Santa Monica Beach Spring 2025, new revelations upon visiting a familiar destination
This year, 2025, we took our first beach trip to our usual Santa Monica Beach, in mid April. It was a risky venture, as our city had been pummeled by the apocalyptic wildfires a couple months before, including the Palisades fire by the water, and we didn’t know what we were getting into, but we wanted to see the ocean. When we arrived, the beach was empty and cold. We looked at the water and it looked unfamiliar, the color was a strange brownish gray color. And there were little white and blue things lining the sand all along the shoreline, and we didn’t know if it was some kind of poisonous algae or jellyfish.
There is always the incomprehensibility of the ocean—it’s not definable, it’s always changing, it’s a whole world. I love it but fear it. Likewise, climate change is terrifying, and you feel the effects of it most when you see what it is doing to our natural world. The jellyfish-like creatures turned out to be “Velella velella”, and they often shore up in the spring, and apparently their increased presence could be related to rising temperatures. And the color of the water was probably some kind of algae bloom which is said to have been fed possibly by the runoff from the wildfires, in which case, it would be toxic. It was sad for our daughter not to go in the water, it was hard to explain to her.
The ocean has always been a daunting and beautiful and terrifying presence to me—godlike in my mind. this trip felt even more of an acknowledgment of that than ever, and yet a reminder of how fragile and precarious ocean life is, how much we have to watch over it, while still being in awe of it.
Julia Shammas Holter • she/her • Los Angeles, CA
Julia Holter is a composer, songwriter, performer, and recording artist based in Los Angeles. Her interest in sonic mysteries has led her to record in various settings–in her home, outside with a field recorder, and in recording studios—as well as to perform live, often with a focus on the voice and the space between language and babble. Holter’s music is multi-layered and texturally rich, frequently featuring a varying ensemble of creative musicians. She has amassed a body of work that explores melody within free song structures, atmosphere, and the impulses of the voice.
