July 11th, 2010
EC Comics
Luther Phillips
Mr. Beaser: Is there any limit you can think of that you would not put in a magazine because you thought a child should not see or read about it?
Mr. Gaines: My only limits are the bounds of good taste, what I consider good taste.
Sen. Kefauver [alluding to the cover illustration for Crime SuspenStories #22 shown above]: This seems to be a man with a bloody ax holding a woman’s head up which has been severed from her body. Do you think that is in good taste?
Mr. Gaines: Yes, sir, I do, for the cover of a horror comic….
Sen. Kefauver: This is the July one [Crime SuspenStories #23]. It seems to be a man with a woman in a boat and he is choking her to death with a crowbar. Is that in good taste?
Mr. Gaines: I think so.
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July 7th, 2010
MUT012
Box Kites
Glitter Tracks
Click to Enlarge
12 tracks recorded in Winthrop, Maine, and Chicago, Illinois in 2008/2009. All songs performed by Box Kites. Produced by Malcolm Felder. Cover art by Annie Heringer.
FREE MP3: White Space
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July 4th, 2010
Manifesto of the Month
From The Language of Form and Colour
Wassily Kandinsky
To begin with, let us test the working on ourselves of individual colours, and so make a simple chart, which will facilitate the consideration of the whole question.
Two great divisions of colour occur to the mind at the outset: into warm and cold, and into light and dark. To each colour there are therefore four shades of appeal — warm and light or warm and dark, or cold and light or cold and dark.
Generally speaking, warmth or cold in a colour means an approach respectively to yellow or to blue. This distinction is, so to speak, on one basis, the colour having a constant fundamental appeal, but assuming either a more material or more non-material quality. The movement is an horizontal one, the warm colours approaching the spectator, the cold ones retreating from him.
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June 27th, 2010
Smash Putt!
The industrial artists of The Department of Culture re-apply and reinvent their practiced predilection for mechanized mayhem to the humble sport of miniature golf. Forget everything you would normally expect from this national past time and be prepared for innovative chaos teetering on pure bedlam. Smash Putt, originally opened in Seattle, has since moved on to Portland, and soon Denver, CO.
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June 20th, 2010
The Stendhal Syndrome
Luther Phillips
In 1989, Professor Graziella Magherini, a Florentine psychiatrist and psychoanalyst, made her name with the publication of The Stendhal Syndrome, addressing clinical instances of queasiness, disorientation, heightened sensitivity, and panic in people confronted by great works of art or architecture. Named after Stendhal, the pen name of Marie-Henri Bayle, best known for his novels The Red and the Black and Charterhouse of Parma, whose diary contained an account of his visit to the Church at Santa Croce, where he fainted in sympathetic response to a painting, this affliction, also dubbed Hyperkulturemia or Florence syndrome, is a psychosomatic illness that can cause rapid heartbeat, dizziness, fainting, confusion and even hallucinations, usually when a person’s viewing art that is particularly beautiful or a large amount of art in a single place. The term can also be used to describe a similar reaction to a surfeit of choice in other circumstances, e.g. when confronted with immense beauty in the natural world, or when overwhelmed by the viewing possibilities presented by netflix.
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June 13th, 2010
Gabriel Boyer / Normal Feelings Tour!
Gabriel Boyer and Normal Feelings are going on a Northwest Bookstore Tour starting this week. Gabriel will be reading from his book, A Survey of My Failures This Far, and Normal Feelings will be playing your favorite hits from Mutable’s array of musical releases, from A Journey to Happiness Island, The Textbook Tapes, Battery Power, as well as new songs you’ve never heard before. Keep an ear out in your town!
To check out the tour diary go here. Dates below:
6.15 Olympia, WA @ Orca Books
6.16 Seattle, WA @ Inner Chapters Books
6.17 Port Townsend, WA @ The Boiler Room
6.18 Portland, OR @ Reading Frenzy
6.21 Palo Alto, CA @ Know Knew Books
6.22 Oakland, CA @ Book Zoo
6.23 San Francisco, CA @ Dog Eared Books
June 6th, 2010
Manifesto of the Month
The Subgenius Manifesto
(Excerpted from SubGenius Pamphlet One and The Book of the SubGenius by J.R. “Bob” Dobbs, and edited by Rev. Ivan Stang of The SubGenius Foundation, Inc., then re-edited by the Reverend Kareem du Gristle of the Church of the SubGenius, Santa Cruz 25 Hour Clench, only to be further modified by Reverend Modemac on November 18, 1995 with HtMl markup at sacred-texts by DJ Brujo, 12/y2k.)
“Time Control? You’ve come to the right place…”
ARE YOU ABNORMAL?
Then you are probably BETTER than most people!
IF you suspect that things are much worse than you ever suspected —
IF the only thing you’ve been able to laugh at for the last 5 years is the fact that NOTHING is funny anymore —
IF you sometimes want to collar people on the street and scream that you’re more different than they could possible *imagine* —
IF you can possibly help us with a donation —
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May 30th, 2010
Wilfred Owen’s War
(The first world war was the first science fiction war. That’s to say, the first war in which technology transformed the landscape to such a degree that the battlefield no longer was comprehensible to its human participants. Not that war is anything but incomprehensible. Think of Tolstoy’s descriptions of the Napoleonic wars, but this is different. Gas masks on horses, and streaks of light sort of different. Hell was no longer a place of fire and brimstone, but of chemical warfare. That having been said, Wilfred Owen captured this eerie and impossible landscape in a smattering of remarkable poems before his untimely death two days before the end of the war. This week, we thought we might present a few of them to you.)
Apologia Pro Poemate Meo
I, too, saw God through mud, –
The mud that cracked on cheeks when wretches smiled.
War brought more glory to their eyes than blood,
And gave their laughs more glee than shakes a child.
Merry it was to laugh there –
Where death becomes absurd and life absurder.
For power was on us as we slashed bones bare
Not to feel sickness or remorse of murder.
I, too, have dropped off fear –
Behind the barrage, dead as my platoon,
And sailed my spirit surging light and clear
Past the entanglement where hopes lay strewn;
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