Some Shirts Are Just Fun

Threadless!!

A little whimsical. Today's shirt is in the collection because it makes me smile. No real reason other than that. 

Anyone want to lend me a story for this one?

Another Stealth Music-T, Barenaked Edition

Fridays are tricky, it's turned out. Most school Pro-D Days are scheduled for Fridays so the blog tends to miss out on the Music T posts. Tomorrow, another Pro-D Day, is concert day for the Barenaked Ladies here in Vancouver, playing WITH the Vancouver Symphony Orchestra at the beautiful Orpheum Theatre. Jeff's not a BNL fan (?!? I know, right?) but when we found out his best friend's wife bought tickets for THEM as part of an office event, he agreed to come and hang out.

Like many things I probably couldn't imagine my pop culture world without today - Buffy, C.S.I., Amanda Palmer - BNL was more my brother's thing than mine. Between the two of us, he tends to be the earlier adopter in the family and his youthful BNL fandom knew no bounds. There was a summer in Saskatoon when I got tickets for an outdoor, multi-band music festival where BNL was playing and sent my boyfriend at the time with Arthur as he was about... oh, twelve years old ... at the time. I had to work that day but I believe that they had a pretty good time. Arthur asked me later if I remembered The Simpsons episode "Homerpalooza" where they go to a Lollapalooza-inspired music festival and Lisa comments,"It smells like Otto's jacket!". My pre-teen little bro smiled at me when I said I did and declared proudly,"I know what she meant now!" Now that I think about it, he might've actually known that particular concert scent before I did too.

It's the quirky nature of memory that I cannot pinpoint when it was that I sent Arthur to that concert. Even Arthur's not sure exactly. He says that it was the year they released the "Born on a Pirate Ship" album so that dates it around 1996. And it goes to show that life before the Internet is truly the modern Dark Ages in that I cannot find a record anywhere online that the Barenaked Ladies played any concert festival in Saskatoon that summer or the next.

So for the fun of it, here's a video made a little over ten years ago where the boys of BNL pay tribute to the wonderful booth known as "Speakers Corner" where they brought their music and faces to the public for the first time ten years before THAT.

Wow, I'm feeling old now.

The Power of Place

Today's shirt isn't exactly exciting or eye-catching but the memories of my visits to Oxford always thrill me a little. The thought of walking the same lanes and seeing the same vistas as Tolkein, Shelley, Wilde, and Adam Smith boggles... and I mean BOGGLES... my mind.

Geography is so much more than co-ordinates on a globe. In the movie Collateral, Jamie Foxx's character has a photograph of the Maldives tucked into the sun visor in the taxi he drives. When things get rough, he takes a little holiday by looking at that picture and thinking about that beach. That power of place depends on the depth of feeling associated with the memory or the dream. We never recapture a specific moment but we do try, don't we? And being in a place that has deep meaning for us can invoke the memory of that moment so that we can choose to relive it, reflect on it, even re-evaluate it through our more experienced lens. Returning year after to year to the same restaurant to celebrate an anniversary. Spending Christmas morning with family in the same living room every year. Stopping at the same viewing point every time a road trip passes by it. It's where nostalgia and deja vu have a love child and produce the essence of a place. Those little snapshot moments in our minds' eye give us solace and respite, maybe even resolve and motivation.

And then there are places where we've never physically been to that still resonate with us. For me, that was most keenly felt in Florence, Italy. The first day I woke up in that city and stepped out of our crazy amazing fabulously-priced hotel and onto the via that runs along the banks of the Arno, I felt as though I had returned to a well-known and long-loved place. I traced this feeling back (past my multiple screenings of A Room With a View) to my undergrad degree spent buried in multiple courses on medieval history. Dante, Boccaccio, the Medici family... I studied their writings, their art, their politics. I lived, breathed, and dreamed their legacies for four years. It shouldn't have surprised me that their stomping grounds would seem familiar. But it did. And that's the power of place. 

Anyone have an example to share?

**Now that I'm thinking about Florence, I gotta share images from the hotel.

Those paintings are the DOORS to the rooms

That's the front lobby and the check-in counter

And THAT's a typical room. Not even kidding. The ceiling had LED "stars" and you could signal "Do Not Disturb" by pushing a button on the bedside console.