The Little Red Umbrella: ubuweb

Best Of UbuWeb: "Dali Speaks" by Salvador Dali

Originally posted on March 21, 2011:

UbuWeb is one of our most favourite sites on the whole of the Internet. It was started all the way back in the '90s by a New York City poet, Kenneth Goldsmith, as a place to host multimedia files from the history of the avant-garde. It has 100 year-old recordings of Dadaist sound poets. Books written by computers. Surrealistic Luis Vuitton commercials made by legendary Japanese directors. It's crazy.

So, as a way of justifying the hours we spend on UbuWeb (and in a transparent attempt to bathe ourselves in the reflected glow of its awesomeness), we've decided to start posting some of the most interesting stuff we come upon while we're surfing through its depths.

First up! Salvador Dali, best known as the artist dude who did those melty clocks and as the curator one of the twentieth century's greatest moustaches. This is a conversation he had with Irish actor Edward Mulhare in 1960, while Mulhare was on Broadway playing the world's most famous fictional phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, in My Fair Lady. Dali figures he still has a thing or two to teach the actor about proper Surrealist English diction. You can download the MP3 (right-click save as) or stream it below. And learn a little more about it on UbuWeb here.

Photo: Salvador Dali

UbuWeb is one of our most favourite sites on the whole of the Internet, host to multimedia files from the history of the avant-garde. It has 100 year-old recordings of Dadaist sound poets. Books written by computers. Surrealistic Luis Vuitton commercials made by legendary Japanese directors. It's crazy. Visit it here. Or see all of our "Best Of UbuWeb" recommendations here.

Posted by Adam Bunch, the Editor-in-Chief of the Little Red Umbrella and the creator of the Toronto Dreams Project. You can read his posts here, follow him on Twitter here, or email him at adam@littleredumbrella.com.

Best Of UbuWeb: Orson Welles - One Man Band

The Orson Welles we remember best is the young genius at the top of his game: the Orson Welles who revolutionized film technique and narrative with Citizen Kane; the Orson Welles who literally had people running for their lives with The War Of The Worlds. One Man Band is a 90-minute documentary telling the story of an Orson Welles we don't remember nearly as well: a frustrated director who spent the last years of his life starting a wide range of exciting and ambitious projects only to watch them fall apart, one after the other.

It's a fascinating film, a behind-the-scenes look at the latter parts of Welles' career, relying heavily on interviews with his widowed partner — actress Oja Kodar — and tantalizing clips of the projects that never came to fruition: his one-man version of Moby Dick; a sea-bound thriller starring Jeanne Moreau; a narrative-twisting character piece with John Huston, Dennis Hopper and Peter Bogdanovich.

You can stream the entire 90 minutes of the film on UbuWeb here.

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UbuWeb is one of our most favourite sites on the whole of the Internet, host to multimedia files from the history of the avant-garde. Visit it here. Or see all of our "Best Of UbuWeb" recommendations here.

Best Of UbuWeb: "Superflat Monogram" by Takashi Murakami (For Louis Vuitton)

There aren't many artists in the world more popular than Takashi Murakami. He started his own new Japanese pop art movement, "superflat", which mixes anime and manga with corporate branding, commercialism and mass production. Names like Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein and Keith Haring come up a lot when people talk about him. He does everything from keychains to 30-foot tall statutes. The big stuff sells for millions and millions of dollars. His work has been displayed outside Rockefeller Center and in a fifteen-room exhibition at the Palace of Versailles. A couple of years ago Time put him on their list of the 100 Most Influential People.

But his work, ridiculously cute and commercial, can also get kind of twisted. He chose the name "superflat" in part to reflect what he calls the "shallow emptiness of Japanese consumer culture." And he has no problem fucking with the usual inane slickness of corporate art. “I always emphasize that the power of the dark side exists even in cuteness," he told SWINDLE Magazine a few years ago. Some of his characters are grotesque. And his most famous and controversial statues are of disturbingly young anime figures ejaculating and lactating all over the place.

This video is from 2003, when he collaborated with Marc Jacobs for Louis Vuitton, designing a new line of multi-coloured, monogrammed bags. They were crazypopular; sales soared. This is the commercial he produced to accompany the launch, a strange, mildly disturbing, psychedelic, Alice in Wonderlandish trip, featuring his "Louis Vuitton panda" character. There's also a sequel from 2009 you can watch on YouTube here and you can visit the video's page on UbuWeb here.

Best Of UbuWeb: General Idea's "Pilot"

In 1977, AA Bronson, Jorge Zontal, and Felix Partz, collectively known as General Idea, produced a half-hour long segment called Pilot, which was broadcast on TVOntario. The video is both a campy survey of their work from 1969-77, and a witty commentary on mass media and the role of the artist in society.

From Catalogue Netherlands Media Art Institute:

"By using a satirical didactic style, collages of imagery from 1950's beauty illustrations, and self-portraits stereotyping themselves as cinematic characters, General Idea show how they have successfully designed themselves, how the media is expertly manipulated to achieve desired results and how the audience becomes no more than a submissive mass, smiling in a standing ovation at the command of a master we do not see." (Elaine W. Ho)

It's really good. You can watch Pilot here.

Photo: General Idea, Pilot (still) 1977

Posted by Rebekah Hakkenberg, the co-creator of Once Again, To Zelda. She also tumbls and tweets. You can read her posts here and email her at rebekah@littleredumbrella.com