Let It Bleed: Essays 1985-1995

by Gary Indiana

Gary Indiana's essays, like his fiction, take no prisoners. In his fifteen years of writing cultural criticism, he has altered the way we look at ourselves and our society. Ignoring good taste, Indiana writes discomforting home truths, because his views of home are unique and never comfortable. His insights are acute, brash, bracing, intelligent; his subjects and speculations range from Rodney King's beating to Mary McCarthy's friendship with Hannah Arendt to the presidential campaign of 1992. Let It Bleed collects for the first time some of the most engaging, provocative, and exciting writing that has been seen and produced in a long time.

Genres: Essays, Nonfiction, Criticism

300 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1995

About the author

Gary Hoisington, known as Gary Indiana, was an American writer, actor, artist, and cultural critic. He served as the art critic for the Village Voice weekly newspaper from 1985 to 1988. Indiana is best known for his classic American true-crime trilogy, Resentment, Three Month Fever: The Andrew Cunanan Story, and Depraved Indifference, chronicling the less permanent state of "depraved indifference" that characterized American life at the millennium's end. In the introduction to the recently re-published edition of Three Month Fever, critic Christopher Glazek has coined the phrase 'deflationary realism' to describe Indiana's writing, in contrast to the magical realism or hysterical realism of other contemporary writing.

Reviews

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Indiana's writing is both a sharper scalpel and a heavier mallet than you could find nowadays, but a lot of the types of essays presented in this collection have been a bit outmoded since. In some cases, that could be seen as prescience (his essay on the retirement of Johnny Carson reads like it could be a post-Weinstein indictment of the masculine enterainment industry) while other times they can be a bit cruel (his travelogues to EuroDisney and Branson are fun, guilty eviscerations of low culture, but someone like DFW is better at understanding both why those places are evil AND alluring to people). Overall, this is a standout essay collection, and I'm excited to dig into one of his novels next to get a fully rounded picture of Gary Indiana.

[Charlie Cray · Rating 4 out of 5]

Those who never had the pleasure of reading the Village Voice won't miss the cutting edge political muckracking of Wayne Barrett (the original Trump corruption biographer) or Jim Ridgeway (who broke many nationally significant stories, including some chapters of Iran-Contra, while mentoring a bunch of other younger journalists).

The Voice's cultural and arts criticism was consistently interesting and informed, too. Gary Indiana -- usually known for his novels -- published essays in the Voice that savaged mainstream artists and exhibits with a bitchy brilliance.

Take this excerpt from his review of a MoMa retrospective on Irving Penn: "Penn's work, whatever the subject matter, purveys the ideology of authoritarian beauty. Anchored in the reductive mental universe of the fashion magazine, this ideology is one of expropriated types, of "captured essences." It serves the delusions of a leisure class by presenting the world as a plenum of heterogeneous consumer goods and Dickensian characters. The diversity of Penn's subject matter is important in this connection. A class can only settle into its prejudices comfortably if it thinks it has seen the world; Penn's travels to faraway Peru, his descents to the lower depths of manual labor and petty trade, have yielded abundant proof that the world is full of colorful characters, and Beauty, too -- even crushed takeout containers, plucked in quantity from the nearest dumpster, will yield at least one attractively squished, Archetypal Take Out Container. ... The idea of delectation as a modus vivendi is not unrelated to art, as Oscar Wilde and Ronald Firbank amply demonstrated. That it appeals more frequently to vulgarians is one of life's little ironies. In general contour, Penn's career reflects his public's fear of appearing vulgar."

(This reminds me of a Warhol exhibit that I visited with my then Austrian girlfriend. We came across a flat bronze-ish copper slab that the curators had titled "oxidation painting." In fact it was one of Warhol's "piss paintings" -- created by pissing on the slab and letting it oxidize. No description was provided of the artist's technique, which of course washed away the entire putrid point of the piece.)

There are hilarious essays about Branson, Missouri, the 1992 New Hampshire primary (as good as anything Taibbi has written), the Rodney King trial. Some of the arts reviews don't do much for me, but then, neither did the subjects.

I was repeatedly reminded how much New York has changed. That change is what made Patty Smith's memoir of her days as a starving artist in the Village -- "Kids" -- such a bestseller. I think a big collection of Voice articles would be more interesting to me. Finding that indigenous NYC arts scene underneath the swarms of tourists shopping for a cultural experience that just can't be bought -- like first-time Burning Man participants who have a hard time understanding "gifting culture." Maybe the edge has decamped for Detroit. I dunno. What I do know is that I feel sad thinking about how The Voice once combined cultural essays and reviews (like Indiana's) that were as good as any published today by the Baffler, Jacobin, Brooklyn Rail, whatever -- but along with real shoe-leather investigative stories that the NYT wouldn't dare get its hands dirty digging into. And could put out for free, because the pay-for-phone-sex services would continue to advertise, no matter what.

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

A product of the 1990's, it is not about "current" events, but still significant events in our recent history. I liked this book, mainly because it is brutally honest of the author's opinions. I didn't always agree with him, but I appreciated his ferocious veracity.

[Zach Werbalowsky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Everything good by him.