Boyer and Jill have arrived in Flagstaff, and now the city of Flagstaff is putting out its feelers and rubbing all over them. Jill keeps vanishing, to the other side of town, and out with unknown persons, while Gabe loiters on streetcorners with Vietnam vets and reminisces about his inherently credulous nature. We learn about toothless mystics and the time Gabe was almost pimped out in Dublin. In a kind of terror they continue on into California.
You can find Chapters 1 - 8 here.
We here at Mutable asked you to send us your reel-to-reels and taskams of the garages of the basements of the world and the video below captures the most epic of these sorts of DIY moments, the end of the infamous Kenny Rogers rock opera and Saginaw in the bad old days when Green Anarchy was alive and well in the bosom of the Pacific Northwest. For a moment, this was a place where experimental film thrived in the larger primitive skills atmosphere, during the first few hesitent years of the new millennium. This moment captures the spirit of an era, and we here at Mutable cannot seem to stop watching it. It was a moment when the youth had this naive belief that they could change the future, maybe even save the planet. If only they’d been right.
As we go cartwheeling over the edge and into a place of exhilarating uncertainty, as our paths forward corrode in the heat of the moment, and the bottom falls out and we are gone, would it not be wise then to come up with a plan? Somewhere to stash the jewels? A rendezvous point after we’ve escaped into the woods?
In this our end times, will we indeed each go diving off on our own into the hellscape? Is that the best avenue of egress as we slide over the horizon to impale ourselves upon the rocks below? Might there be some other way to enter the apocalypse?
The analog internet is a decentralized network of information holders and distributors who work as diplomats and ambassadors to surrounding communities and function as the librarians of the future, function as librarians in the rubble of the end times, dishing out the latest wasteland gossip, zines, and cooking tips for rat and rabbit, as well as a farmer’s almanac of DIY tips—a people whose sole responsibility is to hold onto the past as the present gets eaten up in our terror, to shine a light into the rising dark, and create a path once the path forward has been eaten in the madness of it all.
The analog internet is like a webwork of human connections, made up of people sharing information and ideas to local counterparts who then pass these ideas on to their own contacts.
But why?
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“Everything used to be a breeze.” Manson & Madri’s ongoing manifesto of the times and what’s gone wrong with them continues with this little gem of lost hopes and dreams, a nostalgia of progress and how it all turns wrong in the end. “We should have tied it down with much stronger string.” Indeed.
Breeze 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 and you can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
For the month of October, videopoet Lina Ramona Vitkauskas revisits the idea of time as mosaic via heterotopic spaces—transient and transformative places we visit in our minds as well as physically / geographically / biologically / politically. The videopoem “Topography” is a collaboration with sound artist / poet / translator Khashayar Mohammadi and speaks to seeking an inner cartographer as we navigate our lived experiences, that is, mapping and finding the "lay of the land” of our life’s purpose and identity. Another view: what occurs when two poets who also speak in other mediums decide to collaborate? We draw an audio-visual map. We create our own topography—mountains and valleys from sounds. Rivers from words. A bi Lithuanian-Canadian-American and a queer, Iranian-born, Toronto-based poet, writer, and translator who both have a love for ancient Indo-European dialects bring their own A/V languages to the table. As the poem states: we arrange sequences of dialogues.
Poem:
TOPOGRAPHY
“He was one more incognito in the city of illustrious incognitos.”
—Bon Voyage, Mr. President, Gabriel Garcia Marquez
The same substances—your bones.
Calcium or wood fibres.
Think protection, rockets,
or of safe people in the crowd,
grasping for dimension, in
simultaneous paralysis.
The market booms with traitors.
We flee our voices, our runny DNA flung
upon the street, watercolour without myth
or mystery.
Outside the wreck still curls into itself.
Lizards slide between bank doors.
Scaffolds of eyes, arranging sequences
of dialogues. We are not the first with selenite
slippers to kiss the compass.
We take the sugar pills,
receive a swift kick in the gut
from the algorithm. What tombs—
we herrings—in cages
blessed with lungs.
Chadha Brahmi, a 23 year old architecture student from Tunisia, never considered herself an artist. She compares her artwork to her weightlifting. She is suffering to create something better and beautiful.
There are various themes in her work, but the disembodied eye is the birthplace of it all, the form from which it all sprouts, and the foundation of her uncategorizable vision. Her depictions of eyes and the accompanying disembodied beauty verges on the horrific and occasionally slips into a kind of modern-day impressionism of body horror of the silenced subject. These are artworks that can seem like sketches or illustrations and can veer into collage, peppered with found objects or cut open like a pop-up book in progress to reveal the artifice of the 2-D. They can have the extreme allure of satire and its caricatured vision of reality even when they are always awash in watercolors that give an unnerving living quality to them, and often are like blood splatters on the page.
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Hanoi is a mobius strip.
You think you are moving in one direction and then find yourself back round towards the intersection that started it all, except for somehow it’s changed in the interim. Like somehow you slipped into an alternate reality Hanoi. Or. There are parts of Hanoi that sing with remarkable birds and vegetation hangs out from every window, off of every balcony, and into these back streets, and there are parts of Hanoi that are tight walls of junk shoppery crammed with a river of angry motorbikes and their murmuring engines. Hanoi contains every possible version of Hanoi.
Or to put it another way. Hanoi is functioning as a stand-in for my mind at the moment and its many frustrations and confusions. It is what a broken mind looks like. A mind racing in many directions at once. A mind facing the inevitable end times and the games we play to avoid facing it.
We, the human race, are the greatest procrastinators. When faced with our own impending doom, our answer is always, “Not yet.” We watch the lava rolling over the lip of our front yard and think, “Maybe it’ll go away on its own.” We witness our neighbors in the furthest housing unit swept off into the sea and say, “It has nothing to do with me.” This is us.
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“My baby used to give my heart a chill.” With his signature deadpan suave, John relays a change in the mood. This new wave noir synth-driven vignette with its lush guitar and evocative lyric-work is a masterpiece of understated tension.
Chill 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 and you can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
Creative Writing In Higher Education
The words “Creative Writing in Higher Education” fill me with dread (angst, disquietude). For the past 7 years, to varying degrees, I have studied creative writing at university level. If there was any consistent philosophy that held together the various modules I studied, it was evidently wasted on me: from the standpoint of a student there was no coherent vision for any of these modules. I have listened to creative students bemoan the courses which they cannot get their heads around and worry about whether they’re doing what they’re meant to be doing. But perhaps that is the point, the significance, the substance of these creative writing modules: that they have no “point”, as such, but instead play roulette with undiscovered talents and ignore them when they make significant headway. And there is a part of me that thinks this whole process insidious and evil: a damning summation of everything wrong with the teaching of creative writing in higher education. But, as Lars Svendsen points out in A Philosophy of Evil, the problem with many theories of evil is that they have a tendency to assume that evil wants to commit harm. (Cf. Natural evil.) And the one-sided nature of this tendency “leads us to lose sight of ourselves” which in itself can be described as evil (Svendsen 87). The whole losing-sight-of-ourselves could be prescribed to the evils committed under both Hitler and the Nazis as well as Stalin and the Communists. Thankfully, the teaching of creative writing in higher education is nothing so serious. And in many ways that is a part of the problem: it is not taken seriously enough.
It’s also a mistake to try and make people take things seriously. What often happens when this is attempted is the people for whom the lesson is being taught start cracking up; because the fact of the matter is that anyone who says they ought to be taken seriously ought not to be taken seriously at all. (E.g. Hitler and Stalin.)
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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 and you can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
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 and you can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
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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