AMW is on the Internet

hello! i do not really live here anymore.

Wed, 29 May 2013 11:04:14 -0400

I’ve moved (across the country, across the Internet), and can be found here: annawiener.com.

on epigraphs

Wed, 27 Feb 2013 07:41:00 -0500

“But what’s in an epigraph? And couldn’t Speedboat as a whole be read as a steeplechase composed entirely of epigraphs? The book’s parts, though, seem to bear the same relationship to one another that an epigraph does to a text: they comment, and shed a kind of elliptical light, but they fail to establish a sequential relation from one paragraph/scenelet/sentence to the next.”

— Matthew Specktor on Renata Adler’s Speedboat, in The Believer

on joy, pleasure

Tue, 18 Dec 2012 15:39:13 -0500

“Until quite recently I had known joy only five times in my life, perhaps six, and each time tried to forget it soon after it happened, out of the fear that the memory of it would dement and destroy everything else.”

— Zadie Smith in the NYRB, on visceral/sensual pleasures, ecstasy (the drug), ecstasy (the state of being), love, Q-Tip, birth, and more: “Joy”

on sibylle

Sun, 09 Dec 2012 15:43:00 -0500

I first learned about Sibylle Baier while working at Anthology Recordings, a small record label that trafficked in digital reissues of rare and out-of-print vinyl. Anthology was conceived as a paradise for crate diggers, and it hosted a phenomenal collection of high-quality (and DRM-free, because hi, target audience) albums that included records from Abner Jay, Moondog and Dick Dale alongside every Can album imaginable, super-niche international music like Malaysian teen pop, and some ultraweird, goopy-awesome stuff like Andy Goldner (recommendation: start this video at 2:00). It really was an amazing library, one that I am still sifting through on my own hard drive, but ultimately it seems the thrill of the hunt just didn’t translate over to the digital space.

Anyway, Sibylle was one of those quietly badass musicians whose songs carry the casual intimacy of work that was never intended for a wide audience (at the beginning of the song below, you can hear her lips part; I mean…!!). She is German, and recorded in the 1970s on reel-to-reel and distributed the tapes to friends and family. At some point she may have disappeared into the woods? I am not totally clear on these details. In any case, an album of SB’s music wasn’t released until 2006, and it’s damp and gray out and I’m in the office preparing 1099s, so it seemed like the right moment to pull this out of the drafts folder.

Below is a song that deploys one of the more wonderful lines from T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” (Turning a blind eye on her misspelling of Eliot.)

on speedboat, again/as always

Sun, 02 Dec 2012 12:56:00 -0500

Last week I wrote a piece about Renata Adler’s Speedboat for the Paris Review blog. A few people have asked where to find copies of the book, which is one of the best feelings, I think — convincing someone to read or see or listen to a piece of work you believe in. If eBay and Powell’s can’t provide, NYRB Classics is reissuing both Speedboat and Adler’s second novel, Pitch Dark (with an afterword by Muriel Spark — !!), in March of 2013.

As a side note/because the worlds we inhabit are always smaller than we like to think: this weekend I went to Philadelphia to visit a friend. We spent most of the day walking through the city, but as it grew dark we entered a used bookstore. Everyone I know seems to have a different methodology for used bookstores; I am lazy, so I just start at the beginning of the alphabet and go on down the line. Needless to say, the first book I pulled from the shelf was a first edition of Pitch Dark. I have never seen any of Adler’s books in stores before, not once. The cover is faded and yellow around the shape of what was once, presumably, a smaller book. The first lines are: “We were running flat out. The opening was dazzling. The middle was dazzling. The ending was dazzling. It was like a steeplechase composed entirely of hurdles.”

on injunctions

Mon, 26 Nov 2012 17:10:00 -0500

“‘Take off everything except your slip,’ the nurse said. ‘Doctor will be with you in a moment.’ Nobody under forty-five, in twenty years, had worn a slip, but nurses invariably gave this instruction. There they all are, however, the great dead men with their injunctions. Make it new. Only connect.”

— From Renata Adler’s Speedboat, which contains, essentially, everything.

on prince, heartbreak

Sun, 25 Nov 2012 11:35:00 -0500

Hilton Als has a personal essay in the December issue of Harper’s, “I Am Your Conscious, I Am Love: A Paean 2 Prince,” about Prince and sexuality and race and love and gender, and it is a complete knockout. Needless to say there is a lot going on here (including the fleeting curiosity about whether this is the closest a Harper’s headline has come to a rebus), and Als’s memoir is complicated, simultaneously energizing and devastating. There is a lot of heartbreak: Als’s personal heartbreak(s), but also the larger heartbreak of feeling abandoned by someone in an elevated position of power — here, a pop culture icon, but I think it can be more universal — who seems to finally emphasize and embody some necessary, but hitherto unarticulated, truth. Thinking you have an advocate, realizing you don’t. It’s all tangled together here, and what emerges are parallel narratives (of Als, of Prince) alongside a portrait of 1980s New York, and some commentary on the often cruel and irreparable seduction of the music industry / the muting influence of commercialism on art.

In any case. I’m throwing a lot out there at all once but not really doing this justice. What I’m getting at is, this is a fantastic piece. Here, especially, I felt something snap:

“I saw the Lovesexy show with a white boy I was very much taken with who was not as taken with me as he was with his fear. I made him a peach pie I thought we might like to eat during the performance, but the performance irked him: it took away from his drama, from the centrality of his maleness. He ‘loved’ Prince but not his power. And that is what it must always have been like for Prince: Black queen (if only in spirit), how dare you walk into the room and suck us all up in you? How dare you suggest, as you did in ‘Controversy,’ that you were neither male nor female but possess the power of both? Can’t you see I’m here? A white queer (or straight) man sitting here, the natural custodian of the world’s attention? What gives you, Prince, the right to take that spotlight away from me and shine it on that fine ass of yours, which no flat-assed white man could ever hope to approximate, let alone compete with? The pie grew sticky in my lap. He refused to eat it.”

on memory, tubs

Mon, 19 Nov 2012 13:07:00 -0500

“Another time, my wife and I were in a tub on a hot July night drinking gin and tonics when the alarm sounded. We didn’t budge. We figured we were safe in the water. The other day I sniffed around the entrance, smelled no smoke and saw no familiar names on the mailboxes. Everything looked pretty much as it did then, except older and shabbier and, unlike years ago, as quiet as a tomb.”

— Charles Simic, “Memory Traps”

Much to appreciate in this post, but I’m especially charmed by just how bloggy and bathtub-y it is — and yet, still elegant. For another account of memory traps, Colson Whitehead’s “Lost and Found”.

on trading cards

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 13:40:01 -0500

March 19, 2013 (!)

on bass, computers

Mon, 12 Nov 2012 14:43:00 -0500

“The progression of a house track, and one plausible reason for house’s ascendancy, goes like this: There’s some twinkly pirouetting melody in the higher registers, then some bass for a while, and then the introduction of a soaring, optimistic vocal track about saving the world or, for the slightly less ambitious, having a feeling re tonight’s bestness, then the simultaneous near-crescendo of the twinkles and the all-out vocal redemption, and then, right at the moment of presumed climax, the bass goes away for a few beats, everybody misses the bass so much and can’t wait for it to come back, maybe the snare reintroduces itself after a few seconds to remind you to get excited for the prodigal bass’s triumphal homecoming, a good DJ takes just longer than expected to bring the bass back, 20,000 or 50,000 hearts stop as one, lever arms hanging anxiously in midair, and then, when the bass kicks back in, the crowd goes out of their motherfucking minds, just like they did the time the bass disappeared and came back four minutes ago, pumping their right arms in genuinely exhilarated unison, survivors all of the briefly yet catastrophically lost bass.
···
The guy standing next to me says, through the accelerating wind, that these are the only days a year he gets off from the grind—he’s a computer technician—and he’d fucking kill to have a job like Bassnectar’s. From what I can tell, the main differences are that this guy stands at a computer during the day while Bassnectar stands at a computer at night, that this guy stands at a computer in an office while Bassnectar stands at a computer in front of hundreds of thousands of people, and that Bassnectar’s skill or, more probably, luck at computers has put him in great in-real-life demand, such that he gets to stand at his computer in a different city each night to be revered for a few hours by people who, in all likelihood, have been less lucky at computers.”

It will come as a surprise to approximately nobody that I’ll read anything Gideon Lewis-Kraus writes, but this piece in GQ, about the Electric Daisy Carnival in Nevada, is just delightful — funny, searing, compassionate, and bizarre.

on internet dating

Sat, 20 Oct 2012 10:01:00 -0400

“The man generally held responsible for internet dating as we know it today is a native of Illinois called Gary Kremen, but Kremen was out of the internet dating business altogether by 1997, just around the time people were signing up for the internet en masse. Today he runs a solar energy financing company, is an elected official in Los Altos Hills, California and is better known for his protracted legal battle over the ownership of the pornography website sex.com than he is for inventing internet dating. Like many visionary entrepreneurs, Kremen doesn’t have very good management skills. His life has passed through periods of grave disarray. When I met him, at a conference on the internet dating industry in Miami last January, he asked where I was from. ‘Ah, Minnesota,’ he said: ‘Have you ever been to the Zumbro River?’ The Zumbro flows south of Minneapolis past Rochester, home of the Mayo Clinic. It turned out that Kremen had once driven, or been driven, into the river. He used to be addicted to speed.”

— Emily Witt, “Diary” (London Review of Books, October 25, 2012)

on lexisnexis, dick dale

Fri, 19 Oct 2012 12:15:00 -0400

One of the things that I used to love about my alma mater, until they destroyed it and subsequently all chances of eking a donation out of me (I hope you’re listening, Cardinal Fund), was that alumni could access all library resources remotely. For someone like me, whose lifeblood used to be LexisNexis, this was not just a matter of post-graduate privilege, but a serious lifestyle issue. I LexisNexis’d everything, all the time, and especially late at night. It’s extremely entertaining to read academic takes on popular culture, especially those articles that make it clear someone brilliant to near-pathological levels has accidentally watched a reality series marathon and doesn’t know what to do with such blunt debasement other than write it out.

Anyway, long story short: I recently came across a trove of articles I had saved from several years back, all sourced by LexisNexis’ing the phrase “Dick Dale.” I really love the following, from “Surfing the Other: Ideology on the Beach” (SURFING THE OTHER, oh my god, Wesleyan, I will never forgive you for taking LexisNexis away from me) by R.L. Lutsky:

“The turbulent social and political issues of the 60s never seemed to intrude upon the beach… the appeal of surf music, like that of surfing itself, has indeed been presented as a matter of fun. [Yet] clearly, the notion of fun involved here — from wild surf to wild bikinis, wild rides to wild dancing — is not readily described as clean.”

Clean fun! What even is that, these days? This is a real question, and if anyone would like to answer it you can find my email address to the right. I am charmed to pieces by the thought that wild surf, wild bikinis, wild rides, or wild dancing would be anything other than clean fun — not to mention Dick Dale’s music, which would never, ever be described as sexual, dark, edgy, or dirty.

In any case! Below is a video of Dick Dale and the Del Tones in 1963, with their particular brand of unclean fun:

on family, audiobooks

Mon, 15 Oct 2012 14:27:00 -0400

The Paris Review Daily was kind enough to post a piece I wrote about my grandfather, audiobooks, and Marcel Proust (sort of).

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fall 2008

Sun, 14 Oct 2012 23:56:00 -0400

Metropolitan Museum of Art, Fall 2008

I realized this weekend that I’ve been talking about...

Sun, 07 Oct 2012 17:36:35 -0400

I realized this weekend that I’ve been talking about seeing Einstein on the Beach the way people in college talked about their acid trips.

berlin, july 2012 [a printing press]

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 10:10:00 -0400

berlin, july 2012 [x3]

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 08:38:00 -0400

lisbon, july 2012

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 08:37:00 -0400

berlin, july 2012

Sun, 26 Aug 2012 08:28:00 -0400

on childhood concerns

Wed, 15 Aug 2012 18:01:00 -0400

“Like any New York Times-reading child of the ’80s, I knew that AIDS was a sexually transmitted disease. I also knew, somehow, about sex—at least, I’d been forced to take our tenth-grade sex-ed class. I was relieved to know my mother hadn’t been infected, but that raised uncomfortable questions about my parents. My father said he’d known something might have been wrong since I was six. Was the disease the real reason I was an only child? What hadn’t they been up to? Perhaps it was a kind of only-child possessiveness, in which each parent existed only for me, never for the other, but I always had great difficulty thinking of them as sexual beings. My parents’ bed, for instance, I always thought of as my father’s; he was usually in it, my mother usually not. It was a place for instruction, listening to music, reading, and rest.

And yet, could it have been … Yes, my father really did give me condoms! Before I left for music camp in Tennessee, where my violin teacher had recommended I go study with a friend of hers. How farcical it made actual sex seem at the time. How strained, too, that moment, as though he’d told me to go fuck with his blessing and then attached the curse of precaution, another self-consciousness added to my own.”

— From Marco Roth’s forthcoming The Scientists: A Family Romance. Excerpt in Harper’s here.