Boyer and Jill perform at a hostel, and then are off in search of the National Soul in Southwestern USA. John C. Lilly appears in Gabriel’s dreams, while Jill’s dreams are full of ex’s. A short play is enacted that involves murder. Steaks are enjoyed in the rain and somebody’s in denial about the state of his bank account. In the end, however, chipmunks have all the answers.
You can find Chapters 1 - 7 here.
Elliott Smith performing at the Green Street Grill [1/4/98]
Much as I would like to think of Elliott Smith as a Boston band of the 90’s he surely is not, but what is captured here is a musical event in the 90’s Boston rock scene featuring a not-quite-as-famous Elliott Smith playing songs from the earlier ends of his compositional spectrum. It is a lovely artifact we wanted to present to the larger listening community. Enjoy!
The new single out this month from Town Meeting starts big. The vocals are large, looming, and upbeat, and it goes from there. But what starts out almost church-y quickly turns weird and then heavy, with down home chops reminiscent of musical legends as Canned Heat. This is a song that begins brightly and then dives into its winding interior, psychedelic, punchy, instant classic material. It presents a cheery face but this is a face that hides secrets and marinates in gems. Enjoy!
“All you want, take one, just…. A little bit.” It begins with a radio announcer declaring that “in every man’s life there comes a day…” and then the guitars kick in, matching Manson’s lyrics and accompanying jolts of heart-beat-like drum accompaniment. “Desire hold your hand.”
Desire is just one of a series of rock videos we have been posting from their collaboration, all of which can be found under the Song-A-Day link along the sidebar. Our dark journey into the sounds and minds of Manson & Madri continues.
A bunch of teenagers are making a horror film when their videographer stumbles and finds himself in an abstract space. He wanders, Blair-Witch-style, breathing heavily and muttering incomprehensibly when he stumbles upon some terrified scribblings upon one wall.
The Backrooms began as a photograph on 4chan and evolved into a Reddit thread. (r/CreepyPasta.) It inspired fan fiction, followed by a backlash (r/TrueBackrooms) and then… Earlier this year…
A collection of shorts about the Backrooms, produced and directed by 16-year-old Kane Pixels, can be found on Youtube. The Backrooms is a k-hole of found footage from different people who have found themselves in “the Backrooms”, whether it’s the teen videographer or scouting parties from some underground government agency. The vintage video look combined with the generic, anonymous, and occasionally and increasingly surreal space is addictive. Start below and then continue to explore. The Backrooms is a paranormal mystery and horror film presented in bits and pieces that you can explore and peruse to manufacture your own story about what is “the Backrooms”.
Enjoy!
You may or may not realize but there was a time when performances in loft spaces in and about Boston were a regular thing that drew a good-sized crowd. They were held in spaces that had been carved out by their inhabitants into a maze of drywall decorated in garish murals and filled with junk and treasures and junky treasures and treasure chests of junk.
There are still lofts like this in Boston. You just need to know where to dig. And several weeks ago, we here at Mutable, found ourselves off down the rabbit hole and into onesuch place as this. The techno was ever-present and the manikins had been accessorized.
Stephen Curo was the MC for the evening, and after the loading bay had been thoroughly cleansed of cigarette butts and the proper drapery put in place and lighting magic made from an upside-down lamp of some retro elegance, the crowd dribbled in. It was opening night at the Rabbit Hole.
As you can see above, the evening began with a few short plays read by select members of the audience, and was followed by a remarkable tale of supernatural terror, metalheads, and their Christian parents, written and performed by C. Atari-Bartok. This was followed by an equally unnerving little fable of what happens in the closets of children between cartoons, a story from the mind of Katherine Bergeron. The anecdotes of biting in adolescence by Stephen Curo, sadly were not recorded, but you can read all about them in his on-going memoirs, Reflects Poorly.
Then it was time for a break and off to sample some wine and crackers. The vibe was all ascots, waxed moustaches, and accompanying glitter nail varnish. Smokes were had out by the loading bay as the orange line rolled by, and then, with a snap Stephen Curo was calling our attention back to the stage for another chilling tale by Katherine Bergeron involving children. (Unfortunately, this second gem was also not filmed, but is available at Metastellar.)
And finally, Gabriel Boyer read an excerpt from his post-apocalyptic noir, Devil, EVerywhere I Look. You can watch his performance in its entirety below. Enjoy!
“The end is near. Or has it come and gone before?”
– An ancestor
Why can we imagine the ending of the world, yet not the ending of colonialism?
We live the future of a past that is not our own.
It is a history of utopian fantasies and apocalyptic idealization.
It is a pathogenic global social order of imagined futures, built upon genocide, enslavement, ecocide, and total ruination.
What conclusions are to be realized in a world constructed of bones and empty metaphors? A world of fetishized endings calculated amidst the collective fiction of virulent specters. From religious tomes to fictionalized scientific entertainment, each imagined timeline constructed so predictably; beginning, middle, and ultimately, The End.
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Manson’s deadpan vocals are almost entirely drowned out by the amazing sonic violence of the driving guitar and drums, but all the same, the message remains. The Charm offensive. The power of Charm. Aren’t we all so Charmed? “It’s not fair. We are not all there. We are just not born with our same share of Charm.” How true.
Charm is just one of a series of rock videos we have been posting from their collaboration, all of which can be found under the Song-A-Day link along the sidebar. Our dark journey into the sounds and minds of Manson & Madri continues.
The apocalypse just got a whole hell of a lot more personal. It’s turned its face inside out and made itself into just one of the boys. It’s twisted your arm back and then back again—and back again—until the logjam of muscle memory is gone and you are nothing but %100 rubber, with a corkscrew of an appendage that twirls off comedically into the never-ending night. Welcome to Neverland.
The ups are very much going up and the downs are just around the corner, and they say that civil war is just around the corner, and Americans have always been good at cutting corners.
Neverland is a state of both never-becoming and never-having-been. It is the place where the future we dream of is a dream and the past we remember never was. It is a place where most of us live most of the time. And it itches.
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Stumbled upon this album from Shelly Strunk and instantly fell in love. It has been compared to Satie and Tchaikovsky with a touch of Wendy Carlos, but what a clear voice is heard in all of this—-that transcends influence. When this music works, it works like magic. Shelly Strunk, the voice behind Sallo, deserves to be noticed. Enjoy!
It’s impossible to talk about criticism without talking about interpretation. Before I do that, however, I would like to talk about logical inference. This is, quite simply, the drawing of a conclusion; the engine for truth. There are several theories of truth. The most relevant one here is the correspondence theory. The correspondence theory of truth posits that a proposition is true when it corresponds to a fact. And what is a novel, if not a series of propositions? You can’t deny that F. Scott Fitzgerald’s descriptions of cars, for example, correspond to automobiles in the real world; and the fact that automobiles exist. If we bear in mind, Wittgenstein’s notion of family resemblance, moreover, it doesn’t matter if one car is red and another car is blue; or if one car is a Ford and the other is a Chevrolet. Fitzgerald’s descriptions (i.e., propositions) of automobiles correspond to those in the real world, for those are the facts which we call automobiles, or cars.
How can I say that logical inference breaks down on a literary level? Am I asking the impossible? I have demonstrated, via the correspondence theory of truth, that the things propositions describe correspond to those things which are described; they exist in the real world and can be committed, via writing, to print.
What does the word ‘fiction’ correspond to? If the logic of correspondence is anything to go by, it must correspond to something. If this were a perfect world, I would say that ‘fiction’ corresponded to anything that was not non-fiction; even if non-fiction, in light of the correspondence theory, becomes redundant, like snow which is non-snow, and water which is non-water. We can quickly see a problem bubbling to the surface here; it’s obscuring our goggles and making us nervous.
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“What we have here is a scorched earth.” Just in time for the Christmas season, Manson & Madri bring us a delightful little melody about houses and toast, and how toasty it’ll be when our houses go flapping with flames. Minimal vocals on this one, again spoken and not sung, like a haiku that forgot to count its syllables. You fill in the blanks. It’s all there if you’re looking, in among the flames. “We can’t all be chickens.”
Scorch is just one of a series of rock videos we have been posting from their collaboration, all of which can be found under the Song-A-Day link along the sidebar. Our dark journey into the sounds and minds of Manson & Madri continues.
[Below is an excerpt from Declan Tan’s debut novel. As much a work of philosophy as a work of literature, it takes the reader in and out of abstract spaces, and exists somewhere in the space between 1984 and Infinite Jest. It’s a small book that packs a big punch. Enjoy!]
~
In this life we have everything backward. Born into death. Politeness before truth. The suicidal earth sets itself alight. And just as how death comes before life for some of us, man does not work because he has something to offer the world. Instead he is forced to work because he is told something can be offered to him. Forced to cultivate a personality beneficial to the slow suicide of the Earth. And where do we find acceptance? Always in another, always external. Rarely in these conditions could we hope to find it within. And we are taught many things out of blindness. We are told some are born for Greatness. We are told some have Greatness thrust upon them. This too is backward. Most, if not all, have idiocy thrust upon them. And then, again, som are born to it. And one day there will be no bone left to grind Some speckled wind will blow its heavy breath across our vision and over our trees and leave us all in the hollow.
Or is it not us but simply the murderous sun that has forsaken us? I lit a rotten cigarette and watched its burning ember glow, the ash over-running its edge until the small orange hum of heat was lost in the gray-black. I blink and wash my eyes with sparse tears.
The foreign body sensation.
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Everyone loves Bob Ross, but AI-filtered Bob Ross becomes like a mystical message full of the swirls of animals, eyes, and bits of insect, challenging how we think of the intersection between perception and reality. In parts hilarious, absurd, and downright disgusting, this dream journal of mad anthromorphisms and salacious animal graftings can be viewed again and again and new layers revealed, new possibilities discovered.
The below video was originally shown in 2017 at “Basilisk”, Nicodim Gallery, in Los Angeles, California, USA, and is by Alexander Reben.
In this installment of Boyer’s audio memoir, Gabe and Jill continue deeper into the unknown, from Departure, TX, to Clines Corners and Santa Fe. Questions are asked, but will they be answered? Is it true that Santa Fe was built upon a mobius strip? Is it true that R. Crumb has an identical twin also named Robert? Jill and Gabe share a moment of wonder. What else can we ask of them? For indeed it is true that these dark days have come back again.
You can find Chapters 1 - 6 here.
For this month, we have chosen the first track off Raw Demoon Alchemy by Darius Jones. Something like a Coltrane minimalism, this song features a single melodic phrase repeated by a single saxophonist for the full close to ten minutes of listening time, but each time, with a different nuance of intonation and expression. It is a track with a raw primacy, like a Raga endlessly introducing itself or if the blues-born traditions of America approached the mystical purity of certain types of Persian classical music. The repeating phrase can vary ever so slightly from one telling to the next. An altogether enchanting experience. Give it a listen below!
For the month of November, poet Lina Ramona Vitkauskas revisits the idea of time as mosaic via innate memories of languages we have always known and have yet to speak. One of the author’s last cinepoems, Keeping Up with the Huidobros, used a confrontational method of translating a translation, more specifically leveraging the homophonic (sound) to get new meaning from poems. In this latest cinepoem, “Translating Myself”, the poet applies what poet Clark Coolidge once said of writing poetry: “It had to make itself something through me.” In this spirit, the poet layers her own words to create new poems from one.
Poem:
Translating myself
This is what we hurt or hurl
or vex or transpose: the
opining horizon, leaving us.
There is a green leaf in the fire.
My flesh, you’ve made the two
of us a blind study. We’ve left
our vortex, grainy and laminated
in space, and we never reach
the summit of suns, big yolk
growths, an autumn phenomenon,
bringing us kilometers of numerical frosts.
I’ve been waiting to hear from you—
the other you—the silence is never
too long like the sleeve of my skin.
How we multiple etcetera our thoughts,
how we remain etched in this cosmic
fluid. Here the screen malfunctions.
I am a radio. I am the soundwave.
A low-fi spoken word piece with a simple message, in this number Manson & Madri explore the end times with their usual verve. This song captures the chaos of its message. It is a propaganda stripped of its propaganda. “The rebellion runs / long and red. We’re gonna go / out of our heads.” The world ends today.
Rebellion is just one of a series of rock videos we have been posting from their collaboration, all of which can be found under the Song-A-Day link along the sidebar. Our dark journey into the sounds and minds of Manson & Madri continues.
Mary Timony, darling of the underground rock scene of Boston in the 90’s and 00’s, with her gritty and sweet songs and arthouse friends, was a captivating presence. I didn’t meet her till five years after this video was taken, at a loft in Dudley Square, but she was a secret crush of mine at the time. The music captivates—its prettiness and the deadpan of its delivery. Enjoy!
It was something like the summer of 1998, and I was living in a warehouse by the Brooklyn Bridge—living illegally in a warehouse that filled with raw sewage one night—where the landlord cut the sewage access and electricity every so often—and the dry wall we’d put up didn’t reach to the ceiling eighteen feet above—and I never had electricity in my room. When I think of that summer, I always remember the time my roommate claimed that a stream of flame sporadically shot out of his upper arm while working construction earlier that day, and the time I met Wally Shawn while working at the Film Forum.
He’d come in to complain about the line. I remember how I chuckled and shrugged at his incorrigibly irritated self like a person presented with some rom com darling come to life. I couldn’t take him seriously because of the fact of him being him and all that goes along with that, but Wally Shawn should be taken seriously.
He is not just the Sicilian in the Princess Bride. He is not just Woody Allen’s foible in Annie Hall. My Dinner with Andre only scratches the surface of what he is capable of. Uncle Vanya does not do the many talents of Wally Shawn justice, brilliant piece of theater though it may be. These are valid and interesting faces of Mr. Shawn, but the point is that he has more than even these myriad faces, and the more you look for them, the deeper they go.
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