Monona Merch

I started a little merch company (Monona Merch)recently but rather than try to write a whole new spiel about it I'd rather just cut and paste the mission statement from the site:

Monona Merch is a company I started in 2007 with the help of the Little Type gang. I'd wanted for a long time to buy some sharp looking t-shirts featuring logos of my favorite fanzines, record labels and bands. Unfortunately, many of my favorite fanzines, record labels and bands were pretty small time and either couldn't afford to print merch, sold merch featuring badly designed logos, or printed their merch on giant baggy shirts that felt like they were made out of canvas. With the launch of Monona Merch we'll be bringing you a few familiar items and a whole lot of unknowns, designed and sold by people who know and love underground rock music and printed on quality American Apparel t's. There aren't a whole lot of big names in the Monona Merch catalog - call it a murderers row of criminally underrated movers and shakers - but that's the whole point: we're wearing our hearts on our t's to show support for the little guys that plug away in virtual anonymity. We may not make a lot of money but by God we'll look sharp standing in the line at the soup kitchen.

Check out Monona Merch

UPDATE: Check out Angel Corpus Christi modeling her new N.B.T. shirt from Monona!

Vox

It's been a satisfying if occasionally trying day in the studio. I was moving along at a decent clip until I ran into a song that's relatively quiet. And you know what that means, sportsfans: your humble blogger's voice is naked, exposed and painful to his own ears.

A minor disagreement arose over how long I should hold the word "I'm" in the song, with Mike suggesting that I cut it to a reasonable length while I insisted I'd never be able to sing the word in key if I didn't draw it out for twenty or thirty minutes.

Finally I admitted that my primary concern was just getting through the song without destroying it, at which point I was informed that aside from that one word, I'd already pretty much nailed it by the third take. "Nonsense!" I shouted (not really), and demanded proof.

Ergo, at the moment Mike is doing a rough vocal comp so I thought I'd take this opportunity to check in. Not much more to say. I'm on number five out of fourteen and I'm hoping to get three more done tonight, which is probably a bit ambitious but who knows.

I'll check in again tomorrow but in the meantime enjoy these pics.

My nemesis.

The Boss

My first self-portrait.

Photo Shoot

That's what I'm doing today, and I'm not looking forward to it. I hate having my photo taken. I don't know how to make cool looking faces so about half the time I end up looking feeble minded as I force about 3/8 of a retarded grin. As for the other half of the time, I end up twisting my face into a horrible rictus that gives me the appearance of being severely constipated. It's positively Nixonian. Add in the factor that I can never seem to find a pair of pants that fits properly and I dread going to these things. Ho hum. It has to be done so I'm going to cowboy up and give it a shot.

For a couple days in mid-week I'll be doing vocals for the album so I'll try to occasionally blog the experience. Not that it's going to be super exciting or anything but what the heck, maybe you'll find it interesting.

I toyed with bringing comments back but after opening them on the post below I remembered why I turned them off in the first place - I just don't see the point. I'm trying to get in the habit of cross-posting everything on my MySpace page so you can comment over there if you want.

Yikes

If I'd known Ann Althouse was going to give me a shout-out I would've tidied up a little around here (she busted one of my ubiquitous typos, now fixed). As it is, I welcome all Althouse fans and I hope you'll stick around. I don't blog too much these days and when I do it tends to be updates about my alleged musical career but every once in a while I say something of actual interest to those outside the small circle of fans of my music.

That said, regular readers might not be aware that in the blog world an Althouse link is sort of like unexpectedly getting plunked into heavy rotation on a major commercial radio station. Pretty cool indeed! Check out Ann's blog - like most of the others on my Daily Reading list, her stuff seems to annoy the living hell out of reactionary leftists, who insist on calling her a conservative even though she really isn't. Great stuff.

Thanks, Ann Althouse!

Let's open comments and see if I don't have to shut 'em right back down.

UPDATE: I almost forgot, AA ran a Google search on me and came up with this FCC judgment against a Dallas radio station for playing one of my songs. I remember reading about this years ago as the station was under attack by some Christian fundamentalist group for playing the song. In our early days we tried to ignite this sort of hype for ourselves several times, phoning and faxing Chicago TV stations pretending to be members of one outraged group or another who were protesting a Screeching Weasel performance. It never worked, of course. By the time the Dallas thing happened we were already doing okay for ourselves so we didn't really care so much. If I'd known they'd been hit with a 2K fine I would've chipped something in!

The weird thing about it is that they attempted to decipher my lyrics and, as you might expect, often failed, sometimes hilariously and usually making it worse than it was. Case in point:

"When you just need a man, a beat-me-leather fag,
to take you out in drag."

Now, as silly as it may seem to debate the subtle nuances of this example of high culture, it does sort of irk me that they got it wrong. The line is "beefy leather fag," not "beat-me-leather fag." It's an important distinction because "Beefy leather fag" is funny whereas "Beat-me-leather fag" sounds like something translated from French by Babel Fish.

Also, the FCC thing doesn't distinguish between the lyrics and the spoken intro. The latter ends at the line, "Won't you be my homosexual husband?" and is spoken by former J.D.'s editor and current filmmaker Bruce LaBruce (link NSFW!), a very funny guy (who I think might be gay).

Anyway, there are many other mistakes in the FCC's version of my lyrics. I don't even remember all the lyrics - I ad-libbed a bunch of them. Plus that song was written almost 20 years ago.

Oy, I need a nap.

I'm Okay - You're Not

I'm glad to see that Ann Althouse is still talking about the Hmong students' hissy fit over at UW Madison. Most recently she quoted extensively from an Isthmus piece on same (the Isthmus is the weekly leftist paper up here).

Not too long ago cases like this got me all stirred up. I'm tempted to say that I'm older and wiser now but the truth is, crap like this happens far too often for me to get all apoplectic every time without running the risk of blowing out a major artery or something. I get steamed, but not quite livid.

The story is pretty much always the same: A professor tries to fan the dim and flickering flame of intellect he sees in his students and makes the tragic mistake of not using "I'm Okay You're Okay" language. The little Marlos and Phils get an attack of the vapors from hearing such hateful words and go whinging off to the dean who, typically, says, "There, there, my little lambs" as he announces to the world that such slights against their feelings will not be tolerated.

Cue outrage from the vast majority of Everyone Else In The World who can't believe that such weak-minded crybabies are going to enter the adult workforce so ill-prepared to co-exist with their fellow man without having somebody to whom they can run and blubber. The latter assertions, sadly, miss the point that these sensitive muffins will likely live and work their entire lives within arms length of any number of willing wet nurses who will file lawsuits on their behalf every time their precious feelings are bruised. Such a world does indeed exist.

It certainly exists in punk rock - and especially on the West Coast, where witch hunts of this type have been conducted with regularity as long as I can remember. Even in a subculture that on the face of it would seem to be a bit more muscular, these sorts of Romper Room antics thrive (at least in the fertile soil of the SF Bay area). You'd be right if you pointed out that punk is as much a fantasy world as college life, but one can conceivably earn a living in punk - it's hard to be a professional student.

As it is, nobody's career was ever on the line when some punk dingbat who read too much Naomi Wolf and Susan Faludi decided that those of us who weren't gay were de facto rapists. And there were always enough people in punk who loathed such nonsense that it really was and is relegated to the absolute lunatic fringes. As many times as I've been targeted in the crosshairs of some delicate flower who didn't care for my choice of words and who tried to sabotage some this or that of mine, it's never actually worked.

Similarly, I doubt that Prof. Kaplan's career is in jeopardy, at least in terms of him potentially losing his job. What likely has happened to his career is that the joy has been sucked out of it. Henceforth, if he has any brains at all, he'll be tiptoeing through the tulips that populate his classroom. And that's what the whiners really want more than anything: they long to watch you go gently into that good night.

Here's hoping he tells them all to go to hell, and here's understanding when he doesn't...

More HERE, HERE, HERE HERE, HERE, HERE, and HERE.

Waubesa Radio

I've been doing an online-only radio show for about four months now operating under the name Waubesa Radio. Just go HERE and click play - the show runs on a loop all day every Friday. When I don't have a new show, the gang at Insubordination runs an old one or a best of. The show is streaming only - you can't download it.

Anyway, I keep forgetting to mention it here, so there ya go. New show airs tomorrow.