Night Moves

August 1, 2018
Down but not out in the hardscrabble Chicago of the 2000s.Pitchfork writer Hopper (The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, 2015, etc.), who was also a music consultant for This American Life, freestyles her way through the past in this spirited random-access journal of her Chicago days in the early 2000s, when she struggled to get by while taking in the sights. There's the guy on the roof, peeing into a duct ("Does he know where that duct goes?...Is he a handyman who hates his job?...Is our duct next?"), and the disappointed evangelical who finally loses it. ("Whuddup, bitch? Why didn't you take a pamphlet? You can just ignore him like that? Huh? Beeitch!") Hopper mostly got around by bike or foot, subsisted on crummy jobs, attended concerts, and fell in and out of relationships that left her buoyant or bummed out ("I think he thought I was just being vindictive for that time he ruined 1997-2002"). The author doesn't just observe; she also asks the right questions: "You know how some nights you leave the house wanting to milk summer for all it's worth, but all you get is a good glimpse at the rotten soul of the universe as it exists in and outside of yuppie jazz discos?" The weather was often unforgiving--"everyone is feeling the deep funk of winter's bitch turn"--but the city was not: "It is profoundly comforting to live in a city that doesn't give a shit and loves you how you are, because it is every bit as marred, bereft, and cocky as you are."The nonsequential entries make it difficult to chart Hopper's growth, but that isn't her game. In this lively and funny collection, she bears vivid witness to an industrial punk landscape that is both crumbling and evolving beneath her bare feet.

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September 1, 2018
In the early aughts, Hopper (The First Collection of Criticism by a Living Female Rock Critic, 2015) was a twentysomething going to shows, DJing, and riding her bike in a Chicago that, in many ways, already no longer exists. This time capsule of a collection documents, in journal-like bits, all this in tandem with the growth of her career as a professional music critic. In one entry, she stops at Kinko's to pick up the latest copy of her zine, which she'd been making since the early 1990s, just before grabbing the new Chicago Reader, which contained one of her first mainstream published pieces, and feels the welcome weight of this yearned-for writing life. Delighting as much in the audience as in the concerts themselves; hanging out with her friends in crummy apartments and old warehouse districts in their blessed, pre-condo state; haunting her chosen city, along with the friendly ghosts of Carl Sandburg and Nelson Algren; or even just talking about the weather, Hopper is ever-quotable, gut-checkingly deep, and laugh-out-loud funny.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)