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Fireweed has been a left-feminist quarterly voice for a long time, and the issues I have seen never failed to have something intriguing and thought-provoking in them. This was no exception.
This issue largely deals with topics such as activism, homophobia, eating disorders and art from a 'riot girl' / 'radical' viewpoint. Having said this, it is not the harangue that various misguided individuals might think...
There is humour here (the piece parodying those insipid magazine surveys was a scream, as was a cartoon in which a woman's dog becomes a slave to fashion and pre-packaged rebellion) and sobering writing as well (stuff on racism; HIV; being Jewish and lesbian; and confronting stereotypes).
There is a directory of 'zines, books and record labels run and done by women.
While, to an extent, I was an outsider while reading this, I like to think it gave me more insight than I had before, and I wouldn't have kept reading if I could not relate, so I believe it is worth picking up, for bois, grrls and otherwise alike.
A little magazine from Rochester, with an amusing essay on Quentin Crisp (though I did find it disturbing that the author seemed obsessed with the fear of the dear old man dying on him - how unpleasant that must have made the visit!); an informative and detailed piece on Xena from a professor, outlining all of her evidence for the lesbian subtext (hell, text!) on the show.
The piece on Pansy Division was short but sweet, and managed to be objective, considering that the author decided that they aren't the band for him, but endorses them anyway.
I can't say I really cared for the poetry found therein, and the short story just fell flat, although well-crafted, but, otherwise, it was an entertaining, well-organized and easy read.
The editor is maintaining a queer 'zine archive, at the P.O. Box, so it's worth sending
yours in for posterity...
Lady Chablis was the female impersonator involved in the Savannah, Georgia murder case that inspired the best-selling true crime book and recent so-so movie "Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil".
She was already something of a celebrity in the small town and larger drag community by then, and the fact that she knew the victim inevitably drew her into the trial, where she naturally used the courtroom as her stage.
With the publication of the book, Miss Chablis became a celebrity.
Like many a future star, she had very humble beginnings and difficulties along the way, which she deals with honestly without ever seeming to wallow in misery.
The book has a strong sense of her spoken voice and personality imprinted on it. It is bitchy, funny, vulgar and occasionally highly moving, as in the account of her lesbian friend's final days.
Following the advice of such diverse personalities as Vanna White and Marianne Faithfull, the Lady includes recipes in her book.
I am particularly partial to the one for pecan pie, since it advises the reader to go to a major book chain, rip the appropriate recipe from a particular book (since, to quote the Lady,'...that bitch Betty Crocker stole my recipe'), sneak out with it and glue it into the space provided in her book. Priceless...
If you are looking for profundity, you will not get it here, except in small doses.
However, it is entertaining, loaded with personality and guaranteed to please - like the
Lady herself.
This is a graphic novel, which is a fancy term for a great big, expensive comic book with a more sturdy cover.
However, do not be deceived - it is nothing like a Batman comic (well, except perhaps in the homoeroticism) or even a Betty and Veronica issue (ditto, and add the same brilliant campiness too).
Dennis Cooper wrote the text, based on a short story of his which inspired the comic.
Keith Mayerson is the graphic artist behind this project - and such drawings they are!
This book is dizzying in its scope, references and drawing styles and techniques. Some pages might take you twenty minutes to appreciate all the tiny comments and drawings and subtle critiques/observations.
The basic storyline concerns itself with a predominantly queer punk band called HORROR HOSPITAL - in particular, its lead singer, Trevor Machine.
It follows the group through its adventures and misadventures with record company executives (such as David Geffen), interviewers and various hangers-on.
Along the way, Trevor falls in love with a boy named Tim (understandable - we're an adorable nomenclature...), but cannot bring himself to say it until very near the end, by which point it is, of course, too late, as Tim gets killed in a car accident.
I am not sure that I could convey how mind-blowingly stunning this book is. It is,
however - and the ending made me cry, which does not happen to me often in reaction to
something written or illustrated.
As the title suggests, it is Brian Eno's diary, from 1995.
For those who need a brief intro, Eno is a musician/producer/artist/etc., who has been actively involved in experimental and electronic music since the mid-Sixties. He was in Roxy Music. He has produced countless artists who have pushed the envelope of pop and rock. He has recorded several albums, a good intro being "Here Come The Warm Jets" (1973).
According to him, he had purchased diaries before, but never gotten past January 6 or so. As a man who frequently sets himself tasks as a creative challenge, he decided to form himself to keep one.
It is astonishing, after reading through it (there are also appendices added that include bizarre short stories, essays on various topics and explanatory notes on allusions within the text), that the man survives a year! Does he never sleep?
Like the best diarists, such as Samuel Pepys in the 17th Century, his entries say more about the world around him than they do about just himself.
Along the way, we learn interesting, and not always flattering, things about David Bowie, U2 and the band James, among others, so there is a certain amount of 'oh, boy - Eno knows so-and-so, and can he dish!?' at work here.
However, he's at his most captivating when he's obsessed with himself and his children,
for, through him and them, we get a sense of the world from a childlike perspective.
This is a collection of humorous essays by a syndicated columnist from the States. It's fun, but not frothy, tending on the dark side of things.
'How Alec Baldwin Ruined My Life' is close to misogyny in its comments on Kim Basinger, though it treads that uneasy no-man's land between camp and slander. I think it's meant to be tongue-in-cheek, though, so I can give it a passing grade...
'The Diary of A Would-Be Porn Star' is hysterical, undercutting the absurdities of mainstream queer eroticism, while acknowledging how deeply these hurtful and unrealistic images have permeated the culture.
The material on religion, such as 'If Jesus Loves Me, Why Hasn't He Called?' is also priceless, though the deeply religious might be offended (and should be).
It was nice to read a book by someone ensconced in the mainstream culture who can poke
fun and it, and I'd recommend it for light reading - and deep...thought.
Ms. Gibson burst onto the Canadian literary scene in the Seventies with "The Butterfly Ward" and "Considering Her Condition", in 1976 and 1978 respectively.
"The Butterfly Ward" went on to inspire Canada's first widely acclaimed queer film, "Outrageous" (with the late Craig Russell, who was a friend of Margaret's).
Themes of madness; non-conformity; dogged survival and the strange mixture of cruelty and grandeur that characterize human relationships were present in her work from the earliest days.
For much of the Seventies and Eighties, Ms. Gibson struggled with mental illness; poverty; exploitation and an abusive relationship, so she ceased to write or be published until the early Nineties, at which point she returned with a vengeance.
Since 1993, she has published three books of short stories (this, "The Fear Room" and "Sweet Poison") and her first, award-winning novel ("Opium Dreams").
Her writing is not easy to take by any stretch of the imagination. If she is brilliant in terms of style and technique and imagination, with her eccentric use of word combinations and capitalization giving a strong sense of author's voice, she is also blinding in the light that she shines into the darkest corners of the soul and society. Of course, the beam also falls on treasures hidden in the gloom (if the father in the title story is sometimes abusive and troubled, and the mother is not well in any sense, there is the daughter who loves them and holds the family together, with a talent that bursts through the squalor of their lives; the mentally challenged couple in 'The Button Factory' love each other, and their rebellion against their sadistic boss is perfectly portrayed, even if the reader knows that grief and separation will follow).
These five stories are like black diamonds, shining with a powerful determination to be
heard; even if their tone is frequently bleak, the despair is rendered so well and fought
so hard against that the experience is tempered into great art.
This collection of interviews and drawings by a variety of cartoonists/graphic artists/illustrators is absolutely dangerous. So much concentrated talent in one book will both overload the mind and make people like myself, who used to draw cartoons, give up and whimper in the corner.
Such stars as G.B. Jones (who propounds her queer theories about Jughead, Archie,� Moose, Big Ethel and Dilton Doily - glad I wasn't the only one who wondered...); Keith Mayerson (in addition to stuff about "Horror Hospital Unplugged", one gets to see his parodies of Jack Chick's Christian comics); Art Spiegelman, whose "Maus" series send shivers down my spine, with its animal portrayals of the Holocaust; and Eli Langer (arguably the most dangerous artist here, as he was charged with child pornography over paintings intended to show the horrors and complexities of the issue) give great interviews and insights and advice about drawing - as do the other participants.
Quite a worthy, well-constructed book, typical of the Juno line. Long may she
publish...
Billy Tipton (1914-1989) was a jazz pianist/saxophonist/vocalist from the early 1930s until death, experiencing what little heyday was to be had in the 1940s and 1950s, and was generally respected by peers as a solid if unremarkable musician.� Billy married several times and lived a quiet, low-key life.
Billy was also a woman, but did not want this fact known, so lived as a man. � Only in death did the 'truth' become a generally known fact.
Of his wives, only one claims to have figured it out (the author of this book could not find two of the five); one accepts it now, but says she did not know it then; and the last went to her grave in a state of denial.
It was a challenge for Middlebrook to write this book, since there are few primary documents surviving, and lots of questions which will presumably never be answered now (Did she identify as a lesbian, at least to herself? How were those presumably heterosexual wives fooled? How many of her bandmates, who now claim they had figured it out but did not care, really did or would have known or cared then? It's easy to say it now, after all...).
Another problem is that, because I know the 'story', I found myself looking at all of the photographs and saying: 'How could you not know this is a woman?'
Were people in a state of denial, or unable to conceive of someone living her life that way, or did they simply assume that a jazz musician could not be a woman?
One of the more interesting things the book brings up in chapter epigrams and the like is the text of various radio comedy routines Billy participated in in the 1950s and 1960s. � Many of the jokes, reading them now, seem almost bitterly ironic, such as ones about questioning masculinity or the ones about the male sex, the female sex and insects (it does not take too much imagination to change 'insects' to 'intersex', after all).
We will likely remain in the dark about many aspects of Tipton's life.� However, Middlebrook does the best she can to reconstruct the history of Billy, and does some reasoned speculation as to motive, based on the realities of the time and feminist theory, on extensive interviews with Billy's last wife's children and other associates and even on some biographies and documents by other 'men' who lived like Billy in the music industry, though more openly.
For the story of someone who spent her entire life in hiding and possibly irrational fear, it does a pretty good job at shining some light into the shadows.
How to describe Diane Schoemperlen's work? I was telling an American friend of mine who was enamoured of Margaret Atwood's "Good Bones" that she would probably like this book, since it contains the same sort of generally short, biting narrative mixed with personal politics. There's a bit of Fay Weldon and Joyce Carol Oates at work as well, in the acerbic nature and the uncompromising search for the true essence of people with their metaphorical clothes off.
The stories here range from a sort of fairy tale about an ideal wife with an ideal husband and an ideal family who is gradually sickening and dying, for whom the only cure is having her heart ripped out (I asked my notably non-sensitive boyfriend about his theories on this story, and he proposed that perhaps a marriage with no real heart, for all of its solid body, was a form of death, and the gruesome ending was meant to illustrate the point...out of the mouths of foxy babes...there's also perhaps something there about who gets to define 'ideal', and what it means for those trapped in the defining terms...) to an expansion on, of all things, one of those word problems into a meditation on life (yes, the 'If a train leaves Cleveland, etc.' one).
As she was a creative writing instructor, her piece on how to write the ideal romance was both funny and informative at the same time.
If you are looking for light reading, this is certainly not the place to look. While Diane's style is smooth, flowing and precise, there are barbs to it , and a certain amount of mental engagement is required.
This is a huge book full of interviews with many singer-songwriters about their writing, influences, fears, hopes, etc.
It focuses sharply on the craft, as it consists of excerpts from a magazine devoted to songwriting, so you will not find Janis Ian, k.d. lang or the late Laura Nyro discussing their queerness, but it is a treasure trove of a book in which even artists like Bob Dylan and Leonard Cohen loosen up and talk revealingly about their work.
It is biased towards veteran performers in a folky mode (though the interviews with Tom
Lehrer, a satirical pianist/math professor who is a favourite of my boyfriend Arne,
and Sammy Cahn, a venerable lyricist, were a nice change) and there are far more
men than women profiled, but it is still a great collection.
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