La-La Land

Saturday morning Adam and I headed off to LA for a day of history and music. After several hours touring the Nixon Libaray in Yorba Linda (interestingly enough the Watergate exhibit was "closed for renovations"), we then headed off to the Hollywood Bowl for a concert with the Decemberists. The Hollywood Bowl is a beautiful outdoor amphitheater up in the Hollywood Hills. They let you bring in your own food and bevs (including alcohol!) so we had a lovely picnic up there prior to the show.

The show itself was fabulous. The Decemberists are doing a series of shows on this tour with orchestras, and last night they played with the LA Philharmonic. While there were a few times when the orchestra overpowered the band a bit, it was a great show. I got some pretty bad pictures of the event, but I'll post them anyway:

The amphitheater. If you had the ability to magnify the picture, you'd see the HOLLYWOOD sign up there in the right middle, on that distant hill.

This is a picture of the audience after the band asked everyone to pull out their cell phones and wave them around as if they were waving around lighters. The effect was pretty cool (or silly as Adam put it) but the picture doesn't really capture it. I think the band was having as much, if not more, fun as everyone at the show.

UPDATE: someone got video of the cell phone thing. It's actually the entire encore, when they seemed to be having a great deal of fun. Cell phone thing is about 4 minutes in.

A few You Tube links to songs from the show (I did take some video but it's not worth trying to figure out how to get it online because it's just not that good):




Plus more at You Tube