Chris Grigg

Our Favorite Things is a new DVD/CD release from reigning Kulture Kut-up Kings Negativland. Twenty-seven years of the group's "greatest hits" have become all-new moving pictures in this amazing, years-in-the-making package. Created with 18 other filmmakers from all over the USA (and one a capella group from Detroit), Our Favorite Things is a collaborative project that takes Negativland's sound explorations into the world of film and video. What emerges is a darkly cracked look at 21st century America, juxtaposing paranoia, torture, control, power, weapons, fear, suicide, cola wars, mental illness, and intellectual property issues with the lighter side of dopey advertising, cartoon characters, cleaning products and Jesus.

In an effort to cure her smoking habit a middle-aged woman discovers that she can communicate with her long lost son while watching a Halloween safety program on TV. After suffering a nervous breakdown, her husband, a used car salesman, is revitalized when he travels back in time to drive the first car he ever sold. Seventeen years later a powerful canned food manufacturer crashes the same car into a toaster truck while endorsing a brand of yams on live TV. At the funeral his clergyman experiences a crisis of faith when he and a lifelike Mexican continue their search for a married couple who have befriended an insect who enjoys drinking lime soda. They later meet a young man whose bizarre murder scheme involves four innocent members of an experimental rock band who have all given up smoking.

Within days of the release of Negativland's clever parody of U2 and Casey Kasem, recording industry giant Island Records descended upon the band with a battery of lawyers intent on erasing the piece from the history of rock music. Craig "Tribulation 99" Baldwin follows this and other intellectual property controversies across the contemporary arts scene. Playful and ironic, his cut-and-paste collage-essay surveys the prospects for an "electronic folk culture" in the midst of an increasingly commodified corporate media landscape.

Since 1959 at the age of five, David "The Weatherman" Wills has been recording his life, self, and anything he likes (such as the weather, toilets flushing, and intercepted cell phone conversations) and broadcasting it to anyone listening. Together with childhood friends Richard Lyons and Mark Hosler they formed Negativland, which quickly became an absurd and noisy multimedia world without boundaries, ownership or privacy. Negativland's complex chaos of plunderphonics poses both serious and silly questions about the nature of culture, media, technology, control, propaganda, power and perception in the United States of America. Is what you're hearing and seeing real or simply familiar? The medium reveals that any message is all in our heads.