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 offset the administration-controlled student paper: The Daily Beacon. It pioneered university instructor evaluations, and helped students with landlord evaluations and humor.
Features included the Drop and Add Checklist, the Win A Date With Johnny Majors Sweepstakes, JIT, a fill-in-the-blank UT diploma, and the Chair of Excellence Sweepstakes, among much much more.
The Lame Monkey Manifesto was published from 1987 to 1990 with a total of 23 issues.
The University of Tennessee at Knoxville never really saw anything like the Lame Monkey before. Yes, there were alternative newspapers, but nothing so antiestablishment wrapped in humor and dripping in satire. It lampooned and disgruntled a lot of faculty and administrators, who were probably our most faithful readers.
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 that. 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 Paul Mozingo, who co-named and brainstormed the manifesto, Robert Bowers and Lance Bledscoe for taking over instructor evaluations, and especially for Ian Blackburn who served a stint as editor and publisher, and for many many others who I hope to mention.
Features
The Lame Monkey contained submissions from students and the university community, so the content varied greatly, but there were a number of recurring features.
The Drop & Add Checklist (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, a beautiful woman, 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, I hope in part due to pressure from staff irate at being publicly lambasted by anonymous students and their colorful criticisms.
- The Restaurant from Hell
- JiT
- Boner's Fishtank
- Dieclectics
- Sweepstakes
In the Beginning...
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 up the balance. UTK was the school which my parents were willing to loan me tuition, so I ended up there. At the time, it was a party school, but because of it's size there were a lot of resources and I made good use of them. I couldn't study film making, so I learned video and print on my own through the UT student Videotape and Film Committees & etc. I eventually became a College Scholar so I could study whatever I wanted.
Paul Mozingo and I were roommates when the Lame Monkey was conceived. His parents had bought him one of the first 128K Macintosh, so we learned MacWrite and MacPaint, then later MacDraw. Unlike my Apple ][+, it made it easy to create graphics, so we both saw the potential and sought to make something of it. Together we started and folded several business ventures centered around advertising under the moniker Plaid Planet Advertising. The first was a coupon book, and quite possibly the first commercial desktop published publication in the region. It was created in MacPaint (before MacDraw was released) and the photocopy masters were output on one of the first 100 Apple Laserwriters at Eastern Computers in Oak Ridge, TN for $1/page. We also started and killed Cable Works, a direct-mailed cable TV guide, and some other businesses. This led me being offered a position a Universal Printing, a digital print house on campus that had a graphics camera, digital typesetting, and two large Kodak photocopiers.
Origin
The Lame Monkey was a child of the desktop publishing revolution. Desktop publishing was a very new thing. Many press men had never seen anything from a laser printer. I was working as a typesetter at Universal Printing because I knew how to drive a Macintosh. Universal leased time on a digital typesetter with another company at some expense, and laser printing and my labor was a whole lot cheaper, so I had solid access to the tech. Paul and I were tired of feeling voiceless in the face of the Big Orange Screw. With motif and opportunity came intent.
Why "Lame Monkey Manifesto"? Paul and I were thumbing through a thesaurus trying to find interesting names for our advertising companies. "Lame Monkey Manifesto", "Plaid Planet" and other names sprang from that brainstorm, with the former immediately implying some sort of underground newspaper. When the idea of actually doing an underground newspaper manifested, the name was already wrought.
It was originally produced on a 512K Macintosh in Aldus Pagemaker, each page was printed on two landscape 8.5x11" pages which were then pasted together to form a tabloid-sized page (11x17") on pasteboard. The Mac had two floppy drives and no hard drive, so the boot drive also stored the Pagemaker application and the second drive was used for document storage. Since it was easier and faster to physically paste-up artwork than to deal with the computer limitations of the era, the pasteboard "flats" were what I delivered to the printing company to shoot to plate and print. (Direct-to-plate was a far off dream.) Later, we switched to QuarkXPress, and instead of tediously pasting all the instructor evaluations icons onto pasteboard I created a custom logo font in Altsys Fontographer and used Filemaker Pro to compile the data and export the preformatted text, saving many hours.
Universal Printing was owned by Rand Cabus, who let me use the facilities in exchange for an ad in each issue. (THANKS RAND!!!) This helped keep expenses down to some paste-up board and press cost. The Lame Monkey was printed on the cheapest paper the web press would take, to hold down costs. Press runs ran mostly at 5,000 copies, but each issue had many second-hand readers. They got passed around. Keeping costs low meant less leg work with advertisers and more space for actual content.
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. My car was literally filled from top to bottom with stacks of papers, so I usually dropped half the stacks the first day, then supplemented them with the remainder over the course of a week.
After it became clear that the Lame Monkey wasn't going to disappear on its own, the university passed a regulation that any materials distributed on campus had to be endorsed by a student group. In order to maintain our ability to place stacks on campus, the paper became the "Official Newsletter of the Friends of a Lame Monkey", a shill student group I formed. I tapped Leonard Harmon from the Theater Department as our faculty advisor (THANKS LEONARD!), made membership cards, and we held regular meetings with pitchers of beer in the back room of Sam & Andy's in the Roman Room.
The Lame Monkey was a voice of satire amid stodgy academia. It was always able to pay for itself, if you exclude all the free labor. This was the goal.
Compendium
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Lame Monkey 1-1
The cover has "blah blah" all over except in one place where it 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 had never seen anything like it, thought it was amazing, but when she exited the elevator a jaded older lady commented in a perfect snobby voice: "those fish hats, they're everywhere!". Well, that got them on the cover of the Monkey too. This "Drop and Add Checklist" introduced the first instructor evaluations ever to occur at UTK. Since we needed evaluations from as many students as possible, and since The Lame Monkey was a work in-progress and would take too long to explain, I made a form for a fake poling company (the fake logo appears at the top of page 7). It looked official enough to get students to willingly fill out the eval forms. Paul, I and some friends with clipboards spent several days in the Art & Architecture building stopping all passersby, getting as many evaluations as we could. You can view the raw Instructor Evaluation Survey forms here! The first issue was released on registration day, when students gathered at Stokley Athletic Center to stand in line, pay their tuition, and try to work out their schedule. I rented a monkey suit from Big Don's 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 response to the first issue was varied. It was a hit among students, but was dismissed as as one-off by administration. The Knoxville Journal ran an article about me and the paper. |
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Lame Monkey 1-2
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Lame Monkey 1-3
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Lame Monkey 1-4
You can view the raw Instructor Evaluation Survey forms here! Part 1; Part 2; Part 3 |
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The Friends of the Lame Monkey UTK established new policies regarding distribution of printed materials on campus, requiring that all materials must be affiliated with a university recognized student group. Since stacks of the LMM were mainly placed in academic buildings and dorms around campus, this would effectively kill our access to students and faculty. This would have restricted advertisers who were placing ad flyers around campus, but the timing of this new policy always struck me as a suspicious attempt to block distribution of the Monkey. In order to counter this, The Friends of the Lame Monkey was established on April 1, 1987 as an official student group. Leonard Harmon volunteered to be our faculty sponsor and we had monthly meetings in the back room of the Sam and Andy's Roman Room on the strip. Subsequent issues of the Monkey bore the moniker of "Official Newsletter of The Friends of the Lame Monkey" on the page 2 mattress tag. |
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Lame Monkey 1-5
You can view the raw Instructor Evaluation Survey forms here! Part 1; Part 2 |
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Lame Monkey 1-6
A winner is finally selected for the Chair of Excellence Sweepstakes, a running joke since issue #2. Ron Ruelle succeeds in the path of least resistance and is chaired at a special ceemony at The Long Branch Saloon with the support of Friends of the Lame Monkey President Lance Bledsoe and the blessings of Robert Deadalus. |
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Lame Monkey 2-7
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Lame Monkey 2-8
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Lame Monkey 2-9
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The Volunteer Watchdog This is not a Lame Monkey, but I got caught up in a student government campaign by Acacia, the fraternity which took on the UT Administration when a dispute resulted in the seizing of their house, forcing them to purchase their own. It seemed a good idea at the time. |
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Lame Monkey 2-10
I was leaving to go on an extended solo backpacking tour of europe with no solid plans to return, and passed the publisher hat to Ian Blackburn. I was back ~3 months later. |
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Lame Monkey 2-11
Ian Blackburn takes over as the Monkey bearer. |
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Lame Monkey 2-12 The Evolution of the Lame Monkey
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Lame Monkey 2-13
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Lame Monkey 3-14
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Lame Monkey 3-15
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Lame Monkey 3-16
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Lame Monkey 3-17
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Lame Monkey 3-18
I returned as editor, relieving Ian Blackburn. In hindsight, this was a mistake. I really should have continued to provide artwork and content, and tried to turn the Monkey into a self-sustaining institution instead of my personal labor of ego and love. |
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Lame Monkey 3-19
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Lame Monkey 4-20
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Lame Monkey 4-21
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Lame Monkey 4-22
In this collaborative issue with another local zine called Township Jive, we doubled the press run and had half folded to display the LMM masthead and half folded to display the TJ masthead, with the other's zines pages being upside-down. They distributed their half and we distributed ours. A win-win for local publishing! |
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Lame Monkey 5-23
One June 7,1990, President George Herbert Walker Bush orders the organization of Operation Desert Shield in response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait on August 2. The war against Iraq would be launched as Operation Desert Storm in January 1991. |
Bo Ferger: A Candid Interview
Bull Flies at UTK
God's Little Petri Dish
In the Ending...
Almost famous
I did not enjoy being famous. Or was it notorious? It was double-edged: wherever I went, people knew me or thought they knew me. At parties I was always introduced as "The Monkey Man", which was always followed by basically the same conversation. I couldn't go anywhere without being recognized. Once I got death threats from a six foot ex-military abusive-to-girlfriend-at-parties nutjob who lived in Ft. Sanders known as Bonehead for printing "Clowns On The Run" comic strip, which he claimed was making fun of him (it might have). 
Preferring a lower profile, I started publishing under the name Rev. Dr. Ne0n Fleshbiscuit, my church name in the Church of the SubGenius.
Still, there was criticism from feminist anarchists, and truly frightening threats and character assassination from a house mate who volunteered to help on instructor evals and then got very spooky and weird. I was working a soul killing job, Desert Shield / Storm and the Gulf War started, the historic Ft Sanders group house was condemned to become a massive apartment complex, my love life took some painful turns, and I lost a lot of my faith in humanity and just didn't have it in me anymore. Kaput. Fin.
I was/am an insufferable perfectionist, for layout, design and content (but clearly not for proofreading). I was always horrible at delegating. Cudos to Lance Bledsoe and Robert Bowers for demanding I allow them to totally manage the instructor evals in the later days. People were graduating and moving on, and I didn't have the wherewithal to find and keep another editor, and somehow turn this labor of love into the institution that the university definately needed and deserved. Could've, would've, should've's: I wished even then that I had the maturity and experience to somehow develop the Friends of the Lame Monkey into a pipeline for new production staff, sales people, and editors, to keep Gimpy limping into the future. That would have been a fine legacy.
When I returned from my walkabout, I made the mistake of asking for the editorship back from Ian Blackburn, and should have left it in his steady hands. He published smaller issues, but published regularly. He took his experience and used it to help found the Metropulse, so like the Atlanta Fellini's Pizza dough recipe that migrated to Vatican Pizza, and then via Russ Harper to the Tomato Head (assuming that story is true), the viral newspaper spirit passes along into the continuum of alternative publishing, and even now into the web, the tweet, and the stream. People need a voice and a laugh and need to be heard, that just can't be served by corporate media interests. That spirit is fundamental and will always live on.
Enjoy!
Collections and Media
The Lame Monkey has been included in a number of zine directories and archives, including:
- University of Tennessee Special Collections Archives, Knoxville, TN
- University of Wisconsin-Madison Libraries, WHS State Archives Preservation Facility, Madison, WI
- Tamiment Library and Robert F. Wagner Labor Archive, Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, NYC
- Mike Gunderloy's FactSheet Five, available at archive.org
Comments
I was a UTK student from 1984-1989, and I remember a new issue of the LMM being a major event. I distinctly remember one of my electrical engineering professors being described as “wears high collared shirts to hide the circumcision scars”.