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.

Painter William Wray is opening his latest showing this Saturday night at a gallery in Monrovia, here in Southern California. Here’s information on the gallery and its friendly and knowledgeable owner, Laura Segil, and here’s info on the artist, and above is one of his paintings.

Some of us are more familiar with some other William Wray art. It’s the art he signs as Bill Wray, and includes animation and print work on Hellboy, Batman, and Ren & Stimpy. Here’s that Wray’s site, and here’s a representative illustration. (Although when he does, say, Bugs Bunny, it’s with a gentler touch.)

So I ask you: Which is the serious art?

The answer is: both.

I like that William Wray is both a fine-art painter and a commercial/comic illustrator. I like that my friend Gerald Locklin writes accessible poems that are also packed with meaning. I write marketing copy as well as plays, and I enjoy them both (although in different ways). Shakespeare wrote for the masses, but somehow wound up being artistic. Samuel Beckett, the doyen of litterateurs, loved detective thrillers (and I’m sure if he could have written one, would have).

We have this false notion that there is “low” art and “high” art. I don’t think so. I think there’s “good” art and “bad” art, and there’s art that’s more accessible (because the references are more easily understood by more people) and there’s art that’s less accessible. Moreover, I often wonder if the advocates of “high art” aren’t a little too interested in keeping more people from scaling their towers and gaining access.

Recently a colleague from USC came to see one of my plays and told me afterward how glad he was to see so many people laughing. (Intentionally: It’s a comedy.) For decades, he’s suffered the slings and arrows of a certain slice of the academy, where lighter material is frowned upon, and to be funny isn’t to be any good. (And we wonder what happened to the audience for poetry.)

So I celebrate William Wray and his alter ego Bill Wray. And early this Saturday evening I may drive out to Monrovia to meet them.