COMMENT

Somewhere Kierkegaard is writing about drama and in a short chapter with the head “What it means to die,” he writes, “I know that the tragic hero dies in the fifth act of the drama, and that death here has an infinite significance in pathos; but that when a bartender dies, death does not have this significance.”

The injustice encoded in this cleft has always been with me since I first read this passage 8 or 9 years ago, that is, it’s felt like a competent summation.

A bartender of course can mean the world to anybody, far more than imagined or real heroes. I don’t mean to be totally sentimental here. I’m not rewriting “A Clean, Well-Lit Place” or whatever. How about a general call for revision of the term “heroism”?

My friends in Kansas City and expats too are mourning the very sudden and untimely death of Anne Winter. Anne was a critical figure in the local music world in many capacities: as a D.J., as a promoter, as the owner of the used record store that mattered, and finally as a person. Gosh, even as a sort of model to some extent.

Now, the sentimental alarms are going off all over, but the record store she owned wasn’t just a record store. As a high schooler living in the rural land adjacent to a metropolitan area going to that record store was totally affirmative. A diaspora of freaks from rural lands, suburbs, and in the city itself gathered there to not only be turned on to records, zines, shows, people, but to affirm possibilities, to affirm modalities, sexualities, politics undreamt of in the rigorously conventional hinterlands. Anne’s presence there was sort of like a friend of one’s older sister, who knew about everything that had ever been cool and instead of fetishizing her treasure wanted to tell the world. Doing some math, when I was 17, Anne would have been my age, 31. I probably saw her almost every day, as I loitered not buying anything in her shop after high school. That’s sort of what I meant by “model.” It’s simple to say, but the idea that someone can own a record store as their JOB, can stay punk into their 30’s, can fight the jadedness of withstanding waves of identical freaks from the hinterlands…that meant an enormous amount to me at the time, and means something to my life now, and to the artistic communities I participate in now. She was a real hero—and she will be awfully missed.