Note from JG: If ever a book was meant to be listened to in audio form, this is it. Hearing McGough tell these tales in his own voice makes this volume exponentially more pleasurable. Play it at 1.25 speed for the appropriate hopped-up energy.
“Oh my gawwd,” he shrieked. That pretty much sums up the overall tone of I’ve Seen The Future and I’m Not Going (Pantheon. $29.95. www.mcgoughandmcdermott.com), the screaming mimi of a memoir by industrial grade eccentric and one-time art world darling Peter McGough. He spills tea and drops names with Page Six fervor from start to finish, but never quite manages to pull together any retrospective wisdom. For over 40 years, McGough was the creative, and sometimes romantic, partner of David McDermott (now living as a tax exile in Ireland). Staples of the early 80s Lower East Side scene, they collaborated on paintings and photographs that chronicled their bizarre, time-defying lifestyle: In downtown tenements and upstate country houses, they decorated and dressed like Victorian dandies, frequently denying themselves modern comforts like, oh, electricity. Yet, somehow, they didn’t find any anachronism in partying hard with Warhol, Basquiat, Schnabel, Steve Rubell and dozens of other bold-faced names of a certain Manhattan milieu. Their work was accomplished, providing them inclusion in two Whitney Biennials, and for a period earning them tens of thousands of dollars for each new piece. But before, during, and after that period, they had a willfully naïve attitude toward money, spending profligately on real estate, horses, antiques, and foreign travel, perpetually teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. High-strung McGough is a shiny dragonfly of a storyteller, alighting on this party for a moment, that gallery opening for a page or two, then flittering on to this hot boy, that outrageous behavior, and so on. Disconcertingly, though, McGough’s narrative style remains the same after he’s diagnosed with AIDS and stubbornly dabbles with a pre-cocktail array of pseudo-scientific therapies, including Raw Foodism and spiritual babble. Miraculously, McGough ultimately agreed to take conventional meds and today, at 62, is still here to share his tales. His stories are a hoot, but you’ll have to make your own sense of them.
