Mallory's Camera

He often did work that shocked me, Patti Smith wrote of Robert Mapplethorpe’s most famous photographs.

You know the ones she’s talking about. The guy pissing into somebody’s mouth. The whip handle shoved up an ass. Male genitals caught in elaborate nooses.

Elsewhere she describes her reaction as “squeamish.”

I’m so glad she wrote that!

I have the same reaction. I was kind of ashamed of it. How uncool am I? I thought. But Patti Smith is the last word in what’s cool and what’s uncool, no?

Thing is if you place one of Mapplethorpe’s floral portraits next to one of the pictures of a black guy hammering nails into his dick, they are essentially the same photograph. The use of light and dark is exactly the same, the formality of the composition, even the pornographic subject matter – because really, what are flower petals except sexual fetishes for bumblebees?

Intellectually, I’m cool with that.

But when I look at his pornography, it nauseates me. I mean that literally: I want to vomit.

It’s not a generational thing. Mapplethorpe and I are both Boomers, we shelter under the same symbolism of economics, current events and pop culture.

It’s not a judgmental thing either. Honestly, I want to like them.

Corny, I know, but what I feel is that they’re decadent in some sense that’s a gateway into pure evil. Of course, I’m not sure that evil even exists outside of bad acid trips and the prose of Danielle Steel. But even though Hannah Arendt’s riff on the banality of evil has come to monopolize most contemporary discourse on morality, we can’t forget evil’s more ceremonial aspects either. Cthulu on speed dial: Hey, big fella. Want to come up from the subterranean nether worlds and grab some lunch?

We were both praying for his soul, Smith writes early in the book, he to sell it and I to save it.

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Just Kids also made me wish I had more of an eye. My artistic instincts, such as they be, are so exclusively channeled into words that often I feel like an idiot savant. I read about Robert’s decorating schemes, his precise vision for the rabbit warrens he inhabits with Patti Smith, and I look around at the cement bungalow – still mostly empty of furniture and artifacts because why should I invest in new furniture and artifacts when I have two full storerooms filled with perfectly good furniture and artifacts in Monterey?

That was a rhetorical question, of course.

Sometimes I make art. Not particularly good art.

Day before yesterday I cruised two local crafts stores because I wanted to make a folk art kind of box as a birthday gift for Max. I was appalled at the prices – part of the charm of Patti and Robert’s craft projects is that they were all done with found objects; you had to be porous walking around, always on the look out because art cannot be compartmentalized into one sector of your life, it’s all around you waiting for you to see it.

Else?

I’m kinda lonely.

I admire the pickup line Patti Smith used on Sam Sheppard: Wanna walk down to the deli and grab some coffee? You just don’t make friends that simply anymore. Now it’s this kind of ritualized dance done mostly over the Internet, and it’s tedious and repetitive. I feel the person I was in my 20s struggling to get loose of this middle-aged carapace, the person I was before I had children – she's the person who cares about art. Me? I’m just as happy to watch The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills and eat Doritos.