| Title | : | Night Moves |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1477317880 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781477317884 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 184 |
| Publication | : | First published September 18, 2018 |
Night Moves Reviews
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I have some complicated feelings about this book, and complicated feelings about Hopper, which I'm sure are influencing each other. When Hopper is philosophizing, she's amazing. When she's being generous and kind, light shines. When she discusses Chicago, it's very specific, but also very true. But when she's being smug it's just so frustratingly negative and petty. Look, I don't love drunk idiots either, but I've also been a drunk idiot and there has often been a reason. I also definitely get being annoyed at the rich assholes who follow you to your neighborhood, but aside from a very brief mention in the introduction, there's no context given to the role that Hopper herself (and me too) have played in gentrification, in making the neighborhood "safe" for said rich(er) assholes (who are just jerks because they aren't your friends - they're probably fine if you know them). So I'd give this stars for beautiful prose and reliability but minus stars for smarmy smugness and jarringly dropped syllables.
I also have some feelings on the style: the jumps in time I like (although I wish there were a slightly clearer narrative string, or a list of key people or a timeline or something), the weird internet-speak I could do without (although I realize it's pulled from journal entries and at the time it wasn't super annoying to talk like that).
I suppose in some ways I'm envious of Hopper (well, in many ways). I was in college in Chicago during the time period this was written, but I just...knew about almost none of this. I was going to shows, but only corporate, under-21 shows, I didn't know anything about any scene in Chicago, and I was too scared to ride my bike beyond my own neighborhood. It gives me some nostalgia for something I never experienced - I got closer to this in my own late 20s, but by that point it was too late for many of the bands and spaces she mentions. Time and feelings are weird. -
Jessica Hoppers NIGHT MOVES is a stream of consciousness portrait of the last days of bohemia in Chicago (or Austin, or Brooklyn, or Portland) before hundreds of urban planners with their brand new copies of Richard Florida's RISE OF THE CREATIVE CLASS gentrified the cities and made them unaffordable for anyone but the rich. A beautiful snapshot of a period filtered through a slight haze of a time lost, this is a fantastic book from the woman who has been chronicling this life since her zine HIT IT OR QUIT IT started publishing in 1995. For the Boomers out there, this is the contemporary version of Patti Smith's JUST KIDS.
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My review for the Chicago Tribune:
http://www.chicagotribune.com/lifesty...
In his seminal play The Importance of Being Earnest, Oscar Wilde has the character Gwendolen declare, “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” By that worthy metric, Jessica Hopper’s memoir Night Moves—which draws on her personal journals from the aughts, and which chronicles her formative years as a DJ and aspiring writer in Chicago’s independent music community—would make for appealing train reading.
A Pitchfork music critic and author of 2015’s The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, Hopper has been, among other things, the music editor of Rookie Magazine, an online publication “by and for teenagers (and their cohorts of any age).” Here, she doesn’t quite look all the way back to her own teen years, but to an equally important period of young adulthood, that time in one’s late twenties and early thirties when one seems to be half-stumbling, half-running hell-bent toward whatever it is that one hopes to be.
As she explains in her introduction, the days documented herein begin in the spring of 2004, “a few years into what has since become a two-decade run in Chicago” and serve as “a testimony, of sorts, to my obsession with the city” (xv).
Like all vivid writing that depends on setting, Hopper’s degree of specificity is strikingly high. The book comes with a map delineating the patch of Chicago geography that she makes her object of recollection: North Avenue to the north, Lake Street to the south, Western Avenue to the West, and Ashland Avenue to the East.
Also, like all good writing that focuses on a living city, the stories Hopper tells drift through currents of change, and echo with the awareness of erasure and loss. She studs the table of contents enumerating the book’s thirty non-chronological vignettes with asterisks denoting each spot that “no longer exists,” including Reckless Records, Earwax, and Edmar Polish Grocery, which she writes later is “decrepit, Polish, and smells like only old grocery stores smell—a little mildew, a little grandma cologne, and the musk of coriander” (38). Her tone bristles with well-placed judgment against the people and phenomena she believes have altered the city for the worst, declaring in her author’s note that “Wicker Park’s level of disgusting has ratcheted skyward since this was first written” even as she admits to being “an unwitting participant in a wave of gentrification that has since subsumed the area” (xv).
Hopper’s credentials are impressive—including stints at MTV news and serving as an editor for the American Music Series at University of Texas Press—and she has a twenty-year and counting career as a cultural critic to her name. But she started out untested and unpublished, making friends and falling in and out of love among, as she puts it, the “aging loners waxing nerdy in the night light”—going to and from Hold Steady video shoots and shows, parties at the MCA, and “yuppie jizz discoes” (33).
In chapters as meandering as her bike rides and walks through the city, the book’s nonlinear structure enhances the sense of discovery that Hopper herself feels as she finds her way and her voice.
Direct and spontaneous, her style calls to mind the Beats or the New York School, except female and Midwestern, as when she writes “I like the train bridge because it’s so Chicago: ¼ nature, ¼ trash, ¼ industrial, ¼ gleaming rehab condos everywhere you look. You can’t beat that view of downtown. Chicago is so Chicago—it’s like getting mashed in the face with a volume of Sandburg poems” (5-6).
Of Canadian cartoonist Julie Doucet, she observes that reading her diary of 2002-2003, “it is the routine of it that is familiar and comforting. The boon of worth and productivity she feels when she gets a check in the mail […] Slogging through creative lulls, wanting things to be exciting,” concluding “It’s reassuring and inspiring that you don’t have to be Mark Rothko—pacing, cursing, and suicidal—in order to be an artist” (66). That breezy-yet-realistic, easy-to-read honesty is well-executed here in Hopper’s memoir: insouciant, brainy, and repetitive in a good way, like hanging out with someone who unfailingly but not uncritically adores “Chicago’s deep manic powers” (123). -
I work for the University of Texas Press, so I read this early. It is remarkable.
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I wanted to love this book. It’s about the exact part of Chicago where I lived, during the same era. I went to the same bars, record shops, and venues.
And yet, this just fell flat. A love letter to a city, but without anything to pull you in deeper. -
A pointless book about a forgettable time in a very good music critic's life.
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There were a few luminescent lines/moments, but largely I didn't care that much about what was being recounted, and the writing didn't make me care.
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Memoir of Biking and going to shows in the Early 2000's in Chicago. Read cuz I bike! and I go to Shows! And I live in Chicago! although I've had this book for like 3 years I waited till i knew the city (And Lydia recommended it again) to actually read.
My main quibble is that Jessica Hopper does not mention being hit by a car while on her bike, which is inaccurate to the life of the daily Chicago biker according to anecdotal and personal experience.
As for the good stuff I loooved the structure, which is like 1-3 page vignettes mixed up chronologically
but roughly sorted by theme, which felt closer to the feeling of memory and weaves this emotional portrait of the years when Hopper was striving and finding her voice.
But it also makes for this sense of fleetingness, and melancholy mixed with joie de vivre, that ,I don't know, it left me with a slightly hollow feeling. Theres a sense that while Jessica makes it out, not a lot other people do, and I suppose thats just life. hmmm
anyway was fun and often beautiful, even if it left me sorta uneasy. TY 4 rec lydia -
- i am very excited to live in the midwest again // i love that she bikes and hosts silly little art nights, as well as Becoming An American Cultural Voice
- i am a memoir guy, i loved it
- love that she was from minneapolis... wild to recognize the minneapolis bands she knew from school... can't believe she went to south, the world is so silly
- sometimes i felt a little silly when she referenced a whole slew of things and people that i didn't recognize... better when she talked about chicago specifically, and young adult life and how being an artist is like being a person -- reminded me of just kids by patti smith for the way it was supposed to capture A Moment, but also i would have liked to have more previous background on The Moment (i couldn't finish the Patti Smith)
- why is she so straight edge? bordering on hater tbh // but also i liked it -
if you were ever a hopeful yet cynical dumbass and/or were said dumbass in Chicago and you love music this is for you
made me nostalgic for times in my life that were really shitty but formative and for things I haven’t even experienced
also Night Moves by Bob Seger has been stuck in my head since October coincidentally ok that’s all -
Night Moves was this lush, poetic memoir. Hopper’s sense of humor and the energy of her group of friends, her scene, the sense of biking through Chicago at 2 a.m.—it all infects every inch of this portrait. Excerpts were taken from her journals from 2004 to 2008: they are of the moment, vivid, capturing those strange city moments that take you aback or that are memorable for a day, or two. Some excerpts are more effective than others, but all together, the mood sticks with you, the passion for a city you call home.
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i want my writing voice to be like this - accessible language but so structurally smart that it takes a bit of thinking to get to the meaning of a sentence, word choice that reveals the author's character, always fun to read, short and sweet, there are so many things i like about the prose here
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finished this slim one as i was sitting doing door for a rock show in "shithole" st. louis city, on a breezy summer night, believe it or not! and missing chicago, too. i normally live in the neighborhood that jessica depicts in the beginning grid-map in this book - ukrainian village and humboldt park ~ but here is my neighb in its forms of the early 2000s, in Jessica's fast-paced diaires. i am taking a short stint in STL, & reading this book made me feel FOMO for chicago's current bike-riding season. but kinda like a tug on my shirtsleeve saying "it's okay, you'll be back soon." i am already nostalgic for the early 2000s anyways, as a time when i first started going to shows as a teen at DIY spaces. i was lucky to have seen jessica hopper read portions of this book at columbia college chicago this year, where i'm getting an MFA. hearing jessica's voice read out-loud her stories was a perfect way to enter this world: riding around with friends, snapping off chunks of chocolate, saying hi to people u kno at the bar - this is literature to me! all the entries are stamped out of order, as if jessica is reminiscing about this time of her life as bits & pieces pop into her head. although many will look at this book as a white hipster's account of gentrification, going to obscure shows, and wicker park getting bougie/bro, for me this book is a pure love-letter to goofy and loyal friendships, and the failed-industrial midwest landscape: dirty and lovable, just for us. a sweet ride. midwest shitholes unite!
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I actually wish I could give this book negative stars, that's how much I loathed it.
Jessica Hopper should stick to what she knows: music. This book is a long-winded rambling session on paper, and I was not invested in even one of Hopper's "vignettes," if that's what you want to call them. I am normally a huge fan of "little moments," and much of my own work is written in similar fashion. However, in order to sell these "moments," you have to make readers care, and Hopper simply did not spend the time or effort to make her readers care about what she was writing. It read sloppily, there were no real main characters (the only character's name I remember at all is JR, and he, as a person, is forgettable), and I still don't understand the point of this book.
What I find most infuriating is that someone like Hopper can get published when her writing doesn't even fit into a specific genre, the way agents/publishers tend to favor, and when it doesn't have a focus or a true theme (aside from her love of Chicago, which, by the way, is poorly portrayed).
Let's not even get into the crude language that she uses to fill her pages. It is not tasteful, witty, or relevant; she just comes across as trying too hard to be cool. She tries and fails to be Joan Didion with a caustic edge. This book simply DID NOT work for her, and I am incredibly sorry I spent the $15 just because the cover was attractive and the description/reviews seemed captivating. -
I bought/read this book to show love/support to a Chicago author (my home town) although she is not home grown herself (Minneapolis). She, like so many young hipsters or whatever "label" they might willingly answer to migrated to the urban North Side neighborhoods of Wicker Park, Humboldt Park, Bucktown, Ukrainian Village, etc., where during recent years gentrification was happening apace. This is memoir/auto/such 'n such more like diary though flipping chronology back 'n forth by a few years like the mixes she spun as DJ. She's a local music/culture critic with some notable bylines in stuff like Chicago's "Reader" and blog/fanzine etc. She does capture some of a/the "Chicago vibe" and places where those enlightened youth groove to their own beats 'n eats. She rides her bike to get around and hangs with the boys a lot. You could read this at one sitting, never have to go back to clarify or perhaps look up a word or reference because it's clean unadorned prose. Nelson Algren said it all better but that was then - JH's now, is now then, too, 'cause the eyesore of a Trump Tower [Chicago] (before presidency), (laments in book), is not (just) a molehill compared to a Pres. in colossal turmoil.
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I'm just stealing all of Will's reads. But this one got me straight in the molecules and takes me right back to those aughts and doing similar but not nearly as cool life's work with friends in that beautiful scrappy town we call Chicago. Jessica Hopper is a bad bitch.
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We get it. You have friends and a social life. And you don't drink, so you have witty observations of a drunk city.
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When I was a college student in Wisconsin, I dreamed of living in the city of Jessica Hopper's "Night Moves." I may have moved to Chicago a few years too late, but this book put me right back in it and in stitches.
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this is a love letter to a Chicago that no longer exists and that, even if it was still around, I am nowhere NEAR cool enough to ever participate in. Parts of it were absolutely brilliant but on the whole, the non-linear organization and the fact that it is just journal entries made it confusing and a little shallow; brief vignettes/snapshots in her life, vs the overall picture. This book didn't really show Hopper's life, who she is/was and who her friends were, what she was working on or listening to etc etc, and it was never intended to, but I think that's the book I would rather have read than this one. Still very quick and enjoyable
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Like many other reviewers, I was drawn to this book as I too lived in or frequently visited Chicago during many of the years that Hopper writes about here (the '00s) I felt brief pangs of nostalgia with era-specific pop culture references and occasionally Chicago-specific references (our neighborhood wanderings rarely overlapped).
There are some occasional beautiful metaphors, but overall I found this work discohesive and hard to follow. -
This book has its moments (mostly that Hopper sites the authors you should actually read when wanting to read about a Chicago gone but not forgotten.) but most of it reminds me of my early 20’s and living in the exact same place at the same time. I laughed out loud at the cringey-ness of my younger self. Wicker Park. Ukrainian Village. The bands. The bars. The name dropping without references. Kill Hannah. 🤢
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True 4 star.
Some gems in this for sure. Made me want to move to Chicago more than I already did
“I wanted air conditioning and lobotomizing entertainment. Instead I got air conditioning and Spider Man 2.”
“Her shirt read ‘I FUCKED YOUR BOYFRIEND’ in Olde English lettering. I feel like the world is coarsening faster than I can handle.” -
A collection of almost interesting vignettes. This was probably the life I wanted to have when I was 16, but these people just seen kind of self-absorbed to me now. Would've liked to get more narrative detail, but that's not the format Hopper was going for. Didn't make me nearly as nostalgic as I feared, probably because this year kinda frames a lot of things I used to think were important as not so much after all.
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This was fun to read. A short, sweet love letter to living in the Midwest! I liked the small anecdotes and sometimes the way they were written even felt like poetry.
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Very evocative of a time and place that I wish I’d known myself. And I’d fallen a little more in love with Chicago by the end. The page about Tr*mp Tower made me gasp!
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not gonna lie this was pretty hard to finish.
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A writer details her love of Chicago while reminiscing about her and her friends’ twenty-something days gone by.
Now all I want to do is listen to Separation Sunday while riding my bike around Wicker Park. -
Couldn't get into this one.
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I waffled between totally digging the poetic vibe Hopper has going on through many of her entries and being turned off by her too-cool self-awareness. It's definitely worth the read, though you might not dig it. But you might. And it's short. So give it a whirl.
