingal’s little heap of bones.
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