Mallory's Camera

Is Clusterfuck Day a global holiday like Earth Day or merely a regional Hudson Valley celebration like Rip van Winkle’s birthday or the reenactment of the burning of Kingston?

Whatever.

Yesterday was it.

The hurricane took out Optimum’s cable. Or something. Internet here has been out for more than 24 hours. In fact, Optimum-enabled Internet is out over the entire New York City metropolitan area.

The only way I know this is through checking various Optimum Internet hate sites with my phone because Optimum has issued no customer service updates at all, and the outage isn’t being reported as a news story despite the fact that an Internet outage in America’s largest and most densely populated metropolitan region has the potential to get very hairy indeed.

Not only is the Internet out but also all television and VOC-enabled landlines.

Yo! Terrorists! Wondering about the timing of your next attack? Well, wonder no more!

No Internet is an inconvenience for me, but I know how to set up a hotspot. After I tromp and garden, I will mosey down to the library to see if the head librarian was smart enough to sign a deal with FIOS (underground cable!) Which will allow me to put in a couple of hours on client work.

And if the Internet is down in the library, not a biggie. My clients will just have to wait.

It’s a complete disaster, though, for all those people with real jobs who work from home and for all their young kids who assume that no TV means they’re being punished for something they can’t remember doing.



And then there is the National Counting Project, which I am enjoined from mentioning by name because I took an oath to defend the U.S. Constitution from all its enemies, real and imaginary, and apparently mentioning the National Counting Project by its true name weakens the National Counting Project’s mojo.

I’d gotten a phone call from National Counting Project central last week, instructing me to show up on the third floor of the Civic Center at 10 o’clock on Tuesday morning.

So, I drove into deepest, darkest Poughkeepsie on Tuesday morning. Hurricane minus 4 hours.

The city of Poughkeepsie is not a pleasant place to begin with, but it’s gotten a whole lot less pleasant since the Plague began.

I began circling the Civic Center looking for entrances, and I immediately stumbled across two very scabby looking syringes. People aren’t even disposing syringes in the bushes anymore; they’re tossing them in the street like gum wrappers.

On my third trip around the Civic Center, it began to dawn on me that the Civic Center didn’t have any entrances. I mean, once upon a time, it did! But they’d all been boarded up with plywood.

This presented me with a problem: How was I supposed to get to the third floor of the building?

And assuming I did get to the third floor, who was actually doing the training? A bunch of vampires?

I trotted around to the front of the building, which at one time, somebody had tried to turn into a kind of plaza with trees—half of them dead now—and blocks of concrete in case any itinerant masochists wnadered by and needed a place to sit.

Then I began assailing random passer-bys: Excuse me! Are you going to the training for the National Counting Project?

How crazy do you think they thought I was?

But finally, someone said, Yes!

She, too, had been stymied by the lack of entrances to the Civic Center!

Then I had an idea! “Hey, there’s a hotel over there, right?”

“Yes-s-s-s-s-s.”

“Maybe they know how to get in.”

So, we asked the desk clerk.

“Oh, no. That place has been closed for the past five months.”

Oh.

“But wait. You’re looking for the National Counting Project?”

We were!

“I think that’s at the courthouse two blocks down the street.”

He thought right.

Most of the National Counting Project training is being done online except for the first two hours—one hour of which was devoted to filling out two official National Counting Project forms, line by line, while the other hour was an orientation to our spanking new National Counting Project phones!

Except my spanking new National Counting Project phone did not have any of the proprietary National Counting Project apps downloaded on to it.

“Well, what am I supposed to do?” I asked the trainer.

“I don’t know.”

“But, I mean, this phone is like useless—“

“That’s correct.”

In the end, most reluctantly, he gave me the number for National Counting Project IT, which I called as soon as I got home.

The national IT number turfed me to the regional IT help line, which had a recorded message that ran something like this: YOU are a fucking idiot for calling this help line. Leave a message with your name, phone number, the geographical coordinates of the place you were at when Elvis died, and the final four numbers on the bar code of the last case of toilet paper you purchased. Do NOT leave more than one message. Someone will get back to you in the next year or so.

Beep!

Whereupon a cheerful AI voice announced: This mailbox is full!

O-kayyyyyyy!

I was not gonna get bent out of shape about this, I decided, because this was really not an emergency.

Worst case scenario? The National Counting Project could shove the phone it gave me up its collective ass, and I wouldn’t work for them.

But it is pretty amazing to think that these are our tax dollars at work!

And not only that, but our tax dollars at work deciding highway improvement funding and federal education matching grants and how many congressional critters the State of New York should have in the next decade.



Else?

I watched Visconti’s Death in Venice.

For whatever reason, I have been thinking about Death in Venice for at least a month!

Criterion’s streaming service finally picked up my telepathic signal.

I wouldn’t call Death in Venice a good film although Visconti and Thomas Mann shared enough obsessions in common to make the film a fairly faithful rendition of the novella.

Here’s a fun factoid: The impossibly beautiful boy actor who played Tadzio also played one of the commune elders who commits suicide by leaping off a cliff in Midsommar 50 years later.

If you believe—as I do—that actors are always really starring in one long film, the same film, just mysteriously segmented up to confuse audiences, then this is pretty weird since in Death in Venice, this actor is the incarnation of impossibly gorgeous youth while in Midsommar, he is the incarnation of impossibly gruesome old age.

And then there is the issue of the Adagietto from Mahler’s 5th Symphony, which I will grant you is a stirring, soaring piece of music the first 25 times you hear it.

But the 26th time you hear it, you think, Enough.

Dirk Bogarde, who is my boyfriend even across the vast gender preference divide, is fabulous as Aschenbach, but then of course, when has Dirk Bogarde ever not been fabulous?

And Visconti has a good eye for that moment just before opulence turns into decadence. Which is a very tricky pivot.

Aschenbach’s makeover leaves much to be desired, though. As this is the seed moment of the entire narrative, it’s a glaring weak spot. The whole movie is kind of a Douglas Sirk wet dream, so I guess it would be too much to expect subtlety there. But it certainly would have worked more effectively.

This entry contains spoilers for the film Midsommar



And then there’s Midsommar, a really fucking strange movie, that’s probably best seen on streaming media.

Why?

Because if you see it in a movie theater with other people, you’ll laugh at it.

Don’t forget: Humor is primarily a way to ameliorate the discomfort caused by the contemplation of taboo subjects.

The film is intentionally funny, of course, if you accept it on its own terms. Like it’s even got a double-edged punchline: Sacrifice is necessary in every relationship.

I’d say Midsommar is the film you’d get if Ingmar Bergman had teamed up with, say, Wes Craven.

Florence Pugh—rapidly becoming one of my favorite actresses—plays a woman whose life has just unraveled in the most horrifying manner imaginable. She’s desperate and needy, so she decides to tag along on a trip to northern Sweden with her Loutish Boyfriend and two of his loutish pals. They don’t want her. But the weird cultish commune they’re visiting wants her. It really, really wants her—and no, you can not imagine the rest.

On display throughout is fabulous faux-Swedish folk art that I think Midsommar’s art director entirely made up:







Really, Midsommar’s exclusion from the Academy’s Best Production Design nominations list is an outrage.

Oddly enough, the squirmiest scene is not one of the many scenes of ritual violence and mutilation, scattered like flower petals throughout the movie.

No, it’s a scene in which the Loutish Boyfriend has ritual sex with one of the commune denizens.

She lures him to her with a trail of flower petals and awaits him naked with her legs drawn up in what I guess is the Ritual Sex Hut.

Behind her stands a line of naked women, and the women are of all ages.

And this was just shocking, shocking, shocking! I mean, these were not females chosen to spark up the movie with a little tits-and-ass razzle-dazzle!

(I actually paused the movie at this point to stare at the older women’s naked bodies, strip off my own clothes, scurry to a mirror and do a compare and contrast.)

If you remember back to the classic horror movie The Shining, the most horrifying hallucination our flawed protagonist Jack Torrance has is of an old woman rising naked from a bathtub.

Ladies and gentlemen, our culture cannot conceive of anything more horrifying than the body of a naked old woman.

That is a truth that should make every feminist take self-inventory.

Anyway, very powerful movie, though not for everyone.

Although oddly enough, I saw it on Max’s recommendation. He kept texting, Mom, YOU will like this movie.

And he was right.

###

In other news, I passed the tax certification exam with flying colors. Tax season starts in a week, and by the time it ends, it will be spring!