yonmei

09:45 pm: At home...
I am sort of watching Gordon Ramsay beating up a bunch of crappy American restaurant staff in a series called Gordon Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares USA.

It is really peculiar. The Americans seem to know Gordon Ramsay is a famous chef, but have no idea that what he is famous for is swearing up a storm, being hideously rude, and serving tasty meat to total strangers. (I have never seen Gordon Ramsay do a vegetarian meal. Has he?)

It's sort of spooky. So is the American voice-over, explaining everything. Also, the restaurant owner looks like an abusive husband, what with the way he'd got his wife trained not to ask about how he owed quarter of million.

Mainly I am lying with my back solidly propped up, processing photos.

Gordon Ramsay giving terribly unsweary pep-talks to Americans is totally fucking weird. The other people in the restaurant seem to be allowed to swear, at least the restaurant manager and the cook were both cursing away, but Gordon Ramsay - hand curled in front of his mouth, perhaps to remind himself that he wasn't allowed to swear at them - was completely terribly awfully improbably clean-mouthed.

PS Ironically, today I cooked what on sober reflection may have been the worst lunch I ever cooked for anyone anywhere, which is kind of sad, really.
If I stay awake, there's a programme about Johnny Cash on next.

Tags: johnny cash, random stuff, sometimes i write about food

09:10 am: Hello, I'm Johnny Cash
I saw the Johnny Cash biopic when I was staying with my sister; her son and his father like Johnny Cash, and so do I, and my sister had picked up a DVD of the movie, Walk the Line, so we watched it on Sunday night.

It was, in a very, very real sense, absolutely terrible. The scriptwriter had seemed to feel that it would be a good idea to work in as many references as possible to songs that Cash wrote, or sang. The first time I noticed this, it was sort of cute. The cute wore off about the second or the third time, but it went on happening.

Joaquin Phoenix was chosen, I suppose, because he could kinda-sorta pass for looking almost like Cash (too slender, too pretty, but almost) and he could sing, even if his voice wouldn't have been mistaken for Cash's even by a completely non-musical person. Reese Witherspoon was just extremely good: not only in sounding like June Carter (which was doubtless helped by the simple fact that all of what I know June Carter's voice sounded like is from a handful of lines on Johnny Cash DVDs) but also in reacting to Cash.

I haven't even thought of a RPF story since I was a teenage B7 fan, aside from a brief flirtation with Have I Got News For You fic. But I do understand the appeal.

Because the biopic was wrong.

As far as I know, the only fact it got wrong was in saying that Cash got the idea of doing concerts in prisons and taped the album Johnny Cash in Folsom Prison right there and then: in fact he'd been doing concerts in prisons for years.

The basic story of Cash as given by the biopic is of a boy with a brutal father, a good older brother, and a loving mother, who lost his brother, left home as soon as he legally could and joined the air force, got married, had two daughters. tried to be a door-to-door salesman, made it as a singer, went on tour, got addicted to amphetamines, became famous, fell in love with another singer, even more famous than himself, got arrested and charged with illegal drug use, nearly lost his career because of his addiction, lost his wife, but finally got the woman he'd fallen in love with, got his own house, his family all talking to him again, and the film closes then; on June Carter and Johnny Cash hugging each other on stage as June's just said yes to Johnny's proposal, with title cards rolling up over the screen that tell you they married and lived together till June died in 2003 and Johnny followed four months later. It's a love story - Johnny Carter was listening to June Carter's voice when he was a little kid and loving her voice then. It's a classic poor-boy-makes-good story. It's a bad-boy-reformed-through-love-of-a-good-woman story. (Yes, kids, you too can kick a drug habit! All you need is True Love!)

And all of those stories were wrong. I don't care how true to the framework of facts they were: they were wrong. Oh, okay, this is egoistical: I mean, in a RPF kind of a way, this isn't the Johnny Cash story I want to see.

The Cash played by Joaquin Phoenix isn't the Johnny Cash who sang "Nasty Dan" on Sesame Street. Or who sang "Ghost Riders In the Sky" on the Muppet Show. Or who wrote and sang "A Boy Named Sue". Or who started giggling when he was singing "A Ring of Fire" with Willie Nelson, and got back on track after a deadpan look from Nelson. Phoenix plays Cash laconic, serious, sad, with one-liners delivered deadpan. You can't imagine Phoenix's Cash doing a quick combover and mimicking Elvis Presley live on stage, still less the delighted grin of Cash with the muppets. You can't imagine Phoenix's Cash singing a song to make you laugh. And while Walk The Line makes reference, twice, to Cash's dressing in black, it never references the lyrics of "Man in Black".

I don't want to decry Phoenix's achievement. He couldn't make his voice sound like Johnny Cash's voice, not at that age or any other, but he could mimic Cash's inflexions and his facial expressions. He was damned good. But it was like looking at a very, very lifelike wax model of a person: no matter how alike, you could never mistake the one for the other. Not that this mattered much except when Phoenix was singing. Of course he was singing quite a lot.

What bothered me more than anything else was nothing any film could have done better: if I wanted a version of Johnny Cash's life that would satisfy me, I would probably have to write it myself. Making stuff up as needful.

Tags: johnny cash

05:17 pm: Doctor Who in Manchester and Other Exciting Adventures
Doctor Who in Manchester and Other Exciting Adventures
26th-29th October 2007


( Friday )
( Saturday )
( Sunday )
( Monday )

Tags: cats, doctor who, family stuff, johnny cash, travel

10:30 am: OMG hearts
One of my Secret Fandoms (you know, the sort you hardly like to admit to on account of it being hokey and embarrassing and all that) is Johnny Cash.

Another is the Muppet Show. I don't think I need to explain about that: I mean either you understand why it's so completely adorable and gives you the warm fuzzies, from the two grumpy old men in the box to Eddie the Eagle screaming to Kermit's weary shoulder-drooping fuzzy green frogness, or you see it as a clutch of unconvincing puppets doing silly jokes to a laugh-track. I can't explain.

I fell for Willie Nelson's voice many years ago, and still am: whatho said once that you wonder why anyone bothers to do a song after Willie Nelson's sung it, because he makes it sound better than anyone else. But with Johnny Cash, it was RPF first, and voice second: I wanted to hear him sing after I read a former journalist's memory of an interview:

So, we were there all afternoon, in that shadowy room, and it was one of the finest afternoons I've ever spent, and definitely the worst interview I've ever done. We hardly talked. This is how he's choosing to communicate, I realised. By singing. Which from a singer is not unreasonable - in fact it's possibly more right, more true, than answering interview questions. Also - I turned the tape recorder off. Why? A one-on-one personal Johnny Cash concert on the sofa and you turned the tape off? Why? Answer: because I knew this was not something which could be repeated. Couldn't be, shouldn't be.
He did say one thing I remember: "You have to be what you are. Whatever you are, you gotta be it."
And I came out realising that I didn't want to be a journalist any more.

I love listening to Cash sing (plus he, like Willie Nelson, gives me great imaginary music videos in my head, the sort no one will ever make for me)

But sometimes when two Secret Fandoms collide, the result is something that's just better than either: Johnny Cash sings Ghost Riders in the Sky and Jackson on the Muppet Show. omg ♥♥♥

Johnny Cash just looks so happy.

---

Also: Dirty Ol' Egg-Sucking Dog, and the full version of Johnny Cash on the Muppet Show (link to part 1) and Johnny Cash with Big Bird on Sesame Street.

Tags: fannishness, johnny cash, muppet show, omg hearts, secret fandoms