Hard to show your colors when you no longer know what colors mean. Or as Carlos Varela sings, los mapas están cambiando de color.

So I’m talking to this liberal younger person and, jokingly, I say, you’re a Red, only to get an objection, “no way, I’m an independent.” I didn’t mean that kind of Red, though I should’ve known better.

The Red States vote Republican. The Blue States vote Democratic. Reds are right. Blues are left. Tell that to the ghost of Vladimir Illich Ulyanov, aka Lenin, whose ghost must be stirring in his mausoleum, if he can get CNN there. Red was for a very long time the color of the radical left. Most certainly the color of the Communists, just as the hammer and sickle was their logo. The color of revolution. The color of blood shed in the service of the revolution. And so on. Blue? Well, bluebloods are aristocrats and one always thought of them on the right, although at the time of the Russian Revolution the name White Russian stuck on, as a political category, not as The Dude’s favorite cocktail.

Flash forward to late 20th and early 21st American politics and Red-Right/Blue-Left dynamics. So much so that calling someone of a liberal persuasion a “Red” is not taken as an insult because one is calling that person a leftist extremist but because one is calling that person a right-winger.

I suppose it’s the postmodernism, and I’m having a hard time adjusting. Granted, left/right dynamics have changed and there are issues old left and right wingers could not have anticipated, like ecology. But this color switch is confusing. Distributors of films for home watching, on DVD or streaming or whatever, may have to change the name of the 1981 Warren Beatty movie to Blues, which would make it sound like a period movie all right, but one about old New Orleans and the birth of jazz.

All this code switching is giving me the mean old lowdown dirty reds.

If you read my PODER story on master tailor Christian García, either in print on online, you might think, yeah, nice clothes, but not what I can afford. Indeed, as I pointed out, these unsurpassed bespoke (a word that means truly custom-made by master tailors) cost no more than many of the top Italian brands of suits that, though certainly of high quality, are basically factory made. And some, as the story observed, are not even the best workmanship.

So what can a man who wants to dress well do, if money is, as it is for most of us, indeed an object? It can be done.

First, unless you have money to burn in the latest groove, try to avoid fads. Buy clothes that are stylish but not exaggerated. For some time, the fashion industry has been trying to get men to shop like women, convincing us that “last year’s model” is no good any more. That’s only true if last year’s model was faddish. Otherwise, a good suit should last quite a few years, and most men can’t tell what was in last year from this one, so you’ll look just fine.

Go to stores and try on different brands, looking for the one that flatters you. And that you feel comfortable in. Guys who grew up dressing preppy may feel odd in Italian clothes. And those who like the European look will find Brooks Brothers boring and dowdy.

Once you find a brand that you think makes you look terrific, comb the retail outlets. Again, you will find last year’s models, but, be honest, can you really tell one year from the next? Unless you’re a slave to fashion, the price drop will make it worthwhile.

Men’s stores are an endangered species. But if you know one you trust and, most of all, trust the staff, it’s worth putting yourself in their hands. No outlet discounts, but, wait, all stores have sales at the end of a season. And if you are a regular, they will keep  you appraised on when the inventory goes on sale.

I’ve made this mistake, so I speak from experience. You go to a store, try on a suit jacket. Look in the mirror. It looks great. Or so you think. Clothing stores have these fitting mirrors you step into and there is one in the front and one on each side. Position yourself so that, without twisting your body which will distort the clothes’ lines, you can see how you look on the sides and, most importantly, in the back. Unslightly bulging or pulling needs to be avoided, so keep looking for something that fits well all around.

A good store will have tailors to make alterations to smooth out the lines and improve the fit. Talk with these chaps. These guys are your best friends for their job is to make you look good. And if you show you care about their craft they will give you their best shot. If you have questions, ask them. Everyone loves to let others know what they know. If you are shopping at an outlet, where there are no tailors, try to find a good independent one. Ask around. Usually, the ladies who work at dry cleaners may not be experienced enough with men’s clothes, but there are always exceptions. When you go to a tailor shop for alterations check out the clientele. If they are well-dressed, are bringing in quality goods, and look like they care about their clothes, you’re in good hands.

If you have a male friend or relative whose tastes you trust, go shopping with him so you can get an outside opinion, other than the salesperson who’s eager to make you buy. I know this will sound sexist and possibly it is, but a man is usually best suited to advice another man on style. A female friend who is a high-end fashion professional once bought a pair of loafers for her beau, who rejected them saying they looked like ballet slippers. I saw the shoes in question and, in spite of the lady’s impressive fashion credentials, I had to agree wit the guy.

Dismiss the notion of “dress up.” it’s either dress well or badly. Don’t make the common mistake the only time you have to look good is when you’re wearing a suit, and the rest of the time you can look like you’re homeless. Bermudas and a t-shirt don’t have to look disgusting. Bermudas are basically short pants and they should fit well. And a period rock concert t-shirt can be cool, but not a tacky one that’s three sizes too big or too small. As for those polo shirts with a corporate logo, wear them to company events by all means, but otherwise, don’t. Take my word for it.

Buy as good shoes as you can possibly afford. And take care of them — invest in wood shoe trees to keep them in shape. I was on jury duty once and the poor sap who lost the case — he was undoubtedly guilty but that’s not my point — had lawyers wearing suits and ties but scuffed shoes. One look at them and anyone would conclude they were losers — they were, in fact, and had to be corrected by the judge on points of law they were ignorant about.

At the other end of your body, get a good haircut, trim your facial hair if you wear such, and, please, after a certain age, unsightly hair can grow out of nose and ears. There are inexpensive battery operated gadgets that trim that in seconds. Otherwise, you are going to gross everybody out.

Most of all, pay attention to your appearance. There are men who look like a million dollars in clothes they buy in thrift shops. They simply know what’s good and what’s not and what looks good on them. Fit is important, but so is color. Pale-skinned men and olive-skinned men and black-skinned men don’t look good in the same colors. Take a lesson from Giorgio Armani himself, who wears nothing but navy blue because he knows it’s what looks best against his gray hair and tanned skin. In fact, a good rule-of-thumb is to forego “downtown black.” A pin-striped suit of the darkest blue imaginable gives the impression of being a black suit, but better. And that’s the point of dressing, either casual or formal. You just want to look better.

One of the wonders of multigenerational dinners is learning stuff I would’ve never imagined. The diners are middle to older aged adults and youth of high school and college age. The subject is poetry. Though possibly it wasn’t a contemplation of the poetic imagination that launched the talk. More likely, since that’s where we found the sticking point, it was the issue of poetry as stalking.

Would you write a poem to someone that inspires you, possibly because you have romantic feelings, but do not know very well, i.e. is not someone you are romantically involved with? And how would you feel about being the recipient of such verse?

The young people had a straight answer. No. And a straight rationale. That’s stalking.

Stalking? Gee, I guess that demonizes a big chunk of the poetic canon. Sure, Mrs. Browning wrote nice sonnets for Mr. Browning, but aren’t they, like, the exception. The first great sonneteer, Petrarch, had a Muse who was the object of his 14-line poems. He called her Laura, and it’s possible they did not even meet, most certainly that she was someone else’s wife, just as certain that she was underage, and most likely that most of the time she rocked his poetic boat she was pregnant.

His literary elder is Dante, whose even more famous Muse was Beatrice, and who also fit this bill.

Western poetry was born among stalkers.

One cannot ignore such pathological behavior as stalking since it can have, we know, truly terrible consequences. But to be horrified at the receipt of a poem. To be afraid of committing a crime in writing one. Something here is not right, though I admit I don’t know what it is.

Perhaps it is the death of love, or at least of love’s finest accoutrement, poetry. Mute thy lyre, poet. She does not want to listen, and if she does she’ll have you hauled to the calaboose. Shut thy ear, Muse. The poet is mute lest you call the cops. And this can have gender reversal or same gender roles. It does not matter. The singer and the sung one. It seems what we are about to lose is the song.

In Greenberg, now on video release, Ben Stiller and Greta Gerwig are not as mismatched as the fat, dorky  Seth Rogen and the beautiful, smart, competent (keep adding praise) Katherine Heigl character in Knocked Up. Stiller has played at least one hunk, Zoolander, albeit as a total spoof, and Gerwig is a changeling who can look plain or ravishing — one of her gifts as an actress. But even then, we, the male viewers, seeing how unappealing males hook up with the most alluring females, protest, even if silently, “hey, that’s not how it plays out here in the world.”

Sure, Brad Pitt still gets, well, anyone he wants. But in a number of comedies, particularly the Judd Apatow brand, it’s beauty and the beast.

I think I know where it began. No, not in  Jean Cocteau’s Beauty and the Beast, where, frankly, the Beast looked rather, well, studley, even if he could’ve used a shave. And not in any of the monster/babe hookups of so many horror movies, where Beauty never truly returns the Beast’s desires — poor Quasimodo longing for Esmeralda. Not even in Cyrano de Bergerac, where Beauty finally realizes it’s the long-nosed Beast she loves, but only a couple of minutes before he dies.

It was Ghost Busters.

In this horror-movie spoof, Sigourney Weaver, in her prime, is possessed by some mythic demon who is supposed to mate with another mythic demon, who has possessed . . . Rick Moranis, the same tiny, squeaky-voiced, funny-faced, big-glasses comic who played his underwhelming appearance as a ridiculous version of Darth Vader in Spaceballs. Since they’re really not the lanky siren and the diminutive nerd, but two thunderous underground creatures of Satanic libidos, they fall for each other just like that. The scene where they walk away to get it on, Weaver towering over Moranis, is not only hilarious but painful to watch, particularly if you’re a guy who’s no stud, but, hell, you don’t look like Moranis.

Beauty loves the (pint-sized) Beast.

This was prefigured in Woody Allen’s films. That Allen gets hot chicks is a trope of his, one must say narcissistic even if brilliant, movies. But Allen works his character in a way that guarantees the hook-ups are believable. He is not a total loser, like Rogen in Knocked Up. On the contrary, sometimes his character is quite successful, and he has a certain appeal. In one of his most successful versions of Beauty and the Beast, Mighty Aphrodite, the lovemaking between Allen and Mira Sorvino makes perfect sense, given the twists and turns of the plot, in which, among other things, Allen is Sorvino’s heroic savior.

In the Apatow comedies, there are, I must admit, some justification for the hook-ups, even if they’re the kind a guy doesn’t want to hear — I was drunk and just broke-up with my boyfriend that’s why we ended up in bed, but now that I’m sober and we’re back together, its been nice knowing you. Still, I suspect a filmmaker (evil breed, all of them) messing with the spectator’s mind, saying, you think this chick is out of your league — and now there’s a movie thus titled — let me show you who gets her, not you.

I first encountered this directorial malevolence when I was quite young and enthralled by Italian movies —  which were, in fact, quite enthralling those days. It was 1964’s Seduced and Abandoned, a dark comedy of Sicilian mores, where I first saw the incomparable Stefania Sandrelli. The film opens with a traveling shot following her as she walks — a camera move much favored by Italians of the period — and she is, well, perfect. Modestly, she is looking down as she walks, but at one point she opens her gorgeous eyes and looks at the camera. In other words, she looks at me. I was struck by love and desire.

Then, in a comic dinner scene, her family has invited a pathetic little man, an impoverished count or something like that, to the house in order to interest him in one of Sandrelli’s sister, hefty where Sandrelli is slender yet curvaceous. The little man is taking the bait — I don’t recall if they marry — as the overeager parents introduce the family. When the unappealing suitor asks Sandrelli is she has a fiancé, she responds, no, no one wants me because I’m too skinny.

This is cruel. She’s not skinny. She is, I repeat, perfect. And it’s part of the spoof on Sicilian mores, which included a male predilection for rotund ladies. No one wants me? You’re wrong, Stefania, I want you, I really, really do. I say that to myself as I, in my mind, raise my hand so the Italian beauty will notice me, I raise my imaginary hand among the other imaginary hands raised imaginarily in the movie theater, among the thousands of imaginary hands raised in theaters throughout the world by men who are silently saying, I want you, I want you.

My hand is still raised, waving in vain in the darkened and ever darkening theater inside my head.

Beware, El Chupacabra is back!

First sighted in Puerto Rico in 1990, latest sightings place the mythical beast in Texas. How did it get there? Airport security is a joke if a monstrous creature is allowed on a plane from San Juan to Dallas. I mean, I’ve seen some uuuuuugly folk on planes, but El Chupacabra?

Lest you’re tuning in late to this bit of folkore, El Chupacabra is thus named because it chupa cabras. Sucks goats, actually their blood. Vampiric in nature, El Chupacabra is also Hispanic. Or at least only sighted in Hispanic territory. Like Puerto Rico. Or Texas.

In the ’90s, El Chupacabra made it to the X-Files, the popular TV show about the paranormal. One episode featured Rubén Blades as a feared immigration officer the undocumented called La Migra, and two immigrant brothers with an illness that produced Elephant Man symptoms — the explanation for their chupacabra features.

How will the monster fare in our days? Not well, I think. Back in the original chupacabra days the economy was flush. Today we have a recession, anti-immigrant laws in the books and environmental disaster. I think El Chupacabra will just slouch away. As we say in Spanish, la calle está dura. And there are no free lunches. Not even for goat suckers.

Young and hip — how many classical pianists sport dreadlocks? — Awadagin Pratt is a dazzling artist who in November played  two concerts at the White House. This pianist, whose performances are as hot as his looks promise, will be featured at the Coral Gables Congregations Church’s Summer Concert Series this Thursday July 15 at 8 pm. Pratt will be performing works by Brahms, Mompou, Schumann and Liszt.

Tickets are $25, available online at https://www.communityartsprogram.org/eticket. Also at the door, but reservations are strongly recommended since the church is a relatively small venue, which adds to the intimacy of the performance, and concerts sell out.

Milton Glaser was a founder of Push Pin Studios, which though created earlier hit its stride in the ’60s, when it became one of the most influential design phenomena of that design-crazed era. Glaser was the creator of the I ♥ New York campaign, a concept copied ad nauseam to this day — most recently in an imaginative Starbucks commercial. And he also did the famous poster of Bob Dylan in profile, his hair in swirling psychedelic colors and shapes.

Our own design museum, the Wolfsonian-FIU, is screening a documentary on the designer by Wendy Keys, Milton Glaser; To Inform and Delight, at 7 pm, Friday July 16. At the museum, 1001 Washington Ave., Miami Beach; 305-535-2644. Admission is free for members of the museum or AIGA-Miami and $10 for others.

When a justifiably hysterical phone call awakened me on the terrible morning of 9/11/01 and I turned on the TV, my first thought was a movie. Independence Day. Moments later I was awake enough to realize this was news not sci-fi and, worse, the beginning, I thought, of an Apocalyptic war. History may yet justify my bad thought, but nothing really happened after the attacks.

Except on the screen.

The first step was a moratorium on footage of the crumbling towers. I think that was right. We all saw what happened, no need to revisit it over and over again. That moratorium lasts, more or less, to this day. Even a current TV show based on 9/11, Rescue Me, barely makes visual reference. It’s an agreement we have reached as a culture that we are traumatized enough without endless views of that barbaric footage.

In the movies, a moratorium was short-lived. A Schwarzenegger action vehicle, Collateral Damage, was put on hold for a while. But then came the flood — sometimes in movies that actually included something like the Biblical Flood. Independence Day begat The Day After Tomorrow, which begat 2012, where the whole damn planet is collateral damage.

Movies love massive destruction, if for no other reason than because they can do it, just like they love crashing and blowing up cars. And massive Apocalyptic destruction works best. Like in War of the Worlds. The sight of monumental constructions crashing, like the Eiffel Tower or the Statue of Liberty, are so alluring that one pre-9/11 movie, Planet of the Apes, used the wrecked remains of Lady Liberty as a signifier of how mankind had gone wrong. When Charlton Heston has his final rage we, the viewers, know exactly how this happened. We know it because we’d seen it in other movies.

And we kept on and keep on seeing it. 2012 is numbing in its wreckage; it’s literally the end of the world. And now Inception, which I’ve only seen previews of, but I’ll be damned if they could not substitute preview footage of 2012 and I wouldn’t be able to tell the difference. This is the end, my friend.

A related subgenre is the post-Apocalyptic movie. In these, the end may be signified by bits of footage, as in Terminator, or merely by the terrible way things are, as in Planet of the Apes, and more recently The Road and The Book of Eli. These are deeply pessimistic tales that are a staple of science-fiction. It’s the future and we’re already all screwed.

Again, I insist that movies do this because they can. Also because of a childish impulse to destroy, what drives kids to wreck sand castles or Leggo structures — never mind your own home. But also because for a very long time we’ve been living with Apocalyptic fears, such a long time that we’ve now internalized them. No one makes movies like On the Beach any more. We just assume we’ll eventually be “gathered on this beach of the tumid river”, as T.S. Eliot wrote in the lines that inspired the book’s and the movie’s title. And we make movies about total destruction, with no longer a need for something as obvious as nuclear weapons.

We still live in the Apocalyptic era. The bombs have not gone away, and in many ways they’ve become more dangerous than ever. But movies are art, or dreams, and they show what Hamlet called “indirections.” The cause of the Apocalypse is likely to be environmental these days, reflecting where contemporary anxieties are now coming from — in fact, you can pinpoint them to the Gulf of Mexico. But from the Bomb to the environment there was a smooth segue that no one even felt. Or, in other words, we live at the verge of the Apocalypse, which could come from rogue nuclear bombs or equally roguish environmental recklessness. It doesn’t matter how the end comes, my friend, it’s still the end.

On a curious note, Leonardo DiCaprio has become a kind of F/X hero. What with Shutter Island and Inception taking him back to his F/X glory days with Titanic. Weird, for an actor who was making his mark as a serious realist, e.g. The Departed. What gives? I’m mixing my Christian metaphors, but perhaps the Apocalypse and the Inferno are the same thing and we need a Virgil to guide us. Leonardo will do.

The Cleveland Orchestra belongs to Miami for two winter residencies every year at the Arsht Center. It’s fabulous to put on some nice duds and go hear these master musicians perform at the Knight Concert Hall, with its state-of-the-art acoustics. But these days most folk are pinching pennies and tickets plus parking plus a glass of bubbly — what else would drink? — in the lobby will set you back a few of those pennies you’re trying to pinch.

So here is the orchestra on TV in a High Definition broadcast on public station WLRN-TV Channel 17, Saturday July 10 at 8 pm. They will be performing Bruckner Symphony No. 7 and their musical director, Franz Welser-Möst, will conduct. Preview at http://www.youtube.com/user/clevelandorchestra#p/u/9/Plkgm_eVOTQ. Then tune them in Saturday night. And don’t forget the bubbly.

The Florida Panhandle is beautiful. I can’t say the same thing about South Florida where I live. Except the beaches, of course, which are magnificent, and, frankly, a big reason I live here. The “river of grass”? I’m not convinced. There is a certain majesty to the Everglades, I will concede, and maybe I’m just from the old generations that called wetlands “swamps.” But driving through the bottom half of Florida is a tedious experience. When you go north, as everyone always observes, you go south. Or rather, South. I hear drawls, instead of urban Northeastern or Latin American accents. Hell, I hear English. And there are slight elevations, rolling hills of very modest roll, yes, but roll they do. Foliage grows denser, and not just in manicured tropical gardens. Rivers are black as molasses — and full of gators, so swim at your own risk. Up in the Panhandle there are bayous. And the coastline is either lovely beaches or a dark mirror, though not as dark as what’s inching toward shore.

I drive up there every year for July 4, when my mother, my sister, and her husband, in whose land, where he was born, they live, all host a family gathering. This year, there was a grouping of my brother-in-law’s kinfolk, but it’s mostly my own, on my mother’s side, who come visit. Up to four generations are represented, some of them born and raised in the Deep South, even if their surnames are Spanish and they speak that language, the more haltingly the younger they are.

Used to be that our July 4 dinner was my mom’s traditional Cuban fare: roast pork leg redolent of garlic and sour orange juice, yuca root with more garlic sauce, black beans, white rice. Some American side of me kicked in as I thought, this just ain’t right. Sure, somewhere in our days there, my brother-in-law would smoke baby backs seasoned with his own rub, cook up collards and black-eye peas, and bake cornbread, all of them recipes from his late mom, a local matriarch. This year the “American” menu got scheduled for the actual July 4 and I felt my debt to the Founding Fathers was being repaid as I ate.

In truth, I’m fonder of Southern cooking — what yankees call “soul food”, but in the South it’s just food, enjoyed by folk of all backgrounds — than of Cuban. What heresy! But maybe it’s because Southern cooking is harder to come by in Miami than Cuban, which is everywhere. Be that as it may, my brother-in-law’s cornbread was positively sinful. And his collards rocked — one of my cousins, born in very Spanish Tampa, served himself the ham hock that flavored them and picked at the bones, a treat that satisfied his Spanish bloodline as much as his current Southern lifestyle in nearby Alabama. There were enough babybacks for a repeat performance the next day, when, again, a plateful of bare bones left testimony to my carnivore ways.

The cuisine that wins my heart every time, though, is Spanish. And this, more than Cuban, is my mom’s forte. She was the daughter of Spanish immigrants and half her siblings were born in northwestern Spain. An amazing cook, daughter of an even more amazing one, my mother learned to cook Cuban when she married my dad, a criollo who wanted rice with every meal, black beans, fried plantains, yuca and the other staples of the island. However, my dad too had a fondness for Spanish cuisine, and that never left my mom’s kitchen. I was born and raised in Cuba, as were my parents, but my palate is Spanish. It’s my soul food, a wondrous peasant cuisine — before the new chefs gussied it up with postmodern experiments — not much different, really, from the dishes of the American South. Smoked sausage, bone-dry ham, beans, and, yes, boiled greens.

All food is soul food. All souls got to eat. And in the Florida Panhandle, for the celebration of the Declaration of Independence, my soul is nourished by Spain, by Cuba, by the U. S. of A.

God bless!