an ill-fated scheme, brought about by the initial failings of "new" blogger.
starting with a single word, i increased the length of each entry by one word
to see how long an entry could be before blogger choked like a weasel
swallowing a wardrobe. the bug was fixed at some point fairly early in the
scheme's arduous progress, which was fortunate as it would have
taken forever to reach the thousand or so words that the limit seemed to
be and was already showing signs of becoming a bore. i decided at that
point that i would end it when it reached 100 words, but even that was
a struggle and resulted in some of the lamest posts ever to hit the web.
(now officially recognised as "not even seeming like a good idea at the time".)
The Yes/No Interlude
being the delicate blogging of an english chap in austin, texas, who has recently
ressumed his technical career but is still searching for eternal verities in
the bottom of his martini glass and on curious web pages. he is married, quite old
and off to the gym in a few minutes. you can email him at ner (at) nerichardson (dot)
co (dot) uk...
Some Tunes (07/27/03)
peradventure, elizabeth wren; the mechanical forces of love, medicine; the best of... , sandy denny; mystical songs/tudor portraits,vaughan williams.
Bedside Reading (07/27/03)
inconspicuous comsumption, paul lukas; pattern recognition, william gibson; the best democracy money can buy, greg palast; the dog of the south, charles portis; the conquest ofcool, thomas frank
You can read about the real "Yes/No Interlude" here.
Wednesday, July 30, 2003
It's going to take me a while to get used to this new regime –- after a year of attenuated leisure and having the time/opportunity to let a single thought flit around my tiny brain from dawn to dusk I now find most of my waking hours taken up with A JOB. On a few levels not much has changed -- I still get up at the same time and sit in front of a computer and the money isn't enough for spontaneous lifestyle changes or the purchase of desirably technological gadgets. However, there is one big downside: I don't seem to be able to find the time or the inclination to blog. I can barely even find the time to read blogs or other online outcrops of elucidation anymore....
I'm sure I'll get into some sort of routine over the next few weeks, that I'll lose this deadening weariness that descends upon me after dinner and smothers all the ideas that were buzzing in my noggin during the day. So don't give up on me just yet if entries seem even more sparse and banal than the last hundred were. Eventually everything will click into place and I'll be churning out big thoughts, boffo laffs and all the other stuff people were once rumoured to come here for.
a-a-aaaaaaaand one hundred. THE END. Or at least it will be when I get to the end of this entry. Just punch me in the head if I come up with a futile scheme like this again or start entertaining the notion that lipograms are the way to go. How many days has it taken me to write these 100 grueling entries? I'm not going back to see, nor am I going to check that I got the word count right for each one as I have a suspicion things went slightly awry in the mid seventies. (That's all folks.)
When I'm done with this malarkey I must write a long review of Eliza Wren's recent album, Peradventure. I'm baffled there's only one review of this online and it's probably only available outside of Austin via her website. (which I must warn you is rather disappointing – there's a Shockwave doodad on the front page but I've never stayed online long enough to download so I've no idea what it is, and the two tracks from the album are my least favorite.) It's neat to discover a new favorite band that no-one else has heard of, but this is wrong.
So I might as well continue calling this The Yes/No Interlude for a bit longer. No point in changing now and then having to change it again when I move, upgrade, get wildly ambitious and go madly over the top at www.what-a-stupid-web-site-name.com. I may change the graphics and layout to celebrate finally finishing this 1-100 words nonsense. Just two more entries after this and I'll be free of this ridiculously restrictive regime. Soon I'll have the luxury of being able to ramble on for thousands of words or just post an annotated link as the urge takes me.
I'm probably going to change domain name and webspace provider as soon as my year's contract with uk2.net is up. It's time to switch to a .com extension, too. Uk2.net doesn't let you use grown-up stuff like PERL, PHP and I've been promising myself I'll do something a bit more with my website than just a straightforward "X sucks, Y rules, today I had yogurt" blog for some time. I used to be cutting edge, you know back in the days when using the web for self-advertisement and meeting girls was a new and mostly unexplored field.
Cheapo Records! How my heart would once have leapt upon entering such an establishment, a secondhand CD store the size of a supermarket. But now I just feel a sense of despair, seeing all that music I don't want to hear. There's just too much, more hours of phony rebellion, sappy conformity and dull plod in the section marked Rock/Pop - A alone than a human could comfortably listen to in a year. Even the good stuff, the gems I'll never get to hear, reduced to acres of uniform plastic cases. It feels like a morgue.
I suspected from the big rise in blog hits on Thursday that the grinning middle-aged munchkin "'Harlemm' Lee" must have won Fame or been outed as Saddam's third son or something -- and yip, of the last 50 folks who came this way hardly any were searching for the usual wholesome internet goodies like "girls overinflating balloons","avril lavigne's butt", "faith hill's bra size" (an increasingly popular search -- why?) or "Aristasia" but were instead looking for info about the reinvented man-child who sings like an electrocuted smurf. Well, sorry folks, you've come to the wrong place.
Dunno how he did it, but Simon of No Rock and Roll Fun managed to find the most perfectly bonkers example of rightwing hogwash yesterday, the sort of thing that is now impossible to parody in America because there's certain to be someone saying or writing something even more repugnant. There really are grownmenandwomen here who instead of being escorted home and given something soft to chew on get book contracts, radio shows and newspaper columns just for being able to put the Dixie Chicks, Stalin and compulsory sodomy in the same paragraph....
So how's my new job, you ask? Well, it's a bit of a shock to the system after all this time off. I worked a total of ten hours between late May 2002 and mid July 2003 -- discounting some pretty perfunctory voluntary work I did at the Texas food bank, wiping crap off the top of cans of menudo for the poor -- and have rather got out of the habit of spending eight hours a day doing the same thing in the same place.
Also I'm slightly horrified that I'm using Windows XP....
Don't you wish you were a top neo-con pundit like Andrew "The revolution will be blogged – so long as it doesn't happen at the weekend" Sullivan? You could tie the tragic suicide of Dr David Kelly to Howell Raines without feeling the slightest inkling of shame. Even after a year here I'm still amazed there are so many of these blustering rightwing blowhards who not only seem to be in a constant state of apoplexy over the very existence of liberals but have somehow managed to make a living out of it....
...neon world outside, trying to make sense out of the shapes beyond the window, rerunning the last few hours, trying to recapture those moments when you felt immortal just because you were dancing without feeling selfconscious to the greatest song you'd ever heard and you forgot to ask the DJ what it was…. poised between nausea and insanely profound thoughts, the faint strain of some local FM station fading in and out beneath the cabbie radio banter sounding like the most poignant soundtrack... and that's what Junior Boys sound like.
Listening to Junior Boys and reading k-punk on their spectral roadmusic. It conjures up an essential part of clubbing rarely mentioned: the taxi home. Back to the early 80s for my anecdotal ramblings: post-Phonographique drunk, forlorn, battered by aural hallucinations and abandoned by friends. Mind on early 20s overdrive. Aching with unrequited love for just about any goth nymphet who'd displaying the right mix of stockingtop and distain and gone off with some Kirkgate fishmonger with a rockabilly quiff. Sprawled alone in the back of a cab watching the ghostly....
A weird thing about the Austin music scene -- some of the most intriguing female singers are also actresses and models. Normally this would be the kiss of death, indicating a general will-do-anything-to-be-noticed desire for celebrity rather than a genuine creative imperative, but as with Patricia Vonne (whose disappointing first album barely hints at what she could/should do), Eliza Wren's music is more than just another bulletpoint on her resume. Go to her website, download her version of Roky Erickson's "Unforced Peace" and join me at the next paragraph.
There seem to be two main strands of Austin music. That which has its roots in the blues, R&B, country, folk and other autochthonic traditions and that which seems to have sprung out of the acid-fried brain of Roky Erickson. You can probably guess which of these I prefer and seek out. Every night there are dozens of bands reheating tired out licks that may once have been "authentic" but has now be processed by repetition and reduction to little more than hokey, Austin City Limits-ified tourist muzak.
If I don't post anything today maybe everyone will assume I'm slaving over the finishing touches to a fabulous successor to The Yes/No Interlude or out exploring the less obvious wonders of Austin and writing about them. Or will they surmise I'm just sitting around and scratching myself as I take this last opportunity to watch daytime TV, which I managed to refrain from doing over the last year for fear of getting caught up in surreal soaps like Port Charles and reruns of Dharma and Greg?
I'm possessed by extreme lethargy today. Thinking of all the things I probably ought to do in this two-day limbo between getting a job and starting it, that I should squeeze into these last days of freedom, has tired me out. Like all those things I didn't do when I was unemployed because I was too busy looking for a job and felt other activities would be too much of a distraction. Write a novel? Nah. Read a novel? Hmmmm. Take a nap? Now you're talking....
I may have to pad this entry out as it needs to contain eighty five words and all I really want to mention is this newspaper headline from the Washington Times on Monday:
There's a sort of terse, disgusting poetry in that. (Via News of the Dead).
How many words was that? Well, okay, here's a rather cool and lovely link for space perverts: Varla Dayne, which seems to come from an alternative universe where John Wylie edited The Eagle.
Finished Tom Doyle's biography of Billy Mackenzie, The Glamour Chase. It's a tragic story, sadder than I expected, having somehow got the idea he had retired from music in his mid-twenties to raise whippets, that the records which did occasionally appear were just whims or favors, nothing he meant seriously. Poor Billy, who reached his zenith so young, then found himself unable or unwilling to drift into a career of mere celebrityhood afterwards, blessed with the voice but unable to find the song again.
And so it's back to being a tech writer. I'd entertained the notion of maybe using the move to America to re-evaluate my career prospects and maybe doing something else, but this year has proved there's nowt else I can do that can't be done by someone younger, prettier and much, much cheaper. Besides, I'll be doing it at a neat little place just off Burnet rather than in the hellish concrete wastelands of North Austin where all those giant, faceless corporations squat.
So, I, um, well. Okay, this is what happened. I got a job.
I had an interview about a month and a half ago. It went well, but they told me they weren't in a hurry to fill the position so it might be a while before I heard anything. A few weeks went by and I forgot all about it. Then yesterday I got a call out of the blue. Was I still interested? Could I start Monday?
What will that title be? Blowhards In Bondage? No. The Brabbler? Nope. Throbbing Gizzards? I think not. The Day The Zeitgeist Changed? Not likely. I Love Sausages? Begone. Walter Benjamin's Underpants? Silly boy. Mere Onychomancy? I have no idea what that means. Snood Frenzy? Haven't I used that already? "Mission Accomplished"? Is that a gibe at our Resident? Questions About Hats? Wilfully obscurantist. The Honey-Tongued Misanthropist? Cute, but not for me. Decomposing Sperm Whale? Too salty. Untitled Blog Project? Hmm, maybe....
This is the eightieth entry in my entirely misconceived n+1 project, but the end is near. Not only will I stop this nonsense when I reach one hundred, but it will also be the end of The Yes/No Interlude. Hurrah! The interlude is over, so it's time for a new blog. Same place, same modus operandi, same curious obsessions, same curious indulgences, same overuse of the word "curious" -- just a new look and an even more obscure title....
The Yellowcake Revelations seem to be proving that it's always the smallest, most unnecessary dribbles of bullshit, the ornament swirls and trickles, the superfluous lies that are told just because they can be, because it has become habit, that bring down the rotten edifices of lies and dissemination.
Bush has got that panicky look in his eyes again, that old chimp grimace. The folksy arrogance that has seen him through most of his residency has turned back to bewildered incomprehension.
Mmmmm. Yellowcake. Sounds like something they have at that bakery in East Austin we ventured into at the weekend. Everything looks wonderful but before you can get a good look at the thousand types of multicolored pan dulces, galletas etcetera at the counter you're assaulted with "YES! WHAYOOWAN? NEXT!" and either back out of the store in terror or point at the nearest item and leave with a bag of vivid pink bricks that taste only of flour.
"No one can accurately tell you that it was wrong. That is not known. The president said that Iraq was seeking uranium in Africa. That still may be absolute fact."
"That's absolute, total nonsense. The president said something that was based on the information that was available to date. In hindsight, we have said that it should not have risen to the president's level and that's exactly what we have reported to the American people."
Always leave 'em laughing. Joseph Heller didn't die, nor did he write those crappy novels after God Knows. He went into hiding and wrote scripts for Ari Fleischer. The latest batch could be straight from the underrated Good as Gold:
"This revisionist notion that somehow this is now the core of why we went to war, a central issue in why we went to war, a fundamental underpinning of the president's decisions, is a bunch of bull."
After a year here Austin still seems to me a blank slate upon which my pen (or whatever metaphorical tool goes with a blank slate) has failed to make any impression. Perhaps a whiteboard and a dried-up magic marker that just makes an annoying squeaking sound would be a better image, a magic marker that -- ooops! -- has just fallen on the floor and rolled under the table, to lie amongst the dust, fluff and dead insects....
At the risk of repeating myself: no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Saturday morning, watching squirrels running along the electricity line, dragonflies and little lizards in the trees, just waiting for the woodpecker to show up again. The Lounge Show in the background's playing French music to celebrate Bastille Day: Trenet, Gainsbourg, Brel, various yé-yé girls and the ultra-kitsch Claudine Longet's "Guess Who I Saw In Paris". And I found the Foams EP on SoulSeek and have already managed to download 2% of the first track....
Just remembered there's another Desperate Bicycles track I used to love: "Advice on Arrest". Over little more than choppy, almost flamenco guitars chanted lyrics about what to do if you're arrested turn into a glorious anthem: "At the station there'll be questions... don't answer, see a lawyer first... don't make a written statement... without legal advice". The last thirty seconds still give me the shivers. They don't write them like that any more.
Had planned to get this one to one hundred words nonsense out of the way quickly by writing about the videos that came on MTV, VH1, BET and CMT this morning but after struggling to find even seventy one words to say about Linkin Park's "Faint" beyond "Constipated white boys show their angry at the world by jumping up and down against a backdrop of grayness and decay" I gave up.
Was this the silliest idea I've ever had? Maybe not, but certainly in the top ten to date. I've reached seventy words now and it seems like this divertissement is all I've ever done, that my life has been spent trying to say things in an exact number of words. And I thought I'd get to eight or nine hundred? What was I on that morning? Too much coffee, man.
Whoever came here via a search for Julia and her Bazooka is my kind of person and I hope she or he sticks around. I was thinking of Anna Kavan while leafing through Pamela Ribon's Why Girls Are Weird a few days ago, as I sheltered from a sudden Austin rainstorm in Barnes and Noble. Her heroine is called Anna K., you see. Is it a reference to Kavan?
It's just my opinion I know, but one of the essential albums of all time is re-issued on Tuesday -- Shirley and Dolly Collins' Love, Death and the Lady from 1970. It's not folk-rock. Folk-goth would be a better portmanteau construction. It's the most emotionally battering music I've heard (including early Swans), almost every track capable of leaving me limp and sobbing on even the happiest of days.
This is quite possibly the greatest thing I've stumbled across online for many years, containing not just the entire works of Sir Thomas Browne but also many of the books he referred to in such classics as Religio Medici, Pseudodoxia Epidemica, Hydriotaphia or Urne-Buriall, etc. Where else will you find Henry Peachum's The Valley of Variety (1638) and The Travailes of an Englishman by Job Hortop (1591)?
Why is it so hard to describe how a certain voice -- in this case, Sandy Denny's --can rip ones soul apart with effortless ease, without a hint of the mechanised mugiency of today's pop donkeys? Do I now have to go off and read Roland Barthes?
And how did I get so ancient without ever hearing her sing? What twittering deadwood wasted my listening time?
Back to Fairport Convention. What We Did On Our Holidays isn't quite as breathtakingly as I'd hoped it would be, having developed the puzzling notion recently that the music to really break my heart might be late 60s English folk-rock, but "She Moves Through The Fair" and "Meet On The Ledge" set up the right kind of resonances in my brain with their melancholic poignancy.
It looks as if normal blogging service has been restored. Even those two lost archives have returned -- after I spent a hour recreating them by hand. But it was good to get back into HTML and CSS, delving in the innards and remembering what it used to be like, when I did an online diary and changed the look and feel every other day.
Is this really Bettie Page at 80? It's taken from this month's Playboy – a publication I don't buy for obvious religious and moral reasons (and lack of $5.99) so can't verify. She looks supernaturally well-preserved. Maybe a regime of bondage, implausible lingerie and six inch heels is the key to looking young forever. I thought it was a plain-clothed Cyndi Lauper at first.
Was it when he said "Bring 'em on!" last week that George W. Bush completely ceased to be human? As James Carroll writes: "there is nothing at the core of this man but visceral meanness." It wasn't a process that ever had very far to go. Look in his eyes when he does that speak –- pause -- glare thing he does....
At least I don't need to continue this N+1 malarky through to the bitter end. I'll stop this nugae difficiles when I reach one hundred words. Then I can start churning out fiddle-faddle and flapdoodle without having to think about word-length. Fiddle-faddle, flapdoodle and flummery, even. Can't beat a fat slice of steaming flummery on an overcast Austin morning.
Okay, the big post problem has apparently been resolved. We'll see about that when I'm able to publish something of ANY SIZE AT ALL!
What is up with Blogger lately? Two months worth of archives went missing too, which wouldn't be so bad if there was still a Republish Archives option.
"Zero, nada, nothing new here," smirks Bush's mouthpiece, Ari Fleischer.
Nothing new? The President passes off dodgy speculation as an integral part of his "evidence" for invading Iraq and that's "zero, nada"? Well, I guess not. How silly of me to think it's even worth mentioning.
Blugger seems boggered again ... or it is just me? Everyone else seems to be posting merrily, but when I try to publish anything it goes into a loop, reloading the "Publishing is in progress – this may take a few minutes blah blah blah" page or coming up with:
Something must have happened, a blockage or unblockage, depending on whether you regard writing as a creative or therapeutic process. Was being a "technical writer" (my title when I had a job in a dim, distance era) enough to satisfy the urge, even when all I was writing was about installing cash machine video drivers?
Jealousy's a terribly thing, of course. Especially when you're jealous of someone's success at doing something you haven't really tried doing, at least not since you got a computer. Although you always used to write bits and bobs, and thought when you bought a decent PC it would all come together. Ten years later....
Eventually I'll have to talk about Pamela Ribon's first novel: Why Girls Are Weird, which has just appeared and is giving me... what's the opposite of schadenfreude? Is there a word, preferably Germanic, for the unreasonable resentment of another person's fortune? Though maybe it's not unreasonable at all, just part of human nature.
Surprised to see yesterday's Church of Me taking Andrew Sullivan as the voice of reason regarding Michael Moore. By setting up Michael Moore and Ann Coulter as opposing extremes, Sullivan settles himself smugly in the middle as the Mr Commonsense of Punditry, when he's the lord of the neo-cons himself....
So maybe I should switch to increasing the length of each posting by ten words. That would speed things up. But not yet. As a writing exercise this is still working for me. Maybe when I reach 100 words. Right now I'm at 50, although only by extending this sentence.
I'm starting to wonder if this is such a clever idea. The post that got the BIG POST ERROR was 1,256 words long. Posting it in two sections got around this, which means the limit is at least 650. So I've got at least another 602 entries to write.
I only lost my fascination when I started to encounter other Hitchhiker fans -- not merely people who had also heard and loved it but Hitchhiker fandom. They diluted the intimacy of the universe Adams had created, moved their furniture into the spaces in my head he opened up.
I was probably the perfect listener, an Arthur Dent in waiting: passive, confused, angry wanting only the quiet, simple life, but unable to have that because of the self-perpetuating forces of bureaucracy and commercialism. Even though Dent's essential Englishness was closer to Richard Briers than Johnny Rotten.
The radio version of Hitchhiker Guide remains the best, the perfect medium for such wayward imaginings. The sonic inventions, the perfect voices -- the books only worked if you still carried those in your head. (The Book's graphics were the only good thing about the TV version.)
One of the posts that got lost was about my life back in mid-1978. Kicked out of college, pushing a trolley around a mail-order warehouse, my life seemed to have reached a dead-end. Three things kept me going: music, books, first radio repeats of Hitchhiker....
I don't have a copy of Mostly Harmless with me, but I still remember the way the book seemed to pit feckless whimsy against existential despair. It was a book only a world-weary forty-something still riding on the success of his twenties would write.
I remember writing something about the last of the Hitchhiker books. Like most of Adam's novels the circumstances of its writing were more interesting than the book itself, but the first few chapters were an astonishing departure from what he had done before.
I meant to return to the subject of Douglas Adams and the whole Hitchhiker's Guide malarkey, but Blogger started playing silly buggers and zapped my posts out to Proxima Centauris or thereabouts. I'm not sure what else I had to say, but....
Magic 105 -– a San Antonio radio station that always seems to be playing Corey Hart's "Sunglasses at Night. It's not quite an "all 80s all day" playlist but if you really want to hear Men Without Hats again, here's the place....
Now I've reached forty words I think I have enough leeway to work the actual count into every tenth entry, preferably in a non-obtrusive manner, to help everyone -- including myself -- keep track of how I'm doing. Like I've done here.
It appears that people using Blogger Pro have also been getting the BIG POST ERROR message when trying to publish entries longer than "I wuv fluffy kittens!" so it isn't some capitalistic ploy to get $35 out of us skinflints.
I've never read a Jeffrey Archer "novel" but I've seen enough sneering pieces in Private Eye to recognise that this looks like the plot to one. I trust there will be a typically unsubtle moralistic comeupance at the end....
Okay, so how did Marcello manage to publish a 2,959 word post today? Is he using Blogger Pro? Is that what you have to do now if you want to use Blogger to write rather than make notes?
Which is a barely exaggerated rendition of how the aforementioned Fairport Convention loving accountant used to write in a fanzine he once did. Veritable quantities of estimable ale would be boisterously imbibed at agreeable hostelries, for instance.
However, I recently bought a copy of Roget's Thesaurus for a dollar at Half-Price Books. It's a facsimile of the 1879 edition so if perchance my lucubrations divagate toward the impalpably fustian you'll comprehend the nidus.
I trust you will all be keeping an eye out for superfluous adjectives and the piling up of extraneously sub-clauses, tagged on just to add the extra few words needed to reach the required length.
Writing entries in Word should also sort out my tendency towards subject/verb mismatches which I never notice until all three of my regular readers have seen what an illiterate chump I can be.
I wonder what would happen if you asked for a Michelada back in Yorkshire? It's a Mexican cocktail made from beer, ice, lime, Worcestershire sauce, soy sauce, Tabasco and beef seasoning.
The n+1 project. A series of entries, each one word longer than the previous, the object being to see who gives up first: me or the new version of Blogger.
Working on a title and explanation to put in the sidebar to explain what I'm doing now, as it isn't exactly obvious. I think the following entry will suffice:
I didn't even know that Sandy Denny and Richard Thompson were ever in Fairport Convention. My musical heritage blocked out by a nincompoop with a Prince Valiant haircut!
I've had a grudge against Fairport Convention for two decades based on an accountant's hairstyle. Only now am I able to listen to their music without squirming.
Although I've raved on and on about the Desperate Bicycles in this blog, I have to admit that I only bought their first two singles, "Smokescreen" and "The Medium was Tedium" when they came out. The "New Cross" EP didn't do much for me and I didn't even know they had made an album.
Now, twenty odd years later and by the magic of Soulseek I can say that I only really like the first two singles and that my judgement at the time was spot on. The EP's too shouty and earnest and the album sounds like they're trying to be the Buzzcocks. It's not bad, just lacks the special magic of those first recordings, the heart-piercing punctum as you kids say nowadays. In a way I'm glad to have it confirmed that I wasn't really missing anything intensely wonderful either at the time or in the decades since.
I spent some time browsing the UT Fine Arts Library's CD catalogue looking for early 70s English folk rock, something I've steered well clear off for decades but now feel I ought to investigate. They didn't have much -- Fairport Convention and Steeleye Span being about it -- but somehow I stumbled upon something else, something I probably should have been looking for sooner. They had a sizeable collection of local, Texan stuff. And while this was to be expected, I had assumed it would all be tedious 6th Street Tex-Mex heritage blues, there turns out to be a lot of cool and strange music waiting for me to request. They haven't got that most aluring of all Austin artifacts, the Foams' 1981 EP, it's good to know that I can get now my ears on everything from the 13th Floor Elevators' labelmates Bubble Puppy to the band the guy at the local coffee shop plays in.
First off though: Jandek.
Oh yes, Jandek. A true Texan cult figure, even though there is nothing Texan about him apart from his post office box address. For two decades his name has been a legend, even to those who have never heard any of his records. Perhaps moreso because once you've heard what he actually sounds like a big part of mystery is gone....
If you haven't heard of Jandek, here's all I know -- and it's pretty close to all anyone knows. Even the most comprehensive fan site hasn't unearthed much about him and this is the only account of anyone apparantly meeting him.
In 1978 an album called Ready for the House came out -- it had the label number Corwood 0739, although no-one had ever heard of this label before, let alone seen or heard Corwood . Irwid Chusid, a DJ at WFMU somehow got hold of a copy, and being a fan of outsider music played it on his show and more or less introduced Jandek to the world. (In his book, Songs in the Key of Z:The Curious Universe of Outsider Music, Chusid has a chapter on Jandek, which is a good place to get all the basic information you need.) Since then, Jandek has put out a further 32 or so albums, at least one a year, all of which are available on CD from Corwood at $8 each or 20 for $80, if you're really keen. There are differences between albums, despite at least one person's theory that everything he's released over the last 25 years was recorded at one session since there's been no real progression or change over the years. Some albums do away with even the rudimentary out-of-tune, single "chord" acoustic guitar accompaniment that is normally his signature. Some have drums, played even more crudely than the guitars. A few feature a woman called Nancy and some have another guy singing. A sort of band plays on others. But most are just Jandek plucking away at his out-of-tune guitar and crooning to himself. There is no information on his record and CD sleeves. They all have a photograph of Jandek, the inside of a house or a street in Ireland on the cover. The back cover lists the track titles and times and the address of Corwood Industries. The font and layout has only changed once over 25 years and 33 albums. He doesn't give interviews. He doesn't play live. His real name might be Sterling Smith. He might have a normal white collar job as he appears to live in an upmarket part of Houston and probably isn't reliant on album sales for his income.
I can only judge his work by the one album I've borrowed so far, The Beginning (it seemed an appropriate place to start, although it turns out to be his 28th album). [CONT...]
The first thing to hit me is that guitar, miked insanely close, harshly metallic and boomy -- it reminds me of someone who has been shown how to shape his fingers into an open chord for the first time and has decided to keep hammering away at the strings until the pain gets too much, regardless of what it sounds like. That someone being me, aged 12, when I took my guitar to school and had the humiliating experience of discovering it was half the size of anyone else's in the class and strung with industrial wire. It may not be a recognisable chord he's plucking and his guitar has probably been out of tune since Jimmy Carter was in office, but he's sticking with it. To be able to put out 27 albums and still not know what a G chord sounds like shows some kind of superhuman dedication or something. And then his voice, a gasped "Hello... it's February," which turns out to be the entire lyrics of the song. His voice isn't the cracked desperate yelp of psychosis or anguish I was expecting, which is a relief. It's spooked and unsettling but I don't feel like I'm getting a cheap thrill from the exploitation of some hapless cauterwauling ex-mental patient like Wild Man Fischer. The closest regularly available music I can compare it to is the material tagged on to the CD of Skip Spence's Oar, the extra extra bonus tracks that sound like he was making it up as he went along to fill up the last few minutes of his recording session, which was doubtlessly the case. Except for all his problems, Spence still had at least a passing acquaintance with melodies and tunes. Jandek doesn't. He appears to pick up the guitar, start plucking at it, sing for anything up to five minutes, then stop. No verses, no chorus, no development. No chord progression because there probably isn't a chord anywhere around to begin with. You can't even compare him to other so-called musical idiot-savants like Wesley Willis and Daniel Johnson who -- regardless of what psychiatric problems they have -- are playing what they think (and very often is) regular rock music. Jandek obviously knows what he's doing. He isn't under the illusion that he's a rock star, he isn't allowing himself to be pandered to by alt-rockers trying to be edgy and transgressive. He makes his music and mails it out. He has his reasons -- and figuring out what they are through the music itself seems to be a hobby bordering on obsession with some people.
It ought to be repellent but I can see the fascination, even as the stabbing pains between my eyes begin. Maybe more than Skip Spence it reminds me of Dock Boggs, except I've never heard anything by Dock Boggs. Just the name and the things I've read conjure up something that sounds like this, desolate, primal, parched and driven by inner demons. On "Lonesome Bridge," he comes close to an almost recognisable version of the blues, or at least what the blues might have sounded like if Suicide's first album had come out in 1920. The opening hiss of "Weeeeeelllll....." is almost as scary as the screams on "Frankie Teardrop".
The title track of The Beginning is a fifteen minute piano piece, an instrument Jandek had not played on any of his previous albums and possibly hadn't touched in his life prior to recording this. It makes my teeth hurt as well as my head, but it brings back fond memories of thumping away at my grandmother's piano when I was five. I don't think I would have made it to six if I had kept it up for this long, however.
Will I borrow another? I made it to the end of In the Beginning and played a couple of tracks several times. Could I become a fan? Will I take advantage of the 20 for $80 offer?
I don't think so, but don't imagine for one second that my fascination is quenched.
Okay, to avoid Penman's Complaint, wherein the inadequacies of the New Improved Blogger bring about the symptoms of swearing, despair and an all-enveloping rage at the modern world, I shall cut my last entry into chunks and publish them backwards so that it still reads in order. Let's see if I can do this without any further pain....
Ian Penman busts the new improved Blogger. Doesn't he know that posts on Blogspot should only consist of a quote from another blog followed by the word "Indeed"? Someone needs to have a word with him, tell him to either post his Pillbox pensees in bite-sized chunks or move to another system. It's damned annoying to wait half a week for him to update only to get:
My epic posting on Dizzee Rascal's forthcoming album, Boy in da corner, which contained more words than there are atoms in the universe, dropped names like Bataille, Pascal, Bergson, Camus, Rousseau, Durkheim, Heidegger, Stalin, Merleau-Ponty, Kristeva, Lacan, Wittgenstein, Teilhard de Chardin, Kurt Godel, Buddy Hackett and Liz Phair in the first paragraph alone and used the word "idioglossia" three hundred times was just wiped out and lost forever by my ailing laptop. Which is good in a way as it means I should be able to write an even longer piece when I've actually heard it....
I must have missed the fireworks 'n' celebrations but it's been a year, give or take a few days, since we moved to Austin with dreams in our hearts and a U-Haul filled with Ikea furniture. Since then.... well, we've still got the furniture. Things have not worked out as well as they did in the imaginary sitcom version where a part-time coffee shop job would net enough to pay for a big, desirable apartment, a happening lifestyle, luxuries like healthcare and regular invitations to dressy dinner-parties where things like "the increasing ridiculousness of Brooks monthly effluence in the Atlantic are a cautionary lesson to us all" and "it isn't often you hear anyone say 'the sensual apprehension of the simulacrum' while dressed as a French maid" and "remember that the first great Christian theologian, Origen, said something about how no one, not even the devil, was condemned to Hell forever" were said over coffee, canapes and cigars and allwas well from sea to shining sea.
We're getting by, except that's not really good enough, not in a society where biting into a caramel apple pop can get you landed with a $700 dental bill and any real health scare would wipe out our savings. I want and need a job, to rejoin the land of the living and for us to be able to afford all the stuff that validates our American existence -- a car that doesn't drag half its insides along the road like a wounded creature, a place of our own, holidays... start a family, visit friends in England and New York, etc, etc, etc. I want this over-extended interlude to end, even though looking at what few openings exist in Austin is like being repeated punched in the face and asked how grateful I am and then told that's the wrong answer and punched some more. Before coming over here I had this nutty idea that this would be the land of opportunity and reward, but when half the people I know seem to be getting up at 5am to earn $7.00 an hour, it's hard to stay motivated and each day the bathrobe and stubble stay on a little later....
This time last year it felt good to be here in time for July 4th. I don't think I'll be in the mood to celebrate anything this year.
