Blah Blah Blah

If I keep listening to Rage Against the Machine, something bad is gonna happen. "Bulls on Parade" is playing and I'm thinking about how cool it must have been when the boys played that song outside of the Democratic National Convention in 2000. Even I, Joey Whitebread, would have been moshing.

Now here's something I find perplexing: I got this 4CD set of "blues masters". You've got Howlin' Wolf, Muddy Waters, The Hook, Leadbelly, and a host of others including - get this - Canned Heat. Why in the name of fuck would the compilers put a mediocre blues rock band along side Lightnin' Hopkins? They're the only white people on the whole set. Here's what you do if you need a token white boy for a blues compilation - forget it. White people play the blues for shite. I think I'm becoming a blues purist because I feel that the blues is acoustic and only played by black people from the rural Southern U.S. I'll give folks like Muddy Waters a break because they were sharecroppers in the South who migrated. But if you were born on the south side of Chicago and pick up an electric guitar, you've just started playing a blues derivative. And, as far as I'm concerned, people like Eric Clapton and Johnny Lang and Susan Tedeschi are completely removed from the blues idiom. Finally, the Grateful Dead should never have ever covered a blues song. They massacred them.

I've learned a few things the past week and one of them is just how handy playing Dungeons & Dragons is. While we were role-playing this past weekend, Middle Earth came up. Everyone but myself had read most of Tolkien's books so they were able to give me the background of the Lord of the Rings. You know, stuff that happened before The Hobbit. So, a couple days later, I talk to my dad who had recently seen Fellowship of the Ring. I found myself trying to explain things to him but failing miserably because I tried to do so in D&D terms and not a gamer is he. Like when trying to elucidate upon Gandalf's fate upon falling into that chasm in the Mines of Moria. A phrase like "he fell into a different plane" is pretty meaningless for most people but is clear as day for someone who plays Dungeons & Dragons. Saying that Gandalf was like a "demigod" flew right over my dad's head and I found that I had to define what a ranger was to him. We gamers know this crap like the back of our hands.

My landlord and I watched Nixon and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen last night. League was fun but nothing special. Of course, all of the subtleties of the graphic novel were lost. And I was surprised that my friend didn't recognize most of the characters. Being an Oliver Stone fan, I think Nixon is a fucking awesome flick. Anthony Hopkins is superb. Again I had to explain some stuff to Stevie. Hell, I thought everyone knew what the Pentagon Papers were. And the identities of the major Watergate plumbers. I just wish Bongo had the flick on DVD - VHS looks so fucking horrible to me now that I'm spoiled with digital cable and a DVD player. Next up, I have Terry Gilliam's cut of Brazil. A full account of the debacle behind the film can be found here.