Oh my gosh! UbuWeb is like digging through treasure in my grandmother’s attic. I got lost clicking different links: a letter from Frank Zappa, an old stop-motion short film with homemade sound effects, and a forty minute dance performance that creeped me out after a minute.
I finally settled on a link called 365 Days Project because it sounded like an app my daughter uses called 1 Second Everyday. That app is fun because at the end of the year, you’ll have a quick video diary of your entire year. The UbuWeb 365 Days Project is fun because, as the creator says, it gives us “365 days of cool and strange and often obscure audio selections” from a large collaborative. The selections do not disappoint.
January 1, 2003 entry is an audio of two women, maybe from Seattle, singing. The liner note is “Found at the Seattle Goodwill in 2000. Two women singing quite off key and really going for broke on this home recording.” And that’s an accurate description. A comment by David Fairbanks Ford is tongue-and-cheek:
Stunning performance of Irving Berlin’s ‘You’re Just In Love’, o my gosh, who are these ladies? I’ll bet they both smoked. A lot. I’ll bet they could hold a cocktail and cigarette in one hand and belt out ‘Darktown Strutters Ball’ at the same time. This must have made parties with the two them lively. Bet their husbands said nothing. For thirty years. The harmonics on that record could also be studied by the aerospace industry. What a great country we live in and it’s all because of women like those two.
I decided to see what might be submitted for another date, and chose my birthday. I clicked on the October 24, 2003 entry, and laughed out loud listening to “I’m A Little Weenie” by Dick “Two Ton” Baker. The song is about a weenie looking for a bun while he’s boiling in a pot. There’s almost three minutes of this fun 1950’s style diddy. There’s an August, 2005 update on the submission that this version was not Dick “Two Ton” Baker, but instead Sheriff John from an old LA TV show that ran 1952-1970.
Where do people find these things? And why are there so many experts on this song? If you’re in the mood to dig a little treasure hunting, click the link to head over to Ubuweb. It does not disappoint.
Shellie Kalinsky 