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.
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.
When I was young, my brother and I had a cheap, very basic slot car set — either Hot Wheels or Matchbox branded I think, although I can’t remember which — that we used incessantly. The visceral experience of making miniature cars hurtle at top speed around a plastic track without careening off into oblivion was almost overshadowed, however, by the act of populating the area surrounding the track with any manner of detritus — cardboard boxes, coffee cans, LEGO structures, Godzilla toys; meant to represent building, bridges, Godzilla, etc. — that characterized the vast metropolis that was the stage for our death-defying motorsport.
This came back to me while watching this video of a far more elaborate set-up being filmed mostly at track level with a camera mounted on one of the cars. The only thing that could make this better is if they had someone making the noise of the car’s engines with their voice instead of real car recordings. I wonder what that cardboard and plastic city would look like to me now.
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.
