Kim Gordon, formerly a key member of Sonic Youth and now half of Body/Head, will have her memoir, “Girl in a Band,” published on February 24, 2015.
From the press release:
Often described as aloof, Kim Gordon truly opens up in Girl in a Band. Telling the story of her childhood, her life in art, her move to New York City, her love affairs, her marriage, her relationship with her daughter, and her band, this is a rich and beautifully written memoir. At the heart of the book is the examination of what partnership means—and what happens when it dissolves. An atmospheric look at the New York of the 80s and 90s that gave rise to Sonic Youth, as well as the Alternative revolution in popular music that Sonic Youth helped usher in, paving the way for Nirvana, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins and many other acts. One of the most revered people in modern rock and roll, Kim Gordon is also a highly regarded fashion icon, visual artist, and the source of much fascination.
[I just published my rock ‘n’ roll novel, True Love Scars.” Rolling Stone has a great review of my book in the new issue. Read it here. There’s info about True Love Scars here.]
This album, Hard Rain – A Tribute to Bob Dylan – Vol.1, has some great covers.
Check out Bill Kirchen’s amazing “Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues” for example.
Uncut magazine released it May, 2002.
Check it out.
Tracklist
01. 0:00:00 The Waterboys – Girl From The North Country
02. 0:04:16 Bill Kirchen – Just Like Tom Thumb’s Blues
03. 0:09:48 Johnny Marr – Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right
04. 0;14:10 Howard Devoto / Luxuria – She’s Your Lover Now
05. 0:17:41 Thea Gilmore – I Dreamed I Saw St. Augustine
06. 0:22:08 The Band – When I Paint My Masterpiece
07. 0:26:05 The Hollies – The Times They Are A-Changin’
08. 0:29:18 Robert Palmer – I’ll Be Your Baby Tonight
09. 0:32:37 Cat Power – Paths Of Victory
10. 0:35:52 Thurston, Kim And Epic – Sitting On A Barbed Wire Fence
11. 0:39:36 Mary Lou Lord – You’re Gonna Make Me Lonesome When You Go
12. 0:43:08 Manfred Mann – With God On Our Side
13. 0:47:30 Cassandra Wilson – Shelter From The Storm
14. 0:52:36 The Nice – She Belongs To Me
15. 1:04:19 Paul Weller – I Shall Be Released
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –
The wronged woman. Illustration in the Wall Street Journal.
Things seemed to be going well for Thurston Moore.
He was living in England.
He was making music.
His split with Kim Gordon was behind him, and her comments in the press had faded away.
Moore himself had remained mum on the subject. His personal life was his personal life.
And then Moore decided to say a few words about the split and his current love, Eva Prinz, who edited art books for Moore’s Ecstatic Peace publishing house.
I’m in a really romantic place with Eva; we’ve kinda been a couple for close to six years. A lot of those years, nobody was very aware of it except us. The cat’s been out of the bag a while now…
I’ve had some life issues. In your 40s and 50s things can change in ways that upset the order of things that have been established over 25 years-plus of marriage. It’s really distressing. You have to work through it, it’s very personal and I don’t really talk about it so much. It’s just something I work through in my own world.
I’m involved in a really sweet relationship, and it really does make me happy; it truly does. But I’ll always have that experience of sadness that a separation brings, especially one that was as important, not just to me but everybody around us. There have been some fall-outs, but that’s to be expected. It’s pretty heavy.
Oops.
Big mistake, dude.
On Wednesday the feminist website Jezebel ran a post with this headline: “Thurston Moore Confirms He Is a Dick”
Aging indie rock cool guy Thurston Moore spoke publicly for the first about the end of his marriage to ageless indie rock cool lady Kim Gordon to a UK magazine recently. And, predictably, he sounds like a dickhole.
Moore and Gordon’s 2011 split killed what little belief in love remained in the jaded hearts of Generation X. But what made things worse were widespread allegations that Moore had been fucking around on Gordon for years with a much younger woman, allegations which Moore has now confirmed in an interview with a British mag.
Flavorwire’s Tom Hawking lamented Moore’s admitted philandering, claiming that Moore had disingenuously presented himself as a counterexample to the dickswinging rock n’ roller only to make a fool of Kim Gordon, who is still possibly the coolest woman in the world. There’s also this:
“It’s that, by the sounds of it, he was cheating on Gordon for years, and seems to feel the need to tell the world about this. It’s that by his own timeline, he may well have already been getting it on with his new love when he and Gordon appeared inBust’s annual Love Issue in 2007, talking about how great their marriage was. And so on.”
Not to let this whole thing become yesterday’s news, Moore posted this on Facebook:
Jezebel is gender fascism. By not having any real critical facility to understand, in their case, men in relationship to women (presumably them) they opt to promote hate by imperialist blather. By couching it in feminism is a distinct lack of class, but i’m sure they’re having a bit of online fun and when they grow up maybe they’ll glean the complexities of real life and love.
Stereogum ended one of their posts on the subject like this:
Well, uh, I’m sorry you’ll have that experience of sadness, dude. I’m sorry it’s “heavy.” But based on all available evidence, is there anyone who’s not Team Kim on this one?
No one but Thurston Moore and Kim Gordon will ever really know what happened, and why it happened. It certainly looks bad for Moore, but who are we to judge?
I hope that going forward, both Kim Gordon and Thurston Moore are able to move on and enjoy their lives.
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –
Kim Gordon’s collection of essays, “Is It My Body?: Selected Texts,” will be published by Sternberg Press later this month.
The book collects essays Gordon wrote for various publications including Artforum in the 1980s and early 1990s.
From the Sternberg Press website:
Throughout the 1980s and early ’90s, Kim Gordon—widely known as a founding member of the influential band Sonic Youth—produced a series of writings on art and music. Ranging from neo-Conceptual artworks to broader forms of cultural criticism, these rare texts are brought together in this volume for the first time, placing Gordon’s writing within the context of the artist-critics of her generation, including Mike Kelley, John Miller, and Dan Graham. In addressing key stakes within contemporary art, architecture, music, and the performance of male and female gender roles, Gordon provides a prescient analysis of such figures as Kelley, Glenn Branca, Rhys Chatham, Tony Oursler, and Raymond Pettibon, in addition to reflecting on her own position as a woman on stage. The result—Is It My Body?—is a collection that feels as timely now as when it was written. This volume additionally features a conversation between Gordon and Jutta Koether, in which they discuss their collaborations in art, music, and performance.
-– A Days of the Crazy-Wild blog post: sounds, visuals and/or news –-
On November 13 2013 a benefit for ISSUE Project Room (IPR) staring Kim Gordon’s duo with Bill Nace, Body/Head, was held at the ISSUE Project Room in New York.
At ISSUE’s website is this info about ISSUE: “ISSUE Project Room is a pioneering performance center, presenting time-based work by emerging and established experimental artists that expand the boundaries of creative practice and stimulate critical dialogue about art and culture in the broader community.”
There’s more info about the benefit, which in addition to Body/Head, featured Ikue Mori, I.U.D. and J. Mascis, here.
Body/Head: Gordon and Nace in Matador promo shot. Cool shades.
Kim Gordon, now in the duo Body/Head with Bill Nace, provided this Lou Reed tribute to Salon.
Lou was the first real antihero in rock. As a 14-year-old hearing the Velvet Underground for the first time, I acted out the lyrics to a song about heroin when I didn’t even know what it was. But I thought it was cool and I knew it was different than anything I’d heard before. Lou went about self-destruction and creation with the same exploratory innocence of a 14-year-old girl rebelling against a role she doesn’t want … won’t accept … to be a conventional boy, to be a conventional girl … With Lou’s death I feel a certain panic that the same innocence that comes with any urge to make something and get lost in it along the way has left with him, leaving the rest of us feeling way too adult.
Members of Sonic Youth and Arcade FIre play an 11 minute version of “All Tomorrow’s Parties.”
Also, below is a crazy, juvenile film made in 1987 featuring Sonic Youth called “Lou Believers.” It’s terrible, but…
Back in the ’80s Kim Gordon wrote for Artforum and made visual art (as she still does) along with making music in Sonic Youth. Here’s an art film, “Making the Nature Scene,” she shot at Danceteria, a New York club that no longer exists. According to Spin, filmmaker/designer Chris Habib digitized the film for Gordon.
Habib writes on the Vimeo website where the video is posted: “excellent video i found in my sonic youth archive. i digitized it for kim during her CLUB IN THE SHADOWS exhibition at kenny schachter’s old space in the west village.
“shot at DANCETERIA in new york c.1985.
“judith barry, roli mosimann, alexa hill, wharton tiers, and chasler aided kim in the production of the film. tony oursler edited it. the ICA & artists space helped fund it.”
