Gary Indiana
There was a New York City that I dreamed of when I was growing up. It was a mixture of Greenwich Village during the Beatnik era and the Lower East Side of the 1980’s. It was full of punks, dreamers, activists and artists. The dangers that might have been lurking there were more aesthetic than real. Poverty and hunger were stylish accouterments. All who were there possessed the ability to transform the urban environment. While obviously this political, arty urban paradise existed only in my imagination some lived it in all its gritty, dangerous, complicated, hungry reality. Patty Smith lucidly captures it in her recent book Just Kids. Gary Indiana’s new compilation out from MIT Press, Last Seen Entering the Biltmore, collects his poems, prose, short plays and works of art from the late 70’s to the present, chronicling through his artistic production his time in this environment after he made the decision to “not to do anything he didn’t want to do” and to become a writer. Last Seen Entering the Biltmore captures Indiana’s sense of absurd and also his strong artistic integrity. I wrote a full review for NYFA’s online magazine for artists, NYFA Current, and would be honored if you checked it out here.
I have two new reviews posted now on Elevate Difference—
I’ve been listening to Seattle-based singer-songwriter Jen Wood since I was in high school. At that point Jen had already been making feminist and indie oriented acoustic music for years, notably with the riot grrrl related Tattle Tale (which also featured Madigan on cello). I remember being so inspired by Wood’s song writing that I painstakingly typed out the lyrics to her song “Bullet Box” and taped them onto the cover of my math folder, along with the photo from the cover of Wood’s album Getting Past the Static. When I got the chance to see her play live (I think at 17 Nautical Miles in Portland, if memory serves? How’s that for the 90’s! That’s old-skool Todd P. right there) and dorkily had her sign her CD for me.
Killerfemme 