jandek wears a suitcoat
We start with an empty stage in a circus hall in Little India. There are blue lights and on the synthesizers is a single red rose; on the floor have fallen three petals. Fallen or been placed. Fallen or been placed.
So, Jandek comes out. Jandek wears a suitcoat. Jandek takes off the suitcoat, folds. Drummer sits on floor. Guitarist takes off shoes, socks. Why wear them onstage to begin with? It’s dark and blue and gravely silent. Like they have stumbled upon a beautiful fragile animal that they don’t want to scare away, no one moves, no one crinkles anything, no one’s phone even goes off. (robots in disguise / small fleet of sparrows) But it is not all good, it is not all palatable, most of the time, in fact, I do not find it at all palatable, but I wait and watch. I thought, maybe, for some reason, things were going to rage. Things were going to break apart, like the breaking apart of secrets or of the slience that was mostly vocal squall and sometimes wiggling whirr. No shoes guy is amazing. Sitting guy is occasionally perfect. Most of the time things seem particularly unexperimental, other than playing with things that look like chopsticks, skewers, tobacco tins, a drinking straw. But mostly there is a wish for breaking (and respite), and then there is truly a moment, after nearly two hours, and it is not a long one, but I am with them, with the chopstick guy and the percussionist who has rattled and rattled and made eye contact and knocked down the chimes, and you want to listen to the clanging and steal the densely scrawled lyric notebook (pure gold! fandom! poetry! eBay!) and maybe you’d rather even do that than be here, but it’s all so tenuous and you just kind of keep hoping.
And then Jandek picks up his suitcoat and his little clock and walks away and you ride home on a streetcar full of Jandek fans (world’s most unlikely occurrence) and think, man, that was totally weird, and and you wonder if we were being goaded, how many of us took the bait, have always taken the bait, took the rose petals, and fell for it.