This Is Why Events Unnerve Me – Peter Hook’s “Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division”

Unknown Pleasures: Inside Joy Division by Peter Hook (2013)

“This is why events unnerve me
They find it all, a different story
Notice whom for wheels are turning,
Turn again and turn towards this time.”
“Ceremony” – Ian Curtis (music by Curtis / Hook / Morris / Sumner)

In the spring of 1996 I was getting very serious about music.  I had just come back from London and I had the spark of an idea to write a novel about punk.  It would be broken down by its various years with an epigraph for each one and it would begin with that brilliant line from Patti Smith: “Jesus died for somebody’s sins but not mine.”  I had Horses and I had Never Mind the Bollocks and Boys Don’t Cry and they were fueling all of it.  But clearly there was stuff I was missing.  And, already being a fan of New Order (thanks to my sister Stacy who had Substance on LP), one line in the Rolling Stone Album Guide: “Bassist Peter Hook, drummer Steven Morris and guitarist Bernard Sumner founded New Order on the ashes of their previous band, Joy Division.”  lead to me reading “Joy Division’s brief recorded legacy towers over the subsequent efforts of its imitators.  The suicide of lead singer Ian Curtis in 1980 guarantees that the group always will be misunderstood, or stupidly romanticized; for all the harrowing detail of Curtis’s obsessed monotone, Joy Division breathes fresh musical ideas into punk rock.”  So I knew what I was missing.  I needed to hear Joy Division and I knew that I needed to hear some Clash.  So I went to Tower Records and, without listening to a second of either, I bought The Story of the Clash and Permanent: Joy Division 1995.

 

Ghosts from the Past: A Review of Heidi W. Durrow’s The Girl Who Fell From the Sky

I snagged this image of the cover from the author's website. And if she reads the review, I'm hoping she'll be okay with that. The Girl Who Fell From the Sky by Heidi W. Durrow (2010)

Serendipity is a funny thing.  It can mean that you end up working on a Tuesday night when you are normally off to cover for someone out of town.  That will mean you drive in to Brookline instead of taking the bus.  So you might be listening to “All Things Considered.”  And so you happen to listen and hear a writer talk about her first novel, The Girl Who Fell From the Sky.  And she might talk about Nella Larsen, whose great novel, Passing, you read in Graduate School.  In Portland, Oregon, where the bulk of this new novel takes place.  So when you get to work, you look it up to make sure you have copies.  Then someone comes in ten minutes later and asks about it, because it turns out she was also listening to NPR and you know right where it is.  And so you pick up and read a book you might normally never have grabbed and you find yourself transported to a city where you spent the largest portion of your life.  And then you make it to the end and realize that it is one hell of a book, the first brand new novel by any novelist, first-time or otherwise, that has rocked you in a long time.

 

A Clean Break from Possibilities: A Review of David Louis Edelman’s Geosynchron

Geosynchron: the finale of the Jump 225 Trilogy

When you’re an unpublished writer and someone you know gets a book published, it’s a tough thing.  If you like the person, you should support them and buy the book.  But it can still leave you feeling a bit ambiguous, in that they are successful in a field that you have not found success in yet.  It makes it a hell of a lot easier when the book is good.  I’ve known David Louis Edelman for close to thirty years.  He has been a friend of both me and my sister and his sister is one of my dearest friends.  That said, my full-on recommendation of his Jump 225 Trilogy, which concludes with Geosynchron, has nothing to do with that connection.  It did have something to do with why I heard about it in the first place and read the first one.  But it is my enthusiasm for the series, my joy at what I have read over the course of the three novels, and the notion that this book is great fun that leads me to encourage people to read it.  And I am most certainly encouraging people to read it.  If you ask for a book at the Brookline Booksmith, I’ll recommend it.  I’m writing about it here so you can go find it.  I’ve put in an official recommendation to Indiebound, the official brochure of Independent bookstores.

 

The Gritty Dirt of Shakespeare Done Right

Orson Welles in Chimes at Midnight (1965)

“Welles never approached such posterity again, although ‘Touch of Evil’ (1958) is a fine example of the then-fading film noir genre.”
Steve Persall ST. PETERSBURG TIMES (as syndicated in the San Diego Union Tribune)

First of all, when you’ve just explained that Citizen Kane is widely regarded as the greatest film ever made, obviously he never approached such posterity again. Neither did anyone else. That’s kind of the point. But in Persall’s article, he dismisses Welles among other directors that “once were giants.” What that misses is that Welles may have been forced out of the studio system, but he hardly failed to continue to be a giant (fat jokes not withstanding).

 

Possibilities 2.0: A Review of David Louis Edelman’s Multireal

Multireal by David Louis Edelman

On the night that I first started reading David Louis Edelman’s Multireal, I was undergoing a sleep study at Mt. Auburn Hospital.  My neurologist was trying to determine a cause for the headaches I have been having for the last twenty years or so (dating back to high school, which makes this a good time to disclose that David and I went to high school together).  While immersing myself in the intricate story of the way Bio/Logic programming has brought about an amazing new world and open up the possibilities of the future, I turned my head to the left and noticed that the 17 electrodes attached to various parts of my head were hooked up to an electronics box made by a company called Bio-Logic.

So the first thing David’s book does is pass the Hunt for Red October test.  In Hunt, when trying to determine what the doors that house the Caterpillar Drive could be, he asks Jeffrey Jones, “Could you launch an ICBM horizontally?”  Jones replies, “Sure.  Why would you want to?”

Any good Science Fiction novel must pass the Hunt test.  It’s not enough to create a world of amazing possibilites and incredible technology.  There must be a reason these technologies were developed.  Things that people don’t need eventually fall by the wayside.  They can sound neat on the page (and eventually look neat on screen), but if they don’t have a practical purpose, then it’s just flashiness.  In other words, sloppy writing.  Well, Multireal passes the test with flying colors.

 

Gonzo

we were riding the crest of a high and beautiful wave…

The Rumble in the Jungle was fought the week after I was born. Yet, by the time Hunter S. Thompson shot himself on a Sunday evening in early 2005, I was thirty years old, married and it was the day my son turned seven months old. Those intervening thirty years, my lifetime, are barely covered in Gonzo: The Life and Times of Hunter S. Thompson, the new documentary released today. And it’s not hard to see why.
Sondi, Hunter’s first wife, mentions that people have written her about how Hunter went out on top with a bang. She corrects that notion in the film. He wasn’t on top anymore, hadn’t been on top for a long time. His best writing was behind him and he knew it. And so those last thirty years flash by in just a few minutes, with the various interviewees discussing how hard it was for him during those years, how little he accomplished in terms of his writing. It is at this point that Jann Wenner, describing his friend, becomes so choked up that he actually stops the interview.

 

love will tear us apart . . .

Many of the key scenes in the film seem familiar, like you’ve seen them somewhere before.  Ian Curtis calling Tony Wilson a cunt for not having them on his show.  Tony signing Joy Division to a contract with his own blood.  Ian collapsing on stage in an epileptic fit kicking off the Derbyshire Riot.  Ian watching Herzog’s Strozeck before hanging himself.  They seem similar, yet somehow different.
Of course you have seen them before, if you’ve seen 24 Hour Party People.  But that was a comedy and Control is not a comedy.  It’s a straight forward musical biopic.  And I do mean straight forward.  Photographed in black and white, with musical highlights of a career spread throughout the home story of the musician, this is very much the kind of biographical picture Warner Bros was so famous for in the late 30’s and early 40’s, except they never would have made a film that was so god awful depressing.

 

Return to Narnia

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian (2008). For the record, the really good actors are on the far left and far right.

“Don’t you hate being treated like children?”
“We are children.”
“We didn’t used to be.”
That’s Peter’s argument at the opening of The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian and it’s great one, more so even, because it’s not in the book. In fact, a lot of what’s in the movie wasn’t in the book. In some ways that’s a problem, because even more than the first film, it’s a different genre than the book. But in other ways, it deepens and enriches the experience and comes out stronger.
The movie starts out with a bang: Caspian is forced to flee. No back story, no growing up; he’s already a teen and he better run or die. Then we’re thrown back into England (and more good reminders of the war) and the pull that Lewis describes is shown in a magnificent scene as the children are transported back to Narnia, where they may still be young, but they remember what they were like when they were older.

 

Nothing’s Gonna Change My World…

Evan Rachel Wood and Jim Sturgiss in Across the Universe (2007)

If you are not of the belief that the Beatles are the greatest and most important band in the history of rock and roll, then you are wrong. In Across the Universe we have 30 of their songs on display, come to life in a movie of astounding courage, visual inventiveness and the firm belief that all you need is love. That we can do it without making use of their best song (“Help”), their most beautiful song (“Here Comes the Sun”), their most poetic (“Eleanor Rigby”) or any of the songs written for their own first shot at the movies (“A Hard Day’s Night”) makes you understand the depth and breadth of the music they gave us in just eight years.

In the last several years at the movies, I have had my heart shattered (In America), my vision realized on screen (Lord of the Rings), my comic books come to life brilliantly (Batman Begins, X2) and disastrously (Daredevil, Fantastic Four) and my belief that love will win over all first reaffirmed (Elizabethtown), then shattered (Brokeback Mountain). This is the first film, that from the first minute, I absolutely wish I had written.

This is not, as Jude would have us believe in the first few lines, the story “all about the girl who came to stay.” In some ways, this is not even the story of Jude, the shipdock welder from Liverpool at loose in 1968 Greenwich Village. This is the story of the sixties, of the Beatles, of today.

There is a story, of course, a love story of Jude, dancing in a leather jacket in a Liverpool club that looks, not too surprisingly like the Cavern Club and how he comes to America and falls in love with Lucy, the clean cut American girl dancing at the prom with the boyfriend soon to be off to Vietnam. Their connection is her brother Max, and while at one point, he does have a silver hammer, he, at least, does not actually use it to kill anyone.

These names all come from Beatles songs, of course, as do Prudence, Sadie and Jo Jo. Not everyone gets their song on screen, although thankfully Prudence does, since it is a transcendental reminder that “Dear Prudence” is one of the most beautiful things Lennon and McCartney ever wrote. It’s not just the names, as the Beatles are alive everywhere, from the record label, to little asides, and only naturally, when Prudence comes climbing into their lives and Sadie questions where she comes from, what else can Jude say but “she came in through the bathroom window.”

The songs are not just on dazzling display, but also sung anew, both by young actors, and veteran singers (and let’s just say here, that I have been right for years in my claim that Bono and Robin Williams look alike). And these new voices don’t just provide words, they give us a different look at these songs. Is “I Wanna Hold Your Hand” a happy little love song or a reminder of what you can’t have? Is “All You Need is Love” an anthem or a plea? Is “I am the Walrus” a drug trip or a different viewpoint on life. The answer to the last question is, probably both.

Who knows what reaction you will have to this film. What it made me do is go home, crank up the volume on every Beatles song ever recorded and remember that all you need is love. All you need is love. Love is all you need.