Gordon

Everyone always says Kim Gordon’s cool, so let’s get that out of the way – it may be tiresome to read repeatedly but it’s true. The Sonic Youth bassist turned California visual artist’s first solo album, No Home Record (2019), was very good and incredibly cool. Not just “cool for a 66-year-old mom”, but a remarkable work full of vim and mordant fury, thrillingly modern hip-hop post-punk. Cool as Leslie Winer fronting the Velvet Underground. Four years on, The Collective similarly strives to extract magic from chaos, yet…

‘Taut” is one of the most overused words in book marketing. A novel is nothing if not “irresistibly taut”, “taut and emotionally charged”, or even “bow-string taut and visceral”. It’s become a glib descriptor – the likes of which Kathryn Scanlan would probably detest. Ironically, there’s not a writer today for whom the word is more appropriate.The author has earned a reputation for turning out slim volumes which trouble the boundary between novel and nonfiction. Her award-winning debut, Aug 9 – Fog, draws from a diary…

American author Kathryn Scanlan has won this year’s Gordon Burn prize for her “desperately consumable” novel about horse training.Kick the Latch is based on a series of interviews with Sonia, a horse trainer from the midwest. The novel is “a thundering achievement, liberated from hard lines of genre and form by a laser-focus on not just excavation, but building of voice,” said judging chair and journalist Terri White.Scanlan said it is “a thrill and an honour to receive this prize, which is unique in its recognition of…

During her three decades in Sonic Youth, Kim Gordon helped redefine the possibilities of rock & roll, from her unsettling voice and subway-rumble bass playing to the way she integrated her feminism and art-school background into the band’s lyrics and philosophy. Today, Gordon is pondering another road ahead as she prepares to tour behind her second post-Sonic Youth solo album, The Collective (out March 8 on Matador). “The band is really great,” she says, “but the hardest thing is all the decisions you have to make…

The Daft Hunks are two twentysomething YouTube influencers who don’t review music so much as react to it (their most-watched videos see them listening to Olivia Rodrigo and Lana Del Rey in real time). On their latest video they check out the new single from Kim Gordon. “She’s 70 years old and still doing it,” says one of the Hunks. “That’s crazy,” says the other.They begin playing Gordon’s new single, Bye Bye, its dread-inducing hip-hop beats scraping against each other as Gordon intones a scribbled to-do list. “Buy a…

In the 1960s and 70s, no serious rock fan viewed the drummer Jim Gordon with anything but awe. By the 80s, none of them viewed him with anything but contempt, a 180-degree turn that led to his virtual erasure from the culture. Even four decades later, when the veteran music journalist Joel Selvin first tried to sell publishers on a book meant to tell Gordon’s story with nuance and depth, they balked. “They would debate it for months and then say, ‘Nope, can’t do it,’” Selvin said. “It was almost impossible for them…

Those, and there are many of us, who balk at the Alpine crags and chasms of the numerous big Byron biographies, may happily take a stroll over the level ground of this unassuming yet impressively comprehensive volume. Stauffer, professor of English at the University of Virginia and president of the Byron Society of America, manages, with the aid of a choice handful of the poet’s vivid and hugely entertaining letters, to fashion a rounded portrait, venereal scars and all, of one of the prime movers of the Romantic…

Film-maker Jeanie Finlay paints a warm and generous portrait of a sympathetic subject: the American fat activist, podcaster and bestselling author Aubrey Gordon who became a viral sensation for her blog Your Fat Friend, in which she railed against the cruelty – sometimes unintentional and sometimes not – of people who can’t help deriding people like her. Her sprightly, witty, unrepentant arias of complaint earned her a fanbase that included Roxane Gay, James Corden and Adele. But it also got her trolling and vicious…

Posted in: Batman, Comics, Comics Publishers, Current News, DC Comics | Tagged: barbara gordon, batgossip, Batman #142Three weeks ago, Bleeding Cool ran a little bit of Batman gossip. And we always like to mark our own homework and check exactly how we did.Article Summary Batman #142 kicks off Joker: Year One with a look at the Joker's cyber imprisonment. Commissioner Barbara Gordon develops a virtual prison for the Joker's containment. Previews hint at a dramatic Joker escape and impact on Batman's…

In February 2016, Aubrey Gordon sat at her computer and pressed publish on a blog post. An open letter, it was titled A Request from Your Fat Friend. She decided not to sign it with her name. “I need less sympathy and more solidarity; less pity and more anger,” she wrote, about being denied medical care by doctors, and basic understanding from her thinner friends. Gordon describes herself as a fat woman, who at that time wore a US dress size 26 (about a UK size 30). “If you disapprove of yourself, vivisect your own body,…