Kinuyo Tanaka in Burden of Life, directed by Heinosuke Gosho

(Many moons ago, Chris Fujiwara wrote a play called The Clue of the Seven Madonnas for Bedroom Theater, a play inspired by the films of Edgar Wallace. He has written about everyone from Otto Preminger to Jerry Lewis. To read more about him click here. Below is a selection from his most recent article, written for the Museum of Moving Image.)

The 100th birthday of Kinuyo Tanaka, the legendary Japanese star, invites reconsideration of a career whose significance—not only cinematic but also cultural—is little recognized in the West and perhaps has yet to be fully explored in Japan. Outside her native country, she is still best known for her appearances in three Kenji Mizoguchi films—The Life of Oharu (1952), Ugetsu (1953), and Sansho the Bailiff (1954)—that were part of the first wave of the Western discovery of Japanese cinema. Oharu, in particular, is the apotheosis of the Tanaka figure: the Japanese woman as noble lady, lover, mother, geisha, middle-class wife, prostitute, and pilgrim, all encompassed in a single film by the sweep and curl of Mizoguchi’s crane. But Oharu did not come out of nowhere, and our understanding of it is deepened by knowing something of what framed it in Tanaka’s life: a personally momentous trip to America two years earlier and her success, the following year, in embarking on a new career as a director.

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Levi Fuller, who played in the little-known soul band Extra Play with Kevin Micka, Gabriel Boyer, and Malcolm Felder, all members of the Mutable universe, and played everything from stand-up bass to saxophone on A Journey to Happiness Island, has released a new album, Colossal. You can buy the vinyl at sonicboomrecords.com or buy the mp3s from iTunes, or read more at Levi’s website, denimclature.com.

The above pulpy periodical is really a manual on the workings of hell!

“I haven’t seen young meat for so long.” So begins another episode of Twilight at the Lady Jane Grey College for Little Ladies. Isabel is in a tavern in a world overrun by demons, while outside creatures of the underworld are eating each down to a dot across the globe, while in another place Nathaniel confronts the faery Lilu and discovers the truth about hell, faeries, and demons.

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For the past few months you may have noticed the occasional manifesto popping up for you to peruse. “Why,” you may have asked. The why is this.

We here at Mutable have believed in the art of the manifesto from before there was a Mutable to speak of. We taught a course at the Berwick Research Institute on manifesto-writing back in the summer of 2002, and have been soliciting people to write manifestos ever since. Our first book was Manifesto I, a collection of the manifestos were written as a result of our expertise in nagging.

All of this has evolved into the Manifesto of the Month. On the first sunday of every month we publish a manifesto discovered in the wonderful world of the interweb. Click on the link below to see the results of our ongoing efforts.

View all Mutable Manifestos

Autobots or unfortunate racial stereotypes? You decide!

Transformers. More than meets the eye. Although in the case of the most recent Transformers film the reverse is true, that everything is in full view, it’s just that there’s so much of it. The camera flits from shot to shot with the agitation of a hummingbird on steroids, and thereby leaving the audience no room to question or even think as images wash over them at brainwash speed. Afterwards I had the distinct impression that someone had just raped my mind.

Three second cuts with impossibly intricate robot disappearing acts? A bevy of beautiful women? (Every woman in the film is either super-model status or the main character’s mom.) More explosions than I care to count and characters who are always just about to burst an adrenal gland in their excitment? Two gang banging illiterate autobots with large ears and gold teeth who speak in some painfully stereotyped street slang? Welcome to the world of Michael Bay.

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The faery Lilu hides behind a dandelion stalk

The end is nigh! The end is nigh! The narrator has a faery infestation within his brain, while Isabel and Nathaniel are confronted by the faery Lilu. Listen to discover why faeries and demons both are dangerous to human-folk, unless you already know of course, in which case I suggest you hurry to the nearest mental health ward.

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(Gabriel Boyer has been writing and editing books, and putting out records with Mutable since its inception, so we thought we’d send a shout out for his personal blog, My Asinine Life, where he records the vicisitudes of his always unstable emotional life. There’s a brief example below. For the complete list of entries to date go here.)

Sometimes you think back to days gone by, and wonder how it is you ended up here by the side of this particular road, on this particular street listening to the whine of a passing freight train while you smoke your stale cigarette by the grape arbor round back. It’s afternoon, and the yucca trees at the corner of the yard are dead, and just moments ago, you were reading about some poor sap drinking himself to death in a small mexican town while the air gently squeezed your lungs with every intake of fat and watery breath, your face damp and smelling of mustard, and your eyes on the past and back when you were a better man because your suffering was a pretty little thing you nurtured in the dark, but all of this is a pleasant noir fantasy itself is it not, for after all I still nurture my suffering in the dark and I am not a better man.

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Only a flock of our little bird friends could do this much damage

Demons have overrun the earth. It’s only the desire to stay alive that keeps people in hell, and Dr. O’Reilly has no desire to stay alive whatsoever, but how does he know what he knows and what is that thing that is currently insulting him from out the shadows, and what is that bird poking itself outside of Isabel’s guts?

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