It makes my heart glad to see that someone is finally considering the chainsaw artist when it comes to carting around one’s tools of the trade. Violinists have the iconic image of an open case littered with change. Cellists are known for annoying the everliving shit out of people with obnoxiously large cases. But the Chainsawist? Wholly ignored by the casing industry, which when you stop to think about it is a less than bright move on their part.

Be you lumberjack or dismemberment fetishist, now anywhere you go with your chainsaw you go in style.

Etui pour une Tronçoneusse [Wim Delvoye : NotCot

Meet Max Gogarty, the latest addition to the Guardian’s company of travel bloggers. Don’t let his appearance fool you. Beneath those £400 sunglasses, that meticulously tossed coiffureage and the carefully cultivated stubble perforating his lilly-white androgyne throat throbs the lion’s pulse of an adventurer. The most obvious allusion is to a swarthy Richard Burton, carving away his foreskin with a dirty flint in a cave just outside of Mecca before bravely entering the holy city where white men feared to tread. But more so! This is the face and soul of the adventurer, the hero, the titan.

But like most titans, Max has already found himself the target of a swarm of small, envious Lilliputians. After a few short hours of his introductory post going live, Max has received over 500 outraged comments from the Guardian’s readers: a cacophonous roar of shrill, petty voices from which only the words “twat”, “git” and “wanker” can clearly be discerned. His lithe, twink-like muscles are restrained by the flossy ropes of jealousy. It irritates the gossamer lanugo of his alabaster skin. This incessant biting, of the lesser, lice-like humanoids, sucks the radiance from this Herculean man-of-action.

But what’s the rumpus? Who is this homoerotic love child of Achilles and Adonis? Who is this avatar of colonialist adventure, hearkening back to an age of heroes? Who is Max Gogarty?

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A slightly different format this weekend. Oscar nominations have been announced and while the pithy award show is as much an indication of cinematic excellence as one of Eliza’s massive bowel movements, it does draw attention to films that may otherwise have gone unnoticed. With that in mind Ectomo presents the nominations for Best Short Animated Film. Hit the jump for enough embedded video to make your browser weep.

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In the dim history of my mumblings there are mentions of a property called, intriguingly, Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat. I first read this and wrote about it back at Table of Malcontents, mentioning it in a post on comic book MBQ. The post earned me to scorn of an entire generation of American manga fans (”white, fat, mousy-haired, wire-framed and lacking in personal hygiene”), and perhaps was not the best venue in which to introduce Rankle.

Allow me, instead, to quote from creator Rosearik Rikki Simons:

Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat is about a child Ghoul named Ranklechick. Ranklechick lives near Jupiter’s moon, Europa, within a sentient space station called the Europan Zoo. He lives with his three-legged cat, Pumpernick. Since birth, Ranklechick has been accused by his father of murdering his mother and now the sad little Ghoul thinks he can make everything right if he can just talk to his mother’s ghost. This is Ranklechick’s obsession, and every Ghoul on board the Zoo must have an obsession in order for the Zoo to survive. Being that he is of the inventor class of Ghoul, Ranklechick invents an absurd collection of devices in his quest to speak to his mother, like his Bliss Extractor, which he uses to try to get an autograph from the ghost of Charles Dickens, or his Sphere of Belligerence, a spacecraft propulsion system that literally insults physics. All Ghouls are social idiots trapped in a society that thrives off of absurdity, like a vast population of Asperger’s patients. Ranklechick spends his time living in the densely populated Europan Zoo, building necrotic communicators when he isn’t being interrupted by the the strange and unnatural — and he has many interruptions: running from handshaking lessons, avoiding being made into candy by the evil android Nathan Burblepinch, getting repeatedly decapitated, suffering the company of oniomaniac children, being possessed by the Spirit of Failure, suicidal disembodied brains, melancholic ham, a sardonic talking three-legged cat for a best friend, and all the while Ranklechick continues to believe he is becoming a comic book character. When all is quiet and he has time to think, he wonders if he’ll ever get to tell his dead mother that he loves her. This is a comedy.

I was so taken with Ranklechick’s cast and setting that I penned two pieces of fanart, something I never, ever do, one of which can be seen to the right. That is Sister Toovibohnes (I’m iffy on the spelling), a straight-laced space nun that lives aboard the Europan Zoo with the rest of the gang.

Ranklechick has been generously made available for free on Simons’ website, along with Super Information Hijinx: Reality Check! (which I have not read, but I believe it involves catgirls and also “the internet”).

Ranklechick and His Three-Legged Cat; Reality Check [Studio Tavicat]

A delightful look back at the golden age of air travel…

Gordon’s Jet Flight, a children’s book from 1961, took me back to a golden age of plane travel, when passengers in coach got to eat steak, kids were allowed to visit the pilots in their cockpit, and Homeland Security didn’t give my teddy bear a cavity search.

Meanwhile, on my last flight, I spent 13 hours with the slopping body fat of a morbidly obese Turk pouring onto my lap. Through out the flight, he gasped, panted and mopped sweat from his brow as if the very act of sitting were, for him, a task of Herculean caloric expenditure. He couldn’t speak any English except for the word “BAFROOM!” which he moistly shouted into my ear every time I drifted off to sleep. His voice was both the sound and the smell of a thousand farts. The floor smelled like a porn theater, and the stewardesses fed us only crushed saltines and a shake made of protein powder and water of semen-like consistency.

Gordon’s Jet Flight [Mike Lynch Cartoons] : Quote from Eye of the Goof

When I was a teenager — the sub-dermal tectonics of my face bulging with pus and my brain racing with cheap, wanna-be pimpsterism — my friend Dong Diep (pronounced ‘deep’) and I had a plan. Over the summer, we would purchase an old van for a dollar. This would be supplied by his Asiatic and Rastafarian cousin, who existed like a funky phantom in an ether of marijuana smoke. The rest of our money would be pooled to renovate this van with all of the necessary riggings for cross-country pimping: namely, a water bed in back, lava lamps for head lights, a bitching set of hydraulics and, most ingeniously, a drag chute to slow down and turn on a dime if we happened to spot a honey by the side of the road that we couldn’t otherwise stop for (see the Batman television series for mechnical reference). Through sticky, drunken fumblings on the railroad tracks with insecure teenage girls we had conquered Malden: our next goal was America itself.

We never did end up doing that trip together. The logistics were, of course, sound, but I ended up spending my money on a trip to Europe instead, where the furry armpits of loose European women expanded my philosophy of pimpsterism. The rest is history: I’ve spent the vast majority of the last decade living in Europe. I have no idea what happened to Dong, but with his suggestive name (perfect for an insinuating pun!), I imagine he did similarly well.

Still, I sometimes wonder what would have happened if Dong and I had driven across country in our pimp mobile. It’s possible that if we’d done so, I’d love the highways of America just as much, if not more so, than I adore the hostels of Europe. And if we had gone on such a trip, I like to think it would have gone something like this cheesecake Kerouackian adventure, first published inthe Summer 1967 issue of Glamour Photography under the title “The Great Cross-Country Girl Hunt.” Like our would-be trip, it describes the adventures of three creepy men in a van, driving across country and taking pictures of loose, half-naked women they happened to spy on the side of the road. A Bang Bus for more innocent times.

Check it out: the article and photography are both top notch.

Glamour Photography - Summery 1957 [Ziza.ru] : Hugo Strikes Back!