The Dream is Gone -- Moan

Thank you everyone for all of your help choosing some new hobbies. I have found all your suggestions extremely useful and I think I will use a lot of them.

Now, I promised to inform everyone what happens with this unspecified Marshall stack. Well, as I attempted to prepare myself for, the dream is gone. Yesterday, Joe made some serious and desperate attempts to get to the bottom of this Tim guy's supposed disappearance. Joe even went as far as to phone the guy's mom (Thanks Joe). Anyways, it turns out that Tim (the owner of the amp) made a quick decision to accept a job offer on oil rigs down in Texas, and within 3 days, he sold his house in Lethbridge and moved immediately with all his stuff (including my potential amp). Apparently, this all happened over a month ago. That explains that. All my dreams were shattered and I went on a roadtrip with Joe and the Lyalls yesterday to Lethbridge in order to fight off my suicidal thoughts. We went to a number of music stores and looked for/tried out some different amps, because I guess now I am free to pursue a different amp for at home. We can discuss that more in the future. (You all know I won't be able to refrain from keeping everyone in the loop during that whole process).

Next, I would like to discuss something else that relates to this amp business, without going all into it. Joe and I rented a movie from our local store. We couldn't seem to find much, and then settled on one that we saw a preview for before. Black Snake Moan by Craig Brewer. It caught us rather off guard. I don't know why, but we were both expecting a bit of a silly comedy. From close to the beginning, it seemed to be quite a bit raunchier than we expected. I'd be careful on who to recommend it to for that reason, but in the end I was quite impressed with the film (especially considering my uninformed expectations). This is Craig Brewer's "Blues movie". He previously did a "Rap Movie" called Hustle and Flow, which I have not seen (but it won some awards). Anyways, I wouldn't consider Craig as any sort of brilliant film director, but I do appreciate what he is doing here and it is supposedly very loosely based on the novel, Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe by George Eliot . But really, this film has broke a keen interest within me for this sort of deep south blues music. It makes me want to discover this genre and style of music. I really like this style musical film; very intentional about the musical part of the film and making music a strong key element to the film. I guess some similar films that do such things (off the top of my head) are Swing Kids, The Pianist, and perhaps The Graduate (for what it does with Simon and Garfunkel). I'm not comparing the quality of these films with each other, but I remember them all causing within me a real strong impression and an appreciation for the specific musical styles that they presented.

Anyways, I loved the blues music in Black Snake Moan, and it will cause me to sample some blues music now and likely cause some sort of representation within my music collection. It could also have an effect on what sort of guitar amp I buy eventually; I adored the tones that these songs could get out of what I believe to be Class A style guitar amps or blues amps. The Lyalls watched the movie the other day right after Joe and I and it made a good impression with them as well, causing Kristine to pick up a glass slide for her guitar yesterday.

Now, I'd be interested to know if any of you who read this have had any experience with any blues musicians, or whether there are any albums you would recommend. Also, I'm wondering if any of you can think of any films that you enjoyed, that made a strong impression on you in a musical sense.