20-eleven.

Artists, Arise! We summon you.

Musicians and singers; dancers, painters and sculptors, writers, builders of useful AND unusual things, stretch your bodies and ready your tools. It's time for you to go to work.





Yours are the products that steady our spirits, and soothe our souls.

And we are communally cracked, bouncing toward broken.

HAPPY NEW YEAR! ummm, happynewyear? ... wait, ... happy. new. year. --- not quite.

happy new year ... I guess that's the one.

happy new year...

2010 leaves "us" more unemployed, more homeless, more precariously positioned, more tentative, and more collectively ... blah ... than many of his earlier siblings.

And it is art that will ultimately restore our sanity.

This year I have reconnected with more people from my past than at any time in my life. I welcome each of you. I'm glad to have you back in my universe.

It is my sacred personal tradition to offer a comment on each departing and arriving year. This particular transition finds me lost for words -- but vocally so.

Most years this blessing is a call to the Universe for pleasant things to come your way.

Not this time.

This year, a call for YOU to stand up, dust yourself off, introduce yourselves to the neighbors, and get to work. We must rebuild.

There is plenty to do. And to quote the lovely Alice Walker, "we are the ones we have been waiting for" to do it.


With that, my 2011 blessing:

As the new year sparks to life, I wish re-ignition of the fire in your belly. I wish it to warm, then glow, then crackle, then consume the excuses that may have kept you on the sideline and ultimately burn outward as unquenchable passion to make a difference. THIS is the year we need you to make progress on that thing you were born to do.

I wish you toward a desire for introducing yourself to others. We can spare no quarter to anonymity.

First, because there are scoundrels and scallywags among us. And every time they sit a briefcase or bag beside their chair and walk away -- it shuts down the airport. We need to start figuring out who they are, so we can return to keeping our shoes on when we travel to grandmother's house.

More importantly ...

We are surrounded by people in pain; real, tangible, gut-shredding circumstance and situation. We need to put names and faces to these trials, and stop pondering them in the abstract. It isn't "the homeless," it is Bill, his wife, and the three kids living in their Civic.

THOSE are two very different problems.

I wish for you commerce. Create something. And sell it or trade it for something someone else has created. Then make something else, and repeat the process. A song, a bottle of wine, a meal, a painting, a table, a loaf of bread, a cut lawn, a colorful knick-knack. These are the seeds of an assembly line, then a factory, then an industry, then an economy.

Neither Washington nor your State capitol creates jobs. Those come from people with a tangible "something" to market. And a "strong economy" starts with the thing you created.

I wish focus for you. I bless you with an eye for finishing the things you start. These are not times to leave business incomplete. You will drown in a boat half-bailed, lose everything to a fire half-extinguished, and starve in wait for a meal half-prepared.

I wish for you language. Our melting pot is flavored with many spices, and we have degraded ourselves to complainers about the combination, rather than savor-ers of the flavor. I encourage you to learn a paragraph not crafted from the alphabet of your youth.

Hierdie jaar, leer jouself om te sê goeie môre in 'n taal wat nie jou eie.

Salve.

I wish for you an infinite supply of hugs and kisses. Not for your reception, but for your delivery. We need to resume touching each other. Texting isn't the same. It cannot replace a hug.

Artists: I wish your favorite muse to be captured at your side; rendered incapable of leaving you, and emotional in her captivity. I wish her to inspire you, cajole you, tease you, anger you, and propel you to your greatest works ever. You are our bulwark from these blahs. They would have us believe they are inescapable. You have the crafts to prove them wrong. First our survival (√) then our sanity ( ), then our stability ( ), and ultimately our success (!).

As always I wish you life, health, strength, a smile, great sex, a party, nutrition, a song, a good book, a circle of trustworthy friends, a cabal of wise counsel, a bushel bucket of hope, and a tougher tether to your elders and children.

We have lost many bright lights this year. People we admire and love have gone to the other side from every facet of public and many of our private lives. I wish this to remind you that ours is a temporary sojourn through this time and space.

We will not arrive the destination at the same time, but I wish us to all arrive "together."

happy new year ...

--Stew.

Photo: This year's photo is called "Father Time opens the gates of dawn which open upon the real world." That's not what I would have named it, but then .. I deal in words, not images. The artist's title DOES seem to capture everything he intended. If you like it, and want it for your living room, Art.com will be happy to frame it and send it to you.

Twenty Ten

It is beyond habit, now; this annual sendoff and welcoming of the years. Greetings old friends, it is time for another New Year’s blessing.

New friends, this has become my annual tribute to the information age. Every year, as the final grains slip beyond the waist of the hourglass, and we prepare to flip it over, I look for a new representation of Father Time, and write a few words of blessing via blog to the peoples I call “mine.”

This year’s art was painted in honor of Chritiaan Huygens. It is described as Father Time holding a pendulum between cycloidal arcs instead of an hourglass. In the background Saturn with its moon Titan and ring discovered by Huygens. Travelers--you can find this piece in the Netherlands’ Boerhaave; the National Museum of the History of Science and Medicine.

This is the first time since beginning this tradition that I have the privilege of capping a decade, as well as a year.

This marks the fourth “decade,” or portion of a decade I’ve witnessed. It was by far my least favorite while having had the most long-term impact on my life.

I don’t mean just the way the Universe dealt with me, as an insignificant. That indeed sucked, but is of no real consequence. I mean the aesthetics, the music, the culture, the society, and the general ... aura(?) of the era seemed to never quite balance in the aughts.

For context; consider that here in America, we started the decade locked in a weird and bitter Presidential campaign that “ended” without the vote deciding the Presidency. Speaking from a purely non-partisan place, that’s just ... weird. It neither computes nor balances. And it almost perfectly illustrates what I’m trying to pin down about that space in time. It feels like “everything” in the aughts had a “not quite right” feel to it.

We all watched our first “live on network television” national tragedy that Tuesday morning. It didn’t feel real, but was on teevee. It was on teevee and didn’t feel like a soap opera or cable drama, either. It felt like ... being violated? watching helpless as someone hurt your child, your family, something you love dearly? For four days there was wall-to-wall commercial television with no commercials. Again with the “offness.”

Of course, that tragedy required us to fight two separate wars against very nebulous enemies; entities we just couldn’t quite pin-down, or identify. “Terrorism,” “al-quaida,” “radical Islamic extremism,” “insurgents,” were our new enemies, even though very few people have seen them, though hundreds of thousands have fired weapons in their general direction.

Lakefulls of ink have been spilt and shaped in defense and condemnation of these things. I am here to neither support or attack them as choices, today. I am simply an observer of the odd and subtle ennui that for me, epitomized the aughts.

The internet and social networking and cell phones and satellite information beamed to private houses for fee all came to maturity in this relatively tiny span of time. Yet, for most of the decade, it all felt like information without purpose. It was as if everyone suddenly had access to the equivalent of unlimited cash, with very little in the marketplace to buy. Toward the end of the decade, more usability started to emerge from the capability, and all signs point toward a very well integrated future for man, machine, and the knowledge matrix.

And then the economy turned on its heels and bit us--the hand that feeds it. Previously predictable real estate cycles turned into toxic asset pools, and global mega-corporations became welfare queens. American unemployment tripled seemingly overnight, and the deficit swelled past pre-Carter/Reagan era records.

And finally, mercifully ... we flip the hourglass and reset the numbers. We lose the confusing “what do we even CALL the era” bit, and enter the “20-somethings.”

My wishes for you are unusually simple this year.

And on this precipice, I stroke keyboard, and click mouse to offer them to you in this newly dawned age:

First and foremost I wish you solid ground on which to stand; days with specific milestones, goals complete with reasonable schedules, budgets with solid funding streams, and beliefs that are settled to your core. I wish for this new stability to completely permeate your environment, and ultimate our society.

Whether you look in the mirror and see a Conservative or Liberal; theist or atheist, pro-or-con, mac or PC, I wish your world to a perpetual state of rock steady. I bequeath you a universe where what is good for you comes bathed in light, and the evil is covered in shadow for easy recognition.

I wish you wholesome food; processed and prepared just enough to be at its freshest, ripest, and most nutritious.

I wish you water; pure and unbottled, that quenches your thirst fully and causes you to crave its healthy goodness like Pookie craved crack.

I wish you wine that bursts with flavor, color, and bouquet, made from grapes grown in vineyards filled with love.

I wish you beer and spirits perfect in their strength, and powerful in their effect, and for you a discerning conscience for moderation.

I wish you’d put the soda down. :-)

For the first time ever, I wish for you a PARTY; in whatever context that word conveys to your heart an ideal of being surrounded by good friends and laughter, participating in whatever activity engages everyone present to their betterment. I wish you celebrations to attend, and bless them to help heal the tears in your piece of our tattered communal soul.

I wish for you a perfect book; for some of you to write, and for others of you to read. I bless it word-for-word, and will you to its completion. I wish for it to touch your soul in an untouched place, and to spark your imagination AND inspiration to go forth and make the world you can touch and see a better place.

I wish for you one perfect song. I wish for it to be a song you can sing with your own voice, or play with your own hand. I wish for it to soothe your savage beasts on days where their hunger threatens to consume you.

I wish for you an argument that never ends, with a friend who is not threatened by the disagreement, about a subject that stretches your mind, and deepens the understanding between you.

I wish for you peace, and love, and joy.

I have no sacred powers with with to spark life into any of my wishes, but I do believe that the human soul is capable of speaking the desired into existence. It is with this belief that I humbly present this list of wishes for you with a word of encouragement to speak them into existence in the universe YOU inhabit.

We know that there will be sorrow in this year, and pain, and disappointment, and sadness.

But it doesn’t have to be the defining character of the time we fill.

And when we meet here to celebrate the arrival of the next baby New Year, I wish for us the satisfaction of knowing we helped shape and mold a better “we.”

Peace,

--Stew.

Photo:
http://www.museumboerhaave.nl/AAcollection/AAJPEGS/M03/P00785.jpg