Feeling artsy

Lately, I've been in an L.A. state of mind, but today the New York side of my brain stepped up and demanded a bit of face time. I blame it on Ubu.

I've been minding my own business - happy to be plugging stuff into my iPod and selling my soul to iTunes to do it. I've been really getting into having the spoken word loaded in there. I listen to Boris (my iPod) while I'm working, which means that have big chunks of listening time. Mostly it's all about tunes, but I also like to do some learnin' too.

I've got Buddhist talks by people like the Venerable Lama Zopa Rinpoche, Geshe Tashi Tsering, and His Holiness the Dalai Lama. There's quite a few podcasts loaded too. The once weekly surfing podcast 'In the Lineup' has a place of honor. A German podcast called, 'Schlaflos in Munchen' fills quite a few megabytes and gets regular listening.

The other day, I was going to download an audiobook of Samuel Beckett's, 'Waiting For Godot.' For some reason I decided to Google Beckett to see if there were any free recordings of any of his plays or monologues. There were indeed. Downloading ensued. What also happened is that I stumbled on Ubu.com. Little did I know that it would suck me in for a couple of hours and leave me wanting more.

So, that's what precipitated the New York state of mind. There's quite a bit of art and things about art there - everything from recordings of Marcel Duchamp, Gertrude Stein (click here for an MP3 taste) and Yoko Ono, to short avant gard films, a John Lennon diary, and works of Arabic calligraphers (like the one above called 'Paix et Liberte').

It's worth a look and some time if you're interested in art or just want to expand your mind a bit. If nothing else, check out the section dedicated to Aspen magazine - it's a time capsule of the art world in the late 50s and early 60s. Each issue contained articles, artwork and music. One cool example is this piece by the poet Gary Snyder.