Overhaul

This website is limping on an obsolete template (like some countries I could name.) Overhaul is sorely needed anyway! Hello, goodbye, hello again, hoping soon.

Choral music is the new resistance

Chicago is my kind of town, having just performed “Bubble Sleeve Handcuffs” at Loyola University by the New Earth Ensemble in the EcoVoice Project’s Cry of the Earth concert. “Consolatus lux” will be performed by the Cascadian Chorale on the Eastside December 6 and 7 in a program called Angel in the Snow. And a secular Christmas carol, “More Delights I Send” will debut* at University Unitarian in Seattle on Christmas Eve.

Goth baby concert pianist

I recently was finally able to find an app to unlock the copyright protection on a DVD made from the tape of my junior recital as a piano student at University of Washington. So I’ve put all 18 pieces on YouTube. I think it’s pretty obvious that I had preferred the second half of the program, the Brahms and Debussy, over Bach and Mozart.

Here is Brahms, Opus 118

and here should be the whole program.

I am so grateful to have this memento of those days. At this point in my studies I was already looking longingly sideways over to the composition classes, but degree tracks are narrow. I had squeezed every drop out of my scholarship (18 credits per quarter over four years) so by this time I had enough credits for a piano performance degree by “only” having to take another year of lessons (3 credits per quarter I believe) and presenting a Senior Recital. That was a Herculean “ONLY” so I paused and decided to take my music theory/history degree and run. It would be a couple of decades before I returned to school for composition.

By the way it is so much easier to listen to this than to watch it. I unknowingly had a case of bobbing bird syndrome so bad that my head pops all the way in and out of frame when the camera zooms in closer. There was a practical reason to move like that, it helps gets quieter notes to speak. But wow it sure looks like I’m moving in only one plane up and down like a thirsty bird. Anyway, put a sack on your own head if you must, and enjoy. :)

How about that Brahms? Oh my heart, still, always.

Travels in Unreal Time

I started a travel photo blog a bit ago. I am about as good at updating that site as I am at updating this one.

Winner, Winner, Cookie for Dinner

A coronavirus-tinged film festival trophy brings a critique of the USA full circle.

“…Sweet land of liberty. Of thee I sing. Land where my fathers died…”

I didn’t put any of that into the elementary school essay contest sponsored by the VFW, something about “Our Flag and Country.” What I did write was the jingoistic propaganda fed to me by a culture that made imperative the daily recitation of the Pledge of Allegiance. This tiny essay merited first place. The Veterans of Foreign Wars bestowed upon me a beautiful honor in return for my heartily parroted words. The dignified statuette, a winged woman with a torch, was a cross between Lady Liberty and an Oscar statuette, and I found its implied symbolism enthralling even if I had no clue what lofty ideals in particular it was supposed to stand for.

I played with that trophy like it was a Barbie doll. Her hands were raised in the air in permanent triumph, and I would put my thumb in the little indented cup of her left hand, and tap my index finger on the point of the torch held in her right hand, and I’d tap the points of her wings, and with sweat-grippy thumbs I'd polish the shiny gold-tone plastic as if it were a genie bottle that would recognize my touch and might eventually shimmer into life. Then I’d put it back on the windowsill with all the others and go watch some TV.

Among other things I am a product of the 1980s’ American public education system and the traumatic, sudden loss of my dad at the age of nine. Looking back I am so grateful that it was all pre-internet viral gawking, but it was also a time and situation of no access to social services or grief counseling. I’m not even sure if I missed a single day of school, but my siblings and I must still have been a subject of some concerned gossip among teachers in the break rooms. Did they coddle us? Did they compensate us somehow for such an unimaginable loss by treating us differently? I can’t really know. I was smart but not tested into a gifted program, and I was talented but didn’t know how small a pond I was in. My only contact with a larger world came from the TV that was on from morning to late night playing orchestral adventure themes, jingles, laugh tracks and the first glimmer of what is now called reality porn with real people overcoming incredible hardships that were supposed to be inspiring, but to me were somehow only monumentally guilt-inducing. My dad died, but other than that I faced no adversities whatsoever. Poor little middle-class girl. Poor little default winner.

How hard do I work, really? I grew up befuddled that every outcome came easy to me if I worked for it, aware that the system must somehow be rigged in my favor in invisible ways that nobody was equipped or inclined to discuss. I was right, but my level of exposure to the world left all of this knowledge firmly in the realm of instinct and I was very, very good at gaslighting myself. In retrospect, undiagnosed lifelong clinical depression was my unseen adversary, but clearly there was something else too, something larger. Even just the glimmer of awareness of an all-permeating societal injustice can be a profoundly demotivating force for anyone under its umbrella, an umbrella the size of the sky itself. It can also have the galvanizing effect of a hot pink dot in a sea of black umbrellas. It can rally a righteous cry of Black Lives Matter.

In the past several years, the human need for validation beyond school assemblies has driven various groups such as new parents to make their own jokey-but-not-really-jokey merit badges for every messy, tedious, mundane category from diaper changing to leaving the house fully dressed. In these days of pandemic surreality the same types of trivial categories apply to all of us now, parents or not. Hard times make us crave comfort wherever we can find it and if you want a medal for doing the dishes 100 times in a row, be your own guest.

“Coastal Fire: A Common Diary” has won honors at film festivals, for which I am so glad and grateful. We’re still in this coronavirus soup so I haven’t experienced any of it other than virtually. An upcoming physical screening at a major theater in Berlin has me incensed and heartbroken about not being able leave my country to attend. But there was something about this hefty trophy from the Vegas Movie Awards, with her upstretched hands holding a gleaming sphere with spikes radiating outward, almost like... a corona… alright, I wanted it. I simply could not pass up the irony of crowning 2020 with what to me looks for all the world like a giant, beautiful middle finger to SARS-CoV-2, the literal raging coastal fires, our collapsed, infested government, and all that comes with it and is yet to come before we emerge from this slow-boiling melting pot.

We find our little joys where we can. We work hard to do it.

Don’t forget to vote, as early as possible, and don’t forget local.

Still pretty dusty, but this isn't social media

Until I make a separate CV-type page, I’ll just put this here so it’s somewhere. Behold, IMDb awards:

WOW, is it dusty in here. Site is getting an overhaul.

The site has more style; now I need to work on pulling more substance from the hard drives. Music samples are now organized a little better here and on SoundCloud. Thanks to Shaya Bendix Lyon for the photos!

Ridiculous Goals

A year ago if you had told me that right this minute I would have a film that I made by myself, that I sent out in the world, that it had been screened on both coasts of the US, in giant multiplexes, had just been in a fine art division of a fest in Germany, and was about to be screened in Dallas and the next day, freaking Hollywood... that it had even won two filmmaking awards, and was up for further adventures, I would have laughed at you. And then taken a breath and laughed some more and said something like, “Oh, you stinker!"

Ridiculous goals if I’d had them, but I didn’t.

But then it kind of happened like this: I didn’t start with a film in mind at all. I started with a goal of writing a sonatina and it just kept growing. I ran with it! I finished it! ...giddy not to have to answer to or wait for anyone else’s schedule, input or approval... but moreover, its theme of ADD practically gave me an imperative to hyper focus on it all by myself.

If I wasn't already an outsider locally, I’m sure setting myself up to be one. How dare I go rogue and presume to call myself a director, a cinematographer, an editor, and everything else that has joined “Composer" on my imdb page? Not to freaking mention, performing violin after just picking it up two years ago? "Just who do you think you are, and what do you think you're doing?!?" demand all of the completely imaginary voices of my colleagues, alternately snickering and yelling, which may or may not reflect any of their feelings in real life. Well, I'm a composer, who is also visual. I think I'm doing a tiny project all the way through to learn a bit of perspective about the whole process... right up to and extending into film festivals and hopefully a good entry path into a distribution model.

I entered a ton of festivals in lottery mode, knowing that odds are notoriously slim. Mainly it was to push myself far beyond that always-referred-to “comfort zone” to thicken my skin and inure myself against failure. And now each time I see another “Not Accepted" in my inbox, I completely agree with it. Yeah! You're right! I totally get it. Ha, I can't believe I even submitted it! And it really does suck to have to be judge and give people bad news, I feel for you. And it was close to final deadline and you probably had nowhere left you could put it, or it didn't fit what you're doing. Also maybe it just sucks! And then I move on.

But also, when the occasional “Accepted" comes in, I completely agree with that, too. Yeah! You're right! Isn't it awesome? Especially since I did it myself... but you probably don't even know that unless you read all my project blurbs, right? So it's kind of double plus awesome, isn't it! We are global artistic community and we are the luckiest people in the world.

Then I move on… no. Disagreement has to have its turn with both of them as well. To the acceptances, I say all kinds of terrible things in my head, the nicest of which is Oh, honey, is this not sub-par? To the rejections, I say, Well, you probably didn’t see the latest version or didn’t read the cover letter or didn't watch it or whatever, so what.

And THEN I move on. All of this self talk zooms by faster and faster, by the way.

Is my audacious plan of inuring myself to failure working? Yes, I’m certain of it! Is it making me question reality? Yeah, a little bit.

Meanwhile, I’m digging into a new concept: division of labor!