isten to our three experts pontificating this week on these three issues of sexuality, reality, and dentists on drugs in the 21st century for the first in our series of 3 Things. Mutable’s favorite three curmudgeons are giving their two cents on issues you had no desire to ever know anything about! Check in regularly for more 3 Things!
Michael Lewy’s art exists in spaces that are often bare of even desolation, and utilizes common usually office-related objects to then re-interpret or re-examine them in an abstractified way. There is something very etherealized and conceptualizing about his CGI interpretations of office environments and other equally meaningless spaces, and something appealing too, but my favorite of Lewy’s works always have some sort of story to them—a simple image that suggests some larger story we are missing or a video project that is much about the back-story of his trapped minuscule double for example. (I am thinking of the video projection piece in the City of Work series, that gives us a glimpse of a minuscule Lewy in a CGI workplace dealing with his solitude poorly.)
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Wendy McDermott was walking by a lake. It was her holiday. The sun was shining. She was happy. Her new white t-shirt and her new white jeans. Her twinkling blue eyes. Her bouncing brown hair. Her slender legs. Her long fingers. It was a nice sunny day.
There was nothing she had to do. She didn’t have to go to work. She didn’t have to ride on a crowded bus. She didn’t have to say, ‘You look nice,’ when her colleague asked about her new hair style. She didn’t have to smile at her boss when he told her that her report was full of holes that were big enough for RMS Titanic to go through. She didn’t have to say, ‘Sure,’ when snobby Jackie asked her to have lunch with her. She didn’t have to do the washing-up after supper in her small kitchen. She didn’t have to clean her room with lots of knickknacks.
There were many things she wanted to do. She wanted to drive around and park the car under a big tree and have a nap. She wanted to walk around and sit on the top of a hill and have a nap. She wanted to sleep in as long as she was pleased. She wanted to be up as late as she liked to. She wanted to watch TV if she woke up late at night without worrying about the next day.
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A B S T R A C T
This manifesto outlines a strategy to eradicate suffering in all sentient life. The abolitionist project is ambitious, implausible, but technically feasible. It is defended here on ethical utilitarian grounds. Genetic engineering and nanotechnology allow Homo sapiens to discard the legacy-wetware of our evolutionary past. Our post-human successors will rewrite the vertebrate genome, redesign the global ecosystem, and abolish suffering throughout the living world.
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So here’s a person without cares within the larger care-riddled world, and this person then takes on certain responsibilities. This person is known to have a very irresponsible outlook on life, and this person readily accepts a situation in which being careful and watchful are necessary requirements. This person moves a person they care most about in the world from her familiar environment and off to another less familiar environment. This person has the best of intentions, and we know how those can be paved to build roads that lead to places far from heaven. This is where we are now. It’s called Boston.
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If you’re going to shave down a seal—and I’m seriously not suggesting that you do—you need to pay attention to the contours.
You see, most of a seal is smooth and uncomplicated, a long curlicue like a hairy Nike swoosh. You’ll get lulled into a long careless shave, and that’s when it’ll go wrong. Because there you are, zooming along, and blammo. Flipper changes the angle. You nick that seal right in the fold of his flipper, and then you’ve got a mostly hairless, bleeding, pissed off seal. And once that seal starts thrashing you’re both trapped in an upwelling cycle of blood and resentment.
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It begins with a few good lies. Then something terrible happens and those lies are shattered. You’re looking for someone to blame but also terrified and barreling off into god only knows where when you see something else—maybe a girl on a rock, or a hummingbird midflight, but something—and you see that where you are is just nowhere, and you see where you are for what it is, and everything becomes clear for a moment. You’re going to die someday, and it’s terrifying. This is the album.
These songs were written in the throes of passion, while slinging roe in the Bering Strait, and while staying up all night keeping an eye on an old man named Larry who would occasionally stumble out to the kitchen and ask me where he was. They are songs that were captured in a park outside Beijing, and songs we first charted in a basement in Chicago when the country’s economy was collapsing. One of them is a song I wrote to the woman I ended up marrying. These are personal songs.
Sometimes they twist out of control or nudge off darkly. They are full of my loneliest moments. Once or twice they might sparkle uncertainly.
—Gabriel Chad Boyer
Lyrics by Gabriel Boyer
Music by Normal Feelings
Normal Feelings is
Gabriel Boyer – vocals, organ, keyboard, fun machine
Malcolm Felder – organ, guitar, bass, drums, ciblon, kendhang agen, percussion, backup vocals
Jason Allen – drums, melodica, bass, organ, keyboard, kenong, kempul, peking, percussion, samples
Phil Arezzi – guitar
Piotr Wereszczyński – guitar
Alex Yoffe – celempung, peking, gendèr barung
Dan Katayama – guitar
Paul Medrano – tape ghosts
Michael Gorka – guitar
Recorded in Chicago, IL, Eugene, OR, and Yanjiao, China
Produced by Jason Allen
CDD Pre-Mastering by Scott Craggs.
No Place to Die by Gabriel Chad Boyer and Normal Feelings, released 07 December 2014 1. Schizo Kong 2. Nevada 3. Stolen 4. The Waiting Song 5. Alaska 6. WAD in Space 7. Nervous 8. Train to Hong Kong 9. Grace 10. I fell in Love with a Lady 11.
1. Kelvinhall to Buchanan Street
The Glasgow subway system is an underground railway which is small enough to be disconcerting. The water running on the tracks at Kelvinhall was disorientating, and the bright orange decoration reminded me of the subway in Brussels, New York and Milan. But not London. Yet having spent some time away from the metropolis, to visit another city was reassuring. On the subway I was reading Paul Theroux’s 1975 book The Great Railway Bazaar in which he travels from London across Asia to Japan and back again.
My journey on the subway was 12 minutes long and I almost stayed on longer just to carry on reading. I should perhaps have been studying my fellow passengers in the four carriage trains which circular around the inner ring and outer ring of the Glasgow system. It was enough just to remain in the system, looking up at the same adverts for Glasgow in bright pink. This tropical shade reminded me of the jacket worn by Douglas Dalrymple, a 19th century explorer and businessman. While the painting of him (hanging in the Kelvingrove Museum) may have been over-restored, his pink jacket was unlikely to be something he had ever worn.
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Within the first ten seconds of Bode Radio’s Dust Bowl Masquerade, the album defines itself as a jarring fusion of the exotic and the deranged. In the following twenty seconds you find yourself really enjoying yourself. Then the rug falls out from under you, and it continues to fall out from under you, and over you, and around you, until you are seeing sound in a very different very unsettling way. Dust Bowl Masquerade is both a frenetic piece of cut-up electronica as well as a very groove-oriented album from start to finish. I’d like to say it’s what it would sound like if The Books and Aphex Twin had a baby, but this baby belongs in a species all its own.
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Scientists at SONY CSL Research Laboratory have created the first-ever entire songs composed by Artificial Intelligence: Mister Shadow. What was the inspiration behind the writing? We can only wonder. Welcome to the future!
Those of us who are ourselves involved in manufacturing the sorts of weirdness showcased in the award-winning film Frank are prone to be a little over-sensitive that others are chuckling darkly in corners at our futile efforts. We are the sensitive children others beat with mounds of dung. We are the ones who wore the dung-shirts for the sake of something greater than just coins of refined dung, but rather for the sake of the greater dung god in the sky sort of thing. Even while screaming silly that this omniscient dung being could never exist. What is Frank?
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Gabe, you are writing to me from Tokyo.
Whenever I think of Tokyo, I can’t help but think of the film Lost in Translation. And I’m going there now (mentally) because Bill Murray starred in that film, and one of his great contemporaries, Robin Williams, tragically removed himself from this planet this past week. This also transitions into the questions you’ve asked me about my work, most relevantly, Spiny Retinas, because before Williams’ death, he was interviewed specifically about the perception of the “sad clown” archetype: what did mean to him, how did he relate (sadly, he fully committed to that life role).
I think of this specifically because I often use humor to confront personal challenges and I use it in my work to address the “darkness” of our times, which is what I believe Spiny Retinassomewhat deals with. In past work, I have let this sardonic voice come through a bit (e.g. my e-book from 2012, HONEY IS A SHE, often trails off into dark humor [it deals with going through a divorce]). More so with Spiny Retinas.
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The first thing you incoherent erogenous zones should understand is that there is no apocalypse. The apocalypse already happened, you pleasantly subdued psychologies. There will never be an apocalypse if you keep this up my half-whored verb friends, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t prepare for it like you would prepare for one of your notorious cyclical weddings or any of the other great beginnings or endings of you. It is in this way that your brains become peopled with new and colorful crustaceans of the cartoon variety.
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People are the first indication that you’ve moved from Djuna’s city to Tom’s. People: better to call them figures. They behave in only one way, not the same way but one way each. They’re doing what they do whenever you look. Unobserved they likely hide, lay folded or at length in canisters under the street like tanks of obsolete poison.
The ones wrapped in on themselves may burst with new selenotropic buds that spring up where brows rub wrists. Dirt-caked blooms with stiff seaweed fans, picked by other flowers and other fish into a comb of rigid tendrils. Fed by cool milks of the moon. Fed on white drink with ribbons curling through it, blue and moonflecked like Pierrot’s face.
The ones laid out full-length must grow by diminution, like corpses getting bigger. Their chests will rise to lower points and filter out less yeast; their eyes will sink nearer to the tank’s tarnished surface and take root in metal clefts. With their other flesh laid aside, stretched full elsewhere and eyeless, such eyes would stand like glistened marshland plants. An eye unglassed, unglazed, still shocked by sight, atop a stalk of greasy nerves. And every slump toward the floor makes these bodies longer. When they die, we think, they die as man-shaped patches of damp. Not a fingernail thick, but thirty feet between their toes and the eyes that stand still upright.
Cave paintings made with human soap.
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We believe that your home should make you happy.
We believe that when it comes to decorating, the wife is always right. Unless the husband is gay.
We believe in carbohydrates and to hell with the puffy consequences.
We believe minimalism is a bummer.
We believe handcrafted tchotchkes are life-enhancing.
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In recent years there have been many disasters, but what about the general disaster? “Before the alternative of facing the anarchic growth and total arbitrariness of decay or bowing down before the most rigid, fantastically fictitious consistency of an ideology, the masses probably will always choose the latter and be ready to pay for it with individual sacrifices — and this not because they are stupid or wicked, but because in the general disaster this escape grants them a minimum of self-respect,” (Hannah Arendt; The Origins of Totalitarianism, page 352). This is the quote found on the opening page of Quotilator, C. Cooper’s remarkable game of computational free association, in which various hyper-linked words lead to other quotes, with blue hyper-links being scored at the bottom. You can click the winner button at any time and type your number in to see if you’re a winner, but the answer will always be, “You may be a winner.”
I wanted to know what’s the deal with BJ Thug Life, and so recently I went to a metal show in Beijing with thirty-thousand Chinese stuffed down my pants. By which I mean the currency, not the people. Why I was carrying this brick of cash next to my penis is my own business, but what happened that night is everyone’s business.
Now, I want to be clear about something right from the start. I know nothing about metal. Everything I know about metal, I learned from Wikipedia or overheard in the bars of Oregon. And really, the only reason why I was there that night is because my brother wanted to see some metal, and BJ Thug Life is all I could find.
We were at Yugong Yishan. One of those really swanky really dingy joints, housed inside one of Beijing’s many historic walls. With the classic Chinese lion statue by the door and just a few feet from the gate of the mammoth and presumably ancient estate housed behind that wall. And the room was full of what appeared to be the Chinese version of nerdy seriously overweight ipad-obsessed auteurs, scrawny undergrads, and beefy jocks. (I did catch sight of one or two other actual honest-to-god foreigners. The one near us seemed to be genuinely-ironically getting down with the locals over some serious shredding in downtown Beijing, and the other one I only caught sight of for a moment in a long line of banging heads. He looked malnourished and prone to violence, a scrawny good old boy getting his kicks the only way he knows how, but I’m sure he was a very nice man.) And that sock full of cash was weighing down my crotch. And neither of us had any idea what BJ Thug Life really was or where this brotherhood of hoodlums could be found.
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The United States Civil Disturbance Plan 55-2
The following information was obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The original printing was of June 1, 1984. The information herein is UNCLASSIFIED and does not come within the scope of directions governing the protection of information affecting the national security.
In this document signed by the Secretary of the Army, is hereby assigned as DOD Executive Agent for civil disturbance control operations. Under Plan 55-2 he is to use airlift and logistical support, in assisting appropriate military commanders in the 50 states, District of Columbia, and the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico and US possessions and territories, or any political subdivision thereof.
The official name of this project is called “Operation Garden Plot.”
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Click on Wes to see all our letters to him.
January 25, 2012 2:00pm
Dear Wes Anderson, I heard you took the train from Chicago to southern California. I thought it was kind of cute to hear you don’t like airplanes. They scare me too, somewhat, but not enough so that I can’t ride them. The other night, Brett told us the story. He’d been gone for Christmas to Columbus, Ohio. He didn’t mention the train story until after a couple beers at the kitchen table. I showed him I Love Dick by Chris Kraus—a series of billet-doux glitter bombs from a married couple to a man named Dick.
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The first track of Jonah—of Devil Music Ensemble and Debo Band fame—Rapino’s aptly named and under-appreciated album, High, is a ten-minute meditation that revolves around a reading of Ovid’s Metamorphosis. It has the driving power of Crystal Method—although a Crystal Method that has matured to a more Brian Eno level, a more spiritually complete vision of the musical workings of the universe. This is a music built on the foundation of a JRR-Tolkien-level logic and with a serious psychedelic overbite, and it is a powerful piece of music. It stands out on the album and is a current favorite of mine!
released December 1, 2010 Recorded & mixed at Hardcore Studios JP MA by J Rapino - Mastered by B Wood Instruments Casio SK 1 - Yamaha DX 11 - Yamaha CS 15 - MicroKorg Violin - Lapsteel Guitar - Electric Guitar - Acoustic Guitar Oberheim DMX Drum Machine - Vibraphone - Glokenspiel Guest Artists Farhad Ebrahimi playing drums on Ziggurat Rafi Metz reading Ovid's Metamorphoses on Ziggurat Sebastian Paulson playing drums on Cloud Horse All Songs Jonah Rapino Music ASCAP www.massdist.com www.jonahrapino.com MD95
