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Hello, all you people coming from the WELL Bloggers site. I only noticed today that my RSS feed was pointing you to the wrong page for each entry. Why you no tell me this before? I bite you now. Love, me.

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Oh, here's the big news (which you probably already know, but just in case...):

My Comics Page, which has been running the entire "Bloom County" strip on their site (or as much as they can get; the first few Sunday strips were unavailable, due to scanning quality issues), is going to start running "Academia Waltz," the first strip that "Bloom County" (and "Outland" and "Opus") creator Breke Breathed produced, back when he was a student at U of Texas. According to comments at Off the Kuff, the strip was pretty crude but the historical value is high, as we get to see the first appearance of Steve Dallas and Cutter John.

So if you're not already a subscriber at MyComicsPage.com, maybe this will persuade you to check it out. I've been a subscriber since they started running "Bloom County," and apart from the missing Sunday strips I've had no complaints at all. They carry loads of decent comics (including "Boondocks," "Doonesbury," Lalo Alcaraz's great daily strip "La Cucaracha," and a slew of editorial cartoons), and they're all collected on a single page, so you can just read 'em all at one sitting in the morning. It's definitely worth the ten bucks per year.

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So on Tuesday night, I was at Intuit to see the documentary Jandek on Corwood. It was a pretty packed house; normally, Intuit's performance space sits about 70 or so people, and they had to set up extra chairs for the extra people that were still coming in by the time the show started.

The doc was pretty good. People who know all about Jandek probably won't find any new stuff in here, but since that's only about a few dozen people in the world, the vast majority of the population will probably find the movie greatly entertaining. You get a pretty good overview of the handful of facts as we know them; since the people at Corwood Industries aren't really very forthcoming with details of the music, the movie is made up of interview footage with people who know the most about, and can best talk about, about Jandek and his music (Byron Coley, John Trubee, Katy Vine, Phil Milstein, etc.). The Jandek artifacts are visited and revisited throughout the film: the music, of course, and the blurry album covers (the filmmakers do a great job of pointing out great similarities between the covers of albums that were release 10 or 20 years apart from each other), and some great footage of the post office box that Corwood uses to communicate with the world.

What's also great about the film is that the makers got the great idea to travel to Point Judith, RI (which, for the uninitiated, is a song title on Jandek's second album Six and Six), and get some really creepy-looking footage of the flora and fauna. Eerie mist-filled landscapes, shots of desolate beaches and rocky promontories, and a really disturbing shot of waterbugs skittering over the surface of a pool of water, which somehow reminded me of that part in Winged Migration where a group of crabs surged over an injured bird who couldn't escape their clutches.

Since this was a 90-minute documentary, it was able to hit the few credible theories about Jandek and his music pretty well. The mystery about Jandek is not who he is (his identity was figured out a while ago, and reported Katy Vine used this information to track Jandek down and do one of the few actual Jandek interviews), but why he's doing what he's doing, and why he doesn't really seem to care about the music he's doing, once it's recorded and released. A few of the interviewees have some theories about why this is, and their theories seem to hold water, but again, we can't really know if they're true, because Jandek will simply not talk at all about his work. So the true ideas and theories behind his music may never actually be known. Which is part of the appeal, I suppose.

After the film, one of the producers answered some questions about the film. The most interesting information that came out of this was that the film cost only about $3000 to make, and the majority of the cost was air fare to go interview people. The digital video tools that have appeared in recent history allowed the film-makers to create their film very cheaply, and the producer drew a parallel to the home-recording technology that appeared in the 1970s, which allowed Jandek to start recording and releasing his own albums.

One more great tidbit: as the producer was talking, someone actually showed up at Intuit. Yes, someone missed the entire film, and only showed up for the Q&A part of the show. So this guy (whom I've seen at Intuit before, so he might actually just be a friend of the gallery owner) walked up to the owner and whispered to him, "Is that Jandek?" Yes, that's right, the most obscure figure in music history decided to show up in Chicago to answer questions about his work. (Well, I guess we can't be too hard on the guy; after all, he did miss the documentary, so he probably didn't know that much about Jandek.)

The movie should be released on DVD in the spring, if all goes well. If you get the chance to see it, I'd definitely recommend it. It'll give you all the information you need to know about Jandek, and you'll never have to purchase an album. Unless of course you're sufficiently intrigued by the Jandek story to check his music out. In which case, good luck to you. As Jandek once wrote on some official Corwood correspondence, you may not get all the answers you want. It's better that way.

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