Cancer 29°

The next performer on the new Glow roster was Brian King, who is from Boston. We didn’t include Brian for local flavor but because he is a superb talent who just happens to live in the area—Gloucester to be exact. He has one of the best voices on the planet and the particular show he wrote and performed, called Gravitational Fool, had its premier a few years back at Afterglow in Cambridge and it really is a piece of work that I love whole heartedly and would like to actually help develop and move to bigger venues and wider audiences. For Brian, we had a very good house of fellow performer friends of his. Another Boston idiosyncrasy: People turn out to see other area performers but don’t show up at all for those they don’t know. I did a great deal of promotion to the Boston people and they certainly didn’t need me to tell them about Brian and his band performing; and yet they only really showed up for him and no other performer, with few exceptions.

By the time Brian’s show began on Friday, I had already eaten two meals at this restaurant called Waypoint which is owned by the same chef who owns Alden & Harlow, this guy called Michael Scelso whose name I may be mispelling but I don’t care. We ended up eating most of our meals at both his restuarants because they are so close to the venue. We brought people there as well and would have spent upwards of two thousand bucks. You would think that my solciting this chef-owner (at whose restaurants I have over the years spent tens of thousands of dollars) for a tax-deductible donation would have resulted in some kind of forthcoming. But no. Again the greed that goes with the gentrification and the accutely Boston practice of chef-owners needing to populate their small portion of the planet while giving nothing back. If you Google this guy you get nothing but nightmare stories about him. A Boston Globe journalist told me “he is evil.”

One could never get away with that in New York. And what I might be learning in the process of all of this is that I need to focus back on places, like NYC which I called home for twenty years, instead of knocking my own block off trying to pioneer in a new city. There may be a reason why our artists have not played Boston over the years. People are cold, unfeeling, rather mercenary and have a huge chip on their shoulder, maybe, because they have never tried to make it in a place like New York. Who knows. Back to Brian:

The show is really great and is all about the character of The Fool in historical context, from the gleefully witless Tarot figure of the same name to Peirrot to the dunce to the jester, all of which is juxtaposed the character of the gay male in art, entertainment and media over the years. It’s a topic that could be hit or miss but Brian really made the connection between these two elements, triangulating them with personal stories of himself and his own journey as a gay man coming out in his youth in, yes, closed and conservative Gloucester where this would be unwelcome. And Brian really is the best singer. He is as good a singer as any singer we’ve ever had in festival, including Amber Martin or Bridget Barkan.

I think the show has legs and I love Brian who is very supportive and kind and I would do anything to help him succeed financially and with audiences.

 

Typos happen—I don’t have time or an intern to edit.*

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