Geeky Chic

During an interview, a partner once described his experience dining at Les Halles.  Everything had gone wrong that evening.  There was a mix-up, and he and his wife were forced to sit at the bar for an hour and a half, despite having a reservation.  To their increasing chagrin, someone at the bar puffed away in their direction.  When they were finally seated, the partner’s anger was at its outer edge of containment.  But at the moment when he bit into the first course, the perfection of the dish washed away the restaurant’s sins against him.

This is how the Shins concert felt this evening.  I had been to the venue many times before, but this is the first time that I didn’t have a ticket for general admission on the ground floor.  Instead we had actual seats on the balcony, and they could best be described as noseblood seats.  The venue had a policy of absolutely no beverages on the balcony, so as our beer wore off, we became more irritated at the two mediocre opening acts (who played for over an hour and a half).  By the time the Shins came on at 10, my mind had calculated the lost time that I could have spent at home doing practice sets.  But after the first song (Kissing the Lipless, if I recall correctly), we were all smiles, and enjoyed the remainder of the show, which featured the Shins’ brand of peppy-sounding (yet slightly dark, upon closer inspection) rock with a hint of country twang.  They engaged the audience in between songs, and threw Reeses candy into the crowd near the end of the show, and made Chris Rock “tossed salad” references.

The following lyrics frrom the Shins’ Pink Bullets are some of my favorite of the moment:

Since then it’s been a book you read in reverse
So you understand less as the pages turn
Or a movie so crass
And awkardly cast
That even I could be the star.

**

On an entirely unrelated note, the Times is doing an interesting (though I don’t like this style of reporting) series of articles called American Dreamers: The Lure of Las Vegas, which describes the harsh realities of living there.  This is on my mind because one of the girls in our party this weekend asked, “Geez, where do you go to party if you live in Vegas?”