This is my sidereal astrology column. It deals with the actual astronomical location of the planets as opposed to using a fixed cycle (as Western Tropical astrology does). To make things simple (since last month’s may have been a bit complicated for most of you non-astro types): if you were born at the beginning of a given sun sign read the horoscope for the sign before yours (for example, you were born July 30th and you’re an ‘early’ Leo, so read Cancer). If you were born towards the end of your sun sign just go ahead and read that sign. Right in the middle? Read the sign before yours.

ARIES
Repeat after me. Ohm! Ohm! Ohm! Get used to it because this month your world will turn inwards, towards spiritual pursuits. If you’re not particularly spiritual you will find yourself attracted to new ideas, foreign cultures and philosophies. You may even be inclined to join some new group that shares your ideals. That will somewhat shift mid-month when you feel you’ve ruminated long enough and it’s finally time to get out there and be seen. Some of your friends may have trouble keeping up with this Jeckyll and Hyde affair. You’re simply exquisitely complex this month.

TAURUS
It’s called cabin fever and you combat it by leaving your house and fraternizing with new and stimulating people. You’ll get to experience this remedy close up this month as the social bug bites you in the booty. This will be especially apparent after mid-month when a new social circle, person or association becomes part of your life. Whatever it is, you’ll be in the thick of new and revolutionary ideas and this will stimulate your mind to no end. With identity issues far behind you, you’re ready to let everybody see who you really are, and that’s where the party’s at.

GEMINI
“Get Bill Gates on the line,” is the most appropriate phrase do describe your month. Career projects that relate to partnerships will get a big boost in April. Look for the first week of the month, especially, to yield some very lucrative opportunities since expansive Jupiter will be suspended in your house of finances for almost a week. Don’t worry, this robustness is not only limited to your career sector. It could also mean major action for your love life, provided you take the first initiative. Thanks to having dealt with your psychological demons and subconscious specters all year, you’re ready to work something out.

CANCER
Welcome to the Pontification Salon, where our favorite Cancer presides over many impressionable sycophants like a sane David Kuresh meets Deepak Chopra. You’re just a font of wisdom this month and you’ll want to take advantage of this state, especially when it comes to wooing beautiful people in search of the truth. Your magnetism and ability to attract new relationships into your life will take hold around the full moon, mid-month and continue to expand through the end of the month. However, the first week of the month is great for asserting yourself in this climate of you, you, you. You’re likely to meet with little resistance in all affairs that week.

LEO
To help you get through the first two weeks of the month, you might want to think of buying a copy of the Kama Sutra. You’re oozing sex and just can’t hold back. You’ll be on the prowl again and attractive to partners through the full moon. You’ll also be uncovering your secret sexual fantasies. Look for something really dramatic and saucy to happen around mid-month. In the coming months this preliminary boost of carnal energy will help to boost your confidence. This may affect other areas of your life as you suddenly have the guts to approach all situations.

VIRGO
Home is where the heart is. Heart is where your home is. All in all this month is about relationships, nurturing them and living with them. You may even find that a relationship turns domestic-literally or just figuratively. This nurturing nature will definitely bring out the best that romance has to offer, especially by mid-month. With Jupiter direct in your 11th house, that love will extend to your friends as well. You’ll be popular and loved all around.

LIBRA
Take that “I’ve got to get organizized” bumper sticker off your car. You are now about to overhaul every minute detail of your life. This may start with something as mundane as taxes but it heralds a time of great mental clarity for you. This could signal a boost in your career over the coming months (all that organization has to pay off) and a load off financial debt. Either way you’re getting your shit together and it will feel fantastic.

SCORPIO
Put on your furry wolf costume, break out the bottle of Charles Shaw and get ready to howl at the moon by midmonth. That’s when your romantic and creative adventure will really start to peak. You’ll never look back to those lackluster dateless days because your world of gallivanting about town is about to rock. This could also be the start of a new relationship that will unfold over the course of the next two or three months. Whoever he/she is you’ll be immediately attracted to his/her intellect and ability to communicate. It is likely, as well if you meet this person in the first two weeks of April, that they will share common ideologies and stimulate you spiritually as well.

SAGITTARIUS
If you were thinking of buying a house, refinancing, or moving, now is the time. The new moon in your house of residence, along with Jupiter illuminating joint assets sets a good tone for this. If, however, like most of us in this crap economy, you’re broke, you may want to stay in your home with your partner and have a lot of sex. The time is good for that too. Either way, home is beckoning you and it’s time to hibernate quite a bit. Another alternative, if you’re not feeling carnally inclined, would be to decorate your pad. Don’t worry, next month promises to be a lot more exciting. This is a time of prepping for the real adventures, that way your casa will be ab-fab just in time for many overnight guests.

CAPRICORN
You should be holding court with the likes of the Algonquin Roundtable this month. You’re at your intellectual best and it will catapult you more into the limelight by mid-month when you really “discover your true self.” You’ll be witty, alert and right on target all the way through. And as you’ll see, in the coming months, this will also help your love life regain that luster it had lost most of last year. If you’re going to go out and try to win someone’s heart, do it through your intellect and do it during the first week of April when luck shines down on your romantic sector.

AQUARIUS
Don’t send me SPAM after you read this horoscope. I know you’ll hate me when I say that this month is the ideal period to focus on your taxes and other finances. It’s the beginning of a new financial cycle so you’ll be imbued with a sense of renewed finesse when it comes to getting your affairs in order. Come on, you got enough attention and action last month. It’s ok to focus on security and money right now and temporarily turn in your dance card. The coming months will see you focusing on more serious matters. Our little Aquarius is growing up!

PISCES
Well, aren’t you just the belle of the ball this month? All attention is focused on you and that magnetic radiance of yours. You’ll be riding on a boost of security that will send the emphasis into your social life. You’ve got places to go and people to see and it’s all so inspiring and filled with excitement. You’ll reach the pinnacle of your sparkle mid-month with Venus in your first house around the passionate full moon. You may have such a wanderlust that you just can’t stay at home. This could provoke friction on the homefront, especially if you’re motivated by arrogance and conceit, tone it down, they’ll still love you.

Photo: Shana Ting Lipton

Since all I seem to see lately are brutal images of war on television–that almost look like screen captures from a video game, devoid of any humanity–I’m going to cut the chit-chat. I’m back from Barcelona and Nantes…more to come later. For now, straight to a serene and surreal image. It’s Café Royale in Barcelona where two of my friends Paco Cabanillas and Nigel Hayes spin. It was opened a few years ago with the help of Pedro Almodovar, who threw his birthday party there. This is Royale seen through my sleep-deprived eyes…

jinni , feminine jinniyah. [jinEyä’] , plural jinn. [jin] , in Arabic and Islamic folklore, spirit or demon endowed with supernatural power. In ancient belief the jinn were associated with the destructive forces of nature. In Islamic tradition they were corporeal spirits similar to men in appearance but having certain supernatural powers, especially those of changing in size and shape. Capable of both good and evil, the jinn were popular in literatures of the Middle East, notably in the stories of the Thousand and One Nights. The term genie is the English form and is sometimes confused with the Roman genius.

I love the Arabian myth of the genie because it’s probably the only fable that seems to influence both American and Arab cultures. Our hit animated film Aladdin notwithstanding, the tv show “I Dream of Jeannie” will always be a key pop cultural reference to our generation x (and I suppose the re-run generations as well).

If we’re going to get serious and archetypal about it, the genie stands side-by-side with ‘the witch’ in terms of frightened male perspectives of women. There is always that sense that women have secret powers–powers to seduce men, powers of intuition (women’s intuition) and of course the fact that birth springs from our loins, and that we follow a mysterious moon cycle all contribute to this mystique. And that word is of course appropriate considering notable stick-wagging feminist Betty Friedan wrote a book called just that, “The Feminine Mystique.”

I wrote about this for my graduate thesis within the framework of French film. I was really trying to understand French society’s fascination with the woman (Statue of Liberty, La Marianne, Brigitte Bardot/”And God Created Woman,” Catherine Deneuve/”Belle du Jour.” Despite the power of the ‘patrie’ (stemming from the Latin word ‘pater’= ‘father’) the French are supplicants at the feet of Woman (with a capital “W”). And on a worldwide scale her archetypal strength does not go unrecognized. However, varying from culture to culture, that recognition can sometimes take the form of fear and threat.

Genies, like a good cologne, can be bottled and summoned on the wishes of their owner. Their sole purpose is to serve their master’s needs (talk about S&M lore). They are potent (in that they possess unexplainable supernatural powers) yet impotent (in the exterior limits that are imposed on these powers and their mobility). I won’t even go into judging the myth. It’s really not there to be judged. It’s simply a statement on relations between the sexes. And I couldn’t even begin to look at it from an Arab cultural perspective–as I’m too much of an outsider to venture into that sort of inner sanctum analysis.

On a more sophisticated level the genie could be a non gender-specific being who represents the Yin, feminine, instinctive, Right brained side of life. Her duality based existence can help us pontificate on ours. The genie has all the powers inside her. She thinks that she must regulate them by asking an outside force to impose limits on them. In fact, she is perfectly capable of handling these gifts. She is a prisoner in a cell or bottle of her own making. All she has to do is cross her arms, blink and apply purpose…she could be out of there in no time.

As I prepare for my 10-day trip to Barcelona and Nantes, I feel refreshed that I’m about to encounter a totally different perspective on the world and one of its microcosms: me. One of the reasons I always feared moving back to Los Angeles is that its distance from the rest of the world seems to prevent its locals from broadening their perspectives. There’s a sense that LA is the center of the world and that Vegas, Baja, San Francisco, Seattle and Hawaii are its own little satellites.

When I lived in New York I could actually do the whistle-stop three-day tour of Paris or London. The Carribean was practically next door as well. While I lived in Amsterdam, I visited Madrid, Barcelona, Lisbon, London, Munich, Baden-Baden, Antwerp, Prague, Rome, the Greek island of Kos and Paris all within just a couple of years. That ideal geographic proximity (that Europeans might take for granted) helps to funnel in innumerable influences which in turn make people more sophisticated and well-versed in the trappings of diverse cultures.

All of that seems like it’s a world away from LA–or at least ten hours by plane. And to be honest, if there were no impetus, other than leisure, for my journey, I’d feel like it was sort of a drag. I have to remind myself that I cannot just stay and rot in the cultural desert. At the same time what I cherish about LA is its ability to perfectly accommodate when it comes to the ‘mythical American road trip.’ Joshua Tree, Sedona, even Vegas–all fascinating destinations in their own respects. But, as the cliché goes, the real destination is the trip itself–the experience. I guess you don’t really get that from waiting in line to have your makeup bag searched for box cutters at LAX.