Sunday 21 June 2009

The Antagonist in The Observer

My letter was published in The Observer today: http://www.guardian.co.uk/lifeandstyle/2009/jun/21/letters-motherhood-children-relationships

The original letter was much longer, but I thought it was edited well. My letter continued on after this to discuss feminism and public opinion (as I mentioned in the previous post). Still, I'm quite happy with the way it turned out.

The Punk brought me a copy this afternoon. We were reading the paper today and I found it (page 30 of the front section) and passed it to him. He read mine without realizing it was mine, said "Oh, this one's clever," then he saw my name and cracked up. I said "Thank you."

It was great to see The Antagonist mentioned the paper. The website's been having steady traffic and that's a relief. I haven't been able to work on it as much as I'd like to with the move and the first issue of the new series, but I hope to post more of this month's extra content this week.

Saturday 20 June 2009

Relocation to G-Town

G-Town

After a stupidly busy week touring every crack den for rent in Cardiff, me and the Punk have settled on a very nice house in Grangetown.

It's a beautiful house, and we have a week to move into it. Today is probably my last monging day in this flat. Weird.

The house is gorgeous, and I'm excited to live in it. It's already just about perfect, so in order to keep it that way, it looks like we're going to have to get rid of about half of our stuff. This doesn't depress me as much as I thought it might. I find the idea of trashing the pointless liberating, and look forward to what will hopefully be a less traumatic move than last year.

As I say, the house is great, and is by far the best thing we've seen all week. I suspect the only reason we can afford to move into it, however, is the fact that it's in Grangetown, which is supposedly dodgy. It's near the train station, which is awesome, and as there weren't any burning crosses or flags in the front garden, I figure it can't be that bad.

After hearing several warnings about this apparent dodginess, I checked it out on the old 'net. This is what I found:

Wikipedia: "A short walk from the city centre, Grangetown is considered one of the rougher areas of Cardiff. House prices are reasonable and therefore attractive to first time buyers. Grangetown is also known as 'G-Town', due to its 'ghetto' and 'gangsta' like image, caused by juvenile delinquency and anti-social behaviour."

Cardiffpedia: "There's an air of last century Poland about Grangetown - invaded by outsiders, districts fought over, sections sliced off, parts renamed and given to others" Peter Finch Real Cardiff (2002) p.113

and

"A staggering 20% of the population suffer from a limiting long-term illness, 36.45% have no qualifications."

and

"Unique in Wales, Grangetown has its own IKEA store."

Well, that's nice at least.

According to one of the Grangetown community websites, the worst "crime" problem Grangetown has is actually with motorists speeding and parking incorrectly. But a genuine little-old-lady had her purse snatched last week, I think.

I'm not worried about it, although everyone expects me to be. I know I'm a girl and everything, but shit. Asian supermarkets don't make a place dodgy. The Punk isn't worried. He laughs.

He's from Brixton.

Although we'll be moving away from Swansea, my home-away-from-home and base of operations for the past five years, it's only 30 miles East (which is nothing to an American, with or without a car), and I think it'll be good for the magazine. I'll be that much closer to the shows I keep getting invited to, and The Headquarters will move into its first *office* -- no longer will I have to publish this thing out of my kitchen! Not that I minded; that was fun, but it'll be nice to have a place to hang all of my gig posters.

Many of our contributors will still be in Swansea, obviously, but I don't expect that to make a difference. If anything, I hope the relocation encourages people to "expand their horizons." If we can begin to establish a bit of a base in Cardiff as well, that would be great.

Feminism...

In other news, The Observer called my this week. I talked to the editor of The Observer through my shoe phone. Looking back, I think that was the moment I had anticipated when I bought the red high heel phone for its comedic value. Anyway, they're planning on printing a letter of mine tomorrow, and he wanted to know more about The Antagonist.

He'd seen the website and said it looked "fascinating", wanted to know if I wanted to appear in the paper as the Editor of The Antagonist (YES) and where we are based. I explained we're in Swansea now, but moving to Cardiff this week, so he said for the sake of simplicity, he'll just put "Cardiff."

If you're wondering, the article was a response to a column complaining that women who choose not to have children are still seen as silly, selfish, or unnatural. My argument is that it is ridiculous that, nearly fifty years after Roe vs Wade, people still think the reproductive choices of others are their business. Also, doctors are saying that women don't understand the added dangers of "putting off" reproduction and encouraging them to pop out their inevitable children in their twenties for the sake of their health. These doctors are just being naive: women know exactly what the added risks are, and they're willing to take them by reproducing later (if at all) instead of having children before they're emotionally and financially ready.

It's becoming more and more apparent that you can't have it both ways. If you have kids early, whether you want them or not, chances are you'll have a hard time supporting your family financially, and even if you manage to go back to work and earn a decent living, balancing work and family life will always be a struggle. No wonder so many mothers prefer to go into business for themselves. Conversely, if you spend years pursuing your career before having children in your forties, you're stigmatised as a scary "career woman" who endangers her health and the health of her offspring by "leaving it too late."

Even in our supposedly more female-friendly society, we can't win when it comes to balancing career/family. Some people are going to choose one over the other, and that is their right, while rest have to decide for themselves what's going to work best for them. It's hard enough as it is without everybody weighing in with "helpful advice."

Friday 12 June 2009

The Merits of Insomnia

I'm officially nocturnal.

I think I should get some sort of identification card that states this; something like being a junior member of the Spiderman Crime Fighting League (or some such thing) that I can whip out and show people who look at me like I'm just lazy for waking up at 2. Well yesterday/the day before, I didn't get to bed until noon.

I like to think it's ambition-driven insomnia rather than plain old ordinary insomnia. When I finally slept at some point over the last god-knows-how-many-hours, I was dreaming of interview questions.

At some indiscriminate point I transcribed, edited, and formatted the interviews with Pour Habit and the Flatliners. It's funny how memory works: Chris Cresswell interviewed like a pro, but going back over it, he really didn't say much. Especially when I asked if their change of direction was intentional. Don't get me wrong -- I like the band, but the usable content only amounted to about 400 words for 20 minutes.

Pour Habit emerged as the overall winners, and after having gone over their interview again, I really can't say enough good things about them. Colin Walsh was my primary point of contact, but the rest of the band (minus lead singer Chuck) participated as well. Colin was lovely and gave proper answers, which I appreciated to no end, but the transcription with the bands' commentary is comedy gold. I threw out a few pictures in favour of jokes, and it's great fun to read. I'm excited to see it in print.

Which should happen, by the way, sometime next week.

I've been arguing with myself over the importance of paper weight and texture over the past several days/nights.

As I write this, I'm listening to the recent launch of The Death of Chapman Baxter (Where's My Girl) and it's bloody exciting. It's good to know that someone out there is influenced by the same things I am, and I love the way it's all come out. I'm writing an article for Feedback about it for this month, but Punk John is going to do a live review for The Antagonist and I can't wait to read it. They're playing in town in a couple of weeks, and I, for one, am going to make damned sure I'm there.

Monday 8 June 2009

Sexually Transmitted Punk

The bake sale was a great success! Not many people actually came due to an error on Facebook (gee, thanks, Facebook), but everyone there was really cool and bought lots of baked things! I spent Thursday, Friday, and Saturday (for DEAD OF NIGHT) baking and all that's left are a couple of lemon cupcakes. Not bad going!

With the raffle and the door charge we managed to raise enough money to print the first small run, and that's awesome. There's a printing company in Mid Wales willing to print runs of any size on glossy paper, and I'm waiting for their samples to come in the post. Good stuff!

Everything is happening so quickly for the magazine, and it's wonderful, but I'm having a hell of a time keeping up with all of it. The insomnia has helped a bit, but I've been ill all weekend and now I can't talk or concentrate, either. That makes things a bit harder. I just have a couple of more pages to lay out before I convert everything to PDFs and send it off to the printer, and the first t-shirt order is going out next week.

Things are already ticking over for the next issue: I'm interviewing Blind Pilot, Heaven's Basement, and hopefully getting a friend's interview of Black Eyes and Neckties. No idea who's going on the cover. Tempted to use another amazing picture of Kitty Moran. With friends like these, who needs celebrities?

Speaking of amazing friends, Emma, my lovely Uni friend with an MA in Publishing, is going to help us put together a Greatest-Hits-style portfolio to get the magazine stocked in chain stores. This is exciting as well, but my own ambition scares me sometimes. I'm not worried about it selling. Weirdly, I don't I especially care if it sells. I know it's important to keep it going and funding itself, but it will always exist, and that's the point: it needs to exist so I have something to read. A lot of other people are reading it, too, and that's fantastic; I'm glad I've given them something to read.

I love magazines. No, let me put that another way: I love the idea of the magazine, but so few people get it right. Even though my magazine is very different -- black and white, skinny because there aren't any adverts -- I feel that I, at least, have my priorities straight. I'm not a catalogue masquerading as public service. I appreciate that sometimes people like adverts, but the balance between helpful and prescriptive is so tricky that I'm not even going to attempt it.

I went down to WH Smith today. I can home with Big Cheese and the Rolling Stone. Both had Green Day on their covers. [Everyone has Green Day on their cover this month. That's not a complaint.] I read the Rolling Stone interview first, which, as always, was very well written, but left me with the distinct impression that the band has lost the plot. I don't think they have, but the focus on drawing comparisons between them and the overrated and super-famous was irritating. All of these comparisons to U2 and the Beatles are making me very uneasy, and I'm afraid they're going to go that step too far and ruin my memories of my favourite band forever. I hate U2 and the Beatles, and as far as I'm concerned, they have nothing to do with Green Day or, in fact, "Rock & Roll", whatever that means. [This naturally makes me wonder if I just woke up one day as an idealistic Punk, or if I was born that way. Can Punk be sexually transmitted? Nevermind.] But I digress, the point was that the Rolling Stone is always well written, at least, and it was probably a bad idea to read that interview first.

The Big Cheese, on the other hand, had this awesome Green Day feature that lasted pages and pages, but the interview (with Mike Dirnt) was most unsatisfying. I had to re-read sections because I wasn't sure what the writer was trying to say. The layout and the headings were cheesy (no pun intended), and what could have been a terrific interview was undermined by jumbled writing. It was extremely frustrating to read! The intention was there, and the old photos were great, but I'll be damned if I can remember a single thing Dirnt said. If The Antagonist ever gets to interview Green Day, I have no idea what I'd ask, but I'd make sure it made sense before I published it.

Other than that, the magazine was pretty good -- they review zines, which is something that a lot more people are doing now, although I hardly think they can criticise them when their own layout is dodgy and many of their pictures are pixellated. Granted, I think they might realize this as none of the criticisms are too harsh. That's nice. There was a sizeable feature about new bands that I found particularly useful, and although multi-coloured adverts spring from every corner, their hearts are probably in the right places. At least I'd like to think so.

Thursday 4 June 2009

The DIY Balance

Have spent the evening baking cupcakes for tomorrow's Minion Fest. They look really good, and I'll have to make the baklava and the rest of the cookies tomorrow. The cookies turned out pretty funny: they're peanut butter and I baked them in muffin tins instead of on cookie sheets, and they've come out in little bowls like Yorkshire puddings. They taste awesome!

Kitty Moran turned up out of the blue this afternoon. She mentioned that she might stop by, but I didn't get her text until after she'd been and gone. This is remarkable because she lives more than an hour away. The doorbell rang about five, and there she was with The Jackal, holding a huge bucket of gluten-free lemon and sultana cupcakes. She stayed for about a half hour, kept her sunglasses on the whole time, and then The Jackal took her back to the train station. I am always impressed by her effort. It was all very spy movie -- I felt extremely out of place wearing my pyjamas in the Headquarters. Let it be known that The Antagonist socialises with the most exciting Villains around!

Not sure what to expect for the Minion Fest tomorrow night. I know a few people can't make it, but loads of people are helping out. Not many RSVP'd, but I'm not sure how reliable of an indicator Facebook is. I also posted an open invitation on MySpace, so God knows. I better bake some more cupcakes just in case...

Punk John was working on his DJ set earlier. At one point he actually pulled out the Reality Bites soundtrack and played me the "most '90s songs ever" which were Spin the Bottle and something by The Indians. He was right, and that doesn't make them inherently bad, but the weird tempo on Spin the Bottle made me crazy. We wound up talking about drummers in abstract - I wanted to know why we have such a bad reputation, and The Punk just laughed at me.

In other news, there's been some photocopier-related intrigue. The leasing company can't deal with the magazine because it isn't a registered company yet, so there are a number of ways to proceed:

1. Get registered as a business and get the lease anyway.
2. Buy the damned thing and register later.
3. Print with an actual printing company and damn the profits.

It's looking like we're going to register as a business no matter what, and we'll either buy the copier or start printing with this lovely (and helpful) company we've just discovered. I got the estimate from them this week and although it would cost twice as much to produce that way, it would look a lot more like a magazine than a DIY zine.

This raises another issue. We ARE a DIY zine. The trouble is getting the balance right between proper "old school" DIY and large scale publication. Having discussed it with the Usual Suspects, we think we should have it printed in black and white but have a colour cover. How's that for compromise? That's how Bitch does it, and that's how The Chap did it for ages. It worked for them, and it seems like it's the next logical step for us.

The next illogical step is The T-Shirt. We've found a great company in Cardiff willing to do them fast and cheap. This is a major breakthrough. We're expecting to place the first order for sale over the website within the next week or two. We'll start with a small order -- say 50 -- and see how they do before ordering any more.

First thing though, we've got to get the June issue out. We'll have to work slowly on distributors, but we've got to get a physical object out to them and the readers before we can do much else. The speed at which we can do this depends on Minion Fest tomorrow night and the Late Nite bakesale at DEAD OF NIGHT. We're doing this, but I won't know how big a miracle to pray for until the end of the weekend.

That's okay. I'm just crazy enough to make it work.