Punk Heart's Holiday Auction to benefit THRIVE, a mental health facility in Chicago and Nami (National Alliance on Mental Illness). For our first auction, we are adding one rare/signed/framed new item each day for 10-days. Our goal is to donate $1000 by the end of the auction. We have some wonderful donations lined up from an archive of rarities, so please, dig deep and help a great cause.
$30 Gift Box includes a t-shirt, button, sticker, and poster. 20% of the proceeds go to Thrive--a mental health facility in Oak Park, Illinois. John Jughead Pierson & Paul Russel - Punk Heart T-Shirt Bundle includes a two-sided Next Level combed cotton t-shirt w/ a large 18" x 24" signed poster, pin, and 4" x 6" sticker, all shipped in a custom box. The project features prose by John Jughead Pierson, co-founder of Screeching Weasel, Mopes, and Even in Blackouts; the artwork is by John's longtime friend, Paul Russel, creator of the iconic Screeching Weasel logo, and art designer of the seminal X-Box game, Halo. 20% of the proceeds of this project will be donated to Thrive, a mental health facility that provides critical services in the Chicagoland area. |
Punk Heart Project - The StoryWhile Jughead was having dinner with a friend, she asked him what was punk. Normally he hates this question because it is complicated and varies from person to person and band to band. After some silence, he said, “The Punk Heart is inherently wounded.” And then his friend Mary said, “Well, Now you HAVE to explain what that means.” He gave a few examples and then she encouraged him to write them down. The goal was to really analyze himself honestly and to hope that his answers to the question could be shared by others. Then he asked his friend, Paul Russel, to create an image to go with the words. Paul and Jughead have been working together for years and years, and it made sense that the two of them would create a piece of art together that meant something to both of them.
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The result was an endearing image that reflected John's words--a stigmata etched into a hand, wounded and bleeding. After getting some positive feedback from friends and fans, John decided to offer the design as a package for sale, with a portion of the proceeds going toward mental health programs in the Chicagoland area. The idea is to help others who have been wounded by life and circumstance--to use the punk ethos to make a difference in the lives of wounded people. John then approached Chris from Sound's Rad! who jumped at the idea based on the notion that helping others is not only good karma but an expression of sound values.
As John states, "I always have the instinct to donate money out of my incomes, but the reality is, that I don’t trust myself to actually get it done, to achieve that last step of writing the check and sending it. You see, I don’t make a lot of money, in general, and once cash is in my hands I find ways I have to spend it. So in this case I feel more confident in making this particular donation happen because Christopher is an upstanding citizen of the world and he will deduct the percentage to be donated before the royalties reach my grubby fingertips. And since people of his ilk consider me an underground “legend” I can use that pressure to get him to do something I, myself, am incapable of following through to the end.
The reason I chose mental health as the cause to receive this 20 percent, is because it is relevant to what this specific prose writing speaks of. I do believe the punk heart is inherently wounded, and I’d even go so far as to say most hearts are inherently wounded, or at least the ones I find dear to me. I feel a bit of insanity or imbalance is the home of creativity and uniqueness. What is interesting to me is not the folks that try to be different but the ones who struggle to be like everyone else but just can’t seem to escape their own eccentricities. In them, eventually, something in this struggle in the self begins to make sense and then one is able to incorporate this, off kilter sense of the world, into the vision of themselves in a more positive light. But not all people can achieve this, some damage is too deep. The difficulty is how to live with oneself and others, before and after these self realizations. There are mental health issues that arise from both nature and nurture, and the space is so gray in between that it doesn’t seem a bad cause to throw money at. Are there actually incurables in the world? I don’t know, but I’d like to pay people to try to help alleviate the overwhelming symptoms some people have to live through in order to try to be themselves. At the end of the day I would like to say I have done something to help soothe and take control of the pains our own brains can cause us.
Paul Russel gave me some notes on this explanation, but ultimately wanted me to leave it the same, knowing that I tend to speak more poetically and he speaks more literally in reference to issues such as mental illness. I feel his comment here is valid, so I am adding it at the end: “technically mental health problems are not so much identity issues, eccentricities, or an inherent woundedness, but actual highly complex illnesses and syndromes within the brain.”
I told Paul that I was concerned with that not being made clear too, but that in the writing I tried to choose words that are aware of the vastness and seriousness of mental illnesses, but ultimately I thought he was right, so I decided to incorporate his words."
As John states, "I always have the instinct to donate money out of my incomes, but the reality is, that I don’t trust myself to actually get it done, to achieve that last step of writing the check and sending it. You see, I don’t make a lot of money, in general, and once cash is in my hands I find ways I have to spend it. So in this case I feel more confident in making this particular donation happen because Christopher is an upstanding citizen of the world and he will deduct the percentage to be donated before the royalties reach my grubby fingertips. And since people of his ilk consider me an underground “legend” I can use that pressure to get him to do something I, myself, am incapable of following through to the end.
The reason I chose mental health as the cause to receive this 20 percent, is because it is relevant to what this specific prose writing speaks of. I do believe the punk heart is inherently wounded, and I’d even go so far as to say most hearts are inherently wounded, or at least the ones I find dear to me. I feel a bit of insanity or imbalance is the home of creativity and uniqueness. What is interesting to me is not the folks that try to be different but the ones who struggle to be like everyone else but just can’t seem to escape their own eccentricities. In them, eventually, something in this struggle in the self begins to make sense and then one is able to incorporate this, off kilter sense of the world, into the vision of themselves in a more positive light. But not all people can achieve this, some damage is too deep. The difficulty is how to live with oneself and others, before and after these self realizations. There are mental health issues that arise from both nature and nurture, and the space is so gray in between that it doesn’t seem a bad cause to throw money at. Are there actually incurables in the world? I don’t know, but I’d like to pay people to try to help alleviate the overwhelming symptoms some people have to live through in order to try to be themselves. At the end of the day I would like to say I have done something to help soothe and take control of the pains our own brains can cause us.
Paul Russel gave me some notes on this explanation, but ultimately wanted me to leave it the same, knowing that I tend to speak more poetically and he speaks more literally in reference to issues such as mental illness. I feel his comment here is valid, so I am adding it at the end: “technically mental health problems are not so much identity issues, eccentricities, or an inherent woundedness, but actual highly complex illnesses and syndromes within the brain.”
I told Paul that I was concerned with that not being made clear too, but that in the writing I tried to choose words that are aware of the vastness and seriousness of mental illnesses, but ultimately I thought he was right, so I decided to incorporate his words."
John Jughead Pierson
Co-founder and guitarist of three punk bands, including Screeching Weasel, The Mopes, and Even in Blackouts. He was in Screeching Weasel for around 25 years before relations between himself and Ben Weasel fell apart. The Mopes are a side project for such well known Pop Punkers as Dan Vapid, B Face, and Dan Lumley. Even In Blackouts was considered one of the bands in the forefront of acoustic punk. Jughead acknowledges that this may be possible but more likely he was just trying to do something he hadn’t done before, and was guided creatively by the band’s lead singer, Liz Eldredge. Jughead has also written two novels, Weasels In A Box and The Last Temptation of Clarence Odbody. He has written over 25 long form plays and has played on around the same amount of records. |
Paul Russel
Dabbler and the luckiest boy in the world. Having studied animation, film, photography, graphic design, illustration, and storyboarding in college, he became friends with John Jughead Pierson, and over a couple years did several fliers and the first two album covers for the band Screeching Weasel. From there, he began a career in graphic design, after impressing someone at a cross dressing birthday party. With a summer job as assistant graphic designer at the Ravinia Festival under his belt, he worked a few years as a temp, working for multiple clients. At another birthday party he met his future former wife, who introduced him to someone in the video game industry. After three years at a company in the Chicago suburbs, he was made aware of a vacancy at Bungie, and through pure dumb luck (and a lot of hard work), spent 12 years there working as an environment artist on seven shipped Halo titles, also suggesting the word ‘Halo’ for the game. In 2012 he retired from the game industry to reset, and is now refocusing on personal work and portraiture for friends, returning to his roots as an illustrator. |
A small section of work by Paul Russel
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