Ferndale Public Library Staff Recommends: Jeff's Thought-Provoking Picks

This article was written by Ferndale Public Library Circulation Specialist Jeff Milo.

With me, music always comes first. So, first, let me tell you about First Stop Friday, our monthly local music showcase held at 7 p.m. in our Community Room. This program started 4 years ago, this month, organized and hosted by Circulation Director Kelly Bennett. (Note the flier featured above for program information and line-up.)

Pewter Cub 
If You Can Hold Your Breath
CD -P

Pewter Cub is a local shoegaze rock trio who performed the very first First Stop event, back in 2010. If You Can Hold Your Breath is a fine batch of nostalgia-stirring pop nocturnes, with intricate rhythms, spaced-out guitar solos and wonderfully wispy lead lullaby-bending vocals.

Now onto movies.

Woody Allen: A Documentary
DVD –Bio Allen

I just saw Blue Jasmine, the latest (among dozens) of films by Woody Allen, the unrelenting prickly poet of neurotic love, neurotic comedy and surreally-real daily dramas with eerily relatable characters. Get a peek into the way this writer/director regards himself, how he works, why he works and how he got into such a groove (a new movie ever year)! The guy has desk drawers filled with sticky-notes scribbled with hundreds of feasible scenarios to start up a story.

Wait, I should suggest a book right here. I’m still thinking about Elmore Leonard and how much I’m going to miss him and his work.

Out Of Sight
Elmore Leonard
Fic Leonard

The recently passed crime novelist was a poet and a local treasure. Leonard knew how to get in, situate the most stimulating, provocative and flamboyant characters, start them talking (and talking tersely), and get out with a smooth reflexed roll of the chamber, er, typewriter.

The man knew how to write. That’s what he was here to do. And now, after 87 years and only 40-some-odd novels (not to mention scads of short stories and screenplays), “the Dickens of Detroit” is deceased.

If I could pick just one book of his, it would be Out Of Sight, a fast-paced tale spiced with his characteristic knack for punchy repartee, where two people, a bank robbing beau and a federal marshall maiden, find love in the wrong place (the trunk of a sedan) at the right time (a nearly botched prison escape).

OK, back to movies.

The Black Power Mixtape 1967 – 1975 
Documentary
DVD Special Interest – 305.8 B

I checked-this DVD out as we neared the 50th anniversary of the March On Washington and the Rev. Martin Luther King’s “I Have A Dream Speech.” This was a sensational, startling and enlightening peek into the more aggressive attitudes seething through the civil rights movement, particularly the mindset of activists like Stokely Carmichael (eventual “Honorary Prime Minister” of the Black Panther Party), who outspokenly questioned (even doubted), with all due respect, King’s promotion of non-violent passive resistance.

With the Roots’ Questlove composing the soundtrack and interviews featuring Harry Belafonte, Erykah Badu and Talib Kweli, this is all part of the recovered footage of Swedish journalists who came to America during these years to document the civil rights movement.  

Sapphires
Comedy S

For a bit of history with much more levity (and plenty of seminal 1960s-era Stax Records soul music,) check out this inspiring (and comedic) musical that was inspired by the true story of a quartet of Australian Aboriginal women (sisters Laurel Robinson and Lois Peeler, with their cousins Beverly Briggs and Naomi Mayers), who went on to tour Vietnam in the late '60s, as a performing vocal quartet, to entertain U.S. troops. Chris O’Down (Pirate Radio, Bridesmaids) stars as their flakey yet charming manager and the story is shifted a bit – but what dazzles most of all is the vocal talent of the four young actresses portraying the sisters. Come check it out, right now, and start dancing! 

Alright then, time to get a bit heavy, again.

Dirty Wars
Jeremy Scahill 
355.009 S

I can thank Jeremy Scahill for dropping the scales from my eyes. Scahill is national security correspondent for The Nation magazine[1] and author of Blackwater: The Rise of the World’s Most Powerful Mercenary Army. In case you missed the film documentary of the same name / subject, this book documents the rise of the drones. His documentation of how (increasingly so) military leaders and heads of state rely on covert “extra-judicial” killings of “combatants” by means of either drone strikes (something you can learn extensively about inside its pages) or the Joint Special Operations Command. Are we living in a state of perpetual war? 

Orange Is The New Black: My Life In A Women’s Prison
Piper Kerman
365.7 K

There’s a lot of disconcerting news of fresh scandal, reprehensible atrocity and woeful statistics hitting us on a daily basis – perhaps you, like myself, let some of the steam off by way of streaming episodes of the new quirky and amazing Netflix comedy/drama Orange Is The New Black. “Wait, it’s based on a book?” said my brother, after reading the end credits. Yes, it’s based on a book. Come check it out.  

While we’re talking about books, again – this next title is current contender to be my “favorite book of the year.”

House of Rumor
Jake Arnott
Fic A

A fictionalized half-history of the formation of modern sci-fi literature, this is subtly a spy-fy hybrid, laced with sinewy espionage and a rewardingly head-scratching mystery that takes decades to solve. You’ll see World War II, the invention of James Bond, quantum mechanics, UFOs, L. Ron Hubbard, the rise of rocket technology and even David Bowie cross the stage before the final curtain falls. 

Punk Rock Jesus
Sean Murphy
Graphic Novels – M

What if a corporation artificially inseminated a young, naïve, desperate woman, creating a clone of Jesus Christ using DNA taken from the Shroud of Turin and turned the Second Coming into a reality TV show? But if your “star” rebels, breaks loose and starts fronting an anarchic punk rock group that tours the world – what mayhem might ensue? 

The Giver
Lois Lowry
J-Fic L

I’m finally reading this dystopian, coming-of-age, young-adult drama done with pure elegance (the kind of book everyone you know seems to have already read and reveres) and it’s not disappointing. If you haven’t read it yet, I won’t say a word – I’ll just implore you to pick it up and see where it takes you. If you have read it, though, then seek out another such title, a title you’ve been meaning to read your whole life and make this the week you finally open up its cover and read past its opening sentence.