Secret Cheerleaders

Following the advice of a friend, I've spent the day creating a profile on Flickr so people can find my photography. It's a lot of fun, but I'm finding it difficult to cope with to 100mb limit -- I have so many pictures! Have spent the last several hours going through them all and picking out my favourites. I'd like to specialise in pin ups, but I have a lot more landscape photography than anything else. That's okay -- I probably enjoy it more than anything else, so maybe I should specialise in that... or bands. Yeah, bands.

Here's a link to my Flickr page:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/tigerlilywatson/

NOFX's El Hefe at the recent gig in Cardiff.

This all started when Kitty Moran asked for some help putting together a modelling profile. We've got some great ideas, and we might actually chuck her into a river. For creative purposes, naturally.

The magazine is still coming along, and I'm actually still waiting on a couple of last-minute submissions. I hope it comes together. The last one definitely had more of a plan to it, but at least I'm getting more help with this one.

Went to Swansea over the weekend for DEAD OF NIGHT and it was great to be back. Weirdly, Swansea doesn't feel all that familiar anymore, and once again I feel homeless. I miss the goths terribly, though. Adam said he'll try to come visit the Headquarters soon, and I hope he does, although August is looking pretty poverty-ridden for everybody. I'll be glad to see the start of the school year.

Jen, our make up artist, looking gorgeous as ever on our way to DEAD OF NIGHT.

While in Swansea I picked up the latest issue of Feedback, and they gave me a really fantastic send off. Really touching. Thanks, guys.

In other news, the our audience is growing through the efforts of the bunch of people I will group together in the "Secret Cheerleader" category. Excellent. Phase 1: Complete.

Disappointing Lack of Spindles

Have office almost properly set up now. Huzzah! Am surrounded by post-its of things to do, red pens, and extension cords. Weirdly enjoying myself. It's nice to have a proper Headquarters. Still, I figured there would be more gig posters on the walls. Will have to dig them out of the moving-related wreckage later.

Loving life in Grangetown. It's really friendly around here, and the house is awesome. Went to a wedding yesterday and wound up finding a medieval fire escape/modern secret passage. I went upstairs in the castle (where the bathrooms are), and this fire door was magically open. I looked around the corner to see a long, empty corridor full of arrow loops. Was immediately torn between wanting to explore it and thinking "Hey man, I SAW Sleeping Beauty. I'm not going down there!!" Ended up kicking off high heels and running up and down it once I was convinced no one would shut the door on me. It went from one end of the castle to the other -- not only could I see the whole wedding from a window, but I could see into other halls from other windows, and out over the moat from arrow loops and other (now barred) windows. There was even a spiral staircase that lad to other parts of the castle, but taking into consideration it was about 11 pm and the rest of the castle was pitch black, I decided thought I would venture no further. Besides, I've already seen those parts. It was the passage that was exciting!

Here's a picture of the wedding from the passage:



It looks like a ghost, but it's probably just Disco.

Have spent the morning(ish) working on Death of Chapman Baxter interview. They came up to Cardiff last week for an interview in person which was entertaining as much as it was educational. Wound up being a personal shopper for Shaolin Wolf -- he was looking for a pair of white-rimmed Blues Brother sunglasses and we found him some at Rebel Rebel. From there we took a detour to Spillers, where Shaolin Wolf and Honky McCracker browsed albums while I sorted the "sell my magazine" paper work and chatted to a lovely girl there about the recent NOFX show. Spillers, by the way, now stocks The Antagonist, so if you're in Cardiff, you should go and get your copy there.

Here's a picture from my Cardiff adventures with the DOCB:



Have many exciting submissions to go through tonight. Have just recieved the second installment of Amphetamine Logic and I can't wait to read it. Was hoping to bring out hte next issue in about two weeks, but have hit yet another snag with funding. Although the bank people are very nice, they are also apparently very busy, as no one has gotten back to me in more than a week. Will have to call them again later.

Kitty Moran and Jen Sheehan have just gotten back from Comic Con, and it looks like they had a great time! Jen's actually moving to Cardiff in October now, and I'm really excited! She should be here for the next DEAD OF NIGHT, too, so we'll have to set up a photo shoot for her cover soon...!

Speaking of which, the photo shoot with Elizabeth went very well. We have an exciting assortment of saucy pictures to choose from. Here's a preview:

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.

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.