Category: Blogging About Blogging

Caturmonday Musings

Drove to Gilman yesterday, picked up my music stand, which I had loaned to a fellow artist last week after my caterwauling. On the way to and from said venue, I listened to some of my own records and my, I like them! People make records for many reasons I am sure, and me? I seem to make records that I want to play, for entertainment, for me. Self-centered? Why yes, by definition. Success is enjoying them, and yesterday, I enjoyed them very much.

I wouldn’t be happy being toooooo predictable, to myself or to anyone observing, when it comes to my artistic output. I s’pose if being marketable were a priority I’d have stuffed myself into a category long ago and tried to be understandable as a public entity. That just seems boring, to me, best left to others who may enjoy that kind of thing.

I’m leaving behind a little legacy of songs, recordings, posts, podcats’s’s and mewsletters, as part of the human record, my small voice in a giant field. Why? Because I choose to, because it feels right to do, because I want to. Free will, what a thing.

There’s a song by XTC on their Oranges & Lemons album which used to haunt me a bit, in particular this repeated line:

He’s always saying what he’s gonna do

The song is One of the Millions by Colin Moulding. The whole album is great, heck everything by XTC is great.

In my youth I was often a frustrated artist, a frustrated boyfriend, a frustrated bandmate a frustrated bandleader, a frustrated person. I had plans but not the means nor skills to implement many of them, yet I strived constantly, continued through my frustration and indeed, said what I was gonna do. I heard myself saying what I was gonna do. And like Colin Moulding, observed this with a certain wariness and dread.

In my youth, if I wanted to record a song and make it into a record, there were a number of hoops to jump through. Gatekeepers to pass. The traditional route for many, back then, was something like this: Record a demo of a song, then teach it to a band, record it properly, then the feloniously dull “shop it around.” To record labels or managers or whomever, OTHER people, gatekeepers, people who are not me.

To be an artist is to be your own gatekeeper. Choose your own path. Make your paintings and hang them on the wall if you like, maybe to find relevance to other people, maybe not. To be an artist is to not be concerned with how a piece is received. To be an entertainer, sure, you need to care about that, and that’s fine, I’ve done a bit of that too, but approaching the end of my sixth decade, I’ve learned I very much prefer the agenda of the artist. Which for me means to make it up as I go and do whatever I want.

This journal style of songwriting, self-producing and self-releasing my own product, CONTENT being the hilarious catch-all term, god, it is so liberating. Demo, nothing, I just make. In fact, some of the songs I have produced in recent years, started as demos lonnnngggg ago when I tried to go the old traditional route. On Top Of The World, for example, man, I demo’d that on a Tascam 4-Track cassette recorder in like, 1991 or so. Couldn’t quite get it to sound the way I wanted to, lyrics not quite complete, couldn’t quite find the right collaborator to help finish the words, band and producer at the time didn’t quite know what to do with it, and it.. died. Well did it? Ah, but no, the idea was still appealing to me, and I remembered it and one morning felt inspired to go for it AND! Now I know how, and have the tools at my fingertips, and, I made the thing, finished lyrics and all, and, I like it. Success.

Lunacy abounds. The world will do its thing. I read yesterday’s email newsletter from Bernie Sanders and bless his great heart, he nails it right on, yet again. Mr. Sanders and Heather Cox Richardson and some other brilliant voices I choose to listen to, and I choose actively.  Much of the Internet and social media today seems focused on feeding content to users, analyzing our habits as dispassionately as if we were laboratory animals, and feeding us what statistically they determine is likely to keep us engaged.

To actively and intentionally curate our own menus of information and experience has always been an essential skill, and I think this has become somehow more complicated of late. Quoting myself,

The feedlot backlit and I am split

from People I May Know. I’m fond of that line, and feed lot can be stylized either as one word or two, it’s a clear double-meaning. I love the image of grazing on the content that is fed to us, in our feed, and the lot – the lot is also a double-meaning, as in “you lot,” or, the space in which we feed.

Quoting myself again,

Tomorrow is a day
Yesterday was one also
There have been some before
Presumably there will be more

I love that! Thought it was a throwaway, really, when I came up with it – an afterthought, nothing remarkable, and intentionally not remarkable due to its place it a rather absurd song, but then, when I hear or read it now, it has considerable meaning, and it makes me smile. Makes me smile.. isn’t that one good aspect, one possible good result, of a piece of art?

They’ve been going in and out of style,
But they’re guaranteed to raise a smile

– The Beatles, of course. And what a gorgeous sentiment, what a lovely invention, their imaginary band, led by a Sgt. Pepper, of all things. A pure work of the imagination. Perhaps a bit weary of all things Beatles by then, they invented and inhabited this whole other world, and gave it to us.

But getting back to my previous quote, that chorus is from a song called Derogatory Matrons, and this title, and the main verse, I came up with when I was about 14 and had only just learned of the existence of punk rock and new wave music like, minutes before. Enthralled I was, and in fact, the words “derogatory” and “matrons” had only just entered my vocabulary, and I in fact was not entirely clear what either one meant. But! I liked the way they sounded together, whilst pogoing.  AGES later, odd thing happened, my friend Roger Clark (AKA Little Roger!) asked me to contribute a song to a project he was working on, and I made this track, which didn’t exactly fit the bill for his thing, sooooo, it was mine to mess with aaaand, it reminded me of Derogatory Matrons – the idea and vibe still living in its little song-place in my brain cells that held it for however many decades. So I made the track. It found a happy home on my Sensible Comments album. All very sensible indeed.

So, what IS in a name?

Liking my name, this morning, in a peculiar way. Names, rather. Funny thing about “Eric” – I’ve never disliked the name, nor given it much thought, it’s my given name and I kept it. Had this odd moment this morning of actively liking the name. I like the sound of it, the two-syllabled simplicity. So, right, finishing my sixth decade of life and suddenly realize I like my name. Thanks, mom and dad, for the cool names! Names? Well yes, Roy being my middle name. Named after a buddy of my dad’s. Very rock n’ roll, that name, innit? Not only because Roy Orbison but also the sound of it. You can sort of rock the “Roy,” with a certain twang, or drawl. Dinwiddie, now we’re in the deep water. I love this name, now, but had to retire it for a time in my youth for a few distinct reasons. 1. Misspellings! Of every imaginable sort, routinely, comically. 2. Spelling it out loud for people over the phone, spending precious minutes of my life ‘splaining “No, there’s no L, that’s an I at the end, I am not Din Widdle! I mean I could be, but I am not. 3. I had this nickname, Din, which really started as my initials on guitar repair tickets when I worked at Subway Guitars in the late ’80s. There was another guy there with the initials E.D., so I just wrote Din to disambiguate myself. This took with my workmates and friends, and so Din and Eric Din I became. Only many years later, after my father passed, did I start to regret that a little bit. I don’t know if it bothered him or not, probably not, but losing him was quite a thing, and the surname, as something we share, gained some unexpected meaning for me. Surnames, surnames, I think if I were to do it again I’d be Kretzschmar-Dinwiddie, do the hyphen thing including my mom’s family name. Eric Roy Kretzschmar-Dinwiddie, now that would be fun to spell for people over the phone, wouldn’t it?

Amusements continue. I can’t get back into my FB account because the good gatekeepers of same say they can’t confirm my identity. Isn’t that so 2025? I’ve been on that platform since 2007 you see, as Eric Din, and when I sent my ID to confirm my me, they correctly observed that the name on my ID does not match. I don’t know how much time I care to spend trying to fix that, we’ll see, but I haven’t felt greatly motivated yet. Perhaps in part due to the many horrible aspects of FB and corporate electronic social networks generally, and what they have done to society. I left Twitter the day whatshisname took over, and I wished everyone else would. Now being in FB exile, I guess, my feelings about it are a little complex. I miss some folks there and indeed, some I will likely never again interact with in this life, absent that venue, just because it’s the only place where we were connected. So that’s real, and I don’t love that part. But at the same time, I’m sort of savoring this abscence. Odd as it sounds, FB had become something of a chore. I mean, as a recording artist and for my record label I want to have reach there, right? Well that’s harder than it used to be. Many of my music posts in recent years would fall flat, no response or very little, leaving me to wonder, is this just that people aren’t into my work, OR does it mean FB is not showing my music posts to my friends in their FB feeds? And being an emotional person, I have emotions around all that, and they are not entirely pleasant emotions, and I think, am I getting paid for this unpleasantness? No, they are. The UpTones’ page on FB still had some reach, but in the last few years we played live, we had to buy a “boost” for our gig announcements, whereas earlier everyone who had followed us there would see our posts organically. Waaaay into the weeds on this I am, so I’ll step out. It’s a weedy thing, this dystopian hot mess. And somewhat shocking to me is how much the social networking fracas has influenced my songwriting. Quite a many of my songs over the last ten years or so are directly informed by these conflicts and contradictions.

Michael Valladares really nailed it some years ago, when he said regarding an early social network (Friendster, was it?), “Let me tell you about my me.” As sort of a catch-all for what a social profile is, for a person. My Me. I found this delightfully funny, and it stayed with me even though I don’t remember the exact context of our conversation. Let me tell you about my me.  Well social networks go kablooey eventually it seems, and here I am, back in my faithful WordPress site, saying let me tell you about my me.

Here’s some photos, of me, at Gilman this last Saturday, caterwauling at Peter Montgomery’s b-day bash. It was rad, the whole event.

As for my names, I’m keeping all of them.

Photo creds: Larry Lynch

A Journal Entry Of Sorts

I do the same thing over and over again expecting different results. Some have called this the definition of insanity but I prefer to see it as dedication.

Now then, making records. Berkeley Cat Records has a slogan – a tag line, if you will –

We’re from Berkeley. We are cats. We make records.

And it’s… TRUE!!

By gosh we do this.

I have some webby updatings to do, on this and a few other webbysites.  To bring my archive up-to-date. Been rather prolific, this year, and I’m pleased with my output. Each track is unique and different, so in this regard I guess I lied earlier. I do the same thing, that is, I get up (early, wow, very early these days) and make Peet’s coffee (various blends, current fave is Big Bang, no they don’t pay me to say that, it’s a Berkeley thing), and some days, some mornings, the light bulb over me head says, hey, here’s a track or a song idea! And I go there. Expecting what? Why, Petunia, I just don’t know.

Trying times, trying times, what a cliché that becomes. 2024, what the FUCK?! OK damn, my great friend and confidante, my career counselor and living Buddha Garden rock star beautiful human being Luke Kreinberg, died by suicide earlier in the year. It hardly feels real and if I start in talking about it I’ll write a novel, so let’s call that a headline. Grief sets in long and slow as comprehension of this slowly forms in my dumbfounded and stunned heart and mind.

Politics, another headline, shall we?   Biden, the drama, then Kamala, the campaign! The energy, the enthusiasm, the embrace of good values, decency and the rule of law, the rejection of all that is horrible, and then.. The most staggering debacle. It tests my optimism.

Optimism. I have lived most of my life with an intentional, deliberate optimism. Even in difficult times, in my personal life or career or through difficult events in the world around me I have chosen through and through to be optimistic. Part of it is calculated. I’ve found that pessimism can lead to the expected (bad) results and optimism can seem to help to lead to good outcomes. You get the result you imagine, to some degree. It’s not magic or hocus pocus, I think the current popular word for it is intention, setting your intention.

This year, yeah, it’s been tested a bit, this willful optimism of mine.  And becoming aware of that, becoming conscious of this inner struggle, certainly informed some of my songwriting and creative efforts.

A month after Luke’s passing, I went to see a psychotherapist. Private, expensive, several sessions, somewhat helpful. Smart fellow, wise and doubtlessly expert in his field. Younger than me, by at least ten years. After the 3rd visit I thanked him and canceled. You know, making records costs a bit, too. And I found, that the process involved in telling this gentleman, this professional, my stories and trying to understand myself a little better, is not wholly different from my process in writing and recording my own songs. Things are revealed, things I like and sometimes things that surprise or even disappoint me. In short it helps me work on myself, to hopefully become a better person. Well, funny thing – I even at one point some months ago said I was done making records for a while. Ha! That didn’t fly, so, well, I decided I can afford one or the other – record-making or therapy.

To become a better person. Now that is a worthy goal. And it’s one worth saying out loud at this time in our world, I believe.  Because there seems to be, among our fellow man, an embrace of values which are indecent. And I chose every word in that sentence. Our fellow man. Yes, also in women and in humankind more generally, but in men, I speak of men, men who have lost their sense of honor. Who have somehow been influenced, or brainwashed, if you prefer, to celebrate and reward simply the worst possible traits men can have. That is a mistake, and a dire one, and I doubt any good will come of it.

Meanwhile nature bats last, and she’s at bat. Instead of focusing our considerable human genius on dealing with the climate crisis intelligently, with the sort of organized focus which landed men on the moon, the human race is instead fighting wars over territory, power, religion, oil, water and vengeance, dumping more carbon into the atmosphere than ever before.

So how’s my willful optimism doing? Well, surprisingly ok. Because after all, it is willful.  What am I doing, with my time? Well, continuing to make art, for one thing. NOT making “art” with generative AI (I laugh out loud as I write this), and striving to be the best version I can imagine of myself. And I know, I know without doubt, that my friends and colleagues, and untold millions of good people whom I don’t know personally, are similarly striving. And THAT realization changes my optimism from willful, to easy and natural.

Our capacity for self-invention is considerable. And that’s some good news.

A Week Ago And Only Once

HERE is a scan of the set list I played at Ivy Room last Sunday. Blogging it as a memento, as it was a fun slice of life. Funny detail? I’ve started to use non-cursive print lately, along with my usual BLOCK LETTERS. With a pen, mind you, these ancient instruments.

I’m scheduled to play a set for Peter Montgomery’s 60th birthday party, at Gilman, in January, with a luminous cast of luminaries. Here’s the flier for that, as created by Peter himself:

And good morning

Bah Bah Blog Sheep, Have You Any Green?

When teh Inertnets was a widdle baby, I visited a “colocation” site where companies and individuals could rent space to host their webservers. “Servers” made me think restaurant, but these were “boxes” – that is, computers, some of them not unlike the one eventually ravaged by Angry German Kid. Linux was newish, Windows NT was overlording and Apple squeaked from a distance “We’re not dead!” Startups and investors roamed the valley in search of meat as the words “dot com” caused money to rain from ice sculptures. In the colocation building there were cages, each cage padlocked from the outside, LEDs within blinking furiously, whirring of hard drives and thousands of cooling fans created a soothing yet deafening hum. Oh, this is it, I thought – the whole William Gibson, Philip K. Dick business – souls in these electron-streams, experiencing reality of a sort, invisible except in there, in those caged boxes among each other. What did it mean to me? What was my relationship to this lunacy? I didn’t know yet but I was attracted to it, attracted and repulsed, as to a great fun drug with unpleasant side-effects, and still today I am. The boxes are smaller now and “blade” shaped, racks upon racks filling untold acres of energy-devouring computing power, keeping the light flowing so I can “like” a pic of PKD and his adorable kitty.

Another Truckload Of Animals And Prizes

I recently purchased a little scanner, an Epson ES-50. It’s quite tiny, unlike the giant hulking scanning machines of yore. Remember how they emitted bright white light as the works crawled the page, placed face-down on glass? You’d cover the thing and it would do its mysterious work, whirring and clanking. Now this little tiny machine makes almost no sound, emits no light, and efficiently passes a page through producing.. voila!

I was delighted to find that page recently – I had forgotten I had it. The drawings Jesse Michaels sent us when we recorded our Skankin’ Foolz Unite album. The doggie on upper left won the audition, and landed thusly:

This ^ is also a scan, using said spy-scanner. I fancy it a spy-scanner because it’s like some James Bond shit that Q gave him to scan secret documents but I digress. I have not secret documents, nay, but plenty of pages of handwritten lyrics and assorted photos and drawings from friends and sooooo, I like my new scanner spy thingy.

Speaking of exciting top secrets, Shannon Wheeler is drawing a cover for my EP release of I Changed My Mind. I like my homespun cover art for the single – in fact I purchased said spy-scanner precisely for the purpose of making this. I simply printed out the Berkeley Cat Records logo, wrote on it with a Sharpie, and then scanned it.  Voila indeed.

What ever shall we scan next?  I love a new toy.

So, as evidenced by evidence, my attempts at NOT making records have utterly failed.  I’ll accept this about myself and continue.

A long time ago, a post-UpTones band I had with Ben and Paul and drummer Tom Pope, did a lot of touring on the west coast of these Untidy States.  The band was called HOBO, which mystifies me somewhat, but it made sense at the time.  We had a lot of fun gigging and recording an album and.. well, we were going to call our second album Another Truckload Of Animals And Prizes. I mean, I wanted to, but the idea never took flight, and the band turned into something else and didn’t make a second album and.. Well, now I am going to make Another Truckload of Animals and Prizes. I think the words were lifted from a circus truck we saw on the road somewhere, but googling around I can’t seem to find it. Maybe we made this phrase up?  Anyway, who wouldn’t want another truckload of animals and prizes? I must have it. I must make it. I must and I shall make and have it.

Good morning.

Musing about Songwriting about Deciding and Dancing about Blogging

Made a song. Published said song. Below is a scan of the lyrics as originally scribbled while composing and arranging the track. Once the songwriting was done, I typed the lyrics out in ALL CAPS and printed them out large, so they’d be easy to read.. Taped that to my wall, set up a mic and captured the lead vocal in one pass. It was smooth, efficient; In ways that jumping back onto a plane or bridge may not be, one presumes.

…all of which ends up being:

Barbercontenheimerglobbus

Resharing this from my Substack..

In which..

Ba Ba Ba, Ba Barbarella, Ba Ba Ba, Ba Barbenheimer, Ba Ba Ba, Be Bop a Thing..

Hello! It’s Caturday and there are things to be done. Cats to be played with, guitars to strum. Rivers to jump in, if it can be arranged.

What of the movies? Barbenheimer, or as I prefer, Oppenbarbie. Will I set foot in a movie theater for the first time in lo these many years? I might. I hope it’s not too loud. My last movie theater experience was bad. Too loud, and, lots of commercials! Yes, commercials. You pay the cover, you pay for parking, you buy the popcorn, you’ve paid, right? Captive audience, commercials. No mute button. This plus internets has made me stay home for my movies. But.. Barbarellaheimerbarbenopalypse.. I think it’s on. I may need to experience this moment of popular culture in its undiluted form. The Barbie preview – I pulled it up on Apple TV yesterday, and wow. I think I like. As for Oppenbabyheimerdude, I have read quite a bit about him, and his brothers, and his colleagues and friends and lovers, over the years. A fascinating and complex man to be sure. Epic moral dilemmas, giant world-changing science with huge secret team in the desert, why not? What we need is both films, side-by-side or even overlapping, to save time and maximize popcorn value. I’d sit through commercials for that.

OK, CONTENT! All of this is content. The writers and actors strike brings up so many fascinating issues. AI does its inevitable advance and hoomans try to understand it. An amusing feature to all this is the ads I see on FB and elsewhere – telling me to use AI to write blog posts or songs. I find it darkly funny that people would spend money to buy ads and target me with that message. I can spell out the reason, that will never appeal to me in any way at all: THE MEANING OF LIFE!

The meaning of life. I enjoy writing, creating, recording, and all of these things. I do them because they are fun. I learn things about myself, by doing them. I might entertain some people, or even inspire them, sometimes, by creating and sharing things that start in my imagination. So, no, thank you, dear AI company, I think I’ll not have you doing the fun bits instead of me.

Hey, my second solo album comes out August 1! This is the title track, sort of, and it may address some of these hot topics. Be well, stay cool and hydrated, <3 E

Too Many Web Domains Syndrome

Must simplify. Gonna keep this web domain cos it’s my me. I love Berkeley Cat Records cos it’s my label and the first great brand name I’ve had since The Uptones. I am letting my Peace and Love and Rock and Roll domain remain as-is from now on, an artifact. It was a good journey.

Updating the Uptones site lately has been fun. And here I am at my own domain, typing a little blurb as I think of how to tackle some more updates today. We have things. Records, releasing. Both virtual and actual. I like it.

Here is a bunnyrabbit.