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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