MMFI (Make Me Feel Important)

This is a picture.

Some would say that this looks just like any old picture that some idiot took with a camera-phone at a music festival. They would be right.

But let's back up and meet a cat.

This cat is my cat. His name is Bob Nastanovich. He's pretty much the coolest, sweetest, sturdiest, awesomest cat in the world. I gave him the name Bob Nastanovich because I needed a namesake who is cool, sweet, sturdy, and awesome.

This is a rock band.

They're called Pavement. If you asked me - and why wouldn't you? - I'd tell you that they were the greatest American rock band ever. They broke up around 2000, and I never got to see them play. The two gentlemen on the far left are Stephen Malkmus and Bob Nastanovich. Bob Nastanovich, for those keeping track, is the man about whom Blur wrote the unfuckwithable "Song 2," the scourge of every talent show.

WOOOOO-HOOOOO!
Well, I lie and I'm easy.

Sunday at the Pitchfork Music Festival, Stephen Malkmus played a solo acoustic set. Then he brought out a special guest to play drums. That special guest was Bob Nastanovich. It looked like this.

This is the first, and will probably be the last, picture I ever took with a camera-phone at a concert. In the past, I have frequently mocked the very concept of taking camera-phone pictures at concerts. It's not much of a picture, as pictures go. It's a terrible picture, really, which is why I always mock people who take pictures with cellphones at concerts. Point of fact, the concert wasn't much of a concert as concerts go. By any objective criteria - for example, how hard the musicians playing the songs tried to play the songs like they're supposed to be played - it was one of the very, very worst sets I've ever seen, and I'm including those times dudes brought guitars to high school and played "Lightning Crashes" by Live in the cafeteria. But Bob Nastanovich sat on that drum throne, and he thwacked away, out of time and with no expression, to "Trigger Cut" and "In the Mouth of a Desert" from Slanted & Enchanted, and it was, without putting too fine a point on it, The Most Important Moment Of My Entire Life.



Full stop.



Apropos of nothing: the video to Pavement's "Gold Soundz," one of the songs that I call my favorite song despite the fact that there are at least a couple of other songs I call my favorite song.



Slanted & Enchanted stats from wikipedia:

* #134 on Rolling Stone magazine's list of the 500 greatest albums of all time.
* Chosen as #5 on Pitchfork Media's Top 100 Albums of the 1990s.
* Chosen as #4 on Spin magazine's Top 100 Albums of the Past 20 Years in June 2005.
* Included in the All-Time 100 albums from Time magazine.
* As of 2007, the album has only sold 150,000 copies.