Quotes from Kim Gordon

if you have to hide your hypersensitivity, are you really a "strong woman"?

Fluxus explored art as a process, using the viewer, or the audience, to complete the work. It asked, What can art be?

When people ask me what L.A. was like in the sixties, I tell them there wasn't as much terrible stucco as there is today: no mini malls with their approximation of Spanish two-story buildings, no oversized SUVs bulging out of parking-space lines. What used to say "Spanish-style" is now something diseased looking. Nobody seems to know how to stucco anymore.

We'd have to start wearing long wigs and eye shadow and glitter pants." "Okay, okay, well, that's life,

Entre as vidas que vivemos e as vidas que desejamos viver fica o lugar em nossas mentes onde a maioria de nós realmente vive.

É preciso tão pouco tempo para forjar uma vida.

I wonder whether you can truly love, or be loved back, by someone who hides who they are.

side. He began ranting about the fur coats they

when my family headed out west, like any birth canal Rochester was forgotten.

Women make natural anarchists and revolutionaries, because they've always been second-class citizens, kinda having had to claw their way up.

Once Dan told me he wished he could make art that was like a Kinks song. (A lot of artists listen to music while they work, and many think, Why can't I make art that looks as intense as the sounds I'm hearing? I don't have an answer.)

Back then, and even now, I wonder: Am I "empowered"? If you have to hide your hypersensitivity, are you really a "strong woman"? Sometimes another voice enters my head, shooing these thoughts aside. This one tells me that the only really good performance is one where you make yourself vulnerable while pushing beyond your familiar comfort zone. I liken it to having an intense, hyper-real dream, where you step off a cliff but don't fall to your death. Though

Marriage is a long conversation, someone once said, and maybe so is a rock band's life. A few minutes later, both were done.

There were others of course - The Velvet Undergound, the Doors- who took risks in the 1960s, when no one knew where any of it was going. Before them were the Beats and before the Beats the avant-garde artists, the futurists, Fluxus, and before that, the blues, outsider music, a mourning for what's expected but will never happen, so why not dance and play and forget for a few moments that we're all alone anyway?

still carry around with me a battle between working conceptually—art based on some overriding idea—and my pure carnal sensory love of materials.

The Westway, the old strip club on Clarkson Street, is still there, but today it's owned by a hipster restaurant entrepreneur who caters to the ironic cultural lifestylers, more fashion world than art, people who are "cool" because they live in New York.

Participant Inc. gallery,

Mulholland Drive has more filmic and real-life drama than any other road in L.A., as well as being the favored route of the Manson family for crosstown travel and creepy crawling exploits . . .

An unending kiss--that's all we ever wanted to feel when we paid to hear someone play.

What is a star? Is stardom a kind of suspended adulthood? Is it a place beyond good and evil? Is a star a person you need to believe in--a daredevil, a risk-taker, a person who goes close to the edge without falling?

But no place gives you everything. I'm equally mistrustful of the energy bursts New York gives you, which fragment and exhaust you. Living there gives you a phony sense of self-importance and confidence. If you're at all anxious, the city acts out your anxiety for you, leaving you feeling strangely peaceful.

How was she not the quintessential woman in our culture, compulsively pleasing others in order to achieve some degree of perfection and power that's forever just around the corner, out of reach? It was easier for her to disappear, to free herself finally from that body, to find a perfection in dying.

The city has seasons, but they're muted, and the transition of summer to fall to winter has more to do with changing temperatures than it does with the leaves turning, or the trees getting bare, or the grass going from brown to green, or getting older.

All the hours and years since then inside vans, on buses, in airplanes and airports, in recording studios and lousy dressing rooms and motels and hotels were possible only because of the music that sustained that life. Music that could only have come out of New York's bohemian downtown art scene and the people in it