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'It's probably easy today to dismiss Negativland's activities as trifle, banal or plain stupid. They probably wouldn't be too uncomfortable with that, as they rarely claimed to go beyond the softest platitudes of the entertainment biz. No Other Possibility (1989, 58 mins, .avi d/l link), their first video work, showcases the band at a career threshold, before their U2ploitation move and just after their Christianity hoax. It typically explores the debris of American pop culture, dealing with automobile fetishism, televised preaching, halloween traditions, Marlboro masculinity, soft drinks and MTV.' [more inside]
posted by item on Nov 30, 2012 - 31 comments

Spectrum: New American Music was a series of five LPs released by Nonesuch between 1968 and 1974, featuring works by composers like Stefan Wolpe, George Rochberg, and Milton Babbitt, performed by Arthur Weisberg's Contemporary Chamber Ensemble. Nonesuch released a Spectrum compilation on CD in the 1990s; everything that's not on the CD is available at Internet Archive (Part 2), courtesy of the Avant Garde Project. [more inside]
posted by roll truck roll on Aug 20, 2012 - 10 comments

If you're a fan of William Burroughs' work, a complete reading of Junkie, by William Burroughs himself, has recently appeared online, for free. Junkie (alternately titled Junky) is a 1953 semi-autobiographical novel by William S. Burroughs, published initially under the pseudonym "William Lee". It was his first published novel and has come to be considered a seminal text on the lifestyle of heroin addicts in the early 1950s. Also some Burroughs movies, which include The Cut-Up Films, interviews, Burroughs The Movie and Shotgun Paintings.
posted by nickyskye on Aug 7, 2012 - 18 comments

35 full-length Viennese Actionist films 1957-1969. *NSFW* (Extreme graphic & scatological situations.) "The term Viennese Actionism describes a short and violent movement in 20th century art that can be regarded as part of the many independent efforts of the 1960s to develop 'action art' (Fluxus, Happening, Performance, Body Art, etc.)." Previously: 1, 2. [more inside]
posted by Skygazer on Jul 14, 2012 - 29 comments

Obscure Records was a U.K. record label which existed from 1975 to 1978. It was created and run by Brian Eno, who also produced the albums (credited as executive producer in one instance). Ten albums were issued in the series. All ten are available for your listening pleasure at Ubuweb.
posted by flapjax at midnite on Jul 13, 2012 - 30 comments

Today, Christmas day, is the 103rd anniversary of the birth of notorious British bon vivant Quentin Crisp. Previously. He was not noteworthy for any achievements, he was the opposite of an activist, but he was full of very good advice - Ubu web has recently made available his 1979 recording, An Evening With Quentin Crisp.
posted by Abinadab on Dec 25, 2011 - 15 comments

Henry Miller was a prolific and influential writer, and possibly one of the most written about American writers of the 20th century. [no less than 92 posts on MF about Henry Miller] He was also an admired painter [previously] and all around well traveled cat. Opinions of Henry Miller the author and the man, are many and varied, but one thing is certain, he is a darned entertaining fellow.
Ubuweb.com [previous ubu citings] has recently added three recordings of conversations with Henry made in the period 1957-1964. These join two previously available albums of him reading from his own works, and expounding his views in his lucid and amusing Brooklyn accent.
posted by Abinadab on Sep 17, 2011 - 11 comments

The Avant Garde Project is a series of recordings of 20th-century classical, experimental, and electroacoustic music digitized from LPs whose music has in most cases never been released on CD, and so is effectively inaccessible to the vast majority of music listeners today. Until now, of course. [more inside]
posted by carsonb on Jun 28, 2011 - 17 comments

"Starting with the precedents set by Charles Ives and John Cage, VARIATIONS presents the principal milestones of Sampling Music, looking at examples from 20th century composition, popular art and the mass media, and the way all of these currents converge today." Curated by Jon Leidecker, who records and performs as Wobbly. "Poet Kenneth Goldsmith presents selections from UbuWeb, the learned and varietous online repository concerning concrete & sound poetry, experimental film, outsider art and all things avant-garde" in Avant-Garde All the Time. Goldsmith's the founding editor of UbuWeb and sometime DJ on WFMU as Kenny G. (Previously: CodPaste - a 14-part podcast about the history and practice of sound collage and mashups. )
posted by moonmilk on Mar 20, 2010 - 9 comments

Never Again is a novel in which no word occurs more than once. Published in Ubuweb's contemporary collection. [more inside]
posted by kenko on Sep 12, 2009 - 101 comments

Whispering Jack Smith, an early crooner, sings - From 1929./ / Whistling Jack Smith, an imposter, lies - I Was Kaiser Bill's Batman [+da hool long]. / / At the bottom of the pool : : the perfect filmic appositeness of Maria Montez. / / Jack Smith, Blastitudinal Love & MORE.. . in their NEWEST pagan sensation! [more inside]
posted by j.henry on Nov 26, 2007 - 16 comments

/UBU Editions--Third Series. New, handsome, pdf editions of eleven out-of-print books, including ones by Maurice Blanchot, Claude Simon, Monique Wittig, and Rosemarie Waldrop. Be sure to also look at the first two series of /ubu editions. Previous ubuweb.
posted by OmieWise on Jun 27, 2007 - 9 comments

It's BACK! Otis F. Odder (of The Bran Flakes and Comfort Stand Recordings is reviving his 365 Days project on the WFMU Beware Of The Blog! Hot damn! He opens it with the complete recordings of the Michael Mills Satanic Messages Radio Show and the complete Beatles Forever recordings (previously excerpted in the first incarnation). (Previously on MeFi)
posted by Rev. Syung Myung Me on Jan 1, 2007 - 14 comments

"To play this motif 840 times in succession, it would be advisable to prepare oneself beforehand, in the deepest silence, by serious immobilities." Erik Satie's Vexations (previously) was more-or-less disregarded as an unperformable thought experiment, until John Cage staged an eighteen-hour performance in 1963. The event cemented Satie's importance in avant-garde music and his influence on a generation of artists. In 2006, several musicians and artists performed their own renditions.
posted by roll truck roll on Dec 30, 2006 - 17 comments

UbuWeb has converted all of its rare and out-of-print film & video holdings to on-demand streaming formats. via WFMU.
posted by treepour on Nov 28, 2006 - 11 comments

U Penn's Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing launches PennSound, an mp3 poetry library. Press release is here. Listen to sound files of single poems; read the manifesto; browse the author index; check out the webcast archive; and more (from the related Ubuweb).
posted by jokeefe on Feb 1, 2005 - 6 comments

The Collected Works of Racter: "A tree or shrub can grow and bloom. I am always the same. But I am clever."
Or, perhaps more useful than poetry, "A Method for Sorting Cows."
Have I read this before, or merely something like it? "A piece that is essentially the same as a piece made by any of the first conceptual artists, dated two years earlier than the original and signed by somebody else. "
In our confusion, we can settle for simple non-sequitor: The Ubuweb Anthology of Conceptual Writing.
posted by kaibutsu on May 5, 2004 - 7 comments

Before there was McSweeney's... Phyllis Johnson published 10 issues of Aspen, a multimedia magazine in a box to which the USPS denied second-class mail rates. After a few issues that stayed close to the ski resort in terms of theme, the magazine began bringing in guest editors and addressing cutting edge art and media, in New York, Britain, Asia, and the minds of cultural critics and psychedlic drug users. Andy Warhol participated in Issue 3 and the Fluxus movement dominated Issue 8. There were 10 issues in all, the first 9 of which are featured in this new web adaptation at Ubuweb. At the risk of only posting whenever Andrew Stafford unveils another cool web-native multimedia art project, I thought a lot of Metafiltrates would appreciate this interpretation of Aspen Magazine
posted by xian on Nov 15, 2002 - 11 comments