Virgo 4° (August 26)

The dream I had last night is difficult to put into words. I know it was inspired by watching My Brilliant Friend, which is superb. I know that it hinged on a close friendship with a solid guy. I know that I was filming along the coast of New Jersey. I even spoke to the fact that I was filming. Ellen was there looking for her lost adopted child, walking around with a picture of him as one might do with a pet whose run off. We hugged. We talked about when she was filming in the area. There is always this town, this village in my dreams, that runs along the water. All the buildings are made of a grey stone. I need to find that village somewhere in the world. It could be some place in France that isn’t super on everybody’s radar. I was wearing costuming from the set. I think that the Meisner, no the Drabkin family it was involved. Also there was a gathering at this house and people were interrelated like the families in the TV series, and there were hostile elements that brought me back to Oysterfest, perhaps, when I felt a little uneasy in a crowd of twenty something white people who seemed to know the words to every song from the early seventieis that might smake of racist Southern Rock. But this friendship and the feelings suffounding it were so warm and welcoming and I felt seen for the first time in a long time. I was enjoying a truly close family-like brotherly bond. Perhaps he was a cousin. He was Italian after all, but again I chalk that up to the series I’m watching. My own cousins on both sides are pretty terrible narcissists, the alive ones anyway That’s all I need to write today.

The following blocks of text are exceprts from my first year of  Blagues, nos. 746-750. 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.  

Why do I do what it is I do in regard to the half of each year, I spend, putting together performing arts festivals and series. Well, the simple answer is that Ed Sullivan and I share more than a birthday. Like Ed, I was a journalist from the age of 22 to about 40. IN fact the main reason I thought to adopt the pseudonym of Quinn Cox was because I wanted to keep my journalistic world—editors and publishers and the subjects I wrote about—separate from what might or not be a success as an astrological duo which has affectionately come to be known as Starsky + Cox. But you see paradoxes began to spring up. Like my Libran brother Oscar Wilde said, and I paraphrase because I’m too lazy to look this shit up: Give a man a mask and he’ll reveal his truths to you. Okay I’m going to look it up and see how close I got. What he actually said was: “Give him a mask and he will tell you the truth.” Which is much simpler and better but I was close.

People do not know me and that’s been okay. I think I’m getting ready to reveal myself in teaspoonfuls. The fact is that back around 2005 I thought Stella and I needed to take to a stage, something we had only done together, rarely, in acting classes where, at HB Studios, we were labelled “the Lunts” which, I won’t lie, I loved. I had a sort of rock-bottom epiphany where I thought, hang on, our book Sextrology came out last year and it has been a success, so we should take to the stage and somehow combine comedy and astrology with some music thrown in. At a place called (under) Elmo in Chelsea, which one tried to convince oneself was a boutique version of Fez under Time Cafe which had recently closed down, we launched our first “Cosmic Cabaret” to a full house of wonderful people we knew personally and periferally. Lots of fashion people—Zaldy and Ruben and Isabel Toledo and John Bartlett—as opposed to performer folks. And, I have to say, after another decade or so “being” with performer folk, I much prefer the people in the fashion and design world, despite the fact I was so utterly convinced, in 2005, that I wanted to stop hanging around with fashion folks whom I did at the time find fatuous and enter the “real” world of performing artists who were down, dirty, honest and true.

Performing artists, who had been down, dirty, honesty and true for the whole time I dipped in and out of their circles, for the past 20 years since I made my way to NYC, but when, in 2006, I began to seek their company, they were on their last gasp of genuine experience. Now, first, let me say, there is no downtown. And I say this as both a journalist and a downtown denizen who more dabbles in performance. I have said this for a decade now: Round about 2007, “downtown artists” began emulating some hybrid breed of Upper East Side Socialite and opera, indie-movie and/or rock star. Quite a leap, I know; but one felt, downtown, that one should speak in a mid-Atlantic accent previously reserved for Rosiland Russell and garb oneself from head to toe in outfits that were spontaneously ready to pass, if pressured, at a Met or Whitney Event.

Suddenly the creme de la creme of the downtown scene used words like creme de la creme. Though they might still live in apartments where the bath tub was recently or still, in the kitchen, they thought they should no longer have to pay for meals or makeup or plastic surgery because they were iconic, and they were. Some still are although that particular brand of enchantment is wearing off and, dare I say, thin.

And I started to miss my friends that worked at magazines that no longer existed. I started to miss the art directors and fellow writers, like myself, who live such solitary lives that it takes a proper poking or, at the very least, a more gregarious partner to stap you into interaction. But what I missed most about living life as a more anonymous character was the ability to move on a dime, to travel, undetected, without needing to be any one place on any certain date….

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I was talking about being a journalist. I started at Passion magazine in Paris in 1986 than moved to New York in 1987 where I worked at an Avenue magazine offshoot called On The Avenue; at the same time I became managing editor then editor of DV8* which was a downtown music, fashion and art magazine that club kids like James St. James and Michael Alig would circulate for us at clubs like the Tunnel, Limelight, Palladium and The World. I then became managing editor of The New York Social Calendar which was a hip rag that was put in the new breed of luxury hotels like the Royalton and the Paramount where Where magazine wouldn’t fit. I freelanced for a number of magazines and newspapers including Paper, The New York Observer, Stop, In-Style, where I was a party reporter and Detour, where I wrote big celebrity features, The New York Times and the Boston Globe. I also was a field producer of a television show called Ooh La La made in Canada by the people who produced Fashion Television with Jeannie Becker. I did fashion pieces for youthy magazines like YM, Mademoiselle and Teen People. Soon, though, people got wind of Starsky + Cox and we/they began writing horoscope columns and features for seemingly every publication from Paris Vogue, Allure, Cosmopolitan, Elle and Teen People, Star, Glamour and ultimately the Daily Beast (if you can believe we had a short-lived column there which ultimately became our own brand of Haute Astrology). Meanwhile under my real name and also under Stella’s real name I wrote for Neimann Marcus “The Book” which was pretty prestigious and allowed for more creativity than journalistic outlets, even though it was considered advertorial.

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The word nemisis is literally from the goddess Nem-Isis, who was the shadow twin of Isis. An archeytpal Debby Downer if you will.

In my life, I believe, that I have had one nemisis, which is different from an enemy. A nemesis might be closer to a frenemy but one of the two people in the equation might be bordering on restraining order. My nemesis has actually tried to kill me, oh so subtly, but I don’t take it personally as he tries to kill everyone he “loves”, oh so subtly, because he has this weird worship/destroy attitude toward people he suspects are smarter, more fortunate or talented than s/he. This nemesis is no longer a nemesis in that I am in no way any longer emotionally involved with this character. Someone close to me probably warned me by saying something like: Anyone that wants to get that close to you so fast is probably not someone you want to know (or probably will know in the longr un because they are going to assert some narcissistic agenda). True dat. Funny thing about narcissists: They stage things like farewell tours and then they don’t go away.

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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!
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