elephant shirts

absconding with the bread

Sep 01, 2024

∙ Paid

Webster’s defines merchandising as the practice of juicing up your cohort to work all available angles to abscond into the sunset with maximal bread when time comes to pay the piper. This can mean putting the Snoopy drawing you invented on an kid’s shave ice maker. It can mean putting the logo of your petroleum corporation on a rainbow polyester beanie. It can mean weaving a mesh tank top and embroidering Bart spiking a volleyball that has sunglasses on it and saying “I hate Mondays.”

Or in this case, here today now, it means me putting this picture of an elephant stoking a fire with its trunk beneath the night sky which was made by Leo Visser as the cover for an obscure Dutch cookbook in the 1930s or something, which I found on the floor of the bookstore where I worked in high school and then years later used as the cover art for an album that has kept being popular… on some T-shirts.

They’re available now to order. Go for it! There’s 2 colors: natural with blue ink or black with orange ink.

I have usually been pretty uncomfortable with the idea of crass direct merchandising. It’s probably inherited punk scene baggage that nags in my head with over-thought thoughts about “you’re not an apparel maker, you are a song writer” or “band shirts are dorky advertisements to nerds from other nerds, opt out, you are an arteest”. But also I am very much not an arteest, I am a small scale hustler scraping a living however possible anywhere adjacent to this art realm, crusty ideals eroded and bent. So finally, for no particular reason, 23 years after the album was released, I am releasing a shirt of it.

Again: you can order one direct from me now.

They’re quality products. Made in USA 100% cotton from Bayside, their 5040 model, and printed in Anacortes by master printer Paul of Granular.

And also just to say, it’s not like I didn’t notice the existence already of bootleg versions of this shirt out there in the world. Not “calvin peeing on (blank)” level of homemade merch, but enough that I’ve noticed that some people out there in redbubble etsy hellscape at least would appreciate a well made version of this shirt. Here are some good ones: