At the Cut & Paste exhibition at the Estorick, I noticed a pile of CDs in the museum shop, full of avant-garde sound pieces. Excellent, I thought, I’ll have that. And then I remembered UbuWeb.
ubu.com, if you don’t know it, is a web resource for avant-garde material available on the internet, founded in 1996 by poet Kenneth Goldsmith. Like the play for which it is named, it is a domain of greedy self-gratification for lovers of aural and other delights. For example, here is Guillaume Apollinaire, author of Bookkake’s own Memoirs of a Young Rakehell, reading in 1913:
1913! I know! And there are other recordings by Apollinaire as well. And so much more. Here’s an experimental film by Pierre Coulibeuf, who did his doctorate on Sacher-Masoch. Here is Jean Genet’s only film, Un Chant D’Amour, from 1950. Here is an extract from a complete online copy of the third edition of ASPEN, The Plastic Exploding Inevitable, with poems from Ginsberg and Orlovsky and Snyder and The Beast Sound:
GOOOOOOR! GOOOOOOOOO!
GOOOOOOOOOR!
GRAHHH! GRAHH! GRAHH!
Grah gooooor! Grakh! Gruaarr! Greeeeer! Grayowhr!
Greeeeee
GRAHHRR! RAHHR! GRAGHHRR ! RAHR !
RAHR! RAHHR!! GRAHHRR! GAHHR! HRAHR!
BE NOT SUGAR BUT BE LOVE
looking for sugar!
ROWRR!
GROOOOOOOOOOH!
I discovered the Aspen stuff through another discovery: Goth be praised, UbuWeb has a podcast: Avant-Garde All The Time, in association with The Poetry Foundation. It’s a sort of gentle troll through the UbuWeb archives, and well worth your subscription. It’s great to see already-awesome online repositories of culture evolving new curation methods to explore their own archives, and this is a particular goodie.
