Month: May 2026

The Bias Cut

Fashion of the moment and what lasts

Last week as part of a month-long retrospective of the career of filmmaker Ernst Lubitsch (1892-1947) (think The Shop Around the Corner), Film Forum here in New York City showed two screenings of the movie Trouble in Paradise, starring Herbert Marshall, Miriam Hopkins, and Kay Francis. But wait, there’s more.

The Film Forum lobby ad card for the retrospective.

At both the 12:15 PM and the 7:00 PM showings, my old friend and colleague, Howard Gutner, introduced the film and showed slides of photos from his latest book on Hollywood’s Golden Age, Banton of Paramount, a deeply researched study of the work of costume designer Travis Banton (1894-1958), whose protegee, Edith Head (1887-1981), was the eight-time Oscar-winning designer of films such as All About Eve (1951, in the Black and White category, which category ended in 1970) and The Sting (1974, her last). Banton never won because awards for Best Costume Design weren’t introduced until 1949, and by that time his alcoholism got him forced out of studio work; I’d never heard of Banton until Howard told me about his book coming out.

Howard was my work supervisor for many years, and we collaborated on many projects. Several former colleagues showed up across both showings, and our reunion made us look like groupies or the In crowd. A very old In crowd.

Howard’s introduction, which was delivered with real command of the material, a great voice, and wit and warmth, included slides of two gowns from Trouble in Paradise (which is just terrific, by the way): one worn by Miriam Hopkins shows a character who does not come from wealth, and the other, worn by Kay Francis, shows a temptress character with riches to burn. Both gowns, Howard explained, were sewn on Banton’s signature bias cut, where cutting the fabric on a 45-degree angle causes the dress to hug the body, thus showing a body’s true shape. Ah, the world of Pre-Code Hollywood. And this new knowledge, as it turned out, shaped the way I watched the movie—a new lens, if you will, that enhanced my viewing pleasure by heightening my awareness of craft beyond plot.

In addition to pitching Howard’s book, and I am, I want to praise the writers and archivists who keep our artistic histories alive. Howard’s other two books, Gowns by Adrian (long out of print, I see that Simon and Schuster is going to reissue it in November of 2026), about MGM costume designer Gilbert Adrian (you know him, yes you do, because he designed The Wizard of Oz), and MGM Style, about the work of MGM set designer Cedric Gibbons (The Wizard of Oz and so many more), along with the new book on Banton, provide backstories that had not been told; prior to Howard’s book, there were no books at all on Banton, for example. Following Howard’s lead, there are now other books on Adrian, but those writers didn’t get to interview Katharine Hepburn personally (as Howard did) as part of the research (Adrian designed Hepburn’s costumes for The Philadelphia Story). So important was Gowns by Adrian in design circles, I even caught a glimpse of it while watching 2024’s documentary about Bob Mackie, Naked Illusion:

In this still of the famed designer for Cher, Carol Burnett, and Elton John, among so many others, I’m especially proud of my screen capture of Mackie either about to sing opera or take a dump.
Art isn’t easy.

The other night I asked a young waiter in my neighborhood haunt, Belo—a kid I know to love theater, literature, and film—“Do you like classic movies?” to which he eagerly replied, “Yes!” so I told him about Film Forum’s retrospective. He pulled out his phone, Googled Ernst Lubitsch, and winced. “These aren’t classic, they’re old.” And that was it, phone back in pocket, conversation over. In an American age where the president wants to either tear down a congressional cultural monument like The Kennedy Center or rebrand it as vulgar Trump real estate; in a nation in which everyone of note seemingly wants to erase the arts and entertainment they don’t care for—from Timothée Chalamet dismissing opera and ballet, to Meryl Streep doing the same to wrestling on the Golden Globes (I guess that UFC cage match on the White House lawn will show her)—I feel that Americans are being Meta-trained to consume, to criticize, to forget, to throw away, to wipe out everything at greater and greater rates, in larger and larger amounts, across all spectrums of our collective experience—all so we can’t and won’t learn our true and full history. I think it’s that dangerous—for with every bit of historical memory we give up or entertainment pastime we bury with derision, we come that much closer to erasing who we are, where we came from, and the more the oligarchs and freedom fuckers win. (I read that Peter Thiel, a principal architect of America’s apocalypse, has moved to Argentina; that should tell us something, and maybe it’s good.)

I heard a little kid ask his parent the other day, “Why is the Mona Lisa so famous still?” And it struck me that the real beauty of that painting is that the whole world knows of it and that the knowing started in the Renaissance. That said, so too will everyone remember Mar-a-Lago and for just as long, because the grotesque and the evil matter to our story as much as the beautiful and the great; after all, the Borges financed the Renaissance. Obama’s legacy, I hope, will outlast Trump’s for all the right reasons; Trump can build all the monuments to himself and generate all the AI superhero images of himself he wants, but you know the only thing that will really last? This POEM:

I recommend regular rereadings of this poem, aloud, for sanity.

Here in my neighborhood on Friday evening, I stopped by the vintage clothing and gift shop Bliss and learned of owner Violet’s annual plant exchange (where we all can exchange cuttings to share with others) next weekend—and also the 8th anniversary of her store. She advertised for a band via Instagram and an Armenian guitarist said he could bring a tuba player and a violinist for a trio. Violet said, “Only in New York could I get world class musicians to come out to Queens for a plant exchange and face painting.” Now that is what I mean by collective culture.

I’ll leave you this Sunday with a couple of video essays by PissedMagistus on Instagram and Qasim Rashid on Substack, both on the sheer stupidity of racism, fascism, xenophobia, homophobia, and bigotry of all kinds—think of these clips as different kinds of bias cuts. No one should mind either high art, so-called, or low culture, so-called, just as they shouldn’t care what color someone’s skin is or what country they come from. With June starting tomorrow, I think of the Pride call, “We’re here, we’re queer,” and life goes on, right? What should never be stomached, though, are the dangerous people in power right now and the atrocities they are committing. Don’t drain your outrage, I keep telling myself, and while I’m upset over the Kennedy Center and glad a judge ordered Trump to remove his name, I’m saving my tight chest for Delaney Hall and my outrage for two Democratic women governors who are squandering their leadership—already. Spanberger vetoed a bill that would demand warrants for all ICE searches; Sherrill sent in troops to terrorize peaceful protestors yesterday. Shame, shame, shame, snatching defeat from the jaws of victory. So much work to do.

And don’t forget to make space for art.

Sidebar: Seen at the Montclair Art Museum in Monclair, NJ, last weekend—I love this label, upending “Unknown” as the default to illuminate gaps in our historical memory and think about why that is.

Waking in First Light

While the Frozen Left lets democracy slip away, a little talk in the heat of late spring

This morning, as I do at least two mornings a week, I awoke around 3 AM. I was sleeping in my own bed, in a room with a working lamp and fan, surrounded by two dressers, a stack of books, and art objects either gifted to me or purchased with money earned from work. I was able to get up on my own two legs and walk to a working indoor toilet, use it, and pad into my very own kitchen, take out my coffee maker, scoop local artisanal coffee into the filter, extract potable water from my own faucet and pour it into the drip coffeemaker on my own kitchen counter. Flip a switch, listen to the drip, pull down a mug.

These are no small things. Taken together, you realize, “In America, we live like kings.”

I saw a video the other day, though I didn’t save it and don’t know who said it, that in the 21st century, Americans, and indeed many, many people, live like kings for the just the situation and services I noted. And no one is happy.

And though the Big “Haves” as well as too many “haves in denial” are never satisfied, more of us could be living like kings if it weren’t for about 2,000 rich people (nearly all white men) who can’t bear the thought of you having anything, let alone Blacks having so much as a vote, or Hispanics and Muslims sending their children to school. These same oligarchs hate Jews even as they fund Israel’s genocide against Palestinians. To prevent you and me and anyone brown from having a goddamned thing, they will bomb every nation and even blow up the planet. This isn’t even hyperbole. When I read yesterday that Trump’s DOJ, now his personal police force, awarded $1.7 billion to the January 6 insurrectionists—shown in the Mueller Report to be crisis actors (the Republican term) transported to D.C. and housed in hotels paid for by a Trump SuperPAC—I realized how idiotic Democrats have been to “trust the system.” We also know those feces-smearing cop-killers will never see a dime; all the money will go into a Trump trust or some such. But it’s our money. Our money.

I don’t even know how to feel mad anymore. I read that we the sentient have what is called Compassion Fatigue, and Outrage Exhaustion, pick a syndrome borne out of this Theatre of the Absurd that celebrates and normalizes those who engage in pedophilia and rape and grift, gets incensed by the idea of universal healthcare, and chooses unchecked guns over school safety, book bans over public education.

[At 5:29 AM, my peace in typing this on my little porch was interrupted by a big truck’s deafening engine in idle somewhere nearby, for maybe ten minutes, and I thought, “Of course.” It’s the perfect metaphor for America.]

This past weekend, one of my former students, ca. 1997-98, was in town for a wedding in Brooklyn and was determined to visit me, even after multiple delays, changing hotels, and helping return tuxedos. My strongest memory of this student is the first week of school in my tenth grade Humanities class, when I had the kids introduce themselves to the class using a question they hated being asked. His question was, “Are you mixed?” and his answer was, “I am a beautiful mulatto.” I recounted this to him when I saw him, finally, late Sunday evening. He lives out West now with his wife and son, and his best friend came along to Queens with him—in fact, this kid said his main reason for accompanying his bff to this wedding was a chance to see me—and apologize.

In fact, his first words coming down the stairs from the el train and seeing me were, “I love you!” And over the course of tequila shots and beer at my favorite bar, he explained what a troubled teen he had been, and he said something I’d never heard: “You held me with different hands than anyone else,” and those hands were full of “culture.” He felt cared for in a way that was new.

This exchange—the great conversation in general—reminds me how vital education is for mind and spirit, for sustenance in a dry-as-bones corporate world. Of my former profession, I told him that I would love to teach again—all I ever wanted to be was a teacher and learner—but not the way education is now. “I’d like to sit on some steps, like Socrates,” I said, and his friend said, “And philosophize!” Yes. Talk, think, observe. Make learning fun and human again.

I want to say that I gave this kid every out, texting, “It’s okay if you can’t come out here,” and “I’m too tired to get out to you,” and in truth I was really tired, being old now and feeling it at 7 PM on a Sunday; but he was determined, so I did it. My point here: always make an effort.

We can be surprised by visits, and we need to let visitors in. While I was home in Virginia the other week, my dad, Bernie, brother Jeff , and I were sitting outside on the little pea gravel patio, staring at sky and trees and the bird sanctuary that has formed around Bernie’s feeders, after a few hours of long-needed yard work. Suddenly a bird we’d never seen alighted on the feeder, wild black and white striped wings, a red breast, a golden beak. He was a vision. (I say “he” because any bird of colorful plumage is a male—to attract mates and distract predators from the nest, they say.) We all went crazy trying to identify it, commenting on the markings, watching the movements. Wow.

Google Lens identified the bird as an adult male Rose-breasted Grosbeak, and indeed the female is a simpler golden brown color. It turns out the bird should be in the mountains on his migration, some 50 miles west, but he stopped over for a meal.

https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Rose-breasted_Grosbeak/id

This sighting got me thinking about female beauty. I remember by mom, Lynne, saying to me when I balked at wearing lipstick and mascara the year I’d lost my natural bloom and students wanted to give me a makeover, feeling as if it would call unnecessary attention to myself: “Honey, you don’t wear makeup so they notice you; you wear it so they don’t.” She was right.

“Beauty is invisibility,” I read on a post the other day, where men write in the radical female content creator’s comments, “You are so beautiful” in response to a video on social justice for women. I’ve had men do that to me—compliment my hair in mid-sentence. I’m not heard, not seen. So many ways for men to miss out through misogyny.

Years ago, my best friend at the time, a man, asked me what I wanted in a relationship. “Great conversations,” I said, and he snorted, “Yeah, you’re gonna be alone.” And I am. He was absolutely right. I cannot have great conversations with most men, or I can but only to a point, and right when I’m reaching a new understanding, or sharing one, or moving them so they might figure something out, they crack a joke. Every. Time. I’m sorry about that.

And so it was a delight to have a great and serious and also fun conversation with a former male student. Curiously, it’s not the drama students who seek me out to visit after many years so much as it is the language arts kids, like this student. While the intensity of a weeks-long rehearsal process in the drama club creates fast friends, perhaps it’s the 9-month incubation of a high school English class that births the real relationships.

We cannot have it all—in friends, in citizens, in a nation—but if we look around for a minute and make space for visitors, we already have more than we realize. Now, how to get people in power to see this, to want this for all of us? As theater legend Joseph Chaikin said, “I want to change my life and everyone else’s. I don’t know how to do it. And if not the life, then the day, the evening, the hour, the minute.” Chaikin also came to realize that change doesn’t happen “en masse,” but rather “one by one by one.” One conversation at a time, one tough year at a time.

Most every morning, I wake too early and in a panic about the planet, our country, and the next pandemic borne of idiots. Today, I enjoyed a little light. Hope you found some light, too.

Love, somehow,

Miss O’

Sunrise. Queens

Talking of Moms

Coming back from quick trip down South to see my dad

Yesterday morning, en route to a stop at D.C.’s Union Station from Woodbridge (where I’d traveled to from New York last Friday), I sat next to a young Black man snoozing with sunglasses on. He was about the only person on that early morning train from Richmond not spread out while asleep, leaving space for a seat mate. He began waking when we got to Alexandria, and I asked where he was getting off—anticipating when we need to move out of the way for a seat mate’s disembarking is important train etiquette. “D.C.,” he said, and I asked where he was coming from. “Richmond, but I live in D.C.,” and I said, “Not a bad trip, but early,” and he said, “That’s why you caught me snoozing,” and he smiled, then asked where I was headed, and then if I’d been down for Mother’s Day. “My mom died last year,” I said; “Oh, I’m sorry,” he said, gently, and I said, “Thanks,” and explained that I wanted to be home for my dad. I didn’t get a chance to find out about his own mother, as we pulled into Union Station and he needed to get his bag. Such a nice guy.

I myself snoozed quite a bit on my journey from D.C. to my destination, when I wasn’t reading a 1967 Amanda Cross detective novel, The James Joyce Murder—highly academic and modeled on Peter Wimsey mysteries but with a female and radically feminist amateur sleuth. I haven’t felt much like murder mysteries, what with the world being full of murder, hate, mayhem, injustice, all that. Hence the naps, I guess.

Talking to new people on the train is a favorite pastime—but there was very little in the way of chatting with strangers going down or coming back. A youngish woman (tall, white, long strawberry blonde hair, maybe 40) got on in D.C. en route to New Brunswick (as it turned out), but we didn’t begin talking until Trenton, when we fell into a very deep conversation about her mom’s Alzheimer’s and my mom’s death (all this beginning with, “I’m going home for Mother’s Day” or some such), the difference between mental and physical decline—we agreed that the physical is less awful. Her 76-year-old mother is in great physical health right now, but calls this woman and her younger sister by the names of of her own younger sisters—the regression to youth is fascinating and also deeply sad (my half-sister’s mother called my sister “Becky” for a decade before she died, and my sister always answered, “Well, hey, Ann,” like it was normal—very hard). At New Brunswick, my seat mate departed and another youngish woman got on (50 to my 62, as it turns out) and sat beside me, beaming from this great road trip to four high school friends, she said. We too entered into this unexpectedly deep conversation on Mother’s Day, her own mom in Nepal, aged 82 and with the need for a heart procedure, and whom she can’t visit because of the Iran war now, given all the travel problems. We agreed, with an understanding beyond words, that the U.S. government is totally batshit now, I saying simply, “It’s all so awful and stupid,” and she nodding sadly. I talked of my mom’s death—it turns out my Nepalese companion is a doctor (she’d vaguely mentioned “the healthcare field” and I’m sure she’d been deliberately vague because people say, “Hey, let me ask you…,” and I clearly wasn’t going to do that). “I deal with that every day,” she said of death and dying, including families in denial, and spoke of the importance of hospice. In Nepal there is a form of hospice in the Temple, where the dying are taken to be attended by healers and shaman, and that sounded pretty good to me, but now there is a cost to be incurred even for that. (I see more clearly than ever that nothing is free in any village anymore; the triumph of Western corporate capitalism is that a few white men get rich off everyone’s paying them for what they, the villagers, used to get for free, thanks to the threat of weapons and the mercenaries who wield them.) In addition, her beloved family dog is seriously ill, and her children (ages 12 and 14) and worried. All that learning—about Nepal and dying and parents and lives— in the short run from New Brunswick to Newark to New York. I moved to get up when we entered the NJ-NY tunnel to get my backpack, as my new friend moved for me, and bade her a good trip back to Boston, wished her mother and her dog well. As we do.

I lined up in the aisle as others stood to get their bags and noticed a young white man reading an old Mickey Spillane paperback. “Mickey Spillane,” I said, and he looked up, telling me he was reading all those old-school writers now, like Spillane, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, and I recommended The Maltese Falcon for a good movie version of Hammett. He was loving the language, including the new phrase “slopping beer,” and I found his enthusiasm heartening. Across the aisle from him was a short, round old lady with pageboy white hair and a visor, who was saying to the tall young black man next to her, moving into the aisle, “Tie your shoe,” and then, pointing, “Your shoe’s untied,” and the fellow obeyed her and he tied it, and she added, “Sorry, my retired vice-principal-of-an-elementary-school is showing,” and he smiled, and she said, “I can’t let you trip!” He asked, “Do you have a bag to get?” and she pointed to the front of the car, a pink rolling suitcase, and he said, “Easy to spot at the airport,” and she said, “That was the idea,” and he pulled it out and also got his own, and they worked out a system so he could help her get her suitcase off the train. How sweet was that?

There is something about the confinement of travel in short spaces that breaks us open, and I think the sentiment of Mother’s Day hovered over us, too, filled us all with an awareness of where we all come from. Everyone was birthed into this world through a mom, and so many of us seem like moms. (I myself was wished an enthusiastic “Happy Mother’s Day!” by no fewer than three (Black) women at various points this past week, and I just said, “Thank you! You too!”)

There aren’t many universals anymore, or so it seems—mothers, certainly, whatever the degree of influence over or care they gave us. Another, surely, is food. I would say a third universal is responding positively to cuteness, whether it’s dogs or cats or babies, and anyone who is ambivalent about or hostile toward moms, nourishment, or cuteness needs to work a hard, hideous job and live quietly in a hole without access to weapons of any kind.

Cuteness: my 5-year-old nephew insisted on carrying my backpack.

During my stay in the South, my youngest brother, who lives in North Carolina with his family, introduced me and our brother Jeff to the series Tucci in Italy, and when we got back to Virginia, Jeff and I watched the other five episodes. We then received the “Recommended for You” idea to watch No Taste Like Home with Queer Eye’s Antoni Porowski, in which Antoni takes celebrities on a tour to discover their roots through family dishes they have always loved. In that way, Jeff and I traveled to Yorkshire, England, and again to Italy, thence to Germany, Senegal, and Malaysia. Everywhere Antoni goes are women and men preparing local food, and you get a chance to see how geography and colonization inform every aspect of their lives and, in turn, the lives of those who emigrated.

Something about a road trip. I was disgusted by Transportation Secretary Sean Duffy encouraging Americans to take summer road trips with gas at $5.00/gallon— for his own oil profit, no doubt. Jeff and i wanted to spare our brother the expense.

Back in Virginia, hanging out with my dad, we watched sports and walked the neighborhood, talked about how much we both miss Lynne, shared memories. Food was always important to my dad, a retired meat cutter and short order cook in the Air Force, but he said, “I just don’t feel like cooking anymore.” When we did set about making a meal, we both found ourselves looking up the stairs, wondering what Mom would like to eat. It’s been a year but it’s flown by, and last May’s ordeal feels like yesterday, and today.

Awkward family photos. Bernie is 92.

Universals. We all thrive when we have shelter and access to nourishing food and clean water, but more than that, loving homes and creative community culture. And I couldn’t help thinking about how far America has pulled away from all this in favor of corporate structures, bottom lines, 401Ks, screen-screed loneliness, AI, and endless consumerism (says the woman who consumed 11 episodes of two shows on a paid subscription streaming network that still forces commercials on us because we accept it as normal).

I told you once about that professor I had at Virginia Tech, an old (my age now, no doubt) white-haired, deeply Southern white man named Byers (I think), who in his American Literature class asked us what was meant by the term universal. After some attempts from his students in answer, Prof. Byers intoned, “A good example of a universal is a warm [woah-um] shower [show-ah]. Everyone enjoys a whoa-um show-ah.” At the time of his pronouncement, ca. 1983, the only people “enjoying” a warm shower were almost exclusively Westerners, and only since around 1950. In any case, I remember finding his example weirdly specific, if not a little creepy. How about food? I thought. How about being birthed by moms?

I also think connection is vital to our universal survival, as I’ve previously noted, and I was touched to find how important that remains, even to strangers on a train.

Sending you love, this day after Mother’s Day,

Miss O’

Aunt Lisa in conversation with a new generation. Photo by my nephew’s mom.