Gemini 20° (June 10)

 

So we did a little packing and the plan was to meet up at Sonsie, however they are doing some reno and weren’t able to accommodate so we ate downstairs at the Eliot which is so great for dinner as it’s Uni, which is fabulous; but it is terrible as the breakfast room. It could be so great with so little effort but it just isn’t. It’s always been a weird room layout in any case even back in the day when it wasn’t this current incarnation. Anyway, S. had come from an appointment and was needing to go back out for one. And A. had to pack and get all her product together for customs etc. We checked out and hopped in the car and headed to the MFA which was great. For once I actually could have stayed all day which is super rare for short-attention-span-theater that I am. We first did a Frida Kahlo show which I liked as it included popular (folk) art from her own collection along with works by her and the show was sort of about how those two things go together. But the real winner was the Toulouse Lautrec which absolutely blew my mind on so many levels. I have seen much of his work in the past at the Musée D’Orsay and so forth but to think that this man was a fine artist but also basically the first graphic artist in a sense, making posters for the performers and cabaret and theater venues with which he was associated, hobnobbing with queers and prostitutes, feeling himself completely rejected from his weird imbred aristocratic family. Anyway some artists and museum shows really get your blood pumping and this was one of them.

We dropped A. off on Comm. Ave and made our way to Reading which took an hour anyway despite our leaving town early. We stopped off for snacks because one never knows the plan. G. was cute as usual. She cut her hair off to have wigs made for cancer patients. They got four wigs out of her overgrown mop. Her little bob looks beautiful as does she and she’s such a good human and is showing talent with the violin. N. seems quite healthy despite some recent worries but all is good. However dinner was a disaster on a few levels. I will leave it at that. B. got a new motorcyle which I think is a dumb idea but nobody asked me so I’ll keep that to myself. Trying to do a little catch up and to get my brain around all that needs doing (what else is new). First things first: Having perused the website for Spiegeltent and so forth I see that JCM is doing his show there which I suppose makes a lot of sense. Also R.L. has two nights there which also isn’t that surprising I suppose. I dare say he better keep it tucked because that crowd is not the Ptown crowd by any stretch of the imagination. Like attracting like, I’ve come to realize that this particular community of artists (which, let’s face it, does not embrace me/us) is not my tribe despite the opportunities and promotions I have given them. It had bothered me for a few years that those artists-friends I’ve brought to Provincetown seem to side-step me personally/professionally to cozy up to the more, shall we say, radical (read: insane) artists that have been embedded here for the past twenty years. On the surface it makes sense. But the real upshot for me is the realization that the very things I don’t like about the provincial crowd are the same things that, in the end, I do not enjoy about the ones who flock to them and kiss their flabby asses: They are all a bit too trashy for me. Now I know that sounds like an insult but the fact is it isn’t—I’m using the word as a descriptive attitude for the demi-monde that self-defines them and proudly so. And to take it a step further: the reason I’m not embraced by them is because they think I think I’m better than them which I don’t. These folks pretend to be in love with their poverty and label me something bourgeouis (if not unrightly thinking I’m a trust funder or something) when in fact they have the money to buy multiple houses and are the biggest hypocrites on the planet, jumping at any chance to walk some red carpet and do such things as the true “downtown artists” of the day would never wish to do even if invited to do so. They want to pretend to be so down and out meanwhile they have far more money and resource than I surely do. They also use their non-profit status to line their own pockets which is a widely held opinionated fact, oh so sincerely making nightly curtain calls directing patrons to put some extra dollars into the pink envelopes they find on their seats. Good grief. The nerve of some impoverished millionaires!

And so I really do want to brush these thoughts aside and focus on my mission and what I’m really doing here today trying to keep Provincetown’s heritage alive. We are all about the avant garde and many artists now we’ve presented over the past nine years have become the old garde. The avant-garde are are people or works that are experimental, radical, unorthodox with respect to art, culture or society,  may be characterized by nontraditional, aesthetic innovation and initial unacceptability, and it may offer a critique of the relationship between producer and consumer.

This is the ninth year of the Afterglow Festival in Provincetown and many of the avant-garde artists we originally presented are now fairly old-garde whether in terms of their career trajectories or in their total absorption by the culture at large, including the local residents right here at home. The Afterglow Festival honors and preserves Provincetown’s legacy as a spiritual home for experimenting, emerging, often radical artists—our heritage and our mission, therefore, is to champion our rather oxymoronic “progressive tradition.” The challenge in doing this is that audience must trust our curation over the comfortability of going to see performers with whom they are familiar. So we don’t always pack ’em in and so we rely on Sponsors and Sparklers to give generously to our non-profit so we can keep alive Provincetown’s birthright as the birthplace of modern American theater and performance. We have these last nine years made the “solo play” the centerpiece of our theatrical efforts, which has been imitated by other local theater enterprise (often with the same artists and indeed the same exact works Afterglow premiered); and we continue to bring to Provincetown uncategorial works that rearrange the molecules in audience’s brains and inspire thought, creativity and, even, social activism; while we entertain and amuse and otherwise uplift spirits. We provide artists who, in this day and age, would never be able to come to Provincetown as artists have done for a century, the opportunity to do so— to spread their artistic wings, Afterglow traveling and housing them, providing them sacred stage space to create and grow in this, the spiritual home and decades-old incubator of such progressive talents and their works. Provincetown audiences might not know a single name on the Afterglow Festival line-up this ninth year; but if you base the quality of our roster on our track record of bringing to Provincetown those whom you ultimately regard as your (now) favorite performing artists you’d previously never heard of until you first saw them at Afterglow….well, then, you will likely show up and otherwise support us. Sponsorships start at the $500 mark. And you can become a Sparkler for just $100 and in so doing receive PAIRS of HALF-PRICE tickets to all our shows. And everyone gets to join us for our opening night festivities at the beautiful Baie Bar Resto.

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof the Sabian Symbol will be one degree higher than the one listed for today. 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 or 6 days per year—so they near but not exactly correlate.

 

Typos happen. I don’t have a proofreader. And I like to just write, post and go!
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