Mallory's Camera

Diane Keaton's death hit me harder than I would have imagined.

She was a real style icon for me when I was in my 20s. I must have seen Annie Hall 10 times when it first came out. Those vests! Those boyfriend shirts! Those baggy oversized men's trousers! Those hats!!!!!

Boyfriend shirts are still a staple of my wardrobe.

###

I also admired her loyalty to Woody Allen whom I do not believe for a single second ever molested anyone.

Woody Allen was indirectly responsible for my modeling career.

My mother was the production secretary for Woody Allen's first movie, Take the Money and Run, and I used to babysit for the soon-to-be stepdaughters of Charles Joffe, Allen's producer (one of whom was the one-day-to-be-film director Nicole Holofcener.)

Mr. Joffe set me up with a photographer when I was 16 (and just about to graduate from high school; I'd skipped two grades), and the rest is personal history.

I was introduced to Woody Allen several times in the production office. He was withdrawn, an intense presence who sat scowling in the corner. Not what you'd imagine a comedian to be like at all. Interesting thing, though—without the clownish hair and the bufoonish spectacles, he would have been handsome.

Many years later, I had to interact with Mia Farrow in some People Magazine-related context, and she was just awful, narcissistic, rude, entitled. Supernaturally beautiful, of course, with those cheekbones, those enormous Bambi eyes, that soft, little girl voice. But damaged in a way her selective charm did little to conceal. And also someone, one imagined, who would shake the house rafters down upon anyone who crossed her in any way.

When her ostensible lover deceived her with a porrige-faced adoptive daughter, I could easily see her seeking a Medea-style revenge. It fit my impression of her.

I could not see him performing the act—with no history of pedophilia before or since the allegation.

###

Is it adviseable to boff the adopted daughter of your Official Girlfriend?

Decidedly, no.

But this was basically an etiquette breach. In his autobiography, Allen maintains they hadn't really been a couple for a year or more before he fell in love with Soon Yi, that he had merely become someone Mia Farrow went to awards ceremonies and industry parties with. That they hadn't had sex since the birth of their biological son, the Mordred-like (cf Once & Future King) Ronan Farrow.

Farrow was publicly humiliated. She executed a revenge that inflicted even greater public humiliation.

###

Anyway, I don't have much use for those dozens of Millennial actors who upped their virtue-signalling score by disowning their work with Allen.

And I admired Keaton for staying true to her friend.

###

What else?

I'm anxious over the invoice, though not yet at the point where I'm cruising interior design magazines for hints on the best ways to decorate your refrigerator box beneath the bridge.

I scored 86% on my tax law midterms.

I went to the monthly Shawangunk Dems meeting at which Adrienne had enlisted the Democratic candidate for the Wawarsing (Ellenville) district to speak.

Why? I kept wondering. Ellenville's problems are nothing like Shawangunk's problems, Shawangunk being a rural district & Ellenville being a dying Catskills Mountains city.

Plus the guy didn't seem to know much about us; when he was bowing out after droning on for half an hour ("Wish I could stay for the rest of your meeting! But I can't"), he officiously thanked Adrienne & then thanked Joey—"who's running for, uh, something really important"—& I erupted into giggles: "Something important that you can't remember!" I said.

That did not go over well.

I really do not like the Democrats.

Although I do not like the Republicans even more.

It's supposed to rain all day today. I have successfully cleared all agendas to labor on the Work in Progress. We'll see if I do.

Scrawled in pencil across the top of the page: “The Past Lives of Annie Besant¹”

12 September, 1974

Well my complexion has cleared up—I suppose we must be thankful for whatever sparrows fall. Otherwise—my face is as round as a candy-store valentine². I should practice dimpling on the long shots. Otherwise—I am a little on the exploding balloon side, folks, fat, fatter (but not fattest), hopefully a cute³ & not chronic condition.

Otherwise—fate has contrived a little game of charades. Two men, one woman—who am I? Of course with none of the sexual undertones that beset the apartment on Hutchinson Street⁴ but still the resemblance is unmistakeable—it is Ann-&-Reed-&-Jon. And I have out Duerred⁵ Ann at her own doings—the two rosy-cheeked lads⁶ are both fledgling scientists &n engage in long meaningless debates whenever the opportunity presents itself.

Meanwhile—the real Ann-&-Reed-&-Jon are preparing to rendezvous in Istanbul ⁷& I am feeling regret. Meanwhile Luke⁸ is reading Borges & going for walks in Mount Royal park—and I am feeling regret. Regret is part of my heretige as surely as concrete is—flash on the hot, long, unrelieved stretch of asphalt & brick leading down to Amsterdam Avenue⁹ we used to walk on our way to school, Roberta¹⁰ who is dying of cancer & I who am dying of ennui. “Cancer is caused by a wish to die,” John¹¹ assures me cheerfully, “I am firmly convinced of it.” What does he know about a wish to die? What do any of them know? Only I know, I who have died so many times that I don’t want to die any more so I take on a life that is stasis, no deaths, no rebirths (no deposit, no return)¹². Roberta writes in her genteel school-marmish script to my mother, “Could I have the whereabouts of your daughter Patty with whom I was friends from 1961 to 1967…”. Roberta hasn’t changed. She is still the fragile child with the long golden ringlets who got lost in the concrete. She hasn’t changed. She has no wish to die.

Perhaps that’s the moral of the story—that none of us have changed really, we are born into ourselves. We assume with the configuration of our genes & stars, a mantle of psychic guilt & remorse that cleaves to our bones giving us whatever little substance we have. Shakespeare—“our little lives are ringed with sleep”—but I was always a light sleeper¹³.

_______

¹ When I Google this phrase, I immediately run across a link to an essay entitled Memories of Past Lives by Annie Besant, but I can’t imagine I knew about this essay in 1974. I must have thought this would be a good title for a short story.

² This wasn’t just narcissism! Well. Maybe part of it was narcissism. But I was still doing modeling gigs in NYC, and I was acutely aware I was aging out of modeling, the sheen was wearing off the rose, and I had no idea what I would do for $$$ if I couldn’t model anymore. I was only 22, but in those days, modeling was a very young girls’ game.

³ Oh, look! I am making a pun: “a cute”/”acute” (vs. “chronic.”). What a clever girl I am! 😀

⁴ The street where Ann and Jon and Reed were sharing an apartment. Ann and Reed were the official couple, but Ann was sleeping with both of them. Reed wasn’t supposed to know! But I suspect he did.

⁵Another pun! Ann’s last name was “Duerr.”

⁶ No idea who this refers to

⁷ After they graduated from McGill, Ann and Reed and Jon took off and went around the world for a year. They invited me to come with, but even though I was sleeping with Jon, I was too in ❤️LUV❤️ with Mark to do it. I regret that decision still! They got to go over the Khyber Pass and spend two weeks in Afghanistan, which is somewhere I’ve always wanted to go. Afghanistan as it was then, before the Russian invasion in 1978, was on the verge of becoming a relatively enlightened republic. Think Morocco today if Morocco wasn't a monarchy.

(Really, though, I wanted to go to Kafiristan! Because… The Man Who Would Be King: “I would have prayed for them, but, that night, a real King died in Europe, and demanded an obituary notice.”)

⁸ Jean-Luc—with whom I was living (and also sleeping) in Montreal.

⁹ The apartment I grew up in was on West 74th Street between Central Park West and Columbus Avenue; my elementary school, PS 87, was right off Amsterdam.

¹⁰ Roberta was my childhood best friend. A child actress, the sole support of her alcoholic and degenerate parents. I have written about her often in these pages. I was with Mark picking cherries in Oregon when I got her letter announcing she had cancer; I never wrote her back, so I don’t know what became of her.

¹¹ Ah, yes! This would be John Colby. Who lived in the house on Colby Street! Which I thought was pretty funny. He was trying to get into medical school and had concocted a 1/16th Native American heritage to take advantage of the Affirmative Action quota.

¹² Whoa! Melodramatic much, 22-year-old Patty? 😀

¹³ Good ending. I had the flair for writing then. I just didn’t have the craft.

Of course, the Last Honest Cobbler in Dutchess County did not have my boot ready for pickup even though when I went in for pick up the day before—a full five days after the date he’d scribbled on my receipt—he’d absolutely assured me the boot would be ready at 2:30 pm yesterday.

But what are you gonna do?

Not only is he the Last Honest Cobbler in Dutchess County, he is the Only Cobbler in Dutchess County.

“If you wait half an hour, I finish,” he told me.

“Can I watch while you work on it?” I asked.

Hey! Watching someone work is better than a YouTube video, right? I could probably figure out how to repair shoes on my own if I watched him, and then I would have a useful skill to pander after the coming bioweapon attack wipes out 99% of the world’s population and civilization collapses.

###

Preparing for contingencies has always been a hobby of mine.

When I was 10 years old (for example), I taught myself to write with my feet in case my hands ever got amputated.

But I can’t do that one anymore.

###

“No, no, no,” said the Last Honest Cobbler. He was appalled by my suggestion. “You wait in Dunkin Doughnuts."

Dunkin Doughnuts on Main Street in Poughkeepsie is where the local junkies like to go to nod out whenever they’re lucky enough to score.

There is no way I was gonna hang out in Dunkin Doughnuts.

“I will come back tomorrow,” I told him.

He made apologetic noises.

“No, no, no,” I said. “Listen! I want to support you!”

And this was true, even though I couldn’t figure out why.

###

Anyway, yesterday was quite busy with myriad errands and strange little adventures.

In the evening, I went to the movies and out to dinner with Loraine whom I’ve been trying to cultivate because I have a real dearth of female pals here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley.

I have guy pals!

But no girl pals.

And I miss girl pals.

Loraine is a very no-bullshit Philadelphia girl who was brought up by her tough Italian grandmother after her mother committed suicide when she was nine.

I enjoy her company.

I can’t say we have a tremendous amount in common since I am probably what her tough Italian Grandma would have called “artsy,” and Loraine was brought up to suppress her inner artsy, that being the trait that in Grandma’s eyes put the Seconal bottle into Loraine’s dead Mama’s hands.

We saw She Said and then went out to the Most Fabulous Indian Restaurant in the World, which happens to be in Rhinebeck.



I had complicated reasons for wanting to see She Said.

Basically, I wanted to see if it could convince me that the #MeToo movement was as big a deal as it seems to be to every other woman in the U.S.

Because to me, #MeToo is not a big deal.

All it seems to have done is penalize workplace relationships—and the workplace is practically the only place where unattached adult women get to mingle casually with unattached adult men now that no one gives dinner parties anymore.

This means that the only consensually sanctified way to meet unattached adult men is through dating apps.

And, omyGAWD.

Dating apps suck.

###

Having been a model in my tender years, I naturally have my own share of casting couch stories.

I always figured casual sex was the vig you had to pay if you wanted to play the game.

I never felt particularly demeaned by it.

Why would I?

Of course, Harvey Weinstein was an absolute monster since apparently he got off on brutalizing women, forcing them in ways that are absolutely reprehensible and unacceptable—and quite weird if you think about it since physically and psychologically as repulsive as he was, there were any number of women who would have been absolutely delighted to have sex with Harvey Weinstein of their own free will.

After all, like Henry Kissinger once said (a remark that will live on long after his Metternich-ean pronouncements on foreign policy have been forgotten): Power is the ultimate aphrodisiac.

But most of the stuff I saw back in the day didn’t rise to the level of Weinsteinian bullying or brutalizing.

It was strictly transactional: I’ll give you a blowjob, and you’ll choose me for a catalog shoot.

Sure. Unequal distribution of power.

But I don’t particularly see that that unequal distribution has been righted by the #MeToo fallout.

All I see as the consequence of #MeToo is that you can no longer make jokes to lighten a tense atmosphere and that men in positions of power refuse to be alone with women. (We laughed when Mike Pence was the one doing it, remember?)

And in show biz and related industries?

Since you can no longer fuck your way to the top, now you have to be related to someone to score a gig.

Talent was never gonna be a currency in that particular economy.

Talent was wampum—a useless specie designed for defrauding the guileless and innocent.

###

Anyway, when I finally get hauled off to that Reeducation Camp, they should definitely not stream She Said on the walls six hours a day.

It is a very boring movie.

Choppily directed, with scenes appearing out of nowhere that are supposed to connect to scenes that pop up an hour later.

And Zoe Kazan—see mini-nepotism rant above—is probably the most boring actor on the planet.

Dinner was great, though.

Loraine talked a bit about her 23-year-long marriage.

“He got depressed, you know?” she told me. “Deeper and deeper depressed. And I tried everything—got him to go on antidepressants, dragged him to therapy. And he didn’t stop being depressed. And finally I thought, I do not want to be living my life this way! So. I left.”

She smiled and shrugged.

I was filled with deepest admiration for Loraine!

Although, of course, she didn’t have children.

Children make leaving exponentially more difficult.

These days, Loraine is consort to Buff Ken—who, I swear to God, looks like he’s 35 from the neck down even though he’s over 70.

“Ever think about marrying Ken?” I asked.

“God, no!” Loraine said. “Marriage is a trap.”

Pictures and videos coming out of those hurricane-ravaged cities along Florida’s Gulf Coast are absolutely horrendous, a Katrina-sized catastrophe. Eighteen-foot swells. No official death count as of yet, but local enforcement is grimly predicting that fatalities will number in the hundreds. $230 billion dollar price tag on the cleanup.

Of course, horrendous hurricanes are nothing new.

Still, one cannot help wondering how long before Orlando becomes a beach town.

Thanks, climate change!

###

Meanwhile, fall is getting serious here in the quaint and scenic Hudson Valley:





I spent yesterday working desultorily and stanning majorly on Anthony Bourdain.

Reread Laurie Woolever’s oral biography—it’s a short, breezy read—and wondered why the surviving Bourdain brother is objecting so strenuously to the publication of the new book: Woolever goes into Bourdain’s junkie years quite extensively and paints the Bourdain mother as dangerously close to a borderline personality. No tin persona here to be buffed and shined!

But maybe the surviving Bourdain brother is trying to preserve the official Redemption Arc because that one could be a money tree for years and years and years.

Alas! There was to be no real redemption arc.

###

Reading about Bourdain’s junkie years dredged up quite a few buried memories of my own. Like that after-party for that famous Versailles show when I’d decided to shoot up and drop acid. I was sitting around an apartment in the 15th arrondissement with a bunch of other fashion industry junkies, and we were making bets on which one of us would flip out first. The conversation was mostly in French, which meant I couldn’t follow very much of it, but “flip out,” the idiom, was the English phrase, pronounced “fleeep oot.”

It kind of astonishes me when I think about it—which I mostly don't, being a creature of the absolute present tense in an almost existential sense—how many scenes I’ve skimmed the surface of in the course of a single lifetime, flying just far enough away from the sun so that while my wings may have gotten singed, they never got burned.

But here I am today with a 32,000-word economic analysis of the role of occupational therapists in the American healthcare industry to complete, so I’d best get a move on it.

Feeling marginally better today in that uncontrollable sadness has given way to a deep contempt for all things human.

I can handle contempt without bursting into tears!

Human beings really fucking suck, and nowhere is that more evident than in their collective behaviors.

On a one-on-one level, humans can be quite pleasant. Interesting, inventive, even kind.
Amass them together into any kind of group, and they are stupid, petty, mean, and filled with vindictiveness toward anyone who floats more than one standard deviation from the straight line down the middle of the normal curve.

Of course, that normal curve varies historical moment to historical moment, giving the illusion that things change.

But things don’t change. Not really.

In fact, historical cycles repeat.

###

Given the insect crawl of a single lifetime, though, things appear to change. In fact, often they appear to change wayyyyy too fast. Because the pendulum can’t accumulate enough momentum in the space of a mere 80 years or so to start swinging back in the opposite direction.

Talked to Ichabod for more than an hour yesterday.

When it changes, it changes quickly!

That’s what I wanted to tell him as though this was some distilled elder wisdom, the punch line to some koan starring a wise Buddhist monk and a clueless young acolyte.

Ichabod, of course, is neither clueless nor (let’s face it) particularly young, being in his mid-30s. I’m sure by now he’s familiar with his own version of When it changes, it changes quickly!

But I ranted on for breathlessly for 20 minutes or so. (Fortunately, Ichabod has seemingly limitless supplies of filial forbearance.)

That van trip I took in the early 70s.

I’d just done a runway show in Milan, and I wanted to go to Greece before I had to return to the States and resume my U.C. Berkeley studies.

I could easily have flown to Athens.

But I’d met these young Brit guys and decided to join them on the overland trip in a van through the country-formerly-known-as-Yugoslavia.

In Sarajevo, the van broke down. So we ended up having to spend a couple of days there.

The thing that has always disappointed me about foreign travel is that when you get to that foreign place, everything looks much the same!

I want the trees to be blue when I’m in a foreign country!

I want the sky to be orange, and the sea to be purple, and the buildings to be ornate rococo palaces.

Instead, Sarajevo looked remarkably like Brooklyn. Same dirty brownstone municipal buildings, same pollen-and-pollutant haze choking the air. Sarajevo was so ordinary. Sarajevo was so boring.

In the early 1990s, when Sarajevo became the site of the longest siege in the history of modern warfare, I was absolutely flummoxed: How could this have happened in boring, banal Sarajevo?

But I think that’s what started this particular obsession of mine. If things could change that drastically in Sarajevo, they could change anywhere. They could change here.

Since that time, I have been imbued with this sense of the absolute evanescence of it all.

You think it’s real because you see it, you breathe it.

But in another second, you could very easily not be seeing it or breathing it.

###

What else?

The National Counting Project still hasn’t given me a working phone.

But they’re deluging me with desperate emails: We’re offering bonuses! Bonuses! Hundreds of dollars for every name counted!

You’d think with that kind of desperation, they’d be eager to provide me with working equipment.

But you’d think wrong.

I’ve been feeling so awful that I haven’t generated any revenue at all in several days.

That must change!

And Sybyl wishes you a Happy National Cat Day.

Naturally since I live the life of a pampered goddess with endless vistas of untenanted time to fritter away on my obsessions, I spent yesterday watching every single episode of Season 5 of America's Next Top Model (which I'd blackmailed Ben into taping for me.)

Except every half hour or so, I'd fall into this fugue state wherein it seemed I was the owner of a failing business on commercially – and spiritually! – bankrupt Cannery Row in the quaint and scenic seaside village of Monterey, California. When these fits came down, I'd have to scurry off into my office and perform magic tricks. Trick number one: how do you pay $7200 worth of bills with $5400 in cash? Trick number two: the HTML layout you spent hours and hours laboring over on your Mac actually looks like shit with the same browser on a PC. How do you tweak it so it comes out right?

Pulled that second rabbit out of the hat. Dunno what I'm gonna do about that first. Ever hear a rabbit scream? It's painful.

Clearly, I need a vacation.

But ANTM is just so culturally complex and squirmy. Imagine if Mao Tse Tung had decided to transform China into a nation of supermodels and set his mad scientists to work cloning the Marquis de Sade to act as the project's advisor.

I got curious. Do any of these young women who squirm on their tummies through shit and stand for hours on tippy-toe while pigeons have sex in their hair ever really go on to lucrative careers? Well, "lucrative" is a relative term (except when it's applied to my business affairs.) God know that industry is a decentralized empire and there are thousands of mid-level catalog models making at least as much money as they might make working the same hours at a Dairy Queen or a newly opened call center. One runner-up just got cast in an X-Men sequel. Another runner-up keeps a delightful Live Journal about her adventures as a Hong Kong runway artiste.

Cannery Row is as dead as a cemetery. I'd anticipated that for January and February, but not in December. In addition to charging its tenants exorbitant rent, the Cannery Row Company also charges a sizeable monthly chunk o' cash for "advertising." As far as I can tell this holiday season, they are doing no advertising whatsoever. I keep a close watch on the mall ads – Del Monte, Capitola – and they're numerous on the relatively cheap cable networks and Clear Channel radio stations. But nothing whatsoever about Cannery Row. If I had any extra cash at all, I'd seriously consider sic-ing a lawyer on them, demanding an accounting for that cash.