Rita Indiana, Shaken in a Blender

Masterpieces from a Novelist, Musician, Nonconformist

Everyone I know, including me, has been sick the last week or so. Others are reminiscing about Covid (2020-2022), which drove us indoors and inside ourselves. I think there is a collective spiritual long Covid here now, as spring teases us and baseball season is about to begin. Rita Indiana’s books and recordings enabled me to get through those hard years. This originally appeared in Copper magazine, published by PS Audio of Boulder, Colorado, in April 2021.

My obsession with Rita Indiana began when I read a profile of her by Daniel Alarcón in in the October 19, 2020 issue of The New Yorker. It seems like I read the article years ago, because Indiana's music and writing have taken over so much of my life, I feel like she's been part of it forever. But the essay only appeared a few months ago.

In "Rita Indiana's Songs for the Apocalypse," Alarcón is assessing his own anxiety coping with the COVID era, looking at the larger picture of environmental disaster, western wildfires, truth in ta…