Sunday, November 14, 2004

"Pour Me Another Shot Of Whiskey"

T'was a busy weekend, to say the least. Friday we bid goodbye and good luck to Amy, wishing her the best in her new job. Then I partook of some gaming entertainment with Ev, after which I drove out to the middle of nowhere to hear my uncle play with some new band (he still plays with the other band, the Regular Joes, but he's doing this too just for kicks). Anyway, the band was pretty damn good, with two people handling the lead vocal duties (a guy and a girl, the former having a pretty basic coutry/rock voice and the latter having a hell of a set of pipes on her). I went and heard them play again on Saturday, too, and was not disappointed. The place where they played was a little too country-fried for my tastes, and I felt a little too city boy and out of place with all the mullets, cowboy hats, and shitkicker boots. But the band still kicked ass, and had a pretty wide range of cover material (excellent mix of rock and country--and I can't believe I just said that--which worked really well with the band, especially considering both my uncle and the drummer are really new to the group and the band members never get together to practice).

Anyway, I also made a few payday purchases this weekend--two Bob Dylan CDs (the live Before the Flood and 1978's Street Legal), which I'll have reviews for up pretty soon, and a graphic novel, Watchmen.

Now, virtually every comic book geek I actually know (I don't know if this holds true for Adam, but it does for Dav, Chad, and Ev) swear by Watchmen as if it were some sort of holy tome. I've been meaning to get it for some time in order to improve my geek credibility (or "geek cred," as I like to think of it), but funding and inability to track the damn thing down prevented me from doing so. Well, I found it and got it Friday. I'm about 3/4 of the way through it, and I've not been disappointed.

Ev's reaction to my purchasing that particular graphic novel was rather amusing. He asked me why I picked it up, to which I responded that everyone I'd ever talked to about it had wonderful things to say about the book. He couldn't really argue with that, but did I actually have any prior experience with or knowledge of comics? Had I read any other comics? Yes, I told him, I had. I've got Kingdom Come, The Dark Knight Returns, and Batman: Year One, among a few others. Ev then laughed at me, saying I'd managed to grab all the books that completely redefined how folks thought about comics in the '80s and '90s, the books that totally changed the way and the sort of stories you could tell with sequential art. I told him I didn't mind, as long as they were good. Thusfar, Watchmen is not disappointing.

Anyway, I'll work on reviews for those two Dylan CDs. Look for them sometime today.

~chuck

Song of the Moment: Bob Dylan, "Senor (Tales of Yankee Power)"

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