What’s With the Glove?

“Everything is cinema.” The quotation is part of the title
of New Yorker writer Richard Brody’s book about French film director Jean-Luc
Godard who thinks of movies as, in Brody’s words, “channeling the full spectrum
of what is human.”

“Everything is fashion.” Can that really be said? Or is it
simply being intrusive, inappropriate, and insufferably superficial to always
pay attention to hair, clothes and makeup.

It’s a worry that crops up when your livelihood depends on
watching what people wear, when your profession mixes the brutal nosiness of
journalism with all of fashion’s potential for snootiness, snideness and
insincerity.

And then there are the days when you wish you could stop
noticing. But it’s a habit for which it is difficult to find an off switch.
What are you going to do? Pluck out your eyes?

One way out, of course, is to replace the word “fashion”
with the word “style.” At once, your preoccupation with appearances seems more
legit, more humane, more dignified.

I find that way out facile, pretentious. Let’s face it:
you’re the stout, grinning goon from the old Punch cartoon, saying, “Excuse me,
Lady Godolphin, but I should so like to make some notes of your charming
costume,” and identifying herself as “‘Girlie’, you know–I do the Fashion
article for Classy Bits.”

Sorry to be so long-winded, when all I’m doing is fighting
with the man in the mirror, feeling unnecessary need for an excuse to write
about Michael Jackson’s memorial. As if any justification were required for
singing the praises of a big black hat that might take you to breakfast at
Tiffany’s and show up at a wake as welcome as a freshly baked ham.

LaToya did that for her brother. Janet did him proud in a
tilted beret. Brothers wore yellow ties. Minnelli yellow, you could say. Though
Liza was not there, it’s a colour that her director father Vincente was famous
for and that she chose for the funeral of her mother Judy Garland.

Perched on the couch, smoking and sniffling, I did what I
could to celebrate the life of a fellow who now perches on a crescent moon and
who at all the stops along the way was never less than fascinating to behold.

No way wrong was it that style paid tribute. Musical style
was pre-destined. At one point there was a mesmerizing percussion of
drumsticks, like a march, befitting a climb to higher mountains. For extra
measure, packed into the proceedings were the elegance of Queen Latifah: the
sheer beauty of Brooke Shields and the truth of things she said; the child with
the Chanel purse; a nod to the late Farrah Fawcett in the wing of Mariah
Carey’s hair; the coiffure of Congresswoman Sheila Jackson-Lee whose hair was
like a crown and reminded me of the great gospel singer Mahalia Jackson.

On “Man in the Mirror,” Michael Jackson sang, “As I turn up
the collar on my favourite winter coat/This wind is blowin’ my mind.”

In a tune called “Move On Up a Little Higher,” Mahalia
Jackson told us that some day we’re gonna lay down our heavy burdens and put on
our robes in glory. And we’ll be doing it in a place where it will always be
howdy-howdy– and never good-bye!

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