A Cell Phone Time Check

So it was a brilliant evening with my son, dinner at Le Relais de Venise L'Entrecote on Lex Ave and 52nd. One menu item, entrecote steak (you get it four ways -- blue, rare, medium and well, none of this medium rare, medium well over-tuning), frites, green salade with walnuts to start, house wine, and desserts including creme brulee. The waitress, for they are all women and all dressed in black with a little white smock trim, serves you seconds on the meat, heaps on the fries -- fully understanding that life's too short for lukewarm French fries -- and drops by from time to time to see how you are doing, but otherwise let's you have at it. All this -- if you skip wine and dessert -- for just under $25 per person. Crazy prices for New York. And then on the 6 train down to Astor Place and Webster Hall for The Mountain Goats, full band this time behind the chief Goat, John Darnielle, who looks -- in his glasses and short haircut -- like Buddy Holly on speed, but of course Buddy Holly would be on speed today, who can play like a heavy metal wannabe and who writes lyrics that few others his age can even approach. Not to overquote myself but it's past 1 AM and I can't think new thoughts -- here's an excerpt from my Amazon review of his maybe best CD The Sunset Tree: "He sings here of life with an abusive stepfather, a subject not exactly made for easy listening, but The Sunset Tree, a humane and sympathetic freeing from a sad past, is not bitter, achieves strength and -- particularly in Song for Dennis Brown -- addresses some universal and inescapable experiences. This might sound like dreary medicine to take, but instead there is a cheerful, pop (N.B. In concert the pop ramps up to loud rock) edge to some of the music, most notably in Dance Music and This Year. A greater reason, though, is Darnielle's own storytelling -- his stepfather sounds like a monster, but he is not denied his own humanity ("you are sleeping off your demons") and Darnielle even manages -- on hearing of the man's death -- to recall a fragile good memory, going together in an early morning years previously to watch horses work out. It helps too that in this history Darnielle recogizes his own teenaged self as not exactly perfect, describing himself and a girlfriend as 'twin high-maintenance machines.'"

This was the best of the three MG concerts I've seen here in New York, but still, in the encore set, I sneaked a look at my cell phone saw it was 11:26 and said to myself, "by 1 I'll be in bed." The years. Or as Indy said in Raiders, "it's not the years, honey, it's the mileage." One or the other, things add up and wear you down.