DAYDREAM COCKTAIL NATION

I’ve been in California.  On the plane on way there I read, belatedly, Kim Gordon’s Girl In a Band.   I thought the earliest parts, about her family, were the best, especially about her father, Calvin Wayne Gordon.

She writes, "He’d grown up doing chores beside his mother and sister – cooking and gardening - pretty much anything involving his hands – and the habit had stayed with him.”

This included making cocktails. “During cocktail hour which my mom and he never missed, he made amazing martinis and Manhattans with a chilled martini shaker kept in the freezer at all times. This was the late fifties and the early sixties - people took their cocktail hours seriously.”

Kim, some of us still do. The family spent some of their weekends fishing on the Klamath River, just south of the Oregon border, and stayed in a rented trailer.  There are photographs and film of these weekends apparently, though I’ve never seen any. 

“Jackie goes around taking photos, then they go for double martinis at Steelhead a lodge nearby where they went to drink at night ... In one of the videos – it must be 1986 – I show up and Thurston trails in, though usually he liked to hole up in our camper, reading, until happy hour.”

You know, that doesn’t surprise me one bit. 

EATING UNPREPARED

Did you ever want to see Kim Gordon making guitar noise and reading aloud a recipe for corn with miso butter and bacon?  Well no, I can’t say that I did either but when the opportunity arose, how could I pass it up?  She looked liked this:

And if you go if you go to Lucky Peach on twitter you can actually see and hear a short clip of it.

The event was Eating Out Loud, organized by Lucky Peach magazine.  A big crowd - maybe a thousand people - sat in the Million Dollar Theater and listened to readings, and then afterwards milled around in the Grand Central Market, none of them/us entirely sure what to expect. 

Among the good stuff Jonathan Gold read a piece titled “Fallen Fruit,” first published in Slake magazine, Amelia Gray looked as though she might explode while reading a short story titled “Date Night,” and David Chang was scheduled to read “Old Masters” by Thomas Bernhard (wow!) but bottled out and instead read a piece about how great the food is in Tokyo.

We all got given a goody bag which contained one of these things, a plastic splayed - part spoon, part fork, part knife (or I suppose literally “blade”):

 And you know, inspired by Ms Gordon, I thought it might be great to stick this splade between my guitar strings, give it a tug and crank out some guitar abuse.

This is known in my set as "prepared guitar."  But in fact the noise was a bit tame - I think the splade probably needs to be metal, preferably heavy. 

 

THE SANDWICH OBSESSION CONTINUES

Life, being what it is, I had never heard of a Chipwich until today.  My ignorance, of course, and again an all-American form.  As the name suggests, it’s another version of the sandwich, and I had some vision that it might be potato chips between two slices of bread (a sandwich which does not have, and definitely, needs a name, perhaps The Nicholson).  Anyway, I was clearly letting my imagination run away with me.  The Chipwich, as I’m sure everybody but me knows, is a slab of ice-cream between two chocolate chip cookies.

It’s a fine idea, but one I’d have thought that didn’t need much “inventing,” however, one Richard LaMotta is credited as its begetter. Wikipedia tells me that the Chipwich date back to 1981 when LaMotta invented the thing and began a guerilla marketing campaign, "in which he trained and enlisted 100 street cart vendors (mostly students) to sell the Chipwich on the streets of New York City."

Now, the only reason I’ve heard of the Chipwich even now is because I just read the article about Kim Gordon in the New Yorker, and how deeply tragic it is that she and Thurston Moore have split up, but there’s kind of an upside because she’s “been working on being more open.  On being more comfortable with who I am.” 

The article tells us that when she and Thurston got married in 1984, she was working in a copy shop and he “manned a Chipwich stand in mid-town Manhattan.” Now, we all know that the Internet is in many respects pure evil, but one thing it does allow you to do is a run a search for “Thurston Moore Chipwich” and come up with this deeply wonderful image of the boy himself. 

And here is a picture of the couple, and the rest of the band, in happier days, in cartoon form, eating together.  Ah, memories.

KIM GORDON'S SARNIES

The scan above is suddenly popping up all over the Internet.  Or maybe it’s always been there and I only just noticed. It’s from Sassy magazine, September 1992, in which Kim Gordon gives her recipe for “Tuna Tacos Culver City.”  Apparently “Eat This” was a regular feature.

Clearly Kim’s fantasy that tacos are less calorific that sandwich bread is indeed a fantasy, but lord knows she’s always looked trim and attractive so whatever she’s eating it’s not bulking her up.  In fact I occasionally feel she looks as though somebody should give her a sandwich.  Not Thurston Moore, obviously, at this point in marital history.

Did I ever tell you about the time I stood in line next to Kim Gordon, waiting for the lavatory at Tonic, in New York?  Witty exchanges with the stars?  I let her go first - she was next on the bill, and hell I wanted her to get on stage and start.  “I’m quick she said.”  And she didn’t lie.