Here at the Ectomo franchise empire headquarters, we’re cooking up the most delicious, the most ridiculous, the most fun-in-the-bun, value-pack’d merchandise, you just have no idea.
All this week we will be rolling out Ectomo feature 1″ pinback buttons, starting with Moustache Monday.
These buttons are manufactured by hand in my stinking apartment at a high-grade metalurgy facility somewhere on the west coast, and are guaranteed not to succumb to atmospheric re-entry metal fatigue.
Ah, Canada, that frozen wonderland to the north, with its lush, rolling fields of moose, beer waterfalls, and socialized medicine. Truly, it is a snow covered Eden. This week’s Saturday Morning Cartoons is (mostly) presented by Canada, featuring animators (mostly) from Canada, or films distributed (mostly) by The National Film Board of Canada. If you are so inclined (and you should be) all of these videos, with the exception of the first, can be viewed in a higher resolution on YouTube.
• The Cat Came Back: From Cordell Barker. Mr. Johnson has a yellow cat, which he is desperately trying to rid himself of. His efforts prove…unsuccessful.
• Last Time in Clerkenwell: Russian animator Alex Budovsky’s follow-up to Bathtime in Clerkenwell featuring more mind bending flash animation and infectious music.
• The Danish Poet: Torill Kove’s 2007 Oscar winning mediation on her birth, and the serendipitous events which led to it. Simple, clean lines lend this one a children’s book aesthetic which works perfectly.
• Ryan: Directed by Chris Landreth, Ryan is an animated tribute to Canadian animator Ryan Larkin. Thirty years ago, at the National Film Board of Canada, Ryan produced some of the most influential animated films of his time. Winner of an Oscar in 2005, it’s a film whose visuals tell just as much of its story as its dialogue does.
• How Wings Are Attached to the Backs of Angels: Craig Welch’s fantastic, creepy, surreal, Gorey-esque little film about a scientist’s quest for knowledge that is, perhaps, reserved for beings other than mere mortals. Cross hatching should be used more often in animation.
• Yellow Sticky Notes: Nine years worth of Jeff Chiba Stearns’s To-Do lists, written on sticky notes, animated with, well, sticky notes. Trust me, it works.
• Harvey Krumpet: I’m a big fan of Australian animator Adam Elliot’s work, having first seen his shorts Brother, Uncle, and Cousin through The Animation Show. Harvey Krumpet, narrated by Geoffrey Rush, continues the tradition of Elliot’s intimate storytelling; detailing the life of Harvey Krumpet, from his birth in Poland to the end of his life in Australia.
Krazmo attempts to dispel any attempt to discern an over-arching narrative for Don’t Cry sweet potatoes:
I don’t think the theme of the label really has much to do with the type of produce inside. As evidence, I cite the following gallery full of such lovely, obsolete art.
Comment by Krazmo — May 1, 2008 @ 12:55 pm
However, based on the image above it would seem that not all produce imagery is without cohesive thematic intentions. Less can be said for the likes of, say, Gay Johnny Texas Vegetables.
A massive collection of beautiful, Japanese anatomical charts, among other ephemera. I love how they flow from one to the next, creating chains of imagery. The second photo shown above is only a small part of a much longer chain.
Your gross negligence in assuming I am ashamed of any of my musical predilections is noted, and will be revenged. There is absolutely no reason to assume, self-righteous pricks that you are, that the carmine creeping up my collar is anything other than stoic pride, a touch of the ol’ toxoplasma gondii, and perhaps a brief spike in my everyday, baseline feelings of discomfort.
Listen you, I was enjoying the Ruski pop nymphets way back, before any hoity-toity English remixes got loose, much less actual American album releases. This shit was edgy and inaccessible. Hell, it still is! I would get home from my live-action Vampire the Masquerade roleplaying session at the local college campus (back when I was a ginger-curled nymphet myself), maybe boot up a game of Fallout 2, invite my BFF Steve over, and we’d watch these videos, on repeat, in silent awe. Why, I thought to myself, did I not have a dark pixie of a partner, an eternal semi-succubus, someone to cling to during the long nights of crippling self-doubt, someone to share my pants and lipgloss, someone to hold my hair while I purged, someone with whom to ghost ride the whip? I mean, someone besides Steve?
Now, emerald-haired, naked in a wooden trunk, chugging Red Bull and typing on a keyboard for which I cannot see the screen, I ask myself: if I had found her, this dark unicorn, would things have turned out better?
My father and I have long maintained a correspondence of epic intellectual proportions. Usually these take the form of discussions on science and science fiction, Rick Gauger being an award-winning science fiction author, and all-around life of the party.
Recently I sent him a link to a collection of cartoons on the fashion wars of the early 1800s, which were as vicious as they were short-lived. Men and women abandoned the stiff, straight-laced wardrobes of the 1700s and briefly adopted a more modern, flowy, comfortable look. This was the famous Regency era, in which Jane Austen lived and wrote. Unfortunately for fashion, it was quickly destroyed by the severe repression of the Victorian age’s corsets, high heels, and silly hats. Dad, armchair fashion historian, elaborates [with my notes appended, thusly]:
Yes, I’ve always thought it odd that women went out of, and back into corsets in the early 19th Century. In our own time, the 60s got over in a hurry, as women went back to makeup and hairdos in the early 70s. In my century [Dad is 64], I think that the corporations panicked as they saw hair styles, makeup and tailored clothing apparently becoming obsolete, and they put on a major propaganda offensive. The majority of people (including women) never understood the 60s anyway, so they were ready to buy into it. We had a last hurrah of big cars, just at the moment when we should’ve been changing our ways.
Another reason for the quick loss of those styles was that a woman really has to be very good-looking [such as my mother, 54, who to this day refuses to learn how to use an eyelash curler, probably because she’s too busy beating men away from her door with a stout stick] to be able to go without makeup and tailoring. There were a couple of girls among the grad students of 1965 that made me froth at the mouth; most others, however smart and sweet they might be, just didn’t have what it took. One of them was the girl who welcomed me back from my first tour in Vietnam. She came out in a nightie that made her look like a joke. I would have rather died than hurt her feelings at that moment.
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.
