{"id":11522,"date":"2025-09-09T10:45:07","date_gmt":"2025-09-09T10:45:07","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/11522\/"},"modified":"2025-09-09T10:45:07","modified_gmt":"2025-09-09T10:45:07","slug":"rachel-kushner-on-the-10th-anniversary-of-kim-gordons-girl-in-a-band-literary-hub","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/11522\/","title":{"rendered":"Rachel Kushner on the 10th Anniversary of Kim Gordon\u2019s Girl in a Band \u2039 Literary Hub"},"content":{"rendered":"

Perhaps it\u2019s the last ten years of conversation I\u2019ve had with the artist herself, ten years of building intimacy in fragments and flows, that inspire me to take Kim\u2019s own words, from the tender and beautifully frank new epilogue she has written for the anniversary edition of Girl in a Band<\/a>, and to go ahead and reformulate those words into a stanza that lets sky through the lines of her self-assessment:<\/p>\n

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I\u2019m an introvert
and yet I chase this feeling
which can only be conjured
with the mass of people in the dark<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve learned so much from Kim Gordon up close that I can\u2019t help but mimic what she does in order to talk about her. By phone, by text, in person, among others or just us, in a car or at the movies, in unspoken glances, in the lowest register of telepathic reverberation, I am always listening for Kim\u2019s reduction of reality to essence. She locates the thing within the thing, the part that is hidden under the literal, that which might speak multitudes in monosyllables.<\/p>\n

Like Iggy Pop overhearing the guttural patois of teenagers in a doughnut shop and later coming up with the lyrics of \u201cNo Fun,\u201d Kim takes from the ever-changing world and spits out shimmery coins. She surfs the inscrutable. (She also surfs for real, gets walloped by waves, stands back up.) She\u2019s interested in aspects of life that some of us find increasingly and maddeningly weird, weirdly difficult to grasp. Instead of turning away from the textures of tomorrow, Kim turns toward. \u201cIt\u2019s . . . abrasive,\u201d she said to me in warning, when describing The Collective, an album that would go on to hit the big time, even as it\u2019s uncompromising, loud and rude and mesmerically catchy, the sound of now.<\/p>\n

Once, upon returning home to L.A. from New York City, her report to me of the mood there: \u201cPeople are acting out.\u201d It\u2019s the kind of thing Andy Warhol would have said, but she didn\u2019t get it from him. She has her own gift for cutting to the chase, summing up the contemporary, or turning it on its side. People are acting out. Still, Warhol was a critical early reference. One of Kim\u2019s first artworks was a pair of boots she asked him to sign at his art opening in Venice, California. The boots were made of white canvas. In bearing Warhol\u2019s signature, they effectively became a painting.<\/p>\n

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Kim\u2019s own paintings of the last decade or so are often messages that function as image, scrawled words whose meaning is more like anonymous graffiti, the unconscious of the world revealed on the surface as a two-word slogan: \u201cDude War,\u201d \u201cProduct Owner,\u201d \u201cLarry Gagosian.\u201d (Readers of this memoir<\/a> will learn that Larry is not just top Doberman among art dealers but was once-upon-a-time hustling art books on a Westwood sidewalk, as well as \u201cschlocky, mass-produced prints\u201d in \u201ccheap, ugly metal frames\u201d that he hired Kim, just out of high school, to assemble.)<\/p>\n

Hourly employee, actress, muse\u2014even when she\u2019s cast in someone else\u2019s plot, Kim brings her gift for sly intervention. In Albert Oehlen\u2019s movie Bad Painter, she\u2019s a documentary filmmaker who acts more like a stern psychoanalyst, with German actor Udo Kier as her patient, a painter with a self-indulgent streak. She conjures the therapeutic structure by paring it down to an analyst\u2019s unforgiving stare. Richard Prince, in a video recording of his deposition for a copyright infringement lawsuit, tells the plaintiff\u2019s attorneys that he\u2019ll share a little-known secret: long ago he taught Kim Gordon to play guitar. It\u2019s a joke she\u2019s in on, even before I tell her about it, after watching the deposition. She and Richard, as she relays in this book, have been friends since the late seventies, when he was a mysterious loner who walked into the Annina Nosei Gallery, where she was working, with a portfolio of re-photographed watch advertisements, and Kim teased him for having mounted them in what she immediately recognized as Larry Gagosian\u2019s crappy aluminum frames.<\/p>\n

People tend to marinate in their own self-mythology. Kim does not.<\/p>\n

People tend to marinate in their own self-mythology. Kim does not. At a film screening we attended at a Santa Monica high school auditorium, she said quickly, flatly, as we chose our seats, \u201cI went here.\u201d At a theater on Wilshire, as we exited, \u201cThis is where I saw my first Godard movie.\u201d In Picture Window, a 2022 film directed by Kim and Manuela Dalle, she\u2019s in her L.A. house made strange and ersatz, doubling as a set, as she plays herself also made strange, almost an automaton. She naps, the camera static on her face; wakes; starts to move through a series of beauty rituals and domestic chores, a latter-day Jeanne Dielman.<\/p>\n

She\u2019s in a silky short robe, and like the real Kim, who is playing this zombie Kim, her feminine poise is blended with a certain androgyny: the slim muscular limbs, a calm unself-consciousness. She has the averted gaze of an introvert, a private person at whom others are compelled to stare. (It\u2019s this sense of a privacy, more than her features, the blond hair, that makes her and Kurt Cobain seem like siblings.) Sleepwalking Kim has a live electric guitar front-slung, the instrument creating sound, buzz, distortion, as it bumps against the bathtub she cleans. She moves as if unaware of the guitar, which gives electric feedback to the act of scouring, of vacuuming, of setting the table for lunch. Gives sound to the air in the rooms where Kim, and her double, live. Gives sound to solitude, a room tone her zombie double conjures.<\/p>\n

\u201cI chase this feeling\u201d is her telling us what drives her to be onstage. To move into a dream-space in front of strangers, \u201cthe mass of people there in the dark.\u201d Back in 1991 at the Cow Palace in San Francisco, when Sonic Youth opened for Neil Young, I was among that mass. \u201cPeople pay money to see others believe in themselves,\u201d Kim herself once wrote. That\u2019s what I\u2019d done. Now that I know her up close, decades later, I can say that when she\u2019s standing in front of the monitors, she\u2019s both someone else, transformed, and then again her truest self, tapping distortion pedals in her kitten-heeled boots, her drugstore fishnets, inlaid with rhinestones catching the lights. (She long ago realized, as she describes in these pages<\/a>, that \u201cif you wore sexier clothes, you could sell dissonant music more easily.\u201d) Up there, she\u2019s a million miles away, and yet unable to hide\u2014from other people, and from herself.<\/p>\n

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Distance is key to the power of her performance. But it\u2019s key to her offstage life as well. The shy need their space and they carry it around them, a kind of ethereal buffer zone, or maybe a lens, that lets the truth stream through and come into focus. The shy opt for space between words, for stretches of silence. When they do decide to speak, it\u2019s because they have something to say.<\/p>\n

___________________________<\/p>\n

\"girl<\/p>\n

Excerpted from Girl in a Band<\/a> (10th Anniversary Edition) by Kim Gordon. Copyright \u00a9 2015 by Kim Gordon. Foreword copyright \u00a9 2025 by Rachel Kushner. Reprinted by permission courtesy of Dey Street Books, an imprint of William Morrow\/HarperCollins Publishers<\/p>\n

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