The Polaroid

The weekend that I officially moved was supposed to be the weekend that I joined my friend Meg and her friend Andy in Wayne, Michigan for a festival aptly titled Michiganfest. Unfortunately, unlike Fred Flintstone, I didn’t and don’t have the benefit of a magical green spaceman/fairy godfather type character named Kazoo who is able to allow me to be in two places at once. Thus, Michiganfest, and all the awesome bands --including Ted Leo, Radio 4, and Milemarker -- that I hoped to see were missed. And in their stead, I drove over 800 miles through a blizzard, purchased D.C. car insurance, acquired a DC driver’s license (an epic tale in and of itself), bought a bed, observed Passover, moved into a new house and began a job.

Needless to say, I was disappointed that I missed all of the indie rock goodness that Michigan was going to offer up, and probably more so, the chance to hang out with Meg. She was understanding, but as she often says to me when we chat on the phone or on IM, she adamantly contended that she couldn’t understand why I had left NYC in the first place.

After the festival, I was chatting with Meg when she said, “You’ll never guess who I hung out with at Michiganfest.” Now, there are few people in the world who could say something like this and I would have any idea what the answer was. [To digress, there was one time I called up my mom all excited and said “Mom, guess who I am interviewing?!” She paused and then just blurted out “Holy shit! Stephen Malkmus!” Her answer was, in fact, correct.]

I knew who Meg hung out with. The answer was and could only be one person: Alexander Burian.

Now, Al Burian fills a place in my heart that can never be occupied by anyone else. Sure, there is a thirteen year old girl element that he is a pretty good looking guy, but my mild obsession with him has grown mainly due to the utter excellence of his zine Burn Collector. Burn Collector was the final straw that broke this camel’s back and made me start Anecdotal Evidence. Burian makes the mundane seem important, revels in the tangential, and is both hilariously absurd and depressingly reflective.

In addition, the last two records by his band, Milemarker, are quite solid in their own rights. Somewhere in the midst of my last semester of college, when Burn Collector was proving to be my greatest respite from genetics class, stress, and my impending flight from New York, I made the utterly absurd statement: “I just want to lick Al Burian.” It became a bit of a rallying statement, something that Meg and I laughed at when things reached their most stressful or absurd. Al Burian had taken on a super-human (or is that sub-human?) position in our world of inside jokes and perplexing lingo.

Anyhow, Meg informed me that she had not left her meeting with Al Burian empty-handed and that she was sending it to me. Over a week after she sent it, an envelope arrived at the house. Inside was a Polaroid photo with a message from Al Burian…