Tag Archives: Brit Marling

Kim Gordon & How To Rock On
At Every Age

Kim Gordon In Elle

In Elle Magazine’s May Women In Music Issue, Lizzy Goodman wrote a profile on Kim Gordon, founder and singer/songwriter/bass and guitar player of Sonic Youth, that put the lie to any notion any of us may have that it’s “too late,” that our opportunities have passed us by, that the choices we made in the early days of our youth have locked us in, like cement, that we aren’t still perfectly free to make a glorious,  noise for the next decades of our lives. She’s a reminder to rock on until the stone’s rolled over our grave or our bodies are set ablaze, whichever the case may be, and an exemplar of what it looks like, in the words of Fleetwood Mac, to “handle the seasons of [our] li[ves].”

Gordon at 59 has started a new band, is painting like a fiend, and she’s dating again, being squired about by younger men, a restauranteur, actor and architect among them, following the end of he long marriage to Thurston Moore, her Sonic Youth co-founder and bandmate, and father of her young adult daughter Coco. The marriage ended as these things sometimes do — a midlife crisis, an affair with another woman, counseling, Thurston’s unwillingness, or inability, to leave the other woman so as to knit his family back into a piece.  Gordon is honest about the toll this loss took, and it’s her honesty that makes this next turn of her professional and personal screw so instructive for the many of us who, having taken a hit or two by the time we were 30 or 40 or 50 or so, wonder not so much how we can get back up and keep going — there’s something innate in the human survival instinct that allows us to do that — but how we can rise like a phoenix from the ash and set this world ablaze.

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Lina Hanson & Kordo Doski’s
Revel Life

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This is the story of two beautiful immigrants who move to LA — from Sweden and Canada/Kurdistan respectively — and stake their claim on the American dream. It’s a real, Horatio Alger, pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps story, but in really fabulous boots, in this case worn by Swedish-born makeup artist and skincare entrepreneur Lina Hanson (who’s work has been featured in Vogue, Elle, W., InStyle and Harper’s Bazaar, and who’s painted the likes of Natalie Portman, Naomi Watts, Ewan McGregor and Javier Bardem, to name a few), and her actor/filmmaker/business partner husband Kordo Doski, fresh off of making Kinetic, his first feature film as writer/director/producer and star, filmed in his native Kurdistan. We caught up with the international couple in their Los Angeles home on the day before they wed.

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Arbitrage, Nicholas Jarecki’s Almost Masterpiece

I am a lover of the fall film. As a screenwriter, these are the kinds of films I aspired to write. Masterful, tour de force explorations of the human soul, in which characters undergo the kind of life-shattering experiences that force them to change. In these movies, the characters we root for nearly always rise to the occasion. They accept the challenge, they do battle (with themselves and the outside world), and often achieve their outside goals. But even if they do not, they are  transformed by the journey, made better for having endeavored toward some hard-to-attain goal — which makes for a happy ending of a whole ‘nother sort. I think here of a movie like Michael Clayton, writer/director Tony Gilroy’s beautiful masterpiece about a law firm fixer who comes face to face with his demons, and decides to wrestle them down. George Clooney’s Clayton looks who he’s been and what he’s been a part of in the eye. And though we can’t imagine how he fares after the end credits — what will he do for a living? who will he be now that his conversion experience is complete? — we leave the theatre or turn off the DVD believing that the low places have been made high.

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