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Gary Indiana’s Exuberant Venom
The late critic and novelist documented the seedy vanities and sorrows of American life with bitchiness and, sometimes, sympathy.
Throughout a career of over 40 years, the cultural critic and novelist’s works — among them a series of true-crime books about the Menendez brothers ( Resentment: A Comedy) and Andrew Cunanan ( Three Day Fever) — documented the seedy vanities and sorrows of American life. Indiana (born Gary Hoisington in Derry, New Hampshire) first emerged as a writer in the 1980s, when he reviewed art for The Village Voice and fell in with a crowd that included the likes of Susan Sontag, John Waters, and Cookie Mueller. Indiana’s primary critical targets were a culture industry and political community that accepted and even valorized cold-blooded atomization — “depraved indifference,” as he’d put it — a world of glossy surfaces and televisual imagery that belied the fact that we’re all being taken for fools, brutalized by our idiot overlords.
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