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.*

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