Birds of a feather



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Maskerade

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I’ve barely noticed the lockdown, so busy have I been sublimating any anxiety into frenzied and probably pointless activity. In the past month, I’ve made 250-odd (and I do mean odd) fabric masks. Initially they were commissioned by medical personnel to protect and prolong the use of N95 masks, and later they were requested by everyone from Native American groups to food banks to homeless shelters. No one knows whether cloth masks shield the breather or the breathed-upon from COVID-19, but nearly everyone is required to wear one now. The utility of the masks I make, in particular, cannot be known since I work on donated fabrics—different ones on different days, none bearing any mystery as to why they were donated. The conundrum of the masks is that the more impervious they are, the more impervious they are. In other words, a mask that allows you to breathe is not preventing disease transmission. I know more than the average person now about masks, and that means I know nothing, sinc...
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Like Downton Abbey but different

The appeal of Downton Abbey for most Americans is its quaintness—nostalgia for a bygone world. But for a certain class of New Yorkers, Downton Abbey is aspirational. Perhaps we don't long for footmen and butlers and maids and valets. But doormen and supers? Hell, yes. After living for 35 years in a little bohemian self-managed building, Other and I had finally had enough of flushing boilers and fixing water heaters and shoveling sidewalks and picking up litter. A couple months ago, we left our old Bowery neighborhood and moved to the Upper West Side, where rain is just weather and not a gutter crisis. We expected to have buyer's remorse, known hereabouts as the New York surprise—the discovery that whatever due diligence you did was inadequate and your building turns out to be infested with bed bugs or roaches or black mold or totally insane neighbors or ...  In any case, it hasn't happened—so far. We've seen no vermin. And the neighbors seem sane. There's a ...
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Hooting at OWLs

A couple years ago, I audited an African-American literature class, taught by a virtuosic professor who wove music and art and American history into a syllabus that was symphonic in its complexity and power. His performance as the conductor of this score was life-changing, for me at least.  Among the homework assignments was to attend a retrospective of the African-American painter Kerry James Marshall. In the following class, he asked students for their response to the exhibit. One young woman said her experience was spoiled by the presence of “old white ladies.” The scorn with which she uttered this epithet took my breath away. For one thing, I was the only old white lady in the class—most of the other students were young people of color—so I felt like an intruder under a spotlight. Which in a sense I was.  I wasn’t offended. In fact, I almost savored this little taste of being the object of racial, ageist, sexist hatred. It was experiential education. I told a friend ...
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