Pisces 20° (March 10)

I miss blue books, you know, those exam books we used to write into at university. It’s the same reason I miss stationers, especially the French kind. I think it would be so hot to have a stationers and collectibles as part of the retail model for the design stores. If such items were both a draw and an accent for customers. But, like so many ideas, somebody else would have to actually work there.

The so-called “downtown performance scene”, once literally associated with NYC and no more conceptual a reference, has changed more drastically, probably in its history, in the years I’ve been working in it, and for a number of reasons. Many of the popular artists who had been performing on the fringes have seen that fringe become mainstream. Meanwhile there is simply more appetite in other cities, now, besides NYC for this genre (which isn’t really any one genre at all); and many artists themselves comprise a social circle, if not a circuit, while living. in Austin, Seattle, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Portland(s), Boston, Philadelphia, New Orleans. I believe our work with Afterglow, preserving Provincetown as an incubator, working with artists from various American places, and some foreign ones as well, champion artists that have been on the fringe, has helped cultivate this cultural shift, along with other festivals, arts centers, theaters, museums and universities, many of which are in loose contact with each other. Then there are those, the younger ones, who were on the cusp of this cultural shift and immediately spring-boarded into zeitgeist via television and film and commercial “festivals” which really should be termed something else.

I remember, when I was learning to write semi-professionally I think my biggest challenge was to take each thought in turn, to separate them out, and let thoughts simply build through the blocks of letters, characters. I still see vestiges of my struggle with that when I write. I also write several paragraphs, often, at the same time. I’m sure that wasn’t something you knew, would have guessed, or even thought was a thing. But it is.

I don’t want to rush. Rushing is for losers. The tortoise not the hare is the proverbial winner. It’s all very Saturn-Cronos energy of endurance. Endora, as we’ve oftain said, is the pop culture Ops-Rhea. Cronos and his scythe. Old Father, and Mother, Time. Maurice and Endura, forever clad in tuxedo and gown, like the classic ruling couple of the Golden Age of the Titans; and too, they are Oberon and Titania.

Anyway you never saw them rushing. I’m ready to be a late bloomer. Title for a book: The Baby Bloomer Generation. Don’t steal that title—it’s now officially my IP.

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

Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Pisces 19° (March 9)

Oh my goodness I was looking at my collective To-Do list and in a world where I thought I was ahead of the game of 2018 I suddenly feel ever so slightly behind the eight ball, though I am aware, that both perspectives are illusions. I am interested in getting more out of every day, naturally, as spring approached. I am often derailed with regret for the things I didn’t continue to pursue—guitar, tennis, et al. But self-recrimination is not only a trap in itself, it’s also kind of narcisisstic at its core. Look I don’t live in a hut and have to walk six miles every day for water to feed my family of nine. I have the luxury of my problems and wistful thinking. However, and you might relate to this, it is often difficult know if I’m being hard on myself or not hard enough. When I look around I feel nobody works harder than I do. Then again, others might feel I live the life of Riley. Neither or both may be true.

There is much heavy lifting to do this year and I really want to do it. I have learned my lesson about disappointment and it’s almost better to expect to feel it than to toppled by a position of high optimism. The trick is to be optimistic and not get taken off your game, despite the doings of others. I do think I’ll feel better, next week, when I can go through to-do lists and brand books and planning strategies and all that occurs in the course of a day in the life of a person that has a dozen would-be giant projects going at once. This sort of grand re-visioning is for the birds; and I truly never want to have to do it again. The spoon must be moved. And I must reserve this time for more purely creative pursuits.

Starting on the Ides of March, a happy-sad day on a number of accounts, I will be working my way through some creative ideas in what will be a week-long slamming together of a project. Yes, that’s right, I’m giving myself another goal to achieve. This time in the short-term. It might prove to be something of incredible importance, not just in its own creation, but in the manner it will be created. It’s an experiement in actualization which, if it works, I can share with clients and friends. It’s hard to put into words the theory of the method as of yet but, bear with me, it has something to do with creating objects and putting them down onto a desk in front of you. I know that sounds rather basic but it may require cut-outs and cartoons and the like with little snippets of words here and there to get the out of the abstract realm and into the real in a matter of one week.

Yet another reason to beware the Ides of March.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
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Pisces 18° (March 8)

With a heady Pisces man encounter and the watching of the Mr. Rogers special on PBS I am awash in masculine-fish understanding. Well, I should preface by saying that Pisces man is probably the most truly unknowable character in the human zodiacal Pantheon. Typing that triggered a dream. Something about not using upper case in something that called for it. Not a very impactful dream. We once had a contest amongst friends whereby we recounted our most boring dream ever. One friend had what seemed like an epic dream in which she was just vaccuming. She might have wond the contest or I did. My contribution: I once dreamed that I was asleep and not dreaming.

I love the fact that Mr. Rogers (whom I really didn’t watch much as a kid) had Margaret Hamilton the Wicked Witch on. I actually do remember that episode. I think she was also already Cora who sold coffee. I suppose she was so universally frightening to children that it warranted an episode on demystifying the witch thing. But he didn’t have to go and write a song about it called, or deliver the message that, “Witches are Never Real”, because, hello, here I am. And look I know that many of my downtown East Village friends and performers and defacto social crowd consider themselves witches and talk about it and say blessed be and all that…but they don’t have my abilities. Nor do they even know (or actually care to know) that I possess the actual thing of which they wrap themselves in a cartoon-cloak version.

It’s just one of the many reveals about me which have yet to happen. I am and have done more things than most who get praised, obsessively, by those who love to worship. I hope that made sense. Not all talent is gods-given. There are acutely cultivated people out there (many of whom just happen to be born under the sign of Taurus) who have worked so hard on their persona and on little bits of ability, blowing them out to extreme proportion, that it disguises the fact they might not really be very singers or writers or actors or comedians. And yet they succeed via their decades long cultivation and I think that is as important if not more important than natural talent. Those who have both the natural sort and the genius for self-cultivation really make true stars. But they aren’t necessarily also witches. It’s just a little fairy dust thrown on top, an affectation, like a love for Stevie Nicks. Don’t get me wrong—Stevie is fabulous—but we really shouldn’t label her a genius.

As often happens, as I’m writing this, a dream I had last night bubbles to the surface. I think I was in a van or a bus as would travel a band or performance troupe and the conversation swung to what a true genius Christine McVie is; (in the dream) how she was a unique composer who innovatively pieced together compositions. In reality her songs are very simple but surely among the most best-selling ones in Fleetwood Mac. They were catchy. And she’s a bigger Mac than her husband in the equation of the musical group. But she’s an Ethel, a Bea Benadaret, the beta female in the mix, by virtue of Stevie’s love of the limelight, surely, but also her recklessness. I remember friends seeing the band during the Tusk tour while I was still in high school and reporting back that Stevie just sat on the edge of the stage staring into space all during the show. It was when they were on the wane, for sure, seeming corny and tired compared to Squeeze and Elvis Costello and other pop entities coming onto the scene. But I do believe that Stevie just might be a witch. Grace Slick called her a white witch. I’m going to say gray, brown, tan beige or putty.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Pisces 17° (March 7)

This has been a tough couple of days. Any kind of things involving people’s health is always a bit of a pickle, emotionally. Growing up the male Katharine Hepburn I always thought I’d face physical challenges with a yankee resolve; then again, I thought I would swim every day off a dock all year long. Neither of these things seem to have become my eventual reality; so I know I have a long way to go in this area, and in others. I know this. But then I return to the Kate Hepburn thing or anything stiff-upper-lippy. What is the alternative, I ask you. It has to be thus. We must be strident in the face of adversity. There is no other way. I hate medications, I will either endure the damage or make changes where changes might mean something. Otherwise I’m pretty fine, floating; and I will face whatever may come. Doing so is an expression of the dignity of being alive.

Our friend Taylor said that “Comparison is violence” and I not only agree; but I would suggest it is a self-inflicted sort. I may have written this very sentence a few Blagues back but, to be honest, writing so much in so short a spate of time, really is a blur. And yet I’m proud of the quantity, if not the quality. And I feel there might be some gems of wisdom to be found in the silt of the past six weeks playing so-called catch-up which I realize was more than that. Yes, I got derailed in October receiving news that, whether you label it “devestating” or not devestated me. I was feeling so happy and so optimistic about the representation we were being offered. “Let’s have some fun,” said the top agent who was “interested in representing” us back in May—and then the slow silent descent of six months ending with an abrupt…”Unfortunately…” Oh how I loathe that word. And I’m sad to have discovered how easily it was to derail me. In my defense, I swore off all agents, lawyers, managers as best I could, dating back at least six years; because I never again wanted to find myself in a position where someone could take me off my game with just that one word, ususally uttered after 5PM on a Friday.

So many cowards. And so many rich cowards to boot.

I don’t want to compare, as I say, because of the violence factor but, really, most of the people I know that are very wealthy (but for a few poignant exceptions with whom I have close bonds) are really just venal and vapid in equal measure. I surely do not want to be like them. Ever. I want to be one of the good eggs that gets his. And I have. And I’m not greedy. And it’s not that I want more for more sake. I actually want it for security and peace of mind. And so I must again take up my warrior spear and set upon making a difference, for myself, and for my loved one, in this world. I do just have the one—that wasn’t a typo, despite what the daily sign-off (below) of this Blague might suggest.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Pisces 16° (March 6)

I can’t say I loved my father, and I was unable to trust my mother. I now know that I was right in the first place. I found out about six years ago, nearly ten years after his death, that it was quite obvious from birth that he didn’t like me. For the first eight years of my life I lived in a small apartment in Jersey City and shared a tiny room with my sister who is over five years older than myself. Twin beds tucked into corners with just a small space between them. Oh how I hate her too. She had a best friend, who was more a sister to me, who lived upstairs in the building and who moved away when I was six or seven. And yet, rekindling my relationship with her via social media six years ago, she revealed much to me. That my father didn’t like me. That he was extremely upset by my existence because I wasn’t a butch child; not the alpha-male that he considered himself to be. He was truly wrong about that too.

I was right in the second place too. My mother, whom I loved, was not to be trusted. And I knew this early in life. They say you don’t realize when trauma is happening, but that something triggers in later in life. For me later in life meant like ten years old. When shipped off to a rental summer house for the summer, my mother, sister and I; my father staying up north “to work,” I remember one night, my mother had a bunch of her friends over, all of whom lived in the same apartement building in Jersey City, from which we fled to a tony suburb two years before—she said “let’s show them what we do” and we proceeded to make-out to the verbal horror of her friends that shocked me into realization that, though I can’t remember a single incident as to the “what we do” prior to that, I have a shameful, sharp remembrance of performing it for her friends. A completed cycle of trauma before I turned eleven. I always wonder if this made me vulnerable to all that happened, starting at age eleven, which would only support my father’s presuppositions.

Am I, one eternally wonders, a self-fulfilled prophesy in the flesh? Sure why not. It’s so easy to be poetic about the things that happen to us and to reveal them, thusly, suggesting it makes one interesting, that we all have extraordinary stories. But really, though this and other traumas may have cycled through me before teenage, the tragedy of them continue in me all my life. In my self-indulgence, in my isolation, in my alienation of anyone who might be a friend, something I have never successfully been able to pick. I am a split person or a dual person or a person or all of the above.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Pisces 15° (March 5)

So what to make of Roseanne and Murphy Brown coming back with Will & Grace and perhaps there are other shows, but if my writing days for the Styles section of The New York Times taught me anything it is: you only need three examples to build a story.

I am reminded of the recent-back where I wrote about the need for all to be poetry. It was stated so poetically, and rather through rather than by, that it must have gone directly to my supraconscious to rattle around for a week or so before registering as a thought in my frontal regions. Speaking of frontal regions, sometimes you just want to sit home and sip something relaxing and trim your balls, such as they are. I know I do. Weekend alone stuff to do.

Meanwhile the whole thing is like watching reality television. The president and the porn star. Tacky characters. I’m so bored that I want to change the channel, but that’s what they want us to do. The real Kim Jong-un has now become the South Park characterization of his father. I’m so ronery. Only this isn’t funny or genius it’s boring in the most literal sense of the word. And that’s the desired effect. They want to bore us into submission. Resistance is….I have to look up “opposite of bored,” and you won’t believe the leading thought form!: Entertained. Entertained. So I’m back on my rant about entertainers. But antonyms also include: interest, energy, excitement, liveliness, enjoyment. It’s not enough to laugh, we must laugh, think and act!. Entertainment and activism truly must go together now.

Note to self: What would it look like to set up a gig for yourself and/or Stella at a place like the Preservation Hall. I do get the sense that I need a microphone in my hand—stat. This might also be the rantings of someone who is sitting home on a late Sunday afternoon watching television news (which isn’t great on Sunday) starring down the barrel of bottle of Languedoc. It does feel like something of a luxury. We are supposed to get a storm tomorrow and whether it is the actual ions or something more metaphorical, I do feel something gathering. Which is a nice paradoxical counterpoint to the fact that I am really grasping at straws a bit for something to write that might be of universal interest in addition to ticking the box on self-indulgent mutterings.

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

Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2018 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox

Pisces 14° (March 4)

Award shows are no longer just irrelevant, they’re now totally obsolete. We don’t need a pantheon of actors of all people to worship—we don’t. Not unless we start likewise worshiping all walkers of life. It’s beyond ridiculous at this point. And I think about these Gen Y high-school students, which blinding tragedy catapulted into our consciousness, hopefully endowing us with some second-sight into what the fuck kind of reality we’re living. My guess is those kids don’t care about the Oscars®. And they’re the near future.

Apparently this sort of topic was brought up in recent articles in top newspapers. I really must start to read again. You think I’m joking but I’m not. Not enough is being said about the cultural shift this administration is causing us. I feel like we have to all band together in order to fight what’s happening. The resistance. It isn’t very resisting. I think rich people in this country who can make a difference should do more. I think that the firmament of Hollywood stars should be doing more. They have the resources. Instead of spending on their gowns, jewels, make-up and face work they should be organizing said resistance.

I have no social media presence although I am nigh on hoping to change that. Little by little I will be doing my part as best I can. I want to get up to speed and stay up to speed. I know that is going to require a different kind of vigiliance than I’ve been expressing but it is time to make it happen and I’m happy to try and start to make a difference, as much as I’m able. I think we all must. Meanwhile, back to those Hollywood stars. Have you seen footage of the Oscars in the 1970s? People just wore whatever. Now everyone looks like they’re being presented to the queen—it’s ridiculous. No wonder the label of “liberal elites” gets thrown around. Just stop with all the Kardashian shit and get real people. Think of Sissy Spacek in 1977 and re-calibrate from there. People look ludicrous they really do.

Anyway…this hasn’t not been a fruitful time. In the next five Blagues I’m going to have to review my plans for the coming week and rejig the schedule a bit to accommodate all the changes. You see beginning with the start of the new astrological new year, which is Tuesday March 20 at 12:15 PM, we will be at 9° Aries, the first sign of the Zodiac, as we take another turn around the wheel. This will be the start of my fourth year writing this daily Blague! With this, I will be back writing a Blague a day; I will also be re-exploring year one of this Blague which focused on the Sabian symbols and probably linking to that first year. I will also be looking through all my Blagues to date to decide which stories might make for some good live storytelling. The truth is I would like to activate this three year old Blague into something that could become a reading series or something of that nature where storytelling is the thing. And maybe pull some samples of my work to show. There is the OPS that I’m going to put together. I am purposely vague in the initialing of this, so don’t worry if you don’t understand.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Pisces 13° (March 3)

I’m not going to lie to you: there are certain things about getting old that are just plain old fucking depressing. And things that were okay or used to be cute aren’t really that much any more. Not everything but certainly somethings. I don’t think the way we live is particularly cute at this point; then again, we make ever place we live beautiful and just have that natural magical vibe about us; but when you don’t prioritize material existence you tend not to have a lot of material trappings. And this is something else I’d like to see change right about now. I try not to be so blatantly honest in writing what should be pretty public material. That said, I don’t have much of a readership and, really, why should I. So like most things it’s all in my head. The fact of the matter is, though, I must say, somehow this time may feel different.

When I was a kid spending summers at the Jersey shore I can’t explain to you how desolate and beautiful Spring Lake was. All the giant mansions from the gilded era were there and yet they were like silent monuments, dormant gods looking on streets, each one a pantheon of architectural splendour. I could ride my bike endlessly through the town and just stare at all the buildings. Later, when I fell in with a year-round crowd there in high school and after I would visit some of these homes which were just unbelievable. But talk about a place in the past I’ve been passed out of. Jeez you’ve no idea. Now houses are five million. It’s so sad and so sick. There are enough boring people making boatloads of money who can afford to live like this. Back then all sorts of people, from various brackets, could still participate on some level, and all still go to the same public Manasquan high school. But no more.

There was an old movie theater in Spring Lake. I saw American Grafitti there when I was in, what?, fifth grade? Is that possible? The film came out in 1973, but maybe I saw it later? Gosh I dunno. It was definitely one of my favorite records. I think I saw it later, in the summer of 1975. Anway there were hardly any people in the cinema. And there were no people walking around Spring Lake. I think there was an ice cream shop near the cinema too. I can see wide slate sidewalks. The seventies were so beautiful and so anonymous. I loved the silent creepiness of it all. Faded grandeur. That’s what these former towns with their mansions were in the early seventies at the Jersey Shore, in Spring Lake, where still faces peeked through their Irish lace curtains as they silently slipped their martinis hiding from a world that would soon have nothing to do with them.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Pisces 12° (March 2)

There is something to be said for optimism in all its forms. As I sit here in my cold office in early March I feel myself a hinge that’s turning. I can easily look at this past year as having taken something of a toll, but I also see that my recovery is easy and should be rather speedy, that I haven’t given too much into winter and it’s frosty reduction. I’m also incredibly impressed with the fact that I have moved the spoon pretty readily but now I have to put all the pieces together which, really, shouldn’t be so hard.

In these next eight or nine Blagues I am going to have to express (to myself) what my days are going to be like under the new routine. I know that I will need to Blague daily so to never get into this situation again. But I also have to “man my station” in regard to all the social media and so forth I will need to create. I will need to strip my walls of paper and map out what might be the structure of a show which I really must begin to write by Monday if I’m going to have this enterprise be successful. I so don’t want to disappointment myself this year.

I fear that I will repeat the patterns of others’ abuse of me, self-inflicted, you know. That’s how it happens. I am proud that I stood up for myself in situations that were not sustainable with others; but, as a result, I tend to isolate and that is just self-punishment really. So I have to make an effort to stay in the picture. My confidence isn’t exactly at its peak at present so I need to do some work on the score as well. I’ll get there. It’s not always easy, but I will get there. I really want to prioritize health in the coming months. It really is time for me to go deeper in that realm. If only because I’ve been a tad lax for too long. Amazing that my health can be as good as it is. Although certain things tend to be all over the map. I still harbor the teen-age notion that I can just chill for a week and lose ten pounds. I mean it is amazing that my body still has some semblance of snapping back, but it surely isn’t as reliable as it used to be that’s for sure.

Still, I’m doing okay. And any minute now I’ll be able to take my daily walks and do my daily hot yoga. It will be three years since the accident where we were rearended on the highway, our car totalled, and our bodies put through such a fucking ringer. And the insurance company tries to keep us from any kind of recompense. We will sue that young woman and we will make her an example of the evils of texting and driving. She has messed with Starsky + Cox, after all, and I pity the poor fool who does that.

Still, namaste.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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Pisces 12° (March 1)

Who is Scarponi? It’s a name coming through. Sometimes I even psychic myself. So I just looked it up and it’s Michael Scarponi who died last year. I’m not saying that’s who’s coming through I’m saying that’s who popped up in a search. But he did die recently. And he was born 9/25 while i’m 9/28. It isn’t related. I know that I’m grasping. But it’s all been grasping or last gasping or however you want to look at it. I have spent the last month or more catching up on these Blagues which is all fine and dandy. But I have in many ways ran out of things to say. And so I should say nothing. But that’s not really my style.

Yesterday I reached out to Gary Lennon. It was weird because I was writing a couple a days back about how I auditioned for Hair in the early 1990s, for the writers of the show. I met Gary Lennon when he was the boyfriend of Jerome Ragni who died not long after we met. It was in Hoboken and we met in the bathroom of the restaurant where I worked. We were both younger and cuter and we just kind of took a shine to one another. Gary became a playwright in his own right and is now a television producer and writer. Anyway, at the time I was edtior of a magazine that was for and all about the club kids and nightlife. I just found out yesterday that Gary is the show runner for a new show that Ru Paul and J.J. Abrams are doing focusing on those years in NYC. And another acquaintance from back in the day Fenton Bailey, whose company is World of Wonder, is also involved. So I reached out to both Fenton and Gary to say that I would love to write for the show or whatever. It was a knee-jerk thing but I have been wanting, as Stella has, to do some writing for television. So we shall see what pans out. Could be an interesting direction for us. But, as with so many things right now in life, I feel a little unready if that makes sense. I feel as if I must get down to the nitty gritty again and clear out and just feel a bit more sane and steady on my feet, if you catch my driftola.

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*
Copyright 2017 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2018 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox