Virgo 24° (September 15)

Another wall has been hit and this has to be the last. I am so tired of feeling sad and hurt. It still feels as unbelievable as it did six years ago. The thought that someone has derived pleasure from other’s pain is the most baffling bit of all. We were enjoying each other’s company in life, sharing so much, and then poof. It has so much to do with the love interests involved. One in particular was always going to be trouble and it turned out that was true. I have to snap out of this and stay snapped out. 

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 846-850. I am reading through all of my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, by the time I get to my seventh, I will have journeyed through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize. Year seven, I’ll only have to read through year six, once a day.

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*.

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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.

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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?

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree point of the Sabian Symbol may at times be one degree higher than the one listed here. The Blague portrays the starting degree of for this day ( 0°,  for instance), as I typically post in the morning, while the Sabian number corresponds to the end point (1°) of that same 0°-1° period. There are 360  degrees spread over 365/6 days per year—so they nearly, but not exactly, correlate.

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go! Copyright 2020 Wheel Atelier Inc. All Rights Reserved.
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