You might say I’ve Had This Song Dancin’ In My Ears For The Past Few Months (you might not say that).  Either way, I’ve been passively hoping over the last couple days that they’d play this one for PTV.  It’ll make my top ten tracks this year, and it’s good to know it translates live nearly perfectly (tho a bit of a tempo slow).  “Hooting and Howling” is great, too.

Bonus joke that Tom told during a tuning break in a SxSW set this year: “What do you call an Italian man with one toe?  Roberto.”  It helps if you say it aloud.

Britt Daniel, on the rawer new Spoon record, to Spinner (also).

2. “’Virgin mishandled an earlier remaster series,’ says Partridge, ‘and there were all sorts of bad color separations and misspellings and wrong track listings. It was really heartbreaking. They’ve actually fumbled the ball, radically, twice in recent years. During the whole Britpop thing, they didn’t promote our back catalog despite all these bands like Blur, Pulp, and countless others that, to me, were shamelessly attempting to sounds rather like us. Then it came around again a few years later with another wave of bands like Dogs Die in Hot Cars, Hot Hot Heat, Franz Ferdinand, Maxïmo Park, the Futureheads, and Bloc Party. Everybody would come up to me in the street and say, ‘Hey Andy, that band blah blah sounds just like what you did in 1979!’ So Virgin fumbled it yet again, when they should have been promoting our back catalog there.”

Andy Partridge, acerbic as ever, to Wolfgang’s Vault.  A lot of good stuff here for XTC fans. And the good news: XTC reissues soon!  Maybe! (Vinyl plz.)

3. “I have nothing against one person sending a track to another person saying, ‘Hey, check this track out; it’s great!’ That’s like a fan-to-fan thing. But these big websites like Pirate Bay are just another corporation. It’s the future Clear Channel. They have nothing to do with good. They are just evil. It’s the worst. They take our music and put it out for free before we have released it to our record label. There’s no fanfare, there’s nothing, it’s just like ‘Kings of Convenience: Declaration of Dependence. Click Here.’ There’s no sense of jubilation.”

Erlend Øye’s take on filesharing from this Prefixmag interview with Kings of Convenience.

4. “‘From the days when the mathematical and mechanical were paramount in music, the struggle has been bitter and incessant for the sway of the emotional and the soulful,’ he wrote. ‘And now in this the twentieth century come these talking and playing machines and offer again to reduce the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things which are as like real art as the marble statue of Eve is like her beautiful living breathing daughters.’

John Philip Sousa, railing against those confounded music machines.  Part of a neat little Arstechnica piece about copyright holders’ fears of new technologies. (Further reading: Mark Rose)

Having trouble getting into Embryonic?  Wayyyyyyy too long for you to even think about, with your busy life and other interests and limited free time and such?  Try this shaved-down version first (using your own mp3s, not mine).  All killer, no filler, 51.5 minutes of creepy, rhythm-centric middle-age paranoia (original sequence retained).  Dig on this, then widen back out to the full thing, and I think you’ll find it sounds much more manageable (big up to Matthew for planting this seed). (NB: You also might want to start with a focus on the bass guitar, and widen out from that.)  (Previously)

Come by the house for a bit. I’ve remodeled! For the first time in over 4 years! The title of my post is what professional comedians (like myself) refer to as a “callback.” You’re all like “yeah, I remember when you posted this, on your way to your first remodel and the high-rolling life of a blogger in full control of his URL.”  Thanks, guys. Also, haha @ “moved offices.” Give me a second to write that bit down in the old notebook.  That is my own Life in Hell vs. the current realm of the 5th season of the Simpsons, if you know what I mean.

Of course, marathonpacks 3.0 is the most supercharged of all the marathonpackses yet. First, a new logo–only my second one ever–designed by Bloomington-based renaissance genius David Woodruff. He took the Geocities-esque primitiveness of the one I made way back when (on video-editing graphics software), and made it into something fresh and wonderful. And for this, I thank him.

But even more thanks have to go to Ryan Catbird, who more or less loaded my old site onto the back of his flatbed truck and drove it from the Blogger ghetto into the swanky new suburban home you see in front of you. Have you not clicked over? Do so! We’re all well-aware that Ryan’s a genius–as this, this, and this should more than suffice to prove–but did you know that he has the patience of Job, and no shortage of ability to talk to idiots like me in a way that allows them to understand things we have no ability to understand?  Or to take a site that was created over four years with the backend equivalent of duct tape and thumbtacks, and remodel it into the svelte, turbo-charged entity you’re looking at now (CLICK OVER DAMN YOU)?  Ryan Catbird is my Joe Clark, and he convinced me that life is worth blogging.  Sorry you had to go to jail for disobeying the fire marshal, Ryan.

A big part of the reason I’ve not been blogging with any regularity for so long, I’m now realizing, came from the fact that it was hard to do in that old system.  But this one: this one is easy.  So let’s expect more from Ol’ Harvey!  I’ll definitely be using this space much more for the stuff that I’ve been using it for since I started it as a poor-man’s Fluxblog, but I’ll be devoting much more space to my adopted hometown, and the never-ending supply of great music/artists/events emanating from within its tree-lined borders.  Videos, guest posts (like this), links-to-blogs, concert listings, so forth and so on ad infinitum.  For the time being, any post labeled “Bloomingtopia” can be sorted as such.

Thanks for reading (mom), and extra-special thanks, David and Ryan!

“Wes Anderson doesn’t make movies anymore. He creates overly precious paintings inhabited by emasculated man-children who knit sweater vests to the accompaniment of Belle & Sebastian while fantasizing that they’re macho enough to skin a caribou with a pocketknife.”

Vice, “Criterion’s Little Fuck-Ups.” Saves me the time of hating on some of these flicks/directors myself, and gives me some pithy quotes to use in my next drunken argument.  Hating on Michael Bay is like shooting an unpaid intern in a barrel, sure.  But Kevin Smith and Fear & Loathing–far too many bar conversations have turned ugly when people go to bat for post-Rushmore Anderson, Smith, and that fucking film.