Unplanned Obsolescence

Surely most of those who post and read here already know that Jandek, the last truly underground musician, crawled out of his cave this month. He played an hour-long set at the Instal 04 festival in Glasgow and, in so doing, rendered two other cultural objects thoroughly superfluous: Will Oldham, and the documentary Jandek On Corwood.

The film, soon to be released on DVD, is an exploration of the version of Jandek that existed until October 17, 2004: a recluse making music for no one, or at best for himself, and sliding it out into the world through the crack of a door with the chain still on. Thirty-seven albums and counting; one interview (two if you count the Texas Monthly piece, which contains no quotes); and, at the time the film was assembled, no live performances. How do you explore a phenomenon like this? The filmmakers did their best.

In a way, Jandek On Corwood is a religious film. That's certainly how it's structured. You can’t interview the deity, the figure at the center of the cult – he’s not talking. So you interview those who’ve devoted some portion of their lives to interpreting the scrolls, and the one or two who’ve actually had person-to-person, one-on-one encounters with the Man Himself. From a viewer’s perspective, this is where the movie goes to hell.

Hunter S. Thompson once wrote that a photograph of the top ten journalists in America on any given day would be a monument to human ugliness. I assert with reasonable confidence that he said this without even having met any rock critics. There are men in this film (and there are only three women in the film, four if you count the disembodied voice on “Nancy Sings”) whose work I admire, like Byron Coley and Richie Unterberger. But they are not men who should ever be allowed in the same room as a functioning camera. Coley looks like a shaved chimp with a square goatee; Unterberger is almost literally indescribable. Suffice it to say that either man would make an ideal mold for a “Record Geek” Halloween mask.

The parts of Jandek On Corwood not taken up with talking heads are quite pretty. Lots of landscape shots and deserted houses, desolate hotel rooms, and other locales that either suggest Jandek’s music, or have something direct to do with it. (He has a song called “Point Judith”; the filmmakers go to Point Judith, Rhode Island, and film its lighthouse and crashing waves. Three of his recent albums featured cover photos taken in Ireland; an associate of the filmmakers goes to Ireland, and shoots some home video on the same street where Jandek may have once walked.) This stuff, mostly accompanied by Jandek music on the soundtrack, is quite evocative and nice to look at.

But, again, the dream is over. As Seth Tisue, proprietor of a Jandek website, put it:

‘Jandek’ is dead. Long live Jandek.

He’s stood on a stage now, played his (new) songs. Rumor has it there will soon be a live album (Jandek Comes Alive!) and possibly even a DVD. In this era of the new, living, breathing, interacting-with-a-rhythm-section Jandek, what purpose does a movie serve which takes as its central premise that Jandek is unfathomable, impenetrable, destined to remain forever a shadow figure at the furthest margin of music? Granted, he didn’t sell T-shirts, but only the most obtuse would fail to recognize this new development as more than a little deflationary.

I think he did it on purpose. He’s spent years resisting outside definition – why wouldn’t he resist being defined as the ultimate resister, too? Better to come out, just once, and prove, like Boo Radley, that he’s more than just a phantom. Then, his rumored self in tatters on the floor of a Glasgow hall, he can go on about his business in peace.