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.

Earlier this year I wrote a short play called “About the Deep Woods Killer.” If you think it was about the Deep Woods Killer, you would be wrong — it was more about his now-grown son and the emotional wreckage he’s inherited, and it was perhaps even more about a young woman he meets who is strangely drawn to troubled men. (And, indeed, the full-length version I’m now working on is called “Troubled Men.”) The story is very loosely based upon the Green River Killer, whose story I came across on MSNBC in my hotel room in April. The Green River Killer lured women down by the river and killed them. This went on for 20 years. Estimates of his rampage vary.

I changed the setting from river to woods because while I know something about rivers, I grew up in the woods. To me, the river is metaphoric for journey (think “Huckleberry Finn”), while the woods are metaphoric for the subconscious, and how deep you can go. (Here’s an old logic puzzle:  “How far can a dog run into the woods?” “Halfway. After that, he’s running out.”) In my play, nobody’s getting out — but they do go deeper. Hence the woods.

A minute ago I was Stumbling around the internet and found the image below. Stumble promises to find things on the Web that you’re interested in but which you didn’t know about. In this case, I experienced a frisson when I saw the image. I know someone did it for a lark — it’s posted on some “humor” page — but given my play, I read it differently.

An updating of “Steamboat Willie.”

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

Here’s my wife’s advice to the Obama-Biden campaign prior to this evening’s vice-presidential debate:

“All I can say is, I hope to God Joe Biden keeps his mouth shut.”

Can’t do better than that.

It’s been years since I wrote a comic strip, but I think it’s time to take one up again. It would feature my precocious and sometimes menacing six-year-old boy Dietrich, who alternates between being charming and funny and acting like Dick Cheney, except less pleasantly. His foil would be his older but outgunned 10-year-old sister Emma.

A sample strip could be drawn directly from this dialogue which ensued on Sunday night after he refused to help his sister clean up the kitchen, but still wanted access to her Xbox game “Marvel Ultimate Alliance.”

HER:   Uh, what’s the word I’m looking for? “No.”

HIM (matter-of-factly):     Emma, trust me. I can make your life much more miserable. So you don’t want to say that.

HER:     Why should I let you play a really cool fun game when all the apology I get is I’m sorry? I don’t get any help or anything? No. You’re going to have to do something for me.

HIM:      Like what, pee in your pants?

I remind you, he’s six.

Hm. People seem… skeptical… about the $700 billion bailout — so skeptical that Congress actually voted against an appropriation. (That made for a truly red-letter day.)

Hey. Congress. Why so skeptical?

Could it have anything to do with this?

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.”

The cover of this month’s Inc. magazine features four young entrepreneurs behind the headline “Cool, Determined, Under 30:  Meet the brains behind America’s smartest new companies.” (No link because the current issue isn’t on their website yet.) One of the entrepreneurs, labeled “The Trendsetter,” is Una Kim, who “didn’t like girly sneakers. So she did something about it.” The story inside gives us further background on Kim — BA, MBA — and the line of shoes available from her firm, Keep Company.

What the story fails to note about the shoes, and what I learned only from the entrepreneur’s website, is that they’re laughably ugly.

The last time I saw shoes this ugly they were in my closet in 1984 and were made from an ill-fitting black petrochemical compound that wrapped around each foot like a hotdog roll, with thick black laces replacing the mustard stream. My girlfriend said they looked like Polish bowling shoes. Hilarious, yes — but at least they weren’t $95 a pair.

Una Kim’s shoes are certainly different — and serve as yet another reminder that “different” does not always equal “better.” I could come up with a new taste for coffee by pouring battery acid into it, but that wouldn’t be better. (And it might not even be that different, given the remarkable taste similarity to Starbucks house roast). The best way Una Kim could improve these shoes would be to put bells on the tips. And then take them back in time five hundred years.