I Love You

Ok. Not the best picture, I know. But it's a live one. I was only like 5 people away from her. And she was rockin' me. I went to Joss Stone back in February with DeEtte at a tiny little venue in NYC. She only did 2 promotional shows before the release of her new album, and I went to one of them. This venue could not have held more than a few hundred people. Joss has an incredible mix of innocence and sultry stage presence. It's rather disarming and intriguing.

She had a 11 piece band. It consisted of 3 backup singers (the sista's - and yes he is also a sista), bass guitar, lead and backup guitar, pianist, keyboardist, trumpet, alto sax, and drummer (300 pounds of blinging, low riding, rhythm). The band kicked some serious trash. Joss came out and rocked her new single 'Tell Me About It'. Then she began to groove us with her neo-soul pipes. This 18 year old 6 foot British beauty (bit of an oxymoron) has the voice of a mature Harlem soul singer.

In my entranced and grooving state, I new I had to make contact with her. I waited for one of those moments of quite pause provided when the singer is prepping the audience for the next song. I found my moment and yelled out, "I love you Joss." She looked down in her shy and sexy way and said, "Thanks." Recognition. That's right. Everyone around me stared at me and said, "You just got recognition man. That's special." Dang straight.

We danced and grooved till she left the stage and then clamored until she came back for an encore. She came back with a dozen white roses. She started into a love ballad and then threw out a single rose. Being 6'3" has to count for something but destiny was on my side as I jumped and snagged the flor from the aire.

Joss and I have a special connection. But honestly the best part of the whole show was when she sang 'Right To Be Wrong'. She was rocking the song and we were all loving it. Then right close to when the song usually ends she sings, "Got a right to be wrong..." and she pauses. Everyone is just screaming and shouting. She waits till is starts to quiet and then sings again "Got a right to be wrong..." The crowd goes wild again and she waits for them to quiet down. Guys keep cat calling her so she finally puts her index finger on her lips and the crowd falls deathly silent. Then in her innocent yet provocative way she lightly sings but nearly speaks, "So just leave me.....alone." Then the band breaks back in and Joss starts wailing! They wail on for another 3 minutes of reprise improvey goodness.

mm.

She is going to be in Boston at the Avalon on June 11th. I'm going.

Art?

Banksy - Graffiti Artist

Wall between Israel and the West Bank:

Banksy's manifesto. May not seem to make much sense but think about it a little:

An extract from the diary of Lieutenant Colonel Mervin Willett Gonin DSO who was among the first British soldiers to liberate Bergen-Belsen in 1945.

I can give no adequate description of the Horror Camp in which my men and myself were to spend the next month of our lives. It was just a barren wilderness, as bare as a chicken run. Corpses lay everywhere, some in huge piles, sometimes they lay singly or in pairs where they had fallen. It took a little time to get used to seeing men women and children collapse as you walked by them and to restrain oneself from going to their assistance. One had to get used early to the idea that the individual just did not count. One knew that five hundred a day were dying and that five hundred a day were going on dying for weeks before anything we could do would have the slightest effect. It was, however, not easy to watch a child choking to death from diptheria when you knew a tracheotomy and nursing would save it, one saw women drowning in their own vomit because they were too weak to turn over, and men eating worms as they clutched a half loaf of bread purely because they had to eat worms to live and now could scarcely tell the difference. Piles of corpses, naked and obscene, with a woman too weak to stand proping herself against them as she cooked the food we had given her over an open fire; men and women crouching down just anywhere in the open relieving themselves of the dysentary which was scouring their bowels, a woman standing stark naked washing herself with some issue soap in water from a tank in which the remains of a child floated. It was shortly after the British Red Cross arrived, though it may have no connection, that a very large quantity of lipstick arrived. This was not at all what we men wanted, we were screaming for hundreds and thousands of other things and I don't know who asked for lipstick. I wish so much that I could discover who did it, it was the action of genius, sheer unadulterated brilliance. I believe nothing did more for these internees than the lipstick. Women lay in bed with no sheets and no nightie but with scarlet red lips, you saw them wandering about with nothing but a blanket over their shoulders, but with scarlet red lips. I saw a woman dead on the post mortem table and clutched in her hand was a piece of lipstick. At last someone had done something to make them individuals again, they were someone, no longer merely the number tatooed on the arm. At last they could take an interest in their appearance. That lipstick started to give them back their humanity.

Source: Imperial War museum

www.banksy.co.uk