Neptune was one of those bands that for the longest time the quintessential Boston art rock band. Jason was one of the first people to start hosting performance art in his loft in JP back in 1994, and his handmade scrap metal guitars have become symbols of another time in Boston—when the apocalypse was a quaint fantasy we longed for with baited breath rather than the disappointing s**tshow it’s turned out to be. Although, Jason has since moved on to the equally remarkable E with Thalia Zedek of Live Skull and Uzi fame, we will always remember with great fondness the mesmerizing grittiness of this particular long-running Sanford project. I will never forget standing in the dark of the Middle East and knocking my head back and forth to the rhythm of beer bottles being smashed in a generic metal trash can as the home-made guitars thrashed and Jason cut new grooves in his throat with his incomparable screams. All lovers of 90’s rock should have a copy of the recently re-released Studio Recordings.
Places Outside of Place (2 of 2)
Luther Philips
3.
Imaginary Realm: History, Memory, & Self
“Answer my prayer, God, and tell me, pitiable as I am, be pitiful to me and tell me this: did I have another period of life, which died and was succeeded by my infancy? Was this the period which I spent inside my mother’s womb,” (Augustine, Confessions, p. 22)
~
Both Thomas More and his friend Desiderius Erasmus were humanists. Meaning specifically that they emphasized the dignity of Man and the power of Reason while remaining deeply committed to Christianity, and through all of his many successes—entering the service of King Henry VIII in 1518, becoming Chancellor in 1529—More remained a profoundly religious Catholic. Because he couldn’t escape his desire for a wife, More chose to become a “chaste husband rather than a licentious priest” but all the same longed for a Christian vita contemplativa from early youth, and throughout his life, More followed many of the ascetic practices of monks: rising early, fasting, engaging in prolonged prayer, and wearing a hair shirt. He also was famous for his immense poverty.
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Roko's Basilisk, Workweek, & No Sand
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
For those of you who don’t know, Roko’s Basilisk is the premise that AI might develop to create virtual hells for those who didn’t help develop AI, and, speaking of hell, the 40-hour workweek is brutal—but worry not, because the Earth is running out of everything, including sand! As our three experts of nothing discuss these issues in their many infantile styles like overgrown babies as awlays. For the most part, they spend their time complaining about the future, the present, and the past, as usual.
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!
This is Not a Review: of Haints Stay
Gabriel Boyer
Haints Stay is something like as if Cormac McCarthy’s bloody West were touched by the hand of Samuel Beckett, and something of the aesthetic spirit child of Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man, except for more honest. It breathes through its bloody teeth and sings in places you thought were immune to song. It has a power that is difficult for a reader to reconcile themselves with, but also difficult to turn away from, or something like rubbernecking a divine accident.
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Click on Wes’ face to read all our letters to him.
The Wes Letters: Brett, Letter 2, Out to Sea, A Black Hole
in Excerpt, Story, The Wes Letters, Series
Brett Zehner
Dear Wes.
Hi again.
I just turned 28. I wrote a song called 28 with a sweater and a cup of tea.
Still no fame (that I know of) which is sort of good because I cleared the ol’ 27 hump with little damage.
But in fact it’s not true. There has been plenty of damage. A junkyard full of it. I tend to fib because I have a bad memory. But here are some true concrete checkable facts. A list in fact that I keep to help me fend off memory gaps:
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Egoes War
Mutable Sound of the Month
This Afrofuturist freak-out by Nicole Mitchell from Mandorla Awakening II: Emerging Worlds—available May 5th from Chicago-based FPE Records—blurs the edges between philosophy and mysticism, modern art and radical political critique. Inspired by the brilliant Afrofuturist author Octavia Butler, Nicole Mitchell dares to use science fiction to pose the question, “What would a world look like that is truly egalitarian, with advanced technology that is in tune with nature?” Enjoy!
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.
Thrilling Fantasy, Horror, & Science-Fiction Shorts!
A D Jameson
Alien Spores
Can you help me? I’ve been trying to rid this city of alien spores. I thought I’d eliminated them all, but now I see they’re back again. I must have missed a few, and they replicate so quickly! It seems no matter how many I destroy, I always find a few more the following days; they’re extraordinarily resilient. I’ve been asking others to give me a hand, stressing the threat posed by alien spores, but no one I talk to seems to think that the spores pose as big a threat as I do. But they are a real threat! If the spores get inside your nose, they go up in your brain, and then they completely warp your priorities, make you forget who you are as well as your everyday life, make you see things that aren’t really there.
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Stories, Road trips, & Magic lost
in Podcast, Series, Three Things
In this episode of 3 Things, Gabe, Mal, and Adam ponder stories and what makes them tick, their favorite most horrible road trips and losing the magic. Gabe has his own ideas of what makes a good story, Adam talks about wandering off in Alaska, and Malcolm consoles everyone about how great 90’s hip hop was, and maybe those days are done, but those were some days. There’s always spelunking.
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!
The Conscience of a Hacker
The Mentor
The following was written shortly after my arrest…
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Another one got caught today, it’s all over the papers. “Teenager Arrested in Computer Crime Scandal”, “Hacker Arrested after Bank Tampering”…
Damn kids. They’re all alike.
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Video: M. Lamar
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.
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.
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.