Do Everything in the Dark

Do Everything in the Dark

Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana

A dark yet compassionate comedy of art aspirations and friendships come to naught.First published in 2003, Gary Indiana’s turn-of-the-millennium novel traces the lives of a loosely connected group of New York artists and the dissolution of their scene. During the summer of 2001, the narrator of Do Everything in the Dark, a gallery curator, receives intermittent dispatches from his far-flung friends—many of whom resemble well-known figures in the art and intellectual worlds—who are spread out across the globe, from Istanbul to Provincetown to Santa Fe. Seeking various reprieves from a changed New York, the long-festering, glossed-over incompatibilities of these aging bohemians blossom into exotic and unbearable relief. Beneath the contemporary excesses Indiana chronicles, we can see the outlines of the earlier New York bohemia captured by Dawn Powell.Arguably Indiana’s most intimate, internal, and compassionate work to date, Do...
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Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World

Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World

Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana

After 32 Soup Cans, neither America nor the art world would ever be the same. Gary Indiana offers a witty and opinionated biography of a momentous work of art--and its deeply troubled creator. In the summer of 1962, Andy Warhol unveiled 32 Soup Cans in his first solo exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles--and sent the art world reeling. The responses ran from incredulity to outrage; the poet Taylor Mead described the exhibition as "a brilliant slap in the face to America." The exhibition put Warhol on the map--and transformed American culture forever. Almost single-handedly, Warhol had collapsed the centuries-old distinction between "high" and "low" culture, and created a new and radically modern aesthetic. In Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World, the dazzlingly versatile critic Gary Indiana draws on interviews with many members of Warhol's Factory, as well as his own personal recollections of Warhol himself, to tell the story of the genesis and impact of this iconic work of art. With energy, wit, and tremendous perspicacity, Indiana recovers the exhilaration and controversy of the Pop Art Revolution--and the brilliant, tormented, and profoundly narcissistic figure at its vanguard.From Publishers WeeklyThe latest from cultural critic and author Indiana (Utopia's Debris) explores the legacy of Andy Warhol through his most famous and, arguably, groundbreaking work, 1962's Campbell's Soup Cans, a group of 32 20"x16" paintings of the ubiquitous red-and-white canned staple. Beginning with a brief look at Warhol's impoverished childhood, Indiana focuses in on the creation and impact of the famed Soup Cans, resulting is an exhaustive report on the Pop Art movement and its relationship to contemporary culture, featuring vibrant commentary on the way a single piece can stand in for an entire oeuvre. Indiana is highly knowledgeable regarding the art world and Warhol's work, and can assume a similarly sophisticated level of understanding in his reader; as such, he will probably leave casual fans behind with dashed-off discussion of the art scene at large. For those already fluent in the man or the movement, Indiana's in-depth look at Soup Cans is a welcome refresher on the power of a single vision not just to make a remarkable career, but to recast the world in a new light. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. ReviewNewsweek“Engrossing”Buffalo News“Elegant and impressive...[a] witty, smart, near-definitive consideration of Warhol.”San Diego Tribune“Gary Indiana’s Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World is a fresh portrait of the artist...No one has dissected Warhol’s complex personality better. And no one has written more concisely and accessibly about him.”Lincoln Journal Star“Heartily recommend[ed]...I’ve got a shelf of Warhol books - biographies, essays, exhibition catalogs - and I’ve seen dozens of exhibitions of his work. Indiana’s book added something to my knowledge and understanding of Warhol, which is saying something.”Baltimore City Paper“A thoughtful look at the late Pop artist’s defining work...in narrowing his focus, the author locates and captures Warhol’s essence.”Liberty Press“Indiana is able to give a fresh and new perspective on one of America’s most enigmatic 20th-century artistic figures, beyond any other biography heretofore.”
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I Can Give You Anything But Love

I Can Give You Anything But Love

Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana

The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Described by the London Review of Books as one of "the most brilliant critics writing in America today," Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments. With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary Indiana has composed a literary, unabashedly wicked, and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work--from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post--summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality. Interspersed throughout his vivid recollections are present-day chapters set against the louche culture and raw sexuality of Cuba, where he has lived and worked occasionally for the past fifteen years. Connoisseurs will recognize in...
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Horse Crazy

Horse Crazy

Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana

"This story, if it is one, deserves the closure of a suicide, perhaps even the magisterial finality of what is usually called a novel, but the remnants of that faraway time offer nothing more than a taste of damp ashes, a feeling of indeterminacy, and the obdurate inconclusiveness of passing time." So writes the unnamed narrator of Horse Crazy, looking back on a season of madness and desire. The first novel from the brilliant, protean Gary Indiana, Horse Crazy tells the story of a thirty-five-year-old writer for a New York arts and culture magazine whose life melts into a fever dream when he falls in love with the handsome, charming, possibly heroin-addicted, and almost certainly insane Gregory Burgess. In the derelict brownstones of the Lower East Side in the late eighties, among the coked out restauranteurs and art world impresarios of the supposed "downtown scene," the narrator wanders through the fog of passion. Meanwhile, the AIDS epidemic is spreading through the city, and...
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Gone Tomorrow

Gone Tomorrow

Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana

The narrator of Gone Tomorrow is an actor who has been cast in an unlikely art film set in Colombia. But from the moment he arrives at the airport in Bogotá, only to witness a policeman beat a beggar half to death for no apparent reason, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grasvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the incomparably beautiful Michael Simard doesn't seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film's shady financier appears to be sleeping with his mother, and a serial killer is skulking around the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration comes to nearby Cali. But once the fiesta comes to an end, all that's left is the memory and the narrator's insistence on telling the tale. "Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels," writes...
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