First of all welcome to the first ‘issue’ of On the Rag zine! Thanks to Renae for bringing me aboard, its been an idea for a while now, so this is totally exciting to see it coming to fruition. I suppose there was a little bit of fate in my involvement. I have been an AONHC fan for many years, and went to a lot of the shows even the small ones, one night at showcase theatre Renae and I started chatting and we found out we lived in the same apartment complex, and that’s where this began. So were here to do what ever it is we can, I just want to say rant and rave every now and then and hopefully showcase some of my photography.

So here goes, my first column of many to come. I was hoping to have some awesome photos of the Pomona Tattoo and body art expo which I just attended, but alas, they were not giving press passes to anyone with independent publications, and just my luck I don’t have a point-and-shoot, so smuggling in my massive canon was out of the question. Im kinda bummed about it, but there will be some of my photos of other events coming soon, that I can promise. So supposedly Pomona tattoo and body expo is the largest in the country, but this was my first event of this kind so I didn’t know what to expect. It was at the Pomona Fairplex which I’ve been to before for warped tours and car shows, but the expo was in one of the buildings id never been in so I got a little lost at first. Parking kind of sucked and I had to pay $9 even though I was with one of the vendor’s booths, and here is my shameless plug…are you ready here it comes: I was there with the studio I work at part time, ‘ Schneider Studios’, check it out we do all kinds of alternative and pin up photography out of Santa Ana. Alright, so back to the expo, parking sucked, not only did I have to pay I had to walk under a tunnel to get to the building and it was freezing. But once inside it was nice and toasty, with the buzz of tattoo guns and decent music in the air. The crowd was ok opening day, different than I expected, the demographic was great, young, old, tattooed and not and everything in between. It wasn’t as big as I expected, but the atmosphere was good, everyone was in good spirits and I quickly made friends with our neighboring vendors. Beer was $9!!! for like…an 8 oz cup, forget that noise! So I spent the day completely sober and starving because I wasn’t going to drop any cash for a beer let alone a hot dog. I learned my lesson the next day I wrapped a couple of beers in a sweater and stuffed them in the bottom of my suitcase of a purse, I packed a PB & J too. The turn out was good, Texas ink came all the way out, my friend Tasha got filmed by discovery channel while getting her septum pierced by them. There were artists with all kinds of styles everything from traditional tribal, classic sailor jerry to urban street. There were some awesome artists there, I was most impressed by the urban street art style, the black grey and white, the lettering and detail those guys put into their work was amazing. So I spent most of the day hanging out at the booth, but I didn’t get tired of browsing around watching people get tattooed and pierced. I was definitely hard to be around it and not want to get something done. So all in all it was a fun experience, I might go again, but I hear Musink is better so we shall see.

Stay tuned, I will be here for ranting and raving.