To Glamour & Risk: A Manifesto

ADVICE: Enter 2025 on a TILT

First, some housekeeping.

-I am having a closet sale on my Instagram on January 4th at 12pm EST. I am feeling very “I must shed some skin to move forward” and when I say skin I mean designer clothing I have not put on my body for over 20 months. Designers include: Gucci, Pucci, Moschino, Anna Sui, Dolce & Gabbana, Courreges, Pierre Cardin, Celine, prized vintage… you get the picture. The funniest thing is, I’ve been putting photos up of things I’m going to sell and my close friends have responded with “I have NEVER seen you wearing that.” EXACTLY! Everyone who wonders about how Carrie Bradshaw afforded her closet never met me.

-I will be back in Greece for an indefinite amount of weeks, so if you are interested in sending me ARCS or whatever I cannot accept and am not doing blurbs while in Europe.

-I am offering a deep discount on YEARLY subscriptions…30% OFF for a year. As we all know I love a discount. What can I say besides you get more of what I write and a bigger audience gets access to things like my ode to Maria Callas, or my advice column which the New Yorker said was a “good thing on the internet”. I am offering GLAMOUR, GRACE, BEAUTY into your inbox while I finish the second novel (I’m past the hurdles). What more is there????

-Finally, thank you all for this year. I feel as though you have all been with me on such a journey through globetrotting, my very feast or famine finances, misadventures et al. Now, below I’m going to yell at you. I’m going to yell at you about fear and risk and beauty and glamour and authenticity. I’m going to cut it off with a paywall because I think this advice is a paid service.

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In the wise words of 070 shake, “I wanna see you tonight if you can / Maybe it’s no, maybe it’s yes / I have risked it all just to see that dress”

For this month’s column, I am not answering a letter. I am writing from the place of a few gripes that have been starting to give me an itch. God how these gripes annoy and ACTIVATE ME.

Recently,

P.E. Moskowitz

(who is divine and I love, and have played tennis with) wrote:

This fear of pleasure and humanity and the creation of a psychic armor to “protect” oneself from this fear, is not a tenable situation […] We may not feel like we have much power these days. But that is also what the fascists us want us to think. They want us to sense the real dangers of the world, and allow ourselves to become scared of them, to build up impenetrable psychic armors to protect ourselves from them until we become inhuman, and thus are able to invalidate the humanity of any and everyone else.

Both me and P.E. have clearly been feeling the rise of this kind of puritanism. I have prided myself on turning away from a lot of discourse this year but some things filter through that make me want to scream. The pressure to maintain perfection and purity, banal “moral clarity” creates little space for what exists on the margins. It creates intolerance and disgust and pushes those margins even further.

When I speak of moral clarity, it’s not the debate of whether a genocide is a genocide. That is true moral clarity. It’s this strange resistance against anything that makes people uncomfortable. Why do people talk about cheating like it is the worst thing a person can do? Why do people act like someone being rude condemns that person to the Hague? Why do people rush to broadcast people wronging them where the goal is for the other person to be punished? Some things are just interpersonal conflicts, not trial by followers. You cannot be in community with people if the only show of togetherness is by forming a mob.

As a woman who is often accused of having a one-woman show I’ve been thinking a lot about Sandra “A cigarette come to life” Bernhard, and when she comes on David Letterman and says, “Oh honey, ‘92 has started off with glamour, betrayal, and seduction!” I love one of the things she tends to say during her nineties sets, “Things are about to get FUNKY and REAL!” This is what I want to announce entering into every room, not only entering every year. This is what I want for YOU!

A few of my friends on this subject:

Connor Garel quoting some kind of German story in Call Me By Your Name says, “Is it better to speak or to DIE!”

Michael McGregor

says “If you aren’t willing to risk it all, you’re deny your destiny.”

Colleen Kelsey

says, “DEATH to passivity.” She advises to find your inner Danny Ocean (Ocean’s 11).

We are all on expedition! It’s time to act like it.

jamie hood

mentions an Annie Dillard quote in her fabulous memoir TRAUMA PLOT (that you all need to pre-order) that stuck with me:

Some of the walls are bearing walls, they have to stay, or everything will fall down. Other walls can go with impunity; you can hear the difference. Unfortunately, it is often a bearing wall that has to go. It cannot be helped. There is only one solution, which appalls you, but there it is… Knock it out. Duck…

And then later Dillard says “Are you a woman, or a mouse?” which I will repeat to myself for the rest of my life. Dillard is speaking about the writing process, but really how many bearing walls do we have to demolish in our lives? Rebuilding, restructuring all the time. Let the light in! Don’t be so scared, are you a woman or a mouse?

I have this clip of Sandra Bernhard memorized. Her hair reaches the heaven and she’s decked out in a full Isaac Mizrahi outfit saying, “We are moving FORWARD, we are modern, we are bringing the 60s into the 90s, we are bringing HIGH GLAMOUR. And the audience loves it, they need it, they DESIRE it, they REACH OUT for it! Sexual TENSION! We are talking diamonds and pearls!”

This kind of bon vivant type of living is contagious. The audience craves it and is inspired by it. I can’t be living this kind of life all by myself. I get quite a lot of messages asking for some kind of mentorship, but I don’t think it’s entirely necessary. I think most of it can boil down to what Olivia Hussey (RIP beautiful angel) says in response to requests for romantic advice, “Lighten up! Life just unfolds. If I know nothing else, I know that in two months your life can completely change.” I have built my entire life on whims, pursuit and an INKLING. It’s not something that can be formally taught, but take my lead. Some of my friends admit to asking themselves WWMD (What Would Marlowe Do), and the answer is always obvious: