Here at Mutable, we remember the 90s with a fondness, and especially the bands in Boston of the 90s. We thought we’d start this series of live footage of Boston 90s bands with the notorious Morphine as filmed below at the Middle East in Central Square circa 1990. You may not be able to go to live shows currently, but you can remember the world that was, when bands, both momentous and ill-advised, played the venues of Boston with vim and vigor. All footage care of the legendary and now deceased Billy Ruane and his Road to Ruane feed.
Video: Brigade
“I want to fight when you say fight. I want to kill when you say kill. I want to play for the winning team.” John is taking us further into the depths of the American psyche with his ongoing treatment of themes with Dan Madri. From Angels to Fillies to Rage to Sirens to Surge, John & Dan’s Song-A-Day project is relentless.
You can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
John Manson and Dan Madri of The Gondoliers, became involved 4 years ago in a project called Fun-A-Day. (Or FAD.) And now John and Dan are continuing this tradition under the title Song-A-Day or SAD, and over the course of the coming months, we here at Mutable will be posting them regularly for your viewing and listening pleasure. Enjoy!
The Manifesto Manifesto
Manifesto of the Month
1:There is an art form
1.1 There is an art to manifestos as there is an art to anything. Avoid this art form. Make other forms of art. There is no reason to make unfounded statements into strong declarative sentences. Do not believe yourself. Believe others first. Rather than holding yourself up as somehow a larger life form, remember that your unique perspective is a wondrous fallacy. Instead believe everything and anything. Be credulous.
1.2 When writing your manifesto, find yourself hidden behind a potted plant. At other times be other places. Make sure that you are always somewhere. If you are ever somewhere that is also nowhere, then be warned that this is dangerous. This is the sort of place that happens when a person is walking around without formed thoughts. It can be pleasurable. Some people drink themselves silly to achieve this placeless place on a nightly basis. This has little to do with the art of the manifesto.
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Gloomy Sunday
In the Mutableye
According to one anecdote, the song Gloomy Sunday was originally written by Hungarian pianist and composer, Rezső Seress in Paris in December of 1932, the day after a row with his fiancée over his failure as a composer had led to her departure, this being a Sunday, but then again, Gloomy Sunday is plagued by anecdotal evidence. Mostly having to do with its ability to drive perfectly sane people to suicide, and who and when. Rezső Seress’ now estranged fiancée for example? It became famous in the states as the “Hungarian suicide song” before Billie Holiday ever touched it. However, speculation aside, that it was connected with a rash of suicides in Hungary around 1936 seems uncontested.
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Scripted Cocktail Party
in Article, Bedroom Theater, Series
During these strange covid times, perhaps we all need to calm down, down a few drinks, and read aloud the words of others rather than venturing into the dangerous theatrics of our normal everyday improvised speech.
Forced to have a cocktail party for two because you’re under quarantine? Or a cocktail party of one? Worry not! These dialogues are engineered to entertain! Often surreal, occasionally audacious, silly, unrepentant, and embarrassing/humiliating, you are guaranteed a good time if you and one or two friends sit yourselves down on the couch and read and act out the attached plays for your amusement.
With such memorable one-liners as: “Are you the object of my affection? I forget,” and, “Who put the rotten tentacles in my bed,” this Collection of Conversations for Everyday Use is best done over Moscow Mules. These plays have been performed in Chicago, Boston, New York, and throughout America, in living rooms, art spaces, lofts, and of course bedrooms, as many of the attached short plays came out of the two years I spent performing plays in my bedroom, which culminated in a summer spent traveling from Boston to New Orleans to LA to Seattle in a 1971 minibus performing plays in bedrooms and courtyards and all with a girl who broke up with me after the first, a tragicomic experience to be sure.
These short plays are written in the hopes to alleviate the boredom and strain upon my fellow Americans during these trying times. Please feel free to pass them on to your friends. You can view or download the scripts here to throw your own scripted cocktail party or click on the link below!
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.
Video: Surge
“The blood will surge.” This prophecy of apocalypse is an anthem of our times. John & Dan, as usual, are taking us down roads we do not want to travel, to contemplate realities we wish would just leave us alone, but unfortunately, you are living and breathing this time and place along with rest of us. From Angels to Fillies, from Rage to Sirens, John & Dan’s Song-A-Day project continues to drag us through the muck of our times.
You can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
John Manson and Dan Madri of The Gondoliers, became involved 4 years ago in a project called Fun-A-Day. (Or FAD.) And now John and Dan are continuing this tradition under the title Song-A-Day or SAD, and over the course of the coming months, we here at Mutable will be posting them regularly for your viewing and listening pleasure. Enjoy!
Roy Orbison in Clingfilm
Ulrich Haarbürste
It always starts the same way. I am in the garden airing my terrapin Jetta when he walks past my gate, that mysterious man in black.
‘Hello Roy,’ I say. ‘What are you doing in Dusseldorf?’
‘Attending to certain matters,’ he replies.
‘Ah,’ I say.
He apprises Jetta’s lines with a keen eye. ‘That is a well-groomed terrapin,’ he says.
‘Her name is Jetta.’ I say. ‘Perhaps you would like to come inside?’
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My Asinine Life: The Non-Existent Machine
in Article, My Asinine Life, Series
Gabriel Boyer
How does the crisis come? What is the moment? Who owns the disaster? And where does it lead?
There is no one moment when the things we saw become things that are seeing us back. There is no time coming when my own hands will turn to birds and begin fluttering about the pages of my face. There will never be a day when I wake with a single yelp and hop skipping from my bed to go do the two-step down to what paradise lurks on the first floor. I am not draped in the lights of epiphany. I know no answers, but the questions continue to evolve into ever more exotic questions every year.
I am the kind of half-assed loser who categorizes different vistas of bathroom tile as to their degree of ominous and/or disease quotient. I am the one who hyperventilates over video conferencing as the clicks begin to invade our connection. I wake on my firm sheetless mattress wrapped in a single fuzzy blanket to protect from the incessant attacks of mosquitoes whirring about the vicinity of my earholes in an otherwise empty room in rural Vietnam, where I now live, as in I rent a four-story house with other foreigners and work in the rural city of Phủ Lý, and generally speaking am haunted by the more unpleasant sexual encounters of my younger days while also ensconced inside of what hungry ghosts latch onto the already dwindling days gone by, hopes to come, and passion spent—and the body begun its long dysfunction unto death.
Enter the disease.
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Enter Mister Maurice (2 of 2)
William Levy
“Hello, Bill,” he croaked.
“Hello, Bill,” I echoed.
“Where did you get that manuscript of The Wild Boys?” he asked.
“From Gerrit Komrij.”
“Who’s that?” He cried out with exasperated incredulity.
“He’s Maurice Girodias’ agent in Holland.”
“You mean Maurice gave you permission to publish it?”
“Well, not exactly,” I sputtered. Even back then, Burroughs and I had known each other a long while, over a decade. We had first become acquainted in 1960 and in 1961 at the now famous, albeit then deeply shabby “Beat Hotel” on rue Git le Coeur in Paris, had seen each other in New York at his loft on Centre Street and also often in England, and he had generously given me manuscripts to publish in other magazines I edited, The Insect Trust Gazette(USA) and International Times (London).
“Your book came up at a dinner party. I asked to read the manuscript and Maurice gave his agent, this Komrij, permission to give it to me. I took it on my own to publish it,” I admitted. “Out of admiration for your work, Bill. I wasn’t trying to harm you.”
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Moréas’ Symbolist Manifesto
as translated by C. Liszt
As with all arts, literature evolves: a cyclical evolution with strictly determined returns and which become more complicated of various modifications brought by the step of time and the confusion of circles. It would be superfluous to point out that every new progressive stage of art corresponds exactly to senile degeneration, at the ineluctable end of the immediately previous school. Two examples will be enough: Ronsard triumphs over the impotence of the last impressionists of Marot, Romanticism unfurls its royal flag on the classical debris badly kept by Casimir Delavigne and Steven de Jouy. It is because any demonstration of art succeeds inevitably in becoming impoverished, in exhausting itself; then, of copy in copy, simulation in simulation, what was full of sap and freshness becomes dried out and shriveled; what was the new and the unprompted becomes banal and commonplace.
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Kelly Reaves, Untitled (2019)
All the Unseen Things
Gabriel Boyer
Among the doodlers, portraitists, conceptual artists, and illustrators, there are some who lurk in a kind of indistinct atmosphere. Their works do not so cleanly fit inside the confines of an ideology. Their ideas follow a more intuitive path. They may be stuck between epochs, like William Blake, or they may be describing a taboo world. I am interested in two such artists that form a kind of subgenre of this larger type and kind of marginalized scribbler. Both of my subjects are holy wreckers who annihilate the very thing they are tasked with presenting—who wrestle with the paradox of the seen world and the unseen spirit—the contemporary Kelly Reaves and Hyman Bloom, an until recently lost artist from the height of Modernism.
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Video: Sirens
“The preparations were not in vain.” How true. John & Dan, after taking us on a journey through the purity of Angels, the twisted inner life of Fillies, and the wonderful curative powers of Rage bring a song that should become the anthem of these trying times. Enjoy this timely addition to John & Dan’s Song-A-Day project.
You can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
John Manson and Dan Madri of The Gondoliers, became involved 4 years ago in a project called Fun-A-Day. (Or FAD.) And now John and Dan are continuing this tradition under the title Song-A-Day or SAD, and over the course of the coming months, we here at Mutable will be posting them regularly for your viewing and listening pleasure. Enjoy!
Saba Lou: Novum Ovum
Mutable Sound of the Month
Saba Lou, daughter of the infamous King Khan, released an album not that long ago that caught the attention of us over at Mutable Sound. Garage rock at its finest with lyrics that are pure poetry. The music has a classic sound without being kitschy, and a voice that is equally comfortable crooning, growling, or sliding into a deadpan drawl. Occasionally, the song-writing sounds a little derivative of the 60’s garage rock from which she takes her inspiration—like on the chorus of Dirty Blonde—but at its best it transcends its psychedelic roots to straddle the worlds of Black Mountain with its epic sound and a more pared down singer-songwriter sound. Saba Lou likes to play with extremes in her songwriting in general. She has that kind of elastic voice that can play it either way, and this is also where she shines, sliding from sweetness to gritty and back. It is a captivating, even hypnotic back-and-forth, and expertly rendered on Novum Ovum. “Darling, you are the weather.” Novum Ovum is Saba Lou’s second album, and at 19, she’s primed to explode on the world stage.
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.
Click on Wes’ face to read all our letters to him.
The Wes Letters: Ben, Letter 3
in Excerpt, Story, The Wes Letters, Series
Ben Segal
Dear Wes Anderson,
There’s a thing Feliz didn’t mention. Let me explain or at least narrate:
We left Crestline quickly and got our lunch in Lake Arrowhead Village. It isn’t really a village, just a collection of shops and underdeveloped attractions with a free parking garage. Its got an ugly bit of walk by the lake and seems mostly bent on clouding up its natural beauty with commerce. Still, the lake itself is beautiful. They can’t take that away.
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Video: AD Jameson Talks Geek Culture
Mutable author AD Jameson has turned his insights and discoveries regarding geek culture into a fabulous book, I Find Your Lack of Faith Disturbing (FSG, 2108), and in the video below discusses the book’s themes and key ideas. Jameson has always been a great advocate of genre fiction, and his passion really shines in this talk. If you enjoy what you see here, give the book a look!
Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
168 Pages
$12.95
Now Available
Video: Logos For Love
In 2009, friend of Mutable, Lineland went on tour and created some amazing videos, and we are going to be posting them throughout the coming weeks. Below you will find a playlist of Northside, Planeta Igreja, Amtrak Emerald Board, Pat Garrett, Victorian New Worst, & finally Hollywood Graves Tinsel Spots Two Twenty. These are lovely songs, and the accompanying video adds a lot to the enjoyment. We here at Mutable would recommend you take twenty minutes out of your day to enjoy this delightful show!
Malcolm Felder is Lineland. The featured video is from his Logos for Love album shown above.
Myself from a Great Height (1)
There are many versions of the fall of Pittsburgh, and there are many versions of Jackson Cole. But in this particular version of events, Mr. Cole is a drug addict and a vagrant, and he may even have finally found the thread that ties all this terror together. Pittsburgh's collapsed in the civil war America lost, and a down-and-out detective strung out on a very potent hallucinogenic narcotic is going to find the answers in this first part of a three-parted history within the larger Apocalyptic Histories of the Parasite.
Myself from a Great Height is from a series of podcasts from Gabriel Boyer’s Apocryphal Histories of the Parasite.
Sinclair
Talbot Penniman
My name is Sinclair and I live on The Ship. I’ve only got a minute before I’m going to go see a doctor about some surgery I need. I got pretty famous recently. I fully disrupted the ship’s milk supply. Now when I say disrupted I don’t mean I like… changed the way people think of milk… or use milk, I didn’t invent a cheese computer… I didn’t disrupt the milk supply in any innovative sense. I mean we had a ton of milk, and then I lost most of it. I guess it’s sort of my fault, if it’s anybody’s fault. In a sense we still have the milk, it’s in the bilge.
The milk tank is an extraordinarily large cylinder made of bones. The milktank is (or was) a complicated piece of equipment and it is very old. Maintenance records date back over 1200 years, so it’s at least that old. For some reason it will shunt the entire milk supply into the bilge in the event a catastrophic failure. I guess there used to be a way to filter the milk back out from the bilge water… but that’s lost knowledge now. So yeah, the bilge is full of milk now and I guess that’s my fault.
So. Maybe you’d like to hear how this dumb thing happened? Two things: Chromomorphs and Crabgoats.
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Manifesto of Amateurism
Anton Krueger
preamble
…as everyone has by now, surely, become aware, the word “amateur” arises from the holy name of amaterasu – the japanese goddess of the sun who was born from the left eye of izanagi…it is to her alone that all true amateurists turn for benedictions of light and love…
aligning the field: amateurism & professionalism
ONE
…every action (drama / karma) is a creative gesture, because every action continuously creates consequences…
…if there is to be a division, then let it not fall between “bad” and “good” or “good” and “better”, but between action and non-action…
…amateurism is about action – praxis, rather than spectatorship…so the first thing to do is to GET OUT OF THE GRANDSTAND…
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Video: Rage
As we continue to venture further into John and Dan’s unique songwriting style, after the lush pessimism of Angels and wild cynicism of Fillies, once again we are struck, in this spoken word piece, by this pared down gem. Enjoy!
You can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
