notes from the kelp

…click to listen:

…about the music

Unabashedly beautiful.

I write this from my midtown Manhattan outpost in a lovely little boutique hotel, to tend my blog, as well as to tend my psyche. I adore this city and it was my home from 0 to 21.5 years. I return often these days for various work-related activities, framed by visits with friends and my mother, who like so many New Yorkers tethered to a great piece of real estate, still lives in the same apartment in which I grew up. There’s something really adorable about getting a big hug from the doorman, Tony, who has known me since I was six and instantly recognizes me from 41 years ago the moment I step out of the taxicab. I fight the urge to ask him for a piece of candy.

It ain’t news to anyone that New York is a very noisy place. But the unending onslaught of construction, honking, sirens, jack-hammering, and rumbling subways underneath the ground on which this hotel stands, starkly reminds me that I am no longer inured to this noise in any way. Each hair in my ears is on full alert and on edge with every blasting horn, and I have not experienced a single moment of atmospheric silence since arriving last week. It’s exhausting.

I think back to growing up here, and of how I seemingly heard next to nothing of this racket. Or, more to the point, I heard it but it did not register. I was deaf to the noise; my subconscious automatically tuned it out. My thoughts were rarely interrupted by incessant city sounds and I probably even found some tribal reassurance in them, as my senses were swathed 24/7 in the utterances of civilization. I was not alone, even if I was alone.

I enjoy being alone. The utter silence around my home on the far other edge of this continent swaddles my psyche in a different way, allowing my own thoughts and sounds to appear within my head. The photo above, taken from a ferry at dusk a couple of weeks ago, contrasts the noise that accompanies me as I type this. And for further contrast, I’ve chosen a clip of some very active chamber music that makes a joyous noise, to me at least. An unabashed reminder that my life encompasses the full spectrum of frequencies with some frequency. A dichotomy to which I am not inured in the least.

…click to listen:

…about the music

There’s truth in rainbows.

A double rainbow deserves a double blog title. Welcome to my backdrop on a ferry ride at sunset last week, coming from Anacortes back to Friday Harbor. I’ve never before seen both ends of a rainbow at once, and I wish that I had the ability to show you the entire expanse of arc and magic, lifting and sinking from the sea like a colorful slinky toy. I hope this brightens your Monday.

My corporeal being will be off the island for a few days, surrounded by concrete and steel and some wonderful professional interactions. But my spirit remains here and intends to create some blog posts to remind her of why she always looks forward to returning to interact with this. Stay tuned for a few more favorite pix from my most recent adventures!

…click to listen:

…about the music

Jazz at the beach.

Well, Tofino, plus the wild, mountainous midsection of Vancouver Island one traverses to get there, is nothing short of stunningly beautiful. Like so many of the villages up here, summertime tourist crowds swell the size and the local economy, altering the vibe for a four month period of warm air and long nights. But the rest of the year offers a peace and solitude that few July visitors can experience. Wintertime on a beach is always magical to me.

I remember when I lived at Paradise Cove in Malibu, and this time of year I’d have a mile-long stretch of sand, cliffs and raging tides all to myself. I’d walk up and down the empty beach completely alone, occasionally wondering whether a bomb had gone off in Los Angeles and I was the last to know, and perhaps the last person left standing. My twisted psyche sort of liked this thought. Experiencing that kind of solitude within reach of one of the worlds’ busiest cities is fascinating. Experiencing it as I did this past weekend, many hours of travel away from any such metropolis, is another fantastic form of isolation.

Surfers, like the fellow who looks like a black smudge in one of these photos, come to Tofino around the year to feel the first push of the Pacific against a right-hand land mass. Tsunami warning signs and evacuation route information are everywhere. And so are reminders of California’s Malibu, my home for 14 years, as nearly every car we passed had a surfboard or two strapped to the roof, and bicycles sported board racks instead of kick stands. Home again. Just a little colder. And apparently, grayer. No, I did not bring an antique black and white camera. But the light, which showed my eyes plenty of forest green in the trees and a hint of pale teal in the sky, played tricks with my lens, to nice effect.

I think I saw more Bald Eagles in three days than ever before, and one of them was kind enough to pose for me outside the deck to our room on Chesterman Beach:

Looking at this noble image, I can see why it won out over the turkey for the U.S. avian representative!

Tacoma and New York beckon early next week, but I have more photos to post so I’ll be back on the blog soon!

…listen
…about the music

Water. Items.

Here are two lovely views from a couple of afternoons ago on South Beach. I’m facing the Olympic mountain range across the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which is where I will be headed tomorrow as Charles and I venture east, (ferry to Anacortes) then south, (drive to Edmonds) then west, (ferry and drive to Port Angeles), then north (ferry to Victoria) and then finally west again (drive to Tofino. ) A mini vacation that I have now officially dubbed the 2009 Pacific Northwest “Wheel and Keel” Winter Tour.

I like objects in or near water. I like the contrast. I like the tension and unspoken conversation between substances comprised of very different elements. I like the drama.

So now I’ll get to be the foreign element, as I traverse through some wilderness and see some extremely gorgeous parts of this planet. I’ll be another object at the sea.
And I don’t object to that one bit.

…listen
…about the music

Water voyage.

I love taking the ferry. If I didn’t love it, I’d be living in the wrong place, since ferries are the primary method of hopping off this bridge-less island. This week I got to ride four of them: one to Anacortes and back when I drove down to Seattle, and two days later, one from neighboring Orcas Island and back, when I went to a friend’s concert. You can’t spell “hooray!” without: a-h-o-y!

I returned from Orcas early Sunday afternoon, on a day so clear and bright that it was hard to believe it ever rains here at all. There happened to be a sailboat regatta that day, and the ferry captain had his hands full as his huge vessel Yakima barreled through the channel into oncoming and, occasionally, clueless traffic. Two boats in particular appeared to come closer to the ship than I might have dared. One was rewarded with an insistent and loud honk of the big horn. The other, on a potential collision course with us as he crossed our bow, necessitated the ferry slowing down to allow him room to pass in front of us rather than… uh, under us. Rules of the watery road are that vessels without power have right of way, since they often can’t quickly maneuver. That being said, it’s not the wisest thing for a 27 foot sloop to tempt fate and try to partner dance with a 382 foot long, 73 foot wide, roughly 2000 ton powered behemoth of the sea.

But physics-defying proximity has its payoff to a camera-toting passenger like me, and I was able to get a few nice pix like all of these, as I stood at the bow with nothing but a tennis net separating me from the sailboats and the chilly Salish Sea.

Upon closer inspection of the above snapshot, fellow sailors will appreciate the subtle humor in the alignment of the passing sloop, and that of the sign on the ferry’s port side:

The arrow should have been pointing UP!

I’ll post more sea-oriented photos before week’s end. And then, I’ll be off on a short adventure to the wild western coast of Vancouver Island for the weekend, which means a round trip of five ferries! Hooray!

Which is Pig Latin for “ahoy,” of course.

…listen
…about the music

Clarity.

Bright, clear, searing sunshine today. Stunning, as it floods the woods and glares into my eyes as I type this. I snapped the above photo a few days ago at the end of one such afternoon; I love the clarity of light as it offers clarity of thought on my walks.

No such grace and clarity exist for the characters in a haunting short story titled “Luvina,” penned by the late Mexican literary figure Juan Rulfo. Thursday night, anyone in the Seattle area will have a chance to come hear the fabulous pianist Ana Cervantes perform my piece of the same title, along with a number of others commissioned for Ms. Cervantes’s latest CD on Quindecim Recordings, Solo Rumores. The music reflects the bleak world of grim, hopeless desert poverty that Rulfo describes in so many of his writings. My outward reality of sunshine, joy and ease, is sobered by a profound inward sympathy for those who will never know such pleasure.

…listen
…about the music

Ahhhh.

Back on the island, with these vistas of the Puget Sound and its guardian snow-capped Olympics accompanying me home yesterday afternoon. Just wanted to share.

…listen
…about the music

Home.

It has dawned on me that I actually travel a fair amount. Much more than I anticipated when I moved up to this floating paradise. But despite how often I seem to fling myself off of this island (voluntarily, so far: I have not been permanently voted off yet), it is truly the place I most love to be. In short order, it has become home, in the most profound of ways.

I type this from sunny Los Angeles, where I’ve just landed to do fun music-related things that you can read about on my website. Among today’s emails was one from a friend in which he asked, “do you think the fact that you travel often makes you appreciate your home environment even more?”.
Yes.
And no.
Yes, because I have yet to travel to a place that I find more alluring than the place I call home. In contrast to everywhere else my body lands, I appreciate this set of coordinates the most.
And no, because even if I never, ever left this island, I believe I would appreciate it every bit as much as I do sitting here, far from it.

Above: three very favorite views from home: South Beach after a storm, False Bay in dense fog, and a magical, Gilligan’s Island type spot on Turn Island right across from my house, to which I have paddled several times and have promised myself that I will camp there. And I will. The shortest trip of the year, yards from my driveway that’s nestled in the woods on the left side of the photo, will probably be the one I appreciate the most. Ahhhhhh.

…listen
…about the music

A little seedy.

A young-ish buck has discovered that if he whacks the birdfeeder into my window hard enough with his nose, gravity will be his friend as seeds sprinkle down onto his cute pink tongue.

A less than young-ish composer has discovered that the sound of a birdfeeder being whacked hard into her window is increasingly annoying. No matter how cute that pink tongue is.

A young-ish buck may discover a sudden lack of seed distribution equipment upon his return tomorrow…

…listen
…about the music

A view from lane 4.

It’s always striking when I leave the island I live on that dangles off the West coast, and spend time on the island that I was born and raised on, floating off the East coast. The latter is half the size of the former, but… well… only in terms of square miles. As for infrastructure, population, and 24/7 access to pizza slices that drip with a mysterious orange oil found nowhere else on the planet: fuggedaboutit.

Adding to the contrast are trips like this last one, in which I stay for several days right in the heart of Times Square. I think scientists should use me as a lab rat and examine my feeble brain as it attempts to instantly adjust from gazing up at a wide open sky beating down on green space and cute furry animals, to, hours later, gazing up from the bottom of a steel-lined abyss so tightly canyoned that it changes the weather system. Seriously: my room was on the 35th floor. One morning it was snowing ardently outside my window, and the impressive view across the Boeing jet fuselage-infused Hudson River to New Jersey was thwarted by whiteout blizzard conditions. But when I got downstairs to the street, it was merely a light dusting. Snowflakes are no match for this town, baby.

It’s indeed a miracle, what happened on the Hudson that day when the captain pretended he was piloting a little 7-seat seaplane and glided gracefully down onto, rather than into, the frigid water. I happened to be hurling myself through the air on a similar aircraft when all this was occurring. I must say, there’s nothing like watching a potential commercial airliner disaster as it unfolds live on CNN, from the comfort of a commercial airliner. Maybe they should rethink those nifty TV sets in front of all our seats…

In a week I’ll head back to yet another long-time home: Los Angeles. I’d like to avoid a water landing if at all possible, but if it must occur I’d appreciate it if the pilot could plop down somewhere close to Malibu’s Paradise Cove, so I can get a nice view of my old ‘hood.

Meanwhile, I’m very happy for my pong to have pinged me here in the San Juans once again. Above is a snapshot of what it looked like yesterday at 10:30 a.m. in Anacortes, as I waited to board the ferry. At about 11,000 feet, Mt. Baker is my kind of skyscraper, and having spent so much time in the air recently, I wasn’t all that unhappy to be viewing it from sea level– on asphalt.

…listen
…about the music

Not the prelude to “Afternoon of a Faun,” but….

From late this afternoon: two does at my studio do’. Mama and her growing faun, both of whom became regulars at the cervidae soup kitchen I ran during the blizzard three weeks ago. I think the species family name should be spelled “servidae” because it was serv-a-doe around here for two weeks straight until the snow melted and they could find their way back to the salal berries. For a while they stopped coming around, but recently they’ve fallen off the wagon and given into their jones for birdseed. I might have to close down the soup kitchen and open up a rehab facility to assist them in getting back on track with their lives.

I continue on track with mine, and in the early early morning hours I’ll hop a ferry for mainland America to head to a plane pointed toward New York City once again. I’m speaking at the national Chamber Music America conference on Friday afternoon, and I’m going to enjoy seeing lots of friendly faces in the concert music biz. Given the underfed temperatures in the city, our faces will be a little red from the cold, but a number of us have been going to this conference annually for years, and it’s always fun to reunite, do a little business, bend the elbows, and catch up. Regardless of the weather, it’s nice to be able to count on camaraderie. And birdseed.

…listen
…about the music

From 0 to 47: funny looking, but cute.

I have a theory that if I were to spell my first name with three x’s at the end and register a website address as such, I would get a LOT more traffic. Of course, once the visitors arrived and found a smiling but far-too-clothed woman in all the photographs, they might be more than a tad ticked off. As a marketing plan, it just seems like it could backfire.

Well, this is all I can offer up in the way of nudie pix, anyway. Ok, I won’t talk about a few snapshots here and there, courtesy of cute camera-toting boyfriends over the years. Nope. Well, I guess I just did. But hey, that was a loooong time ago! Good thing I wasn’t going for that Miss America tiara. Innocent nudity apparently equals instant career destruction.

Well, not for me. At least, not yet. The day’s still young. Here I am in New York City after my bath in the kitchen sink, looking like Calgon took me away (you actually have to be around my age to even appreciate that reference). I think I was about 23 in this photo and about to towel off and grab a pizza and a beer. Ok, no, I lied. I couldn’t have fit into the sink at 23. 19: possibly. Now: fuggedaboutit. I’m quite small, but not quite that small. But I’m pretty sure about the pizza and the beer.

I’ve now completed 47 rotations around the sun, and am very happy to be beginning a 48th swirl on the cosmic dance floor. Whheeeeee! I think the music clip I’ve selected for the occasion sums up my wacky, often-in-perpetual motion life nicely.

I neglected to mention last week that there’s another birthday here: that of this salinity-laden blog, which is starting its fourth orbit through the internet tubes. Since January of 2006 I’ve been nurturing this little beast like a beloved child, and it’s resulted in a lot of joy and virtually no frustration at all (which indicates to me that given the way my life is, opting for the blog and not the toddler was a good plan).

Should any of you kelphistos who have not lost every dime in this sad economy wish to get me and my little blog a present for our birthdays, we both would be thrilled if you’d download, or buy the physical CD (which I will inscribe to you!), of my chamber music disc, Notes from the Kelp. The links have been staring at you for a year in that right-hand side bar… c’mon, you know you’ve seen ’em, you know you’ve looked away and thought to yourself, “darn, she’s so nice, it’s got a groovy cover, I know I should buy this CD, but… uh… not today!” Well, now’s your chance. Makes a great gift for all the algae specialist biologists in your life! Makes a great coaster for that wheat grass and seaweed protein energy drink your weird friend is always trying to get you to try. And, it even makes a decent 80 minutes of music, too!

Otherwise, I might end up just looking for the rest of the year like I did my first year:

And we wouldn’t want that!

Upon reflection of these photographic blasts from my past, I hereby open up a caption contest for one or both of them. Be creative. Go nuts. Make me laugh. Make everyone else who reads them positively hysterical. You cannot hurt my feelings, trust me.