[Jandek] Miroslav Wanek

[Phil]

At 9:49 AM -0500 7/20/2004, JEREMYD.OSBORN at cemexusa.com wrote:

>I never saw that posting either, does anyone have it???? I'm very curious

>From the list archives at
http://ccl.northwestern.edu/tisue/jandek-mail/jandek-0006.txt --

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From: Oogsab at aol.com
To: Jandek at cs.northwestern.edu
Subject: A Jandek Story
Date: Tue, 27 Jun 2000 12:10:24 EDT

I heard a first-hand account of a (more or less) brush with Jandek the other
day...

Miroslav Wanek, who sings, plays guitar and keyboards, and composes for the
experimental Czech punk band Uz Jsme Doma, was in Chicago this past weekend
for a performance with his band, and I spoke with him for a while after the
show...

One of the topics that came up (and when doesn't it?) was music, and I
mentioned that I had been listening to a lot of Jandek lately... Wanek said
at first that he had never heard the name before... I began to describe what
the music was like...

Wanek, smiling, then corrected himself... About a year and a half ago, he
said, a package was sent to his home in Prague from Jandek in Texas,
containing a CD and a short letter which asked for something of a critique on
the music, and wondering if there was any possibility of a collaboration
between Jandek and Uz Jsme Doma...

Wanek continued that he had listened to the CD and found the music to be more
or less uninteresting and "very sloppy," as he put it... He wrote a letter
back to Jandek in which he politely declined any collaborative affairs and
avoided commenting on the music altogether...

And that was it...

Pretty weird, if you ask me... If you've ever heard Uz Jsme Doma's music
before, you would be hard-pressed to explain where the common ground lies
between their work and Jandek's, but maybe the point was that there was
none...

I've been toying with this following idea over the past few days, though...
Wanek is currently (I think) the only non-Eyeball that has had anything to do
with the musical activites of the Residents for quite some time... Maybe
Jandek was looking for someone who he knew could keep his secret..

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