Our Deal....

So we've been our holidays, which I'm sure you'll hear about soon. But for now, this is pretty much wahy I wanna be in a grrrl gang (Girl gangs+Drew Barrymore+Best Coast=YES!)

Best Coast

Sheffield......

So it's all going off in Sheffield in the next month or so and we are totally invited, now you are too!

First off is this rad event at Site Gallery in Sheffield...

We will have some zines for sale at the event, thanks to the lovely folk of Rotherham Zine Library.

Then we see the derby debut of half of Sugar Paper, Kandy is gonna kick some (wheeled) ass at Dodgebrawl.

Followed by the first Sheffield Zine fair, where we will be having a stall, get on that!

GETBUSY!!!!

I'm sure you've seen me talk about the rate good'un that is Em Ledger on these pages, well have I told you she is an awesome business cat?

She runs rad webstore getbusy, a site catering towards women and girls involved in street and urban lifestyles, girls who like to get busy!

Stocking everything from Volcom to Deathwish and non for profit items from Skateistan, Afghanistan's first skateboarding school! Y'all should definitely check it out!

And if that isn't enough to convince you, then I'm a resident getbusy blogger!

....

We saw the Vivian Girls the other week and this was one of my favourites of new songs live, even more so after this! Kandy gets the pink bedspread and me the blue!

IT ALL ENDS!!!!

Now for a post from the other (much less frequent blogging) half of Sugar Paper zine, it's KD bringin you the HP...no, not the sauce....the Harry Potter!!!

I am a MASSIVE Harry Potter fan, this fact was recently proven by my ability to KILL a magazine based Harry Potter quiz and in turn have all my sister's friends gawp at me as I recite 'Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore' ! As you must all know, the FINAL installment in the film series was recently released along with a rather final poster campaign..IT ALL ENDS.

I know a lot of people who are big fans of the books don't like or watch the films, and over the years I have had more than a few bones to pick with them..but I have come to see them as separate entities to the books, I think that is the only way to fully enjoy the films! Also, I never re-read the book that I'm about to see the film of, last time I did this was for Prisoner of Azkaban...Never Again!!!

So, I am into the books AND the films, they are my go-to films...nothing on, just want to lie on the sofa and drink hot chocolate, I'll put a Harry Potter on!

In early June it hits me...this is it, the last EVER film, the last bit of Harry Potter to be released, the curtain of doom starts to fall...right, I'd better stop being sad and start making plans and make the most of it. A trip to the premiere and of course midnight showing are in order.

The Premiere planning starts, messages are sent to Holly Horcrux to arrange logistics (where to get the portkey to etc) and the countdown begins! The Premiere is on a Thursday night so being ever so very prepared I decide to travel down on the Wednesday night...only to find out on the Tuesday there's already hundreds of people there, aaaaaahhhh! Arrive at St Pancras late Wednesday night, meet my fellow witch and travel past Trafalgar Square to her flat. There are LOADS of people there already, we get really excited and decide we need to come back as early as possible. The only thing that stopped us staying then and there was that Holly didn't have her Hogwarts uniform on!

Two hours sleep and a good strong cup of tea later we're back, it's 4am and we find the queue we need to join for wristbands to gain access to the main area. Thinking about breakfast and if we will get a wristband, we wait....generally surprised at the lack of dressing up and anxious! Then we hear 'anyone a 2?' there are some girls making their way down the line with 2 spare wristbands that they got yesterday, looking for 2 people to take them off their hands. There are 2 girls directly in front of us after the wristbands, but they are pushy, we have full uniforms on and we are nice...we win the wristbands, hooray!

Photographic evidence of wristband, taken back at home with my Kitten Sirius Black.

Now for breakfast where I get VERY confused in McDonalds, I think someone has put the confundus charm on me. Post breakfast, it's about 5.30am, we head back to Trafalgar square and get exciiited. This is the spot where we stood for a large part of the day, great view of the Neville and Snape banners, stage and steps, sweeet!

But we don't have to stay put, we have wristbands so can come and go as we please, and it's stil very early. A cup of tea is soon in order. We go for hot chocolate followed by a (pretty rubbish) cup of tea, but manage to make it last at least an hour and make the most of the comfy sofas...reggae music brings us down, 90s hip hop brings us up...we've not had much sleep and are feeling it!

We find these phone boxes on the way back and massive over-excitement ensues. Aaaah, look I'm infiltrating the ministry, where's Arthur Weasley?! Note, in this photo the floor is dry, this didn't last. The rest of the day went like this: rain, trafalgar square, chatting to Bellatrix Lestrange, deckchairs for a 30 second sleep, more rain, ping pong, rain, food, rain, cafe, rain, friends, dry inside, good tea, funally sunshine! We headed back to Trafalgar Square about 3pm, across the road you could hear the crowds screaming...I was worried we were missing it, half ran to the bit we had been in earlier to find a line of hi-vis jackets. "No more in this side, go round." So we obeyed, and got in round the other side, phew. made it! We're near where the cars are going to pull in, not bad, now to wait (and gently push as far forward as possible). There was no concept of time, but before we knew it there was Ruper Grint, appearing on the red carpet, then Matthew Lewis (Neville), The Weasley Twins at the top, making their way round the WHOLE crowd, no lie, these two love it!

Seeing them do this almost set me off crying, you know why..and if you don't then go find out! Then the stars were coming thick and fast, Evanna Lynch looked amazing I like how her and Luna are almost one and the same, like Rupert and Ron! Then the most exciting bit, Lupin!!! As I mentioned we were stood by where the cars pull in, but this did not guarentee us getting all the stars up close and personal. A lot of them started making their way up and got dragged off by their assistants to the main Red Carpet bit. Not David Thewlis though, as soon as he arrived the whole crowd on our side went wild and starded chanting 'David' and banging the barriers, I think he was scared of a 'mass breakout' if he didn't come and see us. Here he is being amazing....

That was definitly the highlight, that and seeing JK Rowling in the flesh, and the twins, and getting to see some sneak peeks of film on the big screen, and screaming a-lot!

Daniel Radcliffe and JK were 2 of the last people to arrive, they had short interviews on stage (as did everyone) then the screen stopped showing camera footage and went back to the 'screensaver', we think it's over and leave. Bump into Nick on the way back, get take away, watch some of part 1 then sleep. The following day we find out we left too soon, there were some massive emo speeches from Harry, Ron, Hermione, JK and the film dudes, gutted. Back home I watch them on You Tube and cry.... I challenge you to watch Rupert Grint thank JK Rowling for what she has done for ginger people and not shed a tear!!!

Now there's a week to wait for the film, I spend a large part of this week looking at my wristband, thinking about the premiere and by the 14th I'm pretty much just watching trailers and clips and counting down the minutes til I can meet Nickie in town so we can get excited together and make time go a bit quicker. Finally, meet her near the AMC to go and pick up the tickets, she doesn't see me coming cos she has just seen a Lucius Malfoy double walk down the street and is staring at the photo she took of him on her phone. I almost wet myself...it's a total Lucius Malfoy double. Get tickets, get OVER excited, buy attitude cos Rupert Grint is in it, meet Seleena (yes, we are slowly converting her, she wore a cat hat for the occasion, professor McGonnagal disguise yeah), get food, I put Nickie's lion head hat on for the full Gryffindor effect, she puts her party cape for full magical effect, and finally head to the cinema to see Harry Potter and The Deathly Hallows...Part 1....followed by Part 2.

Again, surprised by the lack of dressing up, maybe not everyone loves dressing up like we do, but they should, it's FUN. I'm not going to do a full film review, it would take me another hour. Neville was pretty much my favourite thing in this one, his speech was amazing! Think they did a good job of the fiend fire bit. Luna was great. I am not going to go into any negatives, but leave you now with a quote from JK Rowling...

" The stories we love best do live in us forever, so whether you come back by page or by the big screen, hogwarts will always be there to welcome you home"

E.M.O

This is officially back in print (the zine that sees me talking about how I am a feminist and have a penchant for 'EMO' music), mainly to coincide with the release

of this....

HOT OFF THE PRESS part two of my rants about my love for EMO!!!!!!

I'm just a man, I'm not a hero....

(last week, in my week off after jet setting to Berlin and hanging out with loads of rad folk I headed to London for a Grant Morrison talk, I asked Holly to write about it as she knows far more about comics then me and it makes a change from my voice!)

Seleena asked me to write a report based on our adventures last week where we got to hear one of my all time favourite comic writers Grant Morrison give a talk promoting his new book Supergods:Our World in the Age of the Superhero. So Grant Morrison is pretty much responsible for getting me into comics. I'm now a fully fledged comics geek but 10 years ago I didn't have a clue what I was doing and was totally dismissive of comics. A few key titles changed all that, including some of Morrison's work. The first title I read by Morrison was St. Swithen's Day, followed by Kill Your Boyfriend, and then later Doom Patrol. At that point, aside from Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns, I had never been interested in reading superhero comics before. I kinda liked indie comics, but I thought superheroes were stupid, juvenile, and fluffy pointless crap. Titles like Doom Patrol changed all that while allowing a window of opportunity for me to jump right slap bang into the middle of a complex long running DC title with massive backstory, which is something that had previously put me off reading any kind of Marvel or DC superhero title.

For someone that was once utterly dismissive of superhero comics I'm now obsessed with them .So is Grant Morrison as he is just a geeky fan boy at heart. His new book is concerned with why superheroes exist, why we create them, how they change, and a bunch of examples of the hero myth throughout fiction and religion.

It's not as dry as all that. From the first 100 pages I've read, the book reads exactly how Grant Morrison talks: funny and animated, personal and super smart, geeky and excitable. I could listen to him talk on his own for hours. But he is kept in check tonight by an interviewer before taking on some extremely wanky and pretentious questions from members of the audience.

He talks a lot about the role of superheroes and widens the definition outside of comics, using religion, popular fiction, movies, folklore and myth as examples of our need to create superheroes and our need to hear those stories retold. Morrison discusses the repetition and cycle for all superheroes, it's essentially the same story being told over and over with the status quo restored at the end of each adventure.

While some writers find the structure of mainstream superhero comics extremely limiting, Morrison kinda loves the boundaries it places on his work. He describes it as 12 bar blues. He isn't there to play jazz and fuck things up, he likes the familiarity and the structure, and he can have fun with it. It's an interesting point cuz really in mainstream comics you can't do anything radical. You can never ever really kill a superhero. They always come back, whether it's a magical resurrection spell, an alternative universe, or some kind of other loophole - you can't die. Not for long anyway. Did I mention that Morrison is fucking funny as well? Everything he says tonight, even the deeply philosophical shit, is said with a cheeky grin. I don't know, maybe it's the Glasgow accent but when he's talking about the difference between real life death and superhero deaths in comics shouting “YR MUM'S NOT COMING BACK, YR DAD'S NOT COMING BACK, BUT BATMAN IS!” it's hilarious but so true. Superheroes can't die,so technically there's really no consequences to anything that superheroes do. But Morrison talks about how much he fucking loves that. He argues that Superman is older than all of us in the room tonight and that Superman will still be around when we are all dead, “Superman will outlive us all and maybe that makes him more real and more valid than we as people will ever be.”

It's also amazing how much Grant Morrison contradicts himself. He spends ages talking about how much more real superheroes are than us real life humans, but then rubbishes all that for the second half of his talk by saying that superheroes aren't real. While a lot of contemporary comic writers have spent a lot of time attempting to give superheroes real life problems and making them a bit darker this way, Morrison prefers his superheroes to be just that. Super. They shouldn't have to deal with the same shit us lowly people do. For every stupid question he is asked tonight he deflects it saying 'But it isn't real! None of this is real, it's just a story!'. He goes off on a tangent at one point saying 'people want to pick superheroes apart saying things like “why would superman look like that? Why does he wear such a ridiculous costume?” or “how come you never see Bruce Wayne go to the toilet?” BATMAN ISN'T REAL! HE HASN'T HAS A PISS IN HIS ENTIRE LIFE BECAUSE HE ISN'T REAL!”

Tonight Grant Morrison almost achieves the impossible: he manages to make me wanna read Superman. I hate Superman, I've read some stuff but I've never been able to read much without getting bored or pissed off with it, it just doesn't appeal to me. Until that is Grant Morrison described his new work on Action Comics #1 out this year describing his take on Superman as Springsteen Superman talking about how his Superman will be a working class dirty and gritty superhero. Ok, I totally wanna read that!

The best thing about Grant Morrison is that he seems to hate Q+As as much as I do (people don't ask questions at Q+As they just state a stupidly long opinion and stick a question mark on the end of it) and much prefers the sound of his own voice rather than the stupid questions he's getting asked today. From someone asking 'will you be writing anymore Seaguy?” - (um, well done mate, you know a lesser known Grant Morrison title, 10 geek points to you, thanks for your pointless question) to someone asking a 3 part question that seems to interrogate Grant Morrison's need to write himself in as a character in some of the comics he writes ( I can't actually remember the question because it took the guy about 10 minutes to ask it. I lost interest after about 5 minutes. So did Morrison). Morrison defended the way he sometimes writes himself into comics saying that someone should be talking to these superheroes and asking them what's up. The guy asking the question then said but why do we need to know what those guys think? Whats so special about them, why not some other fictional character, why not Ronald Mcdonald? To which Morrison replied 'it's about fucking time someone did have a word with Ronald Mcdonald, I'll do it, I wanna know what he's about, lets make it happen.' It was a great way to end the night and made me want a double cheeseburger and fries. Grant Morrison you are a legend.