Sex, Drugs, Punk & AIDs: Blatz Frontwoman Publishes Memoir With Jaded Ibis Press
Highly anticipated "fabulist" memoir, The Vicious Red Relic, Love, re-enacts punk frontwoman Anna Joy Springer's relationship with [Gil], a sometimes endearing, sometimes frightening addict and cult survivor who did not disclose to Springer that she'd tested positive for HIV.
What happened to the punk musicians who survived the decimation of AIDS, drugs and wildness of early 1990s San Francisco? At least one of them, Anna Joy Springer, became a respected college professor and now author of The Vicious Red Relic, Love: A Fabulist Memoir. The long-awaited book has just been published by Seattle-based Jaded Ibis Press. Springer also released, through the Press’s parent company Jaded Ibis Productions, the related 14-track soundtrack, Your Metaforest Guidebook, a collaboration with musicians Rachel Carns and Tara Jane O’Neil.
Springer was lead singer and songwriter for the influential punk band Blatz that came out of The 924 Gilman Street Project and Lookout! Records, alongside bands like The Yeastie Girlz and Green Day. She later sang with The Gr’ups and Cypher in the Snow, and toured with Sister Spit, a raucous all-woman group of writers headed by Michelle Tea.
Brilliantly conceived as a training manual, survival guide and time machine, the book returns to 1990s San Francisco and deftly weaves feminism, deviance, punk rock and Sumerian literature into a cauldron of post-Reagan/Bush-era neoliberalism and AIDs grief.
Both the music and literary worlds have heaped early praise on The Vicious Red Relic, Love:
“There is only one Anna Joy Springer. Only one. Her words take me from kitten to monster and back again in a way only she can do.” – Kathleen Hanna, leader singer of Bikini Kill and Le Tigre
“A page-turner, fast and muscular, electric.” – poet Alice Notley
“How to describe the charm, wit, innocence and energy in Anna Joy Springer’s Red Relic? … How very lucky I am to have read it!” – novelist Carole Maso
Springer is now associate professor of literature at University of California San Diego where she teaches experimental writing, graphic texts, and postmodern feminist literatures. She is also a visual artist and author of the illustrated novella, The Birdwisher.
Jaded Ibis Press and its parent company Jaded Ibis Productions, produce fine and unusual works of literature, music, art and related products with the intent of merging diverse media and art forms. The company directs business decisions with an attempt to perpetuate literature that is intellectually, culturally and ecologically sustainable.