L’œuvre de Denis Colin se développe en gambade, discrètement. La simplicité, l’humilité de son économie vous poursuivent de leur charme, de leur humour enfoui. Le plus souvent crée en regard d’un lieu, pour un lieu, un évènement, elle s’y insère et s’en libère aussitôt.
J’ai proposé à Denis Colin des images de son travail tournant autour de la question de l’habiter.
All photographs © Philippe Robin. To see more of his work go here.
We here at Mutable have been venturing into the Far East and its vicinity for some time, and this most recent addition to our library of auditory delights comes from one of these forays. To Dharamshala and Cafe 129 where Mutable regular Gabriel Boyer was performing songs from various unreleased albums, and one or two you may have heard before but never like this. In this most intimate of concerts, at a venue perched high in the Himalayas and coming directly from the monastery he has been calling home for more than a year, Mr. Boyer sings songs of heartache in the Vietnam jungle and songs steeped in a wistfulness he wrote while living with the Tibetan monks of Northern India. Enjoy!
These vignettes of the end times. Of a Mad Max dreamworld happening somewhere off stage left. A lush and endless pessimism. A wild and cynical manifesto of new-wave noir synth and heart-beat-like sonic violence. Like a haiku that forgot to count its syllables, a propaganda stripped of its propaganda and somewhere between a deadpan Jacques Brel and a don juan Daniel Johnston. Between late Leonard Cohen and mid-career Scott Walker. Between a bar stool confessional and a bar room anthem of these trying times, for the late-night crowd, of the American psyche on trial. Enjoy!
The songs presented here are part of a larger project of 30 songs recorded over 30 days by John Manson and Dan Madri. You can explore a library of videos from the full project here.
Lyrics written by John Manson
Music written by John Manson and Dan Madri
Performed by
John Manson: Lead Vocals
Dan Madri: Guitar, Bass, Piano, Synths, Percussion, and Drums
Engineered by Dan Madri
Produced by Dan Madri
Mastered by Scott Craggs
Lina Ramona Vitkauskas (b.1973, she/they)
"1996" from PRVSLY RCRDED
All video poems included in the project PRVSLY RCRDED revolve around the notion that all life is “previously recorded” via inherited memory or biological encoding. The cycle of life (birth/death)—as well as the epigenetic scars inherited from ancestors’ fight-or-flight past—contribute to how we re-imagine/re-tell our narratives. Past poems (written) have now been deconstructed, re-arranged, and re-told as video poems. In the poem "1996", we hear the artist retell her journey to Lithuania as a 25-year-old graduate student—not a typical trip—as all "coincidences" in her journey seem to suggest she was being vetted as a diplomat or intelligence contact at the time. A trip to the borderland area of Kaliningrad, a conversation with the president, and some family secrets divulged resonate throughout the piece, causing the artist to ponder this suspicious series of events.
PRVSLY RCRDED will be an ongoing project, eventually becoming an online space / portal where I can re-purpose / re-present poems. As a 50-year-old poet re-inventing my work—also as a new immigrant from the US during a tumultuous time in all geopolitical spheres—I hope to offer a space for dialogue for those who have also experienced ancestral trauma.
“Yes, your majesty. We are your yes men. We will happily do your bidding. Your majesty.” With Madri’s driving drum & bass and its whining synth accompanying Manson’s sultry spoken word like a post-apocalyptic cabaret, like something diseased come upon the world, we are drawn into a kind of Mad Max dreamworld happening somewhere off stage left of this vignette of the end times, this twisted and cynical ode. Climb those majestic mountains, sirs!
Majesty 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.
Ostrich Derby took place every year on the same day as the Kentucky Derby, starting approximately an hour after the winning horse made his/her triumphant cross over the finish line. Ostrich Derby took place on Mung’s Farm, about four and a half hours north of the Hayes farm and environs. Jeffery Mung and his wife Fay raised ostriches, two and a half dozen of them usually, sometimes as many as three dozen on a sizable chunk of land on Maryland’s Eastern Shore. Mung had begun commercial ostrich farming for eggs, not the actual bird themselves, but the leather, the yolk, the albumin, the shell, the whole of the egg. Ostrich eggs retail somewhere in the high teens, sometimes twenties. There’s been rumor that Mung has branched out into farming the birds for meat, which he has yet to publicly confirm, or deny. All in all, it’s a labor of love, and Jeff Mung charges admission to local school kids to come to see the ostriches. Mr. Bill often reflects on the day he drove through the lazy Maryland countryside, almost identical to Virginia’s Eastern Shore in terms of vegetation, animal wildlife, etc., when he saw out the passenger’s window a large almost saurian looking bird running at high speeds round and round a fenced section of land. Mulch had casually remarked, “Oh yeah, ostriches,” and slowed so Mr. Bill could see the birds. Then even more casually Mulch remarked, “We’re coming here next weekend for the derby.” But Bill hadn’t heard that remark, he had been too busy admiring the stride of the birds, the large nine-foot body, the long sloping necks, and the head which reminded him of an old balding man. Bill then saw several other birds in orbit inside the black screened fence, high as an elephant’s eye. Bill, for a second, was transported somewhere else, a real honest to god mind-warp. Mr. Bill never forgot that moment, the odd, but quick black and white cartoon-like bird cutting, zipping across the long stretch of fenced-in green yard, backed by a row of large blocky shed-like things, which housed the dinosaur’s closest relative. For a moment Bill thought he was in another country. Where was the desert savanna, the palm trees, the Egyptian oasis? There was only Maryland humidity and hot summer sun.
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Boyer is in San Francisco, but his mind is wandering, from his childhood to the 90’s and being young in hacker houses at the turn of the century, or performance lofts, or somewhere in between, and somewhere in there, God plays a part. This chapter is more a rumination than a Bedroom Theater, although it does contain a smashing musical number from the forgotten classic, Free-Thinking Man as Commodity. And food is featured prominently.
You can find Chapters 1 - 10 here.
[We here at Mutable stumbled upon the most outlandish of web pages and felt the need to post an excerpt of this endless and multi-pronged manifesto here. If you enjoy the twisted logic, you can find more at Evolutionary Economics.]
Abstract. The structural constitution of a super organism, are its physiological networks, which distribute:
The proper energy: blood, financial, economic system of re=production of goods.
Information: legal, cultural system of informative just laws and customs that synchronize the motions of its body cells.
Entropy=motion to the system:digestive territorial system from where to extract the raw materials for entropic motion
And so a legal constitution of the Human super organism will be a set of laws that maximize the WHEALTHY (healthy wealth), efficient distribution of energy, information and goods to the entire human kind, as all cells-citizens in any true working, efficient super organism receive enough of them to survive.
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“While I have no intention of teasing an extra squirt or two of milk from this old mother-shriveled old teat.” Pass on your entitlement, and let your bones fertilize the firmament. We are indeed freer than the wildest of babies. Taste the liberty! Another bit of brilliance from John Manson and Dan Madri.
Liberty 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 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.
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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.
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“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 and you can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
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.
Sunburned Hand of the Man at the Green Street Grill [11/30/97]
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!
“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 and you can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
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.
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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.
“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 and you can find a selection of these songs on their album Secret Griefs here.
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.
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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.
