The Lame Monkey Manifesto was an undergound newspaper at the University of Tennessee at Knoxville from 1986 to 1990. It provided a much needed balance to the administration-controlled student paper The Daily Beacon. It pioneered university instructor evaluations, and helped students with landlord evaluations and humor.
(This is a stub article and has not yet been completed. I have a ton of material which needs to be scanned and organized, and will eventually be posted.)
My name is Christopher Gray and I was the founder, editor, copywriter, typesetter, paste-up artist, salesman and you-name-it of The Lame Monkey Manifesto. I had a real hard time delegating and this is why the paper eventually closed: I had always wanted to establish it as an instituition, but never really figured out how to do it. We had some invaluable volunteers who by persistence, hook, and crook were able to (thankfully!) take control of some of the features. Tip of the hat to Robert Bowers and Lance Bledscoe for taking over instructor evaluations, and for Ian Blackburn for served a stint as editor and publisher, and for many many others who I hope to mention.
Features
Instructor Evaluations
One of the most popular features of The Lame Monkey was Instructor Evaluations. At the end of each quarter, we'd distribute forms asking for students to grade their instructors, and the results would be published in the next edition of the paper in time for registration. The grading scale was iconic, depicted by an atomic bomb blast, the finger, scales, sex, and beer. Baldwin Lee, a favorite art photography prof of both myself and Paul Mozingo always got a martini because he didn't drink beer.
The university eventually established its own evaluation system. It is probably more statistically accurate, but certainly less colorful.
Creation and Distribution
The Lame Monkey was a child of the desktop publishing revolution. I was working as a typesetter at Universal Printing because I new how to use a Macintosh, which was a new thing. Universal Printing was owned by Rand Cabus, who let me use the facilities in exchange for an ad in each issue. This helped keeps costs down to only what it cost to pay the press run.
It was produced on a Macintosh in Aldus Pagemaker, each page was printed on two 8.5x11" pages which were then pasted together to form a tabloid sized page (11x17") on pasteboard. Since it was easier easier and faster to physically paste-up artwork than to deal with computer limitations of the era, the pasteboard "flats" were what I delivered to the printing company to shoot to plate and print.
The Lame Monkey was printed on the cheapest paper the web press would take, to hold down costs. Press runs ran between xxxx and xxx.
As with much of the free material at the university, I placed stacks in dorm lobbies, libraries, student lounges, and at the locations of advertisers around campus. It was something to have my car filled from top to bottom with stacks of papers and I usually dropped half the stacks the first day, then supplemented them with the remainder over the course of a week.
The Lame Monkey was always able to pay for itself, if you exclude all the free labor. This was the goal.
Timeline
The Lame Monkey Manifesto comprised a total of 23 issues from 1986 to 1990.
Before the Monkey
I never really planned on attending The University of Tennessee. I grew up in Clinton, TN and was looking to escape to somewhere with more opportunity. I wanted to study film at NYU, secured a hefty scholarship there, but could not make the difference. UTK was my last safety school and the only one I could afford. It's a party school, but because of it's size there are a lot of resources, and I was going to make my best use of them. The Monkey came to be as the result of a lot of failed enterprises, and because I was bored.
I couldn't study film making, so I learned video and print on my own. I eventually became a College Scholar so I could study whatever I wanted.
Underground publishing has a long tradition, but when I started at the University of Tennessee as a freshman in fall of 1984, I was not aware of any.
Lame Monkey 1-1 | January x, 198??? | First Issue
I rented a monkey suit which Paul Mozingo and Lance Greene ran around in during registration to generate buzz, and which became a prop for the cover of issue #2.
The cover has "blah blah" all over except in one place where is says "fish hats". I was visiting a friend in New York City and at a gallery opening I saw a lady with a ceramic fish curved from her chin to atop her head. I was very impressed, but when she exited the elevator a jaded older lady commented "those fish hats, they're everywhere!". Well, that got them on the cover of the Monkey too.
The response to the first issue was varied. The Knoxville Journal ran an article about me and the paper,
I did not enjoy being famous. At parties I was always introduced as The Monkey Man, which was always followed by basically the same conversation, which got old very quickly. This culminated in death threats made to my answering machine for an comic strip I ran entitled "Clowns On The Run". I eventually found out these messages were made by a six foot ex-military abusive-to-girlfriend-at-parties nutjob who lived in Ft. Sanders known as Bonehead. Preferring a lower profile, I started publishing under the name Rev. Dr. Ne0n Fleshbiscuit, my church name in the Church of the SubGenius.
I was leaving to go on an extended backpacking tour of europe with no solid plans to return, and passed the publisher hat to Ian Blackburn.
Lame Monkey 5-23 | January 7, 1990 | Final Issue
The Gulf War had broken out.
