So, I went to see a concert for the first time in eight years this week. It was Mark Kozelek, of Sun Kil Moon fame, at it was at Lee's Palace on Thursday night. The frigging thing started at 10:50 p.m. What the fuck? Alan says that Lee's always waits until nearly midnight to start its concerts. I don't get it. Mark's music is anything but rocking, so even those people who love him to death were starting to droop by the end of the two hours.

During the first 45 minutes of the concert, I have to say that I wasn't impressed. After every song, he and his backup guitarist (who Sh tells me was one of his bandmates in Red House Painters, but who could have been some kid he pulled off the street for the amount of coaching he had to give him) discussed the next song for what felt like 10 minutes and tuned their guitars for another five. I was pretty tired to begin with (I'd donated blood that evening; and besides, my bedtime is normally 10 a.m. to compensate for the 6 a.m. I have to get up at for the commute into the city each day), so these moments seemed to just make me more tired. At about the 45-minute mark, however, he lost the accompaniment and did about five songs in a row—several of which I actually recognized—and the audience really started digging on it. But then the accompanier came back and we finished up with more stalling and hesitating.

I'd had no idea coming into this concert that Mark was so into the guitar aspect of his music. One song he played the opening, er, bar? riff?, about 10 times before he started singing, and in another song he jammed for a long time after he stopped singing. That was either the last song before the encore of the one before that, and I think that was the moment that stood out the most for me afterward. Mark, focussed on that guitar, playing a lovely, simple set of strings and holding the attention of 250 people while the bartenders cashed out and the club upstairs blared out its dance music. It was really a lovely moment, and well worth the late night, and the hour and a half of stumbling, to get to it.

Of course, it didn't help my mood much the next day that when I got home at 1:30, I had to read 30 pages of Sarah Dunant's The Birth of Venus. What a great book.