Man-dork waxes nostalgic on music, officially sounding old

Afternoon, April 4th, 1995: My best friend Brian and I are chain smoking Marlboro Lights in his maroon Mazda 626, the one with the oscillating air conditioning vents that were as cool as they were a non-feature, something you knew you were paying for but were pretty sure you would not recoup in either satisfaction or resale value. Cool things about that car: it had all four windows, unlike mine. It didn’t quake violently like a mouse sander at speeds above 60 mph, again, like mine. The CD player wasn’t portable, didn’t require the cassette-on-a-rope adapter. It perpetually had a full tank of gas, because Brian always had a crisp 20 in his wallet. He wasn’t rich. I wasn’t poor.

So we’re chain smoking. Not “daddy hates me” or “black trench coat” enough to burn a joint in a moving vehicle, we resigned ourselves to no less than 4 varieties of tobacco products in the glove box at all times. Cigarettes. Cheap, disgusting excuses for cigars (from Walgreen’s). Indian bidi’s, the small hand-rolled cigarettes that I remember distinctly tasting like shit. And a pack of the black clove cigarettes that we hoped would make our lungs bleed. We’re on our way to one of those record stores you don’t know why you visit, because you seldom buy anything and when you do you always regret it. Vinyl Edge, where browsing the bins meant breathing in an incense / oxygen blend. Where merchandise doesn’t move, but you are oddly attracted to the staleness of it all. Where the sound scan report, should they actually report sales, would be a flat-liner, clinically dead but having found a way to bypass the need for a beating heart entirely. We always left disappointed, with the sense that if we had just combed through that last bin we would have found it, something so perfect and rare that it was filed under reggae or experimental to thwart those who weren’t pure enough to touch it.

We may or may not have been sipping big gulps between cigarettes, and beef jerky wasn’t an unknown accomplice in the voluntary destruction of our scrawny, androgynous teenage dork-boy bodies. Tomorrow, the Smashing Pumpkins will release a 2-disc epic called Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. It simply must be brilliant. It could never let us down. We would kill ourselves before we would not have it the day it hit the shelves. It was everything the cub scouts and YMCA soccer and history fairs and nights practicing french kissing on the glass shower door had prepared us for. It was an emergency.

And Vinyl Edge would sell it to us today, 7 hours before the sanctioned release date. 2 copies on reserve for us behind the counter. We would come to visit Vinyl Edge for this exact reason at least a half dozen more times in our high school years, to kill the wait just a few hours prematurely. For those few hours we held the new Radiohead or Sunny Day Real Estate or Pavement or Afghan Whigs record before the official release date, we had something. A sense of purpose? Something else to think about beyond the ache for a vagina or what could substitute for one? Both hard to come by at 17.

And these were the days of the checkbook. Writing out VINYL EDGE as the payee, spelling out the nineteen dollars and some-odd cents (regarding checks: how about a line for a phonetic spelling also? Or hieroglyphics?) before drawing the ridiculous chicken scrawl I have come to accept as my signature (can I change it now, midway through Merritt-family male life expectancy, to something legible?). Recording the transaction in the ledger. You had to know how to subtract in the 90’s.

Back in the car, we listened to Mellon Collie in sequence, the pink disc first (Dawn to Dusk? Twilight to Starlight? I’ve forgotten the celestial naming convention). What we couldn’t finish on the way home we locked ourselves in our bedrooms to finish. Secrets I should never tell to anyone, entry #7: We listened to the entire blue disc while on the phone with each other. Cackled with surprise and delight when Corgan screamed “And in the eyes of the jackal I say KA-BOOM!”

We secretly didn’t like Billy Corgan’s bald head. Or his zero shirt and makeup. Or at least half of Mellon Collie and the Infinite Sadness. Turns out even Billy Corgan can’t write hundreds of good songs, though even as I type this I feel like I am betraying myself, Brian, Billy himself. I bought every Smashing Pumpkins record that followed, including the unfortunate Zeitgeist. But I also just recently stopped buying The Cure records, nearly a decade after Robert Smith discovered antidepressants, hockey jerseys, and white high tops. Hell, I bought the second Debbie Gibson record, Electric Youth. Who bought that stinker?

We were loyalists, all of us, and at great expense (much to the delight of the record companies) to our bank accounts. Its not so much that we pretended to like what we really didn’t as much as we just didn’t confront our disappointment. I lost at least a couple hours of my life (that I would never trade for anything else, by the way) in my friend Lacy’s pickup truck transcribing Jeremy Enigk’s lyrics on LP2 (the Sunny Day Real Estate record with the pepto bismol cover). Other guys left alone in the car with pretty girls tried to kiss them, or cop a feel, or take the square peg in a round hole challenge. The sweet nothings I wooed Lacy over with: “Hey, can I steel another smoke from you” and “No, Lacers, I distinctly heard him say ‘lemon’ not ‘Yemen’.”

By college, I had amassed hundreds of CD’s, and sold just as many back to the used bins at mom and pop chains that were bullish on Spice Girls and bearish on Soul Asylum. At least another 15% of my total collection was on permanent loan to a myriad of friends. We borrowed and thieved from each other shamelessly. Brian, I never gave you back The Bends or Aphex Twin’s Richard D. James Album. Send me a bill. And where the fuck is my copy of Head on the Door? And who let me buy this Sentridoh piece of shit?

When Napster hit, despite Metallica’s embarrassing sue the twig and berries off of your biggest fans strategy, the consumption patterns of music die-hards like Brian, Lacy and I didn’t change. Sure, we downloaded free music. Everybody did. But what the industry suits didn’t bother to conduct focus groups around was what we would actually do with all of that allegedly stolen loot. We neglected it. Forgot about it. It was the rental home, the easy girl (I’m told they exist) of our music collection; zero pride of ownership, zero thrill of the chase. We used it once and lost interest. Like Bentley’s to a rapper, these were the records we acquired en masse simply because we could. Listen once, discard, and repeat. But we never stopped buying music, or concert tickets. Indie labels and stores that sold records for $9.99 and $12.99, prices we (as quasi-musicians ourselves) considered fair for full-length albums, earned our business. Major labels and retail establishment that priced single-disc releases at $18.99 went out of business for a reason, and it’s called being cockfaces.

“Listen before you buy” was nothing new at many indie stores, but it did a good thing when it hit the major retailers. It restored accountability to the labels and artists. The general public could now look the industry squarely in the eye and say, “You knew Two Princes was the only good Spin Doctors song. What the fuck for selling me schwag, bro-hem?” When The Promise Ring went alt-country, I saved myself 15 bucks and a ton of resentment with a quick preview through one ear (the plague of all listening stations) at Waterloo Records. When Wilco somehow managed to woo the panties off of every soon-to-be Michael Cera wannabe in the Portland / Austin / San Francisco triplex, it took me exactly five minutes to know I’d rather by the new Trail of Dead record instead. When Trail of Dead put out yet another new record, I quickly discovered I already owned a Beatles record that did pretty much the same thing. Which is when something funny happened. I stopped taking chances. Started playing it safe. I hid behind the safety of the iTunes Music Store and stopped opening the wallet every time a friend recommended something to me, or even more daring, because I liked the cover art or packaging. I stopped following artists.

So I told myself, having gone from sno-cone stand attendant (because it’s not like we sold many sno-cones, so I consider myself more protector of the stand) to telemarketer to shoe salesman to billing department clerk to marketing underling to something like better-paid marketing underling, that if I could afford to take chances way back then, when ramen was a luxury, I sure as hell can afford it now. I’ve unearthed brilliant records by Regina Spektor, Bon Iver, Chad Van Gaalen, Silversun Pickups, The National, Say Hi, and many others I may never have bought if I hadn’t given myself permission to fail miserably and buy the modern-day equivalent of Electric Youth. All of these artists might be obvious picks for the young and pubescent, but by the time you have 2 dogs and 2 kids and worry about things like pre-school lotteries and half-percentage points in property tax rates, you don’t quite have the direct pipeline to college counterculture that you used to. MTV 120 Minutes doesn’t exist anymore, nor does any semblance of a music-video format on the now counter-intuitively named cable network.

My sister gets all the real credit for pointing me in the right direction musically. She owned some of the craziest shit ever. . . a 12-year old girl with a Slayer collection, Thrill Kill Cult, Ministry, Nitzer Ebb, Front 242. But she also had a healthy dose of The Smiths, Depeche Mode, REM, so much of which I still listen to. Not to mention what are still guilty indulgences for me, carry-overs from the early days of our MTV subscription: Poison, Cinderella, White Lion, Bon Jovi. We both convinced our parents to get MTV in exchange for not renewing our membership to the neighborhood swimming pool one summer. Music videos were on all day long. Downtown Julie Brown (wubba wubba wubba, goodbye, and God bless! wtf?), Ken Ober’s gameshow Remote Control, Randee of the Redwoods. About the time my sister, to my amazement, switched to Matchbox 20 and Melissa Ethridge, I fell into a tight-knit network of suburban dork-asses like myself and discovered Mineral, Superchunk, Seam, Bedhead, and just about everything else I still listen to today. Thanks, guys. I’ll bake you a loaf sometime, promise.

Watching American Idol the other night, wondering how it feels to be Eddie Vedder at the top level of a food chain that begot Stone Temple Pilots, begot Matchbox 20, begot Seven Mary Three, begot Fuel, begot Daughtry, begot the rocker contestant before him and the rocker contestant after him, I came to accept that, to a degree, I am an antique. I keep finding new music I like, and will never likely stop. Some of it is even popular among the generations beneath me. But the makeup, the outfits, the merchandise, the lifestyle, and all the other things I embraced just a handful of years ago, they’re all lost on me now.

Which leaves the music. In all it’s format-agnostic glory. I now officially give a rat’s ass how I get it. Putting a record on a platter. Sliding a disc into a tray. Clicking a button and keying in my password. Target commercials. Rounding the corner and tripping over a street performer. It all started, and ends, with what the music I have always loved.

Except maybe in Regina Spektor’s case. Even man-dorks need kiddy crushes.

Two classic ClothMoth designs, now in women's fit tees

In addition to “Yay Serotonin”, we’ve added “Goodbye, Mother’s Cookies” and “Hurricanes are Haters” to our line of tees with separate “women’s cut” styles. These are American Apparel sweatshop free, 100% ringspun cotton tees designed for a close, countoured fit to better compliment women’s bodies. If that’s what you want. Otherwise, our standard tees are also unisex and fit a bit looser. Something for everyone.

All three “girly fit” tees are on sale this week for $5 off using coupon code “girly”. See them online here.

New ClothMoth Tees. . . this week!

Stay tuned, we’ll be announcing one brand new tee in stock and available for purchase, and another coming in a matter of weeks. The silence is broken!

More later in the week, stay tuned.

Happy New Year, and computers suck

First and foremost, Happy New Year from ClothMoth! We’re always excited by the promise of a new year, and as eternal optimists, reflect over each year that passes with gratitude and fondness. Even “bad” years have little glimmers of light, if you let yourself find them.

It’s been a tad quiet around ClothMoth over the past few days, and it will be a few weeks before we’re kicking up too much dirt. . . I built a PC a few years ago that I have used for all of my design (and audio recording) work, and it has died a heroic death. It’s seen ClothMoth through a couple amazing years, and done quite a bit more on the recording side of the house.

Coming in to take over is a shiny new Mac Pro (or shiny refurbished Mac Pro, to be precise. . . 16% cheaper is significant at this price point) outfitted with two quad-core processors. I’ve walked straight down the center of the PC / Mac divide for years. There are so many things about PC’s that make them practical (price, compatibility, upgradeability, etc.) that I will always keep one around. Kelly uses a PC for all of our order management and fulfillment duties, using a proprietary system I wrote in MS Access (more on that in a later post).

But when it comes to the creative work, namely audio recording, video editing, etc. I’ve found nothing to be more competant than a Mac. It’s not so much that PC’s can’t do the same work, because they can. I’ve been running Pro Tools on my PC for nearly 3 years now, with much success. The same computer, though, hates digital video, and there is just far too much work to be done in researching PC components to make sure they are optimal for just one software suite, let alone the multiple I use for ClothMoth, my recording projects, etc.

So the new Mac Pro arrives in the next week or so. At which point, there are a myriad of new designs to finish up. Look for new ClothMoth tees toward the end of the month.

I’ll post later talking a bit about the system I put together for shipment and fulfillment. . . most of you can just skip the post entirely, but for the few fellow t-shirt company owners and small business folks out there that are interested, I love trading ideas back and forth and you may find something of interest.

All the best,
Joshua and team ClothMoth

ClothMoth in HOUSTON Magazine

Posted via email from clothmoth's posterous

My Wacom Intuos3 catches fire. . . and they say it's normal

Just a quick consumer alert: I bought a new PC a month ago or so for the home office (I have owned both PC’s and Macs for the last decade, so no flames please) and proceeded to plug my Wacom Intuos3 tablet into an external USB hub connected to the computer. Apparently, according to the technical support staff at Wacom, this is paramount to violating all 10 commmandments at once. In fact, it’s such a no-no that they don’t even mention it once in the product manual or corresponding literature in the box.

So, what happened? Are you familiar with the smell of an electrical fire? I was convinced my new PC was burning up, and while trying to find out what was burning, put my hand down on the Wacom tablet and nearly burned my finger off. A black, quarter-sized hole had melted into the tablet surface, and as I unplugged it and carried it outside, smoke began pouring out of the hole.

Kelly called tech support and when she told them what happened, they recited by memory the exact location and size of the burn. Apparently, this happens all the time. Worse, though, is the return policy: we can send back the tablet and if they determine the damage was caused by plugging the tablet into an external USB hub, we will be charged a $40 diagnostic fee and no warranty claim will be honored. Remember, this is for the flaw in their product that is nowhere documented.

Hmmmm. So now we have a new model of customer service that we can use as the polar opposite of what we strive for at ClothMoth. I guess all was not for naught.

I’ll post pics of the charbroiled Intuos3 later today for your viewing pleasure.

My goofy face on Discovery.com

While Kelly and I (Joshua) were in NYC last weekend at the fabulous Bust Magazine Holiday Craftacular, I had the pleasure of recording a short snippet for the The Science Channel’s “nerdabout” website. Hear me give a brief introduction of ClothMoth and showcase our “Facts About Uranus” tee online at http://science.discovery.com

Special thanks to Heather Quinlan for giving us this opportunity, have a wonderful holiday Heather!

ClothMoth.net is now ClothMoth.com!

After several prior attempts, we’ve secured the ”.COM” version of our domain name, which was formerly owned by a web design company. We’re pleased to report that we were able to purchase the domain name at a fair price. . . although its never easy to fork over hard earned cash for things like domain names, we view owning ClothMoth.com as valuable to the long term direction of ClothMoth Clothing. We can sleep at night now, knowing that our customers aren’t accidentally stumbling onto a defunct design website.

More news later, including photos of our Wacom Intuos graphics tablet that literally burst into flames, and the warranty nightmare dealing with Wacom.