Shocking Development

I am not a country music fan. In fact, it would be more than fair to say that I am a country music foe. My usual reaction to hearing country music, in fact, is "Who is this @#$%er, and why hasn't he/she been taken out and shot?"

The exceptions to this rule are many-- Willie Nelson, Patsy Cline, Waylon Jennings, some Merle Haggard and Buck Owens, and, of course, Jerry Reed-- but up to the present, Mssr. Paisley has not been on this list. Not that I actively don't like his stuff, just that, up to now, I have not been exposed to enough of it to pry him out from the rest of the legion of twangheads. That said: I am buying this album. Because, well, damn. (You can get a pretty good idea of what's on it by using Amazon's preview player.) I could blather on about this, but really, go listen.

So, Can I Take You To The Pilot? Because That Is Your Song . . .

AND TODAY's offering is . . . Nope! Hey! Whoa, you missed it!

No? Well, I thought it was funny.

(It was a cheesebuger and fries.)

Today's movie, of course, was Control, which I swear I meant to watch back to back with the documentary Joy Division, but I simply don't think that can be done. And if anybody else out there wants to try it, fine by me. If you manage it, I'll give you a @#$%ing medal.

Control was good, if a bit stark, the way alot of biopics are, especially biopics in which the subject dies by the end of the story. This was also bleak, in a way that was a little more stark and quiet than I thought it ought to have been. But that is a minor quibble indeed. Also a minor quibble: I thought they made Ian Curtis out to be a bit more of an ass than he might have been in real life. That's based mainly on the way he was treated in Joy Division, which, of course, didn't make him out to be an angel either, so it's a doubly minor quibble.

So yeah, it was good, but I also think you'd have to be a pretty big fan of Joy Division (or have been a pretty big fan at some point) to appreciate it on all the different levels the filmakers provided. Otherwise, it's basically the story of a talented, charismatic, haunted guy who basically lost control over his life, eventually spiraled downwards into despair, and offed himself. Alot of the other stuff-- the Manchester music scene, the Sex Pistols, the DJ/manager, the role of the media in late 70's/early 80's music, the trans-european scene-- operated on a level of subtext such as to be only understandable via the kind of shorthand that fans of the band, or of the British new wave, would have available.

The major quibble that the mainstream reviewers seemed to have with it was that there wasn't alot of story to work with, so Sam Riley, as Ian Curtis, really didn't have alot to do. I disagree with that. Insofar as Riley's portrayal of Curtis was uncanny, that in itself would hvae been enough to watch. But he was also capable of thowing up some major subtext of his own, in the way that a character like Curtis would have been saying with his eyes all those things he wouldn't be albe to bring to his lips. Nicely done, I thought.

One last thing: I meant to mention int he review of Joy Division that one of my favorite uses of "Love Will Tear Us Apart," Joy Division's signature song, was in the flick Series 7: The Contenders, where it is intended to convey the romance between two of the would-be assassin characters as high schoolers. In the end it conveys not only their romantic entanglement, but also something both deeper and shallower: the faux-despair of two essentially selfish people who are more than willing to swear romantic love for each other, but completely unwilling to live up to it. There wasn't anywhere really apropos in the previous missive to tack it in, though, and since there isn't anywhere really apropos to tack it in here, either, I'll just stick it on the end, like using a feather boa to counter-balance a badly hand-made kite.

There. That'll do it.

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.