Theoretical Girls, Kim Gordon, and The Pictures Generation

Theoretical Girls, "U.S. Mille" b/w "You Got Me" (7-inch), 1978, at The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984.  Photo: 16 Miles   [more]

Theoretical Girls, [Detail of note of lyrics for] "U.S. Mille" b/w "You Got Me" (7-inch), 1978, at The Pictures Generation, 1974-1984.  Photo: 16 Miles   [more]

"People pay to see others believe in themselves. Maybe people don’t know whether they can experience the erotic or whether it exists only in commercials..."   - Kim Gordon, "I'm Really Scared When I Kill in My Dreams," Artforum, 1983.

"I don't even know if it's true. But like Kim's performance of 'I Wanna Be Your Dog,' it was a scary thought. And I thought, this woman knows stuff that I don't know."   - Greil Marcus, Interview, Addicted to Noise, 1997.

I did not know that Kim Gordon got the title of her essay from the lyrics of a Theoretical Girls song.  Thank you, The Pictures Generation, 1974 - 1984, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art.  Also, how cool is the vintage, 1978 Scientology shout-out in "U.S. Mille"?

Listen: "You Got Me"

Debord Films Available

The sectors of a city are, at a certain level, legible. But the meaning they have had for us, personally, is incommunicable, like the clandestinity of private life, of which we possess nothing but pitiful documents. ... And only a few encounters were like signals emanating from a more intense life, a life that has not really been found.

- Guy Debord, Critique de la séparation (1961); translation from Greil Marcus, Lipstick Traces: A Secret History of the Twentieth Century (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 1989), p. 433.

UBUWEB has a brilliant collection of Debord's films available.