the girlcon zine, Vol. 1

In order for you to get more of an idea about our venue for 2015, MayDay Rooms of Fleet Street, we thought we would interview Bryony so you can learn not just about how cool MayDay is but also how brilliant Bryony is! Particularly as she helped so much on Girlcon and all we could give her was a hand made pipe cleaner crown and some after 8 chocolates when we wanted to present our eternal love and friendship.

Enjoy the interview!

How did you get involved in politics?

I was vaguely aware of party politics as a teenager but not that interested, then i got involved in Punk music and the do it yourself community about 13 years ago and became exposed to a whole world of new ideas, mostly of the left, from anti-capitalism to communism, which has given me a lot of fuel to think and learn and try and have productive conversations with people. These days I mostly consider my job (teaching sex and gender workshops to young people and professionals) to be the bulk of my activism, but I also try and fly the flag for making public spaces safer for women, gender variant and queer people as the co-director of Hollaback London, part of the global movement to end street harassemnt.

What were you like as a teenager? And what type of stuff were you into?

I was a prototypical emo for a bit, in the days of early social networking like Make out Club and Friendster - look em up. Selfies abound before we had a word for them. I was into American punk bands and secretly wanted to play in a band but only hung out with boys who would laugh when i suggested it :( I wrote moody poetry and crushed on unsuitables, the same as all teenagers ever!

What are the mayday rooms and how did you get involved?

Mayday Rooms is an archive and a safe haven for radical material relating to social movements mostly from the 20th Century. We have some really rare and overlooked material that is massively inspiring from campaigns that have been going or were hugely significant in their time.

Tell us about the rad punk stuff you do?!!!!!!!

Haha, I play guitar, sing and play drums in four bands that all sound a bit different, mostly with other women but some boys and other non-dudes. I ve been lucky enough to tour America with one of them (called Good Throb, our last album was called Fuck Off) and other than that I m involved a project thats setting up a social centre in London called DIY Space for London which you should check out here; diyspaceforlondon.org What s your favourite thing about mayday rooms??

My favourite stuff is probably the Situationist International material because of the way they used humour, and all the material we have relating to Wages for Housework because I think it is a way of thinking about women s work that is still truly revolutionary.

Thanks Bryony for everything!!

MayDay Rooms are on twitter here: @maydayrooms

INTERVIEW WITH ruby and lau ra RUBY talk

QUITTING

LAURA: Ruby! You quit college so recently! How is it feeling a few weeks in? What does the immediate future hold?

RUBY: I feel freer, and more mature, than I ve ever felt before. I ve been looking for jobs, seeing friends, tearing up every last page of my Kant notes, metaphysics essays, logic equations. A new stage in my life is beginning and it s still blurry and confused and ill defined but I m excited about it – I can t wait to move on.

LAURA: Same! As a two-time college dropout and someone who quit her job the same day you quit college, I recognize that feeling: I am master of my own destiny and really excited about not being tethered to someone else s structure. I can educate myself, devote my time to the projects that I really want to pursue, and spend a whole day listening to The B-52s back catalogue if I want to. I can t wait. Did you have a plan for what you d do when you quit?

RUBY: I ve actually quit university three times now (!) and each decision threw me into uncertainty in a different way. When I was 18, I dropped out of a university course and quit to face nothingness – I was untethered, had no job or immediate prospects for a while and I just drifted. It showed me that boredom isn t lethal, that stalling isn t the worst thing in the world. It s made me a lot less scared. My most recent (and definitely final) university drop out was very different - I have a few nebulous ideas about the direction I want to move forward in, I have some motivation to do the things I need to do. My future still isn t certain, and no doubt I ve cut off certain avenues by forfeiting my degree, but I trust that it ll work out ok.

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LAURA: The first time I quit university, I had opted to attend an institution in the town where I grew up because I was living with someone in a romantic situation and didn t know how it would work if I moved away. After the first day I knew the course was so bad that I went home and filled out a new college application for the next academic year, just in case. I left five weeks later and spent the rest of the year working three jobs, saving money. I ended a relationship and lived on my own terms for a year. I m really glad to have had that unstructured time to clear my head. The second time I quit uni, it was for work. When did you decide to quit?

RUBY: I think I used the promise of quitting to self-soothe for a long time before I actually made the leap. I loved the weight of the words in my mouth. But I never gave the words any substance and actually the longer I went on like this, the less meaning they even had. In the end, it became a kind of empty mantra, which made it all the more difficult to step forward and make it all happen and convince myself and others that I really meant it. It s really comforting, though, to know that quitting didn t just come out of the blue. It was no whim, it wasn t a flight of fancy – it was a decision that I d been trying on for size for a long time. It fit.

LAURA: The weight of those words! Repeating them to everyone was like a dare to follow through with it. The first step I made towards actually doing it was skipping an important exam at the end of my second year, which made the idea of leaving and go from abstract to concrete.

RUBY: Did skipping the exam energize you, pull you forward or just close off a pathway?

LAURA: Honestly, I felt terrified straight afterwards – I had never foregone a formal obligation like that before. I found an email I sent the day after where I write about feeling guilty and strange and mildly liberated. But like you say – skipping that one exam felt like severing one tiny but important tie. There s is this assumption that quitting something is the easy way out – I definitely found it really agonising and erratic.

RUBY: Everyone parrots it, but it s so not true that quitting is an easy way out! The default seems to be that you always stick with what you re doing until you reach the end, and that branching off, dropping out, before then is a cop-out. But for me, quitting was always far scarier than staying put. Especially with something as big and socially/financially valuable as university, quitting flies in the face of everything that seems prudent and wise from the outside. That s not to say that there s a value in being contrary or in recklessness – I just don t think continuing on a straight path is always the best way forward. I mean, your job change now is actually a really scary kind of quitting – out of the frying pan in a way, isn t it?

LAURA: My most recent quit is leaving the security of my magazine job for the volatility of freelance journalism. This definitely feels like a leap into the unknown that quitting college didn t – then I was transferring from the security of one institution to another. But I m excited about having to work hard. Of course, I ve only been able to quit my job because of a huge amount of privilege. I left college five years ago so I have a reasonable amount of experience, and I live with my boyfriend who can help with bills if I struggle. Bizarrely, my parents are totally on board with me leaving a stable job to be at the whims of commissioning editors.

RUBY: I think that s so great that your parents have placed trust in you now to you re your own choices. I think quitting can be a really emancipating thing. For me, after years of being patronized, watched, registered, told off, monitored, I d finally made a choice that denied the university professors that power over me. That said, I think talking it through is so important, too. It doesn t take much searching to find people who ve quit and excelled nonetheless, just like I can name plenty of people who didn t quit and who ve found it hard to move forwards. You need all those perspectives. It helped me to become surer of my decision, finding my resolve echoed in the people I know, like you.

LAURA: Knowing that you were quitting college the same day as I was quitting my job was such a salve, too! With college, I had already quit once, and knew a lot of quitters, which helped. And even if you don t know any mutual quitters, the most important thing is the support of people who trust your ability to make decisions for yourself (and who will be there whatever happens). One thing I will say is that I find it obnoxious on the UK s high school exam results days every August when dropouts, famous or otherwise, brag on Twitter about how far they ve got with no qualifications - it just intensifies the rhetoric that education is only valuable as a conduit to success. For one thing, learning for pleasure alone is such a lovely thing. And for another, that way of thinking puts a huge amount of pressure on anyone who doesn t feel suited to the education system in whatever form they experience it, particularly on mental health.

RUBY: I totally agree. It s a really complex set of issues to unravel, and made more difficult still by the fact that education costs so much in the first place – there s a lot at stake either way.

LAURA: Even though I was only there for two years, I had amassed what felt like an awful lot of debt (and I know college is so much cheaper in the UK than in the US) - £13,000 all told. I have to say, I didn t stress about it too much because it felt sort of invisible – everyone over a certain age has it, and you don t pay it back until you earn a certain amount of money.

RUBY: My experience was the same. But quitting doesn t always have to be about giving up a valuable thing for a reckless dream. So often, quitting means pulling yourself out of stagnation and off of a downwards spiral. You can quit a one-sided friendship or a dangerous fad diet, you can quit a pattern of self-hatred, a school module that you hate, an abusive relationship. You can quit jobs, courses, people, places and move onwards to better things, or at least other things. Quitting isn t off limits to anyone – you just have to quit wisely, plan ahead, set your sights on something else.

LAURA: I couldn t put any of that any better. One thing I will add to your last point is that quitting formalized education leaves you wide open to pursue your own programme of self-education.

A younger friend of mine chose not to go to college, and instead educated themselves on French philosophy, postmodernism, critical theory and politicized dance music and is now one of the most freakishly smart people I know. Although I quit, I kept on top of my French skills and studied things I was interested in.

RUBY: I agree. And how are you counting down to your last day at work? What are you going to do on your last day? Do you anticipate being sad or elated or both?

LAURA: I m just trying to tie up loose ends, find future work and leave my (figurative) desk as neat as possible for my successor. Leaving is bittersweet: I ve been so lucky to have my dream job, but there comes a time where it doesn t fit any more. I predict that my last day will be as euphoric and scary as the day I skipped that exam. Do you worry about not having a formal qualification for the future? I definitely worry that I might still get passed over for jobs because of it.

RUBY: It s easy to lose sight of the plurality of routes to happiness in a society that places such value on the mythic university education, but seriously – it s not everything in life. I m open to the idea of going back to education, but next time (if there is a next time) I want it to be wholly on my own terms, because I want to learn, because I have a goal in sight, or whatever. I think that all things considered, quitting is a brave thing to do. There s value in sticking with a project and following things through to their conclusions, but only if the end point is something that s worth working for. Determination for determination s sake just leads you triumphantly towards dead ends. I think a huge part of quitting is about having faith in yourself to find some other way or pull through.

BEFORE YOU START THE BAND finding people - use the internet!

• (joinmyband.co.uk) we did this & we didn’t find any bandmates but we got a lot of support from people who wanted to see our band through because there weren’t many people around our area doing what we were!

• when you find people, it’s good to start by just no pressure jamming to get a feel of how everyone plays together - we started with just doing covers in a living room.

• if you don’t mesh with prospective band mates don’t worry about kicking them out you have a creative ~~vision~~~ you’ll also have a better band dynamic if you all actually like each other!

CARPE DIEM - seize the band you want. don’t be afraid to ask people from other bands - we asked cherry glazerr’s drummer if she would be in baglady because we really liked her style, & she only said no because she lives in LA & the commute is too far!! probably

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RECORDING we recorded 5 songs for our EP recently in a studio for cheap (in a guys house who does recording as a side job) if you don’t have a drummer or steady percussion, recording to a click is super useful (we learnt the hard way) - for the most part, we don’t have any percussion and usually just play to each others timing - we didn’t use the click and everything was really messy! we learnt a lot - but next time we want to record it ourselves because sometimes it’s just easier when you know your own sound; we knew exactly what we wanted but found it difficult to articulate to the guy recording us. at the very least all you need is microphones and an audio interface (plugs instruments into computer) which you could borrow from a friend OR buy a decent cheap one for about £100 *audio editing software audacity, garageband (grimes made visions on garageband) pricey logic pro, ableton live*

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GIGGING/WHEN YOU’RE IN THE BAND when you’re on stage, it’s good to do some talking - one of our gigs where we didn’t say anything because we were too nervous didn’t turn out well because people mistook us freaking out for us being arrogant! we played a gig with joey fourr and they were REALLY nice and made us feel totally at ease (it was our first gig) - so try and create a supportive environment at your gigs! do stuff that makes you feel relaxed before/ during/after the gig i.e - hula hooping and stuff that will generally ease your nerves take every gig you get - even if it’s a sh*t venue

STEP BY STEP GUIDE TO MAKING A BAND

BOYS • when you’re a lady in a band, this will happen to you: boys/men will question every decision you have made with regards to equipment / set up / sound • you will hear “are you sure?” and “let me do that for you” quite often so stand your ground - if it’s the way you want it, don’t let anyone tell you otherwise

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DIY-ING & MERCH for our band we made badges , stickers, posters, patches, tshirts, totes, printed hats we also made a zine! this was with the help of our like-minded friends you have a feminist responsibility to make music if you want to make it! to illustrate our point, type “indie rock band” into google images & observe the results - we need to change this like angel olsen said - “No one's gonna hear it the same as it's said / No one's gonna listen to it straight from your head” - say it loud!