Had Bunheads on in the background of making breakfast the other morning; half-watching it, I could tell it wasn’t one of their better episodes, a kinda bottle episode thing set in the ballet studio. Fell onto the side of bad quippy, with inexplicable Tommy Lee Jones jokes by teenage boys. Then - and it felt like all of a sudden - I heard this song coming on, “I Predict” by Sparks, which sounded a little like Sparks to me (but I know their new wave-ier stuff) if it was filtered through a clompy, stomping, big beat Queen tube, and since it’s Bunheads, it was this Magic Mike-y group dance with tiny teenagers in silhouette where everyone’s playing a miner in a hardhat.
Little did I know that the video for “I Predict” is equally weird, it’s David Lynch’s very first music video, featuring one of the Sparks stripping to eager customers. MTV banned it because of Ron Spark’s Hitler mustache.
The Dum Dum Girls covering Big Star’s “September Girls” is a recipe for maximum dreaminess.
Starbucks graffiti, “Call Me Maybe,” 2012
The Otis Redding rabbit hole. Fall into it!
Just Kim
In the wake of Patti Smith and Just Kids, do you think that editors are calling Kim Gordon, every day, to ask her to write her own memoir? I also feel, strongly, that if Kim Gordon did her own version of L.C.D. Soundsystem’s “Losing My Edge,” it would be pretty epic.
It was fun to watch Gordon at Tom Tom Magazine’s Women in Media/Women in Music panel - the conversation must’ve felt to Gordon like her “Sacred Trickster” video. I would love to, at some point, go to a “Kim Gordon You Are The Coolest How?” panel, where she could talk about collaboration with Thurston and maintaining a relationship and stuff like that. It would be interesting. But what struck me about Gordon was that you got the idea that music was more of a side thing to her visual art, which makes sense. It’s what she was trained in.
She’s so beautiful, too. Cheekbones of glass. There’s something about her beauty that reminds me of Betty Draper. Maybe it’s the cheekbones and blondeness, the cool. Maybe it’s that she got out, she escaped, with the specter of a perfect wife and mother probably hanging over her head. The opposite of rock. I want to know more. She’s mysterious!
And Gordon did not pick up an instrument until 28. Nor did Patti Smith. And isn’t that fact inspiring?