Aries 23° (April 12)

I really hope today is a more productive day than yesterday was. I productinated of course (a word I created for when you procrastinate productively). Today I must be a bit Dada so I’m going to type in all the words in some kind of linear fashion from a stack of random pieces of paper I have with various words jotted down upon them. But before I do that I have to say that today was very strange as reflected in the title of today’s Blague entry. Talk about your cosmic jokes. Here I am in lockdown, having not been around people for a month, and yet somehow along the way, in my travels, some weird and thankfully harmless little buggies got folded into the mix. You are isolating afraid of a larger contagion and still the Universe has its joke on you. Anyway it was just one of those days where I finally said fuck it and threw up my hands and I’m now telling everyone that I am delayed and I am going to do less and be more. I just got so wistful thinking about our trip to Venice. The world is extra quiet this Easter. I keep forgetting it is Easter, not that it has ever been my favorite holiday. If anything it reminds me of having to wear short paints and knee socks when it was way too cold out to do so. I have bites all over my torso and they are super itchy, and more so than the aforementioned knee socks which were always scratchy wool. I remember one Easter outfit in particular. It was a bottle green cotton velvet shorts and blazer set with a paler green (mint?) short sleeved shirt with peter pan collar (my mother insisted that should be a signature look of mine); the shorts might have been a jumper, in the American sense, otherwise it would have for sure had suspenders attached.

Thinking about numbers and how, when I play with them, I always come up with a repeating 6.6666. This is something which occurred originally in the nineties when I was alone for eight days and nights and was going to write a story about it. There was magic in the air and I did write a lot but I didn’t write everything and I still haven’t. I can imagine, what with the settlement, getting to a much higher number for myself which would be the start of something significant; and now that there is a book deal who knows what we might want to affect for ourselves. I have to keep looking back at what I put together on April 10, because the seeds were sown on that day for making some major inroads. I am going to pivot here and see if I can get some of these random pieces of paper typed in here. Questions for Meg include, of course after waiting to see what the contract itself says, but I’m curious about royalties on foreign and if her person doesn’t want to do anything, who, then would want to take up Sextrology. I still cannot believe that Anna has not gotten in touch with us, after we took her out for a meal; it really is most incredible. I will get to thinking about some of the other dynasty moves, but I know that I have things pretty well in hand. I just have to make a realistic schedule and get some work done on the jewelry side of things. I do believe I got all the answers I needed from Brad. I still can’t get that email sign off to work for some reason, which is super frustrating. I did respond to a latest email from my lawyer which revealed how stupid some people can be. I have to wait until May first before I can sign up with this new doctor, which is fine. I did print out what I needed for the branding project and set up the yoga room and I did manage also to go through all my receipts. I haven’t recorded them all but I do often amaze myself at the amount I accomplish in short periods of time.

My old friend (with whom I made my Broadway debut) Danny Burstein wrote what ended up as a piece in the Hollywood Reporter on having the coronavirus. Before I aay how harrowing his account was I just want to slip in the fact that I forget what I huge fucking Broadway star he is. Sometimes that kind of success happens to the absolutely right person. I need to run through the podcast info somebody at (my? new?) management company sent over. Be right back. So I read it and it is really way more complicated than what we would put together. I will put it on my to-do list however. It is a good thing we didn’t front-load even business, though we will find a clever way to make something like that happen. At least for now, there would be no launch event for the collection either. I don’t know how long this lockdown will last. I don’t know if I should even bother ordering wood. Surprised that I haven’t heard back from a certain artist I’d written to twice. Other than that there is so much running through my mind. I want very much to feel integral to the projects, especially in regard to social media, but there being only so many hours in a day and not wanting to spend my whole life working (especially sitting here on this thing); that is why being in Paris was so useful as well as enjoyable; the obvious pleasures aside, I did go to French class and I did write some creative things and still kept the business going. But I got to go outside everyday and maybe I just need to admit to myself that I’m more active in a city than I am in the country. Although, ideally, I will continue to have both. I am so happy I no longer live in New York City, though; it has become one of my least favorite towns. It’s different for people I know with fancy apartments and the knd of jobs that have required selling their souls. I still have not gotten over certain hurts by certain people. (But I’m happy to be laying low). And I’m not Danny Burstein who has the talent and the beauty and the deserved good fortune of walking down the road to work in a Broadway theater. It could not have happened to a nicer guy, that life. I hope that the world endeavors to allow people to continue on as such.

The following blocks of texs are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 116-120.  I am reading through all my Blagues, five per day, and posting some samples here. Now, in my sixth year of writing this Blague, but the time I get to my seventh, I will have through all the daily Blagues of my first five years. If that’s confusing I apologize:

I am in an admittedly cynical mood. I try not to have such a dim view of my fellow humans; but everyone seems to be fetishizing themselves to such a great degree. One thinks because she’s a downtown artist or he a counterculture poet that s/he is impervious to the sweeping, insidious trappings of this reality-show world wherein one must be fame-ish. Not everyone can stand center stage and perform an aria to perfection. There was a time when not everybody wanted all eyes on them. At this point, I don’t know anybody who is a pure spectator, audience plain and simple.

We have shorter and shorter attention spans, while, at the same time, we expect others to pay more and more attention to us. It was once enough to create in private, if not in isolation. Forget the solo spiritual trip of an artist such as, say, a Salinger; that just wouldn’t fly nowadays. To be fair, in this financially polarized world, who could afford to have a genuine experience as an artist. Accolades, in so much as they translate into cold hard cash, are now necessary evils I suppose. We must court praise in so much as it affords us an ability to express our artistry—unless, that is, we provide an actual service. Audiences are by nature fickle. The mid-career artist has to reinvent. The diva’s talent will fade; one can only hope she socked some assets away somewhere.

Even our minds, which can be the last hold-out of talent, may fail us; and we no longer live in a world we one can retreat to some small cottage upstate or down the coast. Everything has been bought and sold. And when it comes to talent, our standards may have slipped. By the same token, we live in a world of created talent, not of the naturally occuring and emerging. Those who were stars fifty to seventy five years ago were predominantly those who emerged dripping with natural ability, with the off created star or starlet. Now we test would-be stars appeal and market them as we would any product. Because someone can sing, we cast them in lived televised musicals even though they can’t act. Because someone sells records they get clothing lines to market as well. This is predominantly an Anglo-American phenomenon, but it spreads like a disease.

One should express themselves for the joy of doing so, without expectation of being worshipped ubiquitously. You want to sing a song then sing a song. You want to design clothes then design clothes. If you want to do what you say you truly want to do then you’ll do it. But would you do it if you weren’t guaranteed an audience? Would you do it for the love of it or as a devotion or an offering, the expression being reward in itself? There are far more gifted people expressing their talents in obscurity everywhere then the same handful of talents being shoved down our throats in multiple media. Can you be happy without anybody looking? Or do you only truly exist when others are watching?

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To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Cosmic Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree pointof 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!
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