WILD FLAG
here is some information about the EXTREMELY PERSONALLY IMPORTANT ROCK CONCERT that i attended last week. it was by a band called wild flag, and it was performed at local 506 in chapel hill north carolina, my old (college) stomping grounds. i traveled a cumulative total of ~12 hours, including a shittily protracted layover, to see this band i had never actually heard. this is because sleater-kinney is my favorite band of all time always and forever, and i am so excited that janet weiss and carrie brownstein are making music together again that it was essentially a moral imperative for me to see this band as soon as i could.
my show-going companions were a good friend from middle school who i hadn’t seen in about 10 years and a friend from college who i hadn’t seen in 3 months. arguably anything would be excellent with such excellent company, but this was incredible in a way i cannot express and couldn’t anticipate at the time. the phrase that came to mind at the time was “incandescently happy” so that is what i was.
also it is a lie to say that i had not heard any of their songs, because NPR streamed “glass tambourine”,* and naturally also i had watched some youtubes from their prior shows. the point, i suppose, is that i knew this wouldn’t be a continuation of my favorite band, and yet in some ways it was better! because the first time i saw sleater-kinney i had already been a fan for nearly a decade, and some jagoff in front of me kept flashing a camera in carrie’s face and clearly stressed everyone out, and in general i had lots of Big Expectations then that i didn’t have for wild flag. also weirdly it happened that i never saw sleater-kinney in a venue i was familiar with; seeing wild flag on that stage, a stage i’ve been on to sing terrible karaoke, in a venue i’ve been to many dozens of times, was a whole cocktail of emotions (largely extremely joyous) about my relationship to live music and to my college town, which i won’t go into further, because EMOTIONS ARE BORING; ROCK MUSIC IS AWESOME (to reappropriate ryan north). although i will say that their stage banter about college basketball was pretty enjoyable. i was really delighted, too, to recognize both jon wurster and john darnielle in the audience, but i did not talk to them, because i do not like imposing on some dudes’ conversations to tell them i like their bands and their twitter accounts; that is probably a dick move, BUT ALSO BECAUSE:
as i was leaving the show, janet weiss was sitting at the merch table, so i borrowed some dude’s half-dead sharpie and got her to autograph my copy of the wild flag 7”, and told her that she is basically my favorite drummer ever, and thanked her for making music, to which she said “my pleasure.”
so this is my terrible telephone picture, taken while i was still kind of trembling with glee, of my new important piece of music memorabilia. this is going up there with my copy of “a supposedly fun thing i’ll never do again” in the notional sack of things i would save from a burning building. 
*also anyone that would vote to defund an organization that makes this amazing music available is clearly an actual moron who has never experienced fun. that is my political sidenote. NPR is also streaming their dang SXSW set, in which carrie is wearing the same shirt she wore in chapel hill.
