They Do Things Differently There
Jan. 28th, 2024 10:06 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mallorys_camera
RTT was down in the City for an Oliver Tree concert so we met up in The Big City.
He suggested brunch; I countered with the Museum of Natural History, and that’s where we ended up.
It was a fun trip!!!
I grew up on the Upper West Side.
Before it was the Upper West Side—
Meaning while I was growing up there, the Upper West Side was still a working class district. Amsterdam & Columbus Avenue were filled with utilitarian shops, locksmiths & cobblers & corner candy stores & the like. Junkies were forever passing out in the lobby of the tiny converted brownstone where I lived with my mother, & you had to walk up four flights of stairs to get to the apartment.
The apartment was on W. 74th Street & the Museum of Natural History was on W. 81st. In those days, museum admission was free-ee-eeeeee, so between the ages of 8 & 15, I divided my Saturdays between the Natural History Museum & the Metropolitan Museum of Art, on the other side of town, directly across Central Park.
Very little remains of the Upper West Side I remember from the 1960s.
I mean, I guess the buildings remain the same, but I don’t recognize them. The only things that are recognizable are the subways, which are still filthy, hot, filled with dangerous people but undeniably efficient, and the façade of the Natural History Museum.
My favorite part of the Museum was always the dioramas.
As a young, imaginative girl, I could lose myself in those dioramas for hours. If only I could figure out the proper incantations, I knew I could transport myself— To the plains of Serengeti! To the humid mountain tops of faraway Java!
I imagine the days of the dioramas are numbered.
Taxidermy, doncha know.
Exploitation of innocent animals, bla, bla, bla.
I could hear it in the shocked voices of the Millennial parents ushering their children round the Hall of African Mammals: Are those things real?
The skipping children just clapped their hands & chortled.
Once upon a time, this statue stood in front of the Museum of Natural History.
It was removed because…symbol of colonialism & racism! Offensive!
Having grown up around this statue and devoted a significant number of childhood hours attempting to scale it, I—of course—was very much against its removal.
I thought the proper response to this statue would have been to commission an equivalent statue where bronze Native Americans got to piss on a bronze Teddy Roosevelt! And then, they could position that statue maybe a 100 feet away from the original statue on those imposing marble stairs.
I am very opposed to bowdlerizing the past. The past is a foreign country, remember? They do things differently there—but they did do them.
Museum administrators, though, for the most part, are an unimaginative lot, so such a solution would never have occurred to them.
Over lunch at the Museum cafe, RTT and I discussed the Oliver Tree concert (which sounded like great fun) and current events.
RTT is much taken up with the Vincent McMahon sex scandal.
Among the tasty tidbits that have emerged about Vince McMahon, the WWE CEO, is that he likes to shit on girls’ faces & use weird sex toys.
(Wow! I thought. Most men his age are dealing with constipation! Like what does he do—pop Ex-lax before his sessions with Bree Daniels?)
“Oh, honey,” I said. “That stuff is all so boring.”
“Boring?” said RTT.
“Yeah. Boring,” I said. “It happens so many times, and every time they expect you to clutch your pearls and gasp, ‘Quelle scandal!’ And it’s just so boring. Who fucking cares?
“The whole thing reminds me of an equivalent scandal like 30 years ago with Bob Guccione, who owned a magazine called Penthouse that was like the dirty Playboy. I remember that one, I guess, because Guccione owned a house in Staatsburg, which is close to where I live now. I forget what the big scandal was, but it was all supposed to be like super-racy and bad because Penthouse actually did photoshoots of girls showing their pussies, and those pussies had pubic hair.
“Anyway. This is one of the reasons why older people start tuning out. We’ve heard it all before.”
I looked at my handsome, brilliant kid.
“There’s one thing I’d like you to do for me.”
“Oh, of course! Anything!”
“I’d like you to try and remember this conversation when you’re about 65. I’ll be long dead, of course. But see, if you don’t agree with me.”
###
On my way back to Grand Central, I checked in with my grandfather who is still imprisoned in a wall mural near the shuttle stop in Times Square. Like something out of that brilliant Christopher Priest short story, An Infinite Summer. Or a diorama!
I bet I’m the only person in the world who still remembers that my grandfather used to play the cello. And played it badly! I thought.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-28 03:40 pm (UTC)How did your grandfather happen to be memorialized in that way? When they were making dioramas for the state museum in Albany, they took plaster casts of people, and one of the people they took a cast of was my sister's best friend. So she is now a street kid in a diorama of early 20th century NYC.
... but like, did your grandfather pose?
PS: RTT with sparkles is a nice photo ^_^
no subject
Date: 2024-01-28 03:46 pm (UTC)RTT with sparkles is a nice photo
Isn't it? He's standing in front of an amethyst geode.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-28 03:52 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-28 06:50 pm (UTC)And you have a very handsome son
no subject
Date: 2024-01-28 07:03 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2024-01-28 07:05 pm (UTC)The upper West side
Date: 2024-01-28 08:18 pm (UTC)They were a large part of what made the place vibrant, and when they died out, so did some of that vibrancy.
Re: The upper West side
Date: 2024-01-28 08:28 pm (UTC)