Carney

I've always been a local band kind of girl. Back in the Washington it was Static and Soul Food 76 and little band called Shale - I also happened to be dating Shale's drummer so of course I was a super-fan. I pushed my way to the front of tiny venues filled with grungy, sweaty people, stood at the edge of the stage and sang every word. I'm a swayer, not a rocker. I sway.

Arriving in L.A. threw all my local band love in a tizzy. I didn't know who to love or where to find them. Of course L.A. is just chock full of music, but I love a band that brings more to the table than just a song - I want emotion. I want honesty. I want mistakes and new tries and old tricks and something that is real. So, I began my search. One random night years ago at Hotel Cafe, a hub of amazing music, one young guy got on stage to play one song. Just one. He played that one song with so much honesty and integrity. His name was Reeve and he was amazing. And so it began.



Back when Carney was known as Reeve Carney and the Revolving Band I fell in love with their music - how the band (whoever was available to play that night) would improvise for minutes on end, Zane would wipe the neck of his guitar with a handkerchief like an old blues master, the delivery of the songs was honest and stirring, moments where you forgot where you were because you've been swept into the music. And I just went to their farewell to L.A. show and spent 2 hours watching them play to a sold out crowd at the El Rey and reminiscing of the days watching them outgrow the capacity of Molly Malone's. While their musical style has grown edgier the old soul is still there.

They closed their set with Testify, one of my favorites, and I still got excited when I heard the opening riff. And for the encore, just as always, Reeve played the same song he played all those years ago with that simple, beautiful, haunting melody.

This is a band that I will miss being my local hero's.

so... this is me

I realized, while looking back on what I've written so far, that this bit of a blog is less about observations and looking around and more about me - selfish I know, but, basically, I'm writing about what I know, and I know me. And any observations that I do make are painted with my perspective, so it would essentially be about me anyway. Therefore, a change in title was needed. I could think of nothing that could mask the nature of this blog, so I gave it the most blunt name possible so there is no question of what this bit of writing could possibly be about. So, I hope you don't mind getting to know me a bit, and when I do have some interesting observation or interview, you'll have enough knowledge about me to enjoy my take on things.

UPDATE!!!

I've decided that I pretty much am horrible at keeping up with anything, much less writing about my life. But, here are a few snippets and snapshots.

I like to bake

As much as I can be modern and current, I am at the same time nostalgic and old fashioned. On any given evening, I have on an apron, old blues and jazz are setting the mood and either a glass of wine or a cappuccino is on hand while clouds of flour rise from the counter.

I am a messy baker. I'm not sure how, but I always end up streaked with flour. I just hope that it makes you happy when you walk into this lovely picture of hominess that I am so drawn to creating and that we stop regular life for at least a little while to enjoy these moments of baking and listening to good music written well before my time.


I write music


My days are spent in front of a piano and computer screen writing songs for other people. On good mornings, I sit on the edge of my couch with a guitar and my notebook & pen writing the beginnings and middles of songs that later on in the day will be worked out and scrapped and re-worked in front of that piano. I love writing songs. I love the challenge of trying to put the pictures in my mind into words that fit into a melody that somehow is magically plucked from the air and put into my imagination. If I am painting a quaint picture of song writing, its not a lie. For me, it is a very picturesque life-calling that I am leading. However lovely it is, it is also lonely. Spending your time day-dreaming of love lost, love renewed, love found, betrayed and cold or honored and winning and then spotting just your own reflection in the computer screen in front of you as you record these heros into a mic is a shocking reminder to me that I don't like doing this alone after all.
I am a collaborator, a person that would rather spend time with you than without you, a songwriter that, though shy of showing my newest creation with all its flaws and issues, would rather you hear the flaws than you not hear them at all. I never wanted to be a solo act. In all of the dreaming of being a "singer when I grow up" I was always in a band. Unfortunately, the hand that I drew in life has always played the same - I have to plunge ahead alone and later people will come along. Not that I am in need of support, I have so much, - thank you thank you my dear friends for loving me - I just dream of the time when I get inspiration, write it and then give it to my many musically talented friends to work, scrap and re-work with me. I have a wish that I lived in a huge house with all my friends and we all worked in our respective fields of talent and also tended a huge garden and ate popcorn and watched old movies at night all together. In this house we have a huge old grand piano that faces a large open door to the fields beyond and thats where I write songs and you play your guitar and Nick plays his drums... Oh, if only.

More on the Garden
This summer we planted a garden and enjoyed many tasty treats from it.

Baby Tomatoes


Baby Cucumbers


Baby Zucchinis


A very tasty sandwich featuring herbs, cucumbers and baby lettuce from our garden





This fall we began the composting.


Somehow we waste a lot of food: the outside part of the onion, leftovers we never eat, toast that falls butter side down, those things. I have always felt bad about wasting food and now we have a solution to the problem. We are turning waste food into plant food into good food.

sometimes I make things: chocolate chip cookies

These are my favorite "I want cookies but I don't want to fuss" and "I'd really like them to not be über bad for me too" time tested, best ever chocolate chip cookie recipe (or white chocolate dried cranberry, or walnut butterscotch, or whatever else strikes your fancy. pictured are oatmeal rasin)

Ingredients:
1/2 cup butter (softened)
3/4 cup packed brown sugar
3/4 cup cane sugar

1 teaspoon salt
1 teaspoon baking soda
3 teaspoons pure vanilla extract

2 eggs

1 cup chocolate chips

2 cups whole wheat flour*
1/2 cup ground flax seed

Preheat oven to 350 degrees

Cream together butter and sugars until smooth.
Mix in salt, baking soda and vanilla extract.
Mix in eggs until well blended.
Mix in four and the flax until well incorporated.
Mix in the chocolate chips.
Drop by spoonfuls onto a cookie sheet.
Bake for 9-11 minutes, until edges are lightly browned and middle is set.

*alternate: 2 cups oatmeal + 1 1/2 cups flour

And really, these cookies are so easy that I've just tossed everything into a bowl and used a hand mixer to mix well and they turn out fabulously.

while overwhelmed

Right. Apparently if everyone on Earth lived the way I do, it would take somewhere between 1.67 and 3.01 planet Earths to sustain them all. Breaking this down, it means that I flush my toilet too often, I drive too much and I occasionally enjoy a nice steak. On top of this, the lovely moisturizer with SPF that I slather on my face is a mid-level toxic creme sending chemicals through my skin that have been linked to cancer and organ failure. The frustrating part of all of this is that I feel completely used and abused and unable to really make much of the change that is needed to sustain human life on our planet. After all, I'm only one kid!

After the depression caused by information overload was warded off with a good kick of willpower and a glance at my thriving tomato plant, I realized that yes, I am only one kid, but its not just up to me to try to save the planet all by my lonesome and lots of really interesting people are doing really interesting things to help us enjoy living better and living healthy lives.

Section 1:

Have Netfilx? Watch these entertaining and educational shows for FREE! I LOVE the watch instantly option of Netflix!


http://www.sundancechannel.com/ecotrip/
The real cost of living. A British man who looks like a sweater clad Jesus wanders around the consumer industry exploring the environmental impacts of many of our standard products (like a white cotton t-shirt and chocolate bars) and then shows us some amazing people doing it the right way.



http://www.sundancechannel.com/lazy/
This guy wrote a book. And then he made this show. Basically, he finds people in business and education and real life who are skeptics of the environmental movement. Skeptical? This show is for you. Why? Because he makes being a little bit green a little bit easy.



http://www.sundancechannel.com/big-ideas/
Design, Music, Eating, Architecture... thoughts from smart people and examples of other smart people bringing green concepts to everything from designing furniture and buildings to making dinner and recording music. Brilliant.

Section 2:

How did I find out that my lotion could kill me? A fabulous little, well, huge, website database created by people concerned with the use of toxic chemicals in just about everything. www.cosmeticsdatabase.com This particular branch of the Environmental Working Group independently tests as many cosmetics as they can and gives each a safety rating. Be prepared to drop off quite a few of your products to your local Hazardous Waste collection facility - its shocking how much big business gets away with.

Yes, I'll point you Josh's direction again: http://www.lazyenvironmentalist.com/products/ How convenient! Want new jeans but not sure where to buy an environmentally conscious pair? He started making us a list. Sweet.

Sustainable Works Workshop. www.sustainableworks.org Nick and I just finished up this class and we miss it. All the information, the passion to live conscious of our environment and ways to get involved in greening up your lifestyle presented by a lovely woman named Nancy - inspiring. If you feel drawn to learn more, are skeptical about the science behind the Green Initiative or think you could squeeze out a little more green in your lifestyle, I highly recommend this class. Trust me, you will enjoy the process of illumination.

Globalfast. www.globalfast.org/gfx/index.php Give up one meal a week and give the money you saved from that meal to help provide water and freedom to those in need. This is just one of a million causes to get behind.

Toms Shoes. http://www.tomsshoes.com Buy a pair, give a pair. So simple, so good.

World Vision. www.worldvision.org It really doesn't cost much to send a child to school and provide medicine for them. I love sponsoring my kids and I'm so thankful for organizations like World Vision that help me give them what they need.

To sum up, I love living on Earth and I don't want to leave anything less than the best for my grandchildren and their grandchildren and I don't want to force them to live on a giant spaceship and get so fat they can't walk, thanks Wall-E.

while gardening

I love waking up in the morning and looking out my window. Outside my window is my vegetable garden. Growing, flourishing, producing, living. This is my first garden as a grownup, and I’m attempting to grow it in Los Angeles. I’m not the only one either. If you take a walk down my street you see grape arbors and mini orchards and a few houses that have ripped up their entire front yards to grow vegetables and fruits of all kinds.

Growing up in the Northwest for me meant every spring we planted a garden and every fall we tried to find and dig up all of last years potatoes, which never happened. Now, as an adult trying to re-capture the essence of my semi-rural upbringing, I have taken a small plot of land and stuck my flag in it, claiming a bit of serenity and simplicity, attempting to sidetrack the disdain I sometimes harbor for living in the hustle and bustle of city life.

As the little plants grow up and start blooming and the little veggies start appearing, I’m just so proud of them. Like they fought the odds and won. I tend take anything even slightly tangible and translate it to my own life, and so my little garden has become a reflection of my own ability to survive and grow. Not that if they die then I too shall wither, that would be dramatic.

Not only am I happy to have a little place of Zen in my yard, I am happy to add to my local Farmers Market produce my own home-grown tomatoes, zucchini, cucumbers, peppers, garlic and herbs, snap peas, string beans, spinach and lettuce and soon strawberries and whatever else I fancy to grow, answering the question of “what should we have for dinner” with a handful of freshly harvested food. Knowing that I’m doing the best I can to live responsibly, both economically and environmentally, is a most fulfilling thing.

Sustainable living has become a popular thought, Prius’ and organic food and hemp clothing being a few of the commercial responses to the idea. Attempting to go beyond pop culture and maybe a bit more extreme than many city dwellers, I’ve made my own granola, hugged a tree and gotten out my thread and needle to do my best to live in a way that my First Nation ancestors would be proud of.

If being human means that I take from the earth to live, I’m going to do it, but I’m going to try to eek out every drop I can from every moment and every item I’m given. And I’m really enjoying the challenge.

while i forget who i am

...and here i sit, staring at my computer screen, hoping that getting lost on facebook will somehow help me fall asleep and drown out the noise of the nagging drama that seems to have taken over my heart.

i have drama about my family. i have drama about my apartment. i have drama about my career. i have drama about parking in los angeles. i have drama. and who doesn't have drama? my real beef with drama is that its just drama, and yet it bears so much weight on my shoulders.

here's how i look at drama: i weigh my drama against that of say, a person who lives in Somalia, a country currently at war. not only is my life so much more privileged, so much easier and so much healthier, if i would just look up from my dragging feet, the going promises to be easier. not merely because of where i was born but because, coupled with the fact that i have some fight in my gut if i could muster it, i can take this negative drama and turn it into something good.

yes, there is sadness and hurt in my family. but as for me, i will not hold onto that and whither and break under that weight. instead, i will take it and learn from it and find joy and hope.

yes, there are many issues with where i live, but with the economy as it is, maybe i'll move closer to the beach and pay what i'm paying 45 minutes away from it. i would love that.

yes, the career i have chosen is a rough one, close to impossible to achieve anything much less pay your bills via singing at people, but the challenges i face in writing music and communicating something valuable are lessons that translate into moments just like this when i feel the weight of my current troubles vying for first place in my mind.

these things are valuable. and i am learning that. although the child i sponsor through world vision has a difficult life, one where he wouldn't have his medication or education without help from someone who lives far away from him, my troubles are also valid and worth investigating, not for shoving away in some dusty corner of my mind in a file labeled "crap". because, regardless of whether or not i picked him out of the thousands and thousands of faces of children needing help, he would have had a wonderful life. he has hope. he has community. because, as oscar wilde put it, "we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars." and trust me, this kid looks at the stars. as for me, its a clear night in L.A., time to look up.

The pessimist sees difficulty in every opportunity. The optimist sees the opportunity in every difficulty. - winston churchill


www.worldvision.org


photo copyright nick ocean photography, 2008
nickocean.com

while thinking of my dad

this entry is from December 22nd, 2008

my dad died the other day. i have to admit that it affected me more than i expected, though i knew it would happen someday, it wasn't supposed to happen this way. my heart hurts, this i know.

our father/daughter relationship had been severed. its been broken, complicated and painful.

i've wished for many years that we could have a relationship. i wished that we could heal our relationship. more than anything else, i wished and hoped and prayed that he knew that i loved him. to have to give up the hope of this is like taking a layer off of myself.

this is exposing a lot of who i am - my make-up. my dad is a part of my vocabulary. i tell a lot of funny stories about him, add him into conversation often, use him as an illustration. how he wore 70's short-shorts and tall striped tube socks when he played softball 20 years after short-shorts and tube socks fell out of fashion. how he only knew 2 jokes that didn't use curse words. how he used to smoke sweet pipe tobacco in his big brown easy chair and when he was away on business, i could sit in that chair and not feel so far away from him. and how i once told him that i couldn't continue our relationship in the way that it was currently existing and that i would always be waiting for him when he was ready to be my dad again. that time never came.

i will always wish things had been repaired. that he had been able to understand how much i cared about him. that i had never had to watch him walk away on that rainy day not knowing if he'd ever come back. but i'm thankful for the choice to remember him as the wonderful man that he was, not the man that he became. i can leave a legacy for him.