We here at Mutable are old enough to remember a time when performance art was everywhere you went. Maybe not everywhere YOU went, but everywhere we went. In every loft and coffee shop of 90’s Boston, on the loading bays of Brooklyn, and in the pizza parlors of Cleveland. It was inescapable. Then one day it vanished, and instead the world was waiting in line for the latest iPhone update. But M. Lamar, with his remarkable fashion sense, idiosyncratic sensibilities, impressive musical abilities and often poignant commentary, is keeping this tradition alive, and our hats go off to him. Below is a video of his performance, Re-Memberments / The Demon Rising.
All About Food!
in Podcast, Three Things, Series
Malcolm talks about food trends, Gabe talks about his troubled history with food, and Adam talks about Roger Ebert’s cookbook this week on 3 Things. Is food an artform? What is “skin egg”? Did you know Roger Ebert used to bring a rice cooker with him to film festivals and cook up his favorite dishes in the pot while watching foreign dramas before his many unfortunate surgeries?
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
Return to the Secret Fort
Scott Rucker
The Woods, 1909
Our secret fort deep in the woods, was a real work in progress. It smelled like piss. Our gang was made up of neighborhood riff raff. Roger was the oldest, then came Benny, myself, and a boy we referred to as, The Jew. Each of us had our own special gift. Roger had charisma. Benny had the strength of an ox. I had the smarts. The Jew was a talented artist. For a penny, he would draw you whatever you wanted.
We kept our dirty pictures and a series of cuss words in a hole we had dug where we also kept our communal cigarettes, and cologne which we used to cloak the scent.
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"Beasts", Enlightenmentexit, & Barter
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
This week on 3 Things we talk about learning to be a beast to better learn how to be a human, whether or not we have as a society given up on the ideas and principles of the Enlightenment, and whether bartering is a viable economic option. Does smelling poop lead to better vision? Can our world continue to exist on a diet of fake news and geopolitical posturing? Would you barter poetry for a nose-hair hairdo? These are just some of the questions we grappled with this week.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
A day about the British Museum
James Mansfield
I remember visiting the British Museum as a child, when I must have been around five or six, with my father. I say this, but actually can remember nothing from the visit apart from my insistence that we make the return journey by taxi, as I was bored of not seeing anything on the underground. I have since then been to the Museum countless times, and now having founded my own Museum of Imaginative Knowledge, had a strong desire to try and spend some time there for the purpose of what I call pure research, or simply just hanging out. What would it be like to spend an entire day in the British Museum?
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Places Outside of Place (1 of 2)
Luther Philips
1.
Places and People: Adam, Eve, & Prometheus
“And I wish that I were not any part / of that fifth generation / of men, but had died before it came, / or been born afterward,” (Hesiod. Trans. Richard Lattimore. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1969; p. 39).
~
Adam and Eve ate from the tree of knowledge. The true and honest experience of their former idyllic lives was now sullied by a pervasive internal vision. They knew that they were and they became conscious.
There’s that old adage that people are gods that shit. We can envision this as the story of an Adam and an Eve happily shitting away in Eden day in day out until that moment they discovered the God in them (i.e. the moment they ate of the tree of knowledge of good and evil), and never again would they be able to so blissfully vacate their bowels in the bosom of nature as once they had done. This is the quintessential tale of the noble savage—in which humanity is pure, ignorant and blissful—but there is a snake in this garden.
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Toward an Apocalyptic Literature
Letter from the Editor
We have officially entered the Apocalyptic Age.
And as we sit in our rooms writing our precious notes—our lists of what we’ll miss most and how we want our survivors to dress the corpses we leave behind—scrawling these thoughts on bits of paper and the odd receipt—as we wait for the door to be knocked in by the stormtroopers of the future—we must not look away from this dark rising. Rather than censoring ourselves, we must take this opportunity to speak the most terrifying of truths, for this may be the last moment we get to say anything at all before the duct tape is slathered across our snot-slick lips and we are bound to the particular vision of reality the cruel and heartless among us want to seer upon our skulls. Which is not to say that we should stare into the coming darkness with the timid paralysis of deer, but to stand with a pathetic confidence that we can withstand this blow of history even if it means everything we thought to be true turned false, and everything we hold dear crushed to dust by the oppressors among us. This is the literature for the end times.
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Myself from a Great Height (3)
As we end this installment of Jackson Cole's face-off with the beyond, the obfuscuting darkness has only become more infuriatingly bright. How are we to judge this lost junkie? Searching for answers to questions he hasn't thought to ask? Stumbling into rooms without any clear dimension. Walking down streets invaded by the cannibalists among us. Where will he end up? And why did he have to end up there?
Myself from a Great Height is from a series of podcasts from Gabriel Boyer’s Apocryphal Histories of the Parasite.
The Bedroom Theater Variety Show
in Podcast, Bedroom Theater, Series
The show below, pasted between two nights of Bedroom Theater, features avant punk musical stylings, a monologue of a teenage girl flowering as a multi-dimensional lifeform in the abyss, candid unplugged versions of classic songs from Mutable’s Glitter Tracks [by the Box Kites] and No Place to Die [by Normal Feelings], as well as a few brand-new numbers, a four-person retelling of The Nightingale by Hans Christian Anderson, and a recorded round table discussion of contemporary politics. Enjoy!
Bedroom Theater began when my roommate changed the light bulb in my bedroom and ended in a five-hour crying spree in the Nevada desert. There is no audience, only people performing for each other. For more on this, please see Welcome to Weltschmerz.
S**theads: In the Mutableye
The Captured Project originated as an online collection of drawings. In each portrait was depicted some person of note who should be in prison, and each of these portraits were themselves drawn by current prisoners. The project has since come to a close and a book has been printed of these many remarkable works of art, capturing such notable criminals as Ryan Gragg of Goldman Sachs and of course the Koch brothers. Please feel free to click through to look at more for yourself, and consider purchasing a book. All proceeds go to the Brooklyn Bail Fund. You can learn more about the project and how to purchase the book here, and can click on the image to find out what crimes have been committed by Rex Tillerson.
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.
EST, The Good Life, & Dream Science
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
This week on 3 Things, we go from EST and other cults, both real and imaginary, to what it means to live a good life, from the purchase of high quality steaks to being nice to people—how are these two ways of thinking the same and how different—to dream science, and our own ideas of dreams. “I’m creating my own nightmare.” So says Gabe. Join us for yet another kooky bit of conundrumery while we discuss things that we have no right discussing.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
Through the Eye
Kate Perruzzi
You are at a BBQ in your uncle’s backyard. Scores of tiny blonde cousins filter around table legs like frenzied fish in a shallow pond. One of them catches their chin on your knee and glares at you. You do not recognize her.
Your uncle is seated in a low lawn chair beside the buffet of mayonaised foods: potato salad, with and without egg, macaroni salad, chicken salad. None of these are salads, you think, and swig hard on a warm Miller Lite. Your uncle is quiet, transfixed, watching the sky. His eyes are cloudy security glass and the man working the space behind his face is a bank teller on qualuudes.
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The Apocalyptic Manifesto
Gabriel Boyer
Life is always a meeting point for other life. Death is a ruse. Money is a trick. Fear is what you must face and no matter how often you face it, it will not go away as long as you’re still alive, but not facing it is not an option. And the symbols we use to paint the world are only stand-ins for the emotions we use to paint our lives. While all the while, generally speaking, belief is the driving force behind our emotions, and how we see is who we are, and “if we are unable to see then no more you” sort of thing, and when there’s no you then you are easily manipulated by the money-lovers of the universe, and specifically through the use of the binary ruse system involving sex and death with obligation as the cohesion tying this entire faulty belief system together. Wow. I just said that.
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Straightest Lines
Mutable Sound of the Month
We here at Mutable are psyched to share a song from John Bellows’ amazing new album, long EP, out now from Planted Tapes. We’ve been into John Bellows’ work for a long time, but this album really seems like a culmination of his on-going aesthetic. These songs are lushly produced, beautifully written and rendered. Enjoy the track below, and for more awesomeness, watch the video of River’s Deceit here!
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.
Enhancement, Emotions, & Spaces
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
This week for Three Things, we talk about drugs that enhance our ability to count and not sleep, Gabe’s idea of the 4 basic emotions, which turns out to also have been someone else’s idea, which fact Gabe cannot accept, and places we’ve lived and would like to live—from industrial spaces filled with raw sewage to the unfinished homes of our youth and everywhere in between. We’re crapping on each other’s souls this week.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
Kafka and Credibility in the Age of Trump
Matt Rowan
Franz Kafka had a pretty good read on people. He recognized, among other things, the strange but vital interpersonal rules that enhanced one’s credibility or diminished it, depending on the circumstances and the individuals concerned. If you’re at all familiar with Black Mirror, the Channel Four and Netflix sci-fi / horror series, you might have caught the premiere episode of the third season. It concerns people living in a society where social media popularity translates to real societal value, and affects things as mundane as how people respond to you in passing to those as significant as where you’re allowed to live and work. The human dynamic of this scenario, abandoning the technological component, is quintessential Kafka terrain. One wonders what a depiction of social media would look like in his methodical and capable hands.
No more is Kafka’s talent for descrying nuance in just this sort of human behavior, the concept of what makes one a credible source, on display than in the story, “The Village Schoolmaster [The Giant Mole].” In it, readers are offered information regarding the piquant discovery of an abnormally large mole in the unnamed region’s countryside — hence the bracketed auxiliary title. But the brackets are a much better touch than one might first be given to assume. They hint at the kind of compartmentalization into which the mole is relegated throughout the story’s telling. At first blush it’s a story centering on a peculiar and inexplicable phenomenon not unlike other Kafka stories, such as “The Metamorphosis” and “Blumfeld, an Elderly Bachelor.” Instead, though, it is crafted to speak of issues very different, far less surreal than a giant mole, and much more characteristically human.
Accordingly, the story’s title does not bury the lede. It is, indeed, about the village schoolmaster who discovers the giant mole’s existence, first and foremost. Even more awkwardly it’s told through the first-person narration of a “Mr. So-and-So,” as designated by the village schoolmaster but this is according to the narrator, an individual also referred to as a businessman, and therefore of a rank suggesting he’s held in some esteem by society, esteem it’s safe to presume a lowly schoolmaster is beneath. And so the story begins to show its true nature, describing the contrivances of credibility and those possessing the means to adequately and convincingly argue their case, with all the superfluity accompanying any and every overture or public gesture. The truth can be manufactured, and it often is.
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Flow, Plastic Surgery, & Visionaries
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
This week we talk about flow, what it is, and whether it’s really all that good of a thing, alternative forms of plastic surgery—for example, will people ever carve themselves into perfect replicas of pigs? Does it make sense to turn our noses upside down? And megalomaniacs as the drivers of progress, and whether or not madmen are the drivers of change, and specifically… what’s up with Walt Disney?
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
Overland II
Bal Kaur
The above painting by Bali Kaur is a masterful expression of her on-going and ever-evolving aesthetic. Kaur began her work as a printmaker but over her twenty-some-year career has explored a variety of techniques and media. We here at Mutable are excited to see how her vision and her masterful understanding of space, color, and the dynamics of place continue to change and grow. Overland II is just one of several pieces currently on display at Silson Contemporary, 17 Harlow Oval, Harrogate, HG2 0DS. The gallery is open Fridays 10.30am – 4.00pm, and one weekend a month, 10.30am – 4.00pm, on Saturday and Sunday.
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.
Brutalism, Time Travel, & Net Privacy
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
This week, for Three Things, we discuss brutalist architecture—whether it’s a throwback to nostalgic sci fi or a soul-crushing example of urban planning—how time travel can go terribly wrong, and what’s up with net privacy. Should we be concerned that our most intimate moments are so easily accessible? Who would want to access them? And generally speaking are slurring words in each other’s general directions.
Three Things is Gabriel Boyer, Malcolm Felder, & Adam Scotto. Every episode one of them brings up one topic that has been bothering them this week, and they discuss it. You can subscribe to this podcast here. That’s it!
My Asinine Life: The Metaphysics of Snot
in Article, My Asinine Life, Series
Gabriel Boyer
You know it might seem kind of trite considering how everything’s being exploded all over the place by the authoritarians among us, but—I woke up one day without a brain. The other morning I woke up and thought, Gee. Where’d my brain go, only to then have realized that—gosh. Someone’s going to be so upset with me. I should be out parading in front of the fascists and screaming in their faces in a tight-fisted squadron—but I got no brain.
What I mean by this is—wow. I actually just said that. I can say anything and act like it’s actually true. Wow.
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