Potrezebie!!!

By which I mean to say, YOWZA!

I got addicted to this stuff (the hot sauce, Cholula) years ago while living in the mountains. There was a Jamaican joint (for about a half a year) that put bottles of it out on the tables as a part of its bag of Cheap Authenticity Tricks. (What, if anything, it has to do with Jamaica or Jamaican cuisine, I have never fathomed.) It's basically a nice, solid, slightly smokey hot sauce, what Sud-Americanos of most stripes would call a salsa, if my sources are to be believed.

The speciment you see before you, moreover, is a new variety, or at least new to me: chili garlic. I tried it first in doctoring up a batch of canned chili, which was mighty snazzy. I used it today to dress up a bowl of Ramen noodles, along with the usual healthy dose of soy. And WOW, what a difference. I mean, it almost completely transformed the entire experience of viewing the documentary film Joy Division.

This film is about the band Joy Division. It arrived in the mail today, one day after the biopic Control, which is about Ian Curtis, Joy Division's lead singer/driving oddity/alchemist. I decided to watch the doc first, on the grounds that it would be easier to pick the biopic apart having done so. As it turned out, I was only able to watch the one film, due to time constraints, so that hypothesis must remain, for the time being, null.

As a documentary, it was nothing terribly special: talking heads, footage, factoid, talking heads. it does have the advantage that Joy Division had a fair amount of film shot on them during their somewhat brief run, and Ian makes for a fascinating subject, who is either more or less fascinating for the fact that he was pretty much gonna knock himself off one way or the other, no matter what anybody had to say about. (I guess I oughta temper that, as I find myself straddlingthat fence even as we speak.) It probably also makes a huge difference whether you were a fan of the band back in the day, or if you discovered them as some sort of down-and-out oracles, or if you have a Josie and the Pussycats lunchbox. (I have no idea what that last bit is supposed to mean.)

And again, I guess I am somewhere in the middle there as well. I appreciate the genius, such as it is, and the sadness, and the sickness that drove Curtis to his death. But I also remember the kind of pathetic twerps who listened to this band seriously back when I was in high school, and say whatever else you will, Curtis also made it possible for countless kids, British and American, to wallow in self-pity for no particularly good reason.

Also . . . Well, here's an antecdote. During my college years, I wandered into a colleague's dorm room to talk about one thing or another, and she was playing the album Closer-- just happened to be what was on. After a few minutes, after a couple of numbers in fact, I said "I don't know that I can listen to a whole album of this."

Amy-- her name was Amy-- cocked her head, smiled a little wistfully, and said "Sometimes I can, and sometimes I can't." And that about sums it up for me too.

But the documentary was worth watching at any rate. I learned probably all there is to know about Curtis and Joy Division. I had questioned whether I would need to watch Control having seen Joy Division, and part of me thought that seeing them both the same day would answer the question the critics had been putting out-- which is whether, having seen one, you would need to see the other-- but this question will have to wait for another day.