WCS 57: Season of Dat Bitch

w/: Fernando’s meaning + Ducks @ No. 1 + mosquito CBD kills

This week took a toll on my physical comfort. Lot o’ pain, as Morty once said. And my week’s feelings took another hit when I learned the great writer Gary Indiana died.

The news knocked me straight back to 1995 and my second-floor desk at LA Weekly. I was splitting time between covering the OJ trial and writing about film and local music. Weed was still on the DL. A remarkable time to be paid scribe in LA.

Back at that second-floor work situation, a desk phone outside of Arts Editor Judith Lewis’s office rings, and there’s no one else around to grab the call. I pick up the call, which was an appropriate thing to do in that era. It’s Gary Fucking Indiana.

“The Gary Indiana?” I ask. He had requested to speak with Judith Lewis and received my incredulousness in response.

“Yeah,” says the freelance writer. “It’s Gary Indiana.”

Between 1986 and 2000 I must have taken hundreds of newsroom phone messages. Important messages. This, somehow, seems to be the only one I remember.

Eventually known as novelist and playwright, Gary Hoisington had been on fire in the 1980s as a Village Voice art critic. He was right there with Voice writers like Greg Tate and RJ Smith in making criticism appear worth pursuing as a profession.

Indiana wrote about art literarily, and I don’t think I had previously seen that in newsprint. His sentences and paragraphs were voice-y, yet tightly focused, and in the libraries of the Sac State and Fresno State universities and even at Sacramento City College I’d absorb this critic, trying to process what he was doing.

Why is Gary Indiana different?

And how do I get there from here?

What I said to dude that day eludes me. Probably I lauded him and—looking back—he probably didn’t think my reaction was as lame as I did in the moment; freelance writers get their uppers where the can. But all day I definitely like, I’ll never wash this mouth again…

While processing the news of Indiana’s passing I threw up a Frankenstein art show for my day-gig fifth graders. The criticism I exercised while curating was probably excessively rigorous, but some of these kids’ drawings just weren’t good. I tried to be fair, tried to champion the underdog. Mostly though? I wanted that fifth-grade art show to be relevant and—as much as possible—tasteful.

Shades of Gary Indiana.

From 1819 to the 1970s, the United States government ripped tens of thousands of Indigenous children from their homes and sent them to schools far from their homes. There, the students usually faced emotional and physical abuse. They were beaten and starved by the churches who ran these “schools” when speaking their native languages. Some kids died on site, others over time.

Lil Hit

• A new study says hemp extract kills

  Yellow Fever Mosquito larvae within 48 hours.
  MDIP

The 12-foot skeleton atop a Home Depot / Tacoma News-Tribune

Now, for those 10 news bagels that you’ve heard described, but have not yet tasted…