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.
There is a small cabal of crow devotees along the West coast that count several EctoEditors among their number. You can tell who they are easily enough. The sacks of bread-heels and dog-treats stuffed into pockets and trailing crumbs are a dead giveaway. The occasional full-stop, moon-eyed, staring into the sky might seem like the local weirdo’s weekly fugue state, but maybe they’re just watching the antics of a group of jousting adolescent corvids.
If you’re lucky enough to have a few near your home, try tossing out the occasional treat. It won’t be long before soot-winged minions swoop menacingly over your mountaintop lair, rattling across the bones of your fallen enemies in search of necrotizing morsels as a warning to all that would disturb your uneasy peace.
Let me lay this on you, Jim: Sometimes you surf the tubes, looking for strange diversions with which to entertain your readers. Sometimes you find something a little too strange. Maybe it’s a nude man. Maybe this nude man is wearing a number of different, inventive thongs. The aforementioned, mostly nude, thong wearing man may, perhaps, also be wearing a horse mask and maybe, just maybe, he’s dancing while he gathers, sautés, and consumes wild mushrooms. Make no mistake friend, when that time comes, you better be prepared.
It’s Friday which, as The New Scum have learned, is “Candy Time” here at Ectomo, that horrible time when Papa Brownlee puts on his Magical Candy Codpiece and….actually, you know what? I don’t want to talk about this anymore…just…just leave me alone.
It’s positively surreal to see DEVO - DEVO! (and, for that matter, Ray Charles) - starring in a promotional video for Pioneer’s brandnew LaserDisc system…which, for all you kids too young to remember the 1980s, were basically just CDs the size of old vinyl records. The world’s most anti-corporate band has become hucksters for a dead-end technology.
Only DEVO would do the video dressed in suits, bow-ties, and weird one-eyed, spaz-haired skullcaps. Now that’s what I call a sales video.
Footage from the Second Annual Furries vs. Trekkies Bowling Match, backtracked by music from The Big Lebowski soundtrack. The only thing this lacks for ultimate skeeve factor is John Turturro’s purple-clad bowling pedophile “The Jesus” licking a bowling ball like a small child’s buttocks.
Is there truly anything more ridiculous than a “furry”? Perhaps, a person who likes to dress up as an alien caveman?
Now, we here at Ectomo definitely aren’t the most straight-laced, vanilla, fetish-free people on Earth. I’ve got a thing for medical equipment, Eliza’s got a thing for tentacles, and Brownlee…diapers and Pez. So we definitely are not the kind of people to point the finger and laugh. But there’s just something so…unutterably wrong about getting your rocks off by dressing up in fur suits and pretending to be anthropomorphic animals that it’s impossible–impossible, I tell you!–to NOT mock furries.
Klingons are a bit harder to mock, simply because Star Trek is cool and I, personally, am afraid to mock Klingons because Klingons can and will pound your ass into dust. It is their warrior nature, after all!
So what could possibly be stranger than a Furries vs. Klingons bowling tournament?! There has to be an Ectomo reader/slave somewhere in the Atlanta area who can attend this carnival of ca-raziness and report back on the insanity.
Myself, though, I have my money on the Klingons. After all, bowling is not that much different than a batleth tournament, and you just know all those goofy furries are going to be tripping over their stuffed tails.
My boy Adam…he comes through for a brotha all the time. He knows that I need a constant feed of tentacled slimy mutants, hot chicks with raccoon-eye make-up and chestbusters ready to hatch, weird chord progressions and songs that don’t make a lick of sense…so he hooked me up with Animal Collective’s brand new video for “Peacebone,” from their new album Strawberry Jam. Animal Collective’s one of those bands you will either love or absolute hate: there is no try when it comes to music this fucked-up and this inventive. But even if you HATE the music, you–yes, YOU–should make it your Patriotic Duty to the New World Order Under Cthulhu and The Great Old Ones to watch this winsome video of a girl, her monster beaux, and their adventures in picnicking and TPing rich-bitches’ houses!
*Sniff sniff* I’m a monster. I’ve got tentacles and big, crooked teeth. I’m even slimy sometimes (damned cold). Why can’t I get hot pseudo-50’s sock-hop babes with chestbusters for tongues? I HATE LIFE.
I always like to think you can tell what kind of grampa a guy’s going to be by the manner in which he deforms himself with outrageous body modifications. Pictured from left to right, I believe Paul Impossible, outside of the horrifying chasm of his nostril which actually reveals a mucousy tunnel leading directly to his brain, will be the coolest grampa, where as Lucky Diamond Rich on the far right will live in a decrepit, abandoned house and make his grandchildren sleep under the stairs, thrashing them wildly with a cane if they complain.
I wish, yes, that I had something Noisy along a more Cthulhian vein. But the video above begins with a scrolling, starry background, as eldrtich words of horror and warning crawl across the screen: I have a message for you from another time…
And then, just as in Lovecraft, the screaming begins.
One thing that’s easy for relatively normal, relatively well-adjusted people to forget is that there is a large percentage of the population out there with absolutely no social skills whatsoever.
I remember the first time I learned this, when I was hired as a pudgy 14 year old nerd to work at the local comic book store. The moment I stepped through those doors, I became a veritable God of social grace, the James Bond of comic bookstore coolness. I remember in particular one customer who would constantly try to joke with me, following me around the store while incessantly jabbering nonsense. Every once and a while, he’d become transfixed to the spot, a vibrating column of pork-flavored gelatin, and in the midst of his seizure scream out an utterly nonsense remark at the top of his lungs. “MY SHOES ARE NOT YOURS!” is the one I remember distinctly. Then he’d giggle maniacally, searching my face intently for signs of approval. I loathed him.
It’s no surprise that many of these social outcasts magnetically gravitate towards each other in freakish social scenes, such as furrydom. This is an excellent example of the sort of misanthrope I mean. This is a clip of furry Austin Wolf getting an autograph from Rob Paulsen, a voice artist most commonly known for his portrayal of Yakko Warner in Animaniacs. Just look at the way every single thing that comes out of this guy’s mouth is socially alienating: Robert Paulsen, a professional and a normal-seeming guy, is utterly and completely repelled within less than a minute.
Also, make sure to watch to the end for the money shot: a creepy, close-up shot of the lycanthropic Austin Wolf himself. This is the face of the archetypical misanthrope, ladies and gentlemen, and it is a doughy face of madness and horror. Is that the sort of guy anyone would ever want as their number one fan?
A creepy furry with a bed full of child’s stuffed animals skeevily warns us: “I want to have sex with dogs whether you like it or not. I want to have sex with Patch the Dalmation, Oddball the Dalmatian, Nadia Husky Girl, the characters from Oliver and Company, Jenna the Huskie, the 101 Dalmatians. And there is nothing you can do about it. Nothing whatsoever.”
He’s right, everyone. The furry has won: we are absolutely powerless to stop him from sexually desiring a constabulary of imaginary cartoon characters. I can imagine him right now, mashing a Snickers bar between his nubby teeth in exultant. “TAKE THAT, WORLD!”
I have long been a fan of the Residents. Ever since my father at the age of 10 pushed a copy of The Commercial Album into my grape-stained hands and awesomely whispered about an anonymous group of musical pioneers who were only known to their fans as a quartet of tuxedo-clad bloodshot eyes, I was hooked. I’ve been to four of their live performances and sat in the front row, my eyes rolled white in rapture, my hands seizing myself involuntarily.
To the non-fan, the allure of the Residents is hard to convey. Their music is hardly what one would call catchy. You fall in love with the weirdo mystique first and the music second.
But I like nothing better than to teach new people about the Residents, so here’s my gift to you: the Jefitoblog has posted up a massive primer to the Dapper Ocular Ones. Each album’s written up and sample mp3s are posted for listening.
If I were you, I’d start with The Commercial Album: even now, the Residents are best when their madness is distilled into catchy sixty second pseudo-songs. From there, I’d check out The King and Eye (their cover-album of Elvis Presley songs), Third Reich and Roll, Freak Show and Wormwood. And for God’s sakes don’t miss God in Three Persons, an album about “two Siamese Twins with healing powers and liquid gender, and their promoter/manager who falls in love with one”
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.
Is there truly anything more ridiculous than a “furry”? Perhaps, a person who likes to dress up as an alien caveman?
One thing that’s easy for relatively normal, relatively well-adjusted people to forget is that there is a large percentage of the population out there with absolutely no social skills whatsoever. 
A creepy furry with a bed full of child’s stuffed animals skeevily warns us: “I want to have sex with dogs whether you like it or not. I want to have sex with Patch the Dalmation, Oddball the Dalmatian, Nadia Husky Girl, the characters from Oliver and Company, Jenna the Huskie, the 101 Dalmatians. And there is nothing you can do about it. Nothing whatsoever.”
I have long been a fan of the Residents. Ever since my father at the age of 10 pushed a copy of The Commercial Album into my grape-stained hands and awesomely whispered about an anonymous group of musical pioneers who were only known to their fans as a quartet of tuxedo-clad bloodshot eyes, I was hooked. I’ve been to four of their live performances and sat in the front row, my eyes rolled white in rapture, my hands seizing myself involuntarily.
