she-bang

naming

riot grrrl zines

riverside underground

do it yourself

issue #1

stuff

A bunch of us got together and started a local chapter of Food Not Bombs (there are chapters all over the world). This is when everything part of our community, through my eyes, became political. A couple of friends of mine started the “Aesthetics Liberation Front” (devoted to bringing art to public spaces) and I joined soon after. Later, a larger group of us started the Gyroscope arts collective. There is a strong history of activism in our community; current organizations, just to name a few, are Women Creating Peace; the Green Party; the Libertarian Party; and the Temple of Hip Hop Culture. Many artists in our community feel tied to social causes and put on benefit shows, like Tina Bold and Annie Knight did for Step Up Recovery, Tina did for Clamor magazine, Dogs of Ire did for Habitat for Humanity, Alaska did for Digress, and Allison Murphy and I did for Food Not Bombs. These shows couldn’t have happened without the hundreds of volunteers.

Besides Digress, however, any art project I ever worked on (writing, visual art, sculpture) was always entirely for my artistic benefit, and that included my chapbooks. Once I started writing regularly for Digress, I became aware of how my voice changed and grew in response to the community I was writing for. For Digress, I didn’t feel like I could criticize much without couching it in niceties in the name of supporting the scene. I wanted to encourage people, both the venue owners and the artists themselves, to join in. My rhetorical aim was different: my art wasn’t just about expression anymore; I was trying to “cover” art events in such a way as to encourage more voices to join our conversation. I began to visualize a tangible audience, composed not only my friends and fellow artists, but also the other artists and writers who collaborated on Digress. My community started granting me a greater insight into all of the different perspectives that would be reading my work.

Annie was hoping to catch this time and place in print, and I agree with her when she says that “since the subject matter of Digress was the Riverside art scene, this, and the individuals who make up the scene, were the main source of inspiration and ideas for my writing material. More importantly, though, the Riverside art scene has the potential to be a pinnacle of creativity, as it knows how to make a fabulous, explosive art scene with very little support from the city and its main local newspaper. The Riverside art scene has true DIY roots underlying it, which made me realize that I could be doing the same with my writing.”

The DIY philosophy pervades the mindset of all the artists who have succeeded in this community. Dave Warner, lead singer and guitarist of Clonehero, donates his producer skills to local talent, like in the Digress and Riverside Underground Poetry compilations. The more I witness the trials and triumph of DIY events and projects, the more I see a definite connection to DIY and agency: the academic theory of agency is practiced everyday in communities like ours, communities where, in order to create art, we must create opportunities for ourselves.

Annie mused: “Deciding to do something yourself or create something yourself, and to take the initiative to learn what’s involved in making it happen equates to you creating the existence you want for yourself. Thusly, creating your own existence is self-agency. What’s more, by creating your own existence and living it, inevitably you’ll be explaining your actions to others who may be turned on to your way (even those who don’t necessarily jive with ‘your way’ or who are questioning your actions and motives) because you are the creator of what you’ve done or brought to fruition. I think, in this sense, creating an independent existence for yourself or even a piece of art makes you able to express more to others and to yourself about yourself because you’ve chosen the active role of being the creator of who you’re going to be and what you’re going to present about yourself. Living a DIY lifestyle puts you in the position of being a creator and personal activist for yourself and others around you. To me, this all streamlines into the voice that I interpret to be true courage—the courage to do and the courage to defend your actions.”

There’s an urgent reality here. Catch the performance before it disappears. Throw a performance before we all disappear. Wending our way through our place and time, our here and now, we make sense and stories through our creations. ‘Cuz we gotta write our own history.