By Renae Bryant
Welcome to my first regular column for our “on the rag e-zine.” I am so happy that Jen and Lisa were willing to reanimate this zine with me into an electronic form. ON THE RAG Zine was published in hard copy form from 1993 to 1998. I made a few attempts to try to do the zine on my own, on-line, but I work better with partners. My first partner for ON THE RAG Zine was Alicia Lopez. We stapled the zine together on the floor of the VoodooGlowSkulls records store, Cheap Guy Music. We did four issues together. The next partner I had was Blake Martinez. I had been his substitute teacher at Norte Vista. He was trying to start a Food Not Bombs and some Riot Grrrl stuff. We were destined to be life long friends. After these issues, it just became too expensive to keep the print issue up. I also had another outlet for my writing. In 1995, Tim Yohannon, publisher of MaximumRocknRoll (no not Maxim…not even close) ask me to write a column, do interviews, etc. That led to eight years of my monthly column, “The Five Min. Int.” It started out as exactly what the title explains. I interviewed people who had crazy or just interesting jobs: a coroner, b-level porn star, etc. Finally, I ran into a gal at a AFI/Sick of it All show who recognized me as an MRR columnist, she told me that she liked my “personal” writing better and that I should lose the interview format. Since the interviews were more labor intensive…it was just the excuse I needed to do “less” work and write personal columns. When Tim first invited me to do the column, he wanted a personal column anyway…so I suddenly had free reign. I also had a brief stint as a columnist for www.girlpunk.com.
With all of that said, I am really excited about doing a monthly column again. Sometimes my columns will be personal narratives. Sometimes they will be political diatribes. A lot of times they will take the blog/diary form. I am a huge fan of George Tabb’s MRR columns. They are always hugely entertaining. Hopefully, these will be close to that (you have to have a goal…).
January 2009 Rant: I am angry about a lot right now. Sometimes it’s hard to know where to start. I’ve been expressing a lot of frustration through my song writing as we finish up all of our songs for our new cd. A topic that I am not writing about for the record, but feel the need to rant about is reproductive choice and education. Two years ago there were three thirteen- year old pregnant girls at one of the intermediate schools, in the district I teach in. You read about young girls abandoning babies on door steps, trash cans, and then every once in awhile a mom murders their child. None of the aforementioned actions are excusable. Since it “takes a whole village to raise a child,” we are all responsible for not only the children but also the “children having children.” The last eight years, in the U.S., there has been more and more money put towards “abstinence only education.” Teen pregnancy rates have not diminished. As a society, why are we not providing both education and access to birth control to teens? Do we want our teen girls to have to make decisions that they are in no way ready to make? We all know that men can not get pregnant. Unplanned pregnancies affect both the male and the female. It affects one in a way that it does not affect the other, because she is female. The right of access to birth control seems, to me, to be a civil right/equal rights issue. As a society we are forcing a part of our society to make decisions they should not have to make, just because they are female. This is an issue we all need to be working on.