I was a nervous child. My overactive imagination joined with my natural timidity to make an ongoing horror story of my life, thick with evil spirits and malevolent hands reaching out for my fat little feet from under my bed or pouring like smoke out of eerily anthropomorphic cracks in the plaster. I can trace all of these childhood anxieties to one point, one specific Boogieman that lay lurking in the dank swamps of my own brain: The Bunyip. This is his song. Continue Reading…
Thu Tran is a mixed media artist who has a show on IFC called Food Party. Aside from The Mighty Boosh, this is my favourite show on TV right now. Visually this show is what I only dream of being able to one day do with my photo shoots. Call it ‘advanced DIY’ (*cough*- read:budget). I have been living in Thu’s fantasy world of slightly horrifying cardboard friends and living inanimate objects since about 1979 when I became entranced with Sid & Marty Krofft.
Artisan status aside, Thu is also naturally hilarious. Her delivery, cadence, and choice of words are being siphoned directly from the marrow of my funny bone. Some highlights of the show consist of a baguette having sex with a hamburger bun (complete with climax), a carnal representation of peanut butter and jelly finding each other to be soul mates, and crazy recipes like the noodle and ham pancake made in the video above.
A disturbing trend has been spreading its way across YouTube. Across this great nation children, those young, innocent, sinless trustees of our future, are crushing up candy tablets into powder, inhaling it into their mouths before expelling it, giving the illusion of smoking. It’s horrible.
What has happened to today’s youth. In my day we didn’t use such chicanery to facilitate our desire to look cool. No, when we wanted to feel bad-ass and adult we stole cigarettes from our parents, or got Jimmy Hanson’s brother, who had been in eighth grade for at least 6 years and had a full moustache, to purchase cigarettes for us; allowing us to awkwardly light up and clumsily draw carcinogens directly into our fragile, virgin lungs.
So look on and despair, because these are the people who will helm this ship once you and I are arthritic and incontinent. It’s time to take a stand people; time to grab your kids and instill in them a reverence for danger and willful bodily harm. If you ever find your child “smoking” Smarties, it is your duty as a parent to smack it right out of their hands and shove a Marlboro into their mouth, and not a Marlboro Light either, I’m talking about a full-flavored, Cowboy Killer. It may seem harsh but really, it’s the only way they’re going to learn.
And by that I of course mean one Thanksgiving special followed by a group of random, animated detritus. Yes, this week is Thanksgiving — real, American Thanksgiving, not that cheap, Canadian imitation — the day on which we can all stuff ourselves with food until we collapse into a carbohydrate induced coma and after which we begin the long, arduous task of celebrating Christmas for a month.
Also, this is my six hundred and sixty sixth post. Coincidence? Who cares!?
• A Charlie Brown Thanksgiving: I’m of two minds when it comes to Charles Schultz’s creation in both print and on screen. Part of me loathes its saccharine sweet sentimentality and its trite, overtly Christian preaching and another part admires the man’s artistic and creative ability and the cartoons remain firmly fixed in my animated childhood memory. It is perhaps a testament to Peanuts that my usually dominant, cynical side uncharacteristically loses this particular battle.
• Home Movies: “Curses”: I’ve touted my love for Home Movies before so all I will say is if you don’t like it you are insane or brain dead. In this episode our diminutive filmmakers explore the use of foul language and its humorous effects. Make sure to watch out for the hidden surprise right before the credits.
• The Ren & Stimpy Show: The second episode — counting the pilot — featuring the adventures of everyone’s favorite dog and cat. Also featuring Log! I’m sure this will be pulled by the end o the day so get it while it’s hot.
• Dexter’s Laboratory: “Opposites Attract”: Another show that rarely shows up on YouTube and will most surely be pulled. Not the best episode featuring Genndy Tartakovsky’s diminutive mad scientist, but you take what you can get.
•Korgoth of Barbaria: Dear [adult swim], I’m writing to inquire as to what, exactly, is wrong with you. No really, I would like to know why you continue giving asshats like Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim money to churn out hours of retarded pap while shelving truly brilliant ideas like Korgoth of Barbaria. If you find men dressing in drag to be that funny, might I suggest you export your Tim & Eric stuff to England, it is my understanding that they too like that sort of thing. Afterwards, you can pull your heads out of your asses and start to produce more shows that are, you know, good. Regards, Ross Rosenberg
My dreams, of late, have been haunted by feral children. Half-mad orphans scratching out an existence alongside the bestial populace of moonlit forests far enough from the encroachment of urban development to afford them some small measure of savagery.
And here in lies the crux of my subconscious cogitation on the nightmarish lives of unwanted babes raised to regress to their natural instincts. What happens when our urban sprawl bumps up against the borders of their as yet unspoiled night-places? When wild-eyed tikes climb concrete barriers and collectively pad their away across vast expanses of asphalt in search of something to eat and somewhere to nest like so many beasts forced into the street before them.
Artist Sam Weber’s renderings of psychosis stricken youth seem to indicate a vague precognition of the tumultuous time to come, and I find myself to be appropriately terrified.
Starting off your Saturday on a bit of a down note, Ectomo presents Isao Takahata’s Hotaru no Haka, Grave of the Fireflies, based on the book by Akiyuki Nosaka of the same name. Released in 1988, with animation production by Studio Ghibli, Grave of the Fireflies tells the story of Seita and his younger sister Setsuko, orphaned after the loss of their parents in World War II; their mother in the fiire-bombing of Kobe, and their father who served in the Imperial Japanese Navy. Forced to live with a relative, who treats them as little more than a burden while selling their mother’s kimono’s to buy rice for herself, they eventually leave and take up residence in an abandoned bomb shelter.
Grave of the Fireflies is a tough film to watch, and a movie which begins with the death of the young, main character was probably not what many audiences were expecting to see when it was released in Japan as a double feature with Hayao Miyazaki’s My Neighbor Totoro. It is also the only Studio Ghibli movie the Disney does not have the rights to distribute in the U.S., meaning that it has not seen the same, widespread release here. It is a film that should be seen at least once, whether one is a fan of animated features or not, remaining just as powerful now as it was 20 years ago.
A severed puppet head, floating in front of a multicolored disc and shag carpet background, reminisces about his first lovemaking session with his rodeo sleeping bag; describing its pattern of clowns and barrels in the same tones of wistful reverie that one might use to describe the color of their first love’s eyes. Things continue downhill at an astonishing rate once the guru begins recounting a day when, “overwhelmed with humpiness”, he violated his grandmother’s bathroom rug, which to you and me may seem odd but to a man who has spread peanut butter on himself so as to entice his canine companion I’m sure it’s all perfectly normal.
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.
