Liminal Words, Music, and Image

A Mountain Calling

2012-01-19T06:11:00.004-05:00

WHITE ROCK AND MOUNT HUNGER, AFTER SNOW-- painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper.

You might know the feeling. Having been gone from high country for a while, you are on the return trip. You turn a corner and, suddenly, the shape and line of a certain mountain in the distance lets you that know you are truly home.
For the past twenty years I’ve been getting that heart-tugging welcome from central Vermont’s Worcester Range; in particular from the sight of the bare-rock half-dome of Mount Hunger and the sharp little point of White Rock Mountain, a short ridgeline away.
As a distance runner, I’ve made the 30-mile round-trip from my house to the Hunger summit and back at least seven times; I’ve run and hiked the trails around these two mountains in all kinds of weather, with the trails in varied conditions-- from clear and dry to barricaded with wind-fallen trees.
I won’t ever forget my first trip to the summit of Hunger, starting on a sunny, leaf-strewn late October day in Montpelier to arrive at a snow-covered summit. Looking in all directions from bare rock, I had the powerful sensation of a shifting self; of somehow, deeply—in ways beyond words—arriving instantly at a new relationship with the place I called home, its hills, valleys, rivers, meadows, forests; the further distant mountains and the silver band of big lake that marked my horizons.
These sort of ineffable experiences of connection in the outdoors are, of course, not limited to those who encounter mountain ranges, distant or close-up. The hunter in crisp autumn woods, the farmer in a sun-baked summer pasture, the angler in a forest-shadowed late-spring brook are just a few of those who can feel, in their own very personal ways, the stirring of deep connections.
For myself, I know that after the descent of my home mountain, there is always a point at which I look back to see it behind me—-in full, from some distance. At that moment, I am often struck by the paradoxical feeling that, while I know the mountain—-its rocks, trees, trails, and vistas—-a little better than I did before, I also have a compelling sense that the overall mystery of the mountain has somehow deepened.
I’m pretty sure it’s the same mystery that continues to call me whenever I turn that highway corner and think, “Home.” And it’s what keeps me coming back to the mountain for more.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

(This piece originally appeared, in slightly different form, in the BARRE-MONTPELIER TIMES ARGUS)

hushed bells in winter twilight

2012-01-15T19:29:00.006-05:00

hushed bells in winter twilight by Kevin Macneil Brown

I made this music with guitar and cascading delays-- in one take, in-the-moment, while I watched the sky and changing light and shadows of a cold afternoon becoming evening.
-kmb

Eastern Horizon, Winter Morning

2012-01-05T06:11:00.002-05:00

Eastern Horizon, Winter Morning

Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paer, 2011

from mystery, quiet light... (music and images for the winter solstice.)

2011-12-21T20:57:00.007-05:00

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://kevinmacneilbrown.bandcamp.com/track/from-mystery-quiet-light"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;from mystery, quiet light ... by Kevin Macneil Brown&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

Morning, Late Autumn, Berlin Pond

2011-12-16T21:03:00.002-05:00

Morning, Late Autumn, Berlin Pond-- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2011

November Morning, Broken Overcast

2011-11-25T08:23:00.002-05:00

November Morning, Broken Overcast--painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2011

This November here in central Vermont has been full of big skies and changing light. Certain moments, seen while I'm out running on trails, have stayed in my inner vision-- held until I paint them. I am grateful for the chance to re-experience and contemplate within myself these mysteries of light and land-form and cloud and shadow ...

-KMB

November Shore

2011-11-19T06:32:00.001-05:00

November Shore--Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2011

You Are My Horizon --New Music

2011-11-11T06:16:00.004-05:00

My new collection of contemplative music is out today. These pieces were made in the fall of 2011, with baritone guitar and steel guitar. I think of these works as sonic prayers and meditations: inspired by the energies and mysteries of autumn's landscapes, inner and outer.

&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://kevinmacneilbrown.bandcamp.com/album/you-are-my-horizon"&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;You Are My Horizon by Kevin Macneil Brown&amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

october liminal (morning journey)

2011-10-24T06:02:00.013-04:00

Images by kmb

gathered on the morning of October 17, 2011

Lines For Rowland Robinson

2011-10-15T06:17:00.003-04:00

Through hardwoods, followed

the merest suggestion of footpath, found

the sudden flume,

the foaming pool :

slate-lined, deep gray;

shadow-blessed,

October-cold.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Writer’s Harvest and Words of Gratitude

2011-09-24T20:48:00.007-04:00

This fall brings a harvest that is of particular importance to me. With the publication of BRIGHT PATH, DARK THICKET, I honor a writer’s commitment I made to myself more than a decade ago: a commitment to complete three books in the Liam Dutra New England mystery series.

It all began on a September trail run up into the woods and open ridgelines of Irish Hill in Berlin, Vermont, when a coyote running along the trail ahead led me to an old stone cellar hole, and I thought to myself, what if….

I am grateful for what the writing process has taught me about joy and despair, discipline and trust.; for what I have discovered about the history of the place where I live, it’s people, it’s landscape, mountains, shorelines; for the experience of becoming immersed in a story and being part of its unfolding day to day. (Along the way I've also written three other novels outside the series.)

I am utterly grateful for my first readers, who read these books in various stages of manuscript and generously shared their expertise and wisdom. They are:

Ray Zirblis, Robin Cornell, Phil Zallinger, Raina Lowell, Ted Richards, Bill Fraser, David Blythe, Lindsay Riggs Brown, Patricia Macneil, Robyn Sargent, Rob Halpert, Erika Mitchell.

I’d also like to thank the kind and committed people at Bear Pond Books and Kellogg-Hubbard Library-- both places in Montpelier, Vermont-- for graciously hosting author events, and for keeping my books on their shelves.

Thank you to the anonymous editors at Poisoned Pen Press who, while ultimately passing on the Liam Dutra series, paradoxically convinced me that the books were worth publishing.

And thank you, too-- all who read my words!

-kmb

Kindle edition at Amazon.com:

http://www.amazon.com/Bright-Path-Dark-Thicket-ebook/dp/B005ONM5L0/ref=sr_1_5?ie=UTF8&qid=1316910622&sr=8-5

Slow Shimmer in Secret September (soundwork for the autumn equinox)

2011-09-23T18:32:00.005-04:00

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://kevinmacneilbrown.bandcamp.com/track/slow-shimmer-in-secret-september"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;Slow Shimmer in Secret September by Kevin Macneil Brown&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

You Are My Horizon (4)

2011-08-30T07:29:00.003-04:00

YOU ARE MY HORIZON 4- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, acrylic on canvas, August 2011

Morning Passage

2011-08-01T05:34:00.003-04:00

Morning Passage--Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor and gouache on paper, 2011

Changing Tides

2011-07-14T07:17:00.002-04:00

Beach at Good Harbor, Dawn ( 2 and 1)--Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2011

Some of my most satisfying watercolor days have come at those times when my paint supply is low-- when I am down to two or three all-but squeezed-out tubes of color.

One day this summer I decided to use up the last of what I had: two shades of yellow, some alizarin crimson, a tiny residual amount of zinc white.

I began with a wash of clean water, then squeezed out colors— mixing them, with brush and water, right on the sheet. I made two paintings that afternoon, both of them views of Good Harbor Beach, in Gloucester, Massachusetts.

After spending some weeks with these paintings —and making some small re-wettings and re-workings—I began to see that I had not only used up my paint; I had also come to the completion of something: the visual and energetic expression a place, a moment, a feeling—that I had been carrying for a long, long time.

Of course I will restock my colors. And I will most likely paint Good Harbor images again. But I am also excited to harbor that sense of completion, to look up now and turn my attention to a change in tide.

-KMB

Liminal Music 5: drift chart (from the northern voyages)

2011-06-26T13:16:00.015-04:00

I made this long, slow, quiet, maritime soundwork over the course of three rainy, cool days while a North Atlantic air mass was stalled inland here in Vermont. I had been reading about John Cabot's 15th Century voyages, which led to thoughts of the generations who have fished Brown's Bank and other northern waters out of Gloucester, Mass.

My intent was to conjure in sound an oceanic sense of quiet--but powerful-- mystery and awe, along with a strange deep peacefulness.

All sounds are from lap steel guitar and digital treatments (sound smear.)

- KMB

&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;a href="http://kevinmacneilbrown.bandcamp.com/album/drift-chart-from-the-northern-voyages"&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;drift chart (from the northern voyages) by Kevin Macneil Brown&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;amp;gt;

At the Edge of the Longest Day...

2011-06-21T05:53:00.003-04:00

Dusk, Mountains, Pine
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, June 2011

That one white pine in
one dark brush-stroke reaching up
from curve of hard
New Hampshire ridgeline

is held now
in the heart and in
a granite chamber
of memory

So that
here at the edge
of the longest day
possible in this latitude

I feel it again:

The lifting ache of
something ancient.

- Kevin Macneil Brown

Offshore, Halibut Point

2011-06-16T06:16:00.002-04:00

Offshore, Halibut Point

Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2011

Three Mornings

2011-06-05T03:11:00.006-04:00

Video paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown, June 2011

Another Shore Remembered

2011-05-31T16:36:00.006-04:00

Evening, Kennebec River, June.
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, May 2011

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Lately, I've been visited by sudden, strong memories of certain times and places--particular shorescapes I've experienced. After these memories come upon me, I spend time--over the course of a few days, usually-- refining the images within my mind. Once they are clear to the recall, I begin to paint...
-kmb

Book Launch: HIGHWAY IN THE BLOOD

2011-05-16T06:08:00.004-04:00

www.highwayintheblood.wordpress.com

this one morning...

2011-05-14T08:22:00.004-04:00

...this one morning is the reason i came to this place... (York Beach, Maine)
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, May 2011

Good Harbor, Remembered May Morning

2011-05-08T06:34:00.005-04:00

Good Harbor-- Remembered May Morning
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2011

There are certain places I return to by conjuring inside myself: real-world places that have made a deep imprint of color, mood, energy, motion; stillness, space, distance; geologic shape and form, inner and outer engagement. By contemplation and imagination I put myself in these places and create a vivid and refreshing sanctuary; a connection and confluence with something I call depth of place.
Good Harbor Beach in Gloucester, Massachusetts is one of those places. I return again and again, in memories, meditations, dreams. This painting, made in hazy May sunlight, brings me back to a certain remembered spring morning at Good Harbor: waking up in a sleeping bag in the dunes; watching morning arriving and changing over the water--bringing light from above and shadows from below.
-kmb

Woodland Passage, April Morning

2011-04-23T07:17:00.003-04:00

In depth of dark
woods, the sudden slant of
April’s empty light.

Near hard noon meridian
over softness of moss—viridian
underfoot—I stop,
wanting some stillness

and stand
beside a massive quartzite boulder
left here a long time,
almost motionless, glacial
erratic ( but only to limited perceptions.)

I’m not sure
what I can bring
to all this:

Yes, the gift of respiration;
The manifold graces
of being present—

These thoughts cross
inner oceans and
eons in an instant

and at once I find
that I want
to be one who

will stand at the marge of
this season with prayers and passion

seeking the true glide
of wisdom, imagination;

will watch open-hearted for
the fields’ first greening,

the hazing-over of
the hot, coppered sun,

and on the horizon
distant, small, strong,
the broadwings’ lifting arrival.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Mid-March, at the eastern heart of this morning like no other...

2011-03-16T06:16:00.007-04:00

Mid-March: at the eastern heart of this
morning like no other,

The perfect pyramid of Spruce Mountain
rises weightless washed blue.

Above and beyond, arrives
a fresh and fearless sky,

Harder blue,
pulsed–through with the hue
of future roses—

Blooms that, in a softer season,
will be here,

Warm and glistening,
fully-fleshed,

In the all-pervasive sunlight
that seeks itself even in shadows.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

winter resonance and the ineffable freedom of captured light

2011-02-28T10:41:00.012-05:00

As I worked through the winter on the video paintings in the WINTER RESONANCE series, it became clear to me that I had found the right images to accompany my 2007 composition THE INEFFABLE FREEDOM OF CAPTURED LIGHT.
I had made that long ambient/ textural piece of music over the course of that winter, using steel guitars, an electric table organ from a church yard sale, glass bowls tuned with water, a portable suitcase metallaphone, a Lexicon jam man, and quite a lot of analog and digital processing. The purpose of the composition was to convey in sound my responses to color, light, and shadow in the winter landscape. I painted in acrylics on canvas while I listened back to various mixes and versions during that period --there is even a six-channel surround version intended for a multi-media installation. But ultimately I found that the resulting visual art was, for the most part, too representational-- mountains and skyscapes-- to accompany the music directly.
But these recent video paintings-- really, they are manipulated images of winter light itself in motion--seemed to be calling back to that music. Thus, the video above,which brings them together.
I find myself ready now to turn away from winter contemplations. Though I know that there is plenty of winter left here in Vermont, I can see--and feel-- that the light has begun to change to that of another season.
-kmb

a complete recording of THE INEFFABLE FREEDOM OF CAPTURED LIGHT is available for listening or download here:

snow and steel

2011-02-15T08:14:00.001-05:00

Lap steel guitar improv on a snowy afternoon in February.
(Theme and structures from my composition, "Seeking Shadows, Holding Light.")
-kmb

Imbolc Transit (poem)

2011-02-02T11:23:00.008-05:00

Imbolc:
Transit
Arrival;

( Always
arrival and
further
transit)

Soft gray light on cold and
wintry morning

( Did I dream of Brigid last night?
that fiery arrow of a young goddess,
her energy and passion
sharp, to pierce dark clouds with longing?)

The strong-shadowed trees
cross like paths and
map contours alongside
the steep-sided,
snow-bearing
February hillside

Eastering sun
stirs sap
somewhere,
I do believe--

Yes--

A deep and silent

Somewhere.

-kmb

Winter Resonance

2011-01-29T14:05:00.023-05:00

WINTER RESONANCE- video paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown

Making paintings is, for me, a form of active meditation. This winter, finding my mornings devoted to the second draft of a new novel and the afternoon painting light gone by the time I get home from work, I have arrived by accident at a method to keep to my visual art meditations nonetheless.
One afternoon I got the urge to take some flip camera video of snowfall through a curtained window. After a while, I suddenly borrowed an inspiration from film maker Andrei Tarkovsky and began moving the curtain at various speeds while I shot. The video sequence itself was not all that compelling—but I found that isolating still frames revealed some interesting abstractions and motion-induced visual artifacts. So I began choosing frames that, as compositions, captured my interest, then I made simple adjustments in saturation and contrast—until the images began to resonate for me.
In subsequent days I’ve been shooting patterns of light on walls, floors, windows, snow, and trees, with the camera moving, and the light patterns moving also, at some point each day taking time to choose a frame and make an image.
I do miss the smell of paint and the feel of the brush on canvas or paper; but I’ll get back to them before long, when the light gets stronger. Meanwhile I’m enjoying these visual surprises and I am planning on re-animating them, with music to accompany, before winter is over.
-kmb

Ending 2010; 2011 Horizons

2010-12-27T11:12:00.018-05:00

(Mountains, Lake: Dusk- painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, acrylic on canvas)

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As I write this, a late December storm is swirling snow hard into dark pines and spruces, making a world of whites and grays in lines and layers.

The first thing I want to do here is offer my gratitude for all who have supported and shared in my explorations, expressions, and meditations in word, sound, and image!

2010 was a sometimes-challenging year for me; but it was also a year of deep engagement with my inner and outer worlds; of expansion and discovery. As ripple and result, I felt a turning point--a hinged door swinging open-- in late summer.
I had taken to visiting daily a certain place on and in the cold, clear Dog River, letting the peace and power of stone, sand, water, sky cover and fill me. One day I spent hours skimming the same blue shard of slate, recovering it from the river-bottom from under clear water, skimming it across surface tension again, finding it...and sometime during all this, in one rushing moment, I felt the truth of my situation and words came to me: "stepping into the river of gratitude." That river is cold with snow and ice now, all these months later, but the moment still moves, warm in my heart.

Thus it's probably somewhat fitting that my main work in music and art during 2010 would flow together in this video:

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As for the 2011 horizon, it seems that there might be a bevy of books approaching.
In the spring I plan to release a mystery novel called HIGHWAY IN THE BLOOD. It's set in Vermont in the 1970s, and features a strong component of vintage country music and steel guitar lore. I'm planning a book launch and reading with live performance on steel guitar and dobro. And in the fall, look for the third book in the Liam Dutra New England mystery series.
There's also a novel in manuscript--I'll be digging into further drafts with the new year. Right now I can barely remember anything about it, which is exactly where I want to be when I return my attention.
I hope you'll be around for some of this-- and, of course, whatever else might come along...

-kmb

Gray Day, But Something on the Horizon...

2010-11-23T14:42:00.005-05:00

NOVEMBER PASSAGE; HORIZON MEDITATION 2-- Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown, acrylic on canvas, November 23, 2010

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Today the monochromatic November sky inspired me to work mostly with the last of a tube of Payne's gray. As I worked on the first painting, NOVEMBER PASSAGE, I somehow began to think of Bartok. So I listened to the Viola Concerto while I made both pieces. In the second movement-- the "Adagio Religioso" --I always hear light breaking through, and that's what I wanted to paint.

-KMB

Day's Edge, Water's Edge

2010-10-26T06:10:00.003-04:00

QUIET WATERS 8, QUIET WATERS 7- Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown,

acrylic on canvas, October 2010

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Contemplative energies at two edges of the same day in the same place.

Places Water Seeks

2010-09-28T06:02:00.004-04:00

Lake Light, September Morning- painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2010
--------------------------------------------------------

Places Water Seeks

I

River and sky exchange
Intersticial gleamings and
striations of low-toned
light in September:

gray
to steel to
silver to
bronze

II

I am walking in the
shallows and
stalking a heron;
the heron is
stalking the shallows,
watching the water;

The morning is mostly bedraggled
but also
burnished

III

It’s like this at the places where water seeks
the level of flowing, fulfilling--

Such that EVERYTHING
else becomes the guide to its own

horizon

At the Dog River, it’s the
smoke-blue of White Rock Mountain
quiet and looming beyond the bend

At Lake Champlain, it’s those
strong, jagged ranges ringed hard all around

At Good Harbor, the Atlantic at Cape Ann,
it’s Dogtown’s high granite, yes--
but also the lucent gleamings,
twinned and soft-hazed, of
The towers of the Church of
Our Lady of Good
Voyage.

I am so often looking
up and over, into and
beyond the limit…

It is, after all,
water itself
that rises

To push at, then hold.
the entire sky
and more.

- Kevin Macneil Brown

Seeking Shadows, Holding Light: Music for the Fall Equinox

2010-09-23T06:10:00.005-04:00

Sept. 23, 2010

I step outside with coffee mug in hand at 5:32. Clouds riding low on morning horizon, but stars and Jupiter in clear sky above, and a bright satellite moving across from NW to SE. Cricket song hazes the warm air. There’s a band of light, rising pale and high, directly across from where the sun will soon appear.
Coffee half gone at 5:50. I go inside, sit down with my steel guitar, and begin to play, tuning my heart and thoughts toward autumn’s arrival. The music rises, its simple and somewhat stark harmonic motion conjuring for me the image of a web of slow, wide ripples—and also, somehow, the ghosts of British Renaissance church music living on in American mountain ballads.
I listen and play while the morning light arrives on the first full day of fall.

-kmb

<a href="http://kevinmacneilbrown.bandcamp.com/track/seeking-shadows-holding-light-music-for-the-fall-equinox">Seeking Shadows, Holding Light (Music for the Fall Equinox) by Kevin Macneil Brown</a>

Morning Shore, September Light

2010-09-01T05:59:00.003-04:00

North Shore Passage- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor and gouache on paper, 2010

August Ripening

2010-08-12T13:19:00.005-04:00

Horizon Meditation

2010-07-18T09:23:00.003-04:00

HORIZON MEDITATION 1- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2010)

trust the
symmetry until
something deeper
and more true
is revealed:

the pulsing shapes and
colors can-
not be defined
or explained but,
yes!
they are real.

vessels, structures,
openings, arrivals,
chroma, hues;
saturations of perception.

and all with breath
as solid as any
ancient stone,

vibrating,
infinitely
becoming.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Celebrating the Lush Light of Summer

2010-06-28T16:57:00.004-04:00

Toward the Harbor, Morning
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2010

------------------------------------------------------------------

This is an edited version of a performance at Bethany Church, in Montpelier, Vermont.
LISTENING TO LIGHT was presented from noon to one on June 21, 2010, as contemplative music in honor of the summer solstice and the longest day of the year.
Kevin Macneil Brown- lap steel guitar, guitar, composition, recording and mix.

Upcoming Event: Listening To Light

2010-06-16T14:32:00.010-04:00

LISTENING TO LIGHT

by Kevin Macneil Brown

Monday June 21, Noon to One

Bethany Church Working Chapel

Montpelier, Vermont

Free and open to the public

A live performance , in a sacred, meditative space , of contemplative music to honor the longest days of the year. Please come by to listen, contemplate, walk the labyrynth; Stay for a moment or an hour. Noon to One; free and open to the public.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Beginning with the Winter Solstice last year, I've had the honor of presenting contemplative multi-media events to mark the solar calendar, graciously hosted by Bethany Church in Montpelier, Vermont. It's long been a dream of mine to present my more meditative and ambient music in a sacred space; honoring the intent at the heart of this music: to share in sound a deep connection to nature, spirit, and the ineffable power of creative energy.

(I've also, variously, offered visual art and poetry to accompany the music. )

The idea I have for these events is that they unfold without any beginning or end other than their actual duration-- that is, people can come and go as they please, finding and taking as much or little as they need. I have also found that the contemplative attention that people bring, whether listening, meditating, praying, writing, drawing, walking the labyrynth--has a profound effect on the music--- this I find to be wonderful; surprising, exciting.

My thanks go to all who share this adventure with me. Much gratitude also goes to Mark Pitton, for the enthusiasm and commitment he has brought to this process!

-kmb

In Fathoms: Dreams and Soundings

2010-05-31T08:08:00.008-04:00

East Gloucester Liminal- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, 2009

-------------------------------------------------
Avoiding the wreck
that lay at 30 fathoms
we nonetheless stirred
something from the bottom.

Stranger and
darker than any old bones--
we could not say
what it was.

But between blue basin
and silver shoal water
our captain could
thread the needle;

Through fog now, to Brown’s Bank,
where we arrived by morning,
in time to set out new lines.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

<a href="http://kevinmacneilbrown.bandcamp.com/track/in-fathoms-dreams-and-soundings-part-one">in fathoms: dreams and soundings (part one) by Kevin Macneil Brown</a>

At Dawn

2010-05-08T12:11:00.008-04:00

Morning Beach

Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2010

------------------------------------------------

Rising
{sun}

pillar of
diffuse light
through

clouds, becoming
the point of
being
every

reach of
now.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Good Harbor Liminal

2010-04-21T06:49:00.011-04:00

LIMINAL, GOOD HARBOR BEACH--Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,

watercolor on paper, 2010)

... Across a tide,

racing to greet a shoreline,

welcome as first light.

-kmb

from NORTH COAST DREAMING:

http://www.lulu.com/product/paperback/luminist-diary-north-coast-dreaming/2499200

Every Journey Has a Soul

2010-04-07T19:38:00.003-04:00

EVERY JOURNEY HAS A SOUL- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic and maps on canvas board, 2007)

------------------------------------------------------

So grateful for a world
like this,

where, at 4:30 A.M., I can be
pulled from deep sleep by

the song of a bird
I’ve never heard before.

A stepwise song, with rising and
falling intervals like the summits of
soft and wooded hills;

a green and hollow April timbre,
round with yesterday’s rain,
and clean with today’s shimmer
of sun in the moving river.

So grateful for the way all this pulls me awake
and right into the journey,

this sound that leads the way...

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Good Harbor, Morning

2010-04-03T08:41:00.004-04:00

GOOD HARBOR, MORNING- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,

acrylic on canvas, 2010)

.... seaweed, kelp, and keen of gulls
where the liminal begins (can liminal have a beginning?)
and bells ride the wind and tide.
I might find, in any sky, that the light makes real the world...

-kmb

From LUMINIST DIARY:

http://www.lulu.com/content/2152993#detailsSection

Atmospheric Skip and AM Country Music Dreams

2010-03-22T21:27:00.013-04:00

<a href="http://kevinmacneilbrown.bandcamp.com/album/three-mile-bridge">County Road by Kevin Macneil Brown</a>

As I finish up recording and mixing THREE MILE BRIDGE-- an EP, I guess, not quite an album-- of my most recent country songs, I realize that I've never let go of an obsessive memory from my teenage years. It's that of late night/early morning radio, coming up on WWVA from Wheeling, West Virginia in the 1970s.
On Saturday nights I'd stay up all night, transistor radio under the pillow, to listen up close-- as close as I could, anyway, through all the static, the distance and drift. Live music with steel guitars and fiddles; singers, some well-known, others obscure; Coffee-and twang-fueled truck driving songs from the Jamboree.
I liked the voices, the stories; the sense of something timeless reaching through those late nights and early mornings; across the plains, up the Blue Ridge Mountains, or from who-knows-where; sounding in the gray-blue pre-dawn of my New Hampshire mountain home.
I can't let go of the yearning and joy those sounds brought to life inside me. So I keep coming back to my own imagination of them; in my own way. Most of these new songs are about places close to home here in Central Vermont.

Upcoming Event: Finding Light

2010-03-10T17:06:00.003-05:00

(Spring Sky From Shoreline- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2009)

Finding Light: Music, Word, and Image for Equinox Arrival
A meditative and contemplative celebration of Spring's arrival, with live ambient music, poetry, and images by Kevin Macneil Brown.

Saturday, March 20

Noon to One O' Clock

Bethany Church Working Chapel

Montpelier, Vermont

Free and open to the Public

After Snow, Looking North

2010-02-26T10:07:00.003-05:00

AFTER SNOW, LOOKING NORTH

Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, acrylic on canvas, 2010)

Late-winter Horizons: Poem and Painting.

2010-02-18T12:26:00.008-05:00

YOU ARE MY HORIZON III (detail) Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, acrylic on canvas, 2010)

--------------------------------

The angel arrived
having the mass
and volume and
hugeness of a mountain range,

While at the same
time the weight and shape and distance
of an entire cloud-massed sky,

and then
The shore-destroying beauty
of breaking
waves.

And the angel’s message,

silent, was:

Listen;

Wait;

And again,

-completely-

Listen.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Following Trails and Abandoned Highways: Some Notes About Writing the Liam Dutra New England Mystery Series

2010-02-01T13:37:00.014-05:00

My first novel, COMPASS,WATER, STONE AND TIME, began in my consciousness with the vague image of a lonely, whiskey-drinking trail runner who finds himself caught up in a solitary search for something lost in the woods of steep-sided Irish Hill in Berlin, Vermont. I’d been running regularly in the area, around Berlin Pond and up into those woods, exploring trails and an abandoned town road that I’d come to call “the ancient highway.”
Months later, the intersection of two events pushed a story to the fore.
First, a coyote on the trail ahead of me on the ancient highway actually led me to an old cellar hole. (It was covered then in brush; now, years later, I notice that the brush has been cleared, and the old Stewart farmhouse foundation has been exposed to the sky and to the eyes of visitors.)
Then, a boxful of VERMONT HISTORY magazines that I turned up at a library book sale offered a serendipity of articles: one chronicling the history and culture of the Irish in nearby Northfield, on the opposite slope of the hill; another offering an account of the Fenian Invasion of Canada in 1866.
A story and characters began to churn inside me. I got the first draft done over the course of a summer, sitting outside in the sunny mornings before work, writing in longhand with pencil or ballpoint pen in a bright orange surveyor’s field notebook that my mother had found at a yard sale in New Hampshire and sent to me.
Another vital inspiration at the heart of the book came from what I can only call The Muse; in this case, a vision of a dark-haired, dark-eyed, sweet-tough woman who somehow stirred my imagination to create Shawn Donahue, the woman who pulls protagonist Liam Dutra out of his loneliness and shares in his quest.
Liam’s real quest, his deepest yearning, is for connection--communion even-- with the landscape he lives in, including its hidden past. Shawn, I think, having grown up in this place that Liam has come to love, embodies that landscape: physically, culturally, even spiritually. In this, she turned out to be crucial to the story, crucial to Liam’s ongoing journey from solitude into engagement.
Subsequent drafts-- I was using the computer by now-- showed me how hard it could be to write a mystery novel. Changing one small aspect of a character or shifting one event slightly in time might cause a narrative to slide off its foundation and into a horrible abyss. There were some desperate times when I wanted to pull out my hair, rip up the pages, delete all the files; just quit...
But I kept going, thinking and stewing, scrawling notes to myself, shuffling the plot and character details I had notated on blue index cards. Things began to fall into place.
Writing the book within the book-- Neal Donahue’s 1866 journal-- came later, in the winter. It was mostly a pleasure, with Donahue’s voice often flowing clearly and without much effort onto the page. The historical research was enjoyable too; I still carry fond memories of old books, window-focused sunlight, and quiet investigations at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library.
First—and second, third, and fourth—readers kicked my butt in good ways, inspiring further changes and rewrites.
In hindsight, and with three more books in the series written now, I see COMPASS as a dark, dense, and sometimes lonely woodland of a book, with sunlight and water --and love-- offering redemption and hope. ( A few drafts in, I noticed the way some kind of water-- rain, stream, lake-- tended to be part of the scene whenever Shawn was around.)
Another thing I’d like to say is that in writing COMPASS I wanted to offer homage to the writers who inspired me: John D. MacDonald, James Lee Burke, Robert B. Parker, Raymond Chandler; Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau. But I also worked hard to find my own voice, and particularly, to honor the northern New England landscape and the way people live, and have lived, in and upon it.

The second book of the series, THE HAWK OF THE INTERVALE was much easier to write; indeed the first two drafts were often intense and instantaneous in the way they came to me. Sometimes I’d have multiple scenes and conversations unfolding simultaneously in my imagination while I was out on long autumn trail runs. I’d run home and feverishly write things exactly the way they had come to me. It was exhilarating beyond belief, and only slightly exhausting.
HAWK allowed me to discover more about Liam and Shawn’s characters, and to deepen their relationship. Virgil, the Abenaki fisherman and poet who is at the center of Liam’s quest, allowed my poetic side to speak freely. And the Gloucester part of the story was a very satisfying way to immerse myself in my own roots and some haunting childhood memories. The prologue, with Virgil presenting his testament in a dream, came from an actual dream I had; Liam’s meetings with Ferrigno echo actual experiences that I had as a teenager in Gloucester, tracing the steps of my hero, the poet Charles Olson.
While COMPASS lingers in my writer’s memory as a sometimes dark and shadowed book, thinking back on HAWK summons up for me a sense of spaciousness, of clear horizons. Even the manuscript itself seems lighter, with more blank space on the pages!

I’ll add my thoughts about the third book at another time.

-KMB

February: Mystery Series Author Event and a. minor's Arty Party

2010-01-25T09:34:00.013-05:00

It looks to be a fun and busy February!

First off, I'm excited to announce my upcoming author event/reading/ book-signing, Tuesday, February 16, 7 PM at Bear Pond Books in Montpelier, Vermont. I'll be celebrating the publication of my Liam Dutra Mystery series with readings from COMPASS,WATER,STONE AND TIME and the other books in the series. I'll also be talking about the process of writing fiction inspired by the power of place--landscape, culture, nature, history. I look forward to answering questions, too!

To visit Bear Pond Books on-line:

http://www.bearpondbooks.com/

--------------------------

Artist a. minor is presenting a party featuring her dynamic live video art at the Lamb Abbey in Montpelier, Vermont on Saturday, February 13 from 7-10 PM (FREE admission), and I will be providing quiet live ambient textural music to accompany the visuals.

a. minor's work, often inspired by the light and rhythm of ancient Mayan textiles, is a wonder to behold. I'm really looking forward to this event!

Here's more about the artist and event:

http://www.allbrightmoments.com/animation.html

---------------------
Also, my exhibit of acrylic paintings, LIMINAL HORIZONS, continues at THE SHOE HORN in Montpelier through February.

Thanks again for reading, looking, listening!

-kmb

Downloads Available Now

2010-01-03T22:07:00.005-05:00

I'm excited to announce that some of my long-form ambient compositions are now available for purchase as loss-less downloads.

<a href="http://kevinmacneilbrown.bandcamp.com/track/first-light-on-dark-waters">First Light on Dark Waters by Kevin Macneil Brown</a>

<a href="http://kevinmacneilbrown.bandcamp.com/track/three-shoreline-transformations">Three Shoreline Transformations by Kevin Macneil Brown</a>

Ending 2009

2009-12-23T10:59:00.005-05:00

(Winter Mountain and Lake-- painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2009)

--------------------------------------------------

In ancient Greek myth, the Halcyon Days were those surrounding the winter solstice: a period when calm seas allowed the island-dwelling kingfisher to lay her eggs; a period of quiet and well-being, a time for contemplation of new possibilities.

While we might not always experience that sense of calm at this time of year, I would like to summon a bit of it for just a moment while I offer my deep thanks to all of you have looked at, read, and listened to my work this year; who have come to shows, readings, performances, exhibits; who have purchased books or art; have supported me in other ways too many to detail. You have helped me to have an exciting 2009! Again, my deepest thanks to all of you.

I've some interesting things on the horizon for early 2010, including another art exhibit, an author event for my series of New England mystery novels, and a run of Fridays with Rusty Romance at Langdon Street Cafe here in Montpelier, Vermont.

Until then, happy holidays and a great new year to all!

Solstice Horizons

2009-12-16T10:08:00.002-05:00

SOLSTICE HORIZONS

A meditative space with live music and images
to contemplate and welcome the returning light
at the winter solstice

Monday, December 21
12 Noon to 1 PM

Bethany Church’s Working Chapel
Montpelier, Vermont

Free and open to the public

----------------------------------------
At the winter solstice we mark the return of —in the outer world of sky, stars, planets — the sun’s light in a dark season. We might also find, in any time, at any moment, the experience of returning light within ourselves.

These sounds, images, and words are offered as a quiet meditation upon that returning light, within us and without. Please feel free to listen, to look; to close your eyes and follow your own thoughts and images as they rise and fall, come and go.

While this event has a beginning and ending in time, it is also meant to be complete in any moment or section, to be experienced quietly within your own frame of time and attention.

-KMB

New Music from 2009 Available on CD-R

2009-12-11T14:38:00.017-05:00

FIRST LIGHT ON DARK WATERS (New Music for Steel Guitar)

Also Available:
MORNING LAKE REFLECTING SKY

My two long, ambient/ textural works for 2009 are available on audio CD-R via mail order now. The discs are 10 dollars each, plus 2.50 for shipping. (If you buy both, I'll throw in a surprise bonus!)

Morning Light and Water, Ogunquit, Maine

2009-12-09T10:15:00.007-05:00

(November Morning, Ogunquit- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor and graphite on paper, 2009)

-------------------------
Another one inspired by a long walk on the beach in Maine two days after Thanksgiving,

Ogunquit, Late November

2009-12-02T13:55:00.003-05:00

(Ogunquit, Late November-
painting by Kevin Macneil Brown.
watercolor and graphite on paper, 2009]
------------------------------------

I made this painting in the days following a long walk on the beach at Ogunquit. I was inspired by the low light on water and the ever-changing skies of a late autumn morning on the Maine coast.

Between Waters Exhibition Continues Through December, 2009

2009-11-22T11:41:00.003-05:00

My exhibition of Lake Champlain paintings will continue through December, upstairs at the Kellogg-Hubbard Library in Montpelier, Vermont.

Just Before Winter (Monoprint Series)

2009-11-15T10:53:00.011-05:00

Summoning
---------------------------------------

Rising

----------------------------------------------------

Migration

----------------------------------------------

Beneath the Idea of Home

-------------------------------------------------

(Monoprints by Kevin Macneil Brown, gouache on paper, 2009)

These four prints were made in a single morning, using abandoned gouache, water, and scrap papers. Images were made by manually overlaying and pressing paint and papers in various ways.

Although this occurred on a morning in spring, the images immediately told me a story about late fall; I named each piece as quickly as I made it.

-kmb

Between Waters Live

2009-10-26T07:15:00.012-04:00

(October Beach 1- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, 2009)

On Monday, November 9, at 7 pm in the Hayes Room at the Kellogg Hubbard Library in Montpelier, Vermont, I'll be presenting a program entitled BETWEEN WATERS: LAKE CHAMPLAIN MEDITATIONS AND INSPIRATIONS.

This will be an evening combining readings of my poetry and prose with live creation/ performance of ambient music, and a showing of visual art. The works presented in BETWEEN WATERS, inspired by the lake, explore natural and cultural history, evoking power of place and the transformational energies of nature, time, and landscape.

Concurrent with this event, my Lake Champlain paintings will be on exhibit at the library throughout November and December.

---------------------------------------------------

This past summer I had the chance to share my love for Lake Champlain in a video interview with Bridget Butler of Voices For The Lake at the Echo Lake Aquarium. Voices For The Lake is finding interesting and innovative ways to foster stewardship of the lake, honoring a mission to "Connect, Share, Affect." Here's their blog:

http://voicesblog.echovermont.org/

-----------------------------------------------------

September and October/ Harvest Report

2009-09-29T08:03:00.007-04:00

(September, October- Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas board, 2007}

SEPTEMBER , OCTOBER

*
Long journey
Energy gathering
Small birds calling.

*
The rose that waits
to bloom until
after leaves have fallen.

- Kevin Macneil Brown

9/24/09

-------------------------------------------------------

HARVEST REPORT

Arriving at the season of falling leaves, colder air, and opening views, I can't stop thinking about my trip to Chickering Bog a few days ago. I rode my bike up into the hills on a perfect blue sky day. Along the way I was treated to the sight of a hunting harrier in September sun. For a good ten minutes I watched her low flight over pond, sedges, cornfield-- stealth maneuvers and random patterns-- the clear light of sky and water shining on her buff, white, and gray feathers. Later, I stashed the bike in the woods, and ran along mossy trails in pine-filtered light to the bog-- a fen actually: a small stretch of ancient open water surrounded -- and eventually to be covered by-- sedges and vegetation mat; the glug-glug of those waters and the hammering of a woodpecker the only nearby and discernible sounds.

As for my harvest, I'm excited to announce the publication of my mystery novel COMPASS, WATER,STONE AND TIME. It's the first of 5 novels I've written. The story was inspired by one place in particular, the old roads and trails of Irish Hill--running and exploring in those woods and meadows set my imagination in motion. You can sample-- and purchase-- the book here:

http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/compass-water-stone-and-time/7648423

I've also recently finished a long ambient soundwork that I composed all through the spring and summer of 2009.You can listen to it and read about it by going to the post just previous to this one. (It's available on CD in a limited edition version with a selection of prints; to purchase a copy, contact liminaleditions@gmail.com).

Now, looking forward to further adventures, along with cider donuts, snow geese, and the silver light of autumn sky and water.....

Soundwork: Morning Lake Reflecting Sky

2009-09-14T08:38:00.005-04:00

Morning Lake Reflecting Sky ( Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,

acrylic on canvas, 2009)

Going to Lake Champlain in the contemplative quiet of early morning, I have found that water and sky give off a compelling sense of power and mystery. Fog, breaking and changing sunlight; the muffled sounds of birds, waves, oars, and distant boat engines all add to the softly resonant soundscape, shorescape, skyscape.
Over the spring and summer of 2009 I made this long soundwork to evoke for myself and others the moods and feelings I’ve found in contemplating the morning lake.
This piece is designed to move very slowly; to vibrate in subtle ways and conjure the sounds, sights, and textures of a time and place where water, light, listening, and perception might come quietly together.

-KMB

Two Tides ( a short story)

2009-08-09T16:44:00.005-04:00

(Stony Cove- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper)

TWO TIDES

by Kevin Macneil Brown

Try to see the town the way a shorebird in migration might: the patchwork of gold and silver fields in late September, the wooded ridges still mostly green, but going brown and red in places. In the morning there might be a moving wall of mist, white and rising, filling the space between two rivers: the Big River and the Little Creek River.
Both of those tributaries meet in the shallow bay: a quiet harbor with a few boats rocking in the sparkle of pale sun, on the rippling and shivering skin of cold blue-green water.
You might be flying too high to smell the smoke rising from the few clapboard or shingled houses, from their woodstoves and oil furnaces; too far up to notice the salt and sulfur and fish smells that mingle with the breath of the pines in cold air.
If you are that migrating bird, you are southing and gone in no time at all, the small town below left quickly behind.

***
The gnarled and ancient, shriveled and fruitless Seek- no-Further apple tree, thinks Peter Coombes to himself, is a sure marker of habitation long past; a sign that this would be, if one believed such things were possible, a forest of ghosts and memories; the withered tree is likely evidence of a long-abandoned backyard orchard.
And there, sure enough, a few yards into the birch and hemlock thicket, is the cellar hole, the scatter of field-gathered granite.
Peter has not taken this trail across the ridge before. It’s perhaps the last un-explored trail left in town for him.
Today being the River Festival, and he being the new High School biology teacher, he’s expected to help out with the river clean-up, even march in the river parade. He’s trying this new (new to him, anyway: the trail is well-trodden and littered with beer cans) shortcut down to the town.
His boots, shining, swabbed just last night with a mink oil waterproofing, squeak a little as he walks.
The woods are thick here, and quiet. He almost jumps out of his skin when a grouse explodes across the trail and flies with unbelievable speed and agility into woods that are dark, even on this bright September morning.
The trail dips down into a hollow. Peter hears a dog bark. Rounding a corner, he sees a clearing: somebody’s backyard, he thinks. There are piles of weathered wood, scattered lumps of rusting metal, a few green plastic garbage bags piled neatly beneath a poplar tree at the yard’s far corner. There’s an old aluminum trailer up on cinder blocks. Peter feels a little bit nervous to be on private property, though the land’s not posted, at least not that he’s seen so far. The dog’s still barking, but Peter is relieved when he determines by the sound that the insistent beast is inside the trailer.
A curl of dark and slightly toxic-smelling smoke rises from a metal chimney attached to the trailer. Peter Coombes walks faster. He leaves the clearing behind and is soon back in deep woods.

***
Tom Mason is drinking early again. Not too much; just enough to take the edge off his world. He doesn’t know for sure if it’s the coffee or the whiskey that’s warming him so nicely. The cabin-- the log cabin he built with his own hands twenty years ago- -feels tight and snug. It’s already getting chilly up here in the grove above Big River, but he knows what to expect: he’s got all his wood in for the winter.
He stands in just his jeans in front of the bathroom mirror. He’s gotten alarmingly thin, though he recognizes that his hard woodsman’s muscles are still there, despite how little he’s been eating.
I’m still young, he thinks; no gray to be found in hair or beard. Christ, I’m only forty, he say’s aloud.
He goes into the pine-paneled kitchen again, pours himself another cup of coffee. This time he doesn’t add whiskey; just drinks it black. He finds some bitter grounds in his mouth, chews them with pleasure.
It’s a little contrary, he figures, what with winter coming; but he decides that today is the day to shave off his beard.

***

The fog has lifted now; the waters at the wide mouth of Little Creek are dancing with sun-shimmer, even as the outgoing tide takes those waters temporarily away.
Jody Asmussen ties her long blond hair back behind her wide athlete’s shoulders. No soccer games to coach today: the River Festival is too big a deal to garner any competition on this last Saturday in September. The kids and their parents are already starting to gather at the boat-launch and along the old stone jetty. A few people are out on the creek in canoes and brightly-colored kayaks.
Jody slips into rubber hip-boots, dons heavy canvas-and-leather work gloves. When the tide has gone out there will be a couple hours of hard work, pulling tires and engine blocks and abandoned bikes and who knows what from the river. Then, after noon, there will be the parade; the kids in pirate and fish and lobster costumes; the high school marching band trying pitifully to play some recent top 40 radio song.
Jody smiles. Every year it’s the same: fried dough, face-painting, the artist who comes up from Portland every year to help everyone make sculptures from the rusted junk they pull out of river. Jody is amazed that there’s always more scrap, more tires, more rusted metal to be found every year.
People are gathering now, kids are shouting and laughing. Someone turns a car stereo up really loud. The tide is almost out.

***

Clyde Robey sips some of last night’s coffee cold from a styrofoam cup. He’s wearing fresh, clean Dickies: green drip-drys and a matching shirt. His beagle Dale starts barking all of a sudden. Clyde ditches the crappy coffee in his sink, looks out the little kitchen porthole of the trailer. There’s a guy walking by. Looks like a tourist, all dressed up in new LL Bean clothes. A hike and bike type, Clyde figures. Probably headed down to that river festival. The guy passes by; no harm done. Still, Clyde says to Dale, he probably ought to be a little more careful once buck season starts.
No more damn coffee in the house. Clyde heads out the trailer door, whistles for Dale. Tail wagging, the beagle runs out after him. Clyde opens the passenger-side door and the dog, despite short legs, leaps up and in.
Clyde Robey smiles, reaches up to the bed of the pick-up, absent-mindedly pats with his right hand the load beneath the tattered blue tarp. He gets up into the cab, starts the engine, pulls down the long dirt drive to the town road.

***

Peter Coombes says hello to the tall, thin man he passes on the trail. The man is wearing jeans and a thick sweater. He’s carrying a tattered, olive green army rucksack. He looks straight at Peter, but says nothing. Peter sees that the man’s blue eyes are strangely bright and clear beneath his dark hair and brows. There are some fresh nicks on his face, as if from a slightly botched shave.
Peter Coombes watches the tall, silent man walk off the trail, toward a rocky rise in the topography.
Peter wonders if he himself might have taken a wrong turn; is this still the way to town?

***

Jean Latourneau; God what a babe, Clyde thinks, as he smiles into those dark eyes. Jean serves him his hot coffee. She knows just how much cream and sugar he likes, and she always smiles back at him, too. She’s kind of skinny, that’s true. But she’s awful nice. So I’m 30, she’s maybe 23. Big deal. Clyde knows he’s just about ready to ask her out some time.
But he always chickens out. That’s the only way to describe it.
Clyde heads out to his truck, where Dale the dog is eagerly waiting. “Let’s you and me go check out the river thing,” Clyde says to Dale.
He heads the truck downtown, finds just about the last empty slot in the lot above the boat-launch. Definitely a party going on. He turns on the truck radio, the country station, sips his sweet, hot coffee, watches the goings- on.
He registers a few of the hippie women in town; a little thick-bodied, some of them are now; he remembers some of the same women from when he was a kid. Back then they were younger, of course; kind of hot and sexy in their tight tops and cut-off jeans, their long flowing hair.
They still wear the same kind of clothes now, still have the long hair, the face paint and glitter for special occasions like this one. But they’re definitely older; and it’s their daughters that are starting to look like they did back then.
Clyde figures he must be getting old, too.

***

Tom Mason climbs up from the woods to the rocks. He hasn’t been up here for quite a while. He knows he’s been avoiding people. He knows too, that, since the storm, he’s been avoiding any sight of the sea.
At first he drank in town, at Caswell’s Inn...But he got tired of talking about her.
Tired of telling friends and strangers alike about the October night she didn’t come back.
She was so at home, out on the water, he thinks, Jenn Marie Sawyer. So at home on the water. So I guess she’s home now.
Tom is breathing hard when he crests the ridge. His breath catches when he looks down from the rocks; at Little Creek in low tide trickle; the town and harbor, beyond them the blue-green Gulf of Maine.
There’s something big going on in town today. It’s the river festival, he realizes, a little shocked at how quickly he’s gotten out of touch with the community and its events. He takes a deep breath, sits with his back to sun-warmed granite, takes from his rucksack a pair of binoculars.

***

The tide is coming in. Little Creek is rising again by the time Peter Coombes finds his way to town. How he got so turned around, he doesn’t know. He’s managed to completely miss the river cleanup, but the parade is just now forming at the top of Water Street.
He hurries toward all the activity, past the hissing acetylene torch and bright sparks of the masked sculptor wrapping up his junk-art project.
He sees a flash of yellow hair, the unmistakable and statuesque form of Jody, the soccer coach. He walks toward her, toward the ranks of the assembling parade.

***

Clyde wants to get out of town before the parade closes the street. He starts the truck, heads away from town on the Town Road. He’s in the mood to drive. It’s a nice day. Gretchen's on the radio. He rolls down the window to let the fast-warming air in to the cab. Dale sticks his face out the window, panting happily; Clyde pats him, smiles.
The truck moves up the road along the creek. Clyde thinks to himself how much nicer the creek looks now, with the tide coming in, the water rising and covering the rickety old wooden pilings and the dark, muddy flats.
There’s herons and egrets standing in the shallows, mackerel clouds moving in from the southeast. It’s a beautiful day. A great afternoon for a drive.

***

Tom Mason realizes he’s been sitting against this sun-warmed rock all day.
He’s amazed at himself: it’s been almost a year, but he knows he can do it now; he can make himself look at the sea.
He scans the sky, the shore with his binoculars. There had been a parade earlier. He’d watched that for a while; then he’d watched the entire day pass from up here.
He’s seen the tide rising to its high water mark in late afternoon; the long, bent shadows cast onto the pebbly boat-beach by mast and bare spar.
It’s almost bearable now, he thinks. But then he sweeps the binoculars down toward the town, and what he sees nearly tears him apart from inside: it’s a tall blonde woman and a young, handsome man, talking, holding hands; the man is the same one he’d passed on the trail in the woods this morning. Something shudders inside him; a feeling, a memory: Jenn Marie Sawyer, as strong and tall as he was. He remembers the smell of her in bed. Sometimes, when she was just off the water, she smelled like sun and salt and seaweed and soap. And he himself, she’d told him, smelled of cold air and spruce.
They had loved each other soul to soul; muscle to muscle; deep woods to open water.
Sobbing now, bringing down the binoculars from his eyes, Tom Mason remembers the storm, the boat that has never returned.
He remembers the yearning soul he was sure he had seen just a few days later, staring at him through the dark and limpid eyes of a seal out in the harbor. He would never, he’d promised himself that day, go near the water again.
Slowly but timelessly the shadows of the headland where Tom is resting reach out over the water.
And somehow now, he knows he will rise and shave his face again tomorrow; that he’ll come back here and look out at the sea every day, for however long it takes.

***

Just about dark now. Clyde’s been driving around all day. Now he’s headed back toward town. Clyde pulls the truck up to the turn- in at North Cove. Nobody ever comes here, this far up the creek. He opens the door. A styrofoam cup falls out onto the ground. Clyde crushes it with his feet; it makes a satisfying crunch in the quiet evening.
After a minute or so he begins to hear the soft lapping of the Little Creek waters. He goes to the back of the truck, pulls off the tarp. The bed is full of rusted metal: car parts, junk that’s beyond recognition.
Feeling quite satisfied, sweating with effort in the falling darkness, he casts the useless metal objects one by one into the tidal river. As much to himself as to the Dale the beagle, he says, “It’ll be fun, won’t it, to see just what the hell the hippies might make out of all this stuff next year.”

From the Cut: Poem for my Mother, Painting for my Father

2009-07-14T07:10:00.010-04:00

(Moment in Time, Gloucester, Massachusetts-
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2009)

FROM THE CUT, GLOUCESTER HARBOR

He had heard, outside the harbor
The singing, unseen, of
The men at the oars;
That deep rumbling song
So hard to discern from
The sound of the
Far waves that, finally,
Called him.

Whether that singing
Was the sound of flesh and blood men
Hidden by fog, or
Was carried by ghosts
Across time and water,
He neither knew nor cared.

That was back when
This place--Cape Ann--was
Truly an island;
After Reverend Blynman’s canal-cut
Was made so that Annisquam
Could mingle
Her waters with the Atlantic;

Before Andrews’ tall bridge
Brought Sunday drivers
Across from the mainland west.

My mother remembers, at least
In part, those times,

When in summer the whitecaps
And sails on blue-green water might
Rise to meet the uncountable gray-white
Wings of gulls in the hazy sky;

Or in winter the
Cold black crows
Cast shadows on —even colder— the
Rocks scattered all over the
Bare, sparse, Dogtown heights.

Now all this, I
Know, has changed
But has also remained the same

And that sea that had called him
To its heart
has given up in his memory
For us to hold, for now,

At the very least,
Sea glass.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

-----------------------------

I can thank my parents, Patricia Macneil and Norman Brown, both of Gloucester, Massachusetts, for my deep and abiding love for the power of place.

The first place by far-- and one rich in legend, myth, history, art, land and seascape--was Gloucester, of course. But growing up I learned from both my parents to keep my eyes and heart engaged with every place we lived over the years: to seek and find signs of the ancient and timeless alike.

The poem was written while I ran on wooded trails in Vermont, the words rising as a memory of stories and mysteries my mother has talked about.

As for the painting: My father always talked about childhood memories of climbing a certain hill above the harbor, of sitting alone watching boats leave the harbor and feeling a sense of transcendence. He called these experiences "moments in time", echoing, perhaps, Wordsworth.
( After his death, I climbed that hill with my mother and sisters to scatter some of his ashes--it was a place of granite and grass and pear trees above the silver-gray harbor.)
Immediately after finishing the painting I knew without doubt that it was for my father. It was only a bit later that I remembered I'd started it on Father's Day.

Birdsong Maps, Cow Pond, and Bartok's Echo

2009-07-02T07:01:00.019-04:00

( Pond and Trees-- painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2008)

Mapped in these morning woods,
elevation-contours in birdsong:

Liquid and elegant, wood thrush and veery at
300 to 500 feet on
sun-dappled eastern slopes.

At 700 to 1,000 feet
the longer song of
hermit thrush
in the cooler, darker sugarbush
of the shadowed
western ridge and just below.

And here’s an old stone wall
--once tight-stacked, now hollow
and in motion--
tracing the edges
of ancient, overgrown pasture.

--But whose
cathedral spine

these rising stands of

strong white spruce,

spacious
white pine?

-Kevin Macneil Brown

--------------------------------------

The poem above began in my head last week while I was running on the old roads and trails of Irish Hill. I was searching for a place called Cow Pond, where, according to Agatha Fasetts's book THE NAKED FACE OF GENIUS, the composer Bela Bartok had once picnicked. Bartok spent a summer nearby this hill, at Fasset's house near Riverton. I've done some research and so far I've found no evidence pointing to where Cow Pond is --or was--located. But local history shows that this hill and ridge-- now fully forested-- were used as summer pasture even into the early 20th century. Taking that as a possible clue, my mission last week was to visit two small ponds shown on the topo map. Alas, dense summer undergrowth and my own lack of time hampered the effort. It was a great run nonetheless. I'll go back and continue the quest, probably in the fall.

Here's a short story I wrote a few years ago, inspired by Bartok's Vermont visit:

BARTOK'S ECHO

By Kevin Macneil Brown

(Originally published in BOOKPRESS, in 2001)

I am a maker of sounds, but lately those sounds have gone silent for me, and I am haunted only by images. The clearest of those images is before my eyes now, outside the open window: in the late summer green of this place called Vermont, in America, one tree has begun to turn red beneath blue sky, under shining sun. Here, the air is hot and dry by day, clear and chill at night. In the mornings, a damp, cold fog rises up from the little river lined with railroad tracks in the valley below. By noon, the fog lifts, and I can see far beyond this strange tree, to lines of distant mountains. Blue-grey and stony, they rise above the green slopes where the sun sets.
The other images are fading quickly, which is a fine thing for that of the view from the ship that brought me here. I do not wish to always remember that grey Atlantic, Godless, cold and endless, that stretched before me as I stood on the deck. Unfortunately, I suspect that I will always be remembered that way, as I was photographed, gazing out across the rails of the ship——a man leaving his home in fear, pride, anger, sorrow, driven away by the realities of a barbarian invasion. As we turned toward the fortieth year of our century, a mechanical horror descended upon my country and the rest of Europe; inhuman men destroyed humanity with hatred and terror.
Ah, but the image of home——not cold, not grey, not hard and stony, but my sweet, sweet Hungary! Flowers, wet earth, small cobbled streets rich with people, songs, the smells of cooking...my heart breaks to think of it on this hot day of silent trees. At home, there were birds singing in every tree. Here in Vermont, in August, there is only the harshness of crows across the sky. No wonder I feel this terrible silence from inside.
Perhaps I mentioned that I am a man of music. In my youth, I studied the great composers of our European music, and mastered the masters, if I dare say so myself. After this, my ears opened to the folk songs and dances of my homeland. I have such sweet memories of my youthful wanderings, alone or with my dear friend Kodaly, sleeping in the country, collecting songs like a bird watcher collects glimpses. Such hard work, with such flashes of joy! Later, I did the same in northern Africa. My ears opened to a universe of sound——all music became like the physicist’s atoms of energy and meaning. Every atom vibrated in my whole being. I cannot bear to think that all this can be reduced to the ashes of human beings destroyed in war, or, for that matter, to the view of a bare granite mountain top visited only by the cackling shadows of crows.
Perhaps it is my constant tiredness that brings these thoughts——my exhausted, fevered energy as I walk the country roads here, or pace the dark wood rooms of gracious Agathe’s cool, comfortable summer home. My dear Ditta does all she can to lift my spirits: the walks, picnics, reading out loud in the evenings. Thanks to her I can still laugh, still smile. But, secretly, I am crushed by this silence. It is a silence not of the world, but of myself. Though I wander the hills each day, I fear I am drying up like those red leaves on the tree, as if the blood of my heart is showing on the outside.
But today, something strange and wonderful happened, and I write this in the hope that I can shed light on this dark thing inside me, this shadow that I fear grows larger each day.
This morning, after the usual fog had lifted and we had breakfasted, I played piano (working through some Bach) then set out to catalog some pieces from my huge trunk of manuscripts——local songs, brought from home. There are so many regional styles, and my intent is to organize and sort them. It is, of course, a large task, one that makes me tired just to think about. As I sat at the rough-hewn, crowded table that serves as my desk here, I heard Ditta and Agathe’s voices outside, laughing like schoolgirls.
"Bartók Béla!" Ditta called, "Come out here. There is something we must show you!" I was only too glad to be interrupted, and went outside to join them. Still giggling, in a chaos of English and Hungarian, they led me out into a sun so bright it hurt my eyes. It took me a brief while to figure out that it was a sound they wanted me to hear that was causing all the excitement. We walked a short way up the steep dirt road above Agathe’s house to a small, overgrown clearing by the side of the road. In the clearing stood an old wooden barn, broken down, letting blue sky show through where the boards were missing. As we approached it, Ditta clapped and shouted; I heard a quite striking echo——first, distinctly from the barn’s side, then two more repeats, softer and more distant, from the hills around us.
"Béla," said Ditta, breaking into my concentration of listening, "Isn’t it a lovely echo? Like the one at home in Tihany..." In a flash, I remembered a place in Hungary: hillside, stream and cataract. With the memory came an echo of laughter from years ago. "I must listen again. It does not seem to be as strong an echo as the one in Tihany," I said, and began to clap and shout myself. I listened for the sound’s return, shouted again, stopped to listen. Then, the strange thing happened. I stopped listening and the words flew out of me, all in Hungarian: "Tree, rock, stone, sound, music, echo, song, bird, Ditta, Bartók Béla, echo, Tihany, Tihany!" I shouted loudly and for a long time, stopped as the circling echo spun around my head and Ditta and Agathe stood silently watching me. It was like an exertion, this shouting. My shirt was damp with perspiration, and I was a little out of breath.
The three of us walked down the hill together, and I was grateful for the help of gravity to bring me back to the house. To Ditta and Agathe I said, "It is not as good... not as good an echo as the one in Tihany at all." But this afternoon, as I sit at my table and work, that echo crowds out the rote of black notes on the musical staves and begins to replace the grey ocean, even the brittle red leaves of the tree outside my window. The scientists say an atom never stops moving. In autumn, when all the leaves have fallen from the trees and have made a thin mulch on this hard land, I should like to imagine that restless echo under it all, waiting to be heard.
——

And a composition for guitar and looping devices, made around the same time as the story:

http://search.jukeboxalive.com/player/player.php?sid=2239133&method=play

Running Through History and Memory in Gloucester, Massachusetts

2009-06-22T06:48:00.007-04:00

(Homage to Fitz Henry Lane, painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, 2009)

RUNNING THROUGH HISTORY AND MEMORY IN GLOUCESTER, MASSACHUSETTS.

By Kevin Macneil Brown

(This piece appeared, in slightly different form, in NEW ENGLAND RUNNER magazine.)

Some dreams actually hurt. For example, there’s the recurring one where I’m running on the beach. It’s a beach from my childhood summers in Gloucester, Massachusetts; a beach that, in my memory, shines as an image of alluring mystery; of joy and discovery: Good Harbor Beach. There’s a long, gently curving stretch of pale sand; a scatter of rocky islands that seem to float on an incoming tide; the twin lighthouses of Thacher’s reef rising from the waves to the northeast.
In my dream, I head out for a run from my home in the Vermont mountains; a run through woods or meadow or brick-built downtown. Then I turn a corner and my heart takes a leap of joy inside me: I’m all of a sudden on Good Harbor beach. The sense of happiness, of being truly “home”, is vivid, even through the filter of dreaming.
And that sense still lingers when I awaken to realize that it was only a dream, that Good Harbor Beach is nearly two-hundred miles away; that in reality I won’t turn a corner and find myself there when I head out for a run today.
So maybe it’s not exactly the dream that hurts. It’s the waking up.

I began running for fitness at the age of fifteen. That was over thirty years ago, and, as might be expected, my running has changed, just as I have, over the years. From fitness training, through road racing, to long endurance and exploration runs on wooded trails, my running has evolved into a moving meditation, a way to connect with my deeper self, and with the history and geography of the world I run through. Often when I run, my head and heart and energy systems seem to work together better than they do at any other time in my day.
A few years ago, after a four-month period of particularly intense effort in my life, I decided to give myself the gift of a return--to run-- to Gloucester. I had no agenda other than to run on the beach, to look at the Atlantic, maybe take some time to peruse the canvases of New England marine painter Fitz Henry Lane on display at the Cape Ann Historical Museum. Knowing full well of Gloucester’s fabled past as America’s premier fishing port, I had a pretty good idea that by running in Gloucester I would once again be running through history and geography.
What caught me by surprise, though, was that, for the first time, the geography and history I ran through and into would be my own.

So now here I was. This was not a dream; it was really happening. I ran along the sidewalk beside a strip mall and road busy with Friday night traffic. I turned a corner, and there it was: whitecapped blue water on the horizon, long, pale sands in the sun. Now, faced in a waking state with the reality of Good Harbor Beach, I could feel the full force of the yearning for this place, a yearning I had for so long carried inside me.
I flew over the wooden walkway over the dunes, onto the sands, where just a few off-season walkers and kite-fliers moved, with plenty of distance between them. And I ran, feasting my senses, for more than an hour: loops and circles, up and down, on the pale, heavy sands above tide-line, the hard-packed and sandpiper- tracked sands at water’s edge.
The water grew silver and the sky pale gray after sunset, and I ran back to my motel. A white egret flashed by me in the roadside salt marsh. I knew I’d sleep well tonight.

The city of Gloucester is about the sea; about fishing; about the perfect harbor that Samuel Champlain called Beau Port when first he saw it in 1606; the same perfect harbor and headlands where English adventurers from the Dorchester Company laid out fish racks to dry their catch in 1623; the same perfect harbor that Lane painted over and over in the 1800s as a harbor full of working ships and boats beneath a huge, luminous sky.
Not far from the harbor was the place on East Gloucester square where my grandfather, Johhny Brown, worked in a little grocery store in the 1950s and 60s, selling canned goods and boxed cereal and fresh clams and linguica sausage and golden Portuguese sweetbread to fishermen and their families. Just a long stones-throw away were the wharves and piers where he’d take me walking, and we’d look at boats-- draggers and seiners and schooners and swordfish boats-- in the crowded harbor.
Back then the harbor had plenty of stories. Anybody in Gloucester’s Portuguese community in those days could tell you about Smoky Joe Mesquita, an Azorean-born schooner captain legendary for his uncanny, almost supernatural, ability to find fish. He was also legendary for his bravery and generosity: having brought all but one of his crew back from sea alive in a terrifying November storm in 1898, he wore the crown of honor at the Church Our Lady of Good Voyage, offered grateful prayers to his patron saint, and gave bread to the poor of the city.
My grandfather had told me the story of Gloucester fisherman Howard Blackburn, who, lost in his dory on the foggy, wintry Grand Banks off Newfoundland, with the frozen corpse of his dory mate beside him, rowed for days through ice and snow with his hands frozen to the oars--his fingers fell off later. Blackburn became a local hero, and went on, years later, to cross the Atlantic alone in a twenty-five foot sloop.
As I set out early, breaking into my stride for a long morning run, these stories returned to my memory, filling my mind with a slightly different perspective on what we runners call endurance.
It was a perfect clear May morning with a splash of silver sunlight across the blue ocean, the air already warm at six AM as I ran along the back shore at Bass Rocks, where waves broke, with infinite variety and energy, in white foam against the dark rocks below. I followed the road as it curved inland through a neighborhood of fine old homes and cool, dark patches of shade, then arrived again at waterside in East Gloucester, a crowded but appealing village defined by its boatyards and docks. An amazing profusion of vessels of all shapes and sizes, in all states of rigging, repair or dis-repair, filled the narrow harbor here, and scumbled, inverted images of mast and keel and bowsprit reflected back from the water, broken and shimmering in the pale morning light.
That same morning light filled East Gloucester Square, where, as if caught up in a deja vu, I recognized the shape of the storefronted building where my grandfather had worked.
It was already hot and humid as I took some hilly detours on the streets nearby. I was sweating, and my skin felt to me extra salty in the saturated, maritime air. Here was the street where my father had grown up; a while later, I reached the head of the harbor, with its long view of the fishing fleet and the fish- processing factories along the pier. Every place I ran seemed strangely familiar this morning; I realized that my memories were running alongside me.

After shower and coffee, I spent a little more time on my feet, taking in the Fitz Henry Lane paintings on permanent display at the Cape Ann Historical Museum. To my eyes it seemed that, despite the passage of a century and a half and the urbanization this city and its waterfront, Lane’s perspective of water and boats beneath a massive sky still held true: the suffusing maritime light that Lane captured so well had not changed at all.
There were more treasures to be found at the museum: the actual crown that Smokey Joe Mesquita had worn in 1898; the sloop GREAT REPUBLIC that Howard Blackburn had sailed single-handed across the Atlantic in 1901. .
But now I needed sustenance, and my legs needed rest. I settled down with a west- ender sandwich from Virgilio’s Bakery: rosemary-scented prosciutto ham with provolone cheese, red peppers, and herbed olive oil on a sesame-coated scala roll, crusty on the outside and chewy inside. For good measure, I threw in a hand-made cannoli, scattered with chocolate pieces. After all, I did have more running to do, and I’d need plenty of fuel.

The next morning, an intense symphony of bird song rose from salt marsh and scrubby woods and pulled me awake just before the sunrise. Without thought, I put on my shorts and shirt and running shoes in the darkness. Still groggy, I went outside and broke into a run beneath soft, gray, and drizzling skies. The Sunday morning road was free of traffic. I could hear rolling waves on Good Harbor Beach, and I headed toward that sound.
I had the beach to myself this morning. A pale orange ball of sun, made eerie by an intervening bank of thin fog, rose above the water. Gulls screamed above the breaking waves. My body woke up, moved faster, spurred by the soft and cooling drizzle, the kelp and salt smells in the air.
Just before a rising fog swallowed them, I caught a glimpse of the twin light towers of Thacher’s Island. I remembered the haunting and terrifying story that went with this place and the dangerous shoals nearby. In August of 1635, a pinnace had set out from Ipswich, to round the rocky coast here and make for Marblehead. Aboard were twenty- three people, including Anthony Thacher and his wife and four children. Caught in a hurricane that ripped her sails, the pinnace anchored to ride out the storm. But fierce winds and waves caused her anchor to drag, and she was driven into the ledge. High seas washed the passengers into the waves and against the rocks, where they suffered the ordeal of shipwreck and exposure to the sea’s absolute power. Anthony Thacher scrambled at last to safety upon the island; before long he found his wife, safe and dry also. But their children, and all the other passengers aboard the pinnace, were lost to the storm.
The only survivors of this ill-fated journey, Thacher and his wife were stranded for a day and a half on the island, until another Marblehead-bound vessel could take them off. Anthony named the island Thachers’ Woe, that it might always tell his sorrowful story. In 1771 the first lighthouse was built upon it, to mark these dangerous waters.
Again, an old story made me think about endurance. And it made me think about my own small yearnings, casting them in a different light in the face of thoughts of a loss as profound as was that of the Thachers.
The lines of Gloucester’s history are tangled up in loss: the sea has taken more than its share of the brave and adventurous souls who set forth from these coves and harbors. I meditated on these things as I ran, and some words came to my head, in rhythm with my footfalls and my breath. They were the words of Gloucester’s greatest poet, Charles Olson:

It is undone business
I speak of this morning
with the sea
stretching out
from my feet

Another twin towers showed from inland: the sky blue domes of the Portuguese church, The Church Of our Lady of Good Voyage. I circled the beach once more, and headed toward town, keeping the domes on my horizon. There were a few vehicles on the road now; pickup trucks mostly, with fishing gear in the beds, men with ball caps and Styrofoam coffee cups in the cabs. I reached the church, took in the stunning sculpture of Our Lady herself, holding a Gloucester Schooner safely in her arms. I ran further up what those of my grandfather’s generation called Portugee Hill, into a steep neighborhood of close-together white houses with a surprising view to far blue water under the low, gray sky.
Running up the hill felt great; running down again felt even better. I retraced my route, back to the beach.
The twin lights were gone now, swallowed up by a squall line, and the orange ball of sun was lost in thickening fog. I was running on Good Harbor Beach again. Not in a dream, but for real. The pealing chatter of sandpipers sang from the misty tideline.
With each stride, my feet found the water’s edge, closing the yearning circle, rooting me in history and memory and a sense of this powerful place.

New Harbor Dawn

2009-06-10T07:01:00.005-04:00

NEW HARBOR, JUNE DAWN, painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, June 2009)

Two years ago this week I was on a road trip to Maine, playing a weekend of shows with Rusty Romance. It being our anniversary weekend, Robin and I stayed at a nice little inn overlooking the water at New Harbor, while the rest of the band bunked elsewhere. Music and travel meant not much sleep; but I made sure to rise early and fully take in those amazing down east sunrises over the quiet harbor. I sketched, and, most of all, I stored impressions deep inside.
The beauty of New Harbor—its range of color and light like no other place I’ve seen -- still haunts me. I will go back someday, but for now I will continue to make images from my memory of this powerful place.

Memory of a Certain Tide/ After Reading Dante in the Morning

2009-06-04T06:07:00.008-04:00

(Memory of a Certain Tide, painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, 2009)

---------------------------------------------

AFTER READING DANTE IN THE MORNING IN THE NORTHERN SPRING

The deeper
Music calls,

all silence
shuttered.

(Investigate this, all
the time,

with heart held
fully awake.)

While, in the rain,
the lilac-blooms

fall heavy-headed,
full, effulgent,

bringing unbound
miracles unbidden

and always
taking true form.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

A Soundscape for Early Summer: The Fog in Lilac Waves

2009-05-18T07:55:00.023-04:00

(Island Waters 2- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas board, 2008)

Below is a hazy ambient piece I made on four track cassette about fifteen years ago.
The sonic elements include various sounds recorded through my open studio window and layers of direct-recorded electric guitar. (A borrowed 1965 Guild Starfire that I still really miss!)
This source material was looped and layered utilizing the now-vanished technology of endless telephone answering machine cassettes. ( Somewhere I have a big box full of these short tape loops; I suspect that listening to them now might unlock many lost memories!)
http://search.jukeboxalive.com/player/player.php?sid=2182781&method=play

North Shore Light

2009-05-15T07:32:00.013-04:00

North Shore Light, 1 and 2 (Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas board, April 2009)

North Shore Light

Something happened this
morning so that
the warmth of rising sun
on my face was

strong as the knowing of god,
or the heat of human love.

I could turn my back
on all of this, even
look away completely, but

I’d still
feel it in full.

It’s as if there were
more than one
sunrise today,
and from more than one
direction.

I could be forever
uselessly
describing this,
so maybe it’s best to

Triangulate:

In this moment, here I am,
on this beach in north shore light

Over there, to my left and
inland,
stands Our Lady of Good Voyage
with her bells and lilac breezes

Over there, to my right and
offshore,
those mountains of waves rise,
with clearing fog, and gliding
ships.

And in all this

the living
north shore light
now finding,

beginning

another voyage

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Morning Calligraphs, Part Two

2009-04-28T06:26:00.010-04:00

(March 12, 5; March 12, 3; March 19, 1 -- Calligraphs by Kevin Macneil Brown, 2009 )

Here are more calligraphs and some notes on the process:

http://kmbliminal.blogspot.com/2009/03/morning-calligraphs.html

Harbor Song

2009-04-23T12:02:00.005-04:00

Sunset Harbor-(Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2009)

Harbor Song

Dark sails find my horizon
(like Homer painted, 1880,
from Ten Pound Island:

Not just seascapes, maritimes,
but moments of
choosing, yearning, knowing.)

High tide, and
A salt and kelp wind rises
with the morning.

I have slept through the night
and light now
fissures the sky.

This small, safe harbor seems
vivid and fresh today,
with silver waters arriving.

And beyond the breakwater
those fast sails filling
ah, my heart’s desire

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Morning Calligraphs

2009-03-26T09:58:00.006-04:00

(March 12,2; March 12,1- Calligraphs by Kevin Macneil Brown, 2009)

I recently came across a few sheets of paper left over from a pad I'd found not to my liking for watercolor painting. Early one March morning, I used them to make a few simple calligraphs, taking an approach that falls somewhere between painting and printmaking.

I made six images very quickly-- including the two above-- using the papers, black paint and water, wadded newspaper, and a piece of cardboard. This way of working offers me a satisfying surrender to chance, hidden intent, and simple celebration of materials at hand.

(The inspiration for this comes to me from techniques used by Thomas Merton, as documented in Roger Lipsey's wonderful book ANGELIC MISTAKES: THE ART OF THOMAS MERTON (New Seeds, 2006))

First Light On Dark Waters: Preview

2009-03-12T10:06:00.008-04:00

Winter Hymn number 1, Water and Sky,
painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, acrylic on canvas, 2009

I've been working for the past three months on a new project. It's a series of compositions for lap steel guitar in various altered tunings, mostly recorded in one take, with the ambient textures and spatial processing occurring in real time. As with much of my music, this work is intended to invoke and transfer moods and feelings at the confluence of inner and outer landscapes.

Here is a preview if you would like to listen:

http://www.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_2041439.html

Psalm for Journeys

2009-02-07T07:11:00.006-05:00

LAKE LIGHT (Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, February 2009)

PSALM FOR JOURNEYS

Walk, up
and over mountains
(so many mountains)

Follow thin and falling waters
to find wide river
passage

Reach
the place where blue lake shimmers
huge beneath the sky

Hold
this in the heart

-Kevin Macneil Brown

Notes for ACROSS BLUE MOUNTAINS

2009-01-16T09:29:00.004-05:00

(Red Sky, Blue Mountains- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
watercolor on paper, 2008)

Here are some notes and comments about the tracks on ACROSS BLUE MOUNTAINS- SONGS AND SOUNDWORKS 2006-2008:

National, Harvest
This piece began as an exploratory improvisation on a borrowed vintage National New Yorker steel guitar. I fell in love immediately with the rough growl of the middle range, and I kept going back for those notes, that sound.
National New Yorker, Fender Blues Junior; mic-ed with a Radio Shack dynamic mic hung over the grille.

Never Run Dry
A simple song for voice and acoustic guitar. Dedicated with love to anybody who is hurting deep inside.
Vocal, Epiphone guitar; mic-ed with MXL-V63M

Eagle Dreams of Open Water
I imagined this piece as a gamelan composition for acoustic steel guitars in layers; but a gamelan sped up: like a bird's metabolism maybe, or spring run-off from mountains.
Epiphone guitar, Silvertone lap steel (John Goss modified); mic-ed with Studio Projects C3. (Thank you, Glenn Howland.)

The Women at Three Mile Bridge Road
My mystery novel HIGHWAY IN THE BLOOD tells the story of a steel player named Buck Hawkins who leaves behind some trouble in Texas only to find more trouble back home in Vermont. In the book, he composes a Dobro tune dedicated to some people and a place at the heart of the story. I thought it would be fun to actually write and record the piece in character as Buck.
1977 Dobro, 1974 Estrada guitar; mic-ed with Studio Projects C3.

Texas Double Eagle Railroad Blues
A strange little rockabilly blues with a touch of Zen, this came to me one fall day as maple leaves fell. In recording and mixing this version, I tried to keep to a 1950s small-studio /southern AM radio /late night vibe: lots of echo and a hot, sticky mix. (You can hear the full band version on the CD RUSTY ROMANCE- ROOTS N" ROLL.)
Vocal, 1974 Estrada , 1990s Mexican Telecaster, Fender Blues Junior; mic-ed with MXL V63M, Radio Shack dynamic.

Red Sky Prayer Across Blue Mountains
I made this piece on a cold, stark, and beautiful November afternoon. It’s made from the collage and reassembly of some pieces from alternate versions of previous compositions— Including “National, Harvest” and “November Path –for Dennis Darrah”.
National New Yorker, Silvertone lap steel, Lexicon jam man; processed with Acid software.

Colors of Dusk, Colors of Dawn- for Thomas Merton
Reading Thomas Merton’s words in the silent mornings and evenings has often been an inspiration to me, as has the experience of changing light and color in the unfolding dawn and dusk.
I spent most of the late winter and early spring of 2008 on this piece. It was my intent to express in sound those liminal colors, moods, and textures. The process began with a long, direct-recorded improvisation on steel guitar (I remember it as being my Melobar SL-6, but my tracking notes say it was the Silvertone.)
The extensive reshaping and sound painting was done in Acid and Cool Edit Pro.

If you'd like, you can listen by following these links:

http://www.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1959081.html

http://www.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1716973.html

Across Blue Mountains: New CD

2008-11-15T12:00:00.007-05:00

(View From Isle La Motte- Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown,
acrylic on canvas, 2007)

I'm pleased to report that I've just about finished my new solo CD, ACROSS BLUE MOUNTAINS: SONGS AND SOUNDWORKS. It features lots of atmospheric steel guitar and some intimate vocals. I think it's my most personal collection yet; a journey into inner and outer landscapes. You can listen to some of it here:

http://www.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1959081.html

I'm also excited to announce that we've just finishing mixing the new Rusty Romance album. It's being mastered as I write this. More to follow soon.

October Sunset, Lake Champlain

2008-10-25T07:55:00.003-04:00

October Sunset, Lake Champlain

(painting by Kevin Macneil Brown, watercolor on paper, 2008)

Migration

2008-08-30T10:29:00.005-04:00

Migration (Monoprint by Kevin Macneil Brown, papers and black paint, 2007)

Sparrow and Fog

Poised at the edge of
seasons changing
or two weather systems
crashing together,
the white-throated sparrow,
in migration, begins to move now
south-east through heavy fog.

(Or perhaps that poise,
that pause, this fog, that waiting,
those seasons, those systems,
that moving, those directions

are only for us
are only pale
August perceptions…)

There are some questions,
I have found,
For which the best answers might be:

Call notes of birds;
Thick white silence.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

August, 2008

Still Point

2008-05-23T15:12:00.014-04:00

Still Point;
Light Across Water

(Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown, acyrlic on board, spring 2008)

Bright orange glow
(5:15) at

the point of soon-to-rise sun

Within that, blue cloud striations
and, just above: darker, almost black.

Further from this center, to the
north of east, a muted
peach-colored gleam; soft, and
brightening into that orange as
the eye follows

Toward the point of rising light;

The Virgin Point (Merton’s term)
and I feel a yearning toward—no, an attainment of
such a place, a feeling

By this, I mean
the moment, the locus
of new beginning

Where all that is not
necessary falls away into
an open, loving void

(as though swallowed
complete, by
bigger ocean!)

Wave upon wave
love returns to itself,
its strength-- already
considerable--gathering,
felt and
known

that magnificent
blue-green roar!

-kmb, May 08

--------------------------------------

I'm excited to announce the publication in one volume of my two poem cycles NORTH COAST DREAMING and LUMINIST DIARY. Here's more information, and a way to order a copy:

http://www.lulu.com/content/2152993

It's also available at Bear Pond Books, in Montpelier, Vermont.

And more news: I'll be showing some of my paintings as part of the Montpelier Art Walk this June. Here's more information:

http://www.lazypear.com/art_gallery/art_walk/montpelier_art_walk.html

Eagle Dreams of Open Waters

2008-04-03T13:44:00.012-04:00

Rock, Water, Sky
Painting by Kevin Macneil Brown
(Acrylic on canvas, March 2008)

-------------------

Breathing hard beneath
first spring sun

running, wide-striding
along mud of the river path

after the long winter, from inside I can only
make rough outline
of the joy of
all of
this.

Better, then, to describe
up there, the eagle:

high in clear blue sky.
lifted by warming
earth through cool winds,

he's been dreaming
for a while now.

But today it's real
to see and sense:

the fast-moving truth of open water.

-kmb, April 08

------------------------------

Sun today, and clean fresh winds. But last week it snowed, and I was feeling under the weather. Thanks to Rusty Romance's stellar soundman, Glenn Howland--aka Mr. Coffee, aka Treeline Stringband-- I was able to record my way out of the blues. Glenn loaned me a fine mic and pre-amp particularly suited for acoustic music and I spent a day recording some pieces I've been working on for a few months. (How did Glenn know they were finished? Hmmm...)

One of the compositions I recorded was this piece for acoustic guitar-- a small-bodied Epiphone-- and acoustic steel-- the cool little 5 dollar Silvertone that John Goss made into a lap steel and gave to me.
I just finished mixing the piece today, using compression and echo to add texture, space, and motion around the notes. It's sort of an impressionistic acoustic slide guitar gamelan thing, maybe:
http://www.jukeboxalive.com/player/player.php?sid=1959093&method=play

New Harbor, Maine: Three Morning Views, Three Shoreline Transformations

2008-02-20T13:21:00.006-05:00

(Paintings by Kevin Macneil Brown- acrylic on canvas, summer 2007)

It is becoming more and more clear to me that making all of this-- words, music, images--is simply a way to hold on for a long moment to the things that matter to me, before they pass through my hands, my apprehensions.

And now, a re-posted link to some contemplative water music:

http://buckyb.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1638551.html

Winter Light: Image and Sound

2008-02-16T08:44:00.009-05:00

January Dusk

Kevin Macneil Brown, winter 2008, acrylic on canvas

And, in the same spirit, here is a long ambient/liminal piece I began in January and just completed yesterday:

http://buckyb.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1716973.html

Thank you for looking and listening.

You Are My Horizon

2008-01-24T08:01:00.001-05:00

You Are My Horizon 1, You Are My Horizon 2

Kevin Macneil Brown, summer 2007

acrylic on canvas

December Outpost

2007-12-21T08:57:00.000-05:00

Blue Sky
Broken clouds

Dark wing shadow
above
shimmer

(Crossing the
lake in September,
inner silence)

Scumbled blessings
Contrast of
Light and shadow

Reflected back,
the True World of

Love, that silence:

Blue water breathing.

-Kevin Macneil Brown
(from the ferry VALCOUR, Sept. 2007)

-----------------------------------------------------

Here are my thoughts about music in 2007, from DUSTED MAGAZINE:

http://www.dustedmagazine.com/features/686

And here is a small gathering of material that might be part of my next album:

http://buckyb.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1689137.html

Blessings and peace to all. I'll be back to this journal late in January.

Words for November

2007-11-09T07:56:00.001-05:00

This piece of mine ran originally in ULTRARUNNING and most recently in the BARRE-MONTPELIER TIMES ARGUS and RUTLAND HERALD :

Running with the Wind Eagle

By KEVIN MACNEIL BROWN Correspondent

It wasn't supposed to be a vision quest, just a simple run up my favorite Vermont mountain trail: up the old carriage road to the bare rock summit of Mount Hunger, then down the other side and across the wooded ridge to the open, sun-baked ledges of White Rock Mountain. It was not an epic journey, just a couple of hours of moderately-challenging trail running.

Thomas Merton, the monk and writer, once wrote something to the effect that to begin each day by describing the same mountain is to be in the grip of delusion. One way I've found to escape that grip is to simply take myself physically right into — and onto — that mountain, the one I see almost every morning.

Above all, it was the amazing clarity of the morning air that pulled me out to run that autumn day. I'd been up on those trails a few times that season, on longer approaches. But today I was greedy for one more gulp of that mountain air, hungry for another look at that long, all-encompassing view from the peak.

So I ran — first through groves of hardwood, then, as I climbed higher, through dark, cool pines. The mountain was mine alone, it seemed.

I reached the summit after a short and exhilarating rock scramble. Stopping to catch my breath and drink in the view, I noticed the odd way the clear morning light seemed to lengthen the far Adirondack peaks to the West: an optical illusion that created dark spires and towers that I knew weren't really there.

Turning eastward, I took in a long line of high, thin, mackerel-flecked clouds that stretched like an ocean, breaking like silver-gray surf just above the Presidential Range of New Hampshire's White Mountains.

For a while I watched in awe as four falcons, streamlined for motion in a way that I never would be, circled in a warm updraft current that rose, an invisible spiral, from the ridgeline below. The fast flight of the falcons made me restless, made me want to run again. So I found the trail down into the col between the two mountains. There, with blue sky high above me, I leaped from rock to rock in the shadowed, wet and mossy woods.

Then my breath caught for an instant when something dark passed behind and above me. In my imagination I saw clearly the crook of a giant black wing. It was huge beyond comprehension, some kind of spirit, I thought, darker even than these dark woods. The crisp air around me seemed to grow suddenly cold. I shivered, feeling something between fear and awe as a mysterious breeze passed over my sweating skin.

Minutes later, I came out into the open, warm and sunny ledges of White Rock, then followed the rocky, steep and rooted trail down.

It was a few days later that I came across the story, told by the Abenaki natives of Vermont — and retold wonderfully by the writer Joseph Bruchac — of the Wind Eagle in the high mountains. In this story, the primal being who was the Transformer, the Changer — known to some as Gluskabi, to others as Odzihozo — was tired of the way the winds had so often ruined his canoe voyages and impeded his travel.

He decided to leave his lakeside home and climb to the highest peak, the abode of the massive, fierce bird that created and controlled the winds. Through trickery, he got this creature — the Wind Eagle — wedged into a rock-cleft. Trapped there, the dark and massive raptor could no longer make the winds blow.

Satisfied with his work, the Transformer descended. It was only later, when the lakeside land grew still and breezeless and unbearably hot, that the Transformer realized his mistake. He knew now that he'd have to return to the mountain and free the Wind Eagle. He did so, and the cooling breezes returned at last, along, of course, with the fiercer winds.

It might have been a bird, or a cloud, even a plane, that made the dark shadow I felt pass across the sky and forest that morning. Or it might have been a figment of my imagination, an anomaly of heartbeat and respiration.

It really doesn't matter, though, because now I know about the Wind Eagle. And I know that when I run in the mountains — when I move my lungs, my muscles, my legs — something else moves too. It is something big and powerful and beyond my control and intention, yet somehow transformed by my own perception and attention.

It is transformed by my willingness, through motion and surrender, to set something like spirit free.

October Report: Shoreline Transformations

2007-10-06T08:56:00.001-04:00

After having spent some time during the past couple of weeks mixing and mastering, I am pleased to announce that my new CD,
LIMINAL MUSIC 4: THREE SHORELINE TRANSFORMATIONS/THE FIRST LAST OUTPOST, is finished. I'll be releasing it in a limited edition, each copy with a hand-painted shorescape insert and an actual NOAA marine weather forecast print-out included.
The two long pieces are very slow-moving, with subtle, shifting spacial dimensions and a liminal harmonic and melodic haze - my attempt at conjuring in sound the deeper structures and fog-bound, tidal, breaking-wave mysteries of eternal shorelines.
If you would like to order a copy, please contact me at:
Bucky@rustyromance.com

You can listen to the music here:

http://buckyb.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1638551.html

As for the band, Rusty Romance, we are taking some time off from gigs this fall to spend time learning new songs that Rusty and I have written for the band, working towards a new 2008 album.
We'll be back on stage at First Night Montpelier, on New Year's Eve.

Back To Liminal

2007-07-18T13:02:00.000-04:00

It’s been a busy summer with Rusty Romance-- a few road trips, Including a show at the Moxie Festival in Lisbon, Maine. But the band schedule is settling down for a while, so I’m at last finding time to catch up on this journal.
An earlier trip to Maine with the band-- staying in New Harbor, a beautiful, tiny Maine lobstering port-- filled me with inspiring images. I spent some downtime sketching the rocks, water, and boats. Now, back home in Vermont, I’ve been painting from those inspirations a few mornings a week. The other mornings I’ve been working away at my latest novel, about which I’m not ready to say much.
One exciting thing about painting is the way it has reinforced my ideas and approaches to musical composition. Back in May and June I created two long pieces that will likely make up my next CD, tentatively titled THE FIRST LAST OUTPOST. Both pieces begin with the same “drawing”: a performance on lap steel and looping device recorded in real time. But then each piece is worked into a “painting” with what I call transformations and sound-smears: like sonic brush-strokes; manipulations of light, shadow, texture.

As these works formed, I found myself returning to the ethos of my earlier concept of Liminal Music. To explain that concept a little better, here’s something I wrote in a 2005 retrospective:

Thoughts on Composition, Spring Equinox 2005

I’m sure that I share with many other composers the desire --the deep yearning-- to make sonic structures that I want to hear, that I want to exist in the world.
This imagining and this yearning most often lead me to the making of sound assemblages--evocations of place and landscape, inner and outer; narrative songs set within and woven with reference points of musical style and memory-- that while not always exactly, in the end, what I might have imagined them to be, turn out to be exactly what they need to be, even with all their mistakes and imperfections.
In the composing, improvisation, recording, and production processes--most often solitary--I have used the spacial considerations of effecting, panning, and mixing to leave an empty space for myself, and, by extension, for the listener.
In one sense, this is the ultimate creative self-centeredness: putting myself at the center of the sonic world. Of course, the inherent paradox is that this presence reveals itself as an absence: A silent space, in the midst of other spaces both silent and sounding.

When I began composing music that tended toward the-- for lack of a better word-- abstract, I realized that I was making works that, while stemming from the ambient tradition, did not work very well as background music. These were pieces that asked for focused attention, that needed the listener to share in the intended evocation of inner and outer landscapes, both experienced and conjured.
In looking for a name to describe these works, I came to see that the music was about places both real and imagined, about states of in-between: between sleeping and wakefulness; between land and water, between darkness and light at dusk or dawn. Thus the name: Liminal Music.

Would You Like to Listen?

2007-04-15T07:46:00.000-04:00

The link below will take you to a sampling of my music, including some pieces I've written about in this weblog.

http://www.jukeboxalive.com/albums.php?profile=1027587

I plan on updating the jukebox site every couple of months. The next time will probably be in early September.

Thanks for listening!

Spring Light

2007-03-23T08:30:00.000-04:00

The onset of spring in northern New England brings changes in the light: the softening of hues; the lengthening of duration and shadow. This March the snow is still deep-- more than a foot in my backyard. But every day the snow-pack shrinks a little more, and even another big storm could only temporarily change the tide of spring's arrival.
In the past few weeks I've stayed with the themes and concerns of my composition THE INEFFABLE FREEDOM OF CAPTURED LIGHT. I've been painting on canvas in the mornings, answering a call that the exploration of changing light has offered. And I've spun off new musical pieces from various juxtapositions and confluences of the sonic elements of INEFFABLE FREEDOM, using them as sonic background to the act of painting. Over the weeks this work has cohered into a whole that I would like to someday present as an installation piece. (Right now the installation exists only in my studio.)
Given these concerns and interests it's perhaps no surprise that I'd be pulled into the sound world of a composer deeply influenced by the energies of visual art. As winter became spring, I found myself listening in the afternoons to a lot of Morton Feldman, including his six-hour-long STRING QUARTET NO. 2, which, I'll admit, I experienced as If I were reading a novel-- settling into it over the course of a few days, each time taking up where I'd left off before. There are sections of luminous and mystical beauty in this work; mysteries of tone and harmony that sometimes touched a longing in me and truly hurt my heart.
Also a musical companion some afternoons has been Susan Alcorn's remarkable AND I AWAIT (THE RESURRECTION OF THE PEDAL STEEL GUITAR). Susan Alcorn commits to and inhabits each note she plays; It's an all too rare quality in a musician, and for the listener, it can open up worlds. The long title piece offers surprises each time I hear it. And Susan's version of the Italian tune "Volare" is a pure joy: dreamy, alluringly textured, melodic; conjuring with an orchestra of multi -tracked pedal steel guitar something that suggests to me what Les Paul and Mary Ford might have come up with if they'd been hanging out with Sun Ra.
And now this morning the sky is blue. The snow has melted down an inch since yesterday. Time to go out for a run.

A Composition Journal, Part 4

2007-02-05T13:38:00.000-05:00

January 21

AM
Made a few changes to "The Freedom of Captured Light" this morning. Returning to the
third-- and the first finished-- version, made some EQ changes to tame the hiss and rumble, making sure to keep the overall tonal coloration.
Next, I added complexity by doubling--then tripling-- the whole piece in separate tracks, panning and time-shifting (not by much) each track to create a sense of spaciousness and transparency.
And now this piece has come newly alive.

PM
Committing to a name: THE INEFFABLE FREEDOM OF CAPTURED LIGHT.

JANUARY 25

Morning reading : Cold Mountain Poet. A force of nature; humanity almost, but not quite, subsumed in rock, mountains, rivers, pines. (winds and waters.)
These poems, in David Hinton's deep and powerful translations (MOUNTAIN HOME: THE WILDERNESS POETRY OF ANCIENT CHINA) are having an effect on my musical composition. Or am I just riding a wave of synchronicity in my inner winter life right now?

Coffee, work on editing yesterday's two reviews for DUSTED. A quiet house for a while, so I took advantage and vacuumed floors.

Settled into some late-morning work on CAPTURED LIGHT: recorded glass bowls , struck with sticks. The sound made me think of bare rock beneath my feet. I treated the recordings with rolled-off old-time radio EQ, made a few various cuts and copies , then placed them within the mix of the most recent , composite, version of the entire piece. The bowls have a close-up sound that reminds me of a footpath, and perhaps that up-close-ness adds some welcome human scale/perspective as it wanders, unfolds within the big-sky, wide- horizon of sound that is predominant in the composition.

JANUARY 28
Afternoon
Hot bath, a beer. Reading in Holbrook's 1939 biography of Ethan Allen. An entertaining and engaging read, written in a sly and energetic "Yankee" voice.
Later, watching the sky change, the light move, I listen again to "The Ineffable Freedom of Captured Light ." I hear now that perhaps there should be some steel guitar early in the piece--a glimpse of blue as distant allure-- sliding in with major 7th blossoming, entering, reverb-ed for sense of distance, on the left--far left..

Now the sky has gone from blue to striations of violet--then a last blush of rose captured in high windows of high towers at Vermont College. The evergreens are almost black: spruces straight and tall; white pines caught stilled in what looks like mid-motion-- splay, sway, wave...
Dusk falling. I slipped off for a short winter's day nap.

Rising. Up and at 'em. Started a white bean stew.
Some work tonight on "captured light..", adding steel entrances as early hints of blue.
Also some EQ, scooping out bass mud accrued by multi-tracking.

JANUARY 29
Up at 6:30. Sub-zero again. Listening to latest version of "light", I think it's as good as I can make it. That is, it is what it is.
This piece really does go well with watching sunrise or sunset play out against the winter sky. The composition is 20 minutes and 50 seconds long. Maybe I should offer the listener instructions to begin playing the piece 20:50 before sunrise or sunset, and to look out a window while he or she listens.

You can listen here:

http://buckyb.jukeboxalive.com/music_listen_1638143.html

A Composition Journal, Part 3

2007-02-01T18:36:00.000-05:00

January 14 - afternoon

All this microscopic listening makes me edgy, grumpy. So, out for an hour's run in the snow.
My reward: Gray-green river, high and fast-moving under gray, snowing sky. The calm, monastery-like beauty of pine woods at Redstone park: snow-covered wooden benches, the stream and falls full, as they've been all winter.

Clear-headed, grounded, aerated, I listen yet again. I hear a few places that need work. I add more white (metallophone shimmer, pitch-shifted, reverbed), a bit of distant blue (steel guitar again; cut, looped, reverbed). I hear also a need for some translucent haze in the white (bells).

But for now, I need another break. I tend to get obsessive, working, pushing on until I'm satisfied--and/or exhausted. I'm going to try to do this piece a little differently.

January 15

Morning; a few more brushstrokes added. Listened on walkperson while I shoveled wet snow. Listened again while I walked to work. Almost done.

January 17

Crystal clear and cold-- sub-zero -- this morning. Some work on "Captured Light." An attempt at fine-tuning, but not quite getting it. Our heating system being fixed today, so it's COLD in the house. Bright sun, dazzling white snow-- shadows of tree branches on shiny surface crust.
I abandon music for the day, go out for a run. Back at home, I make a slow- simmering tomato sauce with peppers and hot Italian sausage-- an attempt to warm the house. Successful.

PM- Another attempt at EQ tweaking: cutting highs, boosting lower mids. Much better results: the piece has a thickness and warmth it didn't have before.

January 20

Listened to and compared, while editing some writing projects, both versions--original and re-EQd-- today. The first sounded better: more spacious and and airy; more shimmer.
I think the second version was satisfying at first from a sense of safety: it made the piece sound more like my previous work-- dark, murky, almost black and white.
But today I can trust the NEW direction behind the making of this piece. It seems the first mix is the one to go with.
(That said, there is still a need for some hiss reduction, maybe a slight taming of lows...)

A Composition Journal, Part 2

2007-01-29T07:59:00.000-05:00

January 12. 2007

Woke up late after 9 hours (!!) of sleep. Gray morning. Coffee, read a few poems by Tu Fu.... Read them again.
To work on "Captured Light." My mission today is to paint in sound the color field I see as Gold/bright green. This entails taking a section of yesterday's work, cutting it, then re-harmonizing it in the program Acid. (I have tuned it 21 half-steps up.) Then cutting again to size and proportion, laying it in so that it fills the right time/space within the piece. I'm quite sure I've never worked so visually before; but it seems appropriate, given the inspiration for the piece. Like stepping back from a canvas, I listen. Make changes. Step back. listen again.

January 13

This morning's work: simply listening.
Gray, warm-ish but raw outside. Like April again.

January 14

Deep sleep. Up at 7. Snow falling; big, pretty flakes in gray dark morning.
Coffee, reading in Tu Fu. Sadness in these words; an autumnal chill of aging, regret.
Work on "Freedom of Captured Light." Recorded a shimmering pulse of metallophone for the color-field White-gold; after that, a steel guitar melody arcing to a Major 7th as its highest tone: A yearning, sweeping arc of bright blue (from mountain tops to sky.)
Next, hours of layering, moving, removing, mixing.
Snow falling.

A Composition Journal, Part 1

2007-01-25T09:30:00.000-05:00

For the past few weeks I've been working on a long composition, one that was, it seems, presaged by the arrival of the poem in my previous entry. For a while I'll devote this weblog to my journals about the creation of this work. I've never before kept a detailed daily journal of progress--from inspiration to implementation-- on a particular piece of music, so I'm finding this interesting.

January 9, 2007
Up at 6:30, reading the knife-sharp poems of Li Po-- David Hinton's remarkable translations in MOUNTAIN HOME: THE WILDERNESS POEMS OF ANCIENT CHINA ( New Directions).
Sun rise on snow-white mountains flamed with reddish gold; I watched, drank coffee.
A short run with the dog; cold, crisp morning with an April-like wind out of SE. Amazing striations/layers of color and shadow in the view across to the Worcester Range.

January 10
Up in the dark. Li Po resonance of words again: rich in peaceful shock of image, sound.
Thnking this morning, deeply, about color-field, landscape ... (that, really, landscape/shape alone is not what intrigues me, but rather the way light and sound act to shape it-- how paint and words and composition can be analog to that exchange -- and beyond that: how that exchange is a sign of Spirit's true existence.)
So, once again: sky, Luminism; Fitz Hugh Lane.
I'm imagining a long piece of music --1 hour?--of tone-fields as color, shape. (see the mountain drawing in yesterday's journal) Layers of tone (table organ, lap steel, bells) in reverberant space. Stacking, shifting, shadowing...to create a sonic view. Such a piece perhaps best made over a long period of time-- weeks? months?....
Title:
THE FREEDOM OF CAPTURED LIGHT.

January 11
Dark gives way to violet, within that, a perfect half moon. Coffee, and reading Tu Fu. These poems are structured, striated, with a more complex diction than the earlier wilderness poets, perhaps.

Last night I had set up microphone, table organ, yamaha reverb, Lexicon jam man. Now, this morning, with view of mountains flaming from salmon to violet pink then cooling to violet and, finally, snow white, I record a quiet piece: letting notes from the table organ rise and fall and layer within the reverb and delay. This will be the first stratum of the sonic view I intend to work on this winter.
Ths morning's work, relating back to the drawing-- which has become, it seems, the score for this piece-- is the gray, dark pine-colored "ground": the lower part of the canvas, of the view.
(Minor triad tonality (D # minor) with pentatonic scale tones rising and falling: shadow patterns.)

Envoi

2007-01-15T08:16:00.000-05:00

Prepare the bell for
sounding: Cast the metal
(bronze? for belief...)

Its very nature is
the truth of its
voice.

And then there is
the winter sky:
Ah, I can't describe it.

But it calls
and dark birds take
flight, desiring

that brightness. The
sounding distance
arrives, wings mended new

by that far, fresh
falling:
Bells.

-Kevin Macneil Brown

This poem turns out to be preamble to some music I'm at work on now.

Year's End Path

2006-12-14T08:01:00.000-05:00

On a gray Sunday morning in November, I found myself reading in Halsey Stevens' THE LIFE AND MUSIC OF BELA BARTOK. Bartok spent a summer in a house in Berlin, Vermont, a few miles from where I live, and many times I've run along the same road he walked.
On this particular gloomy morning I felt suddenly inspired to make a piece of music; I kept coming back to the image of Bartok walking along a wooded country road in Vermont. I quickly assembled a signal path, patching together delay devices, mixer, EQ, and gated reverb: building a sonic space for the music to happen within.
I've long been taken with Bartok's unfinished deathbed piece, the VIOLA CONCERTO, commissioned and first performed by William Primrose, completed and orchestrated by Tibor Serly. (In particular, the transparent elegance of the "Adagio Religioso" section has haunted me.) At first it disturbed me to read Stevens' statement that Bartok left of the piece only its "torso"; but then I reminded myself: that is, after all, where the heart is.
I began with a technique I seldom use, that of using samples from recordings-- in this case a scratchy old record of Primrose playing the VIOLA CONCERTO. As I placed the short sections within the sonic landscape made by the signal path, I manipulated them, organizing the loops and the spaces between them, until they offered what seemed a strange and dreamlike perspective on Bartok's work, evoking in me the feeling of a wordless pilgrimage along a path: with Bartok himself; with the Viola master Primrose; with my friend composer Dennis Darrah (who has used this technique of collaging loops to great effect in his own work, RECOMBINANT THEORY.)
As the piece unfolded and played back, I pulled out my John Goss-modified Silvertone lap steel guitar, and added an improvisation, the whole thing going in real-time to my hard drive as a take. Listening back later that day, I named the piece NOVEMBER PATH-FOR DENNIS DARRAH.
Here it is:

http://www.jukeboxalive.com/reports.php?album=1667407

Now, in mid-December, I've been listening in the dark mornings to two profound works of music. The first is another late Bartok work, the SONATA FOR SOLO VIOLIN. It's a stark and thorny piece, but one rich with twists and turns, with deep resonances that are awe-inspiring, coming as they do from a small instrument that can produce only limited harmonic material. Bartok begins with JS Bach's great solo violin partitas and sonatas as a springboard, and also works with his own deep understanding of Hungarian music; but, as in all of Bartok's late works,there is something complex and entirely personal to be found in the structures and developments of the material.
The other piece, Olivier Messiaen's VINGT REGARDS SUR L'ENFANT JESUS, for solo piano, might seem at first glance-- and listening-- to be of an entirely different species. Lush with Messaien's post-Debussy harmonic coloration, and with themes and ideas of Christian iconography-- the Star, the Cross, The Virgin, The Infant Christ-- woven from birdsong and modal/rhythmic motifs, it builds an entire world, where Bartok's SONATA seeks only to build deep forms within sound.
But the similarities between these pieces lie in their elemental starkness. Both were composed in 1944, within the darkness of a world war that would soon end. And both seem to offer the experience of music as light in that darkness. Messiaen crafts his light from deep faith, and the assembly and juxtaposition of forms, building a cathedral or tabernacle with tones. Bartok's light, carried by the spareness of a solo violin, is a different kind of miracle in sound: the unfolding of forms, organic and ever-changing; like something alive that sprouts in sun-warmed earth.

And now I put away this weblog for the year 2006. I hope to return in mid-January. Thank you for reading.

Harvest

2006-09-21T08:38:00.000-04:00

Today, with maple leaves falling around me as I sit in the morning fog, I am pleased to announce that the musical projects I've documented in this journal since February are finished, available, and ready for the world in DIY CD-R editions.
If you would like information on how to purchase copies of HORIZON IS A SONG or BETWEEN WATERS-- or if you just want to say hello-- please contact me at:
Bucky@rustyromance.com

Ending August

2006-08-28T08:38:00.000-04:00

Contrary to appearances, I have not abandoned this journal. Back in July, however, the thing on the horizon arrived: I began work on a new novel. That's where most of my writing time has gone. I've been working in the mornings, outside at a picnic table beneath maple-leaf dappled sun, scrawling in pen in a spiral notebook. (I'm not really looking forward to having to transcribe my scratches into a type-script!)
At some later time I will likely post parts of my writing journal here; for now, though, the process of writing is a bit too fresh and raw to be exposed to scrutiny, I think.

I had begun, back in June, a trio of short essays about revisiting works that were important to my creative development. I got as far as Messiaen and Ives. Next up, I had planned a piece about revisiting Charles Olson's first few MAXIMUS POEMS. But the arrival of the novel that had been stewing for nearly a year inside me took precedence, so I surrendered and changed my plan.
As for music, It's been a busy summer of gigs with Rusty Romance, and some guest spots with Mark Legrand's Lovesick Bandits. I've managed to record a few short solo pieces, too-- some new songs here and there. The cover art for my solo projects HORIZON IS A SONG and BETWEEN WATERS is just about finished, and I expect to have both CDs available by mid-September. It crosses my mind that finishing these two projects will bring to a completion the original intent behind this journal.
What comes next for this blog? I don't quite know yet. But I hope you'll come back and see.

Summer Report

2006-07-01T16:09:00.000-04:00

Today, hazy blue skies, after, of course, some rain. It's summer for sure now, and both projects --HORIZON IS A SONG and BETWEEN WATERS-- are finished; sequenced, edited, mastered ( the latter as well as possible,anyway, within available resources) and ready to be heard. I've even begun work on the cover art. I do feel a certain emptiness upon finishing these projects. But it's a welcome emptiness, one that brings with it a sense of space, of new possibilities.
Finishing BETWEEN WATERS entailed some new composition, along with some editing of sections, mostly to fine-tune the proportions of each within the whole. I also made radical EQ changes to a few pieces/movements, especially "Lone Rock Point" and "Searching For Ferris Rock ", seeking to cast just a bit more light and clarity on the decidedly dark and murky original mixes.
Listening back to the finished work, It dawned on me that I had composed my own strange version of a symphony: A single work in sections--movements-- for orchestra (in this case an orchestra created mostly from sound-smeared steel guitar improvs) , the whole structure built by the exploration and recasting of a fairly limited amount of generative thematic material.
BETWEEN WATERS is a sonic object now, and I am confident that it contains and transfers the energies-- of water and rock; of geomorphic and human history and my own perceptions of those things-- that originally inspired it.

As far the song collection HORIZON IS A SONG, well, I had figured it was finished more than a month ago.
But one morning in late May ,I woke up with a melody and lyrics playing in my head, straight into the world from a dream I'd been having:
"Black-eyed Susan's on the highway..."
I got up, made coffee, wrote the song over the course of the day, fine-tuning it in my head during a long, sun-baked run beside Berlin Pond and up into the trails on Irish Hill.
It was only after two weeks of living with the song-- making subtle structural changes, etc.-- that I at last recorded it. In the morning I got a good version in two takes (voice and two acoustic guitars, lap steel solo section, harmony vocal.)
I then spent some time on a weird, spasmodic kick-and-snare drum part for the bridge. (I'd been reading Merton again--I was thinking of this part as my "Zen wake-up call.") All went well, though it took maybe ten tries to catch the drum thing just right.
Then the recording program crashed. Too much heat and humidity. Try as I might, I could not bring the tracks back up. I was angry. But I was also inspired and determined. I started all over again, recording, track by track, another good version of the song. The new version had a very different feel, but I mixed it down, kept it.
After a break, shut down, and reboot, lo and behold, the original version of the song returned! I listened. Definitely the one I wanted. Working into the evening, I added some church yard sale harmonium, made a few mixes. Feeling energized, I remixed the second version, too, this time going crazy with slap-back echo and compression. (I named this the Salty Delta Mix, since it sounded swampy and weird to me, the opposite of the warm and intimate 'master' take and mixes.)
A few weeks later, after I'd picked my favorite mix of the original, I added some tremoloed baritone guitar for texture. By then the song had found its place in the running order of HORIZON IS A SONG.
So that's it for now. I'm going to take a little vacation, maybe get out on the waters. Rest. Relax. Re-charge. Chip away at some small ideas and projects; keep my eyes on that big one way, way, off on the horizon--one I suspect I'll be writing about here later.

Sources and Re-explorations, Part Two: Olivier Messiaen

2006-06-30T08:39:00.000-04:00

Of all Olivier Messian's works, CHRONOCHROMIE (1959-1960 ) is the one I seem to return to over and over. It might be that its scale-- just under a half-hour long-- suits me perfectly; Certainly, the piece appeals because of the way it addresses and illustrates, in one place, most of its composers concerns: bird song, rhythmic transformation, orchestral texture as color and vision.
I listened to CHRONOCHROMIE again a few weeks ago, on a rainy morning when I'd risen to strong coffee and the sounds of a very lush dawn chorus. Concepts of time and color--Chrono and Chromie-- are at the heart of the work, and Messiaen uses complex rhythmic transformation of melodic materials-- bird song, mostly-- to build a majestic sonic analogue to a pre-human world: a mountain, a stream falling through rock and stone.
The rhythmic transformations are, of course, the time-field of the work. The color-field arises when melodic materials are voiced and stacked vertically in strata: gliding strings, breathing woodwinds , chattering melodic percussion, dark-toned low horns. The piece is structured in what Messiaen called strophes: cells of musical events that at first seem to push and pull against each other. But as one listens to the unfolding music, the events begin to take on a sense of flow, that sense increasing until Messiaen has created for the listener the sight and presence of a massive mountain, of rippling, tumbling waters down that mountain's steep sides. It's nothing less than a monolithic construction in sound.
All falls away, though, for the infamous Epode: a thicket of transcribed bird song played only by the strings. Having just heard a real early- summer dawn chorus, I was prepared to be disappointed by Messiaen's transcription of nature. But I was surprised at how powerfully the composer captured-- even using only the relatively dry timbres of the strings-- the liquid chaos of the real thing.
The power of CHRONOCHROMIE lies for me in its sense of transformations, even trans-substantiations: bird song as light and color, vibration as stone and water. And above all there's the mystery of music vibrating its way into all the senses and tools of perceptions, becoming something of substance and mass in the world.

(A note: Messiaen's book, MUSIC AND COLOR (Conversations with Claude Samuel) is an invaluable guide to the composer's fascinating methods and ideas. )

Sources and Re-explorations, Part One: Charles Ives

2006-06-01T09:53:00.000-04:00

This week I've decided to go back and revisit some works of music and writing that have been crucial to my perceptions, and thus my own expression. I've chosen three to re-explore and write about. I'll begin with the American composer Charles Ives's orchestral work, THREE PLACES IN NEW ENGLAND(composed between 1903-1914.)

I first heard THREE PLACES IN NEW ENGLAND on an LP my dad brought home sometime in the late 60s. He'd bought it for Copland's LINCOLN PORTRAIT, but it was the Ives piece that captured me. I have strong memories of listening to it with one ear to our old Magnavox mono rig; the smell of hot tubes is somehow tied forever in my sensory memory to Ives's orchestral triptych. It's probably been ten years now since I've last heard it, so this morning-- a hazy, humid, summer-like one, as befits the first of June-- I sat down with coffee and listened closely.
The first section honors the famous St. Gaudens Bas-relief sculpture dedicated to Colonel Shaw's black Civil War regiment in the Boston Common. Like most of Ives's music, this composition is spacious and feels "outdoors" to me; there is light and sound and silence, and the sections and voices of the orchestra are arrayed to magnify that sense of spaciousness. The dominant harmonic colors, applied to snatches of hymns and ghostly song fragments, are like a more tart and polytonal take on the chromatic exoticism of Wagner and Debussy; but the overall effect is less heroic and monolithic than Wagner, less nocturnal and dreamlike than Debussy. This is, instead, music for bright light and clean, open air.
Like St. Gauden's fluid and classical approach to representational sculpture, Ives's music here evinces a sense of heroism tempered with compassionate humanity; there's all that open space and landscape, and the hymns provide a sense of history, community, and human continuity. Especially powerful is the way the constantly shifting textures-- the piano and contra-bass provide a particularly questing restlessness-- seem to find occasional fleeting resolution in one repeated, haunting hymnal motif.
The second place Ives visits is another war memorial. In "Putnam's Camp, Redding, Connecticut", the composer returns to childhood memories of outdoor picnics on the site of a Revolutionary War battle. It's a wild and raucous piece, with Ives's usual weave of hymns and marches. But there are quiet moments here and there, too, and these shifts in mood bring, to my ears, a morphing between Ives's childhood memories and the more ancient time-frame of the Revolutionary battle itself; thus this music becomes evocative of time and history in layers, of both history and personal memory. This layering could not be better sonically manifested than it is near the end of the piece, when a martial, elegiac, bugle-like horn melody on the far right horizon is subsumed by the same note played, on the left horizon, by a hollow, ethereal, thrush-like flute-- suggesting, perhaps, the ultimate merging of human history with the natural world.
Personal history and the natural landscape of New England are at the heart of the final movement, "The Housatonic at Stockbridge." Here Ives revisits a memory of a walk with his wife along the river. This is water music at its most evocative; music that flows and eddies and pulses and moves with a lush combination of impressionist harmony and tight, poly-chromatic dissonance. Ives brings the memory of moving river waters to life here, ending the piece abruptly --and emotionally-- with one of his yearning, questing, hymn motifs.
(I should add that the CD I listened to this morning-- Michael Tilson Thomas conducting the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1970 (DG 463 633) --offers an interpretation and recording that is very satisfying in its spaciousness, clean sonics, and dynamic range.)

I heard in Ives's THREE PLACES IN NEW ENGLAND this morning the same things I heard-- and loved -- when I was ten years old: evocation of place and history, of landscape and nature, of the unique clear and spacious light that suffuses the New England latitudes. And, certainly, I can hear how those things have stayed deep inside me to inspire my own writing and musical composition.