Speaking of archival film footage, Ubuweb is back. And to it, a superb library of downloadable classics of avant-garde & experimental cinema has been added. Samuel Beckett, Joseph Beuys, James Broughton, Luis Buñuel – and those are just the contributors whose surnames begin with B – the list is huge & extraordinary. Dziga Vertov? Robert Smithson? Carolee Schneeman? Man Ray? John Cage? They’re all here.

It’s not perfect of course – Brakhage is notably absent there in the Bs, there’s no Abigail Child, no Warren Sonbert, no Nathaniel Dorsky, no Warhol – but it’s an impressive, ambitious start. I watched Henry Hills’ Money (right click & do a “save as” if you want to follow that link) for the first time in nearly 20 years the other night, amazed anew at how vividly he generates a ballet both of movement & sound from disparate fragments shot of dozens of New York & West Coasts poets & others. Nobody in that film from the early 1980s looks sillier in hindsight than do I. You might not even recognize me: I’m in the Russian sheepskin hat & red down vest, reading from my poetry in front of the New York Stock Exchange & down along the shoreline of Battery Park.