Hello fellow e-quarantiners:

These are wild, wild times. The last time I sent one of these out there were still sports, people could still go to the movies and church, and it wasn’t dangerous to hug your family. Well now we’re here—in the middle of a pandemic—and I guess this newsletter will continue. I’m sure everyone is just as hella stressed as I am about the situation. I’m still physically going into work just about every day though I haven’t really had to go out and about in the public for work for a week or so. I feel like I’m on a very sad treadmill, trying (and mostly failing) to find things to write about that aren’t related to COVID-19 since there’s definitely not much art or entertainment going on right now that’s not on the internet. I truly enjoyed diving into writing a historical piece on the Spanish Flu’s impact on western Kentucky. It gave me some comfort to know that this has happened before and ton more people died and the country made it out of the woods. Late March and early April were supposed to be a big travel time for me with a reunion concert for one of my all time favorite bands in New York and one of my best friend’s bachelor parties in Chicago…and all of that obviously went to hell in a handbasket. Anyways, I’m going to try and hopefully keep the coronavirus content to a minimum in the coming months, but there will be some pieces in this one that really moved. Here’s hoping that two or three months from now we’re working our way back to normal. I want to hug my friends again.

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We’re gonna get through this thing.

READS

— “We’ve mostly lost the darkness now. Even deep in the country, half the houses are adorned with glaring 24-hour lights that push into the surrounding woods and invade the sky. In more urban places there’s scarcely a dark corner left,” Maria Browning writes in a piece on the death of darkness for the NYT Opinion page. “Something deep within me recoils from it all and longs to turn toward darkness. Night is when the body goes to ground and the soul comes forth.” Paul Bogard wrote a really great book about light pollution in 2013 called “The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light.” True darkness at night is beautiful and perfect. I wish I experienced it more often. Here’s a neat map tool that shows the levels of light pollution around the world so that you can get to dancin’ in the dark.

— Kate Linthicum’s LA Times profile of Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio aka Bad Bunny is a nice primer on the groundbreaking reggaeton artist who just released a banging new album on Leap Day titled “YHLQMDLG.” This stands for Yo Hago Lo Que Me Da La Gana, a mantra of Ocasio’s that boils down to “I do what I want.”

— “Like rhythm, ass, or generational wealth, a vision is something you either have or you don’t,” Charles Holmes wrote about Megan Thee Stallion in a new cover story for Rolling Stone—where the young Houston rapper talks about her origin story, her love of anime, her soon-to-be-acquired degree in health care management and argues with her sisters about whether or not you could live off of your own waste.

— Meanwhile, former Deadspin editor David Roth wrote about what makes it so damn unpleasant to read on the internet nowadays in a Columbia Journalism Review piece: “We have compressed and corroded and finally collapsed what used to be the core of a publication—its relationship with its readers, and the basic notion that one should not make it hard for them to read.”

— Speaking of unpleasant….here’s the COVID-19 megathread. As a person that loves going to the movies and seeing live music, it’s a strange time to be alive. David Ehrlich wrote about how this shutdown could financially impact the film industry for IndieWire. The emotions attached to the experience of going to the theater are complex and important. It’s where so many people go to be moved in each others presence, with that now off the table the NYT’s Manohla Dargis wrote about how she misses sitting in the darkness with strangers: “…there is something qualitatively different about going to a designated space and sitting, and staying, in the enveloping dark with a lot of people you don’t know and maybe some you do. It is an exquisite, human thing to sit with all those other souls, to be alone with others.” Elsewhere in the NYT critical cupboard, longtime pop critic Jon Pareles mourned the empty stages around the city and country. Here’s a photo of the empty room where I would have seen The Format reunite after over a decade apart last week in the good timeline:

Charlie Warzel wrote the insane story of a group of outdoor enthusiasts who went rafting in the Grand Canyon for a few weeks in early March only to reemerge to the news of a nationwide shutdown and a still-coming pandemic. The hilarious and sage Jeremy Gordon wrote about how entertainment companies should take advantage of everyone being at home and, ahem, RELEASE THAT SHIT to the masses and give us the new content that we desperately crave. Thankfully ESPN has crumbled and is giving us The Last Dance, the new documentary series on Michael Jordan, months earlier than expected. The NYT’s Ben Kenigsburg recommended trying out silent comedy movies to relieve some stress. And, to wrap it up, The Atlantic’s David Sims gave some advice that I had been accidentally following: try watching westerns during this time. “As people spend more time indoors, they might notice their attention spans growing shorter. The constant stream of news can make it difficult to focus on anything for too long,” Sims writes. “For me, dipping into Westerns has helped lend some structure to my viewing diet, but its main therapeutic power for anyone lies in opening a window to a world far removed from our own.”

BEST PICTURE CHECK-IN

I continued to clipping right along in my Oscars watch at a probably irresponsible pace. Movies have most definitely been my coping mechanism for these stressful times. The Twitter thread cataloging my experience is still going, as well as my reviews on Letterboxd.

Billy Wilder’s The Apartment and Norman Jewison’s In The Heat Of The Night were most definitely my favorite things in the bunch. Lawrence Of Arabia was impressive but way way long. Overall, this era was full of overlong stuff that felt more like a chore than epic to me.

THE BIG TIME SUCK

I caved and bought a Nintendo Switch because all the time and money that I would spend in bars, breweries and concert venues is now spent indoors. With so much time on my hands, it can’t all be spent watching movies/TV, reading, and eating…so I figured I would invest some TOTALLY HEALTHY time in cultivating a desert island. That’s right…Animal Crossing has begun.

This is 100% Chores: The Game, more so even than Red Dead Redemption 2 — which I also loved. With endless charm and whimsicality, this game has me chopping wood, fishing, and gathering stones every damn day as I develop my land and sink further and further into debt to my landlord Tom Nook.

My island is named Rokovoko, after Queequeg’s homeland in Moby Dick. During the brief passages about the fictional island in Herman Melville’s classic, he says: “It is not down in any map; true places never are.” I always thought that was romantic…also it’s suspected that cannibalism happens on the island so I thought that could give my island a vaguely threatening aura.

Aside from incentivizing near constant play, Animal Crossing is great for being social during this time when it’s nearly impossible to be around your friends and family. You can go to other people’s islands and chat and give gifts and show off your cool designs for clothes and rooms and the landscape. Here’s my friend Gage’s Twin Peaks-themed room on his island.

And here’s me and Maggie cheesing in my museum.

Anyways, this is the perfect quarantine game and it couldn’t have come out at a better time.

TUNES

My slacker anthem. I love this new Disq record a lot. It was an instabuy on vinyl.

Always great to see a friend achieving something great. The west Kentucky peeps in S.G. Goodman, formerly known as the Savage Radley, have signed to Verve and released their first single and video. It’s got over 100K views! Their record and tour are pushed back due to COVID-19 concerns but I want the world for them.

A new Bright Eyes single?? In this economy??? During this Great Depression????

I will never tire of the funked up Michael McDonald vibes of Thundercat. His newest, “Fair Chance,” is irresponsibly smooth.

The new Christian Lee Hutson record is just around the bend and I’m more excited with every single.

For some reason this Jens Lekman song has absolutely destroyed me lately.

Everyone’s favorite leather daddy Orville Peck becomes the May Queen we deserve in his new video for “Summertime!”

All the best wishes to you during this aggressively Contagion-like time.

Your electronic (and probably real life) friend,

💙 Derek