Today was museum and tour day for me here in Amsterdam. I have some great — or at least interesting! — shots and insights to post over the next few days, including photos taken during the grueling Nordic marathon. (I can see why the Dutch are so carefree about creature comforts — if I lived in this climate, I’d do anything possible to warm up too.)

In the meantime, here’s a picture I took of Vincent Van Gogh today at his museum. Actually, it’s a picture of Vincent’s picture of Vincent.

No, I’m not doing anything clever with perspective, the way Vincent often did — I’m just trying to get the placque in the photo as well. Which I did. But it isn’t legible. The iPhone takes pretty good pictures of pictures, but not-so-good pictures of placques.

(By the way, the instant after I took this (non-flash) photo, I felt a light tapping on my left arm and turned around to see a warm-eyed guard tut-tutting me off taking any more. By contrast, some iron maiden of a guard in the Rijksmuseum later that day just about tore off the arm of an unfortunate guy who wandered too close to a cannon preserved from the 80 years’ war with Spain. She pointed down to a warning sign on the floor that asked patrons to keep their distance. “Can you read that? Hah?” she snapped, her eyes squirting blood out of her skull. If I had been that guy I would have said, “No, because I’m accidentally standing on it.”)

But back to Vincent. It was undeniably thrilling to see these paintings up close and in person.  I don’t have much to add to that.

Afterwards, I had lunch in Vincent’s cafeteria. The food was excellent. I’ve been doing my best to have Dutch food while I’m here — and by “Dutch,” I don’t mean McDonald’s, or Burger King, or KFC, which now ring the Dam. I mean plates I can barely pronounce, and sometimes can’t identify. Later that night I had something I believe was called Pruttlepot or Puttlepot, or maybe even Pootie-Poot, which turned out to be a stew of beef with apples and mashed potatoes, with some vegetables somehow baked in the same dish along side, with several side dishes in their own serving bowls.

Here was my lunch (or what remains of it) at the Van Gogh:

That’s a bottle of appelsap (or apple juice — I just like saying appelsap), and the bag from a packet of paprika-flavored Lay’s potato chips. Unseen:  some sort of raw fish sandwhich that was excellent and which I’d already consumed. What I like about this (other than the word appelsap) and why I took the picture is the bag of paprika-flavored potato chips. I love finding these regional variations on American-branded foods. In London nine years ago I first noted that curry is a condiment choice at McDonald’s, but the true discovery was the 10 or so variations of American potato chips — except in meat flavors. There were bacon-flavored potato chips, and beef flavored potato chips, and probably mutton-flavored ones as well. Why is paprika favored in the Netherlands? And is paprika derived from red peppers, as intimated on this bag? Or do the Dutch define “paprika” differently than we do, and as the British do with bacon? (Just as the Eskimos are reputed to have hundreds of different words for snow, the British so prize eating the pig that there are differentiations for “bacon” (which we would call “ham”), “crispy bacon” (which we would call “bacon”), “gammon” (which I guess we would call “fatty ham” and then either trim or throw out) and probably a couple more I’ve forgotten.)

There was no mention, by the way, anywhere in the museum as to what Vincent ate. And I doubt that he could have afforded lunch in his own museum, let alone the price of admission.

Last night, good friend Trey Nichols and I went to see David Byrne perform at the Greek Theatre here in Los Angeles. Neither of us had high expectations; it just seemed like a good opportunity for two friends to hear some music, then later share drinks and cigars. We got all that — and one of the best concerts we’ve ever attended. Only very occasionally in live performance are you present for an event where everyone on stage reaches a transcendent level, the audience takes note and feeds more energy and enthusiasm to the performers, and then the performers notch it even higher. Last night was one of those nights. Four songs in, when he had already received a much-deserved standing ovation, the normally taciturn Byrne looked into the crowd, grinned broadly, and scratched his head. That image of unreserved bewilderment and joy was transmitted to the outdoor amphitheatre’s big screens, eliciting a swell of applause and cheers from us all. David Byrne has always been cool. Last night, he was hot.

He’s touring to promote his new album with Brian Eno, “Everything That Happens Will Happen Today,” which I’ve been plugging here. I like the album enormously. On this tour, Byrne is performing songs from his 30-year history with Eno, which includes three Talking Heads albums (“More Songs About Buildings and Food,” “Fear of Music,” and “Remain in Light” ), the revelatory “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts,” song selections from “The Catherine Wheel,” and this new album. I’ve always been an enormous fan of their collaboration; until last night, I hadn’t realized it had been more than 30 years of music. Tempus fugit.

This Wikipedia page devoted to the tour details the exact set list. I had no doubt that the set list was tightly choreographed — literally — because the songs are accompanied by three young dancers. They crawl, they dance, they leap, they line up, they swivel around in office chairs. If this sounds distracting, it isn’t — it’s enhancing. It’s also so cleanly delivered, so practiced, so perfectly on the beat, that there’s no room for improv (hence the ironclad set list). What Byrne didn’t anticipate, though, was the sort of reaction he got last night, which necessitated a third encore, which included “Burning Down the House.” (A “non-Eno” song.)

For me, the night was memorable for another reason. I’ve spent a lot of years with David Byrne (and, indeed, saw Talking Heads on one of their final engagements on the “Stop Making Sense” tour some time in the 1980’s). I’ve also spent a lot of years — almost 15 of them — with Trey Nichols. After the show we did go out for those cigars and drinks, driving that long winding drive up the mountain in Burbank with my convertible top down to The Castaway, a restaurant that provides an encompassing visual purchase of this end of the valley. We sat there out on the ledge and drank and blew smoke and looked over all the lights far below and shared personal epiphanies about one artistic expression after another — in music, or art, or literature, or theatre — that grabbed us. We had so many in common it was impossible to keep count. (One example:  Trey mentioned the Clubfoot Orchestra in passing; he had seen them accompany “Nosferatu,” “The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari,” and “Metropolis” in Berkeley in the late 1980’s, while I had seen them accompany “Sherlock, Jr.” and Felix the Cat shorts at Silent Movie in Los Angeles in the early 90’s.) Trey remarked upon how astonishing those Eno/Talking Heads albums were when they were new, and how little or nothing has surpassed them, and I reached back to my naivete and said, “Do you remember thinking that music was going to get better and better?” As we closed the bar and moved down the hillside to the parking lot where we finished our drinks and cigars, I remembered first meeting Trey at an event we were both reading in in 1995 and being struck by both his words and his presence in reading them and fully hearing all that potential and power that lay beneath. (My first thought: “Oh, no, a play about football.” My second thought: “No, wait. This is a play by someone smart enough to write a play that pretends to be about football, but isn’t.”)

I drove  us back to my house, where he had parked his car, and we shook hands before he left. I carried inside the rocks glass I had stolen from the Castaway:  a keepsake of the evening. Someone once said that when a friend dies, a library burns down — all those references are lost. My personal archive includes several experiences with David Byrne’s music — and many, many events with Trey Nichols.

An updating of “Steamboat Willie.”

Thanks to Isabel Storey for making me aware of this. (She always knows what’s going on.)

This morning my 6-year-old son saw me sealing a Netflix envelope and asked me what movie I was returning.

“Scenes from a Marriage,” I said. (The Ingmar Bergman movie.)

He perked up. “Can I watch that with you?”

“Why?” I said. “It’s just a movie about two married people talking.”

Now he turned away. “That’s boring. I thought there was shooting and killing.”

Theatre of the absurd is one of the most misunderstood forms — probably because of the unfortunate name Martin Esslin stuck it with. Thirty years ago Saturday Night Live ran wonderful parodies of bad theatre of the absurd and its accompanying high-minded criticism; Dan Ackroyd, as the sour confection Leonard Pinth-Garnell, would watch a pretentious bit of downtown performance art with us and then sniff, “Mmm. That was truly bad.” That’s very funny, because it takes the perceptions of that period about theatre of the absurd, which had sprung up on these shores in New York in the 1960’s, and magnifies them.

Funny, but not accurate. Because, as Edward Albee pointed out in 1962, if there was an “absurd” theatre, one devoid of life and humor, it wasn’t the one downtown. The theatre of the absurd I’ve always loved is packed with meaning, and tends toward the very funny. This includes the work of Pinter, the supposed playwright of menace, and the bleak existentialist Beckett, as well as Ionesco, and Shepard, and the other major writers Esslin put together. They were all saying important things, and they were all funny.

The most important class I took in college was Theatre of the Absurd, an elective taught by professor Jeanne-Andree Nelson. I took the class on a lark: I liked Jeanne-Andree and I figured I could sail through it and get on to the serious business of graduate school and becoming a novelist. But I emerged from the class someone I hadn’t intended to be: a playwright. Theatre of the Absurd was so much fun, so filled with wild energy, so easy to do at any place and on any budget, that fiction looked like work.

In Jeanne-Andree’s class I learned about the writers above, as well as Boris Vian (whose “Empire Builders” I still revere), and Amiri Baraka, and Jean Genet — and I learned about the wonderful comedian Emo Phillips. In 1984, Emo was doing a sort of standup comedy that no one had done before, an insanely inventive and funny comedy that functioned on two levels: piercingly intellectual on the top, and clownishly foolish on the bottom, as though a cocktail-party philosopher had been cross-bred with the town moron. In other words, like theatre of the absurd. Professor Nelson, to whom I remain indebted, was smart enough to recognize the affiliation and to somehow secure a tape of the newly emergent Emo and screen it in class.

Here’s a copy of that first recorded Emo Phillips video, which I just found on the web. (It’s on Emo’s MySpace page, but it hasn’t always been there.) I recognized it immediately because it left an indelible impression on me (especially the joke about the basement). (You can find part two of the video on Emo’s site.) My friend Mark Chaet and I went to see Emo last year at the Steve Allen Theatre and I’m happy to report that Emo is as clever and funny as ever. I’m sure he’ll be back there at some point; you might want to sign up for the email alert.

The Earliest Emo ('83) Ever! (Part 1 of 2)

He speaks truth to power, with a smile.

Case in point:

Tonight I attended a convention party to listen to Barack Obama accept the Democratic party’s nomination for president. Twenty or 30 people were expected; instead, about 60 showed up and crowded the condo at which this was held. (There could have been more, but the hosts shut off the online invite at 60.) The mood of the crowd left little doubt that this was an early indicator of the level of excitement, at least in these circles, for the candidate.

I thought Obama’s speech was superb.

On the one hand, I was impressed by the way he stole all the ground from the Republicans: To listen to Obama, all problems can be settled somewhere in the middle between left and right, and to the satisfaction of all parties (except, well, al Qaeda). I doubt this is true. Every day in every way, the world forces hard choices on us. But the notion of compromise is spot-on, and the concept that right-wingers aren’t unpatriotic, but simply wrong, threatens to dampen the fire under the opposition, as does the notion that their ideas will at least get a hearing. The only skilled way McCain can go after this is to cut the knot by saying that you can’t have it all, and that in a time of hard choices we need someone capable of making them. In what almost all of us hope will be a post-Decider age, I don’t think this will carry him far.

On the other hand, what truly impressed me with Obama’s speech was the deft way he wove his positions that are unpopular with his base  into the overall tapestry of his speech. To wit:  Obama endorsed nuclear energy. I know, you probably didn’t hear it, especially if you sneezed or blinked or thought about something else for a nanosecond. But he did. How did he do it? As part of (I’m paraphrasing) “releasing us from dependence on foreign oil within 10  years.” (And by the way, if he can do that, he can probably also cross his arms, nod his head quickly, and reappear inside a magic lantern.) So nuclear energy under Obama isn’t an anti-environmental position, as it has always been, but is now a national-security issue, and a pro-environmental issue because it relieves us from global warming. That’s smart. Even moreso because he buttressed it with a call for “clean coal energy,” which last time I checked doesn’t exist. While I’m skeptical about “clean coal energy” and an early parole from oil dependency, I don’t doubt his sincerity in working toward these things. He is indeed a man with hope you can count on — or, at least, a man you can count on to hope.

One of the great pleasures of going to the theatre in Los Angeles is becoming reacquainted with wonderful character actors you grew up watching on TV and subsequently forgot about.

A few years ago I saw my friend Aram Saroyan’s play “At the Beach House,” which I knew starred Orson Bean. And it was a treat seeing Mr. Bean — er, not that Mr. Bean — onstage. The surprise was coming across Dena Dietrich in one of the other roles. Yes, she had a career on stage and television, but my generation remembers her more for this:

She was utterly delightful in Aram’s play.

Tonight I went to see a couple of other friends in the appropriately titled “My Old Friends” at the Victory Theatre in Burbank. Appearing in one of the roles was the terrific character actor Malachi Throne. Name not ring a bell? Mr. Throne played Robert Wagner’s boss on “It Takes a Thief,” which debuted in 1968, and, along with what IMDB pegs at 100 other television roles, played Commodore Mendez on the “Star Trek” two-parter “The Menagerie.” Here’s a picture.

Throne has a deep, rich, unforgettable voice. His performance tonight as a man who realizes he’s built nothing in his life was simple, touching, and true. I don’t know if I’ll ever see him on stage again, but I was glad to luck into him tonight, and told him so afterward.

(Hey, as an aside: Given Malachi Throne’s “Star Trek” work (including on “Next Generation”), this seems like a perfect news bit to be on my friend Larry Nemecek’s soon-to-be-renamed blog.)

Just so we don’t lose our humor in the face of the ongoing Bush disintegration (er, administration), as well as all the aiding and abeting our Democratic friends are doing, I share this brief video, which a friend sent me yesterday. Sometimes a little crude humor goes a long way.