Museum Monday

Sometimes we have our heads down in the groove – we think and we write and we try to communicate and help. When I write to you, I’m also writing to myself. And that’s what I did yesterday, reminding myself of the power of creativity, the all-you-can-eat buffet of self doubt and the force multiplier of ink covered fingers. Then I put my head back down into the groove…

Today, I have been simply overwhelmed by all of your responses over the last 24 hours, (Thank you for taking the time to do that). It makes me happy that my words struck a chord and a little bit concerned that it was necessary.  I’ll try and deploy more of these creative weapons in the near future – not against anything, but FOR love, messy inefficient creativity, and joy – even tiny toothpicks of it. I have some ideas and some tools, too.

In the meantime, if you didn’t see it, here’s yesterday’s newsletter.

There’s something that’s been on my mind – it seemed small up against everything that’s been happening these last few weeks, but turns out – that’s kind of the point…

I am so very lucky to be surrounded by some peak-output at the museum, and witness the inspired force of so many other people’s creativity and work on a daily basis. There are times when something like a screen-printed sandpaper coffee bag, ‘fuck’ underpants, albums in a metal box, shirts and scenery might seem inconsequential, but I think the opposite might be true. Let me tell you a story about the end of the world that wasn’t, and a tiny thing that turned out to be huge. 

A few years ago, just as we locked down, I went up to visit the creative mass accelerator machine that is Dark Matter Coffee. We’ve created maybe 7 different coffees together, been to Tokyo, done museum pop-ups and hung out a lot. They really inspired me 7 years ago when I discovered that the music business hadn’t lost its creativity – it had just become caffeinated and moved over to Dark Matter.

Instead of a quick recharge in every sense – I got to see the moments as the enormity of the lockdown hit the company. I think they had close to 107 or more employees and suddenly nowhere to sell coffee to. Many of the vendors they supplied – hotels, sports teams other coffee shops – didn’t need coffee either. (I overheard someone say, we have 50,000 lbs. of coffee – what we need is some money!) I had a $100 bill in my pocket and I put it in the tip jar, slightly triumphant. I felt pretty good as I jumped in my car and headed back to the office (the museum didn’t exist yet). By the time I arrived there one hour later, the enormous weight of their problem hit me – all those employees – never more in need of health care – with no real way to facilitate any of this, and my $100 bill seemed pointless, pathetic. 87c per employee?….FFS

I wanted to DO something – so, I had someone come up with a design for ‘stay the fuck inside’ coffee – as a kind of sequel to our first coffee with them : Get The Fuck Out Of Bed. I spent a few hours printing onto new craft paper bags. Some of the bags came out great – some others pushed the envelope of smudged punk D.I.Y. acceptability – but they were good. Two of my kids came to help me out and it felt like a great family activity, all pulling together.

The enormity of the lockdown started to increase almost by the hour (do you remember that crazy time?) and my efforts started to feel, I don’t know, kind of silly? 

All of the bags (we’d printed a few hundred in our adrenalized panic) were up on the clothes lines we have down there for this random, but seemingly constant, need for something to be drying somewhere – and I went home to bed. The following day it was easy enough to pull all of the dry bags down and put them into a neat pile. I threw them onto the passenger seat of my car and headed back up to Dark Matter.

On the way I looked at the pile of bags, seeing some of the misprint punk-ness. I wondered if I should keep going. I imagined myself walking into the shop and saying what? “Here’s what I did to help!! A couple of hundred brown kraft coffee bags with “stay the FUCK inside on the side – ta daaaa” ….. I think I’d signed them too – oh wow – the conceit ?… signing my hand screened kraft coffee bags… I almost turned around a couple of times, I almost left the bags on the passenger seat and just went in to – I don’t know – donate another $20? Just say hi? I took the bags in and kind of apologized… “Here, I made these…” 

They were graciously accepted, I made some small talk and left. Thinking that perhaps nothing would happen, maybe they’d discretely put them in the trash….

Later that day I saw them on the website, paired with the GTFOOB bag – two bags for $50… I think they sold 300 in the next ten days. It cost me just about the same as the $100 I put in the jar but multiplied a bit to around $15,000.

It’s easy to say stuff like ‘great things happen when you do stuff – nothing happens when you don’t,” but more important I think is just to mention that some activity is better than no activity, that creativity is a fucking weapon, a force multiplier for whatever you want. And, also, we just don’t know – we are also creating stories like the one above when we DO STUFF and perhaps worth mentioning that small stuff, any stuff works! It might have just been an evening I’ll remember with two of my kids trying to help – well fuck, even that’s not bad. It might just be that it now reminds me that I have creative weapons to deploy, so do all of us. Even in the face of overwhelming shit, creativity, effort, LOVE can make a difference. I’ve found that fact reassuring and useful over the last few days, and I hope you do too.

Speaking of creativity – there’s some amazing shit up for auction to help support the museum. I’m still discovering exactly what the larger purpose of the museum  even is and how glorious it makes me feel just being around it and a part of this amazing community.

Onwards and upwards 

and thank you so much for caring about all of this.

You rock ! 

Martin Atkins 
Chicago ILLANNOYS

 

EVENTS AT PPIM

Events are live at the Museum through the first of March! Valentine’s will be here before we know it – but Martin has you covered! Saturday, February 15, Martin will be hosting a pre-date-night screen printing workshop! Print a museum shirt, print f*!K on a shirt you bring – or both!

Take a look at all the upcoming events below!!