Leo 26°

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*

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Leo 25°

As a producer I really feel that I can expand to other venues around New England. Based on my experience and association with Harvard, I could conceivably replicate what I’m doing in Providence and in Portland and in the Berkshires, for sure. There is the MoCa and there is that corridor of colleges moving up to Vermont. There is Bennington. There is Worcestor, even. Newport. Then there is Bangor and Montreal and Toronto. And then all the way down to the Hudson Valley. Not to mention monied New England colleges dotted all over the map, which is what I need to make. Short of just jumping onto the web I want to get a clearer understanding of what I’m doing here and think about this logically. Hartford? New Haven for sure. There are definitely towns where this sort of thing can happen. And it would be fun to work with a roster of talent and have places into which I could book them. The other side of the coin here is finding a Boston base all my own, ultimately, like in a hotel somewhere (which really is a dream), where I could run a nightclub, like a little Joe’s Pub, and really put on the Ritz.

I will be speaking with and schmoozing with people who might help in this. I just have a feeling it’s part of my personality, maybe. Like being Rick in Casablanca. Ohh, that would be a fantasy. I’ll have to revist that soon. I’ll add to this item once I have some more information. Then again I might not and just keep these thoughts to myself. I have to say though I have always dreamed of owning a club or a small hotel or both. There used to be places like that in the world, small hotels with clubs. What a grand thing to be able to do. I should speak with my hotelier friends. Don’t you think?

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
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Leo 24°

So this is what I found out: Boston had the first public school, the first subway and the first public park in America. It’s very livable and health is a big deal for people in Boston. I feel very healthy there I must say.

The city is considered to be a world leader in innovation and entrepreneurship, with nearly 2 thousand start-ups. says:

Innovation that Matters 2016 (Report). US Chamber of Commerce. 2016.

What gives: Households in the city claim the highest average rate of philanthropy in the United States; The city has one of the highest costs of living in the United States as it has undergone gentrification—though it remains high on world livability rankings.

Global City: Boston is placed among the top 30 most economically powerful cities in the world. Encompassing $363 billion, the Greater Boston metropolitan area has the sixth-largest economy in the country and 12th-largest in the world.

 Youth and Vigor: Boston’s colleges and universities exert a significant impact on the regional economy. Boston attracts more than 350,000 college students from around the world, who contribute more than US$4.8 billion annually to the city’s economy.

Tourism: also composes a large part of Boston’s economy, with 21.2 million domestic and international visitors spending $8.3 billion in 2011; excluding visitors from Canada and Mexico, over 1.4 million international tourists visited Boston in 2014.

Wellness: Boston receives the highest absolute amount of annual funding from the National Institutes of Health. Of all cities in the United States. businesses and institutions rank among the top in the country for environmental sustainability and investment.

Progressive: The city is considered highly innovative due to the presence of academia, access to venture capital, and the presence of many high-tech companies. It is a hub of design education with MassArt, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, the School of Design Studies at The Boston Architectual College, New England School of Art & Design, The Massachusetts College of Art and Design, and, even, the Rhode Island School of Design within close promximity

Thought Leaders: Boston has been called the “Athens of America” “the intellectual capital of the United States. The Transcendentalists— Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Margaret Fuller, James Russell Lowell, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—were Boston based.

In a Word: Brahmin has come to mean a socially or culturally superior person, especially a member of the upper classes from New England. But it was adopted from the Hindu term for priests and spiritual leaders, which happened to be from the highest caste.

Hungry: In 2016, Zagat named Boston the No. 4 Foodiest city in the Country. New York was No. 21 and San Francisco, No 22.

 Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
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So I’m looking for a space. Actually I’m looking for a town and a space to headquarters a business. It’s a new business championing an ancient passion. I was thinking Boston or Provincetown or Portland, as I don’t want to do this in New York City. I thought writing about it would help me decide. I’ve put together a business plan, with Portland in the model but I think I should explore Boston as well. I was so convinced of Portland until I went there again just recently. It used to feel like my favorite place but not it feels just the opposite. But I’ll go back because I’m incredibly impressionistic and it was summer so there were carny, hairy, tattoing, ripped, dog-laden, dirty hippies in the town square, and a lot of them, and the port was filled with the dregs of the boating world, drunk, red-faced, in tee shirts, unhinged and looking for trouble, all frequenting the harbor dives.

Now as I write this I have sinced decided not to do Portland but to switch to Boston. But as I’m writing this I’m having a realization of things that I’m not concurrently writing on the page. And that is that I could “do” Portland because I wouldn’t need to be in town too much and when I was there are great restaurants and so forth; meanwhile I could rent a house elsewhere and not live in it, but have a place in a town to get to. But it just might be too small (I’m now changing my mind again); I’ll probably end up in Provincetown. No, I don’t think so. I like the adventure of Portland and it is a very easy investment, emotionally, to just live there. But I’ll likely still yearn for Boston. I really want to live in Back Bay, again, I really love it. But I could easily do the gig in Portland and already start making Paris my city, which would be good for business, as well.

But really it’s about the day to day, isn’t it? I should want to be where I am. Where do I want to be? That is the question. And funnily enough, I feel as if the answer will present itself. I’m really not worried about a thing strangely. And I’m very much a worry wart, or have been. Right now I’m ready to relax into experience more and not contribute to any excess nervousness. If anything I need to get back to yoga this week; and hit the beach for sure. Tomorrow morning. Then Provincetown, then lunch. Maybe I should stick with Boston/Cambridge and Provincetown for now. I need to look up Boston retail and some stats on its economic growth.
Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
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Leo 22°

“Something unprecedented: An artist in whom we have invested much time, energy and do-re-mi emailed to say she’s not honoring her contract to perform at the Afterglow Festival. (Breathe) But never fear! Stella Starsky is here! Three years ago, Stella performed her original piece, Birth of the American Baroness, and floored the audience. Stella will present a newly developed BOTAB at Afterglow on Friday, September 15, at 7PM, en route to performing the piece at Dixon Place in NYC, October 5. It’s too late to re-design, re-print and re-circulate the 5K flyers out there; but we are quickly putting new posters into works, updating web pages, press releases and alerts et al. It will all be worth bringing you this beautiful new iteration of Birth of the American Baroness! Help Stella help us bridge this sudden gap in our programming on the busiest night of festival. I’m name-checking folks whom, if I recall correctly, saw the piece before. Please spread the word and come and see the show which must go on!”

That’s the paragraph I’m going to publish to put some kind of tourniquet on this situation where we now have a huge gaping hole in our programming. Mary Birdsong was meant to perform but I woke up on Sunday to an email, sent overnight, saying she’s not coming. That it isn’t financially feasible (we were paying for the whole thing) and also she had been sleeping with her director and he dumped her. Why would anyone admit these to be reasons? I’ve known Mary for thirty years but haven’t seen her in about ten. People change. I know that she had subsequently booked dates at Pangea in NYC to “practice” for Afterglow. I just contacted them. They responded that she cancelled TWO WEEKS AGO. If this turns out to be true. Then her way more recent note saying that she is also going to cancel Pangea is a lie. What’s wrong with people. We have sunk about $5K + into her show already. People are so unthinking and uncaring. I begged her to reconsider trying to appeal any which way. As a result she blocked me on Facebook. Nice. Oh well, everything happens for a reason I suppose. But why are the most high-maintenance folks (who spend hours and hours and email after email asking you question after question when something so simple as getting a hi-res photo to the festival warrants a thousand emails….) also the ones that do this sort of fucked-up fuck-you thing in the end. We are a non-profit for Chrissakes! People donated the money we spent on you you selfish ….#$%@%!!!!

Anyway, three years ago Stella did her show just days before she started her three-year masters degree program. Now she is just finishing her dissertation and, just days after, she will end up doing (a new, improved version of) the show again! As it is she is going to mount it in NYC in October so it might help her creatively. Meanwhile, we are struggling to fix this situation. I do this with a small team. We don’t have time to take away from what we are meant to be presently focusing on: Fundraising.

Karma, with whom I’ve become intimately aquainted, and though I like her very much, is a Bitch. And she doesn’t like this sort of thing from my experience.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Leo 21°

Watched Glory Daze last eve on Netflix. Brought back many uneasy memories of those crazy club-kid days. DV8 Magazine, which was probably the first magazine ever designed on a Mac, was central to the scene (before Project X came along). Peter Belsky and Jonathan Bee were the teen-aged publishers. Dearly departed Laurie Litchford and I were editors. Editorial meetings with Michael Alig, James St. James, Keoki, Larry Tee, RuPaul and the whole tribe in attendance never went super smoothly. We were trying to publish a serious Arts and Fashion magazine which the kids would then take to Tunnel and other places to sell. I suspect we never got our full share of the profits.

Michael Musto, who is in the documentary, has made mention to me of the inconsistencies in the chronology of events put forth by the film. I’m curious to know if Fenton Baily has anything to add. I may never know. Anyway it was an era in which I felt vacant much of the time, and I feel that way now, looking back. I had just moved to New York City from Cambridge where I was for just a year after returning from Paris, in 1986, which I never wanted to do. I had moved there after college, returning to France, in a way, since I spent my junior there, when I would take the train from Grenoble, most weekends, to stay at some fabulous cheap hotel, namely the Hotel St. Domenico on the rue St. Dominque in the seventh.

My “in” into New York was through a hairdresser friend, Nancy Cohen, who lived in Paris when we did. She was part of our larger tribe. Nancy had a friend called Rondi Cooler who worked at Avenue magazie. As I had spent my year in Paris working at Passion magazine, a giant-sized (1980s) bi monthly glossy in English, all about doings in the city of lights, owned and run by Canadian, Robert Sarner. Rondi got me a job at Avenue—actually I was an editorial assistant at On The Avenue, their glossy tabloid publication, which came out weekly and was super fun and cheeky, taking the piss out of the 10022 crowd, while catering to them all at once. I wrote stories on themes like are Ed Koch and Cardinal O’Connor compatible, employing an astrologer, a hand-writing analyst and a numerologist, or something, to bring the “facts” to light. I also covered parties with great photographers like Mary Hilliard or Eric Weiss in tow (or rather they were towing me).

I was supposed to cover the young uptown set, the junior leage, if you will. Meanwhile I was far more downtown in my character, my wardrobe getting me into trouble on occasion, and with a longing, still, for Le Palace and Castel and Le Flashback in Paris, I was drawn to what was still a vibrant though changing club world in New York. A flyer came across my desk for a party for a new magazine starting up downtown called DV8* (with an asterisk as Wallpaper* would later adopt—I worked there later too, lol). Nobody at the magazine, including its editor and utlmately our dearest of friends who left us too early, could edit. I stepped in to do the actual work of turning stories handed to me, I’m not kidding, on toilet paper scribbled on in the middle of the night in a stall of some club, no doubt; gibberish from which I had to make complete sentences, paragraphs, pieces onto which I would impose some made up point of view. You didn’t email with the writer.

Only Laurie and Peter and Jonathan had computers. I would go to Laurie’s Hell’s Kitchen apartment during the day while she was at work, and race against time before my allergies to her cats sent me running from the old tenement, working as fast as I could on her tiny Mac SE30, to bascially shape scratchings on crumbled bits of paper into something sensical. And there were a handful of writers, like Musto, who handed in ready made copy. It was an incubator for talent though we didn’t know it at the time, really. Nobody thought in those terms. But, for instance, David LaChapelle’s first magazine cover was DV8*.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*

Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.

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Leo 20°

I’m a writer. So I naturally attempt to create an arc. It’s not thought out though it is an unconscious expectation. So even in writing these Blagues I suppose I feel a responsibility to make them complete nuggets. For them to have a beginning, middle and end. But screw that. At least I try to.

Sometimes I think of life in terms of what I would call my autobiography or my one man show or my pithy epitath, expressing a need to sum myself up in a clever capsule phrase. But I try to break through of these pre-sets in my brain, especially here where I should just be letting the words flow any which way. I wish myself luck with that.

I have thought about going back to school. Stella just finished year three of a masters degree. And (I wonder if) I feel the need to have some kind of like credentials. The fact is I hated school. I loved learning but I hated school. I loathed the way I had to fasten my assymentry into stiff new jeans and acceptable check or stripe shirts and footwear. Even new sneakers are uncomfortable. I hated the greasy patina of myself after a day at school where you had to hold in your bowel movments because there were no doors on the toilets in the boys room. Why were there no doors on the toilets in the boys rooms? I don’t recall ever seeing another boy use one of those stalls. At least where I grew up, we bred entire generations of constipated, divurticular males. Why? What was the reasoning? Boys don’t need to not be looked at by a room full of othe boys while they take a shit? I don’t get it…

But, hey, look good for me. I didn’t care about the arc, the titlte, the beginning, middle and end; I just wrote in any ol’ direction. But you see what I did there? I had to bring it back. Why did I have to bring it back. Why must a have a theme or a title. Such are the grooves in my brain I suppose. Though I do want to get to the poetry. Oh, that’s what I was saying, picking up another thematic thread: I thought I should get some kind of masters degree. In my fantasy these past years I thought I’d get a masters in some concentration of my own creation like: Sacred Spaces: Theater and Spirituality, since it combines much of my collective interest and industry. But I keep being drawn (back) to poetry. I make that parenthetical nod because I do think that poetry underlies everything. I do think it is a sort of primal cosmic language. I think that because when I strip away all the external and internal noise it’s what I hear. Yes the Libra hears the lyrical music of the spheres in words that float or breeze or unfurl in the everlasting air.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Leo 19°

The best thing about writing this Blague at this particular juncture, besides the pure venting, is not wanting anybody to read it. Not advertising it. Just doing it. And saying whatever the fuck I want to say. Condescension. Condescension. It’s something that can seep into relationships and experiences unless you nip that shit in the bud. I have gone on record many times by saying that people either celebrate you or tolerate you and you do the same to them. Celebration is the only way forward. First you must celebrate yourself. Then you can celebrate others, fairly easily.

I have felt the weigh of others condescension. I have. So have you. And I realize I have had a much a part in inspiring acts or shows thereof as those who are acting or showing. It’s just the way it goes. I have often allowed others to feel superior because it has served a purpose but it has exacted a price. And I’m absolutely done with it. One of my truest friends in the world is one of the richest and most famous. I don’t need anything from her. I just want to be free to be friends with her. But there are creatures among us who think they’re famous or wealthy or more talented (and somewhow this makes them better—a phenomenon we’ve all fed into) and when they use words like “aw” or “hon” or “doll” you know you’re stumbled upon them.

I’m feeling that for my next birthday, in little over a month, I’m going to pull a Bilbo Baggins and disappear. I won’t even have a party. I’ll just disappear. If we need to be the change we want to see in the world then I want genuine experience to characterize my change. I want to be free of the aw and the hon and the doll. I want to be free of the unreturned text, phone call or dinner invitation. I want to be free of the fabricated social heirarchies designed for revenge against feeling marginalized in middle school. I want to break free of the tyranny of the innuendo and the masked insult or sideways compliment.

I know there are no geographical cures but still I find geography helps. Certain places make us feel away just as others are triggers and push our buttons. I’m not gay and I’m not straight so my very presence in Provincetown is like a square peg in a round hole because, especially and ironically in Ptown you better know on which side your sexual bread is buttered. Why? Because the place is built on gay people having needed a place to feel safe. And the straight people there are distinguished by their small size in number and their scruffy embracing of diversity, that isn’t really all that diverse. The transexual community has had the most recent glaring spotlight—to varying degrees they are a population who are allowed to be both or neither. But bisexuals aren’t cut the same slack. The irony being that bisexuals are probably the purest expression of human sexual realness. I think, in the world of LGBTQ, being bisexual is the bravest thing to be. Because we have no community inside the community.

I didn’t mean to veer in this direction but I guess it’s where I’m going. Just because I don’t need to send all my friends a list of what pronouns to call me doesn’t mean I don’t have distinctions. I am all distinctions. I am not about anything that moves. I am about being open to loving people of all genders. Naturally. Well, I think, naturally. Who knows? When you grew up in the seventies when parents didn’t watch their kids and you were laid bare to sexual advances or, yes, attacks and those attacks become the norm who is one to ever know the difference between nature or nurture on that score. But who the fuck cares. We don’t care if it’s David Bowie or Joe Dallassandro because, why?, they were talented or beautiful enough that we could suspend our prejudices against bisexuality just in case they might decide to like us? Fuck you. Fuck all of you. (Isn’t that what you think I want to do?)

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Leo 18°

I think when I get through this year of Blagues I’ll go back to year one and really dig back into those Sabian Symbols. I need to be quiet and write even if it kills me. I say that because the isolation of writing is not the healthiest thing for me. The fact is that if one writes fiction, good or bad, there are no rules to follow really. But if one writes non-fiction there are cases and arguments to be built, predetermined payoffs to achieve. It’s quite daunting. I have never figured out how to take the easy way in life. And I have never had lightning strike the way others have. I was not born into a family with a grandfather who gave me a house when I was twenty. I worked a thousand jobs and did what I could to get this far. I’m proud of myself but now I want more and less. I want more of the kind of payoff I’ve seen my friends enjoy and I want it to happen more easefully. I’m sick to death of being an adjunct professor in the school of hard knocks.

Any form of poverty will wear you down. We are all impoverished on some level. But I realize that doing what I do non-profit puts me in the position of walking around with a begging bowl which casts me in the light as beggar and I’m not. I make a decent living and dedicate half my year and time and energy to working on this non-profit. I get very little help in this I must say. Actually I get none. I’m tired of struggling to make things happen here. Provincetown has proved time and again that it cares more about realtors than it does about artists.

We’ve tried to save Provincetown from itself but it doesn’t want to be saved. It wants to have crappy remakes of Broadway plays which only speak to the vanity of it’s producer/performers. It wants rich boys in shorts of many colors with dogs of myriad tiny scale clutched into their chests. That’s what this place wants. In some way that’s what every place wants. Where are the true bohemian enclaves? Where have they gone? Where is art being created as a genuine experience. Fascist regimes used to attack the artists and intellectuals first but this current politcal and social culture doesn’t need to attack the artists and intellectuals because there aren’t any. There are brands that make TV shows and movies and music and clothing lines for the home shopping network.

People think that the problem is in the White House, which is only partly true. But it’s also in your house. You know that place that isn’t good or big enough for you. The one that makes you say you deserve more. The one from whence you sit watching doggy videos. The artists I knew back in the day, the 80s and early 90s, most of them made it. And then they lost their artistry. Now they are logos on the back of other people’s jackets. There is no art. There is no poetry. There are just would-be screenplays. Even the live shows that happen in downtown NYC are exploitation. There is that one performer, the worst ever to play Afterglow, who exploits her friend (who didn’t even like her toward the end of their relationship) who died of AIDS just so she can have a solo show at Dixon Place.

Say what you want about Penny Arcade—and I have—but at least she hasn’t made it. And because she hasn’t made it she can still rant and rave her sourgrape symphony that actually constitutes art. Jack Pierson’s work is now as faded and discardable as the giant letters of signage he salvaged to make it. John Derian’s style is as faded and decayed as the moldering pieces of furniture and objets he’s collected. There was only one Boo Radley and he existed fictionally. It all belongs on the trash heap. But not until enough stupid rich people who’ve paid through the nose to acquire it have had their fill.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
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Leo 17°

On Sunday morning I awoke to a cavalier email from Mary Birdsong who has been contracted to play at Afterglow since May saying she can’t come. That she can’t make it work financially (makes no sense since we pay for everything) and that the director of her show who she’s been sleeping with has dumped her (the real reason?). We invest so much time and effort into the performers and were already in a $5K hole with her and now staring into the abyss of what would have been another $3K in ticket sales—lost.

When I first started Afterglow the artists were a dream. And they were also the most successful of their crop. They comported themselves professionally, they were grateful for even the small fee we gave them, because they were treated like gold and liked being in Provincetown all together. It was a something. In the passing years that spirit actually became more, not less, vibrant. But somewhere along the line, as we started reaching out to artists with whom we had less strong a personal connection, the artists started to become as much a source of stress as they were joy.

Some would come to festival with multiple assistants in tow and not see any other artists perform but instead go to other venues. But really nothing takes the cake like this bombshell Mary Birdsong dropped. I first met Mary nearly thirty years ago when we were doing improv together. I loved improv but I hated the world of it. It’s such a long story that. But I need to stay light and in the present. Or as my dear friend Justin Vivian Bond says: Keep it light, keep it pretty and keep it moving. I’m inclined to agree. I also suspect this is the last year I can do this in Provincetown. I just don’t have the support.

It was one thing to get out there and fight the good fight raising money for these artists to come to Provincetown. I put up with a lot of uphill battle in raising funds and also with that awful previous venue owner whose name must not be uttered. But now to have the artists be a source of struggle. And not just struggle but devastation? NO. I’m not putting up with it. It’s all the law of diminshing returns. I just need to eek by and get the fuck out of here.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2017 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox