If there ever was a quarantine song, Aaron Maine was going to write it. The thing is, it dropped just before our world changed. On March 12, the moody, experimental kid who recorded his last album in his Chinatown bedroom released a dissociative track about going outside. Through dissonant synths that will make you scan your browser to see if something else is making noise, he sings, “I lie to myself like I’m a bed / I pull the covers up all the way to my neck / Like you will never see me again.” And just like that, Porches is elevated from musician to mystic.
Last week, the Atlantic dropped a blockbuster lifestyle article out of its forthcoming April 2020 issue. Cut to now, and it is already irrelevant. In it, Amanda Mull coins “premiocre” to define things that are supposedly premium, but are really just meh. On her list of mediocre-fancy things: fake Eames chairs, extra leg room, $40 candles, Crumbs cupcakes, Uber pool, a tile backsplash in a shitty apartment kitchen, a “boutique hotel with a beautifully decorated lobby bar and painfully cramped showers.”
Let’s take a minute and count how many of those things even exist right now. Even if you’re burning the last of your Otherland candle for comfort, chances are, a product whose slogan is “go on, you deserve it” isn’t topping your list as you wait your turn to enter the grocery store. This week, everything is a time capsule, so if you’re jonesing for a nonessential purchase, maybe make it a journal.
Today is the day nonessential businesses close in New York. To our great delight, bike shops and liquor stores seem to count as needs; in California, dispensaries have made the cut, too.
With a drastically reduced set of retailers to assess, The Media has been anecdotally tracking grocery shelves to see which items are deemed inessential in the court of public opinion. According to the Wall Street Journal, okra is sticking around, and so are canned beets and sauerkraut. Twinkies are supposed to last through a nuclear apocalypse; not through COVID-19. “The Beyond Meat isn’t flying off the shelves,” says one grocery manager— vegan packaged foods evidently don’t spell comfort. The real surprise, from Slate, is chocolate-flavored hummus— not that people aren’t buying it, but that it still exists.
(This is where you send me pics of what you’re cooking. Keep it classy— I know we’re all getting stir-crazy but no eggplants, please.)
A few weeks ago we talked about Air, a virtual whiteboard that lets your team collaborate in real time on images and videos. Assuming your face time is limited, this could come in very handy right now. Instead of making you upload, download, and transfer things in the cloud, Air keeps your files in one searchable place, accessible to everyone, all the time. If you’re getting frustrated by everyone’s inability to keep track of stuff from afar, give it a spin.
