Category: Deck Chairs

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.

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

Twaaap

Yesterday I ranted, that I did not want any more social networks. It was a lie. I would be delighted if a better platform emerged, that was not driven by advertising and raw capitalism, but rather by our human desire to connect, and stay in touch.  I’ve joined a few attempts at this, and honestly, I can’t even remember the names of them.  Because nothing happened there.  My posts were ignored, much as they were on Twitter.  I don’t pretend to have anything particularly brilliant to say, but at least in FB, I experience some quality interaction.  Many of my real friends are there, amongst my FB friends.  Some I don’t really know well, but all I find interesting.  I’ve curated my friends list fairly carefully, since 2007.  I pass on friend requests that seem dubious, and block the occasional trumpy.  I have no time for them.  If there were some way to export my friends list from here and import them into a new platform that is less ruthless and more wise, I would do it.  Maybe someone can write an app for that ?
Doesn’t seem likely.
Anyway, I’m still here.  All of this is temporary.  But of all the social networks I have tried, FB is the most significant, for me.  Because so many of my peers are there. As Twitter collapses, and the world turns, I wonder where we will gather in the digital space, in another 10 years.

Ranty McRantface Walks In The Cemetery, Again

Today’s delightful morning read was How America Lost Its Mind. Posting without comment. I have nothing to add as yet. On to other subjects, and possible rant, as coffee sets in.

My solo recordings are now in Pandora, so you can make an Eric Din channel and wowza it’ll take you to all sortsa related musics magically selected from their vast music genome. I listened for a bit and one thing that popped up was Critical Mass, with my good friend Michael Valladares! Approval. You can hear my tracks on-demand if you have a premium account there, or just jump on the “radio” train and see where it takes you. Here’s a link.

Walked in the cemetery again, this time with a friend. We enjoyed reading headstones aloud, especially the older ones. One feature we noticed is when married couples share the same headstone, it’s almost always the husband’s name first. Often it’s in larger type than the “loving wife”‘s name. Patriarchy even in death. I wondered aloud what arguments and discussions did or didn’t take place, when the bereaved families were having those stones designed and carved.

I especially love the old, retired names. No one calls their child Abernathy or Cornelius anymore, but perhaps they should. Josephine and Winnifred top my list. Sebastian, already. I might have a kid, just so I can have a Sebastian.

Reality, what a thing. Facts. Truth. A square is a square, a circle is a circle. That, and that the earth is round, and that child slave-colonies do not exist secretly on Mars, these little facts have always been part of the steady foundation of reason and science that we wake up and go to sleep in. Gravity in its reliability is a law, not a theory, and it wont keep you on the ground less, if someone tweets that it is fake.

Everything is upside down. It can’t last, and thank god (or whatever you may like to thank) that facts are permanent and indelible whether they are known or not, and that lies remain lies no matter how often they are repeated by how ever many raving madmen.

Will the Constitution of the United States serve its function, now that the test case it was designed for is upon us? Will the men and women who populate the checks and balances remove the tumor? Either way, vulgarity and baseness have taken on a legitimacy for some, that I didn’t expect to see, really, in this lifetime. In fact it’s odd, that some “conservatives” have become so foul-mouthed and uncouth, when in my youth, I remember the older conservative types generally frowned upon using foul language and they’d tell their kids to “wash your mouth out with soap” if they said naughty words. I wish they’d be around to hear the Mooch guy, whatever his name was, shortest white house career ever. Now that was entertaining.

That’s when I realized this is not a government at all. Our federal government is set to “Away.” It’s a “reality TV” show driven by ratings and advertising revenue, with a cast of cynical and insane clowns who hate each other, wielding immense power while staggering in random and unpredictable ways like drunk children fighting over a flame-thrower.

A zombie apocalypse would be benign by comparison. Will the Union survive this? We’ve survived many challenges. This is a new one. All our awful presidents plus the good ones all had this thing in common: A desire to serve for the good of the nation, as they perceived it. I didn’t agree with many of them, but they clearly felt what they did was not exclusively in their own self-interest, but also for a greater good of some kind, for at least some cross-section of the public, if not for everyone. Anyway that’s gone, for now. What ever will happen next?

Popcorn sales are brisk.

Everything Is Wrong (Except The Things That Are Not)

The number of Wrong things is mounting. Each horror makes the others seem trivial by comparison. It’s Naomi Klein’s “Shock Doctrine” on gasoline. Each day we go to sleep and things have reached a new level of absurdity. Then in the morning, we wake up and things are twice as absurd again. We live in an article from The Onion and satire has lost its outline.

So we navigate our days, looking after ourselves and our communities the best we can. Meanwhile the Democratic Party has come up with a slogan so tepid it makes skim milk look like your favorite beer. Get another air-sickness bag. Ready? Here it is:

“A Better Deal: Better Jobs, Better Wages, Better Future.”

They spent money and did focus groups to come up with that. Shut up. Look, the orange buffoon has a slogan. It’s meaningless and stupid but it’s a slogan, and a lot of people relate to it and it helped him only lose the popular vote by about 3 million. Slogans can help. The Democratic Party needs some help. A good slogan would help. This one is shite. I am sad.

What else, lead singers committing suicide. Chester Bennington, on his friend Chris Cornell’s birthday, in the same way, are you kidding me? Send in the zombies already, this can’t be real. These guys are so loved and so successful and so talented, what would make them miserable enough to do that? I do grieve for them and pre-dismiss any snarks about them. Clearly they had their reasons. Clearly they meant business. More sadness.

The unpresident wants to pardon himself. That’s great, I appreciate his work as a comedian. Firing everyone and everyone lawyering up against each other and doing exactly nothing good for anyone. It makes me think, for some reason, of the vacuum-beast in Yellow Submarine, which sucks up everything and everyone around itself until everything is gone and he stands there alone. Don’t go near that thing.

Small good things. One small good thing at a time. We can do these things and they have meaning and they help. Yesterday morning I saw a woman’s car stalled on a freeway off-ramp and a man was preparing to help push her car to safety. I pulled over and got out and helped. Lo and behold the guy was an old friend of mine, Steve Lew, fellow musician and fact-enthusiast. We chatted as the nice woman waited for a tow, we caught up and went on our merry ways. It felt nice. Steve sent me a young guitar student earlier this year. I recently taught her to play Ziggy Stardust. This made her very happy. This made me happy. The Gods smiled and were happy. Now I am happy. Good morning.

Brexit With Strawberries and Milk

From what I can tell (and that isn’t much) from the various articles and screeds about “Brexit” (which sounds like crunchy breakfast cereal, I want some), it’s either a medium-sized economic disaster, or The Beginning Of The End Of Civilization. Oh, and Happy Freedom Patriotic Flag-Wave Rah-Rah Populist Nationalist Liberty! – to some. Many pints and ridiculous pub fights scheduled for tonight, throughout the UK and beyond. Enjoy. The “Leave” vote (I love that language, don’t you? I mean where are they going? Gonna put an outboard motor on England and sail it to Freedom-Land-Place?) the Leave vote, I think, was based on emotions rather than thoughts. And I get it. Things are bad. “I vote for DIFFERENT!” is a natural reaction. It might make things infinitely worse, but at least, at least, things will be different. Good luck. Congratulations. I wish you success and happiness.

“Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

-Hunter S. Thompson