rocks
water
pinecones
silver
gold
scissors

POSSIBILITIES UNFORSEEN

The first time I laid eyes on a Jandek LP was sometime between 1983 and 1987 when I was somewhere between 15 and 19 years old. It's not so strange that the memory isn't more specific. I was shopping at Record Exchange in Houston, and I remember a bunch of the Corwood releases hanging in a wire rack on the wall with a sign that described them in the most flat, deadpan, reductionist way: "Local Christian Blues". So I saw the records, but didn't really look at them. I wasn't looking for something local, something Houston. I wanted something NYC. I had visited there a lot during my childhood. I had family there and almost every summer my mom and I would fly or sometimes for Christmas my dad would drive the three of us up there - straight, no overnight stops. I had aunts and uncles and cousins and grandparents in New York. In Brooklyn and Manhattan. More specifically Gravesend and CutterÕs Corner. In Houston, no one walked beyond a stroll down the driveway. In Brooklyn and Manhattan, people walked. And when I walked around in New York I felt kind of strangely powerful - independent, different, smart, and capable. It was there, doing that -walking - that I felt protective of the people I was walking with. I felt like I could handle myself and I could handle things for them too. It felt like I became sort of like a boy instead of a girl. Or what I imagined a boy to feel like. And there was a lot to do and a lot to see there. And people to be around all the time just in the street or even neighbors sitting on porches instead of locked up inside houses. So when, as a teenager, because of family upheaval, I got cut off from all that and didn't get to go back to New York anymore I started looking for New York. Those Jandek albums were a blur. Blurry covers: mushy, milky, vague, out of focus, green and blue and pale and creamy. And Christian. Okay, you've got to know I grew up Catholic. And even to a lapsed teenage Catholic the way to sell something was definitely not to describe it as "Christian". Christians proselytized. Catholics didn't need saving. Christians were obvious and Catholicism was all about mystery. (How ironic). And besides, I wanted to get away from all of that... And well, I didn't really know what the blues was, but I was pretty sure I wasn't looking for that either... Yet, the wire rack of records stuck in my mind as something not understood, and curious, memorable in a vague and indistinct way nonetheless. A few years later I was working at that same record store and those Jandek records were still there. Not all the same exact copies, but maybe some of them were the same copies because we only used to sell them occasionally, and usually to people from out of town. Mostly people from places in fact, like New York City. Either that or we sold them to ourselves - to the employees. Times were different. No one cared about Jandek. No one in Houston cared. The people that cared didn't even care. When people who were from out of town asked about Jandek: whether we knew who he was, wanted to figure out who he was, had ever met him, seen him, etc. etc. etc., they got the standard "Naw, we just leave him alone". We were unimpressed with the questions. And besides, if someone wanted to be private they should be able to be private without being bothered. So in a way we were also protective and guarded. There were plenty of reasons in Houston to be protective and guarded. That's how I remember it anyway. But also, Houston had a way of being unimpressed and conversely unimpressive. I finally decided I should probably listen to a Jandek record or two. Mostly because I asked Tom about it, and he talked it up. I think I asked him about it one day, you know, "What's up? What does it sound like? Christian blues?Ó I couldn't get my head around it. And he said something like "No, no, you just have to listen. It's good. Like nothing else. Actually good music". So we listened to a record over at his apartment, which used to be my apartment. A creaky, but nice old white wood and brick fourplex that ended up maybe being the nicest place we ever lived in Houston. I think we heard Chair Beside A Window or Blue Corpse. Most likely Blue Corpse. I don't remember looking at the album covers all that intently. Just in passing. You know, here: this is the one we're playing, these are the song titles, how weird they are all the same design, weird they are all these same kind of Ônon imagesÕ - photographs. I wanted to hear the music. I was blown away. That was 1990. And yet it took a full 5 years or so before the music really took hold. Before I finally really paid attention, took it all in, took it seriously, actually looked at and saw the covers. It's strange but I don't really care about album covers. It's like another intensely Houston kind of statement, and ridiculous. But there's truth to it. Yes, good design, beauty, I can see it. It's difficult to make something beautiful, lasting, a good design that seems fresh and new and appealing and grabs your attention and makes you want to listen. I can see why people get sentimental about album covers like that. But even though my eyes see the ones that are designed well, the ones that get described as Ômight as well be works of artÕ and yes, I can see how they are compelling, something else inside me is unmoved... In Catholic mass there is the transubstantiation. There is the priest in robes, the altar, the chalice, the statues, the stations, the gold, the marble, the shimmering, the plushness, and yet, the most important thing, which is a happening, takes place in nothingness. In plainness, in a place no one can see but which is all around... And it's not about the opposite of beautiful where I am really moved by the ugly. The Ôugly is beautifulÕ aesthetic. Or the utilitarian aesthetic. Or the streamlined aesthetic. Or, that I don't want images to get in the way of my feelings because they might interrupt or taint or mangle what would otherwise be my normal and pure reaction to the music. No. The Jandek album covers... There's a photograph of me somewhere in a box underneath this contraption I sleep on which is sort of like a bed. It's me in the bathtub at around 18 months old and my eyes are wide and I'm looking directly into the camera and I'm pointing at myself. My pointing finger is touching my own chest, where you put your hand on your heart to say the Pledge of Allegiance. And it's like it's captured. It's the moment when I realized I'm me. And that the picture was being taken of me and that 'me' was a person, which meant a being with a spirit and a will and a purpose and all that goes wrapped up with that. And you can see this understanding in my eyes. And you can see that this is a new understanding... So, 1995. We were living on the bottom floor of what should have been a really nice, old house and Jason was living on the top floor. We had a lot of room. I had a lot of time. We were 'retired' from music and I wasn't working and I came up with a project. It was to listen to all the Jandek albums in chronological order (and maybe eventually multiple times over). I figured it was about time to get down to it. By then I had come to think of them as important, a real accomplishment, and deserving of a serious investment of time. We owned all of them but one. So, 21 vinyl LPS. Did I do it in 21 nights? I don't remember. Half that? I do remember I was by myself on the wood floor in front of the stereo with headphones really early in the morning when everyone else was asleep. I didn't stare at the album covers while listening. I just stared at the floor if I had a light on. Or just stared into darkness if the light was off. I listened to the words, the lyrics, as intently as possible. I had stopped listening intently to lyrics years before. I started doing this because I was startled to realize there was something there to be listened intently to. When I looked at the album covers it was usually separate from the listening sessions. Maybe before sitting down to listen. I think a few times I spread them all out and looked at them at once. I started to notice how they cross-referenced each other or continued themes over years established on previous covers. I started to think of the covers more like bits of a film, stills from a film, and the backs like one part of the credits or like chapters in a book, or scenes from a play, or a group of poems in an anthology, or a series of letters, or a computer, an organized intelligence...the organization of intelligence... I started to think of the covers as more than all of that. As more. They became more than what they were. They became something else entirely. And what they became can't really be explained. And that was deeply satisfying... I had forgotten about looking for NY and was looking for myself. I began to resolve certain doubts and questions I had had about the records, the music, the image, the whole deal. The religious aspect. The work was on fire with searching and wanting to relate that search. I became convinced that this Jandek was a genius. And not only because of the mystery, or the execution of the work, but because of the content of that work. And the whole purpose of that work seemed to me to be to ask the listener the question: ÒWho are youÓ? And there was no answer. I didn't expect to find the answer to that question in the work. I expected to find some clues as to the nature of organizing intelligence. What one might do to organize one's own particular brand of intelligence, such as it is. I began to think of the parameters of the music, the parameters of the sound, the patterns, the words. How close and far apart things sounded. The relative and unexpected variations of volume inside and between tracks. The subjects of the lyrics. The array of nonsense and humor and seriousness. I had to laugh when I finally realized there were references to Dylan and Zappa in the lyrics. And there were other players; Jandek was not alone after all. Maybe someone was helping to take those photographs on the front covers too. The photographs. The interiors reminded me of somewhere. Memories of someplace I knew. I mean, I didn't think I actually remembered those places or things, but the images were what memories themselves are - in the mind, in the brain, in the head. The exteriors reminded me of reading Wallace Stevens poems. They made me exhilarated, excited and feel like there were a lot of possibilities. Parameters could be created, and moved around infinitely. But then there were the black moods. What was my content around which the parameters were moving? The truth. I can get really hung up on truth. So redefine it. Take truth out of it, and replace it with feeling... I think I looked at the Units cover more than any of them, for a brief and intense period of time. It's iconic. Striking and puzzling and amusing in a way. I mean, the lengths to develop that strange color scheme in a room. The legs of the chair and the feet of the couch in the same spring green. The black ashtray and black outlet plate. The lavender baseboards and red roses. The teal couch and yellow window shade. The Christopher Marlowe book in that window. Perfectionism... The faces on Follow Your Footsteps, The Living End, and Six and Six. Old knowledge, a lot of knowing and for a long time self possessed eyes looking straight into the camera. That confidence. Like walking down the street and knowing you can do anything. You can take it as it comes. Six And Six - I looked at that one a lot. It reminded me of picture booth photos of my dad except he had a pompadour and a white t-shirt... The instruments on The Rocks Crumble, On The Way, Staring At The Cellophane. A drum set and a guitar. Not inanimate. Like living, breathing beings. More knowing stares at the camera... The exteriors of Modern Dances, Twelfth Apostle, Blue Corpse, Foreign Keys. A garden, a brick wall, a white wood house with the man in it or by it or not. All different ways to look at the same life, same event, same person. What is the nature of being?... And everyone we knew was going through rough times and I wanted to escape that. I wanted something more. Something I hadn't had but something remembered from myself. Something I was looking for in reading and listening and looking since I could remember when: Mallarme and Dostoevsky and Camus and Djuna Barnes and Viktor Brauner and Baudelaire and Rousseau and Anais Nin and Yves Tanguy and Max Ernst and Odilon Redon and the Russian icons and the North American masks... We finally moved away from Houston to Austin in 97. And I figured I had better start moving away from Jandek. Because that's a natural progression, arc, and it makes sense. I didnÕt want to become subsumed. There were boundaries. But still it took me a long time to move closer and it's taken me a long time to move farther away. I hear and look at everything profoundly differently because of those records. But I don't think IÕve gotten that across very well. I'm a poor writer for the task at hand. It's something to hear and see everything differently and know what that is because of. Look at Blonde on Blonde, listen to John Mayall, look at Joseph Cornell, listen to Jimmy Reed, look at Dallas Street, and listen to the sound of cars driving by. And there's something to be said for things that can become more than they are supposed to be. The Jandek albums are one of the greatest artistic statements from one of the greatest living American artists of the past half-century. The questions, the implications go on. And the music is finely formed and sturdy and rich and his voice is flexible and true and pleasing as a human voice should be and the lyrics are complex and speak of feeling with truth... When I take out all of the covers, now, to refresh my view and to feel and remember and write, the one I keep coming back to is On Our Way. The murkiest of them all. The bluest of them all. Drums barely visible like they are behind a veil. As 2008 is about to perish and 2009 is around the corner I wonder what have I accomplished, if anything. I studied and made an effort to create. My faults are great. Life is a supreme effort. There is a lot to go on learning. Jandek has transformed his own mystery and become something else than we thought he would become. There are truly possibilities unforeseen.