[Jandek] Daniel Marks' New Book

[Frank Hardy]

Some of you on the list may be familiar with my colleague Daniel Marks, who used to contribute smarmy pisstakes to the list parodying obsessive Jandek fans (even though he is certainly one himself, so I often wonder how much of his wilfully inane theories he might have wanted to believe). To this day sometimes he still posts to the list under my name (and believe me, I'm not happy about it) but he was nice enough this time to ask before he simply stole my identity as he usually does. I'll turn the floor over to him now.
   
  -Frank
   
  Listen up you pretentious, mental-illness fetishizing twats: Dan Marks here, shamelessly promoting my new book A History of Rock and Roll Since 1994. I'm not exactly done writing it yet but since reading and writing are by far the least valuable skills needed for coming up with and marketing a book, I figured I'd just get ahead of myself and start telling people about it. As you may know, I've been poking (sometimes violently) around the rock world for the last 18 or so years, whether with my WASU 88.2 (Amherst State University) radio proram "Under Underground", my fanzine Drunken Gonuts, of which I was a co-editor in chief with Frank here (who I'm going to out right now- his real name is Spencer Graham, folks, it's not that big a secret anyway), my articles for Op, Pitchfork and Spin (don't bother looking for them, they usually got rejected, but that doesn't mean I wasn't asked to write them in the first place), and my bands Monster Party, in which I was the drummer and
 manager, and Marks and Spencer, in which I was the ochestrator, co-producer against with Spencer and general "idea guy", or as I liked to say, "imagineer". 
   
  Anyway, this book compiles articles I've written over the years and entirely new opinions, all approved, of course, by me. People have told me that some of the stuff in the manuscript I'm currently peddling is  "inaccurate", "incomplete", or "just plain made up", but really, what do they know. They only work for major New York publish houses. They wouldn't know genius if it hit them over the head with a bronze statuette of that picture of Albert Einstein sticking his tongue out.
   
  Anyway there's a chapter about every major genre in rock since 1994, many of which, like any good rock critic, I have invented myself for the purpose of this book. One of these genres is called "dissonant manic-depressive white boy blues" of which Jandek is the only adherent there has ever been or ever will be. In this chapter I describe Jandek in my trademark sarcastic-but-surprisingly-insightful-considering-the-sarcasm style, one of the hallmarks of which is my talent for creative lengthy compound words. As I said before, I haven't finished most of the book, but here's a snippet from the aforementioned chapter describing the moment I met Jandek: 
   
  "Only two people have ever met Jandek, and I’m proud to say I’m one of them… On a spring break from my junior year of college, after eating psychedelic mushrooms and listening to his album Six and Six on repeat for two days, I became determined to hunt him down. I took a bus to Houston and stalked him at the post office for three days straight before I finally ran into him early in the morning on March 26th, 1989. He looked exactly like the young man on the album covers aged to his early 40’s: tall, gaunt, blonde, and with an expression of perpetual mental occupation. I was thrilled.
   
  ‘Jandek!,’ I shouted, camcorder in hand. ‘Say something for your fans!’
   
  Naturally, he looked terrified, but quickly, almost instantaneously in fact, regained his composure, and he snarled into the camera with the very same snarl he’d made on the cover of You Walk Alone, and uttered a single sentence before getting his mail and slipping out with the most dignity I have ever seen in a man, living or dead.
   
  ‘Life,’ he said, staring me straight in the eye with the faintest hint of a smile, ‘Life is a bad trip, man.’
   
  It was easily the most exhilarating moment in my life, but also the most distressing, since it now meant I was stuck in Houston, Texas with nothing to do."
   
  Okay, well I have to go back and write more of this book, but stay on the lookout for it; I can guarantee at least that it'll be better than Danen Jobe's book If I Was Jandek, This is How It Would Have Gone Down or whatever he's calling it now, even though his and my books are completely different and therefore outside the realms of a useful or logical comparison. I'll share the entire Jandek chapter whenever I get around to finishing it, whether or not you want to read it. Regardless, I need to get finish the chapter entitled "Why Kurt Cobain Was a Total Dick Who Should Definitely Not Be Hero-Worshipped in Any Way by Anyone, and Why the Power Metal Band Dragonforce Is Ultimately Way Better and Way More Historically Relevant than Nirvana".
   
  -Daniel Marks

 
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