notes from the kelp

…click to listen:

…about the music

Found, even if lost.

I grew up in Manhattan, and thanks to being plain dumb lucky enough to be born to parents who loved art, I spent more time than most kids you’ve met absorbing the contents of some of the world’s greatest museums. I lived walking distance from most of them, and practically lived in them: The Metropolitan. The Guggenheim. The Museum of Modern Art. The Frick. The Whitney. I had to take the subway down to the then-just burgeoning SoHo district and its mind-bendingly alternative galleries, and I grabbed the crosstown bus to my two Westside favorites, the Museum of Natural History, and the Hayden Planetarium. I’m certain that my deep interest in amateur astronomy stems from all those afternoons I spent enraptured, staring up at the ceiling with its swirling display of little lights that showed me something I never once saw as a city kid: the night sky.

As an art-immersed adult, I still find that my favorite installations come not from the intention and brilliance of a human, but from the random, insouciant forces of nature. If I weren’t a musician, in addition to my fantasy-career of being a marine biologist, I think I’d love to be an artist photographer, out in the elements every day, capturing the stuff that the Universe provides effortlessly, and that humans, no matter how gifted, can only hope to mimic. I’ve been fortunate to experience so, so, so many Things Put in Specific Places (aka, “art”) on the formal, polished floors of Designated Observation Sites (aka, “museums”). And still, always, it’s the serendipity of an unschooled, un-hip, unselfconscious power greater than me or even the coolest person I know, that gets my attention and my heart.

Someday, when I’m not so busy scribbling all these musical notes, I’ll learn what to actually do with a lens in front of my nose. For now, I’m shamelessly happy to offer several years’ worth of snapshots on this little, watery blog, because they serve to share with you all the art that I find compelling in my daily life. And hey, like a dog dancing on its hind legs, no one expects me to do this well, and so the fact that I do it at all becomes tolerable, and maybe even amusing. Well, at least, I’m keeping myself amused!

…click to listen:

…about the music

From the depth.

And perhaps I too shall sleep
spent
happily exhausted from life
my body
splayed atop rocks and memories
of where saltwater ran
and tides crawled
a sprig of kelp
glombed
to my thigh like an eager lover
and you to my psyche
imprinted
washed
ashore by the push of the unseen
restful
and at peace.

…click to listen:

…about the music

Music from another planet.

This is actually an x-rated photo and should be immediately censored.
We are looking at this moon jelly’s gonads.
And they are oh, so beautiful!

Now, comment-prone readers: behave yourselves.

…click to listen:

…about the music

Proud?

Sometimes the subject in one’s lens is far more wonderful than the technical abilities of the fool behind it, and my posting today is a fine example. If ya want slightly better bald eagle shots, try this earlier entry. Regardless, I offer these pics, taken in a rare moment of ingenuity as I precariously held my camera tight up against the eyepiece of my telescope, only because they made me laugh. To wit: yesterday this island enjoyed, and I do mean enjoyed, the first rain we’ve had in well over a month. Contrary to popular myth, it actually does not rain cats and dogs here, nor even mice and gerbils (shhh! don’t tell anyone!). In fact, no mammals fall from the sky in the San Juans, period (unless you are these folks, who miraculously survived their harrowing experience in the woods, which occurred very close to where I’m typing this).

So when an unexpected mid-summer shower comes along, the dry grasses and the even drier people get a blast of invigorating negative ions that just feels great against the warmish air. Well, great to us. I’m not convinced this fellow shared our glee:

To go from being the nation’s most distinguished and imposing icon, to, well… this kind of indignant embarrassment… sigh… well, we all have bad hair days, don’t we?

…click to listen:

…about the music

Jam for toes.

…but actually, one size fits all.
Greetings from this evening, on the Salish Sea.

…click to listen:

…about the music

Suite, for something extraordinarily sweet.

Greetings from your hostess de la kelp, the Princess of Algae herself.
As my toes (see prior post’s video below) and I have mentioned only in passing until now, Her Highness of the Low and Other Notes, who might have been a marine biologist had she not has sunk into the happy muck of a musical life, has finally found the perfect throne. Not just near the sea, but ON it.

(Yep, that’s me above, with a Washington State Ferry emerging from my neck).

No longer able to contain my musical chaos in the small den right off the kitchen of the lovely little home I own, this spring I rented an additional home on the island to house my studio, and give all those notes in my head more space. “More space” is a bit of an understatement, since the place is on hundreds of feet of waterfront, with 30 gorgeous acres behind it. Remember, folks: I grew up in a modest sized apartment in Manhattan that didn’t even have a balcony.

The house, built almost as long ago as I was, sits directly on the tide pools. Ebb tide means exploring and communing with the sea critters. Flood tide means living on a boat, as I did in Santa Barbara just a few years ago: the water rushes in under the deck. I have found heaven, and it is right here and smells like kelp.

The expanse in front of me in all directions correlates well to expansive, multi-directional thinking. And, to daydreaming, imagining, conjuring, laughing and many other happy gerunds. In fact, it’s so dynamic and distractingly awesomely incredibly unbelievably strikingly heart-wrenchingly beautiful here (there go those happy adverbs), it’s amazing that I get any work done at all. Otters, seals, deer, raccoons, bald eagles, oyster-catchers and the occasional Orca whales… ferries, sailboats, container ships, yachts, dinghies… currents and rip tides and wind and waves and an inescapable sense of not only being on a planet, but on the apparent edge of it, all pull at my attention. I pick up my camera or video about as often as I pick up my composing score pad, wanting to somehow capture this fascinating bliss. Looking out from Sidney, British Columbia, across many Canadian Southern Gulf islands, to the U.S. San Juan Islands, there’s always something going on. Always.

One word is worth a thousand pictures:
Outrageously stunning.
What? That’s two words?
Well that explains why I just write the notes and don’t play ’em, since I obviously can’t count.

Ok, so here you go: a few pictures I took today, in sequence from my deck, worth thousands of words that fail to adequately describe anything. Frankly, the photos fail, too, because you can’t get the 200 degree sweep nor the sweet smell of the saltwater nor the wonderful sound of the birds and the waves nor the sound of the lucky person with the house key going “Oh. My. Gawd.” But these’ll tide you over, for now.

To the west:

Looking at Canada:

To the north:

To the north-northeast:

And since you can’t see Canada’s Coast Range very well in the tiny photo above, here it is from the same place on the deck, closer:

To the east:

Which look like this when the sun hits it at the end of the day:

And the end of the day looks like this. Ahhhh….

And where inspiration is sometimes found.

Okay, I admit it: I had a lot of open time this week to accomplish a gazillion things on my apparently-never-ending-until-I’m-pushing-up-daisies to-do list.
And far too few of them have been accomplished thus far. Except, perhaps, something rather important: sanity. Calm. Peace. Exhaling.
I think I need those things, in order to do any of the others halfway decently.

If you use slightly less than three minutes of your life to watch this very amateur video I spontaneously shot this evening from the deck of my studio when I sat outside to stop working and just exist aimlessly for a moment, you, too, may find a little inspiration for whatever’s on your to-do list.
Or at least you’ll exhale, even if you get absolutely nothing done.

Don’t get excited: absolutely nothing astonishing happens in this clip.
Unless you are constantly astonished that you stand on a rock that is constantly moving. I am.
One person’s slow, dull footage is another’s action-adventure movie. Mine!

…click to listen:

…about the music

A fine collaboration over the net.

As I bumble happily along in my career, one of the things I seem to have become a little bit known for is my web presence. Click and ye shall find me. Between my professional dot-org existence (more about me than anyone could possibly ever wish to know; I apologize in advance), this pixelsonic bloglet you’re currently viewing, MyFace, SpaceBook, LinkedIn, ReverbNation, YouTube, the occasional tweet and a multitude of other enpixelated mirages of my being-ness, I’m burning annoyingly bright pixels into someone’s eyes 24/7 somewhere or another on this rotating marble of a planet.

I’ve written [hopefully] helpful articles like this one about using the net for career-building, I’ve traveled the country speaking to composer colleagues about the groovy power of the web, and I’ve testified to the FCC about the importance of broadband access for all. I’ve temporarily abandoned my first life to spend a few hours here and there appearing as a guest composer on several shows for the Second Life Cable Network, where my avatar got to wear clothes that my corporeal self might not have had the guts to don in public. Why be virtuous in a virtual world?

Reflecting the mystical vortex (my own Holy Trinity) of serendipity, preparedness, and initiative, four of my most significant recent commissions like this one have come to me out of the blue from clients who just happened to click on my name, as well as an amazing classical music cruise for which I’ve just been booked as Composer-in-Flotation-Residence, a way-cool gig that came from my having simply posted an innocuous comment on Drew McManus’s blog about attracting audiences to orchestra concerts. Look to the right of this sentence: that’s the ad for the cruise. It’s going to be faaaaabulous.

Heck, I even met my husband on the internet way back in 1999, when we all thought ax murderers and folks who could never get a date in real life were the only saps trolling for love online. Yup, that was me! And it goes without saying that, being a chick who neither enjoys shopping nor has the time for it, I’ve perfected many surgical strike techniques when Googling my way to doorstep delivery Nirvana for every item imaginable. From Malibu to Friday Harbor, the nice folks at UPS and FedEx know my front porch and my often barely-dressed groggy morning self waaaay too well. I’m amazed the sight of me in my rather deranged-looking UnaBomberComposer state hasn’t scared ’em off by now.

As if all this is not enough to convince your grandmother to finally get DSL, I’ve even profited in the most post-modern, Escher-esque and unexpected of manners from being a cewebrity, a term I unintentionally coined over dinner conversation a few years ago. Before we even finished the main course, aforementioned pixel-hubby and I popped for the 8 bucks to register the URL for cewebrity.com, since it was so dang cute (nuttin’ to see there yet, folks, move along). Two years later we giddily accepted an impressive offer to sell it, and that has kept our cats in the very, very highest grade of kitty chow ever since.

And so, in the wake of over a decade of being Net Girl (surely there’s an action figure for this), I find it ironic that I, the one who tirelessly touts All Things Online, have finally become so busy that I am having a tough time practicing what I preach in a timely manner. Witness the three week gaping space between my last kelpy post and this one. Pathetic insecurities raise their ugly little iHeads: in a globally connected world, if I do something cool and only people who were actually there in the room know about it, does it count? If I fail to post, do I cease to exist? If an MP3 is ripped in a forest and nobody hears it, does it make a sound?

Stay tuned for the continuing adventures of Net Girl! Upcoming episodes from just this June alone include:

• Her stunning new studio location on the sea: now, with more kelp!
• Her 30th high school reunion in New York City: reuniting with the first boy she ever kissed!
• Tales of an enthusiastic yet dreadful chick singer in a rock ‘n roll band: Net Girl’s continued NY jams with Last Mechanical Rites
• The premiere and filming of Paper Cut: a long-winded article about a short wind band piece
• The Attack of Sloth Girl: An extended walk down many San Francisco hills and a quick cab ride back up all of them
• Action Composer: The removal of a boa constrictor fang from Net Girl’s index finger after 25 years (pic for the brave)
• A lovely local premiere of her trio, Elegiac
• California’s Music in the Mountains Festival, and a hike along the Yuba River with cuddly, adorable pet mosquitos
• Immersed in Immersion, Net Girl’s watery summer consortium electracoustic concert wind band commission
• Waxing ecstatic: ear cleaning!

Being Net Girl ain’t always a pretty job, but someone’s gotta do it.
Don’t touch that dial!

…click to listen:

…about the music

¿Cómo se llama?

The first time I saw geese gliding along on salt water, I was surprised. I had only thought of them in the context of lakes and the like. The first time I saw deer balancing on the damp rocks of a tide pool, I was surprised. I had only thought of them in the context of grassy meadows and the like. And here, another moment of my surprise, when I first saw a llama hanging out in a field of cows. Those familiar with the island know…

…that there are actually two llamas on this bucolic property.

Until seeing this, I had only thought of llamas in the context of other llamas and the like.
In South America!
Camelids and Bovines, together in harmony.
Didn’t Rodney King plead, “Can’t we all just getta llama?”

…click to listen:

…about the music

Honk if you like music.

Well, a few posts back I showed you my ducks in a row, so it’s only fair that I now share my latest feathery water visitors and their excellent sense of alignment. The cormorants tend to stand guard at many of the ferry terminals and closely watch (or, ignore entirely) the large, car-laden vessels as they pull in and out of the dock. These guys were perched in Anacortes last week.

The brand new goose family glided past me in one direction earlier today, and then returned on the same path in the early evening. Maybe they’re teaching the kids about the commuting life, in the hopes that they’ll find a good paying job somewhere.

Between my home and my studio, I’m finding the commuting life quite rewarding, and will write much about it very soon on this spot of pixels. This new pattern appears to help me keep my ducks, geese, cormorants, and any other water fowl in a row nicely and delineate my manic-in-happy-kinda-way work life with my home life (one which is definitely not manic but nonetheless quite happy). In fact, there’s so much new stuff to show you kelphistos out there, that I guarantee you will be overloaded (and possibly overwhelmed, in the best of ways) by some upcoming posts and pix. Posts that have yet to be written, of course, because I’m in the middle of three pieces, two upcoming trips, and a bunch of other general life stuff that has precluded my blogging time. Not for long– there’s too much to share, and one thing I never seem to have trouble with is finding time to pick up my camera and point it at something. I’m just a regular quackpot photographer.

…click to listen:

…about the music

Herd any good music lately?

I’ve been a baaaaaaaad blogger, and it’s been too long since my last post. Well, until I have something pithy to offer, here’s a snapshot from a day in the life of this island composer: my drive home yesterday behind some most adorable cargo[at].

…click to listen:

…about the music

Music to glide by.

I’m pretty sure that if anyone watched me just outside my studio, they would have no idea that I’m a musician, and instead assume that I’m a photog for National Geographic or something. I am almost never without my Big Camera With The Long Ass Zoom Lens; a paparazzi lying in wait for feathered and pawed celebs that lurk in my ‘hood.

Of course, much as those of us with honkin’ digital project studios are always jonesing for the newest, latest hardware and software, well, now I can add to my addiction: I am seriously wanting a Bigger and Even More Long Ass zoom lens. This is just too much fun, especially because I have no clue whatsoever what I’m doing. I liken myself to a dog dancing on its hind legs: it’s not that it does it well, but that it can do it at all.

These are certainly not great shots. I ain’t gettin’ no naturalist photo gigs out of this point-and-shoot portfolio. But the pleasure I get from stepping outside to the deck or shoreline many times a day and shifting my concentration from all the sonic chaos in my head, to the visual serenity that surrounds me, is the most amazing “second job” I could wish for.