Spotlight on … Gary Indiana Gone Tomorrow (1993)

‘The copy of Gone Tomorrow I wanted was a hardcover listed on Amazon as a “1993 Gay Signed First Edition,” printed in England by Pantheon, but it cost 40 dollars plus shipping. The one I ordered was an American paperback, which had an apter name on the spine—High Risk Books—and an equally suitable price of three dollars and 99 cents. Three days later it came as advertised, in very good condition. No signs appeared of a former owner. Pages were unbent, words were neither underlined nor highlighted, and nothing was written in the margins until the end of the second-last chapter, minutes from close.

‘Here the dying subject, an art-house director—Paul Grosvenor—who has been diagnosed with HIV, gets groceries with the unnamed narrator, a quondam young actor, on the last day they will be together. Like most of the novel, the scene is told from memory during the course of an unplanned long afternoon the narrator spends with another man, Robert, a mutual friend last seen at the funeral. He recalls going with Paul into the corner grocery, a mom-and-pop store. Paul took a shopping basket and began tearing through the place. He threw in a bottle of orange juice, then a bottle of grapefruit juice, a six-pack of Heineken, a jug of cranberry juice. Cheese. Cheddar cheese, brie cheese, blue cheese, provolone. Sweet Italian sausage. Hot Italian sausage. More cheese. A head of lettuce. A dozen eggs.

‘What is the rush? A staving off. Enough is in the cart for Babette’s dinner and Leopold Bloom’s breakfast. Only, Paul is not hungry. He’s desperate, filling time with the wan hope of more time.

‘At the bottom of the page a reader has jotted, in black gel ink newer than the paper, a neat seven words. Graphologists examining the words would say that the annotator was a thwarted idealist, with a tendency toward sarcasm and anomie, in love with ambivalence; that he was regressive, fixated on ideas, modest and economical and at the same spontaneous, with a sharpened wit.

‘In Gone Tomorrow the motives and ends are both ulterior, the plotting kairotic. Paul, a cipher for Dieter Schidor (to whom the book is dedicated), begins making a film so experimental that the script is unfinished at shooting time in Bogotá, Columbia. Under the posthumous influence of a Low German auteur à la Fassbinder, he travels and works with a sybaritic entourage led by a translator whose name—Valentina Vogel—rings predictively of Veronika Voss. His ambition is fateful. Starring in the film is Irma, a rusty sexpot who effumes the “silvery illusion of perverse insatiability.” Opposite her is Michael, an unknown whose “southern beauty” is “so extreme that it … rip[s off] the veneer of civilization,” which is to say he looks like the girl in Joseph Conrad’s Victory. (That Indiana and Joan Didion have the same favorite Conrad novel makes sense. He likes to trace, as she does but less overtly, less permanently, the journey Heyst takes away from the world and from the self which exists because of others, and to linger on the eve of sure disaster.)

‘The narrator, whose part seems minor, watches the leads rehearse a sex scene. “Between them is developing the possibility of murder,” says Paul. “Between their characters,” the narrator tries to clarify, but the working definition of love is already clear. Locals say a serial killer is loose in Bogotá. Dinner is interrupted by the most erotic cockroach since the one in Clarice Lispector’s maid’s room. A situationist orgy among friends concludes the first act, and the second, where love is made on acid at Dachau and men die at home, makes as sharp a veer on paper as that between the Weimar Republic and Nazi Germany.

‘Indiana once, in an essay on Brecht and Weill’s opera, The City of Mahoganny, found it “possible to view the entire Weimar period. . . as one of reprieve—a long one, relatively speaking, that produced an immense outpouring of creative work,” which he likens to the time of cheap rent in a post-Robert Moses, pre-Donald Trump Manhattan, i.e. the mid-60s to early 80s. Sarah Schulman, in her decade-old polemic The Gentrification of The Mind, remembers the critic Michael Bronski saying, at a conference on “AIDS literature” in 1998, that if it weren’t for fear of the homo it would be “American literature.” With Schulman, it’s possible to imagine a world where Indiana is as American as John Knowles (and only slightly more homosexual). Indiana, who is from New Hampshire the way Conrad is from Poland, may not want to be that American: He belongs to literature, purely. But, like Schulman, he dreads progressive memory loss, the encroachment of normalcy that passes for understanding.’ — Sarah Nicole Prickett

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Further

Gary Indiana @ Wikipedia
Gary Indiana’s ‘Gone Tomorrow:’ An Examination And Celebration Of Corrupted Beauty
INTERVIEW WITH GARY INDIANA
Gus Van Sant by Gary Indiana
Emma Tennant by Gary Indiana
Gary Indiana, The Art of Fiction No. 250
Killing Time
A Small but Important Job: Gary Indiana’s “Vile Days”
Gary Indiana @ goodreads
Gary Indiana Coughs Up Some ‘Hairballs of Insight’
Gary Indiana’s Great Material
Looking Back: interview by GARY INDIANA
loserville
Sleep When I’m Dead: Gary Indiana Might Be Out of Print, But He’s Still Going Strong
Don’t Call Gary Indiana a Gay Writer
Unhappy Thoughts
The Dry-Eyed Mourning of Gary Indiana
why write: Gary Indiana — clarifying questions, scrambling for survival
A Talent for the Low & High
Always Leave Them Wanting Less
Artificial Centuries: Hate and the City in Gary Indiana’s Criticism
Gary Indiana on the psychoanalytic writings of Louise Bourgeois
The Laws of Depravity
Gary Indiana on Nina Simone’s ‘Everything Must Change’
Buy ‘Gone Tomorrow’

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Extras

Unveiled: A Symposium on Gary Indiana at 356 Mission

Lecture | Gary Indiana: The Artist as Writer and Analysand

Visual & Critical Studies presents Gary Indiana

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Diaries 1989–90
from BOMB

Monday November 11, 1989

Cookie died Friday. I saw Victoria Pedersen in the Korean deli near Simon’s place, I had gone over there to eat some Chinese take-out with Simon. I was in an access of frustration about having wasted the whole afternoon writing a reply to the woman who reviewed Hanuman Press in the Voice, who then wrote a long letter against my review of her review. Raymond says this girl is a complete liar. I think she was just ignorant about various things and is now being stupidly defensive. The first draft of her letter was actually conciliatory and admitted certain mistakes in her article, but after being “advised” by various editors she’s written a new one that’s totally abusive and hysterical. I just love all the support I get from the Village Voice. They would much rather have people calling each other names and sounding like idiots than anything like a reasonable discussion. The whole thing has gotten completely out of hand and I wish I’d kept my mouth shut. Anyway, Victoria told me Cookie was dead and we both cried and I sat around Simon’s feeling like I’d been in a car wreck.

16 November 1989 Thursday

The funeral was grueling. People wandered in and out of St. Marks Church before the service, viewing the body. When Sharon arrived I was outside smoking cigarettes with Stephen Mueller and she sort of pulled me along with her into the church—she had a dog on a leash, and an urn full of what later turned out to be the ashes of Beauty, the dog Jackie Curtis gave Cookie when we were working on A Couple of White Faggots Sitting Around Talking years ago, which were evidently buried with Cookie—and marched directly up to the coffin, which was ringed by dozens of white candles spluttering away in little glasses. I’d vowed not to look and there I was, suddenly. Cookie looked shrunken and green-violet in color, not at all the miracle of preservation Sharon had led me to expect a few nights earlier on the phone. Scott Covert, quite unhinged by everything, he said he was moving to Egypt. I told him Egypt was a death culture and it wouldn’t be much of an escape. I guess everybody in the world showed up for this, I couldn’t really focus on anything though I was trying to take Stuart’s advice and look at it “as a writer.” Clarissa said when I called her, “I don’t know what to say, I’m not really the sort of person who can produce emotions on cue.” I thought: me either. Sharon sang at the end, in an incredible voice. It was just like the end of Imitation of Life.

One thing that crossed my mind was, I should really take steps to avoid this kind of thing if I pass on anytime soon—I only want Barbara and Lynne and Betsy present, and maybe a few other people, and they can dump my ashes off the Staten Island Ferry or use them to coat the rims of margarita glasses for all I care.

Collective grief is really for the birds. Even when I closed my eyes and tried to concentrate on what was really taking place, I kept thinking: “God, this room is full of people who wouldn’t piss on me if my guts were on fire.”

December 11, 1989

Saturday, went with Bob Gober to Vito Russo’s lecture at the Public, and then he and his friend John went with me to Noho Star to pick up Tina. Tina and I took a cab to Brooklyn. The cab driver was Chinese or Japanese or something, and everything in his noisy rundown cab was crooked: the front seat tilted funnily to the left, his rear view mirror was tilted almost straight up. Marianne Faithfull was terrific, though I could’ve lived without the opening Bach cantata and the piece by Stravinsky, a composer I really detest. Living in New York you get sick of loud noises.

Coming back, we took a car service after walking around in subzero for a long time. The car service driver was mental. We had to share the car with some yuppies who didn’t quite know where they were going. The driver expatiated at length his theory that “more neuters are being born every day than regular males and females,” he went on and on with these scarily irrational “theories” which he said “philosophers” knew all about. We got out at Wooster and Prince and went into 150. The usual clutch of overdressed hyenas, but Taylor Mead was there as he’d said he’d be, so we hung out with him, drinking way too much rum and coke. Frankie Clemente showed up. Brian McNally came over to banter with Taylor, who’s just come back from Portugal extremely flush and described working with Donald Sutherland, Valentina Cortese, Geraldine Chaplin, and some gorgeous German actor. At one point Taylor said, “I resent what was done in some of my crucial scenes,” and I said, “Taylor, I want that inscribed on my tombstone.”

December 22, 1989 Friday

Dinner last night with Tina at a restaurant called Woody’s on 4th Street. It’s owned by Rolling Stone Ron Wood, apparently. The front room set up like all the cappucino places in the neighborhood, spindly-looking tables with fake marble tops, too small for serving dinner, some square, some round. The food was not awful but very pedestrian, sort of what you’d expect from people who think Ron Wood is anything special. Next door they’ve got a Florsheim Shoes sort of art gallery with actual paintings by Ron Wood. They should specialize and handle Tony Curtis, Xavier Cougat, and other showbiz artists. Maybe Mel Torme paints, too. I had carpaccio and spaghetti putanesca, which they make with bits of chicken in it.

January 2, 1990 Tuesday

New Years’ Eve with Sharon, at Cookie’s. Frank and Stephen were there, John Heys, Nan Goldin, Scott Covert, and a lot of people I didn’t know. Ronnie Vawter came down from upstairs, he’s started smoking again. Afterwards I went with Sharon to Cuando, a mob scene. Then at around 4 AM we went back to Bleecker St. and took some of Cookie’s leftover painkillers. We considered taking the AZT but decided against it. Last night Anne Livet had a party, black eyed peas and hamhocks and collard greens, Clarissa and Frank and Stephen and Sharon again, Anne insisted we stay until the very end. Sarah Charlesworth and Amos, Sarah dancing all her old Hullabaloo dances and insisting that people who didn’t want to dance dance. Iris Owens with lots of advice about quitting cigarettes.

January 4, 1990

Last night: nothing. Trouble sleeping. I found myself watching or at least listening to an idiotic Dario Argente movie featuring Karl Maiden and Tony Franciosa. Sharon called this morning at 11:30, waking me up; the article on Cookie had appeared, she wanted to come over for coffee.

This was a bad beginning. For one thing, I’d some free time today and could have used it productively. But, all right. The article was basically unobjectionable: full of inaccuracies and stupid cliche statements, naturally, and the kind of gross oversimplification American media thrives on. Sharon, however, kept grousing as she read along, about trivia, and then some wide statements which were in fact offensive, but could have been a million times worse. Sharon’s always picking herself apart, or else distracting herself with this sort of thing. I pointed out that Newsday is a daily paper and every single copy of it would be in the garbage the next day. Including mine, actually.

I somehow bought into Sharon’s negativity about the whole thing, but after an hour or so I began feeling suffocated by it and proposed lunch at the Oyster Bar in Grand Central. We took a cab up there and pigged out on clams and oysters, I had two beers which I really shouldn’t have had because the depressive overlay of the afternoon simply thickened under the alcohol. We did talk about other things, but mainly things that depressed us. Anita Sarko was having lunch with someone in the other dining room. When we came back downtown, Sharon asked to come upstairs and listen to music for an hour. I should’ve said no but I just couldn’t, and by the time she left I felt this intense despair, almost a suicidal despondency.

January 10, 1990

Dinner with David and Tina at Mary Ann’s—the Mexican place we were going to on Avenue A was packed—and I have never seen such an ugly plate of anything. Chunks of duck covered in some kind of green pumpkin sauce, plus rice and beans. It really looked like vomit and I couldn’t eat any of it. Tina had some kind of enchilada that smelled like bad feet. David said later his dinner was off, too. I despise restaurants like that, where they serve big heaping portions of questionable food … but this duck dish was really beyond anything I’d ever seen before. The duck seemed to be cooked enough but besides being smothered in this grainy green sauce, it came in layers of pale oily skin … The waitress seemed to derive sadistic pleasure out of asking if we were enjoying the meal, and of course we like idiots told her everything was just fine.

January 15, 1990 Monday

A horrible visit to Charles with Taylor. The place overrun by dogs and cats, which would be all right except that Timmy, the dog Charles rescued after its intestines or bowels got somehow twisted and had to be operated on, regularly deposits big pools of liquid shit and vomit all over the place, provoking endless agony outbursts from Charles, who needs no provocation anyway. I mean the shit and puke were bad enough without him going on about it. Sometimes Charles is terrific, and then there are these times when he just isn’t. Namely in the wintertime when you can’t go outside to get away from him. His car had broken down and a cab had to take us to his house. From then it was just nonstop lamentation and complaint. He doesn’t even offer a glass of wine, let alone anything like a meal. So we had to pick up a ton of frozen food at the Grand Union and fix whatever we wanted, not that either of us felt like eating, what with the shitorama in the living room. The house was cold, uncomfortable, and listening to Charles for 24 hours was like being locked up in a psychiatric hospital.

January 16, 1990 Tuesday

Yesterday some awful bitch called from German Vogue, asking me for “2000 words on Richard Prince, Jeff Koons, and Haim Steinbach,” explaining their wonderful ideas. I told her it wasn’t something I wanted to do. In actual fact, I would rather go to hell. This sailed right past her. These editors are not trained to hear a refusal and I think she went into shock when I again told her it wasn’t anything I was interested in. I tried to recommend David Riminelli but she wasn’t hearing anything at that point. Well, fuck her, and fuck German Vogue.

January 24, 1990 Wednesday

Sharon called up late Monday night and we met at Eileen’s. She was on her way home from I forget where, she seemed in one of her stark moods and I’m sure I didn’t lift it all that considerably. The benefit for Carl Apfelschnitt is in a week and a half. After a point in life, a lot of things become absolutely incommunicable unless you really strain yourself to communicate them—last night, John DeFazio’s place turned out to be a block east of where Carl used to have the top floor of the Bowery Savings Bank, and I remembered the day I walked east from Carl’s and discovered all these Jewish shops along there, how it was like this whole strange little microworld opening up in my mental landscape. There was the one summer when I spent a great deal of my time with Carl—just before and during the time when Betsy lived there, starting with the Mary Lemley period. He was in love with (name deleted), a real sex trip that Carl always made sound terribly desperate and bizarre.

I can see Carl at all these different moments in time, the same way I visualize Cookie at different moments, and it is so queer and disturbing. It’s as if you should be able to rewind the film and step into that moment and be there, and you can’t.

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Book

Gary Indiana Gone Tomorrow
Seven Stories Press

‘Footloose and broke, the unnamed narrator of Gone Tomorrow hops on a plane without asking questions when his director friend offers him a role in an 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, it becomes clear that this will not be the story of gritty bohemians triumphing against the odds. The director, Paul Grosvenor, seems more interested in manipulating his cast than in shooting film. The cult star, Irma Irma, is a vamp too bored and boring to draw blood. And the beautiful, nymph-like Michael Simard doesn’t seem to be putting out. Meanwhile, the film’s shady financier is sleeping with his mother, while a serial killer skulks about the area killing tourists. Everything comes to a head when the carnaval celebration begins in nearby Cali. But once the fiesta is over, all that’s left are ghostly memories and the narrator’s insistence on telling the tale. “Unlike the majority of pointedly AIDS-era novels,” writes Dennis Cooper, “Gone Tomorrow is neither an amoral nostalgia fest nor a thinly veiled wake-up call hyping the religion of sobriety. It’s a philosophical work devised by a writer who’s both too intelligent to buy into the notion that a successful future requires the compromise of collective decision and too moral to accept bitterness as the consequence of an adventurous life.”’ — Seven Stories

Excerpt

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p.s. RIP Richard Labonte. Hero. ** David Ehrenstein, Hi, thanks. ** Misanthrope, Hi. I still smoke about a pack a day, but I need them light. Unless something forces me away from smoking or smoking at that level, I’m sticking to it. There’s just so much death lately among friends of mine and/or people I admire, it’s fucking weird. My friend Richard Labonte, one of the great heroes and pioneers of Gay Lit just, died yesterday. It’s too much. It’s a weirdly conservative time in culture with critics and the seeming majority of art imbibers entrenching and fearing being taken places they don’t already know well. Luckily the artists are still making daring stuff, but the venues to both respectability and a wider audience are as tough as I’ve ever seen them. It makes no sense to me, but it never has. Why are people so afraid of themselves and, at the same time, of losing themselves? Blah blah, too long a discussion for the likes of the p.s. ** _Black_Acrylic, His stuff is beautiful stuff, I think. I hope you enjoy it. The main or only thing its that the classes are working for you. Length is overrated, as we all know. Ugh, the pressure to go autobiographical. Especially when they think you have an angle. It’s a strange compulsion to push people towards working with their autobio and the knee-jerk idea that that’s some kind of ultimate arena for artists to work in. Obviously, don’t take that suggestion to heart and work with whatever most excites you. That’s always the only guideline. ** Ry Of Razeland, I’m good thank you very much! Hope your throat has stopped acting weird and prickly. Tom of Finland, yeah. I’ve never fully gotten the thing of his thing, although he was a hell of a draftsman, and he sure had a focused vision, and I guess that’s the key. Pup play is so massive right now. ABDL/infantilism too. The turn towards those two fetishes seems related and meaningful somehow. I’d be interested to talk with some Pup because the flirty profiles that Pups make are so goofy I can’t quite penetrate that. Kinks I’ve encountered, like, in the flesh? Because making the slave/escort posts I’ve encountered every kink you can imagine and can’t imagine from afar. In person … there was a guy who only got off by having Disney figurine toys scotch taped to his skin then pulled off because he liked the dents they left. Gross? Um, I guess maybe this guy who only got off by drinking other people’s vomit? xo. ** Steve Erickson, Ha ha, thank you. Herbal cigarettes make me nauseous, but maybe I could use them as a film prop. Shit, about your mom. Maybe you should go see them? Would you being in her face help and make a difference? ** Rafe, Hi. Your laptop’s dumpster, ha ha, yeah, I know that realm well, of course. Sometimes one finds the most unexpected treasures in there. It sounds exciting to me: your ongoing project. Not interesting school assignments, I’m gathering? Do you like school at all, or are you getting ultimately valuable stuff from there, do you think? ** Corey Heiferman, Hi, Corey. Mm, all kinds of stuff are new, happily. Maybe that should be ‘is’ not ‘are’. Glad everything is upswinging. Things are moving in an upwards motion here too, and, yeah, I’m wildly suspicious of it. Um, you … dressed up as … a pile on a floor after a birthday party? I’m blank. I liked ‘Basket Case’ too. Can’t remember if I saw ‘2’. Seems like I’d remember if I did. Beardo. Cool. Uh, yeah in the younger teen hippie days I stopped shaving for periods, but my facial hair grows in not so regularly or thickly, so Just looked kind of scraggly. Luckily, looking scraggly when you’re young is cool. ** Dom Lyne, Hey, Dom! Exciting! There was a point when I thought I was done with writing novels, but then I ended up liking writing ‘I Wished’ so much that I changed my mind. Nice, jazzy feeling. ** Jeff J, Hi. Yeah, as you saw, there are quite a few earlier films online. I was surprised by that. Things are finally happening with our film. We got the green light at last, and we’re planning to shoot the film in September/October in SoCal, and now we’re hunting for a Production Manager. When we find one, we’ll go to LA and start helping assemble a crew. Next week we meet with someone we’d really like to have as our DP, and we’ll see if we get lucky. So, it’s on its way, as hard as that is to believe. The novella: we’ve decided it’s going be kind of anaudio book, kind of radio play-like novel, for sound only, and we’ll record that as soon as we finish the film. I think it’s ideal for the text, and it’s pretty exciting prospect. Other than those things, just starting to work on the text for Gisele’s next piece, and ‘I Wished’ and the film of ‘Jerk’ come out in France on the same day soon, so I’m doing some stuff around that. All is well. Any further news on you and yours? ** Jon Jost, Hi, Jon! Wow, it’s a great pleasure and an honor to see you here! Thank you so much for the links! Everyone, Jon Jost, one of America’s greatest filmmakers — here’s the blog’s Jon Jost Day from a years back — was a good friend and peer of Peter Hutton, and he wrote a recollection of Hutton that is no doubt fascinating. He also made a film/video dedicated to his memory, and he is very generously sharing it with us. It’s here, and the password is MOUNTAINS. I extremely highly recommend that you watch it and read Jon’s memorial piece, and they are serious gifts! I would greatly love to see your new film, of course! My email is: [email protected], and I will of course share my thoughts, Thank you so much! Yes, I live in Paris, and it would be fantastic and a true pleasure to meet you if ever come through here. Please let me know if Paris ends up on your agenda. Thank you so much again for coming in here and for your great generosity and for your amazing work. ** Right. Today the blog’s spotlight falls on one of my favorite novels by the singular and inimitable writer/author Gary Indiana. Have a blast. See you tomorrow.