Touching From A Distance is a tremendous gift to Joy Division fans and anyone else who might care about the star-making machine and its human toll.
This book is captivating as all hell, a peek behind the veil into who Ian Curtis was in his homelife, in addition to being just the guy who wrote Unknown Pleasures. After all, Deborah Curtis has an innate understanding of the man as she saw the madness closest-at-hand.
The early chapters concern, inevitably, the formative years of Ian and his future bandmates in New Order and Joy Division, respectively to their later larger fame. Ian was obsessed, as so many young men of that era, with Iggy and Bowie. Ms. Curtis does a fantastic job of letting us see how they came to be a married couple with a new child by the early age of 21 and the sad, tragic effect this had on a rising star in the shameless rock business. Ian wouldn’t live to see 24.
What’s most stunning here is that Deb Curtis seems to have inherited, inhabited even parts of Ian’s reality and hallow-graphically, rather than hagiographically, represented the many attributes of Ian’s poetic gifts and stunning sensitivity and window into the human condition. In point of fact, she proves herself equally gifted. God bless Ms. Curtis for what she endured in losing Ian and having her family shattered, and her return to her better senses and the legacy of inheritor/benefactor to her fair share of Joy Division’s not inconsiderable fortune. Lord knows she deserves all this and more for all she’s been through. My hat is off to her. Run, don’t walk to Barnes & Noble or your computer for excerpts.
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Oh, how I realized how I wanted time
Put into perspective, tried so hard to find
Just for one moment thought I’d found my way
Destiny unfolded, I watched it slip away
Now that I’ve realized how it’s all gone wrong -Twenty-Four Hours, Joy Division Closer Joy Division documentary film clip here: http://pitchfork.tv/week/joy-division/ |