This week on 3 Things, we talk about millennials, insomnia, and healers in strange places. We continue to whine in the tradition of the aging everywhere. Keep listening! And watch Jacob’s Ladder! We may no longer understand what’s happening in pop culture, but … watch Jacob’s Ladder! And keep listening.
What is Crimethink?
Crimethink can be reached from the subway station only by means of a daring double somersault. It is only a multiple orgasm away from the checkout counter of the grocery store, and a mere lobbed brick distant from the witness bench of the courtroom, but it is much harder to access from the closed playpens of your homes, schools, workplaces, and punk rock clubs—only a mystical revelation or masterless revolution will suffice. Crimethink riots rather than diets, so as to love itself body and soul.
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This week on 3 Things, we look at the top 3 musical acts of 2016, the great youtube enthusiasts, including MRE food critics, rat feces infested TV repairmen, and true macguivers with elaborate means for making fire, as well as the best deaths, because, if there’s one thing you can say about 2016, it was a year of death! For a complete playlist of videos and music discussed in this podcast go here. Also. Apologies for the pops and blips! We had a few technical issues this week.
Falling Boxes is the product of a summer spent in a circle making sounds with drums and boom sticks and piano and keyboard and recorder and harmonica and meshing all these sounds together into a single larger hodge podge of sound. It is a collaboration of very different hands and a chaos only barely twisted into a variety of shapes. Mutable’s own Gabriel Boyer worked with the men and woman at Outside the Lines Studio to record covers from the distant past and the recent present, as well as extended freak-outs that sometimes went nowhere, but every once in a while went somewhere amazing! This is a sound collage of raw material and it is yet another unusual weird-o masterpiece, with all proceeds going to the Outside the Lines Studio!
Outside the Lines Studio is a day-program for developmentally disabled adults, in which persons create works of art that then go on sale in the gallery attached, and this sound project is no different. All proceeds will go back to the program itself. We here at Mutable are very proud to have had the privilege of working with the artists at Outside the Lines Studio and are excited for you to hear the wonder that was made there!
Music by the Outside the Lines Summer Music Project
Produced by Gabriel Boyer
Recorded at Third Life Studio
Cover image by Sylvia
Falling Boxes by The Outside the Lines Summer Music Project, released 11 December 2015 1. End of the Line 2. Fallen 3. Gabe's Final Piano Recording 4. Lean on Me 5. Sylvia 2 6. Stay with Me 7. Sylvia's Rough Beach 8. Sylvia 1 9. It's Been a Long Time Coming 10.
The performance showcased below was part of a larger evening called Women’s Inaugural Ball, an event dedicated to women artists and their work on the day of the Women’s March, and after the inauguration, January 20th, at Brickbottom Studios in Somerville. The performance artist, Jessica Lu, lives and works in Brighton, MA. Keep posted for more dispatches from the on-going Bedroom Theater happenings!
The Praetorians, apprehensive that, in this private contract, they should not obtain a just price for so valuable a commodity, ran out upon the ramparts; and, with a loud voice, proclaimed that the Roman world was to be disposed of to the best bidder by public auction.
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In this first apocryphal history of the parasite we find ourselves at a retreat in the Southwest and some strange goings on, as the residents grapple with some incomprehensible force creeping in from the beyond. What it is, and why it is here no one knows, but it is invading our reality.
Mutable’s posting a little early for Valentine’s Day. This lovely ballad by Mutable’s own Animal Hospital is one of a series of songs Micka has recorded for his one and only Katharine. For more from Animal Hospital you can go here and for Good or Plenty, Streets + Plenty, out now by Mutable, you can go here.
I write and record a birthday song for Katharine every year.
For this week, we discussed crazy ideas about: the voices inside our heads, Alexander Dugin, aka the “Rasputin behind Putin”, and the amazingly bizarre Japanese Ads of 2016 (a selection of which can be found here.) Mutable’s curmudgeon’s got deep, got dirty, and got a lot more than they’d bargained for this week.
In this original play by Ben Segal, two men have a short conversation. Written specifically for Bedroom Theater, it is our pleasure here at Mutable to share this delightful drama with you.
As abyss has come calling on your doorsteps this holiday, and your openings are twisting into the most convoluted of holiday shapes in their efforts to disguise themselves as the non-sacred things that have replaced their authentic originals—as what we thought was a thing is now transforming into a much older more disgusting thing—as there is no more time left—as time is always running out—as we move without clarity of vision into places without clear contours where the weak among us can be feasted on by bodiless persons as if these bureaucracies could sing in the spirit of the stars, when these are paper card constructions, built of paper so as to maintain their fully paper empires.
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Click on Wes to see all our letters.
Dear Wes,
Will you ever go bald? Do you worry about it? Do you worry that people won’t want to work with bald Wes Anderson, that they’ll see balding as a sign of antiquatedness, that your career might be divided between the haired and hairless eras?
I worry about it, but then again I worry about almost everything.
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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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