We had the good fortune of connecting with Alan Wieder and we’ve shared our conversation below.
Hi Alan, what was your thought process behind starting your own business?
I’m lucky to have my own tv production company and also a side-hustle as a visual artist. I make my own hours and don’t technically have a “boss.” But he truth is, as a businessperson you always have someone you’re answering to. I have clients, networks, and customers all with their own needs, whims, and demands, and I’d be quickly out of business if I didn’t deliver for them. All that said, I do get to sleep till 10 am every day, sit in minimal meetings, and sometimes say eff it and wrap my day at 2:30.
Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I’m extremely proud of what I’ve accomplished as an artist. I’m a writer first and foremost: I wrote a hit memoir called “Year of the Cock” in 2010, about a very difficult chapter of my life that followed a very tragic divorce. It was a brutally difficult book to write, but it also touched a lot of people and even changed some folks’ lives, so I’m grateful for the whole thing. Now I’m writing a sequel called “It’s Ok, It’s Really Ok” about my happier, but still up-and-down, time as a single dating dad in Hollywood. But in recent years I’ve mostly been working as an illustrator under the moniker Alan Wieder Bad Drawer. I always wanted to draw cartoons, ever since I was a little kid, but the problem was, I sucked at drawing. However, around age 35, I learned to embrace my shittiness and just started doing it anyway, not worrying about how disfigured and kindergarten-like my pieces were. It’s been a formula for success, people actually love my scribblings, and one thing I’ve really learned as an artist is that your flaws and shortcomings can be your greatest assets. Is there anything more relatable than feeling inadequate? Check out my work @alanhwieder on insta and DM me to let me know what you think. I’ve built a decent following but newcomers are very welcome. 🙂
If you had a friend visiting you, what are some of the local spots you’d want to take them around to?
I haven’t lived in Miami for a long time, but I love my high school friend Dan Binkewicz’s bars: Sweet Liberty, Mama Tried, Blackbird Ordinary, Medium Cool. Dan is a master of the good time and all his spots have their own distinctive thing. Little Havana, Wynwood, the Miami Zoo, Venetian pool, Monkey Jungle, and the Everglades are all super-obvious places I would take my French cousin or a lady from out of town. Chartering a fishing boat off Haulover is a blast: I caught a record-breaking mackerel the last time I went out. Prima Pasta on 71st street is a great place to eat delicious and hearty Italian in a fun environment. I guess Jai-Alai is no longer but damn that shit was fun. I won a trifecta there back in high school.
The Shoutout series is all about recognizing that our success and where we are in life is at least somewhat thanks to the efforts, support, mentorship, love and encouragement of others. So is there someone that you want to dedicate your shoutout to?
My all-time hero is the Austrian-Czech Jewish author Franz Kafka. He’s been an inestimable influence on my whole creative endeavor, as a writer and a visualist, since I was a little boy growing up as a Jewish kid in Miami Beach, a grandkid of the Holocaust (my grandfather’s family was largely killed in the war). His work is both hauntingly surreal and absurd and dead-on naturalistic and real. You may have heard the term Kafkaesque: It describes narratives and life circumstances that are absurd, tragic, and dizzyingly oppressive, just like the prisons we find ourselves in in modern society. As I kid I often felt disconnected from and alienated by my teachers, classmates, and even my family, so my connection to the type of oppression Kafka elucidates was profound. If you haven’t read his key novels The Metamorphosis, The Trial, or The Castle, you must! The Trial, for example, tells the story of Josef K., a man arrested and put on trial by some unknown authority, one that never reveals what crime he’s being persecuted for. Isn’t that how we all feel every day??? Maybe it’s just me!
Website: https://www.teepublic.com/user/alanwieder
Instagram: @alanhwieder
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/alan-wieder-88518793/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/alanhwieder
Image Credits
All images © ALAN WIEDER BAD DRAWER, INC.