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,
