Everyone’s favorite holiday is swiftly approaching. That’s right, December first is World AIDS Day, that magical day when we all gather around the AIDS tree and sing AIDS carols. Or maybe it’s a holiday invented to help spread awareness about a horrible disease. I can never be sure.
To bring awareness to this awareness bringing day in Germany Regenbogen e.V. has teamed up with das comitee to bring us “AIDS IS A MASS MURDERER” an inventive — and NSFW — campaign featuring nubile young women copulating with the likes of Saddam Hussein, Joseph Stalin, and, of course, Adolf Hitler making for disturbing images like this. Of course, if you are going to go all Godwin’s Law on the HIV you might as well go balls deep, so to speak, which leads, of course, to the horror of the television ad shown above; an ad that really draws the attention away from AIDS and places it squarely on, well, fucking Hitler.
It was a strange, unpleasant end to the previous week for me, dear readers. My guts, seized by some unholy specter, churned and roiled, swiftly and explosively expelling any and all substances that passed through their many, circuitous bi-ways. Thus it was that my feverish malaise burst into a fluid drenched hallucinatory nightmare for 48 hours. I can honestly say that I was out of sorts.
All this is bad enough, but to then have one of my editors suddenly reappear, kicking in the door of my office, a demented smirk on his face, filthy, and reeking of Strawberry Ripple and shame; staying just long enough to scream “HEY BOY, TAKE A LOOK AT MY WORD MAKING!” before running off into the night, cackling; off to gallivant wherever it is he gallivants, well, you see how I might be a little confused.
That said, this Cthursday-flavored offering comes from Joseph Nanni — whose work has previously been featured on Ectomo — and Bad Advice for Good Times. It was important that I post this. They have to talk to you. About polyps.
Karin Dreijer Anderson — the feminine half of the Swedish duo The Knife — recently released this video of a track from the first album of her solo project, Fever Ray. The song itself is simply wonderful, and fits in perfectly among the motley crew of heartbeat basslines and organic melody with which I’m currently obsessed. But it’s when the soothing susurrations and plodding oscillations of the song are combined with the images of a pre-pubescent post-apocalypse that the feeling of some culmination begins to set in.
Granted, the idea of a world in which everyone over the age of innocence is stricken down has appealed to me since I was old enough to understand the implications of a life free from the baggage of antecedent eras. Imagine it, with one fell swoop the slate is wiped clean, and the psychological plagues passed from generation to generation like genetic memory of , aren’t simply abandoned, but forgotten entirely. The concept is, of course, not without its flaws; as evidenced by the mounds of media in which children are left to their own devices, and thus to their own injury. But on the surface it’s a wonderful idea, this ultimate infantile do-over; Karin Dreijer Anderson obviously “gets it”, and provides the perfect soundtrack for your musings to boot.
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 don’t mind telling you, dear readers, that the past few days have been atrocious. Ensconced in a sputum plastered nightmare illness, I have been limping, hunched and oozing, through this week; the phlegm constricting my chest and vocal chords causing me to sound, by all accounts, like a sniffling, hacking Barry White. The rest of the Ectomo staff has quarantined me to my office, leaving me alone and ignoring my melodious, threatening bellows.
What the current plague I suffer from has to do with this mash-up of Sesame Street and M.O.P.’s “Ante Up”, I cannot be sure. Perhaps in my current state I find myself on the same, depraved wavelength as The Tubes; my fever allowing me some sort of expanded Understanding. It may explain why I find this so funny, the image of Bert and Ernie spitting mad, aggressive rhymes sending me into fits of pulmonary convulsions. For those who may not like it, always remember: nothing despises you or your childhood more than the internet.
I have been deathly ill these last few days, and as a result have experienced some of the best fever dreams I’ve had in a long time. In relating one of these dreams to a friend I was informed that it sounded exactly like the video for Nick Cave’s The Weeping Song.
It’s important to note here that in spite of having gone from wee gothlet to full blown goth-denial over the years I hadn’t actually seen the video for The Weeping Song. Oh sure, I’ve heard it countless times in smoky goth clubs, but more often then not I was preoccupied with laughing into my drink at the slow motion seizures occurring on the dance floor to actually take note and look it up later.
After watching the video I was surprised by how closely it paralleled my dream, while missing the junkie mullets and copper coiffed sidekick in the video the dream I had was nearly exactly what you see above. Either Nick Cave (circa 1990) and I (circa brain-boiling fever) share a brain (which isn’t much of a stretch considering the pharmaceutical soup pumping through his veins at the time) or the idea of a sitting in a tiny boat in the middle of a vast, dark ocean wearing a suit and tie simply appeals to the disturbed.
One of many pieces in the Prinzhorn Collection at the University of Heidelberg:
“The core collection comprises approximately 5000 pieces of art created by approx. 450 patients of psychiatric institutions. These pieces comprise mostly drawings, water colors, writings, like letters, notes, drafts of books and exercise books, which were often self-manufactured, as well as oil paintings, material manual work, collages and 70 wooden sculptures”
The collection inspired Max Ernst and Pablo Picasso among many other artists and features the work of mostly schizophrenic patients, between 1880 and 1933.
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.
