Motherhood, No Enclosures, Firebrand

Stag Bitten by Nathan Backous

1. Motherhood
I set up a zine release party in Portland on the first night after the Portland Zine Symposium and got four bands full of brown punks to play.  My Parade and NighTraiN from Seattle and Kusikia and Stag Bitten from Portland.  I still can't get over how strange it is that it's easier to make an event like that happen in the great white Northwest than it is down here in the South even though there's tons more people of color.  Anyhow, the crowd was beautiful and the music was awesome.  At one point, I was standing up front and I looked across at the at everyone who was standing right up front and it was all brown ladies!  That's the kinda shit I live for.  My favorite moment of the whole show was watching Arolia, the singer of Stag Bitten (thrashy, jerky, imagine if your favorite hardcore band had a baby with Melt Banana) freak out and go crazy while her 6 year old daughter, who is pretty much a spitting image replica of her, stood right in front of her with arms raised high and a camera in her hands snapping pictures of her mama's screaming face the whole time.  It made me wonder what it's like to be a young girl watching your mom sing in a punk band.  What if that was just a normal part of your childhood?  I'm not sure what the answer is to these questions, but I get a good warm feeling in me when I ask them.  I'm obviously thinking about motherhood a lot because I'm in my 30s and so many people around me are either having babies or feeling the urge, but I am not.  When I was a kid, I always thought I was gonna wanna have kids but now it seems that my biological clock is broken and that the babies I want to have are band babies and zine babies.  Art babies.

2. No Enclosures
New Orleans anarchists are really getting their shit together.  Earlier this summer, they released the first issue of a new newspaper called "The Raging Pelican," which dishes out a much-needed anti-authoritarian perspective on the BP oil spill.  One of the best ideas I got out of the paper was the notion that the U.S. South's relationship to the rest of country is much like the global south's relationship to the northern first world nations of our planet.  We've got the natural resources, but we're also the last ones to profit from the exploitation of those resources.  There's all this oil in the Gulf of Mexico, but the U.S. Gulf Coast is a poor region compared to other parts of the country.  More and more parallels between what's happening on the Gulf Coast and what's happening in oil producing nations like Nigeria have been coming to light since the oil tragedy.  Anyway, I can't wait to see the next issue of "The Raging Pelican," which also features really great layout & design which I'm always into.  Also, Nola anarchists staged an occupation of a building at the University of New Orleans in response to rising tuition, and published an awesome, straight-to-the-point pamphlet about why they were doing what they did.  What with all this activity and all of the new bands starting up, I see the New Orleans punk & anarchist community only getting stronger in years to come.

3. Firebrand
I'm always in these bare-bones kind of bands that leave me feeling really naked in front of people and I kind of hate it even though that's  definitely a quality I love in music.  There's never noisy guitars to hide behind.  Just the sound of my own voice ringing out, embarrassingly clear.  I'm in a two-piece band with my friend Candice.  It's bass and drums and if I fuck up while I'm playing bass then the whole thing falls apart.  Should we add a guitarist?  If so, who would it be?  Is it more interesting to defy the rock band formula and just be a two-piece?  Why can't I just fit in and be in a pop punk or hardcore band like everyone else?  I just interviewed Brilliant Colors for Brontez's zine, "Fag School."  Jess, who plays guitar and sings, has such a bad-ass attitude.  I asked them how they handle self-doubt as musicians and she said, "I don't, really.  We're the Beatles!"  It was always so helpful for me to hear other woman musicians be so self-confident and self-assured as I was growing up.  But a part of me wants to speak to the fear, nerve and vulnerability of singing your heart out in front of other people and putting yourself out there that way.  Like, you can be scared, and still do it and that in itself has a certain power.  Not everyone who plays in a band has to have rock star quality.  I know I don't.  I'm not sure why, but watching an old video of Bratmobile's first or second show ever and seeing them look so shy and sound so fragile encouraged me to be in a band way more than seeing Kathleen Hanna freak out and do a backflip off the stage.  I like being scared to do something, but doing it anyway.

Published in MRR #???