Mallory's Camera

In the lifetime I can remember, few events have been as subject to political reinterpretation as the incident on January 6, 2021, when 2,000 to 2,500 Trump supporters stormed the U.S. Capitol in Washington, D.C.

Was it a failed coup d'état?

Insurrection implies some degree of internal organization—and, indeed, pipe bombs were planted that day, too: one in a building containing Republican National Committee offices, another under a bush at the Democratic National Committee headquarters. Bipartisan pipe bombs!

The pipe bomber's case is still being adjudicated. The perp's lawyers claim he qualifies for the "full, complete and unconditional pardon to all other individuals convicted of offenses related to events that occurred at or near the United States Capitol on January 6, 2021" that Trump issued shortly after he regained office. The pipe bomber did believe the 2020 election was stolen. Still. There's no real evidence linking him to the flash mob, so the Justice Department is kinda on the hook over that one.

And I have a hard time believing that the flash mob members themselves were actual insurrectionists. They were just too stupid.

Regardless of my opinions, though, two years ago, the flash mob members were traitors. And now, they're heroes.

There's no such thing as history. There's just endless reediting of propaganda.

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Meanwhile, temps, which have been hovering in the low 20°s, are projected to go up into the 40°s for the next week—and I am really excited about no more agonizing 10-point turns in the icy driveway!

I was all set to go to the gym yesterday, & then it started to snow, so I wimped out. The snow stopped after 10 minutes, but I remained wimped out. To atone for my wimpiness, I spent 90 minutes in the extreme cold solving the chickens' water situation. Will be dragging my sorry ass to the gym shortly.

Also, after three years, my FitBit battery no longer holds charge for more than 20 hours. I'm having to charge it daily, which is a drag-gg-ggg. Do I really need a FitBit? The damn thing doesn't do a great job tracking activity, since if you don't wave your arms during said activity, the activity won't register. Mostly, I use the Fitbit to monitor my sleep patterns, about which I am very neurotic. But does it do a good job with that? Who knows?

"I'm not one for conspiracy theories, but if I were, I'd be thinking how absolutely convenient it is for Trump that Virginia Giuffre 'suicided,' you know?" I said.

I was talking to Richard, a sharp-as-a-tack vintner-cum-political scientist in his late eighties. We were at Adrienne-&-Joey's Victory Party—a party that in my opinion, was absolutely justified: Adrienne only lost by 43 votes & will be running again next year because they're switching all local elections in New York State to even years.

"John LeCarré fan, are you?" Richard chuckled. "Well, I don't think you're wrong."

"Plus, I mean, 'the dog that hasn't barked?'"

"Sherlock Holmes reference," Richard said. "The curious incident of the dog in the night time."

"That didn't bark because he knew the culprit," I agreed. "I kinda think that's the weirdest thing of all—that the juvenile Jeffrey Epstein was once a Sherlock Holmes fanboy."

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The party took place at an old biker bar, the Owl, which has been repurposed as a farm-to-table restaurant called One With Land (so they could keep the OWL signage.) Owner is a Michelin star chef who relocated a couple of years ago from Brooklyn, & I gotta say, the menu was beyond fabulous, course after course of the most amazing food. Standouts were: crostino with whipped ricotta, charred brussels sprouts with a maple syrup glaze, an amazing fusilli that I don't even know what was in it, and fresh doughnuts, still warm, with a Nutella drizzle. There were tons of other dishes, too. Really, really good restaurant. There were about 35 of us packed around two long, family-style tables, oh so Southern Mediterreanean.

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Other conversational standouts:

Nancy (my old canvassing partner): Take lots of photographs! You're such a good photographer!

Me: :::demurring sounds meant to convey modesty:::

Nancy: No, really! I was just telling my husband yesterday—I want that photo you took of me at the tea party to be used in my obituary!

The photo in question:



Nancy, by the way, is 78 and runs four miles a day, so it doesn't take much to make her look good.

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At the end of the party when pretty much everyone but me & Adrienne (with whom I'd hitched a ride since I don't drive at night) had departed.

Joey: This is my favorite part of any party. When it's winding down.

Me: You must be an introvert!

Joey: I am an introvert!

Me: That makes the fact that you rose to the call and actually ran for office all the more impressive!

Joey is actually one of the few Shawangunk Dems who's under the age of 40, so you know. We need more of him & fewer of us!

Here's Joey & the engaging Richard with whom I bantered in Paragraph 1:



All in all, quite the delightful evening, and it completely broke my mood of the past few days, which had been very peevish and borderline-y indeed—-like I wanted to track down people from my past & just randomly spew insults at them, never a good thing to do or even spend much time fantasizing about.

Had an absolutely fabulous time in NYC.

But as soon as I crossed the bridge into Ulster County on the way back to Wallkill, I immediately reverted to feeling anxious & despairing & helpless.

So, that was interesting.

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But anyway, NYC.

Real-life Flavia & I had completely forgotten that October 18 was the day of the massive No Kings march when we signed up for Open House New York.

"Do you feel guilty about missing the protest?" I asked Flavia.

"Yes," she said. "Do you?"

"Yes," I lied.

But in fact, I did not.

The truth is I am sick of political protests. I am sick of living in a state of perpetual seige. I can't keep up the pressure that's ceaselessly being demanded of me. If one more Democratic candidate in fuckin' Oklahoma texts me If you don't send me money right now, Trump is gonna dissolve the Supreme Court!!!!! just because I once contributed $50 to Antonio Delgado, I am gonna stop voting altogether.

I don't think we're trapped in some awful Third Reich remake; I think we're living through the collapse of an empire with obvious parallels to 1st century AD Rome. Trump is as bitter & vengeful as Tiberius, but Suetonius and the possibly apocryphal pisciculi notwithstanding, there were millions of people who managed to live perfectly pleasant & reasonable lives as Caligula sodomized his sister & made his horse the Secretary of Homeland Security, thereby hastening the Republic's fall.

History's gonna do what history's gonna do. And it's very clear the great cosmodemonic pendulum is swinging into Dark Ages territory. I can't do anything about it! The center is not holding. The dark beast is struggling to be born, and I am just fuckin' tired of telling its mother, Don't push!!!!

No doubt, this is just temporary burnout, & in a couple of days I will be ready to rejoin the army of the angels.

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Flavia lives in the most gorgeous West Village apartment you can possibly imagine, right next door to Emily Ratajkowski and three doors down from Sofia Coppola. As Flavia & I left her apartment, I kept hoping the celebs would be leaving their apartments, too, so I could snap covert iPhone pix and sell them to The Daily Mail for large sums of money.

It was also the most gorgeous October day you could possibly imagine, so we walked to our first OHNY venue, which was the Players off Grammercy Park. We tromped through Washington Square Park, scene of so many high school misadventures, which I hadn't visited in years—



—and thence through Union Square, which has the most wonderful Saturday Farmers market where every conceivable seasonal vegetable & fruit is on display. Behold the artisnal tomatoes:



Grammercy Park is the only private park in New York City. You have to have a key to enter. Its high black wrought-iron gate is surrounded by beautiful upscale buildings that have either retained their 19th century facades or been artfully remodeled. Flavia regaled me with stories about her eccentric aunt who once lived there while we waited for our date with the Players. The eccentric aunt was once painted by Alice Neel!



The Players is a club founded in 1888 by Edwin Booth, the famous 19th century American stage actor.

Edwin Booth's career took a nosedive after his brother John Wilkes Booth assassinated Abraham Lincoln. Edwin Booth had a bitterly contentious and competitive relationship with his brother since they were both rivals for the same pot of fame, and attention, after all, is a fiat currency. After Lincoln's assassination, he was overcome with guilt: Had his relationship with his brother somehow driven his brother to commit the murder? Abraham Lincoln's assassin was gonna be way more famous than any Hamlet!

The most poignant thing in the Players Club was Edwin Booth's open letter to the People of the United States, which he arranged to have printed in as many newspapers as possible:



The letter saved his career. He opened Booth's Theater on Twenty-third Street in 1869 and for thirteen years maintained the most popular revivals of Shakespeare's tragedies ever known in the city. One imagines part of his popularity was the frisson of terrified delight theatergoers experienced at beholding a Hamlet who'd once shared a womb with a great man's assassin.

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Fun factoid: Edwin Booth bought the mansion from Valentine Hall—the same Valentine Hall whose widow and granddaughter, Eleanor Roosevelt, I wrote about in my very first Hudson Valley supernatural Big House story.

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The Players is shabby, musty & fusty, its walls covered with not-very-good art, portraits of people who used to be famous long ago. But utterly fascinating the way all such repositories of long-ago fame are fascinating and apparently, still a hangout for moderately famous Broadway actors today. Mostly the basement bar with its billiards table.



After that, Flavia and I scampered off for a tour of the Woolworth Building lobby.

That's the Woolworth Building in my opening photograph. I've always thought it's the most beautiful skyscraper in all of New York City, and architecturally interesting, too, as explained to us in our docent tour—but I see I have exceeded my diary-scribbling time alottment for today, & so must compress the rest my fabulous weekend into expired Instagram story outtakes:

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

At one of the households we canvassed yesterday, the couple who own the place had taken out their lawn & put in a huge garden. Very impressive! They did all the excavation work themselves. Not by hand—they bought a mini-tractor—but they didn't hire anybody.

I spent 20 minutes talking to the guy. He grew up in Ohio, right outside Cinncinnati. Spent a lot of time working in agriculture before he came east.

"Why'd you come to New York?" I asked him.

"I followed the jobs. When I finally went to college, I became a graphic designer. There aren't any jobs for graphic designers around Cinncinnati. If you go up to northern Ohio where the jobs are, you might as well be in any souless suburban area, and there are souless suburban areas that pay graphic designers a lot better than Columbus.

"Besides. Upstate New York & some parts of New England are the last bastion of the family farm in the United States. The midwest is all agri-business, soybeans & corn."

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We cased a road called Garrison Drive.

"Is it called 'Garrison' because there was a family called 'Garrison'?" I wondered out loud. "Or did they actually house soldiers here in some 17th or 18th century Indian skirmish?"

Adrienne didn't know what I was talking about.

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I am thinking Adrienne is going to lose this election. But Joey, the Dem she is coordinating her campaign with, is gonna win. Adrienne is running for the Ulster County Legislature, Joey is running for the Town of Shawanagunk Council.

Partly, Joey is gonna win because he's in his 40s and projects 10 years younger, but partly he's gonna win because he's not a Jewish liberal. Jewish liberalism just isn't selling anymore—not because of anti-semitism per se but because it is associated with an old, tired way of doing things.

Adrienne's opponent doesn't seem to be mounting any kind of campaign at all, but he is an X-cop, and he did tell The Daily Freeman he would offer voters a 15% property tax refund—which is obviously impossible: While it's true Ulster County right now has a cash surplus, it is also true that we are at the beginning of what is promising to be a loooooong federal government shutdown; New York State will not be able to funnel federal money into county coffers, and in three months, there will be ice and snow on the roads that will need to be removed. Something's gotta pay for that.

"Voters really go for that tax-cutting stuff," I told Adrienne. "You should figure out a way to work it into your stump speech. Like maybe say you are staunchly pro-business because if there are more businesses in Shawangunk, it will lower the property tax burden on individual home owners."

And Adrienne did indeed use this schtick on the next five people we talked to.

See, this is why I like local politics. You can have an immediate effect.

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Other than that, I Remunerated away & felt disheartened because I just can't gear myself up enough to do all the work I need to do.

Also, I saw this video, which moved me immeasurably for whatever mysterious reason:

https://www.facebook.com/reel/1320606452767574