It doesn’t come out for another few months, but the artist and critic Gary Indiana has written a memoir, and it is glorious. I think he’s not as well known as he should be, at least in my circles. I keep trying to talk about the book with people I know, and they all frown and say, “The name sounds familiar,” not getting the joke of it or, therefore, why it sounds familiar to them. I probably shouldn’t quote from the book publicly yet, but I’m just going to leave this here for now, in case anyone needs it:
“The audience was as much the show as the music, raw sound that drilled into the brain and was less important than what the players wore, what they did with their bodies on stage. Everyone competed for the most fucked-up reputations, the most suicidal carelessness with drugs, the most gratuitously hostile behavior. Yet punk musicians and followers I got to know personally were touchingly sweet, highly intelligent, and un-materialistic to a utopian degree. Damaged in one way or another, but who isn’t?”
He’s writing here, of course, about punk, which he experienced when it came to Los Angeles in the late 70s. Before that, he lived in a crumbling hippie mansion in Haight Ashbury. He’s also lived in Cuba on and off for many years. So far, he’s had a kind of extraordinary life, and he is so fucking smart and funny—his writing voice is wonderful company.
(The book’s back matter describes him as caustic, but I don’t see that. He probably wrote the back matter himself because the book’s author usually does, I think, so maybe he’s the one who thinks of himself that way. He comes across as far too thoughtful in his analysis of things to be caustic. He is breath-takingly direct though, I’ll give him that. He doesn’t seem to flinch at all when he has to say something difficult, or unflattering; his descriptions of his family are priceless. But there’s a tiny, chest-ripping tenderness that telegraphs across every mention of the stray cats he sees on the street in Havana or in L.A., even though he usually doesn’t do much more than notice them and describe their looks. But you can’t fool me, Gary Indiana. If you love lost, scrappy little animals, then you love everything that’s good.)
Indicative Mood 