On Ubu, Out of the Blueprint & More
lower case highlights cultural events, new releases, publish short reviews and recommendations for works across all genres. Our focus is on small and micro press, radical publishers, and events from independent bookshops. Readers & bookshop events suggestions welcome.
Celebrating Ubu
The web, like much of the world, promised much. Increasingly, late capitalism, enshittification and the commodification of everything leads to a landscape of über-bland cultural monoculture. As a response to this – celebrate the small wins they say – we are recognising the return of Ubu.com
In a message put out on 1 February, they wrote:
“A year ago, we decided to shutter UbuWeb. Not really shutter it, per se, but instead to consider it complete. After nearly 30 years, it felt right. But now, with the political changes in America and elsewhere around the world, we have decided to restart our archiving and regrow Ubu. In a moment when our collective memory is being systematically eradicated, archiving reemerges as a strong form of resistance, a way of preserving crucial, subversive, and marginalized forms of expression. We encourage you to do the same. All rivers lead to the same ocean: find your form of resistance, no matter how small, and go hard. It’s now or never. Together we can prevent the annihilation of the memory of the world.”
Back in 2014 Open Culture wrote: “If you know about Open Culture, surely you know about Ubuweb. If you don’t, its slogan says almost everything you need to know about it: “All Avant-Garde. All the Time.” This vast online repository of cutting-edge cultural artifacts from a variety of eras also adheres steadfastly to the principle of keeping all of its material free: free in the sense of charging you nothing to read, hear or view it, and free in the sense that you can do whatever you want with it.”
But that’s not quite right, as Ubu itself (founded by poet Kenneth Goldsmith in 1996) said:
“UbuWeb’s large, boundary-blurring archive of the avant-garde necessarily alters what is meant by avant-garde, a term saddled with the legacies of patriarchy, hegemony, imperialism, colonization, and militarization. Giving voice to these concerns, the poet and critic Dick Higgins wrote, “The very concept of an avant-garde, which relates to the military metaphor of advance troops coming before the main body, is masculine. The avant-garde theater scholar Kimberly Jannarone concurs: The term ‘avant-garde’—coming to us from the military and first applied to the arts around World War I—is heavily weighted by historical and political critical baggage.… Indeed, the historical avant-garde often relied on sexist, racist, primitivist, and imperialist notions.” And it’s true even today: witness how Italy’s far-right-wing party Casa Pound named itself after Ezra Pound, emblazing images of him across their posters, or how one of Vladimir Putin’s main ideologists, Vladislav Surkov, reputedly took techniques from his days as an avant-garde theater director and used them to sow confusion, discord, and chaos—exactly what the avant-garde excelled at—into rightist political situations. When you assemble a collection of the avant-garde, you run the risk of replicating everything wrong that is associated with it. In response, we deployed impurity as a way of muddying, détourning, and playfully reimagining the avant-garde, twisting and warping the rigorous, hard-baked grids of modernism into something more fluid, organic, incorrect, and unpredictable.
Yet think of the many artists who dissembled received notions of avant-garde as part and parcel of their avant-garde practices, such as Cornelius Cardew, Amiri Baraka, Musica Elettronica Viva, and Henry Flynt, or of others who took the idea of avant-garde in directions previously excluded from the canon. Our midcentury avant-garde pantheon and inspiration comprise artists such as Moondog, Marie Menken, Harry Partch, Daphne Oram, Conlon Nancarrow, Alice B. Toklas, and Sun Ra. Driven by outsiders and visionaries, our avant-garde revels in eccentricity, impurity, and innovative formal experimentation. And at the same time we still love the denizens of the old-school canon, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, and Pablo Picasso. But most of all we love it when they all get jumbled together on UbuWeb. Sparks fly when Henry Miller collides with Ana Mendieta, Karlheinz Stockhausen with Hito Steyerl, Fatboy Slim with the Situationist International, Weegee with Carrie Mae Weems, or F. T. Marinetti with Trinh T. Minh-ha, each nudging, reflecting, and shading their neighbors in unpredictable and destabilizing ways.
UbuWeb reflects this approach, and its avant-garde is vast and inclusive, moving away from the patriarchal, militaristic, racist, and imperialistic model. We like the idea of taking a discredited or orphaned term such as avant-garde and using it against its own bad history in order to reimagine it …”
UbuWeb hosts a vast archive of online alternative media, and they’ve been doing it since 1996. The site features a large mp3 sound archive, alongside an extensive film/video collection where you’ll find some vintage clips.
“UbuWeb is a purposely unstable library, a conflicted curation, an archive assembled by embracing the fragmented, the biased, the subjective, and the incomplete.”
Out of the Blueprint
Out of the Blueprint (‘supporting young artists through the power of print’) is a social enterprise in Leith that creates affordable risograph printing for the local community. They support young artists by providing training, residencies, exhibitions and events and other stuff. They cover 5-% of print orders for under 25s to help emerging creates get their art out into the world.
They specialise in risograph and Gocco printing.
Check out their SHOP for books, prints, comics and zines here: Products – Out of the Blueprint
A latest publication is Kali by Coocora. Out of the Blueprint explain: “Out of the Blueprint are proud to present Kali, a new graphic novel by Coocoora. You might remember Coocoora as our artist in residence, when she created the stunning silent comic SUN. Now she’s back with her latest masterpiece, a graphic novel over 5 years in the making.”
Kali is the tale of the High school teenage honey badger Kali and her friends…
You can buy it here for £12: Kali (2024) graphic novel by Coocoora – Out of the Blueprint
Here’s a slew of writerly announcements and opportunities …
Northwords Now: Submissions window open for the next few weeks
Northwords Now are planning to produce Issue 46 in the spring of 2025. Submissions are now welcome until no later than 8th March 2025, though earlier submissions are preferred. Please use the online form on the website – see link below (postal submissions are not considered.). Work can be in Gaelic, English, Scots and any local variants used in Scotland. Please submit no more than three short stories or six poems, in MS Word format only. Stories and poetry should be divided into separate submissions, each on a single document. Please don’t split work in single genres into multiple submissions.
Short stories should be between a few hundred words (flash) and 1,500 words in length, ideally. Some slightly longer stories (e.g. 3,000 words) are used, sparingly, within the publication, but constraint of space means briefer submissions are preferable. All prose or poetry must be previously unpublished in print or online and not part of simultaneous submissions elsewhere. Copyright remains with the author. Modest payment is made for all successful submissions.
EDINBURGH ESSAY
2025 Edinburgh Essay Award, run by the Scottish Arts Trust has a first prize of £1,000. It welcomes non-fiction submissions on a broad range of topics – from cultural subjects such as art, literature, theatre, dance, music to travel narratives, memoirs, political analysis, and more. Entries should be no more than 2,000 words, excluding the title and captions. Photographs and graphic illustrations within the body of the essay are permitted. Publication will be offered to the top 15 essayists in the new Edinburgh Essays Journal. Entry fee £10. Paid entries close 28 February.