there’s no place like home

 Campfire Goods, Inc. 

Show your state pride with a t-shirt.

hopper

I’m a fan of Edward Hopper.  The NY Times has an interesting article and multimedia section on some of his Cape Cod scenes.

saw JB four times. died happy.

I just read about an interesting project in which readers are asked to submit a memoir of their life in just six words.  Check it out.  There are six word theme projects going on as well.  How would your six word memoir read?

devotion

During the summer of 2002, 65Mapleave and I made a cross country road trip that began in DC and ended in San Francisco.  Our first major stop of the trip was Memphis, where we were fortunate enough to have arrived during the height of Elvis week.  It was the 25th anniversary of the death of Elvis Presley and, on the eve of the actual date, we spent 7 hours waiting in line with thousands of other fans to process through the gates of Graceland and past his grave.  During hour 1 of Elvis watch the heavens opened up and it stormed like I have never seen before.  Lightening was striking around us, baseball sized drops of rain fell from the sky, and yet we stayed, soaking wet, to finish our pilgrimage.  As 65mapleave once put it, it was no longer a question of “what would we do” for a beloved musical act, but rather “what won’t we do?”  It should come as no surprise then that our intense devotion would spill over to other musical acts, and I am not ashamed to admit that we have twice driven to Philadelphia in the last six months to see James Blunt in concert.

In actuality, this is the fourth time we have seen him live and each has been memorable in its own way.  We first saw him in DC at the 9:30 Club, where he played to a packed house and I became a devoted fan.  The second was an outdoor concert in Columbia, MD that just happened to take place on one of the coldest nights of the fall.  65Mapleave and I were forced to huddle together for warmth as we listened to him play.  The third concert turned out to be the most amazing so far as we saw him perform in a small venue and were afterwards able to meet him and get his autograph.  This fourth and last time was no less eventful however.  We nearly died in an amazing rain and hail storm on the drive up, but pushed on to find that our concert tickets had been upgraded for better seats.  We may not have been invited back to the bus (next show, I am sure), but we did also get to see the opening act, Toots and the Maytals, do a cover of “Take Me Home Country Roads.”  If you’ve never seen a Reggae act cover John Denver, I highly recommend it.  Just remember the lyric change from “West Virginia” to “West Jamaica” if you intend to sing along.

Though a James Blunt concert is a more than enough to satisfy my appetite for British boys with guitars, our concert-going weekend was hardly over.  We also had tickets to the Coldplay show in DC on Sunday night.  The opening acts had nothing on Toots, but Coldplay put on an amazing show.  The Verizon Center was packed and the floor was literally shaking as fans danced and sang along.  There were lasers, a multi-media component, and even confetti.  It was intense and well worth the price of admission.

Lasers at the Coldplay show in DC

Despite my futile attempts to arrange a London business trip around James Blunt’s European concert schedule, it looks like 65mapleave and I might have to wait a while for our next fix.  I am now accepting suggestions for alternate musical acts to fill the void.