Mar 26, 2020 What's On
With New Zealand on Level 4 lockdown from midnight last night for at least the next four weeks, the main question (apart from “how do I keep my children from murdering each other” or “how do I earn money now”) is “what the fuck am I going to do with a months’ worth of nights in on my hands?”.
The Metro team has already been working from home since late last week, and every morning we’ll bring you a little round-up of fun or interesting things we’ve been doing to help pass the time at home, and if it sounds like your kinda thing you can do it too (and maybe even tag us on Instagram, @metromagnz, so we can feel like cool influencers instead of sad shut-ins).
READ MORE: 5 Good Things to look at from the world wide web?
Things to do today: Day 1
Something to Watch: I am three (out of seven) episodes into Tiger King on Netflix. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen anything so simultaneously poorly-made and utterly compelling. It is the very definition of what I’m going to call ‘Netflix-core’ – a true-crime documentary that’s twice as long as it needs to be but so full of where-do-they-find-them characters and you-couldn’t-make-this-shit-up plot twists that you have to force yourself to shut the laptop at some point to avoid staying up all night.
At the heart of the film is Joe Exotic – a wild cat breeder, private zoo operator, gay polygamist, magician, country musician, currently serving 22 years in a US Federal Prison for two counts of murder-for-hire – and his rivalry with the owner of a wild animal “sanctuary” (who, it seems, is no saint either). To get an idea of how wild this story is, most of that’s covered in the first few minutes and the show still manages to produce multiple holy-shit moments every episode. It’s perfect lockdown viewing. Did you know there are more tigers in captivity in the US, than there are running wild in the entire world? Maybe. But did you know how crazy the people who breed them are? Well, you will soon. – Henry Oliver
Something to Read: I love this piece by Kaitlin Menza about (and titled) “What It’s Like to Self-Quarantine With a Michelin-Starred Chef”. Menza, who I’ve never knowingly read before, is a freelance writer used to spending a lot of time at home alone, often stationery. Her boyfriend is Kenvin Rose, a chef at Atera, a two Michelin star fine-dining restaurant in New York.
Usually, he works 10am-1am, five days a week, so they’re not used to spending much time together. Usually, he never cooks for her. Usually, they spend Sunday and Monday together watching food-related videos on YouTube. Now, they’re self-quarantined in a tiny apartment together. This short, beautiful essay, details their new, temporary life together. He cooks, she eats. They drink wine. Their love deepens. They “take it one meal at a time”.
It’s a fantasy version of isolation, available to very few, but an aspirational model of how we adapt how we live and what we love doing to this new way of life we’re all discovering. “You do what is necessary, you do what is asked, and you do it beautifully.” – HO
Something to listen to: I am very bad at describing music, or indeed knowing anything about what’s happening in the ‘scene’, preferring as I do to mainly listen to one of about four artists within a genre I call “sad girl music” on repeat until a different sad girl releases a new album and I switch to that on repeat instead.
That’s not going to fly while working from my tiny apartment with my flatmate working a meter away though, so I’ve pivoted to what turns out to be instrumental steel/slide guitar (a type of music I found out exists after asking Twitter to send me songs where “the guitar (?) sounds all like “bwa wowowowow” and all spacey? You know like makes you think of the American desert, you know the kind of music I mean”).
Slide guitar rules! It suits the slightly apocalyptic vibe of the times while also being very comforting with minimal lyrics so you can crank it all day long and just vibe out without getting distracted. I really recommend listening to the Paris, Texas soundtrack playlist on Spotify. – Tess Nichol
