MoFoMas 2025!

Eleven years ago today, I had the audacity to guest DJ on FRIDAY NIGHT IS YOUNG PUNX NIGHT live from MoFoHiFi Studios in London Bridge, England. I could use a little of that courage these days!

The Take Courage House, near London’s Borough Market, against a dreamy, apocalyptic sky of turbulent pink and blue clouds. The clown, the skull guy, and the chicken guy created by Han Hoogerbrugge as alter egos or possibly totems for The Young Punx appear in the sky.

Tonight, 7 February 2025, on Phoole and the Gang, live from Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA, I'm going to play an illegal amount of music by The Young Punx and keep you company for a couple of hours.

I wrote a Blague post about the amazing experience I had at MoFoHiFi - please give it a read! The post has been ported through many Blague iterations over the past eleven years.

If you're new to the Phooliverse or to The Young Punx, but tunes in tonight's show sound familiar to you, it's because The Young Punx are a supergroup of musicians, producers, and studio personnel who have worked on most of the music you hear if you live on Earth in the twenty-first century. Just glance at the list of artists for whom Hal Ritson of The Young Punx has done work, and you'll see that it's simply statistically probable that you've consumed their sound somewhere. The act has been active since 2004, and tunes in tonight's show span over two decades of Punx productions.

I think about the events of 7 February 2014 every day.

I got the best compliments of my career that night.

I felt ferocious and cool.

With the world being the way it is on 7 February 2025, I could really stand to manifest some of that courage again.

It's too easy to feel overwhelmed, terrified, and un-cool these days.

Phoole and the Gang's vibe and format are fundamentally inspired by The Young Punx FM Podcast. Twenty-nine episodes of this legendary thing stream live perpetually on YouTube currently! Raucous nostalgia. Click below to rock.

Exit 2025 terrors just for a little while with music friends around the world tonight for some MoFoHiFi-in-Milwaukee!

Friday, 7 Feb 2025, 6:00 p.m. Central US time at slipmat.io/phoole (<-- best experience), mixcloud.com/live/phoole and twitch.tv/phoole!

Speaking of Twitch

I am launching a SECOND SHOW, only on Twitch, not a music endeavor.

I don't have any art or anything for it yet, but the other night, in the middle of the night, I left myself a voice memo on my phone, and it just said this:

STITCH AND TWITCH

I have a quasi-historical sewing project coming up, and I'm just going to stream while I sew, and we can bitch about things while I stitch, on Twitch. See?

I have to fix this hat, you see.

The hat is objectively perfect, I know. But it has infrastructure problems.

The hat is stunning, but I experimented by using lighter-weight materials in the brim, and the experiment failed; the brim stiffener and wire are insufficiently-strong and must be replaced. The swoop in the brim doesn't stay swooped; it flattens out after a while, which is unacceptable, because I require a damn swoop. I must have my swoop!

So I have to remove the "dagges" or pointy parts with bells, remove the band, remove the inner band, separate the brim from the crown, separate the layers of the brim, replace the stiffener-and-wire layer, and then sew it all back together.

It's not daunting sewing, but it is time-consuming, because I do it all by hand. But once I get into the longer stretches of unpicking stitches and then re-stitching, I will be glad of company, and so: STITCH AND TWITCH.

I am thinking of doing this on Sundays, maybe. The work will certainly take me many hours; I don't know if I'll try to do it all at once, or do little bits of it at a time. I'm not worried about the fabric fraying; the diamond-weave wool twill is nicely toothy and keeps itself to itself. So if I have to box it all up and finish it on subsequent Sundays, so be it. We'll see if anyone is interested in me sitting around doing hand-sewing and jibber-jabbering!

I send you hope for courage

US Phooligans, maybe you voted for or tacitly consented to the things that are happening in the US right now, and if you did, well, yikes. You have been played. Please consider not buying the billionaires' line next time.

But if you voted against the things, and the things are freaking you out, you have to know you're not alone, and don't comply in advance.

There's a great book by Timothy Snyder called ON TYRANNY that I want you to buy from your local independent bookseller or borrow from your local free public library. If you must buy it online, you can use Bookshop.org to order it, instead of giving money to proponents of fascism by using the website named after a river in South America.

The book helps frame our present terror in small, easy chomps, recommending things anyone can do to resist.

The first lesson is "Do not obey in advance." It's a great lesson. Don't take your pronouns out of your email signature because you anticipate that that will be required. Don't take down your Black History Month display. Don't revert to your deadname. Don't resign. Hold the line. Force them to expend more thought, more energy, more effort. Don't comply.

We're all so tired.

It's hard to imagine summoning the courage to do any of this.

So I'm sending you some. I'll make more.

Have courage. There are more of us.