It's best not to talk about it

Make me think of the old argument about whether it's desirable/possible to describe music

http://www.sciencenews.org/20030419/bob10.asp

Just back from 2 weeks of travelling. Weighing in with the musical parts of it later.....

Summer!

And what do we listen to in summer? Elastica! Avalanches! Stuck Together With God's Glue (maybe)!

Always with the Late LAte Show

This week Dave Couse performing a song from forthcoming alnum. Should be good. I wish the A House documentary that happened all those years ago was given to him and the other members just so they would have it at least. His backing band looked quite young - I don't think there was anyone from A House in it.

[Update - they actually had been given copies of it and supplied comments backed. I mis-rememberd this completely. I am extremely sorry about that Anne, Nodlag and Berni]

Have you seen these Heinekan Green Energy ads? The one with this imaginary band The Transformers in it - there are 7 I have only seen 2 but they're pretty good. Is that Richie Egan in one of them?

Beating the touts for Glastonbury

The quick sell out of Glastonbury has meant ticket shortages followed by touting. Touting is pretty bad normally but I think for an event that raises money for charity it is doubly reprehensible. I was trying to think of a few ways of getting back at the touts.

• The glastonbury commercial manager said it was very unlikely they could cancel tickets that touts are selling. Only touting of football tickets is illegal.

• There are a number of resellers - organisations that usually sell football packages/musicals/Paul Macartney tickets who are selling Glasto tix for anywhere between 200 and 300 VAT. They say they have small numbers of tickets but this claim could be to encourage demand. I reported these organisations to BBC Watchdog but haven't got any reply from them yet. It would be great to stop their ticket allocations becuase I bet they number in the thousands.

• I don't mind people selling a couple of tickets on ebay but when you look you'll find that there are a fair few people selling between 4 and more tickets. This is not fair in my book so I tried to get the contact details for them - some have an email address which leads to a personal website. If you ask them a question you usually get a reply from their personal email address and in one or two cases if you look at their feedback you'll see ebayers who were dissatisfied with the seller from previous transactions who are more than happy to supply the contact details. I've no idea what to do with these details. It looks as if it will be next to impossible to really stop these tickets being allocated (EBay refused to stop the auctions though they did take some action for Radiohead a while ago). Anyway I mailed one seller who was selling 8 saying I didn't think it was right to make money out of Glastonbury and this is the reply I got

How about I give you a WARNING... which is this, People like YOU Make 

me sick.. A. You;re not the Police, nor should you act like one.. even if 

you provide Glastonbury with the URL Details you CAN'T take my tickets 

qway, They're not through Glastonbury DIRECTLY.. FOOL! Here's a tip

A. DON'T EVER Email me again with this jibbereish, coz you're blokced 

from sending me emails.

B. IF YOU WANT TO BE A POLICEMAN GO TO SCHOOL TO DO IT.

C. You're RUINING THE EBAY SYSTEN TOO, YOU AND YOUR FRIDNS, 

ALL THESE "FALSE BIDDER" will get their just desserts, YOU'RE FAKE 

BIDS ARE RECORDED AND SO TOO ARE YOUR RECORDS AND YOU 

WILL BE PROSECUTED IF BIDS YOU PEOPLE MAKE AREN'T FULFILLED 

WITH PAYMENTS..

SO YOU WANNA WASTE YOUR TIME AND AGAIN YOU FUCKER.. KEEP 

TRYING ME!

So there's a bit of aggro out there. Anyway I don't know why I'm recounting all this, I can't do anything except hassle the touts and it takes too much time. And I'm tired.

In which Andrew actually reviews stuff for a change.

I may rework some of these later, but at least they're off the list. I should ideally have listened to some of these recently, but I've been without headphones since my London Adventures, so fuck it.

Haha, maybe I should use "computer games" as the Andrew's Other Stuff section. I probably think about them as much as anything else.

ABC - The Lexicon of Love

This is really great stuff. Is this "the" Trevor Horn production? It simultaneously jumps out at you as "this is an eighties production by one of the most eighties producers (surely him vs Quincy Jones)", while not getting in the way of Martin Fry. Despite being Hit After Hit After Hit (Poison Arrow, The Look Of Love, All Of My Heart, the songs I didn't know so well still stand up.

Scene Creamers - I Suck On That Emotion

Indie rock supergroup/The Make-up side project make garage sludge. Ian might enjoy this.

The Majesticons - Beauty Party

Undie hip-hop supergroup make bling sludge. Ian will not enjoy.

Mull Historical Society - Loss

Lovely misery from a guy from the island off Scotland. I have an infinite appetite for this sort of stuff. He reminds me a lot of Badly Drawn Boy: he has his ear for a perfect tune, but also his tendency to sabotage the result, usually by letting the song spiral off for a minute or so too long.

The Mountain Goats - Tallahassee

More beauty from John Darnielle. The songs about love and hate sound sharp whatever bit of the spectrum they're on.

The Thrills - One Horse Town

An enjoyable countryish single (over which inevitably hangs the ghost of Stars Of Heaven), and a pair of nice B-sides.

Viktor Pelevin - Homo Zapiens

This is an odd little book. It stars a Russian Advertising Exec who started at about the same time that those words started to mean something in that order. He drinks a lot, he takes drugs, he has visions of a Babylonian deity that may be running Russia, and he goes to work for an enormous quasi-government agency that may be doing the same job. Er, the end. Apart from a few pages in the middle where Che Guevara's ghost starts dictating memos on the meaning of advertising. I suspect (for no good reason) that that was a nod to the similar "sandbagging the plot" sequence in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash, which it has other similarities to (though obviously not the same lightness of touch: this is Russia for god's sake). It's far from an unpleasant read, but it's all over the place

Steve Erickson - Days Between Stations

There's a line from the trailer for Knockaround Guys where John Malkovich's character, an old-school gangster complains that "there used to be a way to do things, and things got done, and now everybody's feelings are involved". I was thinking about this as I was passing the Screen the other days, looking at the movies being shown: The Hours, Frida, Moonlight Mile, The Hours, and thinking about how these films are all all about the feelings (and fair enough). The point being: Steve Erickson's Books are all about the feelings as well. He takes his characters (only three for most of this book, though there are a pair of twins in there as well), and bangs them off each other, then sees how they stick, and shamelessly exploits coincidence to realign them and whack em together from a different angle. And when two of them stick for a while, in a couple of pages one off the other characters will arrive in a way they didn't expect, and oh, there they go again. None of which is to belittle the incredible skill that he wields. And honesty too: they situations are blatant manipulations, but there are real truths in there, and a sense that all he can do is trap escaping characters and decide how they come back in: once they're in the scene, they do as they will.

Technology overtakes Beard!

No longer will we have to worry about making our daily (or weekly in my case) entries: The Brunching Shuttlecock has the answer.