Hello, my name is Philo Hagen (figh-lo hah-gen). I’m originally from the rainy city of Seattle, Washington, which helps explain the dark green moss you find growing beneath my California sunshine. Then I spent many years in cold and foggy San Francisco, where I discovered a love for Victorian architecture and big fat Mission style burritos. For more than a decade now I’ve been living in Southern California, in both the heart of Los Angeles and the remote desert community of Wonder Valley. This location combination not only supports all of my rather oddball interests, I finally have good weather!
Perhaps you already know me in person or from one of my previous and now defunct web projects, like East Coast / West Coast – the original bi-coastal best friend blog where Choire Sicha (NYC) and I (SF at the time) shared way too much personal information online and wound up winning a Bloggy for it, queerday.com – a top LGBTQ news site for several years running, or hooping.org – the world’s #1 hoop dance / hula hoop site with 2 million+ visitors annually for more than a decade. Whether you already know me or not though, welcome to my personal website.
Over the years I’ve worn a variety of hats including non-profit management do gooder at places like Marin AIDS Project and The West Hollywood Recovery Center. I’ve done freelance writing for a variety of print and online publications including the San Francisco Chronicle. I was the psychic medium for San Francisco Paranormal that clued folks in on the unseen forces in their homes, lives and businesses. I also performed modern hoop dance on stages across the US. Probably my biggest claim to some kind of fame though would have to be my short film Gotta Hoop. It won numerous awards and was featured by The New York Times and many other publications. Typically, however, I was up to a whole variety of things all at once, and I still prefer it that way.
Currently the non-profit management and paranormal work continue. In my spare time you might find me working on that book, tinkering on some music projects (solo and with others), roller skating incredibly long distances, or working on the latest desert home project. Then again, I could just be curled up in front of a TV watching something on Discovery+ with a big bowl of popcorn.
To learn more about my paranormal work go here. You can find the history behind my hooping life here, and everything else – including repostings of years of previously lost content – will hopefully be showing up on the blog. Feel free to reach out about anything really and you can find me on BeReal daily, Instagram occasionally, and Facebook rarely. Thanks for stopping by.
