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.
Imagine for a moment that all your dreams have come true, and finally, you’re starting to turn into a metal monster. Now imagine that to your horror the transformation is less laser eyes and drill genitals and more a long, slow, painful metamorphosis into a rusted erector set. No, there will be no rampage of destruction and mayhem for you. After your diagnosis you’ll be transported to a terminal ward to live out your days being poked, prodded, and otherwise suffering the indignities normally associated with investigative medicine.
Interestingly, my highly refined medical acumen resultant from an exhaustive study in the hippocratic arts (four seasons of House and counting!) was perked at the names of the diseases and syndromes being bandied about. Impressively, the terminology is at least relatively sound. Although I can’t tell what I was more impressed with; that the film makers did their homework or that I’ve finally learned something from countless hours of television.
Pictured above is Pony, an orangutan that was recently taken from a village in Borneo where she was shaved every other day, chained to a wall, and used as a sex slave. Which means that, at some point in the last year or so when you were, say, eating dinner, or reading a book, or playing “teh Haloz”, somewhere, deep in Indonesia, a man had handed someone an undisclosed amount of money and was, at that moment, humping an orangutan. I’ll give that a moment to sink in. Continue Reading…
Naegleria fowleri.
Doesn’t sound so threatening, does it? What the heck is it, anyway? you think. Some kind of glaring pigeon?
No. It’s am amoeba.
You remember amoebas, right? Everyone’s favorite microscopic critter: a shapeless blob of primal sludge that consumes food by simply engulfing it and absorbing it. You know, like the Blob…but smaller than the eye can see unaided.
Well, Ectomo-boy Mr. Fancy-pants-scientist Pegritz, you say, that doesn’t sound horrifying at all! The Blob is scary because…well, it’s like a gigantic Jell-O mold with an appetite for human flesh–but the Blob isn’t real, and amoebas are so damn small every footstep I take destroys a few million of ‘em, probably. FEH! I publicly mock amoebas!
Yeah, but guess what, smart-ass? Naegleria fowleri eats human brains. Continue Reading…
Ripped from the very neural simulation spaces of Qais Fulton’s mental “barn o’ bad-assed bestial boning” comes the above video, a complement to his most recent post about the guy who died from horsey/human butt ballet: purportedly a clip from a documentary that aired outside the United States concerning zoophilia and all manner of weirdos who have all manner of weirdo sex with their pets, we get to watch a be-mulletted blonde guy and a lady who looks like she should be behind the counter of some “quaint” roadside Americana store selling Yankee Candles speaking very candidly about how they…well, “go ’round the world” with the lady’s miniature stallion. Discussed are their first date, in which the woman decided to try the “shock factor” on her prospective beau by ducking under the horse for a quickie, their marriage, and their current sex life…with the horse. At no point do the two ever discuss actually meshing genitalia in the traditional human-on-human approach, which leads me to believe their marriage is actually a farce–indeed, actually a threesome, in which one member is, well, a horse. Do I hear charges of bigamy?! Going once…going twice…?
I’ll bet ANY reader Out There in Ectomoland that one or both of these horse-humpin’ honkies are furries, as well. So, to anyone checking out that event in Atlanta on the 29th, keep a keen eye out for two people in horsey costumes, who may be rubbing up against each other in a manner thoroughly inappropriate to a family place like a bowling alley. If so, approach with caution: they were last sighted trying to make a campfire and chasing each other around with leathered donkey dicks.
(BTW: What the hell is up with me an alliteration these days? Damn!)
We here at the Ectomo Junior Varsity League, as I’ve taken to calling the trio of Peregritz, Rosenberg, and Q while I lay awake at night constructing disgusting fantasies featuring our inimitable crew and a bevy of tentacles, appear to have a strange affinity for man/animal love as evidenced by the past week’s horrible mockery of journalism. So it is with some trepidation I broach this subject yet again, for fear of further cementing our and my reputation as partakers of the bestial delights.
You see Seattle is famous for many reasons, the near constant rain, the hurling of fish in public markets, Dr. Frasier Crane, and a massive phallic structure marring the skyline. However for those of you internautically inclined, Seattle is famous for a far more repellent, darker reason.
Ok, now I could write a long winded account of this event, full of breathless ranting, my neck veins bulging from beneath my skin as a torrent of adjectives floods the page but I’m gonna quote this because the facts are more horrible than anything I could come up with:
“A Hartlepool man is facing jail after he urinated on a disabled woman who lay dying in the street.
The 27-year-old shouted ‘this is YouTube material’ as he degraded Christine Lakinski, 50, who had fallen ill, magistrates heard.”
A clip from a 1970’s educational film strip on how to talk to your children when you catch them masturbating. The preload image alone in the embedded YouTube clip is a good idea of the horror to come.
Ricky — a dead-eyed youth with a face pocked by melanoma — stares without blinking at the ceiling while woodenly masturbating. As he does so, his door knob begins to turn slowly, ominously, like the door knob in a zombie movie. The door opens and his mother — a flabby, emotionless polyp of a woman — enters his room without knocking. Despite Ricky earlier appearance of soullessness and the fact that he is covered with a sheet and could easily have passed himself off as taking a nap, the boy wildly overreacts, flailing his limbs wildly around him, gasping and fumbling with himself. Smooth, Ricky. Now she’ll know you were jerking it.
And she does. But his mother is understanding. “Oh, I’m sorry, Ricky. I did see what you were doing. It’s all right.” she says calmly, her voice atonal and utterly drained of feeling. “It felt good, didn’t it?”
Ricky simply stares at her, a dollop of drool forming at the bottom of his lower lip. This is the first sign that debilitating psychological trauma is kicking in.
“I’m glad you’ve decided to do this in the privacy of your own room,” the mother continues, clearly referring to Ricky’s uncle Randall and the men’s restroom adventures of the same, “When you’re a little older, we’ll talk more about these feelings and what causes them and how we can control these feelings. I’m sorry I intruded on your privacy. I’ll be sure to knock next time.”
And then, as if in reverse motion, his mother calmly leaves the room, leaving Ricky shaking in the fetal position. Unfortunately, the clip ends there, leaving many pressing questions unanswered, not least of which is whether or not Ricky managed to finish up.
On one of my new favorite blogs, Retrospectacle (written by a very smart, very hot and pouty neuroscience PhD student with an African Grey who reminds me of my own foul-mouthed bird, George, cursing under his breath on a perch back in Boston), has a fantastic article up writing up the history of coffee as a preventive treatment for the bubonic plague:
Coffee drinking was on the rise during the mid 1600s, coffee houses spread through England filling an important niche–public meeting place which did not serve alcohol. Originally coffee was sold as a medicine, “the first steps it made from the cabinets of the curious as an exotick seed, having been into the apothecaries’ shops as a drug.” Coffee became increasingly popular during the plague of 1664 when it was believed to be therapeutic and protective against the “Contagion,” as it was called.
Ironically, as the filthy, lice-crawling crowds of London flooded into the coffee houses to take advantage of the prophylactic, their close proximity increased their chances of boils festering under their arms, not lessened them.
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.
Naegleria fowleri.
On one of my new favorite blogs, Retrospectacle (written by a very smart, very hot and pouty neuroscience PhD student with an African Grey who reminds me of my own foul-mouthed bird, George, cursing under his breath on a perch back in Boston), has a fantastic article up writing up the history of coffee as a preventive treatment for the bubonic plague:
