You Have a Right to Remain Silent
It was on a dog day afternoon in August on 6oth Street off of Fifth Avenue in the earliest days of cell phones. A red-faced, perspiring man in a suit and tie was shouting into his brick-sized phone “I am a very private person.” I was on the opposite side of the street but we were alone on the block. I couldn’t help but think I had wandered into a New Yorker cartoon. That scene has never left me and I have frequently come back to it when thinking of issues of privacy. What is our notion of privacy, expectation of privacy? The boundaries are always changing. When I was a kid we had neighbors whose phone service was a “party line,” a shared connection which anyone could hear. At the same time, mail was considered sacrosanct and I still won’t open something not addressed to me. I never think of my phone conversations or emails as iron-clad private and yet, I never used my work email for anything personal and vice versa. We all have self imposed boundaries but the speed of technology and the insatiable demand for information makes the evolution of these boundaries difficult to maintain, hard to reconcile. So much superficial stuff, TMI, is out there competing for our attention. It’s hard to balance but we must. Ours is a participatory democracy and the most important part of that is how we educate ourselves. We need to expose ourselves to the news daily, weekly, monthly, in forms that are immediate and breaking as well as those that take a long view. We need to be thoughtful and deliberate. The national security “scandal?” I never had an expectation of privacy on the phone or in my email. The debate? We had it leading up to the Patriot Act and, as I recall, if you raised any questions you were considered un-Patriot-ic. We trade off every day, opening our bags for inspection, removing our shoes. We tweet, we “like,” we sign up with our emails. We are tracked by location services. Google analytics lets everyone know where we visited, how long we stayed and what we looked at. In Law & Order you knew when Briscoe pulled the LUDs (Local Usage Details of the phone), the case was as good as solved. What can we do? Participate: read, think, vote, let your representatives know how you feel. You have a right to remain silent but you have an obligation to speak up.
SPM
Paella Party
Segovia is known for its intact Roman aqueduct but no matter how many aqueducts you’ve seen or how many ruins you’ve visited in Rome, it is hard to be prepared for how majestic yet utterly contemporary it is when you arrive to it. You feel an immediate connection with ancient history and, in our case as we are of Roman descent, a twinge of pride.
We were there a couple of weeks ago on a weekday which turned out to be a local holiday. There was a fiesta in the Plaza Mayor, a book swap with special programs for children and traditional music. The city is known for roast suckling pig so there was the scent of wood fires. It was a beautiful spring day so there was a floral yet somehow herbaceous tinge in the air. And somehow I imagined I smelled saffron.
A group of young guys were sitting on the ground balancing paper plates, leaning against the storefronts that line the old Roman road. Then I saw another group of older men and women, sitting on some steps. They were eating, too. And then I saw the line for paella. The whole city was sharing lunch, open air paella and a piece of bread.
SPM
Waving the flag for YSL
I just read about the new Saint Laurent store on Avenue Montaigne and it really sounds like my kind of store. No, really, my store. Right down to the Byrds on the soundtrack. I have loved YSL in every incarnation. When I was in middle school I would tear out sketches from the New York Times and my grandmother would whip up heavy silk crepe ruffled blouses, Russian tunics, plaid taffeta gypsy skirts. Later, in college, I inherited a perfectly tailored black gabardine blazer with black and silver shantung burmudas. By the time I was working I added two sahariennes, long sleeve and sleeveless. I invested heavily in the Tom Ford years and still wear some of those pieces. I remember the day Opium was introduced. I had just returned from a summer studying in Spain, feeling out of my element, when I smelled it, something so different, truly like a narcotic. It became my signature for a while. I like the new Slimane YSL. The merchandise I’ve seen in the stores is so clean and appealing. Now it has a home.
SPM
Who you calling a punk?
I find myself ambivalent over the new exhibit at the Met. During the punk era I was a college student who worked at Bloomingdale’s and hung out downtown. I was on a very tight budget and wore a lot of finds from the Salvation Army and hospital thrift stores as well as carefully curated bargains purchased with my employee discount at work. I wore a very limited color palate, mostly black and white with touches of red and pink, because it made it easier to mix old and new. I had always loved clothes and had beautiful pieces that had been my mother’s in the 1950’s and ’60’s: an ivory linen dress with small orange flowers with a circle skirt that would wrinkle if I didn’t put it on straight from the ironing board, an ensemble of pink cotton burmuda shorts with a matching jacket topstitched in black, a silk chiffon blouse with short puffy sleeves and a plastron that resembled an Austrian pull up shade. I had things from the thrift stores that would never be found today: a boxy tweed Chanel jacket purchased on 50 cent day (later authenticated by one of Mademoiselle’s favorite models), a red striped black Mary Quant Scottish cashmere sweater, bias cut rayon dresses from the ’30’s and ’40’s, a fitted black Norell jacket with nile green facings, men’s crisp white tuxedo shirts. I had some odd pieces of Sonia Rykiel and a beloved YSL blazer. I had a pair of Charles Jourdan Mary Janes, scooped out with pointed toes, red with a gold strap. I wore strippy canvas sandals from Woolworth’s on a small wedge. I had oxfords on a sturdy heel that looked like they would be worn by a nun. And so many hats: natural straw with velvet piping, a trellis of tiny fruits that sat on my head, a rich burgundy felt with a satin cocarde and matching veil, a leopard print bucket. No outfit was complete without full accessorization. All of this was very personal and individual. I was more influenced by whatever literature or history I was reading (in whatever language) or a film or museum exhibit than by “fashion.”
Supposedly, if you remember the ’60’s you couldn’t have really been there. I think punk might be the same way. If you dressed in a certain way in a certain time, listed to a certain kind of music, enjoyed a certain kind of poetry, lived in an industrial building where you weren’t supposed to be, maybe you were “punk” and you just didn’t know at the time.
SPM
“Baltimore” with “Version”
I grew up in Mount Vernon, NY. It always makes me laugh when people in NYC ask me if I’m going back upstate at the end of the day. My block was on the border of the Bronx and the 241st street subway was nearby. For many years the 2 train was my mode of travel to the Village. In the early 70s, Caribbean stations were all over radio and White Plains Avenue under the El was a thriving Jamaican community. I loved reggae immediately after being turned on like everyone else by Clapton’s version of “I Shot the Sheriff.” Reggae is bass heavy and I’m a bass player first so I was intrigued right away. Jeff Barnes and Gil Bailey were the two DJs that ruled these stations. Besides reggae, there was Soca and Calypso. These stations would go off the air at sunset every night and the last half hour would feature a spaced out take on reggae that I had never heard before. I would always make sure to be listening at this time. There was one song that really got to me called “Baltimore.” The song itself was great but the version at end of the day was incredible. It had all the elements I loved: a deep bass, a cracking snare, voices and horns drifting in and out, an other worldly sound. I was hooked.
At the foot of the stairs up to the station at 241st was a small record store called Wackie’s House of Music. One day, around 1978 or so I walked in and asked if they had “Baltimore.” Lloyd Barnes, Wackie himself, went through the stacks of 45s and pulled “Baltimore” by the Tamlins. Then he turned and pointed to a man and said, “this is Gil Bailey!” I was carrying my bass so Wackie asked me if I wanted to check out the studio in the back of the store. Turns out the studio was what Wackies was all about; the record store just an extra. They were in the middle of a session. The first thing I noticed was a stack of 4 Roland Space Echoes, the key, I would later learn, to the sound of Dub music.
When I got home, I took the record out of the sleeve. When I turned it over there was a song called “Version” and the artist wasn’t the Tamlins but Sly and Robbie and the Revolutionaries. When I played it I was thrilled to find out that it was the song I had been captivated by every evening. My first Dub record but certainly not my last.
Below you can hear both sides of the Tamlins “Baltimore” followed by a version of Tender Heart, a new track by me showing dub influences. Let me know what you think.
Fashion Calendar
I remember seeing a documentary about Balinese calendars and the concept of time. Traditionally in Bali there are two calendars: one marks the days and one is lunar. They run concurrently, in addition to the Gregorian calendar, and all three must be consulted when planning something important.
The fashion world is similar. A store buyer in New York has just finished the orders for next fall. The current spring merchandise is being delivered to the stores. But it’s still cold out, grey and sleety. We wait for “real” spring, not fashion spring, which will arrive and depart so suddenly we may not even notice. There is a disconnect in front of the closet each morning when deciding what to wear. Time is divided and portioned out; time is everywhere and nowhere. This is the fashion calendar.
SPM
Vendeuse Extraordinaire
When I worked for Geoffrey Beene he would sometimes call me “vendeuse extraordinaire.” It was a small shop and I was the manager, the buyer, the chief merchant, the visual merchandiser. But my favorite and most important job was to sell, sell the brand and the man, sell the aesthetic. The clothes were so beautiful in their simplicity and required a lot of explanation to make sure a new client understood just how difficult it was to make something so stripped down. They looked dreadful on the hanger just because they looked and felt so good on the body. You cannot have both. And “stripped down” is relative. A simple jersey dress could be made of cashmere jersey with the tiniest bias cut chiffon piping hand sewn on each seam. Mr. Beene would come to the shop (we didn’t call it a store or boutique) often, sometimes multiple times a day. We would do the window displays together, choosing the merchandise and dressing the forms. Once I remember tying a bow four or five times. When he told me he liked the second way the best, I had no idea what I had done. Same thing when he would tell me to “do what you do” to the sleeves of a jacket. But when he would call me “vendeuse extraordinaire” I knew exactly what he meant. SPM
Gastrodiplomacy
There is a cliché of the sour-smelling apartment hallway, reeking of over boiled cabbage and over fried fish. That is not my hallway. My neighbors are a culinary polyglot, and the scent of our hallway reinforces it. We are Haitian, Persian, West Indian, Filipino. We are of Roman, Tuscan and Alsatian descent. We come from the American South. And we have the cuisines to prove it.
More than once I have come home ready to cook dinner but wishing I could ring my neighbor’s doorbell and sample whatever is simmering on their stove. I have greeted my dinner guests who step off the elevator complimenting the delicious smell with a “sorry, not us but we’re making something pretty good, too.” The high point of it all is Thanksgiving which everyone interprets in their own way. We compare notes when we meet in the hall.
Cooking unites us; aromas of allspice, coriander, cinnamon, rosemary, pomegranate, rose-water. Fish sauce, pungent and off-putting for that split second before it mellows and brings everything together.
SPM
Precious Cargo
When I worked for Emanuel Ungaro one of my favorite tasks was to help the Directrice of the haute couture when she came twice a year to show the collection. She would arrive straight from the airport and drop off the trunks and I would take them up to the office and unpack. It was in the late ’80’s through the early ’90’s and fashion didn’t have the immediacy of today. The haute couture shows were covered in WWD and the NY Times, usually accompanied by sketches. We would receive photos which I would put together in a look book, following the run of show that was on the seats of the show attendees. The only celebrities at the shows were people who were actual clients or longtime friends of the house like Anouk Aimee.
In the quiet of the weekend evening I would unpack and hang each garment, finally seeing and feeling the fabrics and designs I had been studying for months. I turned each piece inside out to examine the tiny stitches of the petits mains. I lined everything up, passage by passage, the collection slowly reassembled before my eyes. The fabrics were heavy silks and wools, jacquards, printed with multiple screens, colored like bon bons or in permutations of grey. There was one collection with every jewel toned plaid imaginable, one that followed the silk road where everything was on an ivory ground with hats that might have been worn by Genghis Khan. Known for his sense of color and pattern, I recall a collection that was predominately black which emphasized Mr. Ungaro’s signature draping. After lining up the samples and taking care of muslins or pieces ready for a first fitting, I locked up and went home, looking forward to the week ahead.
SPM
Super Bowl or How I Learned to Love The Bomb
I have always been a sports fan, especially of sports writing. The sports pages have so many elements that I love: intrigue, politics, strategy, back stories, statistics. But until I met Steven, I just couldn’t understand football. The rules seemed so confusing; I couldn’t follow the ball. It made no sense to me. Early on, I would dutifully “watch” the games with him with my head buried in a book. Then one day he said “each team gets 3 tries to go ten yards” and the magic of the game was revealed. Suddenly, I got it. And I liked it.
Without the Giants playing, picking a team to root for is tricky. The Ravens are named after a poem and have a beautiful font for the numerals on their uniforms. San Francisco is a favorite place to visit. I’ve been rooting for Baltimore all post-season, though, so I think I’ll stick with them.
SPM
Escape From Nowheresville 