masks for me and you

😷😷😷Here's a list of businesses that require staff and customers to wear masks. Please add more in the comments and I'll vet and add them. 

Also looking for places in DC, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Boston, Cape Cod and LA. 😷😷😷

So far it's mostly bookstores, but is that really a surprise?
Vulnerable people should have friendly, rational places to go!
 

NY:
Manhattan:
Anthology Film Archives--the best movie theater? 2nd st & 2nd Ave.
Bluestockings Cooperative-- new books, zines, beverages and more, 16 Suffolk Street, 10002

Brooklyn: 

Bicycle Habitat- Bicycle repair store, 560 Vanderbit Ave. location
Brooklyn General Store--knitting supplies, fabric, sewing supplies, local goods, 128 Union St.
Community Bookstore--new books with a large children's section, 147 7th Ave, 11215
Greenlight Bookstore--new book stores, 686 Fulton Street 11217 & 632 Flatbush Ave 11225
Park Slope Food Coop--members-only cooperative food store, 782 Union Street, 11215
Unnameable Books-- my favorite used bookstore with some new titles, 615 Vanderbilt. Ave

Cold Spring:
Split Rock Books--bookstore, 97 Main Street 10516

PA:
Philadelphia:
The Spiral Bookcase--mostly new book store with gifts, currently a six (6) person limit in the shop, 4257 Main St. 19127 

The Wooden Shoe-- Anarchist bookstore on 704 South Street, 19147. Call for hours ((215) 413-0999)

Reading Jayne County

I was trying to find a 70s German movie set in the US desert. Juggling search terms, I ran across a film starring Jane County (the chaotic beauty City of Lost Souls (1983)). This took me back. I read Man Enough to be a Woman when I was 19 or 20 after finding it in the back of the Friends of the Free Library bookstore where I worked. It had come in as a donation, as most of the books did, and was priced under two dollars. With this cover, I had to have it.

Man Enough to be a Woman came to me before my first great lesson in mortality but after suffering from depression for many years. I was generally joyless and too young to know how to change that. Though my memory is fuzzy on the text, I now realize that this memoir was part of my lifelong search for examples of happy lives from people who do not follow the rules.

The book's title comes from an album title from County's band Jayne County and the Electric Chairs. She is a US born, Berlin based musician actress and artist. She was a huge part of the 70s Berlin music scene and seems to have met or worked with everyone, while also simply surviving in a cruel & boring world. This book made me want a time machine. Failing that, it further bolstered my belief that one can create spaces to be and just sort of living the idea that life is very short.

Reading queer and trans history helps remove the confines of the banal evil of heteronormativity and white supremacy and makes suspect the myth of queerness being a uniformly miserable time until recently.

Man Enough... got rereleased in the UK in 2021 by Serpent's Tail. I was too busy attending to my living death this year to hear about it, but now I’m keen to find this book again. I especially want to read the new afterword by County herself.

Here's a review of City of Lost Souls (1983) by Caroline Golum. Link to youtube rip above.

Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson

This winter has been testing my resolve to not recede entirely into the spaces between the radiator coils. I'm always craving the lightness of summer, the feverishness of a summer night's impermeability.

There are places that can capture a little piece of that feeling and I am lucky enough to live close to one of them: Unnameable Books. So, on a recent cabin-fever evening, I put on my big coat and went out in hopes of a little heat.

Another Brooklyn definitely gave me what I was looking for. It weaves  a delicate story about childhood friendships and becoming an adult. The novel exists in the sticky land of memory, of hindsight, of lost moments. The book opens with August, the protagonist, giving the reader a deceptively simple take on her past: "For a long time. my mother wasn't dead yet. Mine could have been a more tragic story... But this didn't happen. I know now that what is tragic isn't the moment. It is the memory." And, oof, isn't it?

Woodson deftly addresses how trauma, grief, and mental illness affect generations. A middle chapter of the book opens with "We came by way of our mothers' memories." It sounds neutral, perhaps. It is, in fact, a curse. The stories we are told about our family (and where we fit) have a powerful shaping effect on our lives, and often dictate at least the structure of the stories we tell about ourselves. Another Brooklyn allows in so many of the big things--war, addiction, faith, the body, betrayal--but never pretends that these are either exceptional or simply mundane. The book also gives sibling relationships a gorgeous weight.

And when Woodson describes the city summer, the neighborhood summer, you can smell the sweat and anticipation. Also present is the adolescent fear that lingers in those long nights, fear of going too far in the heat and not being able to find your way back to yourself.

Just read this book, and if you get a chance, see Woodson read in person. I've been lucky enough to see her twice and her presence and voice are truly compelling.

"I was fourteen and didn't want to be involved in any of this, but I was part of it as always, and as always, everyone kept asking me, What's wrong? Are you okay? Is something bothering you? At night I flung my pillow against my mattress and prayed to my fake jade statue of the Guanyin goddess to give me a different face so that people would stop looking at my current one and asking me what was the matter."