[Please welcome the newest New Scum, Angel Ceballos. Ceballos is a rock photographer based in Seattle, and is providing Ectomo with a shunt directly from the heart of indie music. -EG]
Mother’s day was yesterday right? Listen and Watch Eighties Matchbox’s effing awesome song Celebrate Your Mother. Not necessarily in the same vein as yesterday’s celebrations but … close enough.
Eighties Matchbox B-line Disaster is releasing their first album in 6 YEARS, Blood and Fire on May 17th. You can listen to the single Love Turns to Hate on the band’s myspace. This album is the follow up to the unbridled brilliance of their first 2 albums, Hörse of the Dög (2002) and The Royal Society (2004). Self dubbed as ‘Psychosis Rock’, I get classic garage punk with a sprinkle of surf (think The Cramps) and blues and lots of insanity. 80s Matchbox expertly hands us short songs that really only serve as appetizers and make you starving for more, boil your adrenaline and make your mouth water for action.
The band has kicked off a Great Britain tour that ends at the beginning of June. If you’re across the pond I highly recommend you attend one or many. You won’t be disappointed. As for us yanks I propose we do as much as we can to get them to cross over and do some gigs here. I will personally fly over and stick them in my carry on and bring them back with me.
If Stephen Fry is the patron saint of Ectomo then David Mitchell (Mitchell & Webb, Peep Show) is certainly worthy of belief. Like St. Stephen Fry he now hosts a quizcom on the BBC.
The quizcom is a strange genre of British television and radio. As the name might suggest it is a comedy quiz show where points don’t really matter and all that matters is making the audience laugh. The subjects covered range from satirical news quizzes like Mock the Week and The News Quiz; to programs such as Never Mind the Buzzcocks and QI (hosted by Stephen Fry). Which is a program I have long argued is Ectomo serialized for broadcast TV.
And now David Mitchell has his own quizcom. One which neatly takes the current affairs of Mock the Week and the joy of laughing at someone who is wrong on QI. It is called The Bubble, and the premise is either a nightmare or a good vacation.
Three contestants, usually comedians, enter a rural house for a week without TV, Internet, phones, newspapers or radio. On leaving this bubble they are deposited in a TV studio and interrogated by David Mitchell about the truthfulness of real and fake news stories.
Go and watch it, go and feel relief when you get the answer right, but shame when you get the answer wrong. Episodes can be found by searching Youtube.
It was once said of Stephen Fry that he is the patron saint of Ectomo; a statement dripping with truth. When I started writing for Ectomo and Brownlee was helping me with my first few weeks he particularly emphasized tone saying — and I’m paraphrasing here — that Ectomo should read like a verbose Uncle, over-sharing. At my best, I think I sometimes nail that tone and at those times I like to imagine Mr. Fry reading them aloud.
That said, I have watched this clip, taken from the previously linkedStephen Fry in America, half a dozen times since finding it and, thus far, it has not ceased to amuse me. Truly, Dirty Harry’s famous lines have never been so lovingly delivered as they are here between Fry’s Oooos and “Ahhh mummy!” His finishing exclamation of “Holy mackerel!” is more than enough to endear him to me forever and shake my fist at the selfishness of the BBC in keeping him from us here, Stateside.
Well, it’s not like we could have avoided it forever. This Thursday marks that most expensive of holidays; the day some celebrate an imaginary person’s birthday by giving each other presents and some celebrate an imaginary person breaking into their home to leave gifts for them. Truly, it is the most magical time of the year. In the spirit of such activities, Ectomo presents a small sampling of the plethora of Christmas themed animated specials that have littered the airwaves over the years. We hope you enjoy or, at the very least, do no retch.
• A Charlie Brown Christmas: For the two or three people who haven’t seen this the plot is as follows. Charlie Brown, not understanding the meaning of Christmas, is enlisted to direct a Christmas play but is stymied by everyone’s desire to dance repetitively. He then buys a horribly stunted coniferous tree for the play and everyone laughs. Then Linus quotes the Bible. The End.
• Freakazoid!: “In Arms Way” What other cartoon would have a villain named Arms Akimbo?
• How the Grinch Stole Christmas: Chuck Jones animated version of the Dr. Seuss story with voice work by Boris Karloff. That’s all you need to know.
• Mickey’s Christmas Carol: Back when Disney produced animated cartoons of quality they made this, perhaps one of the best adaptations of Charles Dickens’s classic tale. Consider it the condensed version. The animation in this one, like the above entry, is simply top-notch.
• He-Man and She-Ra Christmas Special: I…I really have no idea. At some point in the 80s He-Man and She-Ra had a Christmas special. This makes my brain weep.
• Monkey Dust: Season 3, episode 2 in which the Paedofinder General interupts a school nativity play, Ivan Dobsky has a “most terriblest nightmare” in which he receives a Playstation for Christmas — likening its complexity to “pong, but with three bats” — and “The International Revolutionary Jihad for the Liberation of the Islamic Republic of Great Britain” prepare to blow themselves up in the middle of a shopping center. All this, and more, in another twisted episode of Monkey Dust.
Lastly, [adult swim], while not allowing anything as convenient as embedding because they are jerks, has a section with all of their Christmas themed episodes in one place. So, if you are looking for your fix of Sealab 2021, Venture Bros., Aqua Teen Hunger Force, Robot Chicken, etc.this is where you want to go.
Primping and preening such as I do — with an exaggerated care and precision born from the fear of skin slumped suddenly earthward in progeriatric defiance of the natural progression toward frailty — I can understand the sudden conversion to theism (and subsequent polite request) of Clayton Cubitt upon seeing the dual identities of Winston Churchill. However, if age and wither I must, I’ll take the Churchillian furrowed brow and wobbly jowls over the alternative unknown any day.
Monkey Dust is a hard cartoon to describe without completely blowing the premise and turning people away from it insofar as it comes off as completely disturbed. Which it most certainly is. Nevertheless, I have been obsessed with it since I found out about it and, like most obsessions, it needs to be shared.
Monkey Dust is a nightmare vision of Britain, a dark, twisted other world full of giant advertising conglomerates like Labia, who takes the job of rebranding cancer as “Closure”, an attractive end-of-life option. Its citizens are no less bizarre. Take Mr. Ivan Dobsky, The Meat-Safe Murderer or so he was known until he was cleared 27 years later. He himself always said he “never done it. I only said I done it so they would take the electrodes of me nipples.” Then there’s Geoff, the first-time cottager, who despite his meek, introverted personality holds the lofty goal of fellating a complete stranger in a public place. There’s also Clive, who constantly comes home late only to tell his wife a lie based on the lyrics to The Eagles’s “Hotel California”, inept chat-room pedophiles, pretentious yuppies, and classically trained actors.
These series of interconnected vignettes and recurring characters make for a delightfully sick experience but it is no doubt one you will either love or hate. Some may be turned off by the humor on display here as it is unapologetically dark; but for those who enjoy their laughs more on the grim side of things you are in for quite a treat.
I’ll be honest, I’m quite torn as to my feelings on the excellent Stephen Fry in America in the sense that I appreciate Fry’s knack for combining obvious intelligence and childlike curiosity, making of himself an irresistible tour guide. However, there is a part of me — call it cynical, self deprecating or just strange — that wishes Fry had approached this series with a style more akin to Sir David Attenborough. I imagine him, bedecked in safari-wear, sneaking up on groups of Americans and whispering into the camera of strange feeding rituals and interpersonal relationships, pausing only when the group has become aware of his presence, perhaps to accept a proffered bit of partially gnawed hotdog, his voice-over exclaiming excitedly that “The alpha male seems to have accepted me into the group!”
That or perhaps being followed everywhere by Jude Law, who occasionally whinges about how boring he finds him.
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.
