The Growlers have been getting a lot of interest since their showcase at SXSW, I only hope it continues to rise. They are still touring USA with dates into July.
I’m absolutely intoxicated by their new album “Are You In Or Are You Out”, which is chock-a with 18 tracks of dreamy dirty bliss. Brooks’ voice has a silky crunch that hovers over the surf punk percussion, melodic guitar, and giant bass, in a non committal fashion, like a spector. I tend to always over expound when categorizing them because I end up explaining how their music makes me feel in the form of a scenario.
Thus: Every time a Growlers song comes up on my various forms of musical shuffle, I get this wash of lucidity, where I feel like I’m being comforted by intense sun, dirt clouds, eating popsicles in a garage watching a punk band in 1966. Not a care or responsibility in the world. Just the popsicle, the music, and maybe figuring out a ride home later in the evening. And if not…then I’ll walk the 5 odd miles back home, bumping shoulders with my mate, hungry for dinner.
Regrettably, my shoot with them (seen below) was not able to bring my concept to life due to 1 band member being anti conceptual portraiture. But fuck it, I still love them, they still rock my butt off. Go check them owwwt!
[Editor's note: Please welcome new Ectomo writer Rick Gauger: cartoonist, scholar, and author of science fiction novel Charon's Ark. It is an extraordinary honor to have the story on our front page, as it is the first creative writing Rick has done in ten years, and the first time he has written about his experiences as an intelligence officer with the First Cavalry Division during the Vietnam War. A warning to sensitive readers: this story contains descriptions that you may find disturbing. Everything in this story is true. --EG Gauger]
This is one of the things that happened at LZ Pony. The LZ had been in place four or five days by the time this happened. There were about 30 American soldiers at Pony, including my little interrogating team. Fighting was going on elsewhere, so our helicopter support was sparse. We didn’t have our jeeps, our tents or our other luxuries. We were by ourselves on a bare hilltop surrounded by little hamlets and rice paddies in a valley in the mountains. We lived under our ponchos. For two weeks our luck held out. The weather was good and there was no enemy except for a sniper who used to fire one shot at us from a great distance every evening at 5 PM.
The LZ commander sent out small patrols of seven or eight infantrymen, to explore the hamlets that dotted the big valley and its tributary valleys. I wasn’t supposed to go on these patrols, but I did anyway. I was curious about this exotic place, the infantry needed interpreters, and it’s smart to scout around when you’re in VC country. My Vietnamese Army interpreter, Sgt Xuan, was willing to go too.
I’d been operational long enough to know this was Vietcong country. It was clean, orderly, and motor-scooter-free. Nobody wanted to sell us anything or wanted to come anywhere near us. There were hardly any people who weren’t elderly or taking care of small children. There were nontraditional kilometer-wide paddy fields on all sides where the VC had forced the villagers to collectivize the villagers’ smaller fields for greater efficiency. The hamlets were like islands of jungle dotted across the flat paddy fields. Once you got out of the hot glare and into a hamlet, your eyes adjusted and you saw mazes of pathways though jungle trees and bamboo, beautiful thatched-roof houses, gardens, tea hedges, fruit trees and animal pens. You also saw pits with sharpened stakes, prepared defensive trenches, dugout bunkers, tunnels and booby traps. We were lucky we caught this place by surprise. Continue Reading…
The San Francisco International Airport is hosting a show entitled Out of this World! The Twentieth-Century Space Invasion of American Pop Culture, a collection of over 300 vintage space themed toys dating from the 1930s to the 1980s. Included in the exhibition is this pictured case of authentic toy ray guns, located right in Terminal 3 in what can only be described as an egregious violation of anti-terrorist security measures. The show is set to run through March 14th but I’m sure the TSA will seize these weapons before then.
Man that pisses me off. Just the thought of it chaps my ass. Who the fuck do they think they are? I mean, really? Fucking really? They think they’re so fucking cool with their goddamn cool names and pretentious fucking initials. Fuck them; fucking cocksuckers. FUUUUUUUUUUUUUCK, they piss me off so much. GOD FUCKING DAMMIT WHAT DO THEY HAVE THAT I DON’T! RRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRRGH FUCK YOU! FUCK YOU ALL! FUCK YOU AND YOU AND ESPECIALLY YOU, YOU MOTHERFUCKER!
Seriously, I’m out. I’m going the fuck home. You can all blow me.
The 1987 documentary on the life of Robert Crumb, underground comics pioneer, 60s icon, and the quintessential Dirty Old Man. Written by the man himself, it lacks the distance from its subject that made Terry Zwigoff’s Crumb more of a revelatory study in neuroses and emotional trauma and instead puts you squarely in the middle of Crumb’s gonzo world of misogyny and self-loathing and in that sense it is a much better illustration of Crumb the Artist as opposed to Crumb the Man.
There are, I suppose, two ways to take this ad for Goodyear’s “Double Eagle” tires. The first is that a woman, incapable of understanding the subtleties of using a jack to raise a portion of her car off the ground and then having to deal with the mysterious complexity of threaded nuts and bolts, will walk for what seems like miles, running the risk of being dragged off into the bushes to be raped and murdered by a man or group of men, only so that she can get to a phone — because those broads love to just yak yak yak, am I right fellas?
The other way to take it is that men can easily be replaced by dual walled, rubber tires.
This anti-pornography film from the 1960s left me with one very obvious, and troubling, conclusion: I am deeply envious of the wordsmithery of morally conservative propagandists. From his terse, esoteric pronunciation of bestiality, to his description of a “flood-tide of filth” — a description that calls to mind great, towering waves of briny genitalia — in terms of oratorical outrage, George Putnam is equal parts Shakespeare and Don King. Listening to his ode to a young, female sex toy, he paints a picture of sleazy, corrupted innocence that far exceeds any photograph. His insights are pointed, “[...]very few blind people join the nudist colonies,” he notes; his logic flawless. It was only when he described the irreversible effects of pornography that I realized why man-on-top missionary style sex did not excite me and why I insisted that my girlfriend participate in elaborate, 80s themed cos-play. Suddenly forcing her to dress like Jem or one of the My Little Ponies made perfect, if horrible, sense.
Yet, Putnam remains humble throughout. “In this ad, the titles of the magazines and their table of contents speak more eloquently than I about the tremendous problem here presented,” he says, before uttering the words “Sexual sadism. Strange flagellation cults” with a gravitas that would drive Morgan Freeman mad with jealousy. Oh George, you sell yourself short. Who else could speak of homosexuals as an evil “species” without coming off as a completely ignorant, hateful bigot? Who else could retain their composure while narrating over scores of photographs of female breasts covered by bars so large that one would think these women were in possession of the most freakishly huge areolas to be found on this planet, Earth? Not I!
Towards the end of the clip he quotes Pitirim A. Sorokin — the famed sociologist and author of, among other works, the hysterical and reactionary The American Sex Revolution — as saying that the newsstands of the time
[...] depict the world as a sort of human zoo, inhabited by raped, mutilated, and murdered females and by he-males, outmatching in bestiality, cavemen and out-lusting the lustiest of animals. Male and female alike are hardened in cynical contempt for human life and values.
Part of me wishes these two gentleman had been able to see some of the more interesting corners of the internet, if only to have been able to see their brains leak out their ears. In fact, Putnam is still alive and has, at the very least, changed his opinion on homosexuals. Someone should sit him down in front of 4chan before it’s too late.
In sheer defiance of the World Wide Web Consortium's will, Ectomo was designed using a non-web-standard font. Luckily, it is included in the excellent font pack released by the H.P. Lovecraft Historical Society, which can be freely downloaded in Mac and PC formats here. Ectomo should still look fine without it, though.
