[Video via Angry Cit­i­zen]

Remem­ber when I men­tioned that thing about David Cross and Stephen Malk­mus? Well, it was an effort in hunt­ing triv­ia for Mr. Cross to use dur­ing the Inside the Rock­er’s Stu­dio seg­ment of the 2007 PLUG Awards at which SM received a life­time achieve­ment award.

Over­all, reac­tions seem mixed at best, rang­ing from “David Cross is awe­some” to “The quiz por­tion was painful­ly awk­ward.” But when you con­sid­er that I went “Mis­sion Accom­plished” unpaid and on a twen­ty-four hour turn­around, you can’t do much bet­ter. Do you think it’s bad form to hyper­link YouTube on your résumé?

As an aside, it’s worth not­ing that what­ev­er Pave­men­t’s lega­cy may be, it will cer­tain­ly remain mys­te­ri­ous. Apart from some rare footage, both the Slow Cen­tu­ry DVD and Per­fect Sound For­ev­er are worth­less doc­u­ments for any­one with more than a sur­face inter­est in Pave­ment and what fol­lowed. More­over, since Mike Bond’s amaz­ing Acid Casu­al­ties web­site went tits up there’s no reli­able archive of Pave­ment and Malk­mus ephemera any­where online.

Vashti Bun­yan’s per­for­mance at John­ny Bren­da’s had her seem­ing none the worse for wear, despite what’s been polite­ly termed a rau­cous evening at Carnegie Hall the night before, host­ed by David Byrne. Her piquant lul­la­bies sound­ed as crisp and pure as the cold night air, hush­ing an already rev­er­ent crowd. Con­sid­er­ing it was the first I’d heard Bun­yan, I found myself pleas­ant­ly sur­prised to find her music as much a touch­stone to today’s acid folkies as to Belle and Sebastian.

Most impor­tant­ly, Bun­yan expressed a skep­ti­cism that’s miss­ing from much of the cur­rent crop of folkies whose poseur pol­i­tics and ama­teur hour apoc­a­lyp­ti­cism I find hope­less­ly cyn­i­cal. When Bun­yan intro­duced her songs, she rou­tine­ly paused to qual­i­fy them either as dreams deferred, or as touch­ing trib­utes to her chil­dren. By putting her work in light of her own expe­ri­ences, it was a love­ly way to see how an artist can mature and be suc­cess­ful by admit­ting the imped­i­ments to their ambi­tions rather than let­ting that dis­ap­point­ment con­sume them.