Mar 30, 2020 What's On
Daily reminder that it’s Monday, so if you’re working from home it’s time to get on the laptop and shoot off a message to the team to show you’re awake, alert and ready to work. Yep, it’s day 5, and we’re all still grappling with that age-old question: what the fuck are we going to do today? Luckily, the Metro team’s here to help, with some fun and interesting things to pass the time at home.
READ MORE: Things to do day 1 | Things to do day 2 | Things to do day 3 | Things to do day 4
Something to listen to: Just our luck (and I mean that with zero irony) that the Friday before lockdown, Hiroshi Yoshimura’s rare 1986 album (above) was digitally re-released by Light in the Attic (physical releases are slated for June). This is Japanese ambient music at its finest and sounds infinitely better than the YouTube upload that’s served as the main source of the album since it was rediscovered a few of years ago. A lockdown must-listen IMO. – Henry Oliver
Something to do: Ok, so nothing is shipping right now except essential goods but that doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the dopamine hit of looking at stuff you don’t need or even really want over the next four weeks. For 20 minutes or so each day, I’ve been indulging in opening about 10 tabs at a time for the websites of various shops I would like to buy things from, perusing them at my leisure and even filling my little shopping cart. Then when my blood’s pumping and my adrenaline’s kicked in, is close all the windows and forget about it. Quarantine shopping is the extremely timid and lazy person’s version of base jumping or whatever extreme sport is popular among daredevil freaks right now. – Tess Nichol
Something to watch: If you’re subscribed to Netflix and need a bit of a balm from the daily Covid-19 1pm updates, some funny flicks I recommend on there are: Mr Roosevelt, about a comedian who goes back home and stays with her ex and his new girlfriend; Everybody Wants Some!! which is by Richard Linklater and that’s all you really need to know; Colossal, the only Anne Hathaway movie that no-one saw but she’s actually very good in; and there is NEVER, EVER a reason not to watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off. – ?Jean Teng
Something to read: Completely unrelated to the current circumstances of the world today, “Malfunctioning Sex Robot” by Patricia Lockwood for the LRB was the best book review (well, a review of multiple books by the same author, being John Updike) I read all year.
A sample: I was hired? as an assassin. You don’t bring in a 37-year-old woman to review John Updike in the year of our Lord 2019 unless you’re hoping to see blood on the ceiling. ‘Absolutely not,’ I said when first approached, because I knew I would try to read everything, and fail, and spend days trying to write an adequate description of his nostrils, and all I would be left with after months of standing tiptoe on the balance beam of objectivity and fair assessment would be a letter to the editor from some guy named Norbert accusing me of cutting off a great man’s dong in print. But then the editors cornered me drunk at a party, and here we are.
I’m so happy to have thought of it to recommend so now I have an excuse to read it again. — HO
