Happy Holidays

There. A post. Back from the hometown surviving yet another yule. The LIERAQ sale's over. A new year on its way. New shirts galore on Progresswear. That's a promise.

LIERAQ Sale Extended

I've spent the better part of a week laboriously e-mailing around 800 of our friends, family, clients, collectors, buyers and the 125 or so people who've actually asked for any spam from us to tell them that we're having a sale, $5.00 off all LIERAQ gear, extended now through December 15th. It's our first sale, in honor of our first anniversary. And in anticipation of our pull out of Iraq, be that two months or twenty years.

We've got an electorate who feels that now it's our turn to declare a mandate, though, as with Bush's two elections, the use of the M word is most inappropriate. Yet many feel we've earned capital and can borrow Georgie's line and announce to the world that we're going to spend that there capital. Voters, bloggers and grassroots groups are already launching campaigns of accountability, promising to hold the collective feet of the newly elected to the fire. If they won't give us a nice, juicy, bloody impeachment, they can at least ensure that serious hearings into how and why we went into Iraq will take place. And soon, one can only hope.

Polling since the mid-terms shows overwhelming support for impeachment should it be concluded that Bush lied about Iraq. He did, and with any luck this will be our Watergate. Jack Abramoff's in jail. Tom DeWho is all but invisible on the political landscape. In what seemed like mere weeks the Repulic party (to paraphrase Mr. Bush) self destructed and deflated before our eyes as a groundswell of thinking Americans rose to vote, the war in Iraq their number one issue. Gay marriage, stem cell research, abortion, not even immigration came close. For once, the values voter was taking a truly moral stance.

It gives one hope that perhaps there is a bit of justice in the world and that this time, it just might prevail. Yet who is going to tell that to the mourners of the 100,000 to 600,000 Iraqis no longer walking the planet due to our folly? We've buried 2,919 of our own as of today. Watching the hearings and coming to terms at last with the truth about why their sons and daughters aren't coming home will be painful for these people. And for those who stood silent witnessing the lies, or cheered on the march to war, their silent shame will be palpable.

LIERAQ. $5.00 OFF SALE EXTENDED THROUGH DECEMBER 15TH.

Vice President Cheney's Gay Daughter Mary is Pregnant

by CARIOFTHEVALLEY
Across the street from the Market East train station in Philadelphia is a Loew's Hotel with one of those scrolling news displays on the corner of the building (à la New York City but poorly executed and out of context). As I walked to work this morning I saw the above headline scrolling by and had to laugh out loud. Not that it's funny that she's pregnant - assuming she wanted to be then it's great. The headline itself struck me as funny. How do you convey the import of such a happening in 7 words or fewer? President Cheney's Gay Daughter Mary is Pregnant. I question needing her name in the bit. Does her name contribute meaning? Does he have more than one gay daughter? Why should we care? Well, no doubt Dick cares. According to today's New York Times:

Lea Anne McBride, a spokeswoman for Mr. Cheney, said the vice president and his wife, Lynne Cheney, were “looking forward with eager anticipation” to the baby’s birth, which is expected this spring and will bring to six the number of grandchildren the Cheneys have.

Mr. Cheney’s office would not provide details about how Mary Cheney became pregnant or by whom, and Ms. Cheney did not respond to messages left at her office and with her book publisher, Simon & Schuster.

Nice spin, Dick.

A very nicely written take on this news and how it could make a positive difference in gay rights comes from Thomas de Zengotita writing for the Huffington Post:

That's why this little event in the second family matters. Dick and Lynn love their daughter. She's an actual real person to them. They will stand by her, as they should, and the hell with ideology.

But what Dick and Lynn don't get is that all human beings in the world are connected to the particular people they love in the same way. What the politics they represent ignores is the meaning of that particular, yet universal, love. That ignorance allows them to countenance the slaughter of innocents in the name of abstractions.

Of course the debate about gay marriage, fueled by this serendipitous news, will be top news today and I think it will be interesting to see how the Bush administration distances itself from the VP's own daughter as it asserts that "alternative" relationships should not be recognized or bring forth offspring. Let the headlines fly.

Michael Moore, come get your shirts.

I met Michael Moore in the lobby of Comedy Central this past Valentine's day where I was attending a taping of the Daily Show. Next to Stephen Colbert, Jon's the most brilliant man in America. I refuse to engage in the John/Paul who's hipper conversation. It's apples and oranges and I love 'em both.

Both the Daily Show and The Colbert Report are brilliant satire, demanding an informed and impassioned audience. Blue Collar Comedy Tour this is not. Fake news has faux news running scared. I told Howard Dean last spring that satire will save us. I'd just read Art Spiegelman's article in Harpers entitled "Drawing Blood," in which he published and rated the infamous Danish cartoons by effectiveness and likelihood that they would bring death to any of the poor cartoonists in hiding.

For years I've been telling anyone who would listen that satire is a weapon of truth and a slayer of truthiness.™ From Ancient Rome to Daumier to Thomas Nast to Will Rodgers to Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, satire will expose the emperors' new wardrobes and clarity will win in the end.

Michael Moore is a very, very tall man. He's not as wide as he might appear to be on television. Either that or he's lost a lot of weight. He had to duck to make it under the bargain basement metal detector. I looked at him with the shock of recognition one has upon spotting any celebrity and consulted no fewer than four people around me to be sure that it was he.

I nervously approached him and showed him a Progresswear brochure which he carefully read, laughing more than once. At that moment I realized that if I could make Michael Moore laugh I must be doing something right. He said he loved the slogans and thought they were beautifully designed and happily signed the cover. I said "I'd like to send you some shirts." He said "why don't you just give me some?" I paused, trying to discern what he thought I'd said. “Did you think I said that I'd like to sell you some shirts?" Apparently he did. I laughed and clarified that I'd send a truckload for his entire crew if he'd just let me know where to deliver them. I was so nervous that I didn't think to give him the brochures I’d frantically printed to give to Adam Chodikoff, the Daily Show producer who generously provided our VIP seats. Instead I gave Michael a very corporate looking business card that I'm sure he promptly lost. He told me his crew was in New York working on his latest project and they’d had an especially rough day. He was treating them to a night on the town which commenced with VIP seats at the show.

It was a solid Daily Show that night. Jon seemed truly flattered that Michael and his crew had shown up and introduced him before the show. I sat facing him trying to discern what size t-shirts to order for him. In the blink of an eye the show was over, the elated crowd reluctantly making their exodus to the New Radicals' "You Get What You Give."

Michael Moore's face shows up on a few other t-shirt companies' sites, photographed with the gleeful entrepreneur at his side, knowing that this single picture will garner them sales. So I'm hoping he might be a good sport given that his exact words were "I like these. I REALLY like these." Sending him the shirts isn't an option. I need that photo. Please, Michael. Help out a fellow Midwesterner.

A friend gave me a contact at Michael's production studio, whom I called. A young man answered who wasn't too interested in yet another t-shirt vendor trying to put some XLT shirts on the sizable torso of our nation's greatest political documentarian cum billboard. He politely but firmly said "just send me an e-mail with the info, ok?" He gave me an address that got kicked back.

I’ve been working up the courage to call again. Mike, let me know where to send those shirts. If you could humor us by sitting for our photographer Tony Ward, we'd be all the more indebted.

Intelligent Design Isn't

"Intelligent Design Isn't" is one of our best sellers and I wish I could say I coined the phrase, but I'm sure thousands have uttered the quip before me. Months after designing the shirt I came across a New Yorker article by H. Allen Orr entitled nearly that, "Why Intelligent Design Isn't."

My mother loved our themes, but not this one. She told me that she felt the one which smugly states "Intelligent Design is Stupid" implied that I felt God was stupid. I bit my tongue lest I inform this woman who brought me into a very Catholic world that I had little time for gods. I simply stated that those who were trying to get the theory of Intelligent Design taught in schools were scientific dolts grasping at straws to bring God into the public classrooms of America.

While we high five each other as school boards, starting with Dover, are struck down in their attempts to meddle with local curricula, hundreds of other cases are brought monthly, virtually strangling science education in America. My sister's best friend is a science teacher in my hometown. In a public school. She is forbidden to teach evolution. If you think we're winning this particular battle, guess again.

As if by divine intervention, the first woman to buy this shirt was none other than Jennifer Miller, the Dover, Pennsylvania middle school science teacher at the center of the maelstrom. Look for her in the forthcoming book "Into the Great Divide" by Matthew Chapman, great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin. The book expounds on his excellent Harper's cover story, "God or Gorilla?".

Jennifer has also volunteered the services of her fellow science teachers to proudly sport our attire at various science education functions. I've promised her a whole wardrobe of ID related themes and now that we're expanding our women's lines its time to deliver on that. And document it, of course.

We want to get out on the streets of Philadelphia and shoot people in crowds, but I also want to take advantage of what our messages mean in the context of the history of this burg I call home. Ben Franklin's Grave. Independence and Carpenters Halls. The Liberty Bell. All great locations until the Boy Scouts with Guns, aka the Federal Marshals who comprise a virtual army in an entire quadrant of this city, chase us out or worse, arrest us.

Just as people in Anaheim yawn over having Disneyland in their backyard, Philadelphians are often guilty of treating this nation's birthplace with an equal smirk, cursing at the tourists we trip over daily, never visiting these treasures unless we have family in from out of town.

Living smack dab in the middle of history central for five years gave me a rare appreciation. Walking my dog day and night through the various parks and buildings spread over acres of Center City forced me to think daily about these amazing, crazy men who started this American Experiment. They were the most radical of souls, and they're all spinning in their graves as the theocrats steer us back to the middle ages. Every American needs a kick in the ass tour cum Constitutional seminar of this city, replete with in-your-face quotations of the founding fathers' fervent disdain for religion and the religious.

Want a nation under God? Go visit, or better yet, move to Iran. Afghanistan. Iraq. Listen to an NPR story about three grocers in Baghdad killed and their store firebombed for displays of fruit deemed overly sexual. "Standing up a celery stalk near a couple of tomatoes in a way that might – to the profoundly repressed – suggest an aroused male, is now a capital offense.”

In the meantime we're raising a generation of children who shall, through the narrow mindedness of blind faith, become the least educated scientifically in the industrialized world. There's a war on science. This message fights back.

A post

I promised my marketing guru that I would write three blog postings this week. Here's number one. After a brief flurry of blogging in July this vehicle has lain rather dormant and bare. I'll be reposting shortly some of our earlier entries that mysteriously disappeared. There was some meat there worth leaving out on the counter. Stay tuned.

Photoshoot

We had a photoshoot recently with noted photographer Tony Ward. Design for Progress is creating a new site for Tony's fashion and editorial work and Tony's pleased to be building an entire Progresswear wing to the portfolio. The other side of Tony's work is erotica and he's one of the more respected practitioners of the genre. He's got a great eye and I'm happy to call him a friend.

Tony insisted we get some shots that reached deeper into the latter oeuvre. One of the results can be seen at LIERAQ.com. While I'm not sure how sexy we might get with Progresswear's marketing, lest we be compared with American Apparel, I think sex and war and politics are inextricably entwined. Especially this war. Hence the image fits the bill well.

LIERAQ.com is the newest member of the Progresswear family. When first creating the shirt I had no idea that we were coining a phrase. I'm sure I've heard it elsewhere; perhaps seen it in an editorial cartoon. Yet a Google search for the word yields roughly 37 results, all but one of which are ours. While we first looked at it as merely a theme for Progresswear, we now view it as a phrase that needs its own site and to that end, will be launching LIERAQ.com soon.

We are also discussing alliances with Iraq veterans groups to help with their image and fundraising efforts in the process, and have purchased LIERAQ.org, .net, .biz, .tv and a half dozen others. Some we will be giving to editorial and activist organizations, one is being offered to a certain documentary filmmaker who says he loves our stuff.

The shirts are selling better than any of our other themes ever has. I think we've got a slogan here. Now all we need is a movement. The 15-year-olds on MySpace with 100 anti-war/anti-Bush jpegs and videos - the kids who know they're three years from draft age - are ready to be the voice of this movement. If they're your children, Godspeed.

Pro-choice: Who Chooses?

by CARIOFTHEVALLEY

I am a staunch supporter of a woman's right to choose. But when I read this article in my local paper yesterday, I found myself questioning where I draw the lines on WHO chooses in the case of a minor who does not want an abortion.

This particular article does not concern a minor, but the point is salient anyway. This is the story of Katelyn Kampf, a 19 year old pregnant woman whose parents tied her up and drove her to New York with the intention of forcing her to have an abortion against her will. The parents were arrested, thankfully, and Katelyn retained her right to choose - to have the baby. Amen.

I admit I'm not up to speed on the laws regarding minors, however. What if Katelyn were 15? If her parents are legally responsible for her, are they also legally responsible for her offspring? And if so, what right do they have to choose not to raise their grandchild until the mother reaches the age of 18?

Equally disturbing is this story of an unnamed pregnant 16 year old girl forced to drink turpentine in an attempt by her 44, 28, and 26 year old cousins to induce an abortion. It is not clear whether or not the girl wanted the abortion, although there is suspicion that the pregnancy resulted from a sexual assault and that the pregnancy might exacerbate a health condition the girl has.

There's a t-shirt in this, surely, but the right message is critical. We pride ourselves on cutting edge messages that make people think so we avoid the trite messages found on your run-of-the-mill t-shirt factory shirt. We love to hear from our customers and readers so if you have a message you want the world to see, try it out on us. Of course, if you're a Culture Warrior of any sort (pro-choice advocates definitely earn this title), we already have a shirt for you.

Generally speaking, I believe the choice belongs to the pregnant girl / woman. Not the father (a subject of another post altogether) or the girl's parents, cousins, or other caregivers. But I do find myself struggling with this one just a bit. More to come as I turn over the stones on this one. Don't be shy. Tell us what you think.

The LIERAQ shirts are in!

The LIERAQ shirts are finally in!
After the longest delay yet waiting for new shirts we're proud to announce that the LIERAQ shirts are finally in. To all those who've purchased one they should be arriving shortly.

Shortly we'll be showing the tanks, spaghettis and raglans for the women as well as fitted scoop neck tees. Guys, we gots yer basic tee in 4 colors. Sweats and hoodies are next.

Thanks for all the support, folks.

Deconstruction/Reconstruction

I feel like an archaeologist searching my hard drive, random notes and e-mails for the postings that dwelled here at one time. We're planning on restoring most of it, including some of the Colbert business and our domain squatting adventures in the coming days.

A sense of focus as to the purpose of this blog may well be in order, but given that it serves as a cathartic chronicle of events in and around the building of Progresswear, it's only fitting that topics covered here reach beyond the obvious nuts and bolts of creating a new business venture. The passion for politics and well crafted satire which drive us are but one side of this man's view of the pop culture and current event landscape in which he dwells.

There's a painter first and foremost here, and once you've been through a fine art studio program your world view is permanently askew. Add a lifetime spent in advertising and design, the painter inside wagging the tail which so loves to bite the hand that feeds him. A renaissance Luddite who swore he'd never own a computer crusading for simpler user experiences and a life lived outside of one's monitor. A seasoned eye begging for higher standards in design and aesthetics and the expulsion of mediocre practitioners of this once respected art form. An insistence on better web typography that will save you, dear reader, from years of near blindness if you simply switch to a Mac and read only standards based sites.

Progresswear, and our compulsion to get thoughts off our chests and onto the ribcages of others wouldn't be what it is without a world view gazing in many directions at once. My hope is that this blog is an accurate and occasionally entertaining reflection of all that drives us.

Cul-de-Sac

I'm exhibiting in a show at the Radford University Art Museum in Radford Virginia next month. Preston Thayer, the museum's director and curator of the exhibition picked up two pieces yesterday for their voyage south. As my painting career has been on a bit of a back burner more often than not these past few years, I'm honored and encouraged by my inclusion in what promises to be an engaging exhibit.

As postwar homes populate my paintings, many feel that my work is about suburbia. I quickly correct them, stating that my hometown which I paint is a small city, not suburbia. Nonetheless it's a subject oft addressed by artists raised from the baby boom to Generation X and I do indeed share many of their sensibilities and observations about life in these United States.

The University's site has a flash presentation halfway down the museum's page featuring several of the artists. I'll be exhibiting The Siege of Jean Avenue (illustrated here) and Madonna of the Power Lines, two pieces from the early 90s.

Cul-de-Sac: Art from a Suburban Nation
A dozen contemporary artists’ take on the ‘burbs. Multiple viewpoints, multiple media.
Radford University Art Museum
Radford, Virginia

We'll be back soon: Meaningful Blog Posts for Thinking People

For those of you following along, we want to let you know that the Progresswear blog will be back up and running very soon. We got off on a bit of a tangent last week with some extracurricular blogging about Stephen Colbert, link squatting and other various and sundry topics having very little to do with our core mission. What started as an experiment in capturing media attention and perhaps procuring a design opportunity for some of our favorite Culture Warriors turned into more of a digression than we intended.

Mr. Progresswear found himself exhausted and took a brief vacation to recollect his thoughts and focus. He'll be back stronger than ever in short time, with his original posts about himself, his family, his beliefs and causes. And shortly thereafter will be new posts focused on complementing our tagline, "Meaningful Messages for Thinking People." We will be blogging on topics like Intelligent Design, Secularism, Separation of Church and State, the looming theocracy, venomous culture wars and the lies that sold the war in Iraq. We will also be bringing in some guest bloggers for more color and broader perspective - two key elements of progressive dialogue.

As always, we welcome your comments and suggestions for blog topics and t-shirts.