Remember Yourself Ironically, False Messiah

August 19, 2023 in Article, Letter from the Editor

Letter from the Editor

The truth is, I always loved you.

Oh, you false messiah, what do you have to offer our perpetually flooded, brokedown and generally speaking nonexistent universe—what platitudes and what shopping tips—and what will come of it when it comes—the suburbs turned into a no-man’s land between the scavenging riches of the liquefied and decomposing downtown and what wilds have grown beyond—the family dog murdered for its meat—an eye for an eye—and nothing but silence in between—all wrong place wrong time on account of some of us weren’t built to survive the apocalypse, but you think you’ll do just fine, don’t you?

You and me are you, my false messiah—who sit here pontificating in our cynicism, because—with the apocalypse just around the corner, all your favorite romantic comedies don’t do it for you anymore.

So—who are we? We’re the ones with our feet in two epochs, and our greatest hope is to get to the credits of this madcap comedy of a genocidal romp without being swept up in its killing fields. Many of us believe even now that the annihilation of everything and everyone will only happen on the far side of the globe from us, in the global south of our former vacation spots, but no one panics like a suburbanite, not to mention a mob of panicked suburbanites, armed with rifles and tiki torches.

The Early Cinema of Jamaa Fanaka

August 11, 2023 in Article, Feature

Walker Zupp

Welcome Home Brother Charles (1975) was the first film by Jamaa Fanaka (1942-2012). Fanaka was a film undergraduate at UCLA when he made the film, and it was an attempt to make use of the equipment he had access to. “They’d have these assignments called a Project 1 then a Project 2, which were usually five or ten minutes without sound,” Fanaka recalled in an interview with Jeff Brummett*. Although turning one’s “Project 2” into a movie was unheard of, Fanaka decided to “take advantage of this blessing” and started production on his first feature-length film*.

1975 was a watershed year for the United States. It saw the evacuation of American soldiers from Saigon and the takeover of Cambodia by Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge. The American merchant vessel, Mayaguez, was also rescued after being seized by Cambodian forces. Lastly, Americans and Soviets launched their respective spacecraft—Apollo and the Soyuz—into space for a U.S.-Soviet link-up, which led to new developments in space travel. In the United States things were equally tumultuous. John N. Mitchell, H.R. Haldeman and John D. Ehrlichman were found guilty of covering up the Watergate Scandal and were sentenced to up to eight years in jail. Then Gerald Ford—who had only recently been sworn-in as president—survived two assassination attempts within seventeen days†. (Both attempts were carried out by female shooters, one of whom was a member of Charles Manson’s cult.) In short, it was the right time for Fanaka to make a film about an ex-con’s murderous genitalia. As of June 2023, however, Welcome Home Brother Charles has 4.8 out of 10 on IMDB, is generally classed as a Blaxploitation movie and is about as obscure as the pioneers of Soviet animation, the epic Polish science fiction movie, On the Silver Globe (1988), and the experimental novels of Ann Quin.

Video: Valkyrie

July 26, 2023 in sad, Series

Song-A-Day

“You and me and the ravens, we are going to drink today.” The end of every little thing is indeed coming, and this is the anthem for that ending. Just another line we get to get in. Enjoy!

Valkyrie 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.

John Manson and Dan Madri of The Gondoliers, became involved some 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!

Interview with Dominique de Varine

June 19, 2023 in Article, Interview, Feature, Press

[This week we thought we’d share an interview with artist, Dominique de Varine, who calls Brittany home, but who we met in the Tibetan colonies of Northern India.]

Mutable: I think a good place to start our conversation is Dharma and Karma, as this was where our conversation began. What is the relationship between Dharma and Karma in your work? Has it always been this way or has their relationship evolved over time? And also, was there a time when these concepts were not important to your work and some moment when they became more so?

Dominique de Varine: Karma, Dharma, I don't know what they are! I do have some ideas of course but fleeting ones that fade over time. When I started working on the series "Galipettes," the question it seemed capable of answering was that of emptiness. Over time, an echoing fullness invited itself in, playing an equal and dialectical role. A semiotic reading complements it, involving the opposition between engagement (narrative) and disengagement (narrative). Emptiness, disengagement in the here and now. Fullness, engagement in all the formations of the world. Hence, the Dharma and the Karma.

Chapter 10: The House of the Rising Sun

May 17, 2023 in Podcast, Series, Weltschmerz

Welcome to Weltschmerz

Boyer and Jill get swept up in the nightlife of LA and its lederhosen and stripper clowns. They have made it to the other side of America and celebrations are in order. Although, when they find themselves in a Danish wonderland Gabe can’t shake the feeling that they’re surrounded by rosy-cheeked elderly Satanists, and that night, his dreams are troubled and John C. Lilly plays a part.

You can find Chapters 1 - 9 here.

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Sunburned Hand of the Man at the Green Street Grill [11/30/97]

Boston Bands in the 90's: Sunburned Hand of the Man

May 09, 2023 in Series, Boston Bands in the 90s

Opening with some ethereal sounds from out the plastic recorder of our youth, Sunburned Hand of the Man only gets weirder the longer you sit with it. This mesmerizing exploration into 90s psych rock becomes increasingly unhinged and powerful as it continues. Good both for the meditating mind, and any and all nostalgic lotus-eaters, and especially those latter-day rockers who like myself went running off to the far end of the world to end up lost in Japan or Indonesia, or tucked among the foothills of the Himalayas, say, and camped out at a Tibetan monastery. This one’s for you, man!

Billy Ruane was a staple of the scene at one point, and he documented endless shows throughout the 90’s and beyond. These videos came out of that.

Video: Caliente

April 30, 2023 in sad, Series

Song-A-Day

“There are definitely more things burning down than before and are definitely more people undressing.” And we are indeed watching them burn. This is a spicy little number with Madri’s driving drums and shimmery synth as always perfectly offsetting Manson’s endless pessimism. There’s a euphoria in losing your skin.

Caliente 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.

John Manson and Dan Madri of The Gondoliers, became involved some 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!

This is Not a Review: of Dark

April 21, 2023 in Article, This is not a Review, Feature

Gabriel Boyer

Twin Peaks will forever be my favorite show of all time. It’s weirdness is unprecedented. It sits both at the peak of David Lynch’s career and at this perfect point in history when television was still just trash and when you consumed it, you did with the same relish that you consumed Bagel Bites or Oreo O’s. It was a time when FOX was just getting started with shows like 90210 and Married With Children, when trashiness and disgustingness were hilarious, when Jerry Springer was both a genius and a charlatan, a world of satire and deadpan comedy that will never come again.

But in the sea change that came with the coming decades, new kinds of serialized video content began being produced. There are those shows everyone talks about: The Sopranos, Breaking Bad, Game of Thrones… The first two seasons of both True Detective and Westworld were a revelation. But these were all masterful works of genre, whereas with Dark something new came into the world that for once could rival Twin Peaks with its weirdness.

Dark raises questions of causality and plays with dichotomies like good and evil, but it also manipulates our expectations in an almost mathematical way. What is so mind-meltingly good about it isn’t the dialogue or the characters, but the puzzle of its narratological universe and the way in which this puzzle has been realized. In a streaming universe dominated by sequels and spin-offs, Dark is something of a miracle. It exists in a genre all its own, a genre that is distinct from science fiction, a kind of postmodern realism.

Colin Winnette's Users

March 31, 2023 in Article, Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

We here at Mutable first met Colin Winnette in a loft in Chicago sometime in early 2009, and have delighted in watching as his career has blossomed in the last decade-and-a-half. From the subtle allegorical realism of his debut novel, Revelation, a voice that matured with Coyote and Haint’s Stay, turned wondrously weird with The Job of Wasp, and has now founds its home with Users.

Hailed by the New York Times as “timeless”, the story also reads as very timely, centering around a tech creative and his efforts to create VR experiences from dreams, a premise which perfectly fits with Winnette’s signature dreamlike prose. From Western to sci-fi, the one constant is a kind of watery and elastic reality, a prose both biblical and sly.

You can read a sample of Users here.

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.

Video: Sin

February 23, 2023 in sad, Series

Song-A-Day

“We all live in sin.” Manson & Madri are here to preach it to you with this pared down exposition on our general fallen state. Brings me back to my days as a choirboy, a classic of minimal songwriting.

Sin 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.

John Manson and Dan Madri of The Gondoliers, became involved some 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!

Arlit

February 15, 2023 in Excerpt, Story, Series

Nick Perilli

On their way through Arlit, people sank into the sand. They sought Algeria.

Davies Tuch sat on a boulder—like a lizard—outside the city born from uranium mines. Davies appeared more vigorous, then. His hair gleamed blonde and his features were cut—almost chiseled around the cheek areas. Even with that vigor, he withered out there on his rock. A clogged rifle stuck in the ground beside him, reaching up out of the sand. A man’s shadow cast over Davies.

“Frenchman,” it said. Davies didn’t open his eyes. The man said it again.

Chapter 9: Frank & Eddy

January 02, 2023 in Podcast, Series, Weltschmerz

Welcome to Weltschmerz

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.

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Video: Kenny Rogers Rock Opera

December 22, 2022 in Mutablesoundofthemonth, Feature, Podcast

Mutable Sound of the Month

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.

Mutable Sound 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. If you have a track you would like us to hear, please feel free to send it on to mail@mutablesound.com along with credits and a brief description.

The Analog Internet

November 04, 2022 in Manifesto of the Month, Feature

Manifesto of the Month

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?

Video: Breeze

October 26, 2022 in sad, Series

Song-A-Day

“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. Our dark journey into the sounds and minds of Manson & Madri continues.

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!

Mosaic of Time: Topography

October 06, 2022 in Series, Mosaic of Time, Poetry, Story

Lina Ramona Vitkauskas

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.

Mosaic of Time is a monthly series that each month explores another cinepoem by author and artist, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas.

The whole body of the “Mosaic of Time” section will create a broader mosaic, over time, and ideally capture time as the world progresses or regresses—plunging into global events and out again.

Featured

Chadha Brahmi & the Unspoken Other

September 30, 2022 in Article, Isstillcools**t, Feature

In the Mutableye

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.

My Asinine Life: The End Game

September 18, 2022 in Article, My Asinine Life, Series

Gabriel Boyer

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.

Video: Chill

September 10, 2022 in sad, Series

Song-A-Day

“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. Our dark journey into the sounds and minds of Manson & Madri continues.

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!

Creative Writing In Higher Education + Sceptical Interruptions

September 08, 2022 in Article, Feature

Walker Zupp

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.)

Paperback Book8" x 5.25"560 Pages$16.00Now Available

Billy Ruane was a staple of the scene at one point, and he documented endless shows throughout the 90’s and beyond. These videos came out of that.

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.

Paperback Book8" x 5.25"560 Pages$16.00Now Available

Mosaic of Time is a monthly series that each month explores another cinepoem by author and artist, Lina Ramona Vitkauskas.

The whole body of the “Mosaic of Time” section will create a broader mosaic, over time, and ideally capture time as the world progresses or regresses—plunging into global events and out again.

Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
560 Pages
$16.00
Now Available

Paperback Book
8" x 5.25"
560 Pages
$16.00
Now Available