Mallory's Camera

Which neatly sums up my attitude toward life this past year…

Although I’m also aware that life this past year has more closely resembled lives throughout human history than lives during the past 75 years or so have.

Us Boomers have been very fortunate to have lived in a kind of protective bubble. Disease-fighting antibiotics and vaccines! Birth control! Unparalleled social freedoms!

With the reappearance of plagues, you can expect all that to change.

People are very superstitious about plagues. Most people honestly believe plagues are not a natural phenomenon at all but a punishment.

Punishment calls for a reevaluation of priorities, a change in behavior.

Some variant on self-flagellation when at all possible.



Monday, I went down to the City to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art is one of my favorite places on the planet. Between the ages of 8 and 16, I spent two Saturdays a month there—this is before New York’s museums started charging admission.

When I was a child, my weekends were very circumscribed: I spent every Saturday at a museum and every Sunday with my best friend, Roberta Miles.

I alternated museums. One week, it was the Museum of Natural History, which was right around the corner from me; the next week, it was the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was a brisk tromp across Central Park.

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The Natural History museum in those days was very disorganized, and that was precisely what I loved about it! I loved that the artifacts were all haphazardly shoved together, uncurated, seemingly without design. My make-believe was that I was tromping through human history. I was mesmerized by the Hall of Dioramas—they looked so real to me!—and invented a very complicated You-Are-There game for magick-ing myself to Africa and Asia.

Best of all, though, I loved the Hall of Gems. The opals, star sapphires, and amethyst geodes glittered on musty velvet behind streaked glass next to petrified wood specimens, the biggest gold nugget ever found in a California gold mine, and hundreds of lesser minerals whose strange, unpronounceable names I painstakingly memorized, so I could linger over them in my difficult life outside the museum.

The dark and cavernous space was filled with nooks and crannies and random ramps leading to weird rooms on impossible levels, and every one of those rooms was a portal to—where exactly? Some place that was not the “here” that I knew.

When I heard that they were renovating the Hall of Gems, modernizing it, I thought, Well, that’s another place I’ll never visit again!

Because who wants a Hall of Gems whose mysteries are neatly categorized?

Pas moi.

The Met, though, pretty much remains the place it was when I was a child except for the addition of the I.M. Pei wing, which actually works.

And on Monday, I did exactly what I used to do, which is to say, I wandered.

Through the Graeco-Roman galleries, through the Egyptian arcades, through the armory to look at my favorite Before and After suits of armor.

Here’s young Henry VIII:



Here’s old Henry VIII:



See the difference? 😀

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As a kid, I was obsessed with Greek and Egyptian mythology: Dualities were something my insane home life had primed me to understand. The Met fed my obsession.

On this visit, I was particularly aware of how broken Roman statuary resembles post-modern art, representational and yet, not representational:



I also kinda wondered why all male Roman statues have such small dicks and oversized testicles. Was this true to life? Did men only become obsessed with the size of their junk in the last 2,000 years? Or was this some pro forma stylization?



I was so obsessed with the Met’s Egyptian artifacts that when I turned 20, I saved up all my modeling money for six months and took off for Luxor with Ann D____ where I spend six happy weeks, exploring the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Nobles. Ann and I had many adventures on that trip, the most dramatic of which involved getting smuggled into a Coptic village on the banks of the Nile in the trunk of a car driven by an engineer who worked in the Temple of Karnack. I suppose we were lucky we did not get into serious trouble.

I also suspect my lifelong fascination with miniatures and dollhouses springs from the miniature treasures that Egyptian nobles stashed in their sarcophagi so that they would not go without in the afterlife.

The miniature boats from the Meketre tomb in Thebes are probably my favorites:



Egyptian Thebes is not the same as Greek Thebes, by the way.

Just in case you were wondering.

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Gotta say, the City was hopping! Plenty of people on the streets, 98% of them masked. People look to be taking precautions, but other than that, NYC seemed… normal. Reports of its demise greatly exaggerated. I think people learned from March when the City was the world’s Plague epicenter and are determined not to repeat the experience. I felt pretty safe—unlike that first trip I took to NYC in early spring when it was all Mad Max, all the way.

So that was reassuring.

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And yesterday, I early-voted.

This was actually pretty pleasant. Yes, I stood on line for two hours, but it was a beautiful day, Rhinebeck—where the early voting polling station was situated—is a charming place, and the other people standing on line were friendly.

After the debacle of the Birthday Card That Took Two Weeks to Be Delivered, I wasn’t gonna fuck around with mail-in voting, no way, no how, nuh-huh.

Again—I felt safe. Everyone was masked and social distancing.

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Today, I am taking L to vote—she is 82 and disabled, and can benefit from my assistance.

And after that, I really must do some revenue generation—my clients are sending me ever more plaintive notes. They LUV me ‘cause I’m so good at what I do, but I really shouldn’t test their LUV.

In Alexandria we got onto the wrong train. Somehow we ended up in the third class car to Cairo rather than the second-class car to Cairo – me, Ann and 100 or so goggle-eyed Egyptian men. We climbed into the luggage rack, spent the five-hour trip fending the men off with sharp, pointed umbrellas. In retrospect, I don’t think their unwanted attentions were particularly serious – if they had been, we’d have ended up raped and quite possibly dead.

That incident which happened when I was just 24 left me with a huge dislike of Egyptian men – or rather Arab Egyptian men – or possibly even Arab men in general. Yes, yes, this dislike reflects badly on me, I’m sure. But there you have it. That maniacal groping was very creepy. I flash on it just about every time I see an Arab man. I’m everything they hate. They’re everything I hate. I represent the corrupt moral standards of the west; they represent the reactionary fundamentalism of the Middle East.

Impasse.

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There’s a classic story by C.L. Moore, one of the rare women who wrote in the Golden Age of Sci Fi, called Vintage Season. Time travelers regularly attend disasters as tourists from the remote future. They watch from the sidelines, chattering among themselves and snapping the futuristic equivalent of iPhone pix as meteorites destroy great cities, human populations are decimated by plagues and civilization unravels. They are moved by what they see in the way that Victorian doyennes were moved by the plight of the little poor children who lived in workhouses, which is to say because a compassionate expression sits so prettily on the human face.

Contemporary mediaistas always remind me of the time travelers from Vintage Season.

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So who knows what to make of Lara Logan?

This was not the 60 Minutes correspondent’s first time in the fish eye.

In 2008, she became a minor tabloid press sensation – NY Post Page Six, and even the holiest of holies, The National Enquirer – as the center of a Baghdad romantic triangle. One guy was a US Embassy attaché, the other a CNN reporter. Clutch and claw while you can because tomorrow a suicide bomber is going to accelerate right into your motorcade.

Last year my boyfriend Matt Taibbi wrote a Rolling Stone column titled Lara Logan, You Suck. If he hates her, I hate her – that’s just the way it is with me and Matt.

The Taibbi column painted Logan as a sycophant who would say anything to advance her career. I mean, honestly – McChrystal’s back-up guys, too drunk to invoke “off the record” privileges, talk about Vice President Bite Me in front of a reporter? That’s news. Reporters keep their jobs by reporting news. Except when they keep their jobs by donning kneepads.

She’s a good-looking woman, Logan. Sleek, blonde, possessed of dazzling dental veneers and a charming South African accent. Knows how to occupy the limelight without appearing to hog it, at least when the cameras are rolling. One imagines she’s a bit more imperious when the cameras are off.

One visualizes Lara Logan in Tahrir Square. She packs a pocketful of bright and shiny beads just in case someone tries to sell her Manhattan. She believes she’s invincible even though just one week before the entire CBS team had been picked up by the Egyptian army, blindfolded, detained, an incident that left Logan fuming: “American journalists don't spend much time in conditions like this. Even Al Qaeda can get along with these guys. American journalists kidnapped by the Taliban were treated with dignity and respect.”

Tell that one to Daniel Pearl’s ghost.

Of course, after this incident, once again Lara Logan’s a story, not just another reporter. So you’re going back? some mere reporter asks -- or words to that effect. What happens if something like this happens again?

"I don't worry about things like that,” Lara Logan announces.

Well, maybe you fucking well should! Maybe worrying about “things like that” is common sense, just like climbing up in that luggage rack like Ann and I did 34 years ago was common sense.

I mean, Jesus… Just because you're from the future doesn't mean the present tense can't wallop you one across the head.

In 1977, I was twenty-six years old, living in Paris with the Tugboat Heir. A kept woman! Though that wasn't nearly as romantic as it sounds -- it was dull, in fact. There was no jewelry, furs, champagne, grand soirees or exotic sex involved. The Tugboat Heir was hopelessly in love with me and I was very bored with him. I hardly ever put out.

We lived rather simply on Rue de Vaugirard in the Sixteenth Arrondisement. For a whole year, I did nothing. I made some pretense at learning French. I drank a lot. I walked a lot. And I wrote obsessively in my diary.

Late in the year I went back to the States and my old friend Ann Duerr invited me to travel to Egypt with her. I accepted. We began the trip in January, 1978.

The paper journal I kept during that trip is falling apart, so I decided to type it up.

The person who wrote it is an unpleasant stranger to me now.

( 14 January 1978 – airborne towards Cairo )

I was a terrible writer too. I hadn't yet learned that it's the things you leave out that tell the story.