Avant-Garde All the Time

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And welcome to another UbuWeb Poetry Foundation Podcast, All Avant-Garde All the Time. I'm Kenneth Goldsmith, founding editor of UbuWeb. And for today's podcast, what we're going to do is we are going to listen to some of the films that are hosted on UbuWeb hosts. Well, I don't even know how many films probably somewhere in the thousands at this point. And some of them are silent and completely visual, but many of them are filled with great soundtracks and are actually driven by sound. And the idea of kind of sitting and listening to some of the excerpts is just as good as listening to some of the audio pieces on UbuWeb. And one thing you should know is that unlike a lot of the audio works on UbuWeb, the quality from the soundtracks of the films or video, which are often very low production, are indeed Lo-Fi. But I think they are good to listen to regardless of their often lousy quality. So, in this podcast, we're gonna take 10 films from Ubu and hear what the films sound like. ('THEME SONG' BY VITO ACCONCI PLAYS) #Doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo doo.

You can see her face in my mind.# This is a soundtrack from 1973 by the performance artist Vito Acconci. And it's a sort of proto karaoke, piece called theme song. ('THEME SONG' BY VITO ACCONCI PLAYS) #Of course, I can't see your face. I have no idea what your face looks like.# Basically what he's doing is he's playing a bunch of theme songs and he's looking deep into the eye of the camera, and he begins talking to the audience as if they're part of the pop song. That's a improvisation on... Well, in this case, Jim Morrison and The Doors. ('THEME SONG' BY VITO ACCONCI PLAYS) #Don't you wanna come in here? Sure.# And the weird thing is it becomes very intimate because Acconci's pressed up against the camera lens and is actually actually talking to you, the viewer of the film through the pop song. ('THEME SONG' BY VITO ACCONCI PLAYS) #I don't know if there's anybody there. I don't know if you wanna come in here.# It's kind of eerie and creepy. It's face to face. And the weird thing is that he always says, 'You.' And you kind of think he's talking about women, but in fact, the 'you' is never gendered.

It's never specific. It's always universal. It's you could be anybody out there. ('THEME SONG' BY VITO ACCONCI PLAYS) #Oh, but there'll be something that can win you over. That's sure, sure. I might be crazy. I might be crazy trying to get you here, but no, of course not. No, I'm not crazy. Of course, you can come here.# This is the soundtrack written by Eric Satie for Renè Clair's Entr'acte filmed in 1924. The music is conducted by Henri Sauguet. It's a 22 minute black and white film that is a classic of surrealist cinema. Now, Entr'acte means intermission and Satie purposely wrote dull music that would be played sort of, you know, at an intermission, something to chatter over and have a cocktail over something not to be listened to. And when this kind of music interacts with Renè Clair's surrealist cinema, it gives the images time to breathe and time to move. So, it's non dictatorial. It's not dramatic. The drama is actually happening on the screen, and the music is just a kind of an ambient soundtrack for weird stuff to happen, like two men approaching a cannon and firing it.

Or they take dolls and they nail them to the wall of a rifle range and blast the hell out of them. Dancing ballerinas turn into strange men, and a funeral possession is interrupted, and the casket goes rolling on the ground. What can it all mean? Well, that's always the question with surrealist cinema. It's up to you to interpret it. And the music by Satie is about as ambiguous, leaving just a lot of room for dull interpretation. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
Or like, if you're, see, but like, OK. I got in a fight and I was like, hand hand combat and hit, you know, like, hand to hand combat. Mean I don't care if you're like flying over in an airplane, shooting down at people. It's like, just completely gross. So, if you have to, if you're gonna use knives, which I think is dirty fighting, you really need to, it's best if you use a switch plate, or even better yet, a straight razor. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is an insane monologue. One of the most insane monologues ever recorded, I think on film, certainly on UbuWeb by the young video artist team, Harry Dodge and Stanya Khan. This is a piece from 2006 called 'Can't Swallow It, Can't Spit It Out.' (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
But you wanna cut low, you know, in the groin, in the loin slicing. They don't even know what hit 'em, and the regrets are falling out. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
What you're listening to is a description of strange combat and bizarre violent scenarios. But what you're not seeing is the speaker of this film is running around the suburbs of Los Angeles in a viking costume with a bloody nose holding a huge wedge of rubber Swiss cheese. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
I'd say you could sit on my cheese, but... (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Cheese's just like Vito Acconci, running around. Talking to the camera, these insane dialogues. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
Longer than we've been making soap, codpieces and shammy shirts, and everybody just dousing their pits with cinnamon satchels. But everybody carried a comb. I mean, we bury our dead with our combs. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
The city is empty. She looks violent, she looks homeless. She visits all these bizarre sites where homeless people have encamped, and she's just going on about whatever happens to be coming to her mind. And the whole thing is chopped up very quickly. So, when you're listening to the soundtrack, you can actually hear that she's repeating things. Things have been sped up. It's a situationist inspired (UNKNOWN), something that Guy Debord would say, "Go through the city, discover the city as you've never seen it before." This is kind of an unfaithful or inaccurate portrait of Los Angeles as given to us by Harry Dodge and Stanya Khan. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
Once I was walking through the woods in the middle of the night and the devil, or a devil covered with eyeballs and tiny shining lights, and we were just face to face, he was able to telepathically communicate to me skills needed for speaking with animals. I was able to glean skills about how to communicate with a beast pretty much involved standing very still boring. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is a great soundtrack. This is actually one of the pieces that I would say the soundtrack stands on its own as a really great work of sound art. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
Besides that, I'm, oh, wow! Hey, look out. I'm taking over, man. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is the soundtrack from a video by the young video artist named Jordan Wolfson. It's called 'Con Leche' from 2009. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
Since The Daily Mirror, published pictures allegedly showing the model taking cocaine. Moss said yesterday, I take full responsibility for my actions. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
What you're not seeing here is an army of Diet Coke bottles, old-fashioned Diet Coke bottles that Wolfson has animated with legs on them, and it's an army of them. They're filled up with milk instead of with Coke, and they're marching through the desolate streets of the ghetto of Detroit, Michigan. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
I mean, my wife has black friends. Why can't I, what am I doing wrong? I have Latino friends, I have Scandinavian friends, I have Jewish friends. Can you pause? Thank you. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Probably. Now, if I can kind of think about it. It might be a comment on racism, consumerism. These bottles are filled with white substance instead of black invading a ghetto. Sometimes they're in groups, sometimes they're alone. They just sinisterly march through, like storm troopers, except it's rather like the invasion of popular culture instead of anything violent. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
I'm trying to be positive and the support and love I have received are invaluable. Coty Beauty, which manages the Rimmel Brand added in a statement. We are pleased to acknowledge the statement released by Kate Moss today, apologizing for her recent actions. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Above it all is this commercial voice, this actress talking about texts that are pretty much around like internet, gossip, identity, technology, memory. It's snippets of model gossip. It's news of what's happening with Kate Moss's career. Kate Moss invading the ghetto. But every few minutes you hear the video artist himself, Jordan Wolfson interrupting her and giving her some basic formal instruction saying, "Can you pause? Can you please significantly increase volume?" It's all about dictatorship and invasion on personal levels, political levels, as well as commercial levels. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
But sometimes I'm into chicks, but sometimes I feel very horny towards guys and feel very intimate. I also feel a big sense of regret if I fantasize about guys when I'm done. The future can be found in many places. It can be seen reflected in the eyes of those who are privileged to look at it. It can be found in the shape and form and made from the metal and the wire, the time and the effort of those who are privileged to create it. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
This is another one of those pieces that stands on its own as a great audio work because the artists that made it, people like us, also known as Vicki Bennett, is primarily a audio artist, though many might know her as a video artist. I think she's probably about the best plunder, phonic audio artist. And she uses film in a very similar way. This is a piece called 'Story Without End' from 2005. And what she's doing is she's using found footage from the public domain, mostly from the Wonderful Prelinger Archives. And she's talking about how technology enables us to communicate faster using this narrative. And Vicki is using a lot of samples from the period and looping them and kind of, it's becomes a very romantic view of progress. But it's progress without end. Because as we know, the story of technology is ever evolving and always continuing. And the piece is called 'Story Without End.' What was new this year is old last year. So, looking at the very beginning of technology microwave radio transmission in the transistor and the promises that it holds, of course, soon became obsolete.

And that's the story that Vicki Bennett wants to tell here. But of course, it's not told in any narrative way. There's layers of wonderful old imagery. She's layering lots and lots of audio. It's more of an archeological and a poetic treatment on the history of technology. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
In the laboratories. The men who develop new equipment and the men who will have to build it are always at work, not only improving what has been developed, but creating new things as well. However, it's one thing for highly skilled scientists, technicians to deliver equipment in the laboratory and quite another, to mass produce it on a production line. (INAUDIBLE) (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
OK. I'm gonna set the scene for you here with this traditional Austrian mountain music. OK? It seems like, where could it be? It could be in a beer hall, it could be a party, it could be at a wedding. No, no, it's not. It's at a castle in Austria. And what's going on here? There are naked people, lots and lots of naked people, and a pig is brought out and a knife is taken to the pig. The pig is slaughtered. And all of these naked people dig their hands inside the steaming hot guts of the pig and smear them all over their naked bodies and revel in the fact of blood and guts, then outcome grapes and fruits and tomatoes and animal lungs and intestines. And everybody rolls around in a Dionysian orgy. And what could it be? It could be mother. Then the work of the Viennese Actionist Herman Nitsch. What we're listening to is his theater of orgies and mysteries. This festival that he did in 1998 to celebrate his hundredth performance. It went on for six days. It was a six day orgy of blood and guts and food, and it, of course, ends with a fake crucifixion where they tie a guy to the cross and they smear him with blood of a disempowered cow.

Herman Nitsch is of course, the very famous Austrian performance artist. He's been doing this kind of stuff since the late 50s, and he does writings and scores. But he's also released a number of albums, which are layered kind of mixes of soundtracks from these performances. He often gets a hundred piece orchestras to play wagnerian hymns and then shoots guns over the top of it and brings in Oompah bands and it's all about excess. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
Some call me, Mr. Ra.

SPEAKERS:
Some call Me Mr. Ra.

SPEAKER:
Others call me Mr. Re.

SPEAKERS:
Call me Mr. Re.

SPEAKER:
You can call me Mr. Mr. Re.

SPEAKERS:
Mr. Mr. Re. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And of course, you know these sounds. These are the sounds of sun Ra. This is the soundtrack, or a portion of the soundtrack from what I consider to be the greatest documentary made on Sun Ras from 1980. And it's by a filmmaker called Robert Mugge, M-U-G-G-E. And it's called 'A Joyful Noise' (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
Astro thought in mystic sound, Astro black all outer space. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
The film opens up on rooftop hotel in Los Angeles. It's a bright sunny day, and the entire orchestra are up there decked out in their full cosmic regalia, you know, in an amidst water towers and air conditioning equipment. And they've got rainbow colored afros and weird hats and tunics and silver sequin shirts. And they're singing and dancing on the top of this hotel in Los Angeles, presumably to be closer to the sun, to be closer to the heavens to have a full sun rock experience. And the really, the great thing about Sun Ra is that he's from another planet. He doesn't live on this planet. And the top of a cheesy hotel in Los Angeles is as good as being on the top of a mountain to Sun Ra. And it really is. It is totally, totally joyful. This is a 60 minute film that was filmed all over the US in 78 and 80, when really, when the orchestra was just at its weirdest, and it dropped in between these kind of amazing performances, which are alternately noisy as well as being deeply melodic. As a matter of fact, in one scene, he does a cover of Thelonious Monks.

Round Midnight are bizarre interviews with him in a room of Egyptian artifacts, he says, "I don't consider myself one of the humans. I'm a spiritual being." And there's a portion of this film shot in front of the White House, and he says, I'm not a part of history. I'm more of a part of mystery, which is my story. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
One day it will happen, could be happening now that a voice from another dimension will speak to Earth. You might as well practice and be prepared for it. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Sun Ra, 'A joyful noise.' This is a wonderful combination of African alien and thrift shop. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
The world was in darkness, and darkness was ignorance along and wrong.

SPEAKERS:
Along and wrong

SPEAKER:
And the world was in darkness and darkness was ignorance along and wrong. Yes. I can hear my echo. And the words are coming back on top of me. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
You're never gonna guess who this is. Now, I'll give you a hint. He had a huge retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art a year or two ago. He makes giant imposing core 10 metal slabs that if they fell on you, you'd be crushed. He makes enormous arcs that bisect plazas that make people very upset. Who is it? Well, It's the sculptor, Richard Sarah. And oddly enough he's made tons and tons of really great videos. We've got about four or five of them up on UbuWeb. And in his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, a couple of years ago, not one video was present. So, Ubu's happy to present this whole other side of the great minimalist sculptor, Richard Serra. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
I think that it makes my thinking slower. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And what we're listening to is a piece from 1974 that stars the widow of Robert Smithson, named Nancy Holt. She's a very good sculptor in and of her own right. And what this is Nancy Holt is listening to a time delayed recording of her own speech, and describes what it is that's happening for about 10 minutes. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
I find that I have trouble making connections between thoughts. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
It's an investigation of, of the phenomena speech and time delayed, but it also plays into the influence of drugs during the period. It's got kind of a psychedelic overtone, and it's kind of also got a little bit of where am I? Who am I? A wittgensteinian exploration of what is language and what does language mean to be delayed? What is experience? Richard Serra has a beautiful quote about this videotape. He says, "This is a tape which analyzes its own discourse and process as it's being formulated." The language of Boomerang and the relation between the description and what is being described is not arbitrary. Language and image are being formed and revealed as they are organized. So, it's a very process-oriented piece. A very self-conscious piece. Very similar to Alvin Lucier's, 'I am Sitting in a Room,' and yet it's got a sort of a great trippy and psychedelic edge. Richard Serra and Boomerang from 1974. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
I want to hear my own, my own words, pouring back in on top of me. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
So, this sounds like a drum solo of some kind, right? Maybe some guy banging on some pots and pans in a kitchen. Well, let me tell you, it's not. What you're listening to is a guy dressed up in a hat and a suit looking kind of like a crazy businessman. And he's actually got two drumsticks in his hand, and he's running around and he's playing the city. He's running around the streets of New York, and he's actually banging on metal store shutters, light posts, phone booths, signs of graffiti covered buildings, little shards of broken glass in the street, street signs, mailboxes, dumpsters, you know, running his stick across sidewalk ratings, the sound of pavement, the sound of doors. And you also hear the sounds of the city mixed in with a percussion. This is by the great percussionist called David Van Tieghem. And it's really, you know, I would say this is one of my favorite videos on UbuWeb. It's called 'Ear to the Ground,' and it's made in 1979. And it's just this kind of amazing, nutty video of Van Tieghem running around in the streets of New York.

It's very romantic. It's a city that doesn't exist anymore. The city is absolutely deserted. It looks like it was done on a Sunday morning. All the stores are closed. There's no cars in the street. And it talks about a time in SoHo when artists were free to just use the city as their canvas. It reminds me of the pieces that Trisha Brown used to make the dancer, where people would just be crawling up and down the sides of deserted SoHo buildings or shouting to each other on rooftops. SoHo was just a big playground for artists in those days. Of course, today it's a luxury shopping mall. And if you tried to play the street today with drumsticks, you know, the merchants would have you arrested. There's a very beautiful scene. The final scene is Van Tieghem playing the cobblestone. There used to be beat up cobblestone by the old West Side Highway, and he's running off, perhaps into the sunrise, sunset playing the cobblestones. It really is an homage to a time when New York really did foster this kind of creativity.

(VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
And how do you say, Tristan and Iseult, Pee-Wee's adventure and Underground Cave, everybody must be locked away afraid of people. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
I'm kind of going back to the very beginning of our podcast with a solo voice speaking directly to you. This is the poet and visual artist called Karl Holmqvist with a piece called 'I'm With You in Rockland,' which of course refers to Allen Ginsburg's, well-known poem, 'Howl' from 1955. And of course, the third part of that poem has the same title as Holmqvist. But what he does is he updates Ginsburg's sort of sweeping portrait of his generation, the 50s, with a much more gritty homage to the age of aids. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
Ronald Reagan, Brigeitte Bardot. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
Holmqvist in this piece, catalog snippets of pop songs from Madonna Litanies of names from the aids period, Reagan. There's popes, there's celebrities from the period. There's references to Voguing and hardcore kind of act up politics. And then what he does is he deconstructs Ginsburg's poem and moves the whole thing into the paranoia of a post nine 11 world suddenly after aids is Homeland Security. And the video is just a black image with white subtitles. So, everything that Holmqvist is saying appears on the screen. And what we're really listening to is the soundtrack of Karl reading his work. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
All aboard Air Force One. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
It is disturbing, it is political, it is moving, it is personal, and it is also a highly edited version of history from, let's say the aids generation to now. (VIDEO PLAYS)

SPEAKER:
Homeland Security, gated community, diplomatic immunity, how do you say, insurance policy, father. (VIDEO ENDS)

KENNETH GOLDSMITH:
And so we conclude with a sampler of 10 film soundtracks that can be found on UbuWeb. I believe that everything we've listened to holds up on its own as a work of sound. Of the 10 pieces we listen to, I'd say at least eight of them are really dealing with the nuances of language. Ala Vito Acconci, Karl Holmqvist or Richard Serra's, investigation of Language with Nancy Holt. Conceivably, you could just grab the audio from these things and throw them on your iPod and listen to them. So, it's an entire other dimension of the works available on UbuWeb. So, this has been another UbuWeb Poetry Foundation podcast. I'm Kenneth Goldsmith, and all of this work can be found, of course, at ubu.com. We'll see you next time.