TOPP: Promoter Gary Topp Brought Us the World, graphic biography/memoir of 1970s coolness

TOPP: Promoter Gary Topp Brought Us the World
DAVID COLLIER
Conundrum Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$20.00 paperback, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: As with all of Collier's work, his latest graphic novel is a combination of memoir and biography. This time, he explores his involvement in the cultural landscape of Toronto in the 1970s and 80s, specifically focusing on the life of Gary Topp, a concert promoter and founder of the pioneering Canadian repertory cinema.

Topp emerged from an immigrant background, abandoned the family textile business, and became an influential figure in the lives of an entire community. He was also Collier's first boss and mentor. Though outspoken and opinionated, Gary Topp inspired love and devotion, not only in those who worked for him, but also in the acts he booked—including the Ramones, The Police, and the Dixie Chicks.

This graphic novel looks at a rapidly disappearing past and uses Topp's ability to see beyond the mainstream for a look at where our culture is heading.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: I feel old. Everything in this graphic novel took place, not just in my lifetime, but during my adulthood.

And it's fading history! This is the dim, distant past to the crowd most likely to buy a graphic novel. I'm gonna go shout at some clouds.

Anyway. I'm not from Toronto, but I feel a lot more aware of the reach of punk, and of weird 70s films, and the pervasive, why didn't I see it then, dissatisfaction of young men with the world. The thing about dissatisfaction is, it can be manipulated and redirected by those as observant and savvy as Topp was; often enough for wicked, nasty purposes. Neatly explaining today.

Each panel is an episode in the ongoing story, so it can be browsed without fear of losing the plot threads. Ain't none. I must say I'm lukewarm at best on the art...very appropriate to the period and milieu, though.

I got a few more samples; I don't think you're in any doubt about your feelings for the art by now, so I'll stop here.

Your too-cool-for-school nibling might enjoy seeing how it was done; any oldster punk-rock scenesters might feel nostalgic and dewy-eyed; comic book fans might like a graphic memoir about the edges of fame. It was a decent read.

NO NAMES, a #PrideMonth debut novel from a poet via Minneapolis's estimable Coffee House Press

NO NAMES
GREG HEWETT
Coffee House Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$17.99 ebook, available now

Rating: 3.75* of five

The Publisher Says: Inspired by the iconic punk scene of the late '70s, No Names blurs the lines of affection and sexuality in a haunting tale of desire, hope, and loss.

Mike and Pete were "no names," two working-class boys lost in the shuffle of their stratified town, brought together by their love of music. By 1978, their punk band was blazing across the underground scene. Now, in 1993, Mike is a hermit living alone on a dot of an island in the North Atlantic. When a mysterious letter from an unlikely fan named Isaac arrives, he's pulled right back into the pain he’s spent over a decade running from.

Isaac longs for an escape from his lonely teenage life. A chance discovery of the No Names’ only album catapults him into an obsession with the godlike rockers and the tantalizing possibility of connection.

As their stories collide, mistakes breed consequences that echo through the decades like the furious reverberations of a power chord.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Two-thirds of an excellent novel...after the twist, it's not excellent anymore. It's good, and as a contrast to almost two hundred pages of really outstanding build-up, I felt really let down by the ending. It was a messy trailing-off of several conversations, between characters and us, as well as each other. Multiple PoV novels are always...baggy...but this one's excitement and intensity came from the sense I had in the first part of the book that each person was picking up the thread of a narrative, was the response part in a call-and-response composition.

Much of that energy came from the way the voices wove around each other as they spoke of the times and events that the narrator before had no way of knowing. By the two-thirds mark, they were not telling the same story. They were following their own strands into a future not shared; it's like life, you meet, connect, intertwine for a time, then the time is over. The problem I had with that in this context is that it takes me from one kind of book...close harmony call-and-response...into another, the oratorio going chapter-and-verse through the wind-up of the stories I'd previously experienced directly.

What started as a five-star read ended at three and three-quarters because the narrative drive leaked right out, becoming severe with Mike's relating with the reader how Isaac fits in with the story. I began to nit-pick characters' word choices, their manner of addressing the facts they presented. That is never a good sign. I was disinvesting before the book ended.

But my goddesses, that first bit! A true joy of reading time spent well, and in the presence of a talented voice in storytelling. So not-quite four stars to celebrate the first novel of a writer whose next novel I want to read as soon as he writes it.

LIVE IT OUT, sapphic second-chance romance told with honesty and beauty

LIVE IT OUT
JENN ALEXANDER
Bywater Books
$9.99 ebook editions, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: Spencer Adams was never expected to be anything more than a high school dropout. She’d been a troubled teen, spending more time at the skate park than in school, at least until her music teacher introduced her to the guitar and music class became her lifeline. Ten years later, she is the guitarist in a band that has become a breakout success, and she wants to use that success to help other teens who have had the same rough start as her. She takes on a volunteer project with local youth as a way of honoring her past, not knowing that it will force her to revisit the one part of her past that she’d hoped to forget.

Faith Siebert has always had high expectations to live up to, and she has tried her best to fulfill those expectations, to be a good daughter, a good student, and a good friend. When she fell for Spencer in high school, she knew her family and friends would never approve. Scared of their reactions, Faith ended things with Spencer, following the path her parents wanted for her, even at the immense personal cost. Of course, it had only been a high school romance, destined for brevity anyway. At least, that’s what she told herself. But when Spencer shows up in her life once again, partnered with Faith on a youth music project, her world is rocked and she is forced to re-examine everything she knows about relationships and herself.

I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.

My Review: Not much for rock-star romances, me, but I am a vulturous carrion-seeker for the corpses of heartbreaks past on second-chance narratives. Give me a high-school/college breakup undone decades later and I am on it like a Jane Austen bonnet. Add in the fact that the parties are a same-sex couple denied a natural ending by homophobia (internal or external, makes me no never-mind) and stand back while I run to get it. Didn't hurt your foot, did I?

I got what I was expecting in this read. I loved Spencer's complete willingness to use her skills to help kids in the same bad situation she came from to cope, on many levels, with their sense of powerlessness and absence of agency. True, they won't become rock stars but they will learn how to play a musical intrument...a thing that by itself increases one's satisfaction with one's life.

Faith, the One That Got Away for Spencer, believes it will and is surprised when it's Spencer who shows up to do the teaching. Her career as a social worker is so in-character for the girl she was all the way back in high school, it felt on the nose. I like social workers, and deeply admire their sense of purpose. I'm all in for a redemption arc here, as well, because Spencer's going back to her roots as a shelter-raised kid to extend her hand in helpful practicality.

Do I need to say that these women find their way into a relationship? It's a category romance. Of course they do.

In forming that long-delayed, much-desired romantic reconnection, each of them has to come to terms with her own part in their long estrangement, what it cost them both, and how best to use the rubble of the past to build a good solid foundation. Here is where I felt both the happiest, because the women are truly honest with themselves and each other; and here is also where I felt the length of the book worked against it the most clearly. There wasn;t room to go into the families, or the people they were leaving behind. That was less of an issue, though, than the way the women were ready for that hard, hard, hard task of being vulnerable and honest within their strengthening bond. I can't say it's unlikely...the author's a therapist by trade, she knows better than I do...but I can say that even fifty more pages with some conversations outside their bond would've helped me invest in the resolution.

That said, I give the book as it is a recommendation, tinged with a litte note of caution for the ewww-ick homophobes because there is some steam in here. (I just turned the pages faster.) The story builds its couple's bond well, believably if very quickly, and tells hard emotional truths with honest, sensitive truthfulness.
I'm really glad that Jenn Alexander has more work for me to get acquainted with.

DISASTERAMA!, a funny, poignant memoir of coming (and coming, and coming) of age during a plague

DISASTERAMA!: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997
ALVIN ORLOFF
Three Rooms Press (non-affiliate Amazon link)
$8.99 Kindle edition, available now

Rating: 4* of five

The Publisher Says: DISASTERAMA: Adventures in the Queer Underground 1977 to 1997, is the true story of Alvin Orloff who, as a shy kid from the suburbs of San Francisco, stumbled into the wild eclectic crowd of Crazy Club Kids, Punk Rock Nutters, Goofy Goofballs, Fashion Victims, Disco Dollies, Happy Hustlers, and Dizzy Twinks of post-Stonewall American queer culture of the late 1970s, only to see the “subterranean lavender twilit shadow world of the gay ghetto” ravished by AIDS in the 1980s.

In Disasterama, Orloff recalls the delirious adventures of his youth—from San Francisco to Los Angeles to New York—where insane nights, deep friendships with the creatives of the underground, and thrilling bi-coastal living led to a free-spirited life of art, manic performance, high camp antics, and exotic sexual encounters.

Orloff looks past the politics of AIDS to the people on the ground, friends of his who did not survive AIDS’ wrath—the boys in black leather jackets and cackling queens in tacky frocks—remembering them not as victims, but as people who loved life, loved fun, and who were a part of the insane jigsaw of Orloff’s friends. In Disasterama, Orloff tells their story: the true tale of how a bunch of pathologically flippant kids floundered through a deadly disaster.

My Review: First, read this:

I would become a writer! It made perfect sense: I'd always been socially awkward, pretentious, moody, self-loathing, judgmental, and besotted with the sound of my own voice. What else could I be?
–and–
Unlike prostitution or promiscuity, stripping was entirely public. One foot on the state would forever mark me as a disreputable character, the sort respectable people called a sleaze. On the other hand ... I didn't know any respectable people and my workday would be a mere thirty minutes long. And, I had to face it, some quirk of my psychic constitution rendered the strictures of ordinary jobs insufferable to me. Restaurant work felt like a cross between the treadmill at the gym and one of those Japanese game shows on which contestants are abused and humiliated in front of a sadistic audience. Office work was even worse, calling to mind those B movies in which some poor soul—bound and gagged, but eyes wide with terror—is slowly walled up brick-by-brick in the dungeon of some damp, rat-infested Transylvanian castle.

If this isn't raising a chuckle, Author Orloff (I Married An Earthling was an earlier title of his, which I reviewed rather grouchily twenty years ago) might not be the guide to a bygone day that you personally will warm to. I find his work pretty funny.

I'm Author Orloff's age. Despite being born within hailing distance of the place, I spent little time in San Francisco, more in Austin (a surprisingly queer place even then!) and New York, but the world we lived in as young men has utterly vanished. Many of the guys I knew are dead...many aren't...but all of us have empty slots where loved people once stood. But enough long-face!

The plague and the insurgency it fuelled were forging a previously unknown camaraderie and it was fun. Just then, fun was a political issue. For decades the media had painted gay men as a sad victims of loneliness, depression, suicide, insanity, and/or murder. The Gay = Tragic meme receded a bit during the height of '70s hedonism, but was making a strong '80s comeback with the modern twist that our inevitable bad end came from AIDS. The innocent victim gayboys might be sympathetic, but the pity they evoked felt maudlin and slightly toxic. People wanted to end their days in a party, not a puddle of tears.

What a fast-paced and nostalgic look back at a moment when being young was fun! It can't be helped that AIDS took the lives of so many. It feels like the world Orloff describes (and illustrates with candid snapshots and collected ads, posters, and the like...who the hell keeps this ephemera?!) is as distant as World War II. These days, fun seems dead and young people have to think about what we had the luxury of ignoring.

Selfishly, I'm glad I could ignore it. Responsibly, I wish I hadn't had that choice. Take the walking tour of a vanished world with a cis-white queer punk-party boy who grew up way, way too hard. Maybe not too fast, considering he's still whinnying with us.