Saturday, March 18, 2023

Gary Indiana, Fire Season ***

Fire Season is a collection of essays by Gary Indiana, a writer and critic whose work appears in publications like the Village Voice. Evelyn gave it to me as a gift based on a recommendation from Fran Lebowitz. A majority of the essays are art criticism/reviews, but there are also a handful of social commentaries.

Indiana is a good writer with a direct and acerbic style, but he's not much of a critic. His reviews don't provide me with any new insight into the artist; they report the accepted wisdom in colorful language. None of the essays about unfamiliar artists enticed me into discovering their work.

Outside of the reviews, the essays tend to come in pairs. There are two reports from high-profile trials, of Dr Kevorkian and the cops who beat Rodney King, published before the verdicts were reached. Two of the essays, condescending hipster visits to Branson and EuroDisney, sound like attempts to replicate David Foster Wallace's "A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again" -- and indeed I see that they were published around the same time. Two essays grapple with famous true-crime obsessions, the JFK assassination and the Black Dahlia murder, and what they tell us about our society.

One final complaint I have is that the book nowhere provides details about the provenance of these essays, just the year of publication. In one of Indiana's essays he talks about how one's experience of a film is largely determined by the circumstances in which you see it, and context plays the same role in reading essays.

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