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!