Funk metal group Belikos playing a weird side stage covered in traffic cones at FreeFest (Photo: TBD Staff)

During Saturday's Virgin Mobile FreeFest in Columbia, I sent a tweet making fun of the guy covering the festival for Spin:

Thing is for years I was the guy from Spin, sitting at the back of the house, wishing I'd had the guts to ask for better access, scribbling every feverish thought in the dark in the hopes that: a) I could read them later so I could; b) craft a perfect 450-word review of dozens of artists. And then there's the inconvenient fact that Jon Fischer, the City Paper arts editor who was covering the show for Spin as well, has already filed one great post and easily my favorite tweet of the festival.

It'd have been even funnier without the comma, but it wouldn't have been true, and I'd be surprised if he didn't write the greatest 450-word review of dozens of artists' performances Spin ever ran.

Me, I sent 138 tweets, hopped in the car, and sped home. And reading them back now makes me worried about journalism: not because of the format change (it's just as good as my notebook now that I'm faster at typing on the wee screen) but because a couple different people reporting on the show heard things completely different from me. Here's me at the Pavement show:

(In English: Stephen Malkmus says Northern Virginia is gonna be its own state, then does not play Pavement's song "Two States," about how Northern California should secede from the Golden State.) Fischer heard this:

Here's me on some between-song banter:

And here's DCist's Chris Klimek:

So who was right? Probably Klimek. But maybe in the same way rock critics used to try to write reviews that captured the spirit of the album they were reviewing (a trend that most people trying to actually gather information from those reviews probably don't miss much), these tweets prove that journalism in the post "thoughts" age is gonna be just fine: It was Pavement. We all walked away with different ideas of what they meant. Like Pavement's set on Saturday, pretty close to perfect.

SO OK ON TO OTHER STUFF. We're gonna finish rounding up Virgin Mobile FreeFest on the blog today, but other things did happen, like the Post's deluxe look at Arena Stage's new building in the Ampersand. And David Bazan at the Black Cat, and Ron Charles live-tweeting the National Book Festival, at which 150,000 PEOPLE SHOWED UP, and book-writer Jonathan Franzen admitting he'd never been to the 9:30 Club but wrote about it anyway. Also he digs Fugazi.

But let's look at a Ron Charles tweet to wrap things up.