SHELLO!
Last post, I mentioned I’d been working on an article about friendship? Well, kids, I bring you ‘A GenXer and a Millennial Walk Into A Bar,’ an as-told-to piece for Oprah Daily featuring a few shining examples of intergenerational friendship between these two camps (apologies if you hit a paywall). Yes, you can be in an actual egalitarian caring friendship with someone who is 20 years older or younger than you. In fact, I highly recommend it. We have so much to learn from each other.
That’s So New York
On the topic of unabashed GenXing, last week I met up with my long time pal, fellow scribe, photographer (today’s Bill Cunningham, if you ask me), and Substacker of Mercantile Mayhem Nina Roberts to catch the very cool writer and editor Sari Botton in conversation with New York Times editor Dan Saltzstein about his hilarious new book That’s So New York—a tome chock full of essays, Tweets, and bon mots about the gamut of run-ins, experiences, and interchanges only New York can give you.
Sari runs the brilliant GenX Substack that is Oldster and has given us Never Can Say Goodbye and Goodbye To All That, a couple of anthologies about loving and leaving greatest city in the world. As we speak I’m at work on an essay for Sari myself, and as a fan of her work for quite some time, I was very happy to finally make her acquaintance in 3D. If New York City is your muse, you owe it to yourself to dig in to Dan’s and Sari’s books, pronto.
That Unfortunate Pandemic Anniversary
Can you FCKRS believe the pandemic was only four years ago? Feels like we packed about 10 zillion years into those four, doesn’t it? I swear I never had a grey hair until that fiasco and now I have plenty.
My takeaway here is I think the overwhelm and free-floating abject terror completely bent how I process time. I wrote a lot of Coronavirus coverage for NBC during those early months, but felt compelled to vent in this very early (March 20th) op-ed for the New York Daily News called “Welcome to My World: A germaphobe on what coronavirus has brought out in the rest of us.” Here’s a snip:
“People are walking while staring at their phones like zombies, 6 feet between humans be damned. Through my triggered eyes, they might as well be the Peanuts’ character Pig Pen, visible germ clouds swirling around them in the ether. On St. Patrick's Day, I saw a violin player with shamrock ears serenade a group of parents and children clustered near his stoop. Normally, this heartwarming display would've given me a ray of hope for humanity. Instead, it felt like watching Nero play his fiddle while Rome burned.”
That’s pretty much what ended up happening. The pandemic was overexposure therapy: Interestingly enough, I’m managing my germaphobe shit much better these days.
The Week in FCKRY
As usual with Republicans, things are really fucking stupid. They are somehow passing laws that are costing so many women their lives. We are being used as brood mares with no regard to our health, welfare, or dignity. We are being put to the square to be hung by our own umbilical cords. It’s got to stop.
We need a revolution. I don’t know how else to put it.
To stay informed, I highly recommend cruising on journalist Jessica Valenti’s Substack, Abortion Every Day. Jessica does the work. One recent post, Calculated Cruelty (Part III), outlines the Medieval abuse women in parts of this country are currently being subjected to.
Watch this New York Times video for evidence.
We have to show up in droves at the polls and change everything from the top down. We have to run for office and bring SCIENCE back to law. Get mad. Get very fucking mad. And then do whatever you can about it.
The Week in #Inspo
Some light reads to even out the darkness with a couple of serotonin hits:
Curbed dropped a brief feature about photorealist Audrey Flack’s Upper West Side apartment but also, she’s 92 and is giving us a new gallery show at Hollis Taggart March 23 and a memoir, With Darkness Came Stars. The woman even plays banjo in two bands. “She pioneered photorealism along with Chuck Close, Richard Estes, and Robert Bechtle,” the piece reminds. “But ‘I had to be better than the men to be accepted,’ Flack says.” Shocker.
At the That’s So New York hang, it was a glorious bonus to run into my dear pal writer/author Alix Strauss, who recently penned this incredibly inspirational interview with writer, social worker, former professor and reformed influencer “Accidental Icon” Lyn Slater PhD for the New York Times.
I don’t know about you, but I needed to hear this juicy bon mot: “The key to life is flinging yourself into life without a plan and being open to living that way. It’s a hopeful philosophy because it anticipates that there will always be a future, and that there will always be something exciting, different and new.”
Good, because we need new!
Until next week!
X’s & O’s,
Moi