March 7th, 2010
Manifesto of the Month
Building Innovative Teams: A Manifesto
Kaylea Hascall
Imagine: One fine morning, the boss walks into your office and says “I need your group to be more innovative.” Hmm. What does she mean by that statement? How are you supposed to go “be innovative”? What questions do you ask her about this new mandate? Can you do it? Can your staff?
Right after I was made a supervisor, I attended an on-campus seminar on management. The instructor described analyzing staffing in terms of two components: Willingness and Ability. Staff might be Willing, Able, both, or neither, and the course included practical suggestions about how supervisors could address each case. This is a reasonable way to begin, but once you add innovation to the list of departmental goals, these two components are too simple a criteria. Innovation requires a third component. We call it “Spark”.
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February 14th, 2010
Jason Grote & Never-ending Theater
Mutable favorite Jason Grote is working on a new project: HABIT, an installation piece by David Levine, which uses a three-character “realistic” play Levine commissioned from Grote. The actors will move into the installation and perform Grote’s play over and over again on a loop. Among other things, it’s a riposte to those who claim that “experimental” playwrights do what we/they (depending on whether or not you think Grote’s experimental) do because we/they “can’t” write “normal” or “well-made” plays. Open rehearsal May 1. To learn more about the piece click here.
February 7th, 2010
Manifesto of the Month
Mina Loy’s Aphorisms on Futurism
Last February, on the one hundredth anniversary of the publication of the Founding and Manifesto of Futurism, various poets read from their favorite Futurist Manifestos. Charles Bernstein chose to read from Mina Loy’s Aphorisms on Futurism.
Before Valerie Solanas coined her S.C.U.M. Manifesto, Mina Loy was writing on the emancipation of women, specifically in her Feminist Manifesto, a call for social and economic reform in the lives of women. Lifelong friends with Djuna Barnes and Gertrude Stein and one time lover of Futurist leader Fillipo Marinetti, Loy is known primarily as a striking poet, artist, and thinker. The below reading was recorded on February 20, 2009 in the public space of MOMA’s Garden Lobby.
Download it here, or click below to listen.
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January 24th, 2010
Jacques Vallee & His UFO Friends
(We here at Mutable first discovered Mr. Vallee as a result of his article, Polanski and Kubrick: two occult tales, in which he makes certain suppositions of a supernatural variety, very different from our own article, but insightful. He is more widely known, however, for his work concerning UFOs and the surrounding mythology. He has described UFO sightings as both ancient and mythic, comparing alien encounters with the Fairies of pre-Christian paganism. Frequently warm and generous, the creatures in these stories are seen as wonderful and magical beings continually involved with perplexing humans with the bizarre and non-sensical. While, at other times, Vallee would have us believe the UFOs represent something hostile and damaging: People get zapped with harmful beams and sometimes die. Below is an interview .)
Your latest book, Confrontations, just came out this spring. Prior to that, you hadn’t been in the limelight much. What was your focus during that time?
Jacques Vallee: People assumed I had gone off to a mountaintop to philosophize. The reason that I dropped out of the UFO scene is that I wanted to do UFO investigations, and I was tired of going to meetings where the same things were continually rehashed. What it came down to was just a lot of talk. I think we’re a long way from understanding this phenomenon, and the only way we’re going to understand it is to stop talking to each other, and go back and talk to the witnesses. That’s what I wanted to do, and I wanted to do it first-hand. I wanted to be able to go to the site, meet the witnesses, and monitor what was happening over a certain period of time. So, I put the highest priority on first-hand cases that had not been reported to the press or to the UFO community because the moment the cases become part of ongoing discussion, they get polarized: the witnesses are bombarded with all kinds of questions; there are biases; the ego gets into it. I wanted to do a quiet kind of long-term research. In ten years, I accumulated over two hundred such cases. The book is really a summary of the more interesting of these cases.
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January 5th, 2010
Podcast 54: Bedroom Theater Revisited
The Crucible as a Oneman Show, Pt. 2
What were those girls brewing in the woods? What secret longings burn in Abby’s heart? Find out in this second installment of the Crucible as a oneman show, our Bedroom Theater production. The girls are up to something, but what will come of it? And what of John Proctor and his wandering stare?
Download the episode here, or click below to listen.
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January 2nd, 2010
Manifesto of the Month
The Revolution of Everyday Life: The Decline and Fall of Work
Raoul Vaneigem
The duty to produce alienates the passion for creation. Productive labour is part and parcel of the technology of law and order. The working day grows shorter as the empire of conditioning extends.
In an industrial society which confuses work and productivity, the necessity of producing has always been an enemy of the desire to create. What spark of humanity, of a possible creativity, can remain alive in a being dragged out of sleep at six every morning, jolted about in suburban trains, deafened by the racket of machinery, bleached and steamed by meaningless sounds and gestures, spun dry by statistical controls, and tossed out at the end of the day into the entrance halls of railway stations, those cathedrals of departure for the hell of weekdays and the nugatory paradise of weekends, where the crowd communes in weariness and boredom? From adolescence to retirement each 24-hour cycle repeats the same shattering bombardment, like bullets hitting a window: mechanical repetition, time-which-is-money, submission to bosses, boredom, exhaustion. From the butchering of youth’s energy to the gaping wound of old age, life cracks in every direction under the blows of forced labour. Never before has a civilization reached such a degree of contempt for life; never before has a generation, drowned in mortification, felt such a rage to live. The same people who are murdered slowly in the mechanized slaughterhouses of work are also arguing, singing, drinking, dancing, making love, holding the streets, picking up weapons and inventing a new poetry. Already the front against forced labour is being formed; its gestures of refusal are moulding the consciousness of the future. Every call for productivity in the conditions chosen by capitalist and Soviet economy is a call to slavery.
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December 29th, 2009
Help Debo Band Return to Africa!
Friend of Mutable, the Debo Band, have been given the incredible opportunity to bring Ethiopian music for the first time to East Africa’s largest music festival: “Sauti za Busara” on the island of Zanzibar, February 11th-16th, 2010. The festival, now in its 7th year, draws over 18,000 attendees and showcases 30 performing groups from Africa and 10 groups from the rest of the world. They would bring with them 4 native Ethiopian musicians and dancers living in Addis Ababa. This is a major opportunity for them to reach a wider audience and make further connections and collaborations with music in Ethiopia and East Africa, while presenting Ethiopian music for the first time to this festival.
To pay for their upcoming African tour they’ve launched a fund-raising campaign, and now have 17 days to raise just under $6,000! They’d love you to watch their video and help spread the word. The success of this effort depends on this news reaching people far and wide.
Watch the video here.
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December 28th, 2009
Podcast 53: Bedroom Theater Revisited
The Crucible as a Oneman Show, Pt. 1
Arthur Miller, wherefore art thou? Very probably turning over in your grave at this minimalist interpretation of your classic play by Mutable’s own Gabriel Boyer, done in the same manner as it was done for Bedroom Theater some six years ago to an audience of two. This is the first of five installments of the Crucible, and the first of a series of Bedroom Theater re-enactments. Enjoy the antiquated language, the muppet-like voices, the Morton Feldman score, and general witchery with the knowledge that you are safe several centuries in the future of these dramatically reproduced historical events, a time when you can laugh, cry, and reproduce at your leisure.
You can download the first installment here or click below to listen.
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