This week on 3 Things, we look into the possibility of colonizing one of the planets orbiting Trappist One, Elon Musk’s claims about taking tourists to the moon in 2018, and remember our old friend Bob Caution, the man who once lived in the basement of the Coolidge Corner Theater, and days gone by when living in the basements of theaters was a thing.
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.
“The dust always makes progress!” What a brilliant amateur rendition of the first three pages of a brilliant play. If you have no idea who Sarah Ruhl is, I encourage you to explore her surrealist dramas. If you have never thought of performing plays in your bedroom, I beg you to consider transforming your home in this manner. If you have never thought anything, I pity you. Enjoy!
1. Categories
1.0.0 :: Does the ground consist of spires?
What is and what is not within the world that you are planning to create? Does the ground consist of spires that reach to the tips of the atmosphere, or is the entire orb made up of a teaming mass of encephalocapsules? (Brain capsules.) All of this begins with categorization. Create a series of types, beginning with animate and inanimate matter, or god and mortal, or up and down, and from these preliminary dichotomies you can create the great font of being, the million hordes and so forth.
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There are several long-standing theories regarding the identities of the Residents. One of the earliest (and most amusing) is that the Residents are in fact the Beatles. This was an appealing notion to listeners in the early 1970s, who were still reeling from the sudden self-destruction of the collaborative effort between those strange, beautiful boys. It didn’t help that the Residents’ first full-length record, Meet the Residents, boasted artwork lifted directly from the Beatles’ album Meet the Beatles, with the faces of John, Paul, George and Ringo having been altered with a marker so that they had crossed eyes, nose rings and devil horns. Some fans held onto this belief for many years, but most eventually abandoned it when they were forced to acknowledge that the Residents’ output simply didn’t sound like it could have possibly been made the same group of people.
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This week on Three Things, we talk about the madness of Chinese TV, how we ended up where we have, and the quantum brain. Join us as we wonder through the corridors of media, our lives, and the larger universe as we do every week. To see some of the Chinese TV we watched go here, here, and for a more in depth picture, here.
Click on Wes to read all our letters to him.
February 9, 2012
12:54pm
Dear Wes,
Have you watched the 1960s documentary Endless Summer? After drive-thru at In-N-Out I went home and turned on Netflix. The sunny California male voiceover truly lifts my heart. And I never say lifts my heart. That two surfer friends went around the world searching for the perfect wave is a cute representation of a philosophy of sport or aesthetics of time. Do you know Roland Barthes’ little masterpiece What Is Sport? I wonder what he would have said about surfing.
Speakers’ Corner is a place where anyone can get up on a soapbox and preach it, and Terminator 24 has been a fixture there for over four decades. A self-styled “symbolic ironic play striving to dream, explore, question, learn and live compassionately without fear, prejudice, hate and abuse,” the character of Terminator 24 [or T24 as he is sometimes called] came about as the result of one man’s questioning spirit as well as through his genuine efforts to interact with a wide variety of diverse tourists and visitors. I first saw this video probably more than 20 years ago, and Terminator 24’s remarkable brand of Socratic method struck me at the time and it strikes me as remarkable to this day.
The film found below [by David Napier and Paul Dionne] features many of the characters you would have found at Speaker’s Corner in 1994, but it settles on Terminator 24, who is still there today, and if you ever make it to London, you should definitely take the time to visit Hyde Park and visit Speaker’s Corner to learn how this business of learning is done from the master himself. For more on Terminator 24, please feel free to visit his website.
Social interaction, satire, humour, various topics including sex, ethnicity, PC, and cultural hegemony. "A typically untypical day at Speakers Corner, Hyd...
A detective in Beijing finds a dead foreigner up a tree in the small forest beside the new mall they’re building in Beijing-East, and ends up following a winding trail that may lead him nowhere, but will take him to the resort town of Yangshuo and in a seedy underbelly of Eurotrash and drugs here in among this sea of miniature mountains just north of Vietnam—where nothing is what it seems. Listen to Pt2 here and go here for Pt3.
So strong is the belief in life, in what is most fragile in life—real life, I mean—that in the end this belief is lost. Man, that inveterate dreamer, daily more discontent with his destiny, has trouble assessing the objects he has been led to use, objects that his nonchalance has brought his way, or that he has earned through his own efforts, almost always through his own efforts, for he has agreed to work, at least he has not refused to try his luck (or what he calls his luck!). At this point he feels extremely modest: he knows what women he has had, what silly affairs he has been involved in; he is unimpressed by his wealth or his poverty, in this respect he is still a newborn babe and, as for the approval of his conscience, I confess that he does very nicely without it. If he still retains a certain lucidity, all he can do is turn back toward his childhood which, however his guides and mentors may have botched it, still strikes him as somehow charming. There, the absence of any known restrictions allows him the perspective of several lives lived at once; this illusion becomes firmly rooted within him; now he is only interested in the fleeting, the extreme facility of everything. Children set off each day without a worry in the world. Everything is near at hand, the worst material conditions are fine. The woods are white or black, one will never sleep.
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This week, for 3 Things, we’ll be talking about Uber as a thing and whether it should be a thing at all, antenna TV as a thing as well as possible channels as of yet unaired, and whether or not perhaps our purpose on this planet is to help animals evolve through exposure to extreme radiation, thereby setting off the next great stage in evolution. As always, keep listening, and enjoying the curmudgeons as they visibly age while arguing the sticking points of their insanity.
We here at Mutable are a little bit in love with this track and the accompanying album. It’s a bit of off-kilter improvised synth-y and drum-driven beauty from the duo Ruben + Monte Cristo. If you’re into what you hear, you can check out the whole album here. But for now, check out the bit of awesomeness below!
Avocado Forcefield by Ruben and Monte Cristo, released 13 February 2007
A man can’t seem to leave his apartment—a manikin textbook at the end of time has a voice inside its head—a woman running towards a house in the snow is desperate to share some important information—a policeman in southern China is dealing with a strange foreigner in the Sober Up room—a CIA operative is giving a motivational speech about the end of America—a firm partner off to visit his ailing friend in an industrial city in northern China discovers his friend is more than just quaintly broken—a spokesman for a Chinese fast food franchise no longer believes he exists—and a pastor who gets some unlikely visitors in the middle of the night. These are the characters you will meet in this segment of Apocryphal Histories of the Parasite. Listen to Pt1 here and go here for Pt3.
This week on 3 Things, we talk about luxury preppers preparing for the apocalypse with underground bunkers, our serialized dreams, about our houses rejecting us and nostalgia for New York being surpassed by the epic New York of our dreams, and Gabe’s on-going vampire dreams taking him to outer space, as well as the Grammy’s, what went wrong, what went wronger and what went wrongest.
One man realizes that he might just need a little help from an unlikely place to figure out how to be happy dating in a futile universe in this video by artist Jeremy Franklin-Ross.
One man realizes that he might just need a little help from an unlikely place to figure out how to be happy dating in a futile universe.
One night in the summer of 2000, I found myself standing in the corner of a tiny room which served as the broadcast booth for the college radio station at Weber State University in Ogden, Utah. I had been dragged there by my girlfriend at the time, a woman named Bethany, who had developed a crush on the night-time DJ. It was 11:00pm, and as far as I could tell the three of us were the only people on campus.
“This is B.C. Sterret, and you are listening to Oddity Rock Radio on Weber State Eighty-Eight.” The DJ was speaking into the microphone, and partially obscured behind a wall of tape racks and soundboards. “Welcome once again to the single oasis in the vast cultural wasteland that we call the Beehive State.” I flinched. I had used those precise words in the moments before he went on the air, and he had stolen them.
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In this age of cultural criticism, punditry, general micro-blogging and endless gaffes, shock, and outrage on the Internet and beyond—although mostly on the internet, perhaps in part because it’s a place that exists nowhere, like the Na-koja-abad of muslim mysticism, the Persian term for utopia, which literally means, “the place that exists nowhere”—but also because it is currently the primary means through which we interact with our society and is furthermore the average American’s primary means for self-expression in general. This bodiless heaven, where we can instantly and immediately be gratified of any unbodily need we have while our actual bodies fester in the increasing hell of our actual room, is an interiority exposed and the internal uploaded into the closest our technology has come to mind, with servers as stand-ins for the more mundane ganglia of people and people as stand-ins for the more mundane mind of the masses.
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During the Chechen Wars, stories began to circulate about certain snipers—blonde-haired, blue-eyed, cold-blooded female snipers called beliye kolgotki by the Russians. The White Tights (or White Stockings) so named because they were said to only wear white, were rumored to be contract killers paid by the Chechens on a kill-by-kill basis. These assassins are/were said to be from small Baltic States with a grudge against Russia and are/were said to be members of a bi-athlon team, trained to cross miles and miles of rugged terrain then successfully fire a weapon and hit a target. The story got a boost when newspapers reported the capture of several female assassins—from the Baltics and from the Ukraine. However, other papers reported that the stories were absolute myth, attributing the creation of these mysterious female assassins to paranoia and convoluted historical facts.
At our most recent Bedroom Theater, audience members read poems written by Lina Vitkauskas inspired and penned to this mythical team of sharpshooters. The recording of these readings can be found below, and her book can be found here.
In the third part of this 3 part history within the larger Apocryphal History of the Parasite, we find ourselves in the minds of a seedy Brit hiding out in Southern China for mysterious reasons, a woman in a basement apartment full of holes, a teenage girl who is also a long-bodied lifeform flowering from one end of the universe to the other, the founding member of ELF in an interrogation chamber, and the younger brother of a dead man. They’re all being torn apart by something. What is it? Listen to Pt1 here and go here for Pt2.
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.
