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.