Virgo 18° (September 10)

To clean up my lil black book even more: It will sound similar: But, today activate Marthe. Promote the Glitter Passes. Read more about Bearded Ladies. Work individuals against the businesses. The week started off fairly normally. We got the place tidied up and packed the car and headed to the Ptown Inn. Dropped wine off at Baie for the event. But in retrospect I felt the juice was already going out of it all. One just gets a vibe about these things. But instead of getting totally down on creation, I’m going to make major lemonade from this situation. The answer is always to confide in myself (a.k.a. confidence); and I know that the only things that work for me are of the self-starting sort. That’s always been the way. And, specifically, writing is my therapy, which is why I’m doing this presently. The festival will not have made the money it seriously needed to; but I am hoping that grant money in the coming year might pick up the slack. I have to ask Brian, or tell him, or both:

Grants

So I think we should start off reviewing together all the paramaters of the existing planning grant and specifically what needs to happen on our end to get us to a place where we can ask for the remainder of the money. Also we want to know when we can apply for the second phase of this NEFA grant for Gravitational Fool. Likewise, I want to apply for a tour-planning grant for the next New England artists which will be Stella and her work with the American Baroness as it also has an educational angle, though different from yours of course. I need to know if I can always have a part one and part two of these grant equations working for us, in turn, for New England-based artists.

 

We definitely also want to look at what we can ask for in regard to the MCC. There is that $2500 grant that we wanted to go for but didn’t have bandwidth to pursue in the end. And we want to look at the NEA grant we nearly applied for recently. In the receipt of any such grants that you help with beyond the one(s) that apply directly to you, you would be remunerated for the work you did on that score. My goal moving forward is to get Afterglow in Provincetown into a place where it was fully funded and where we could give tickets away at a lower price, or maybe for free. This year we made a major step in offering Sparlker donors pairs instead of single tickets at half price for any show. This is a step in that direction.

 

The Glow Festival

 

It is under this new aegis that we will present/produce Gravitational Fool and any other New England artists/pieces/acts that are granted by NEFA. Once we get answers to questions regarding the overlap of artists we A. plan and B. tour under this grant, it would still be no more than two artists in either phase of the grant at a time. As Gravitational Fool is the spearhead project for this grant mechanism, and, more expansively, the “moveable festival itself” the grant money does help offset the amount of time it is taking and shall continue to take to introduce the piece to venues throughout New England—we need only schedule three New England locations to fulfill the requirements of the grant but we plan to put together a much larger tour for Gravitational Fool that will loop New England but also into other regions too. The amount of work that will go into this could never be remunerated by this small grant alone—there is much that goes into dealing with just one venue alone—but because it also incentivizes the larger Glow Festival itself, the bulk of my hours working on spearheading a tour for Gravitational Fool will be sweat equity in the larger picture. Because I have this ongoing partnership with ART (and of course the original motor of Afterglow in Provincetown), it makes it more appealing to other venues to discuss the possibility of a similar collaboration with me. That is to say I feel that Gravitational Fool will benefit, in the booking/tour process, from the fact we already have successful series/relationships with ART and great press in the Boston Globe and other publications and with WGBH’s Open Studio with Jared Bowen. If I were simply trying to book Gravitational Fool on its own without the proven, documented, lauded power of Afterglow and Oberon behind us, I suspect we wouldn’t be as successful as we shall approve to be, now, in the coming months, when my work will be making relationships with venues under this new aegis and putting these deals and dates for you into place. A 20% booking cut for the Glow will also help defray the non-profits cost as we chug along. Some venues might be interested in one-offs with Gravitational Fool, but I think more still will be interested in bottling the kind of relationship I have with ART and therefore might want to book Gravitational Fool as part of a series of programming we are in a position to deliver them. This is how I feel the synergy between this grant for individual New England artists, and our larger “moveable festival” concept, can work together to your benefit, specifically, as Gravitational Fool becomes the primary focus for us to book for you as far and wide as we can do for you in the coming years without having to do any of the heavy lifting yourself.

 

Gravitational Fool

 

As you have said on numerous occasions, people in your band have lives and careers and families and WTIIMF is at a place in its history where, if it wants to jump to a next level, it needs some form of management. Let us imagine it’s two year’s hence and we have successfully created and even completed a tour of Gravitational Fool. The plan would be to return to each and every one of those venues again with subsequent works. Sometimes it could be simply more musical and concert like; but I think it will make sense for the band to create new “musical pieces” yearly or every couple of years (say if you’re touring Gravitational Fool through the UK and Europe or to Australia), ideally, with which the band can return tour to places you’ve already presented GF. For your part, as the band leader and writer/creator of pieces like Gravitational Fool, I imagine you would want to be making enough money as an artist, touring (and I dare say supplementing this income on commissions on government or private/corporate grants you can help bring in!) that you wouldn’t have to have a day job; and when you weren’t performing you were writing. I think as you are a songwriter as well that you might make it part of a two-year goal to be selling songs to other artists as well. Not all our performers have this talent. Funnily enough Stella and I had an impromptu meeting with Paul Williams in New York. Beyond being a songwriting legend, he is the president of ASCAP.

 

So, down to nuts and bolts: I will bring with me to the October 12 meeting (place TBD) what is a developing list of venues and contacts we want to secure as venues for Gravitational Fool. From relationships I see emerging I will be visiting New Haven and Providence and Hartford and Portsmouth and Portland and Bennington and North Adams in the coming months and will be adding on to those trips, thinking geographically. I’m also going to be in Montreal in November and (though it is outside the parameter of grant-land) I am for sure going to explore the opportunity of bringing Gravitational Fool there. Meanwhile, you mention places like Lowell (there is a new festival on there next month that is just music and fine art I think I saw Walter Sickert is involved in). For me this part of the process—booking that is—is like any other kind of sales (and brings me back to my days selling designer menswear, oddly) in that you keep culling lists and making contact and giving them all a schpiel. Of course this is where materials come in handy and we need to very soon (like next week) already have some kind of tiny media kit to send people, as a follow up to the release they’ve all been sent initially. Even venues we’ve yet to discover will get word of our having done the showcase, so it has power on the back end of the process too. Cull, contact, schpiel, strike and cement. That’s what I will be doing for the coming months in setting up your tour and perhaps some similar arrangements as I have with Oberon with you as the premier attraction. I am thus now all about the Excel program for this project!!

 

Ancillary bookings

 

As mentioned vis a vis City Winery, I am also happy to make bookings for WTIIMF that aren’t Gravitiational Fool (or other performance pieces). I don’t think it should be the focus, but I am happy to do it. This would be under an “Afterglow Presents” aegis separate from (but of course related to) the Glow Fest. I think with this we should think within a perimeter of 100 miles, probably, and no more. I think it can be an audience building tool that could help with the larger pieces. So you can think about and we can discuss your thoughts on that!

 

My one big question is: As you have often said the other bandmates have lives, loves, work, kids, responsibilities, etc.: Do you expect any difficulty in their being able to do the kind of tours we are hoping to achieve with all this? Would be interested in thoughts on all that!

 

To view the original Sabian Symbol themed 2015 Blague corresponding to this day: Flashback! The degree of the Sabian Symbol may be higher than the one listed here  as the symbols cluminate in the next degree. There are 360  degrees spread over 365 days.

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