Negativland >> Place someone's head inside of a bell and ring it

California Month, tremor #6:

Negativland - "Methods Of Torture"

(SST Records, 1987 / Seeland Records, 1999)

Negativland is named after a sinister instrumental by the German band Neu!, which is one of only a few non-terrible songs Neu! ever did, in my opinion, and which arguably invented "post-rock."   Though it's not as infamous as Negativland's song "Christianity Is Stupid" or their "cover" of U2's "I Still Haven't Found What I'm Looking For," or as satirical as "Drink It Up," this song has been a longtime favorite of mine when I've needed to fill in a minute or so on a mix CD.

I got this album, Escape From Noise, on CD in the early '00s and on LP a few years ago.  (Original LP copies came with a yellow-and-black bumper sticker reading "CAR BOMB," after one of the album's more notorious songs.)  It was reissued on Negativland's own label, Seeland Records, after a messy legal dispute with SST; in fact, I can only think of a few bands that did not have legal disputes with SST.  (This mp3 was taken from my SST CD, not the reissue.)  I also have the fascinating book (which comes with a free CD) about Negativland's crippling legal battle with U2's lawyers, called Fair Use: The Letter U And The Numeral 2.  Notice I specified "U2's lawyers," because U2 themselves had no problem with Negativland spoofing their hit song, and The Edge actually spoke out in Negativland's defense.  This didn't stop indie knuckleheads from knee-jerkingly casting U2 as bogeymen in the whole situation, and SST even famously sold "FUCK BONO" t-shirts for many years.  (In fact, seeing this shirt in SST mailorder catalogs in the '90s is a big part of why I hated U2 for many years before discovering how great their early '80s stuff is.)  Anyway, if you're a band making "plunderphonic" sound collages, things can get pretty ugly if someone disapproves of your samples, or even cover art, so choose them wisely.  Nowadays when I make collages based on cut-up magazine images, I try to write down who the photographers of the original images were, just in case I ever have to credit them in the future when I become famous.
Anyway, the story behind Negativland's next album, Helter Stupid, is pretty fascinating, so go read about it.

A fictitious (I think) Joy Division GameBoy; from retrojapan.tumblr.com

Creepily cool green spider I found on my ginger plants, 10/1/09.  Apparently a non-native species that hitched a ride in on some plants.

This date palm (Phoenix dactylifera; unknown cultivar) which I bought three years ago had grown so much that its roots had cracked through the bottom of its (approx. 20 gallon) pot.  Palm roots tend to look like white gummi worms, much different than the roots of regular trees, and they tend to go to the bottom of a pot and circle around like crazy, often raising the plant up in its pot.  So I got fed up and decided to throw it in the ground today rather than finding a new pot for it.  You can see how big it is by using the air conditioning unit in the background for scale.  Those are some little pups growing at the base of the mama plant.  I planted it in a spot where I'd accidentally killed a small loquat tree last winter by using too much copper fungicide on it.

Speaking of loquats... (Ooooh, cliffhanger...)

Planets with similar climates: The Styrenes - "The Social Whirlpool" (1977) & "Drano In Your Veins" (1975), Hüsker Dü - "How To Skin A Cat" (1984), Was (Not Was) - "Hello Dad, I'm In Jail" (1987), Ween - "The H.I.V. Song" (1994), Milk Cult - "Clown Party" (1992), a few of the the Tetris theme songs.