Category: Blog

This blog contains music, cats, and things of less importance.

Exile On FB Street

Peculiar end to my Facebook saga:  After trying unsuccessfully to quit, numerous times over the years since 2007, I was unceremoniously banished on December 24, 2024. They won’t tell me why other than that they can’t confirm my identity. Well, that’s a chuckle, because, I can’t, really, either!  Who am I?  OK, well I mostly know. Eric Din. Eric Roy Dinwiddie. Same same.

But FB. I could go further with the effort to get back in, but nah. I wasted some time there, as one does. It’s a time-wasting engine, designed to suck your energy oh and yes they are ruining society in myriad ways. Bye bye. So the 1500 or so people who I was friends with there, they can still find me if they want to, and anyway FB wasn’t showing most of them my posts anymore, which was frustrating.  If I shared a cat photo it would get all sorts of likes and loves and awwws, but post a new song and like, two, three people respond. I get it, I prefer cats too. But how much is indifference from my pals, and how much is FB simply not showing the Bandcamp or other external links to them?  No way to know, and weeds grow in the mind.

I have less weeds in the absence of all that.

Twitter, I quit that venue the day whatshisbutt took over and called it “X,” I mean, come on, the worst rebrand since New Coke, and as much a failure.  Everyone should quit but they won’t cos I don’t know why.  I guess the more followers one has there, the harder to leave, and I get that.

So now this blog is a tree falling in the woods.  I wonder if anyone sees it.  I could look at the stats but I don’t care that much.  I’ve become indifferent to indifference.  I feel at peace with myself and my work and my art and my cats and the earth.

Last year saw some monumental disappointments, near and far from me.  My longtime friend and more recent career coach died by his own hand, a little more than one year ago, and that’s still very hard for me to even comprehend.  His choice, he rests in peace, no judgement here, but I do wish he had chosen to stay.  Then the Nov. 5 debacle to end all debacles.  And right now not one but two of my dear old friends are dealing with cancer, and I pray for their victories and health.

What does it all add up to here for me on this Thursday morning with a little welcome rain approaching this weekend?  Gratitude.  For this moment and all the moments.  For all the moments with each of the aforementioned friends, which I remember so vividly.  I have in this life tried to spend my time with people who savor life and music and art and tend to treat themselves and others with love and respect.  And the mind in its vastness can hold so many memories and some in startling detail.

60, I’ll be 60 soon.  With some amount of surprise, I now feel that’s an accomplishment in itself.  I like the number, I like the age, so much more than I had earlier expected to, somehow.  I keep my memories with me, they are wealth.  Even the hard ones, all gifts.  And in some contrast to the state of the world, my own life has been full of luck and good work and good play and wonder and joy over these recent years.  We never know when something will go awry and I am grateful for every good moment.

This song, which went live in the streaming worldly world today, was a nice step in my journey, dealing with some of the above.

Meanwhile, in Dystopilandia,

half of all internet traffic is now bots. Glory be, we’ve lost the meaning of life. The meaning of life being closely tied to being alive, and this being a darkly comical hellscape of things that are not alive, poking at us. Some are feeding the ravenous maw of AI “learning” monstrosities and others are more directly criminal, trying to hack your accounts for any number of nefarious plots. Nostalgically I recall the web “crawlers” of old, indexing the “web logs” and websites, so we could find an interesting read quickly without wading through a dumpster fire of advertisements and cookie agreements, and how cool the Internet was or seemed to be before greed and ugliness swamped all.

Meaning of life, meaning of life.

I make a record, I write a post, I record a podcats (sic) I do these things with my hands and voice and thoughts and tools that yes, include computer technology throughout, but I have no desire to have the tools overtake the joyful tasks and make me merely an observer of them. I don’t want this for our kids, either, I worry for them and I am glad to have lived before this. I don’t even like the little prompts on my text app – “Can I call you later?” “In a meeting,” or whatever. No, you see because I choose my own words, I choose my words because I am alive and have the human gift of language.

Creepiness abounds.  LinkedIn, which I like for some things, is all heavy into AI every which way now, it seems. I go to make a post – I usually just re-share my mewsletter (sic) and the first thing I see is a “Rewrite with AI” prompt.  They also send emails telling me how many “impressions” my posts there have gotten in a week and how many times my profile has been found in “searches” there. These notices are automated of course and if I upgrade to Premium I can see who these mysterious searchers are, and hey, I don’t mind a hustle, everyone on LinkedIn is hustling one way or another and the platform needs to make money like anyone else so fine fine. I’m actually going to take a LinkedIn Learning course about AI that seems geared to understanding and adapting to the reality of it and not simply “leveraging” it, for the love of yawn. I want to know more about this because it’s not going away and I honestly fear it may drive us all mad.

Anyway I don’t want to have a machine talk or write for me, and that won’t change. Like the New Orleans chef in Apocalypse Now saying “I don’t want it! I don’t want it!” and ripping off his shirt, I do not want it. I do not want it, Sam I Am. Not over here or over there, or with a tiger or with a bear.

I will do my own bad writing. I will do my own good writing. Sometimes I may even write something great and feel good about it. Again, the meaning of life. These kinds of things give our lives meaning. And this I want.

The mad rush to AI-everything and “mine” stupid bitcoins is speeding the heating of the planet, everything is being deregulated by dangerous maniacs, and people are thrilled to be able to “make” a song or movie or novel or essay or resume without doing much but “prompt” an AI-chatterboxthingy.

I don’t want it.
Hi tiger.  Bye tiger.

Caturday Log, Supplemental

I improvise, when cooking or preparing food, much as I improvise while creating music. At this moment, I am eating a toasted garlic-sourdough slice adorned with my own riff on the basic tuna salad. Tuna, mayo, a smooth German mustard, chopped onion, sweet pickle relish, some chopped avocado, chopped tomato, and dashes of salt and coarsely ground black pepper.

Delicious Caturday fare, and of course, the actual cats take an immediate interest. Not eager to give them too much tuna (the good veterinarian advises the mercury levels can cause problems), but not wishing to exclude them from this activity (and run the risk of their ire), I separate a chunk of the fish before mixing with other ingredients, and provide it to the felines in their proper eating area thereby satisfying them just long enough for me to have time to complete the hooman-food preparation unmolested.

In another life I am a chef. In this life, I also cook music. Of my recent outings, I am particularly fond of some instrumentals. Being a wordy lad, it’s been satisfying for me to just make some enjoyable music rabbit holes for a change of pace. In reverse chronological order, these tracks I created entirely at home.

One might argue that the latter two are not strictly instrumental, for they involve a few words, more spoken than sung. These I find loosely in the tradition of The Skatalites‘ treatment of Guns Of Navarone, where the title is the lyric, and it’s said a few times and the rest is carried by the band.

In the WORDY department, one of my wordiest, the epic Push the Better Button has a new remastered single out on Berkeley Cat Records, and I’m frankly a little giddy about it. See, unlike the above 3, Better Button took a lot of time and effort to create. Not a quickie tuna-salad on a Caturday, nay, it involved weeks and multiple revisions and wranglings to create an actual functioning all-purpose Better button.

The Button became track 1 on my 1st solo album STREET PARTY, and yes, I was pleased with the outcome, but by that point I was also exhausted by it. Not in a terrible way, though – I learned a LOT about my own processes, both technically and emotionally, working on that song, and collaborating on it long-distance with some of my UpTones musical brethren.

That was in 2020, and here about 5 years later, I’m releasing a smashing remaster of it, by audio masterblaster Leo Frappier. It’s very gratifying for me to hear this track with fresh ears, I do love this remaster, and I hope you might press the button yourselves, in the name of bettering.

And now, cats and hoomans fed, despatches sent, I’m going to practice some tunes on the acoustic guitar, for to sing next Sunday at Ivy Room opening for Psycotic Pineapple.

What else, after that, then? Oh, I suppose I’ll make something up.

-Eric Din

Nerding Forth About Time Signatures, Time Machines, AI, and The Future

A few weeks ago I experimented with a Ska pattern in 7/4 time. It worked spectacularly and I loved the result, so completed and published it as Inside the All Night Ska Disco at Area 51.

Just yesterday I started messing with a ska-adjacent pattern in 6/8 meter, and it got very tropically islandy shangri-lala delighty, so I am eagerly following through with that.

By humorous coincidence, yesterday I came across a ridiculous, probably AI-written, “summary” of Ska music, in the increasingly rotten Inter-mess. In this garbled splutage, it was stated that Ska music is in 4/4 time. Fie, unimaginative robot!  Ska music is usually in 4/4 time, get it right. It IS in 4/4 until someone does otherwise, and I am sure plenty of earlier examples do exist before mine.

“The future is unwritten,” Joe Strummer reminded. Good thing to note, generally, and why especially now, I would think.

So far my attempts at creating a magic sci-fi time machine to put every eligible voter back to Nov. 4 2024 for a make-up exam have failed. We certainly shouted it from the rooftops last year, said loudly and clearly what will happen if that election goes south. It. Is. Now. Exactly. As. Predicted. Whoopsiebears, now they mad. Wiser persons than I may understand it.

I did manage to fashion a 1983 time-capsule, that was fun. Orwell said there might be trouble, and, well.

Good morning!  I’m sipping a nice Peet’s French Roast, brewed in an old-School drip coffee maker from the before time. We’ve probably had this trusty machine since the ’90s, ever faithfully delivering its oh so important yield at the start of each day. Obsolete it is not.

Driving a Chevy Bolt, and GLAD I never got a Tesla. Horrified, that what has been one of the leading EV-makers is now so irrevocably tainted.  It’s not fun times for Tesla owners, as drama ensues, and presumably used models are not fetching “Blue Book” as the brand plummets straight to hell.

What next, we wonder?  I dunno, Joe, the Future is full of Uncertain Tea. But as you say, unwritten.

I’ll keep recording new original songs whenever the inspiration strikes me, and post them here or here per my whim. Whims are good for artistic direction, I find. These tunes are also in the big ol’ streaming world, including now YouTube, so, find ’em anywhere – Pandora, Apple Music, DEEZER, Spotify..  As the pipelines get flooded and polluted by AI-generated content, I’ll be among the artists creating our own material. For what it’s worth, and I don’t know what it’s worth, but it feels right. As long as it feels right, I will do it. One small part of the vast human discussion. The cats seem to enjoy it.

In Defense of In Defense of In Defense of Ska

And oh what fun we had

It’s been a few years since the first edition of Aaron Carnes’ unique and amorous history of Ska music and culture landed in the book-o-sphere. I recently ordered and received a copy of the expanded 2nd edition and yet I haven’t found the time yet to read it, what with work and creative endeavors and the apocalypse and things. SO! Delighted am I to learn that Aaron himself sat down and READ ALOUD the entire thing over several days of recording sessions to create, an audio-book. Now that’s my speed. We can now hear these stories as told by the author directly, and I applaud this fervently.

I recently listened again to the UpTones episode of the In Defense of Ska PodCast in which they interviewed myself and Paul Jackson. Apart from a few crunchy bits (there are always a few crunchy bits), it turns out to be my personal favorite, of the audio interviews we have done. In part because I learned some things, realized some things that I hadn’t really considered before, which become much more plain, in hindsight.

One rather humorous piece – neither Paul nor I, nor any of our bandmates, to my knowledge, were very aware of the up and down trends in ska’s popularity. We just always loved ska, it was never in question. But in 2002 when the UpTones played our first show in over twelve years, it turns out, I learned MUCH later thru Aaron’s work, we couldn’t have picked a less trend-observant moment to re-emerge!

Didn’t care then, don’t care now, in terms of our choice, it’s fitting, really, yet I do find it delightful. Puts some context to things. Why, for example, was this kid in the front row yelling, “YOU’RE SAVING SKA!!” at us? Flattered though I was, I wasn’t aware that ska needed any saving, and besides, what a responsibility! We carried on, played shows all the way through to 2018, with, again, some lineup changes along the way per our normal, finally winding down after the Albany, CA funfest I mentioned in a recent post here.

OH! And in that post, I was mistaken, there IS a poster for that Albany show, silly me, and I have it on my wall here as well. Another Paul original, and here is a photo of same:

While I abstain from predicting the future, that was the last UpTones show to date, and the obstacles to ever create another one seem insurmountable from here. So it goes, as Mr. Vonnegut would say. In an odd bit of prescience, the East Bay Express article by the same said Aaron Carnes before the above gig, quotes me as saying, “The Uptones have always been an outlet, letting some steam off and turning some suffering into joy and getting moving instead of getting immobilized by the situation,” Din said. “The way I look at it now is any show could be our last one. Or it could be the beginning of another round of shows. I tend to accept whatever it is.”

And accept it I do. Maybe the kid who yelled “you’re saving ska” is leading their own group, now! I rather hope so. Aaron is moving on from this epic project, after two editions and an audiobook, and dozens of podcast interviews with many of the players and characters involved over decades of ska’s unique and powerful history. He has defended ska, and defended it well, and as a fan and participant in this wild story, I tip my hat. Bon voyage on your next literary adventures, Mr. Carnes, and thank you.

Oh one more fun bit – my song Donkeyfish, now track 1 on my Poppin’ the Ska solo-ish album, is directly inspired by memories of all of the above.

All best,

Eric Dinwiddie
Ska fan

Originally posted at https://berkeleycatrecords.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-in-defense-of-in-defense

Musing of Days of Yore

In the Before Time (2018!), the UpTones played what would turn out to be our second-to-last show. ‘Twas at Ashkenaz in Berkeley, a place with a great wooden dance floor, wonderful folks, and infinite memories. I have the show poster on my wall, as I love this unusual one.

UpTones Ashkenaz flier by Paul Albert Jackson

Paul Albert Jackson created the artwork specifically for this Earth Day event, and I love the community vibe of it, and the little mini green UpTones band in the middle.

The group reassembled once more after this, for an outdoor show in Albany, CA, adjacent to Berkeley, and I don’t think there was a poster for that. There was a great crowd and it was one of the few times when the front rows were mostly very (very!) young kids. It was a family affair in the park, hence the youthful youths, dancing and playing or watching in rapt fascination. It reminded me, while we played, of how live music struck me when I was very young. A revelation, then, a great world opening, which I wanted to be in.

Three key events –

Pete Seeger when I must have been 3 years old maybe. Not sure where that was, but it had to be somewhere in the East Bay. Moms’s and pops’s brought their kids’s to see the already legendary folk singer, and I got seated cross-legged on the floor right up in front. Memories loose, but I remember thinking he was unusually tall, gazing up at the dude, with his acoustic guitar and harmonica, leading the audience in a singalong of This Land Is Your Land – now that I remember. This would be about 1968.

The Cadillac Kids when I was in 5th grade, outdoors at the Cragmont School playground of all places. I didn’t attend that school, but someone had the great idea to drive me and a few other students to this concert in the Berkeley Hills, from Longfellow School in West Berkeley.  That was the first time I heard Johnny B. Goode. They played Rock Around The Clock and other ’50s rock n’ roll and I was over the moon. Soon after, I was learning to play those songs on guitar, with help from my first teacher, Lee Waterman.

Finally, in about 1978, at a roadhouse in Elk, California, near Mendocino, right on the coast, this rock band I will never remember the name of, changed my life forever. I was with my dad, visiting some family friends up there, and we went to the only event in that very small town that night. Rock. And. Roll happened. Crowd-pleasing hard rock of the mid-’70s long-hair variety. I don’t remember the songs, so maybe they were originals, I just remember the vibe in that packed room, and the band’s powerful presence onstage. I wanted their gig. In my mind, being in a band went from being a fun little idea to an absolutely compelling ambition.

The following years saw me recruiting friends to form a band, bonding with some now lifelong friends like Tom Pope and others, naming our groups and playing parties when we could, and then when I was 15 I met Charles Stella and Erik Rader aaaand, the rest of the original UpTones including my childhood friend Greg Blanche, and it was, as they say, on.

Audio Journal Of A Music Curator

In 2017, I started working as a contractor for Pandora Radio in Oakland. Pandora was creating their on-demand streaming service, integrating it with their classic radio service, and I joined a team optimizing music metadata for this launch. I took to it right away, loved the work and the people there, continued on, and SXM eventually hired me full-time.

After a year or so, I started adding little by little to what is now a 230+ song playlist. Most are songs I’ve come across while doing my work as a music metadata specialist and catalog curator here.  Sometimes a track really stands out to me in some way, and I add it to this personal playlist,
Din’s Pandora Picks.

In the last few weeks, I’ve been listening back to it anew, and frankly I’m blown away by the quality of so much of it. It’s an extremely eclectic, genre- and era-agnostic listen, with the only common thread being that this is all stuff that rocks me in some way.

It happened that The Specials, on my shortest short list of favorite bands, released their ENCORE album around that time.  Track 1 is their reprise of The Lunatics Have Taken Over The Asylum, which I also had the pleasure of seeing them play live at the Fox Oakland on their final tour, just down the street from the Pandora office.

No One Sleeps When I’m Awake by Canada’s The Sounds is a stunning rocker with a unique mood, and brilliant vocals and instrumental work. I found myself playing it on repeat, soaking up every detail, in the car, and on my earbuds and home speeks.

The set runs roughly chronologically from there.  Songs I found recently are at the end, with my earlier discoveries nearer the beginning. A great majority of the selections are in the proverbial “long tail.” Some started there and then got much more popular, and a few are old favorites I arbitrarily added along the way cos they compelled me!

At this point, I’m pleased about the whole playlist and quite delighted to share it publicly. Tooooo many favorites to call out, but that’s why it’s a PLAYlist! And you may play it.

Hop on in, tune in, turn up, rock out. I’ll continue to add to this as time goes on, whenever the inspiration strikes.

Self Care, Care Self, Caturday Musings Selfie

A friend of mine posted on Bluesky yesterday, “my self-care skills aren’t up to this.” This summarized concisely and eloquently what I think many of us are wrestling with presently.

I seem to renew my commitment to taking good care of myself often, with varying results. Today it means waking up early and reading and writing a bit as the cats do their pre-dawn romp, and preparing to learn to play Pickleball. Indeed Pickleball. A fast-growing social sport easier to learn than tennis, and, social.

Reading and writing and listening a bit. The amazing wealth of good material at our fingertips, should we care to curate the experience actively, that Internet of yore, still exists to a degree. In the late 1990s I was thrilled by the possibility that somehow there wouldn’t be a “mainstream” anymore, in terms of culture and music, or just about anything.

I was a huge fan of Google, when they first popped up. For me, their original simple site was ideal, and really it was the first Search Engine (remember those fancy words?) that actually worked for me. Their web-crawling text searching gizmo delivered desired results consistently, and they pretty much blew the competition in that space away, pretty quickly.  I remember finding websites and then later blogs, while these were new emerging forms of communication and creativity, and immensely enjoying the sort of decentralization of it all.

As a musician and band guy, the whole world changed when I was introduced to the MP3 file, I think in ’97. Boom, level playing field for access and distribution, you can send a song to a friend or share it out as widely as you please, and I was all-in, let’s go.  The UpTones had in 1995 released a live CD from a 1989 performance, and around 1999 we made MP3s of a couple of the tracks,  started uptones.com and shared ’em up.

At the time I was part of a startup company called MP3 4U, with Matthew Kaufman and some fellow travelers who believed great things were afoot, a renaissance brewing for both music fans and music creators. And during that time, I watched the stats closely, from our website activities – who was listening, where and for how long, which songs etc. – with these reports I generated from downloaded server logs. It was a great nerdy time, and I loved seeing this view of things.

One UpTones live track, Get Outta My Way, not surprisingly a sort of signature song for the band, started getting an absurd amount of downloads, starting in the Bay Area and then far beyond. I remember the rush I got seeing downloads from Tokyo one morning, it was exciting, we were there, without being there, our music was distributed and available, and we did it ourselves. It was free, of course, we made a loud point of that, buy the CD if you want to, but have an MP3, on us, thanks for listening, right? So eventually that MP3 had a million downloads, and we toasted the occasion at Brennan’s, the storied hofbrau in West Berkeley near our office at the time.

Sipping said beers, the question arose, why not an UpTones show? We hadn’t played one in twelve years by then, and we’re getting emails from kids who have the live CD or MP3s saying do a show already. So we did. Put together a crew with as many original members as poss (6, I think it was!), auditioned some horn players and in walks Jeanne Geiger fresh from her Hayward State music degree and a new chapter of UpTones began. We played at iMusicast. That was a great all-ages venue, silly name and all, and we did maybe five gigs there in the early to mid 2000s. It was a case of one thing leading to another, and I don’t think any of that would have happened if Beserkley hadn’t released that one live album, and the subsequent MP3 adventures.

Things have funneled in the strangest way, now. It seems social media sites with all their promise have really rotted, most acutely Twitter, of course, my god, how hideous that pile. Its dumb new name, its Nazi twit, ugly, ugly ugly. FB which was my jam since 2007, started with a lot of fun and joy and sharing music posts and political fundraisers and random thoughts, oh and kitty pictures. Tons of ’em. But, as things went, the joy eroded from my experience there, slowly over time, to the point where it had become just a habit. Even the pages I maintained there, for Berkeley Cat Records and for the UpTones, lost relevance as FB required payment for “boosting” posts just to have them visible in the feeds of people who had actively chosen to follow said pages. Bait and switch, standard procedure, I guess, but I’m out.

So what do I do now? Well, I blog here, and maintain these little outposts on the Interwebs, sort of like the olden days. I make every effort not to purchase anything via Amazon (100% successful of late). I am having a little bit of engagement on the aforementioned Bluesky, hoping it continues to grow in healthy ways. Healthy. Health. Self-care. Really just saying aloud I need to triple down on that, focus, remind myself, not let this encroaching dark age in but rather simply be aware of it as I live my own renaissance.  Aware of it enough to know I don’t have my head in the sand, but not following the “dailies” – to use a moviemaking analogy. I know them, I voted to prevent this and I know what it is.

“Corruption is just Tuesday, now” I said, in this bit of wordplay, and look, the head in the sand thing!

That was a one-off, and looking at the date.. Wow, January 29, 2024. One year ago. How much has happened in that packed year.

To quote my departed great friend Luke,

All love, soon forward,

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.