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| The Birth of Bitch King: Digress | |||||||||||
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| Annie and I were hanging out at Back to the Grind when we met Tina Bold, veteran Riverside scenester and DJ for ÒThe Vinyl HoursÓ at the radio station for the University of California, Riverside (KUCR). We told her about our interests in poetry and in promoting an active community of artists networking together. In turn, she invited us onto her show to read poetry and solicit submissions for The Pacific Review, California State University, San BernardinoÕs literary and arts journal, which Annie and I were editing together. Annie and I read some poetry, Tina played some bitter musical valentines, and a few people called in, excited to hear poetry on the radio. As the Riverside legend goes, one of those calls was from Alaska, local promoter and poet. By a strange twist of fate, Alaska and I would become friends later after showing art at her gigantic arts and music festival called Saturation (fast becoming a tradition in Riverside with Saturation 2). Saturation is the art show that is widely acknowledged as the ÒbeginningÓ of the current incarnation of our beloved Riverside arts scene, and IÕm going to have to agreeÑafter this show, the Riverside underground arts scene blew up. A year later, Annie, under the moniker Mable, started Digress magazine, which focuses on publishing artists and writers from the Inland Empire. Working on Digress led to the second revolution in my writing. I poured my creative energies into her zine because I immensely enjoyed writing and editing with Annie (not to mention that publishing yourself is a major pain). I learned vicariously about the pain of putting together a community publicationÑflaky writers ignored their deadlines, we had problems with the printer, we battled to sell enough ads to cover costs, and there was ongoing controversy over content. I helped Annie with these situations as much as she would let meÑbut since it was her baby, she took on every challenge herself, and achieved cult-hero status in Riverside because of it. I learned a lot about zine-making by watching Annie: she was devoted to publishing the voices of our scene. During this time, I began to research and explore the worldwide zine and independent publishing community. Although I like to act locally, thinking globally was a source of inspiration and knowledge: http://www.akpress.org/mainpage http://members.tripod.com/altzines/ http://www.thefword.org.uk/reviews/magazines/zines3.live http://www.microcosmpublishing.com/links/ http://www.getunderground.com/ http://www.panderzinedistro.com/ http://www.violeteyes.net/supernova/links.html http://www.angelfire.com/zine/multiplesarcasm/links.html http://www.undergroundpress.org/index.html http://www.puddingtime.com/aytd/res.html |
