Sagittarius 30°/Capricorn 0° (December 21)

Yeah so, Monday, Monday. It can be a good day. If I can remember it not as a blur. Oh right last night we tuned in to watch JVB’s Christmas show which was really fun to attend. It has been quite a difficult year and the advent of some normalcy is really appreciated. I’m sure they made some good tippage—I’ve given all I can give, myself, this year (though I must remember to give to S’s organization). Today I really will get back into the book in earnest. It will actually happen. Not that I really did much more than just smooth out the opener of the next chapter and kind of reinvent for another page which is always annoying because I’m holding all this already written material but the trick now is just sort of marrying what’s there with what could be and that can be kind of a cool thing. It’s all about Taurus man and of course with a St two talking heads 77 and not because I was thinking outwords man but because somebody gave me a challenge to pick a bunch of albums from the year when I was 14 years old so I picked talking head 77 the clash daviau my aim is true by Elvis Costello and David bowie’s heroes and so we listened to those at dinner and then we decided to watch the Keith haring documentary and I was like wait a minute isn’t he a Taurus and sure enough yet he is and there was a keyword from listening to talking heads the album had some bonus tracks which were amazing and he kept using the word sensation and that fits right into where I am and my writing of that chapter and then also just like I don’t know what it is about Keith but you know really after Andy he was the next pop artist to mean to be popular to have as wide an audience as pop possible is pretty well it’s very Leo for in Andy’s case but Terry Taurus too and making him that much more accessible really not making so much of himself that’s the difference between Keith haring and Andy and that’s why the pop shop which never made money was so important it was like a public house so that was last night and yeah pretty fun and tomorrow may prove to be surprising on many levels oh I did continue my dialogue with Cynthia which is great also I need to make a list of people I need to contact wish a Merry Christmas and all that jazz used to make Christmas cards watercolors back in the day and sitting for hours and hours and do the same design but each one was individual and one year I did New Year’s cards I did snowdrops which was fun don’t do that again I wish I would have kept a couple for myself I don’t think anyone would have saved them they would Chuck them like they were just a hallmark card but I did put a lot of love into those cards those paintings I like being creative back in the day in that way I guess I could still do that I should really try to continue doing watercolor and I also love paper mache a whole hell of a lot.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 1321-1325. 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.

Fairly lousy weather for our trip from Boston today to the far reaches of hellish Brooklyn. The journey takes one through concrete jungle at the end, past LaGuardia under construction. It is just the bleakest manifestation of urban life that I have ever experienced. But this has always been the case. Since I was a little boy, when my parents would drive around this part of the world, I would instantly become depressed, cornered in the back seat. There was a heaviness, a gloom, that I’d mainly feel descend into my sinuses. It was never sunny in this part of the world. If it wasn’t raining or slushy, it was hot and smoggy. There is nothing to recommend this part of the world. Talk about feeling like a rat in a cage. Even the terrible roads often have grim concrete overhangs. New York benefitted from some great PR, mainly beginning in the late seventies when Sinatra covered the eponymous song. But it has always been a backwater in my mind. The New Amsterdam rescued from the swamps extending into Bayonne, Jersey City and beyond to Seacaucus and other god-forsaken places to the west, just as the desolate sprawl extended to the Bronx and to Queens and Brooklyn and Staten Island.

I don’t know if I mention that I suffer from a certain bridge phobia which alters over time in intensity but has been quite bad as of late. It was inherited. Anyway, that was an added stress. But rehearsal went very well and lasted only a short time and then we headed (over Brooklyn Bridge, which isn’t the worst) to our hotel on East 64. Toni Basel was staying there. Otherwise it was pretty much a tourist spot, though we rented a one-bedroom apartment which turned out to be nice than I imagined. At this point we are pretty much rehearsing on our own and S. is doing her many errands and I am making my myriad necessary connections to extract the most from this week leading up to Christmas. We had a late lunch slash early dinner at Match—pea soup and steak tartare for me!

We headed downtown to see Vivian’s show and thought we were running rather late. Did you know that Uber added something like 100,000 cars to the Manhattan streets, which is why nothing moves anymore. No longer such a thing as zipping uptown or down. Anyway, there was a big benefit show beforehand, with Lance H. as musical director, and nobody was even going into JVB yet. Our seats were annoying—I have to remember that the seating chart isn’t that accurate when it comes to delineating separate tables. The show was fantastic as JVB’s shows always are. This one really was a topper. We had a slice of cheesecake and some wine and after the show headed back stage and reconoitred in the dressing room before heading, all of us, ultimately, for drinks in the Library.

There were a number of familiar faces and some new ones and we ended up all seated at a big sprawling table. I hung with Nath Ann and Claudia mainly and had a really great time. I was going to take snaps of lighting for our own show but I forgot. I mean JVB is so fun to be fully immersed in I just wouldn’t have split my brain in a way to “grab looks” but I did make some mental notes. A truly great evening all in all. Especially JVB’s rendition of Silver Bells and the opening monologue that descried how the show was accidentally titled Refridgerated.


I’ve decided that given the holidays and given my travels that I would dip back into the archives for material I may or nay not have presented here before. To be totally honest I’ve no idea. I was looking for a pack of stories but what I found wasn’t them. In part I found the following:

I love Julia Child. Who doesn’t, I know, but she has always held a special fascination for me. When I was a waiter in 1986 at the Harvest in Harvard Square, she and her husband Paul would come in for lunch. You would here “Bonjour Roger” in that booming unmistakeable tenor as she greeted the tiny alcoholic nicotine sodden maitre d’ whose name she properly prounced in French, ro-jay. Paul, a curled shrimp of a man who had already suffered his series of small strokes, followed hist towering wife into the dining room where she would always order the same thing: a burger, rare, no bun. She is a Leo and I’ve often remarked on the similarity between her choice of lunch and the bloody meat one would throw into a lion cage.

Before the book and movies about her during the last decades, I always thought she would make a great subject for a work of art. I won’t go any further into that thought lest I actually end up pursuing this instinct myself. At the very least I think she and her husband would make great costumes for Stella and me, come Halloween. But, obviously, there’s more to it. Here was a couple who worked together (even though you didn’t know he was behind the scenes), who had no kids and were rather late bloomers. They were also obsessed with France and had an affinity for Cambridge, Massachusetts and Maine. All of this I can relate to.

She described herself “as the cat looking at the king” when she was a student of Le Cordon Bleu—what can be more Leo an expression than that. And what person from any other sign could turn what was for her a personal passion into an entire movement, changing the way Americans cooked, forever. What other sign could see a chef superstar embodied in the form of a fifties something woman. I’m happy I had the few opportunities I did to wait on Mrs. Child whose name couldn’t be more fitting for someone who lived life with a childlike exuberance and who gave so much to the world.

And then some which will constitute the next spate of entries that follow. And then, I’m sure, I’ll find a way to fatten them all up in the process of posting them. What I don’t want to do is overthink this. I have much territory to cover now and precision isn’t to be my greatest friend. I do still think it a wonderful idea to write a two person play about Paul and Julia Child; even if just as an exercise. Oh I don’t know kids. I’m not going to get to do everything in life at this point so I have start really picking and choosing. What I do know is that I have some past stumbles to right; that is one thing that is for certain.

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I’m in NYC on this day, seeing clients as we prepare for tomorrow’s show at Joe’s Pub. Yesterday was rather tame. We walked around for hours in the morning, did our shopping at that market, Gracie’s or something, on Second Avenue, I think then had a solid breakfast at Pain Quotidien. We got some rehearsing in, made some lunch and then had a client with whom we had a wee wine after. We ate dinner in as well and it was a pretty chill day. Today, I’m feeling my oats a bit more and have a wild hair to tame. Of course this is never a good thing if you try to scratch such an itch. It not only gets you nowhere it sets you back. And all good judgment goes out the window. I’ll leave it there. Anyway, I had said a couple of days I go that I would revisit some old things I’ve written. This dates back to the beginning of this Blague.

The beginning is as good a place to start as anywhere. Better, I suppose. Like any first attempt at something there are bound to be mistakes and I will look back on this initial go at some point and cringe. But in just a few hours we will enter the sign of Aries, it being March 20, 2015. And my plan for this “astrological new year” is to explore the cosmic energy of each unfolding day from all different angles. I don’t know what those angles are exactly yet, but I have gut inklings and they’re fun to follow. I have a few notions in mind, as well, for ancillary stories and such that I will spew here. In fact it’s those notions that inspired the title COSMIC BLAGUE which, I needn’t tell you, is a play on words; as blague means joke in French and is also pronounced blog, so, well, you get it. I’m especially out to explore the notion of synchronicity this year, too, as it relates, for better or for worse, to the universe “acting funny”. When we feel we are the butt of some cosmic joke, or when we miraculously experience synchronicity, in both cases the Universe seems to have an intelligence and a desire, even, to communicate with us. And I’ve found the more you get into that concept, the more it does try to tell you something, one way or another. So I thought I’d share some of my experiences with what I’ve come to perceive as a droll if not an hysterical cosmos. The “Strange Phenomenon” that Leo goddess Kate Bush sings about, no mere coincidence; there’s that. And then we’ve those times when we feel we’ve actually conjured things into being, which isn’t so much synchronicity, but rather, perhaps, the working of magic along these same channels or celestial avenues that sometimes “coincidentally” lead to our door. So I’ll get into all that happenstance, but I’ll stay on track, mainly, by delving into the energy of each day of the year slash degree of the celestial circle as we journey, once again, through the zodiac.

Most of you likely know me as one-half of Starsky + Cox, authors, among other things, of Sextrology which is a popular “sexy astrology” book I wrote with Stella Starsky. If you’ve read it you might agree that it’s deceptively smart and sometimes pretty funny. The sex in Sextrology primarily refers to gender, not the act itself—our premise being that men and women of the same sign actually embody different sets of archetypes that speak volumes on their personality, emotionality, sexuality and gender- and sexual-identity. The most recognizable archetypes are the classic gods and, being that our zodiac is a western one, these gods veritably live within that mandala. The gods are gorgeous personifications of energy. We too are personifications of energy. And we maintain that people born under a certain sun sign embody a different recipe of cosmic energy than others born under another sign—generally speaking, breaking the entire population into twelve groups, or twenty-four, in sextrological terms. But let’s put people aside for a moment (although they are the most vivid representation of cosmic energy available to us): If there is a blanket energy associated with each zodiacal month of the year that manifests through all life and experience, then it follows that there are more niche cosmic energies specifically linked to each day of the astrological year. I suppose that was the 1990s pop-premise of that doorstop Birthday Book, from which we all got a giggle, glib as it was. But I know there’s more to each unfolding lotus of a day than the empirical notion that Marcello Mastrianni, Bridget Bardot, Dita von Teese and, ahem, yours truly were all born on “The Day of the Heartbreaker”; although a look at that list would certainly substantiate the notion beyond a shadow of a doubt. That was sarcasm in case you missed it, Sheldon.

So, as we start another trip around the wheel, beginning in just a few hours, I want to plunge below the surface of the observable and see if we can’t more profoundly delve each daily turn, turn, turn. I get the fact that, to everything, there is a season; but perhaps there are more specific purposes to each and every day. To be cosmically aligned with more subtle energies, those that, when grouped together in a monthly clump might be recognized as this month or that spent in one astrological sign or another, during which time, taken together, experience has the flavor of that sign, as do those born during it, might very well be possible. For the zodiac isn’t frivolous in my imagination, neither in depth or in degree. Depth-wise, it is a symbolically rich system encoded with myth and mystery—in terms of degree, each day of the year could have a sacred significance. And sure, if people (again the best living symbols we have) born on a given day point to what that significance might be, their collective roles and tendencies are worth considering. I will surely be exploring the Sabian Symbols—more on those later—which have long fascinated me and, I suspect, will help open a doorway onto what the larger point is of, well, each point on our 360-degree circle of 365-6 days. Astrologers examine the significance of the signs of the zodiac all the time, a month at a time. But getting down to the nitty gritty of the daily grind of the cosmic wheel? Beyond the light entertainment of daily horoscopes, it’s not really done. So I want to get into it. My sense is that I will feel more aligned with the cosmic clock and better understand what makes it tick, tick, tick. If nothing else, I’m sure I’ll learn something along the day and, perhaps, stay that much more in the moment or, at least, the day.

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. Get your HAUTE ASTROLOGY 2020 Weekly Horoscope ebooks by Starsky + Cox.