Jaz cover issue low res - Flipbook - Page 20
Reviews
My Secret BDSM Life
BY KAZ B
CONFESSIONS OF A
DOMINATRIX –
MY SECRET BDSM LIFE
Kaz B
Pub. 2022 Gadfly Press
Kaz B seems to be full of opposites…
A petite, if not miniature 4’10”,
she has made a career of dominating men. A caring empathetic
soul, who gets paid to humiliate
and degrade others. A giggling,
curvaceous blonde, who is also an
intelligent writer, and a self-aware
and shrewd businesswoman. A
bubbly, popular cam girl with an
OnlyFans page, easily also described as a crazy cat lady. Kaz is
all of these things and more and
in this heartfelt, honest, and often
hilarious memoir, delving into the
events, both the traumatic and the
joyous, that brought her to where
she is today.
From a less than ideal childhood,
through teenage years of finding
herself, and into the intricacies
of a career path that would lead
eventually to the title Professional
Dominatrix, with some extremely
enlightened examination of her
time with an abusive partner.
Kaz has clearly spent some time
probing her reasons for staying in
such a situation so long, and has
maintained her upbeat personality
after coming through both this and
some tragic loss. Kaz exposes her
vulnerable side to us effortlessly;
perhaps being so compassionate is
why she is such a good Dom. She
understands the importance of
dominating vs being domineering,
the context of consent, use of safewords and aftercare. Kaz writes, “I
have many subs who love nothing
more than to be utterly humiliated
and degraded”, yet I’ll bet almost
every one of them would describe
her as friendly and supportive.
Kaz’s writing reveals an open,
honest, and upbeat soul. Uproarious in parts, moving and wistful in
others, just like Kaz herself. This is a
book filled with thoughtful observation and brimming with adult anecdotes that will have you howling
with laughter and disbelief.
Lou Hellbaby
A Certain Hunger
Chelsea G Summers
Pub. Original US publication
2020 – first UK pub 2022 Faber
Having heard this was a book about
a food critic turned cannibal, I
have to admit I pre-assumed that
I would shovel this book into my
eyeballs like a hungry drunk on
the receiving end of a free kebab
would push meat into their mouth:
at high speed, whilst raving about it
to any and all who would listen. I do
after all, love food and, as my late
Nan would have called it, ‘a good
murder’ (to be clear, she means a
work of fiction based around one
or more murders, and wasn’t to my
knowledge the unknown Midlands
Ripper.) It turned out to not quite
be the case, although I can see
18/Salvation
what so many have seen in Chelsea
G Summers’ debut novel, it didn’t
quite pass my taste test.
Initial impressions were that the
protagonist, Dorothy Daniels, was
the kind of uncompromising and
efficient character whom I should
really rather like, and who you
would have thought would be able
to plan and get away with homicide, and yes even cannibalism,
relatively easily. Her tale is divulged
in what I found to be a fairly clumsy,
partially reversed chronology so
we know that the latter is false, we
join her during her incarceration as
she reminisces. Sadly as her story
unraveled, so did a lot of my interest. As her body count increased,
my need to know what came next
regretfully diminished in kind. It
wasn’t that she was unlikeable; in
fact I still wish I had enjoyed the
book more than I did.
Dorothy is cool, collected, witty
and eloquent; but therein lays the
rub… I wanted to hang from her
every word, but Dorothy had too
many of them. Between you and
me, our guilty gourmand is a bit
of a wind bag… Initially it would
seem that is by design, but if you
are going to chuck words in like
‘brobdinganagian’, splash out the
thesaurus and don’t use it twice
within a few pages of each other.
Don’t get me wrong, there were
some clever touches, interesting
characters, and the food critic style
descriptions of taste pairings to
accompany the tantalizingly taboo
dishes she creates are *chef ’s kiss*,
but ultimately I found this one hard
to digest.
Lou Hellbaby
FINGERS CROSSED - How
Music Saved Me From
Success
Miki Berenyi
Pub. 2022 Nine Eight Books
Miki Berenyi may be better known
to you, especially if you are of a
similar age / demographic to me, as
part of UK Indie band Lush; probably best known for absolute banger
Ladykillers. Early onto the indie
scene, before it had started morphing into the Britpop beast it was to
become, Lush provided us with 3
full length albums at the start of the
90s… And Miki was the red haired
singer you will have undoubtedly
noticed. If you are truly familiar
with Lush’s lyrics, there are songs
that have touched on various events
from Miki’s childhood, and she has
shared some of this information in
interviews before. Fingers Crossed
delves deeper into the childhood
that made her the into the fiery
haired, and often simply fiery,
young woman who joined a band
in the first place, as well as several
pleasing anecdotes and juicy tidbits
on life while in Lush, and generally
as part of a touring band.
It sounds like there was some fun
to be had in those heady, early 90s
days; landing a slot touring with
some fantastic names in the States,
including hijinks with Ministry,
Soundgarden, the Chili Peppers
and more… It’s not all applause and
tomfoolery though. Miki courageously covers a pretty traumatic
childhood in an extremely open
and forthright way, as well as the
devastating death of Chris Acland,
drummer in 1996, and her writing
is extremely self-aware and eloquent. With plenty to say about the
music industry from the musicians’
side, and the ladette / Britpop scene
(chapter titles include Bollocks to
Britpop, Sucking Corporate Cock
and Ladettes), as well as insightful and moving musings as she
looks back on her formative years,
Fingers Crossed is a charming,
funny and honest autobiography,
and a thoroughly entertaining and
enjoyable read.
Lou Hellbaby
Ninth Street Women
Mary Gabriel
Hardback £30.00
Paperback £20.00
927/944 pages
I have to confess that when I read
this massive study on the Ninth
Street area of New York City in the
late 1940s and 1950s and in particular the female artists who would
make the street and the art they
produced (Abstract Expressionism)
famous, that I had absolutely no
interest in the art or the artists that
produced it. I am familiar with the
art of Jackson Pollock, Mark Rothko
and Willem de Kooning, but that
was about it.
The woman artist features on
the cover is Helen Frankenhaler,
then in her early twenties and one
of five female artists whose art, lives
and loves are the central focus of
Gabriel’s exploration of how these
women drove the art movement
that would become known as
Abstract Expressionism, the often
spontaneous painting by movement
or implied movement and other
gestures to create paintings that
broke away from conventional
form. Yet, Gabriel’s book is so much
more than a study of five women,
the other four being Lee Krasner,
Elaine de Kooning, Grace Harti-
gan and Joan Mitchell, and an art
movement. Instead it is heady mix
of story and research, essentially
a literary docudrama, where biography intertwines with passionate
love affairs and drunken brawls, of
violence and alcoholism, sex and, of
course, art.
Yes, it is a history of how Abstract Expressionism evolved to
make New York the centre of the
art world in the fifties but because
of Gabriel’s almost uncanny ability
to mix vivid first hand accounts of
these women’s lives with the wider
world it brings the women and
their city to life in an extraordinary way. There is drama aplenty,
Krasner was married to Jackson
Pollock, a man defined almost as
much by his alcoholic destructiveness as his art, and had to subdue
her work in order for his to shine.
While Elaine, wife of de Kooning,
also chose to subordinate her
own artistic ambition so as not to
put herself in direct competition
with her husband. While Grace
Hartigan conversely was ruthlessly
ambitious; “I didn’t have talent, I
just had genius”. She married four
times and was an alcoholic yet of
the five would initially be the most
commercially successful. Joan
Mitchell rebelled from her rich
parents in Chicago and ended up
married in New York while having
an affair with a liar and fraudster
and getting raped by a hoodlum
acquaintance. Helen Frankenhaler,
also from wealth, faired better but
married a leading art critic many
years older whose controlling ways
would eventually end their marriage. Nevertheless both women
created major artworks despite
their spousal mishaps.
There is so much drama in fact
that the book has been optioned by
Amy Sherman-Palladino, the writer
and creator of The Marvellous Mrs
Maisel and the Gilmore Girls, so
expect to lot more the Ninth Street
Women in the near future. A truly
fabulous read, even if like me, you
aren’t that keen on Abstract Expressionism and think Pollock was
a bit of a plonker.
Nigel Wingrove
SHOTGUN SEAMSTRESS The Complete Collection
Osa Atoe
Soft Skull Press
368 pages $48.00
Hardback
Producing a fanzine or a magazine
is hard work, and managing to do
that for eight issues is an achievement in itself. Osa Atoe and her zine,
Shotgun Seamstress, did just that
with the aim of supporting “Black
people who exist within predominantly white subcultures, and to
encourage the creation of our own.”
Published between 2006 and 2015,
Shotgun Seamstress is, as it states
on its opening page, “A Zine by and
for Black Punks”, which by issue 2
had been extended to include black
“Queers, Misfits, Feminists, Artists,
Musicians, and Weirdos.” Yet the
overriding message you get from
flicking and reading through these
eight issues is of energy and the
enjoyment of punk.
It is a total fanzine from its cut
and paste aesthetics to its photocopied pages and grainy photos
covering primarily US Black punk
bands like Brontez Purnell, Trash
Kit, the Gories, Kicktease, Andrea Rhinestone Eagle, as well as
filmmakers like James Spooner
(Afropunk: The ‘Rock n Roll Nigger
Experience (2003), White Lies,
Black Sheep (2007), artists like
Adee Roberson and rather wonderfully in issue 8, their is an interview
with horror actress, Geretta Geretta, star of Italian genre films like
Bruno Mattei’s Rats: Night of Terror
and Lucio Fulci’s Murder-Rock
(both 1984).
Atoe also tracked down and
interviewed Don Letts, now a film
and documentary maker and, at
the very beginning of punk way
back in 1976, the Jamaican DJ at
the seminal London punk club,
The Roxy, where his Dub raggae
playlists were so influential on
The Clash, The Slits and of course,
John Lyndon and so many others.
Also interviewed shortly before
she died is the late Poly Styrene of
Xray Specs.
There’s a lot of great stuff in
these issues and a lot of bands I’d
never heard of, which, having now
listened to a few, like for example
Brontz Purnell, I’d say are well
worth tracking down. Shotgun
Seamstress does exactly what a
good fanzine should do, championed its cause and it did it well.
Recommended.
Nigel Wingrove
The Power
Naomi Alderman
342 pages
£9.99 Paperback
Viking/Penguin Books
The Power by Naomi Alderman is
part science fiction, part thriller
and part feminism influence reborn as a morality tale in which all
power corrupts and absolute power corrupts most of all no matter
the gender of those that wield it.
In this instance, teenage girls, and,
eventually through them, all women, - the ‘power’ being electricity
generated by a skein of knotted
muscle and veins that grow under
the skin and across the collar
bones of girls and becomes the
source through which, girls, all
girls, can learn to discharge electrical power from their hands and
fingertips. A power that, handled
correctly, can hurt a man, wound
a man, kill a man - from that
beginning women begin to take
the societal power away from men
changing society, religion and male
/ female relationships, forever.
Told through the lives of three
women and a man whose stories,
like the skeins from which their
power derives, are intertwined and
seemingly damned by their newly
acquired strength. This is particularly so in the case of Tunde, a
young man and aspiring photo-journalist from Nigeria whose
Youtube video of a girl taking down
a man who was pestering her in
a supermarket and reducing him
to a gibbering wreck bleeding
from his eyes and mouth after she
has touched him, sets the worlds’
media ablaze and ushers in what
will become known as The Day of
the Girls…
From here on Alderman’s impressive cast of characters, Roxy
the daughter of a London gangster,
Allie (or Mother Eve as she becomes) who morphs from abused
teenage orphan to the leader of a
new, feminised take on Christianity,
to Margot an American senator
whose troubled daughter Jocelyn
lacks the ability to use her power,
to Tunde, who documents the
world’s rapid shift, which, like an
electrical Arab Spring, moves from
patriarchy to matriarchy in a series
of tumultuous set pieces, not least
the collapse of male controlled
countries like Saudi Arabia.
The world shifts from male
control, with its inherent, endemic
violence, to female control, which
unleashes its own, equally brutal,
female take on revenge. Now, hundreds of years of being an abused
and subservient sex, of being prostituted and beaten, is crystallised
into an almost bestial discharge
aimed straight at the heart of the
male id, which, at its most basic,
means his cock.
Here, in this world, men are
raped by women who use their
electrical powers to induce an
erection in the unwilling male
victim and then, when satiated, are
shown killing the man in scenes
that only mimic mans’ savage
raping of women in wars through
the centuries. Elsewhere men are
tortured, limbs and organs are fried
or severed, eyes burnt out. Men, in
their turn, plant bombs and resort
to terrorism and war in a futile
effort to return the world to the
old order. Alderman hammers this
home in scenes that are as disturbing as they are brutal:
“The woman on top cups his
balls and dick in her palm. She says
something. Laughs. The others
laugh, too. She tickles him there
with the tip of a finger, making a little crooning sound, as if she wants
him to enjoy it. He can’t speak; his
throat is bulging. They might have
broken his windpipe already.”
In this world, as the initial shock
of women’s new power and status
sinks in, so men try to fight back,
underground groups form, the
Saudi King funds rebellion to take
back his kingdom and the military
tries to harness and control women’s power to use it as a weapon.
Yet the dynamic between men and
women has flipped and no banging
of fists by the old patriarchy can
change that.
Yet, despite the violence, this is a
serious and highly readable novel
that moves at a cracking pace.
Its ideas and the societies that
it imagines, believable, real and,
at times, frightening. The shift of
emphasis from the male Jesus to
the female Mother Mary and Eve,
the first woman, not just apt, but
in the circumstances described,
absolutely right.