stew sez

i now own a punch bowl.
this punch bowl makes me think of my mother and father in the late 60s, early 70s
and their finger poppin’ parties. Back when adults were still cooler than kids (although the kids were gaining ground).
I remember how limitless and cool adult life looked. They smiled like gods. And they danced with irony and total commitment.
Our definition of cool, back then.
And it looked to me like they were having the best kind of fun. Mysterious fun. You could see it in their sly grins
when they walked in or out with someone they met by the punch bowl at my parent’s party. I am haunted by those sly grins like
like glimmering lights in the distance waiting for me to grow up and join them. Those sly grins were proof they knew of things sweeter than candy, rides wilder than merry-go-rounds, smaller, more intimate Disneylands.
These toe-tapping finger-poppin’ drink clutching gap-toothed be-hatted gods smiled slyly while telling me don’t hurry to get old. Which of course I couldn’t hear.
This saturday i’m throwing my own little punch bowl party and i hope there’s an 8 year old in attendance
who will note my sly grin and look up at me like I’m a drunken loud mouthed god and not just some old cat trying his damnedest to be cool.

/s

i am speechless.
they are so amazing.

http://willyoumissme.wordpress.com/

the problem with my local organic supermarket is that you have to be a millionaire hippy in order to buy lamb there.

tribeca was cool. someone told us they were shocked cuz our talk-back was actually entertaining. i didn’t few the film but i heard it looked and sounded amazing in their theater.

i’m still trying to come to terms with the fact that this crazy little thing me Heidi and Annie cooked up just for the hell of it is actually going to live on as part of the PBS canon. I really cannot wrap my head around that yet. PBS changed my life a number of times as a teen – for instance, – like or not Robert Hughes’ politics, his “Shock of the New” series was a watershed moment for me as a kid who wanted to be an artist for life. That doc made art making seem heroic, suspenseful, important and downright necessary. After seeing it I went out and bought a canvas, some oil paints and tried to be Munch for a few months until a painting I made looked so much like a guitar (and a woman) that I realized where I should be hanging my focus. And there it has remained.

And so the idea that PS is going to be there for some unsuspecting teen (so that she may realize that shes not alone in thinking that there’s gotta me more to life than what she’s been handed by her community) and some equally unsuspecting Mom (who will see that we who run away with the circus do eventually get it, albeit too late sometimes)…is just all quite alot to fathom for a singer in a rock and roll band.
/s

…and of course even then it may not make sense…
/s

I don’t know which was more unlikely:
Obama becoming Prez
or a middle-aged rock freak winning a Tony.

I think the latter.

I thought 2007 was about as surreal as my life could possibly get.

2008 made 2007 look like an episode of that BBC series about the country veterinarians.

I’ve never bought into New Years hoopla. I find the parties embarrassing. I have grudgingly attended them only when I was too broke to refuse the highest paying gig of the year: executing grimly endless grooves for amateur drunks. Like my birthday, it’s always been just another day.

But 2008 rocked, nay, shook me in all sorts of ways: emotionally, politically, romantically, intellectually, career-wise, name it. I even learned how to cook chili. There’s more to it than opening a can, son. Anyway, 2008 chewed me up and, being the fat, overly spiced motherfucker that I am, spat me out. And I’m all the stronger for it.

But for the first time in my life I am feeling the significance of this insignificant marking of time. Because 2009 really will be different.
Ain’t no way around that.

The beautiful stuff that happened in 2008 was beyond description. Maybe some day I’ll find the words to describe how it felt to listen to Toni Morrison talking about PS as my ex-wife Freya, my daughter Bibi and my girlfriend Debbie, all Morrison fans, listened on in rapt attention. This was extra deep because Freya turned my Mom onto Morrison’s work. That moment with Ms. Morrison in my dressing room speaking directly to the women of my life, and thus, in a sense, directly to my Mother as well, was the moment I learned what success was. You couldn’t buy that moment with money. That was the real Toni award.

Back in LA when I was young and spending more time in garages rehearsing than I was onstage, often after practice the band would sit around drinking beer and smoking weed and inevitably somebody would get so high they’d start talking about what I “should be doing” with all these songs I was writing. And they’d say things like “Yo, Stew! Maaaaan, what you need to do is write a musical!” And then another dude would mutter, while passing the J and trying not to exhale, “And then get that shit on Broadway, dude…” And then the guy in the backseat, who was by now higher than all of us, would say “Yeah, yeah, yeah…and then you gotta get Spike Lee to film that shit!”

And then we’d all laugh.

Starting January 2008 and right up until a few weeks ago, this year has been a non-stop love rollercoaster of challenges both beautiful and painful. These challenges have changed my direction, my mind, my work, my life. I lost things that I thought I’d have forever. And I gained great things that I never thought I’d have. That’s a fair exchange. Or maybe about as fair an exchange as you can expect from life.

So for the first time ever, this New Year is really going to be “new.” Not because of some false significance that I imbue it with, but because real change has come.

So when I do the embarrasing toast tonight at midnight I’ll actually have something real to toast for a change, as I think will we all. And the only endless grooves I’ll be “spinning” will be from my “party play-list” in i-tunes.

I can’t listen to all these fireworks bombs going off here in Berlin tonight without thinking about Gaza. I’m not foolish enough to think I could possibly add anything valuable to that long sad song here on my goofy singer/songwriter blog. I’m more Sonny Bono than Bono. I just wanted to mention it since we were talking about change.

Nappy New Year,
/stew