It sounds like Miles Davis in the early 70s. A spooked, wah-wahed guitar. The shifting fog of the organ setting on a Korg synthesiser, notes played (by the Representative himself) as if looking for something. Carefully, slowly, but looking nonetheless in the murk. The songs I’ve heard so far (the disc is playing right now) take a while to bubble and simmer before the vocals come in, which, when they do, are also spooked, emerging from the murk and wandering with it.
This is a mood piece, but the mood thick and heavy. The instruments roll together in a strange, simmering broth. ‘I can’t fight no longer/I don’t recognise the battle.’ Is there anything new lyrically? ‘It’s all so useless/ Why do it?’ Perhaps only the way it is sung – drawled, as always, lugubrious, as it is sometimes, but somehow feeling its way forward in the murk.
Manhattan Tuesday arrived this morning. I came down in the lift to go out for a quick lunch before work. And I saw it: a cardboard box, a foot deep, half a foot wide and tall, in the pigeon hole for my department. And thought: is that it? And then, going to it, saw the unmistakeable handwriting on the dispatch note. My name, my address, and then the signature: Sterling R. Smith. Excited, I stood in queue to get the lift back up to the office, so I could unseal it and open it up.
A few minutes passed. Frustration. And then the lift, and then the office, and then I opened it savagely, ripping the cardbox flaps. And there they were: all the CDs and DVDs in Corwood’s catalogue. All of them, shrink wrapped and in chronological order and packed with styrofoam and plastic in the to protect them. Is there a note?, I asked myself. I took the CDs out and stacked them on the floor. No note. I was disappointed. I’d written to Corwood to ask permission to quote lyrics and music. No note.
But then I saw it: a sheet of paper folded into four, and on one side, a note, granting me permission. And a signature: Corwood. I put the folded sheet into my pocket like a talisman. And I saw, unasked for, Manhattan Tuesday was also enclosed. A gift. The CDs themselves, 50 of them, were almost uniform in appearance.
The discs were blue. It’s Corwood blue, I thought to myself. The inlays a single sheet of paper, quite thin. The spines of the CDs were almost entirely regular, but not quite. And the layout on the back of the CDs were likewise not quite uniform. Imperfections, I thought. That’s not how Corwood want it.
And the covers themselves, with which I’m familiar from the Jandek site … here they were, in person. Anti-photographs, as they’ve been called, just as the music’s been called anti-music. How they seem to beg for a context, a story. I Threw You Away, with the photo from Cork (I visited the exact same spot not long ago). And the cottage on the cover of Glasgow Monday, The Cell.
There’s a great deal to be written about all of this, I thought. And there are 35 posts to go this summer, until I reach 50 (one for each of the albums). 50, and all of them notes for a long article, and perhaps a book to come. That’s what the summer’s for, I thought. This is my Jandek summer, I thought.
I was up very early this morning, as always. Up early, and to write about Jandek, but what to write? About the alleged lack of musical proficiency, I thought. The alleged amusicality. Write about that, I thought, and set everyone to rights. Write about what passes for proficiency and what is more proficient than mere proficiency. Didn’t W. say the Representative knew his way around the guitar?, write that. And find the choicest quotes from Irwin Chusid’s interview on the DVD and use that, I thought.
But it was very early, and I was tired. I thought, as I often do, I would like to begin a post with the phrase, I wandered from room to room. And thought, no: some discipline is required. Thought: writing needs to be flung in a particular direction. And this is summer is Jandek summer, I thought. The summer is all for Jandek, I thought.
As I type, Manhattan Tuesday plays on. Didn’t I read the lyrics the other day? I wondered whether they worked. And now I hear the part about depression. ‘It seems I’ve been depressed all my life/ I remember once when I was about eleven years old/ On a summer day/ I was aware of the nothingness of life.’ And I think to myself: this is Jandek’s version of Blanchot’s primal scene (quote here, scroll down), where the child looks up at the sky and sees – nothing. ‘I said to my mother, there’s nothing to do/ She said, just go outside, you’ll find something to do/ So I went outside and did things/ Now it seems there is more to do inside than outside/ But still there’s nothing to do.’
It’s an early summer evening in my city. Heavy wind blew grit in my eyes. I came home to soothe them. Home, and drank from the bottle of wine already opened. And piled up the Jandek CDs I brought home, there beside the washing machine still stranded in my living room. And went in the other room and lay down to hear Manhattan Tuesday. And thought of the leak coming down the bathroom wall from the burst soil pipe and how it must have been leaking all along. And wondered why the plumber hadn’t come yet to fix it, why repairs always take so long.
It’s upstairs’ responsibility. Or the property management company who run it. And I thought, there’s no sense dwelling on it. No sense getting annoyed. And thought, there’s always something to be annoyed about, and if you want to be annoyed, your annoyance will range out and find something. And that perhaps I was in annoyed frame of mind, and that I should lie down and let it pass.
So I lay, and listened. And then I came here into the other room, with a desire to write. I thought, if only I could write, then something would happen, and I’d no longer feel annoyed. Thought: if I write something down, then I’ll have a little distance, for writing affords me that. To set it down for distance, to write of the day and somehow be rid of the day, even as I am in the midst of it. But pushing it away, just a little. And enough to – what? Enough to do what?
And thought, too, that this will be the summer of romance, that I’ll be Visited again. That the Visit begins about a month from now, and it will be our summer, a summer of romance, in which my Jandek summer will be secretly furled. My visitor does not care for Jandek, alas. Few people do. I think W. does. I burned him some CDs. And I sent a friend back to his distant country with a few burned CDs. And I spoke the name Jandek at a conference, to which I’d brought a few burned Jandek CDs to give away. Jandek summer, the summer of romance, both at once, one overlaying the other. One laying down upon the other.
Disc 2 now, of the 2 disc set of Manhattan Tuesday. There’s a new kind of singing on this album, I’ve said that. And a new speech-singing, a sprechstimme (nice word, because it lets the word Stimmung, mood, resound in it). The part about the child and the mother (Jandek’s primal scene) was spoken. And now this fourth song, the first on disc 2, is spoken. ‘I can be a slave to depression/ but at least it’s mine.’ Too confessional, I think. Too direct – it invites too simplistic an encounter. Invites biographical interpretation, and that the key to Jandek would lie in the biography of the Representative.
Pause. Drink some wine. Soothe your eyes. Listen again. The simmering, the bubbling. It’s Miles from the 70s all over again. It’s ‘He Loved Him Madly’ from Get Up With It all over again. A song 30 minutes long that I never want to end (and especially as it is followed by a song on that album in a very different mood).
But this song – Jandek’s – is only part of a suite. A suite – Afternoon of Insecurity – that makes up the whole of Manhattan Tuesday. A title I do not like, I admit. That bodes ill. Not another misstep, I wonder, like that of The Door Behind and When I Took That Train – the romance albums. Not another over-literal Jandek album, I think.
But there is the murk of the music, thankfully. There is the swirl of that organ, and that wah-wahed guitar drenched in effects so that it could almost be Miles’ trumpet. And the suite presses on. Bubbles, makes a kind of bed across which the singing – the speaking-singing – can glide.
‘There’s nothing to do/ Is it just go outside and you’ll find something to do …’ Stay inside instead. Inside, for the whole of your life, there where there’s nothing to do. Nothing – and you are inside with nothing. No one with nothing, keeping it company. The long wake with nothing that is the whole of your life, and inside.
And outside? The outside is too full of distractions. Outside distracts from the sense that there’s nothing to do. Always something to do outside, but in fact this merely conceals the fact that there’s nothing to do. The voice is high, strangely high. As though lifted from itself. High up – stretched strangely into the air. And speaking – but in a high voice. Speaking – this is a tract. Is it over-literal? Do the vocals emerge to clearly from the murk? I think they do …
‘I can’t die/ to the why that looooms …’: those rhymes he likes sometimes. Rhymes that divide a line into couplets. And the long ‘looooms’ and two half cries, ‘aieeee’. And still the organ, creeping on. And the rattle of the drums. And can I hear a plucked bass? The guitar is quiet, for now. The organ has gone church-like.
I think this is music to listen to from another room. To let the singing, the speech-singing fall back into the murk and be dissolved there. Too literal – this is a tract. ‘Ok – so what now/ So what does one who doesn’t care do?’
Write some more, I tell myself. You haven’t written enough, I tell myself. You need some distance, and from the day, the evening. It’s really blowing outside, but you are inside. Don’t let the wind blow you around in here. You’ve a bottle of wine opened. Drink. Offer yourself some wine. It’s good, dark wine. Good for being uncorked for a few days.
Didn’t W. drink from it the other day? Didn’t he want a glass of wine when we were back from the pub, and ask to see the opening of Satantango again, with the cows. I was falling asleep, I remember that. I said to him, I’m falling asleep, and he said, alright, I’ll finish this wine and go to bed. I was on my blowup bed on the floor, he on the bed in the bedroom, whose slats collapse when you lie on it too heavily.
Write some more, I tell myself. Write of trivial things. Remember Lou Reed’s and John Cale’s song from their suite about Andy Warhol: A Dream. ‘It was a very cool, clear Fall night’ … narrated by Cale. Was it from Warhol’s Diaries? It seems to speak like Warhol, like all of Warhol. I like people, says my Visitor. She likes to read about people. With A Dream, I feel close to Warhol. And close to Cale and Reed’s closeness to him, and their need to be close to him.
But A Dream – something about the way it’s recorded opens up space. Opens it up. And the voice, Cale’s, held against that openness. Speak-singing about nothing, about everything. Conjuring up the quiddity of a life. Its quiddity – its string of haecceties, one after another. And I feel close to Warhol. And I feel close to the closeness to Warhol shared by his two friends, who sing for him.
And then I remember how I thought once that to spend time with another – a human being, a cat – is to learn of that secret integrity they have. That secret stringing together that makes them consistently them. A style of being, uniform. And that is somehow good, that is full of goodness. And remembered how it came to me as a revelation, that thought. That you could discover a vast, diffuse goodness in that way.
And that that what’s old married couples might know of one another. And that that’s what it might mean to struggle through life with another. And I remember again the ordinary heroisms of that Winterbottom film, what was it called. Of a man unemployed who had to get the house clean for his wife coming home, and then it wasn’t clean and she was angry and he left the house and went out, and then, after a while – this was one of the story-arcs of the film – came home. Home, because that’s where she was. And hadn’t she learnt by his exit of what he also was, besides an irritant? And that that was a part of their living together, and of a whole life together, that that’s what it might mean, to live together, and for a whole life.
And the CD is playing. Where are we now? A new track – is it the last? has an hour passed? an hour since I say down to write. An hour here as the night is turning, the sky getting greyer? The organ sound is more assertive. It sounds as though something will be resolved, something brought to an end. The song is no longer murky, but determined, sure. It’s rising and finding, to a plateau in the jungle. To a vantage point that will let us listeners see where we have travelled. And will give the artist, too, a sense of what has gone before.
Ah, the song is heating up. The organ plays in a thick single chord – crescendo. And then down again. A down swoop. And he’s singing. ‘It’s the saaame chair’. A favourite motif from Jandek: a chair. In a chair, I stare. I don’t know what to do but sit in a chair. Didn’t I say once to X., ‘she doesn’t even know how to sit in a chair.’ As an ultimate dismissal. To say: she doesn’t know that, not even that. To sit. Just to sit. To be resigned. Not to resign oneself – but to be resigned.
To have come to the end of something. To have been brought to the end. Until there’s just that: sitting, and for no purpose. Sitting, waiting – but for what. Waiting without object. Waiting that’s worn out waiting. Until sitting in a chair is enough. Enough – because it’s a beginning. Things can begin from here. It’s a kind of inside. And to sit in a chair is already something.
I’ve no more to write, and only a drop more wine. These early summer evenings last forever. Never a dimming. Never do the curtains need to be drawn. And I would like to draw them. Against – the day. The outside. The wind that moves the clouds quickly across the sky. I would like the control the source of light. To sit in a dark room with pools of light from lamps that I switch on. There’s too much light – it’s everywhere. Everywhere, and even now, in the evening. This evening, this mid May evening, early summer – or is it late spring – from which Jandek summer begins to open. This late spring one month from my Vistor’s Visit …
No electric guitar on this one. You can hear the bass play. ‘Fear was the other door’ … something is resolving itself. Is coaming to an end. I’m tired. I’d like to go next door and rest again, and close my eyes again. Tonight, what is to happen tonight? I must finish my wine and cycle out. Finish it and go out with my bike, into the still-bright night. Having opened this space in the day. Having had it opened, set behind me like the musical background in A Dream. Against which Cale speaks. Against which I would like to speak-sing.
Ah, beautiful, the rising plucked bass, with the rising organ notes. The clatter of drums. It’s coming to an end, it must be. I’m waiting – and it’s ended. Applause (but no cries, as after Glasgow Monday, The Cell – how I love those cries, those whoops). As I must end here, without applause (but I do not want applause).
[Welcome to visitors to the blog searching for Jandek via Google. You all seem to end up here. Other Jandek posts here. There’ll be at least 50 in total when I’m done.]
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