Culturedarm's 2015 In Review

News & Politics

In early December 2014, the Swedish government – a coalition headed by Prime Minister Stefan Löfven’s Social Democrats, who along with the Green Party took power with just 37.9% of the popular vote and 138 from 349 parliamentary seats – lost a budget vote, causing Löfven to call a snap election for March 2015. But just before the turn of the year, on 27 December, the government and the opposition Alliance agreed a deal allowing minority budgets to pass until 2022. This brought an end to what proved a brief political crisis, and rendered a snap election unnecessary. Then on 10 January, Anna Kinberg Batra was confirmed as the new leader of the Moderate Party, officially replacing former Prime Minister Fredrik Reinfeldt.

Following the first reading at the end of January in Canada’s House of Commons of the ‘Anti-terrorism Act’, the name given to Bill C-51, there was growing concern throughout February over the Harper government’s continuing conflation of environmentalism with extremism. On 8 March we celebrated International Women’s Day, with a look back at the history of women’s suffrage. And on 17 March it was Saint Patrick’s Day, which I kept with a look at the contested dates of his life, the legends which surround it, and his autobiographical Confessio.

Heading towards the United Kingdom general election, I considered the history of the open letter, and competing versions published in April on behalf of businesses, working people, and the NHS as the Conservatives and Labour battled for votes. Then on 7 May the election took place, and I followed it with election day thoughts and a roundup and analysis as the Conservatives won sufficient seats to form a majority government. Labour gained a few seats in England, but their support was decimated in Scotland in favour of the SNP, while the Liberal Democrats were virtually wiped out, so that the Conservatives ended up with 330 seats in the House of Commons, Labour with 232, the SNP with 56, and the Lib Dems with a mere 8. The Greens and UKIP managed one seat apiece.

The former Liberal Democrat leader Charles Kennedy died on 2 June, at just fifty-five years old. On 4 June the world remembered Tiananmen Square, with thousands gathering for the annual commemoration in Hong Kong, a candlelight vigil at Victoria Park. On 8 June – against a backdrop of unemployment, censorship, corruption, and the presidential ambitions of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan – the Turkish general election brought something of a surprise result, with the ruling AKP managing only 40.9% of the vote, thereby losing 53 parliamentary seats and finding themselves unable to form a majority government. On 9 June New York City’s oldest bridge, the High Bridge between Manhattan and the Bronx, reopened after 45 years.

Heavy flooding overwhelmed Tbilisi Zoo on 14 June, killing twelve people and scores of animals, and allowing a hippo, a bear, a tiger, and a hyena to roam free. In the landmark encyclical ‘Laudato Si‘ issued on 18 June, Pope Francis called for a global response to the threat of ‘extraordinary climate change and an unprecedented destruction of ecosystems’. And on a momentous 26 June, same-sex marriage became legal throughout the United States.

On 3 July Iceland abolished its law against blasphemy, following a campaign by the country’s Pirate Party launched in the aftermath of the Charlie Hebdo attack. 8 July brought the first fully Conservative budget in the United Kingdom since 1996, with the headline announcements cuts to tax credits and a new national living wage. From 15 July Kenyan athletes walked for peace, from Lodwar to Lake Bogoria in response to the country’s growing ethnic violence. Then on 6 August, we recalled Hiroshima, on the 70th anniversary of the world’s first nuclear attack. In Japan 40,000 people came together in Hiroshima Peace Memorial Park, observing a minute’s silence before they were addressed by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe and Mayor Kazumi Matsui.

The Perseids, the annual prolific meteor shower, from the comet Swift-Tuttle with a radiant in the constellation Perseus, reached their peak on 12 August. Precisely a month later Jeremy Corbyn was overwhelmingly elected the new leader of the Labour Party. On 14 September Europe’s ongoing migrant crisis saw Germany and other EU states impose temporary border control measures, in a challenge to the union’s principle of free movement. On 28 September NASA scientists unveiled the strongest evidence yet that, under specific circumstances, liquid water flows on Mars.

10 October was World Mental Health Day, with the theme ‘Dignity in Mental Health’. At Canada’s general election on 19 October, the Liberal Party led by Justin Trudeau surged to power, taking 184 out of 338 seats – an increase of 148 seats on their showing in 2011 – to form a majority government. The result marked the end of almost ten years of Conservative government under Stephen Harper, who had been campaigning for a fourth term. As October waned I considered the problem of EVEL, as English vetoes for English laws passed in the UK House of Commons. And I subsequently argued against both the British government’s proposed cuts to tax credits – proposals which were later scrapped – and the notion of a House of Lords-impelled constitutional crisis.

After coalition talks inevitably broke down, Turkey went to the polls again on 1 November, and with national security placed firmly at the centre of the agenda, the AKP regained the parliamentary majority which they had lost in June. On 16 November concerns were raised for the yellow-eyed penguin, with observers in New Zealand citing a rapid decline in nest numbers.

On 12 December, after two weeks of negotiation, world leaders agreed a historic climate deal in Paris, which is meant to limit the rise in global temperatures to less than 2°C above pre-industrial levels. Adopted by 196 participants, it marks the first time that all of the countries of the world, both developed and developing nations, have committed to reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. On 18 December the United Nations set a time frame gesturing towards a peaceful settlement in Syria. And on 21 December the first stage booster of SpaceX’s Falcon 9 rocket successfully landed upright on solid ground at Cape Canaveral: the first time that an orbital rocket has completed a soft landing, which has been heralded as a major step towards reusable rocket technology.

After record rainfalls earlier in the month, in the days after Christmas York, Leeds, and Greater Manchester followed Cumbria and Lancashire in suffering severe flooding, which I captured on film. Then at last on 28 December the foreign ministers of South Korea and Japan announced a deal meant to bring resolution to decades of animosity over the issue of comfort women: the tens of thousands of Korean women forced to work as sex slaves by Japan during the Second World War. Japan pledged a fund of 1 billion yen to be shared among the 46 surviving victims, but campaigners condemned a failure to admit legal responsibility, while the deal does nothing for women in North Korea or China.

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Art & Culture

The highlight of a bracing start to the year in music was the sudden release of Björk’s Vulnicura, a leak forcing the hasty appearance of the album on 20 January, less than a week after being officially announced. Kanye West had counted us into 2015 with ‘Only One’, and towards the end of January featured alongside Paul McCartney on Rihanna’s ‘FourFiveSeconds’. But at the 57th Annual Grammy Awards on 8 February he again courted controversy, with remarks on Album of the Year winner Beck that impelled a debate on artistry and creativity, while also refocusing criticisms of awards ceremonies in relation to gender and race. Mere days later, Kanye introduced his Yeezy Season 1 collaboration with adidas, with a fashion show on 12 February during New York Fashion Week, before the Yeezy 750 Boosts quickly sold out.

On 13 February Drake dropped If You’re Reading This It’s Too Late, a surprise mixtape – though the term provoked its share of consternation – which received critical acclaim and fanned a fire year in rap. On 22 February the 87th Academy Awards saw attention turn to the cinema, with eyes focusing especially on the red carpet in an endeavour to determine the acting world’s best dressed. And around the same time I contemplated one of the distant Oscar nominees, Paul Thomas Anderson’s Inherent Vice, which I compared with the 1938 screwball classic Bringing Up Baby.

The final Late Show with David Letterman aired on 20 May, and I looked back over Letterman’s thirty-three year career at the forefront of late night with a musical top twenty. On 29 May, 102 years after the fact, I recounted the premiere of Stravinsky and the Ballet Russes’ The Rite of Spring. On 5 June Björk released her video for ‘Stonemilker’, directed by Andrew Thomas Huang, and filmed in panoroma on Grótta beach. And on 12 June, Garage Musem of Contemporary Art opened in a new space in Moscow’s Gorky Park.

11 June brought the passing of free jazz pioneer Ornette Coleman. Bloomsday, the long day of James Joyce’s novel Ulysses, was celebrated with a week-long series of events in Dublin leading up to 16 June. Taylor Swift became the biggest name to publicly criticise Apple Music when, on 21 June, she lamented the amount the streaming service would pay artists over its first three months. The sculptor Barbara Hepworth’s first major London exhibition in 50 years opened at Tate Britain on 24 June. And a busy Saturday on 27 June for Kanye West meant the release of the Yeezy 350 Boost and a headlining slot at Glastonbury.

In July I viewed Matisse through the eyes of the largest ever exhibition of his work in the Netherlands, with The Oasis of Matisse on show at the Stedelijk. I reviewed Jolie Holland – who released Culturedarm’s album of the year for 2014 with Wine Dark Sea – as she performed alongside Stevie Weinstein-Foner at The Basement in York. July 19 saw the arrival of the Reebok x Kendrick Lamar Ventilator sneaker. And while the beginning of the year had concluded an Ursula von Rydingsvard display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park, 22 July inaugurated Caro in Yorkshire, a two site Anthony Caro retrospective across YSP and Hepworth Wakefield.

In July I also celebrated the 20th anniversary of Clueless with notes. At the end of the month, Ai Weiwei was initially denied a six-month visa to enter the UK, and I broached his situation, as well as the National Portrait Gallery’s BP Portrait Award and the V&A exhibition Facing History. A couple of days later York Art Gallery reopened, after an £8 million refurbishment, and with a new Centre of Ceramic Art. And on 10 August Joanna Newsom excitingly announced Divers, the follow-up to 2010’s triple album Have One on Me.

I followed Joanna Newsom’s announcement with a detailed look at the themes and references in ‘Sapokanikan’, the impending record’s first-released song (a piece which received mention by Jim Fusilli in The Wall Street Journal come the record’s release in October). Returning to Anthony Caro, I reviewed Caro in Yorkshire alongside another exhibition at YSP, Henry Moore: Back to a Land. On 27 August Tyler, The Creator was forced to cancel four tour dates across the UK and Ireland, when he was banned from entering the UK owing to old song lyrics. Van Morrison had more joy in his hometown of Belfast, celebrating his 70th birthday on 31 August with two concerts on Cyprus Avenue, the leafy street made famous by Astral Weeks.

In September I turned briefly to video games, comparing the demo versions of Pro Evolution Soccer 2016 and FIFA 16. At the end of the month Ralph Lauren stepped down as chief executive of the fashion house he founded in 1967. I reviewed Julia Holter’s impassioned and elegant, genre-crossing fourth album Have You In My Wilderness, a remarkable selection of songs from an artist who quietly confounds expectations while going from strength to strength. And I also took the opportunity to dwell on architecture in Pyongyang, as a photography exhibition in the North Korean capital showed images from Eddo Hartmann’s Setting the Stage: Pyongyang, North Korea alongside some from 3DPRK by Matjaž Tančič. Their joint exhibition, free to enter for Pyongyang residents, was billed as the first ever instance of art photographs from the West going on public display in North Korea.

On 13 October Marlon James won the Booker Prize for his sprawling novel A Brief History of Seven Killings, the first time the prize had been awarded to a Jamaican novelist. On 15 October Burntwood School in Wandsworth, London, designed by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris and completed in 2014 at a cost of £40.9 million, was awarded the RIBA Stirling Prize 2015. And it was obviously awards season in the arts, for on 3 November Mathias Énard took the Prix Goncourt for his novel Boussole, described as a ‘poetic eulogy to the long history of cultural exchanges between east and west’.

Towards the end of 2015 I looked back exactly 100 years to the British literary magazine The New Age, and to short plays translated or published for the first time therein by the Russian playwright Denis Fonvizin, and later the New Zealand modernist Katherine Mansfield. I reviewed Joanna Newsom’s Divers, a breathtaking exploration of our difficult relationship with time and space. And in early November I compiled reviews of 51 short films after attending the year’s Aesthetica Short Film Festival, with some of the highlights including Franchin Don’s ‘Hiatus’, Joshua Carver’s ‘Mary No More’, Nafsika Guerry-Karamaounas’s ‘Cool Robinson’, Dhaneesh Jameson’s ‘The Blue Sweater’, and Cathy Yan’s ‘Down River’.

Alexander Calder: Performing Sculpture opened at Tate Modern on 11 November, showcasing major works from the originator of the mobile, and depicting his collaborations in the fields of theatre, music, and dance. A few weeks later Frans Grijzenhout, a professor of art in Amsterdam, unravelled the longstanding mystery regarding the precise location in Delft of Johannes Vermeer’s The Little Street. And at the end of the month, Animal Collective unveiled Painting With, their upcoming tenth studio album, which they gave a first public airing over the speakers inside Baltimore-Washington International Airport.

At the beginning of December, ineluctably I sniffed out a bunch of winter fragrances, discussing new perfumes from Guerlain, Nicolaï, Jessica Hannah, Frederic Malle, and more. I belatedly reviewed the new Grimes album, the brilliant and buoyant Art Angels. On 7 December Assemble – a collective of young designers and architects – were awarded the Turner Prize for their sustainable work on the Granby Four Streets project in Toxteth, part of inner-city Liverpool. Christmas festivities in Sweden begin with Lucia on 13 December, and I provided a brief history of the celebration along with a recipe for lussekatter, curled saffron buns with raisins. And as Christmas fast approached I looked at some of the holiday’s best sweaters, before reviewing York’s version of Dick Whittington in the context of pantomime’s genesis

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Sport

For the second January in a row, WWE both disappointed and enraged their fanbase at the Royal Rumble, with Roman Reigns emerging as the last man standing in the 30-man main event – a moment not even The Rock could save. In February, the onset of the athletics calendar brought a first world record for Mo Farah, in the indoor two mile at the Birmingham Indoor Grand Prix. And in March, the Football Association’s England Commission trod the path of xenophobia with new proposals regarding ‘home-grown’ players and work permits.

At the end of the month, WrestleMania 31 ended on a high with Seth Rollins cashing in to snatch the WWE World Heavyweight Championship. And with the start of the Major League Baseball season in April just days away, I offered a semi-literate preview while revising Culturedarm’s Beginner’s Guide to the sport. Elsewhere on 26 April the 2015 London Marathon marked world record holder Paula Radcliffe’s last competitive race.

In mid-May, a solid WWE Payback saw The New Day retain their newly-won tag titles against the team of Tyson Kidd and Cesaro, while Seth Rollins triumphed in a Fatal 4-Way to hold onto his world title belt. And a few days later Sasha Banks withstood an aggravated left arm and Becky Lynch in a marvellous encounter at NXT TakeOver: Unstoppable. On 24 May, the Premier League season concluded with Jonás Gutiérrez securing Newcastle United’s survival in the top flight. And 30 May was cup final day across large parts of Europe.

The French Open in tennis was held over the last week of May and the first week of June. In the men’s draw, Novak Djokovic secured his first win over Rafa Nadal at the tournament in the quarter-finals, and beat Andy Murray in the semis, but in the final – which coincided with the start of the Women’s World Cup – succumbed to the immense hitting power of Stan Wawrinka, who thereby claimed his first French Open and prevented Djokovic from achieving a career Grand Slam. In the final of the women’s draw – on the same day that Barcelona beat Juventus 3-1 the final of the Champions League – Serena Williams defeated Lucie Safarova in three sets for her twentieth Grand Slam singles title, and third career Grand Slam. Meanwhile WWE Elimination Chamber produced two atrocious chamber matches and a convoluted main event.

By the middle of June in Canada, the final round of fixtures were taking place in Women’s World Cup groups A, B, C, D, E, and F. In the round of sixteen, pre-tournament favourites Germany thrashed Sweden 4-1, while England edged Norway 2-1. Elsewhere Australia shocked Brazil, China saw off the last African side in the competition in the shape of Cameroon, and in the quarter-finals England went on to eliminate the hosts Canada, so that the four teams remaining were England, Japan, Germany, and the United States. In the first semi-final the United States beat Germany 2-0 after Celia Sasic missed a penalty that would have given the Germans the lead, before an own goal in the final minute of their semi saw Japan victorious over England by 2-1. Japan defeated the United States on penalties in the World Cup final back in 2011, but this time, on 5 July, the United States dominated their opponents, emerging the victors and world champions by a score of 5-2.

In the meantime, WWE Money in the Bank was a significant improvement on Elimination Chamber, headlined by a freewheeling ladder match between Seth Rollins and Dean Ambrose. 29 June was the first day of Wimbledon, and brought Lleyton Hewitt’s final bow. And just over a week later, a lively few days of sport saw Garbine Muguruza battle through her semi-final against Agnieszka Radwanska, Mo Farah make a winning return to the track at the Lausanne Diamond League, and the conclusion to Wimbledon, which I covered with a story of the 2015 Championships in full. Then bewildering booking choices in the final two bouts, between John Cena and Kevin Owens and Rollins and Brock Lesnar, made WWE Battleground a blowout.

After Genzebe Dibaba broke the women’s 1500-metre world record in Monaco, London’s Anniversary Games at the end of July brought excellent times out of Jasmin Stowers, Zharnel Hughes, and Eunice Sum. As we moved into August, the looming Premier League season provoked previews of Newcastle and then of the league as a whole. 22 August was the first day of the World Championships in Athletics in Beijing, the largest event to take place at the Bird’s Nest stadium since the 2008 Olympics. Despite an enticing card, WWE SummerSlam was another bust on the wrestling front, with a flawed finish to the big match between Lesnar and The Undertaker. And I wrapped up the World Championships in Athletics with a look at six key duels which resulted in medals on the track and in the field, before smirking at some of the event’s most unfortunate bloopers.

A swift return to the track on 11 September brought a summary of the season’s final Diamond League meets in Zurich and Brussels, featuring a standout performance by Habiba Ghribi. In the middle of the month several Premier League managers made fools of themselves, and Zlatan Ibrahimovic capped the start of the new season’s Champions League with an outrageous flick. On 23 September, the legendary New York Yankee Yogi Berra passed away in his sleep – 69 years to the day removed from his Major League Baseball debut. Stupidity reigned at WWE Night of Champions, as World Champion Seth Rollins lost to US Champion John Cena, before retaining his belt against Sting in a match that could have been epic, but was ruined by Kane’s interference.

NXT was a much better prospect for wrestling throughout 2015, and on 7 October NXT TakeOver: Respect brought an emotional end to the feud of the year between Sasha Banks and Bayley. But later in the month the main roster admittedly scored a success with WWE Hell in a Cell, which brought a climax, inside the cell, to the issue between Lesnar and Taker, and some dastardly behaviour from The Wyatt Family. On 22 November the curtain fell on the tennis season, with Novak Djokovic defeating Roger Federer to win the ATP World Tour Finals for an unprecedented fourth time in a row, after Agnieszka Radwanska had previously triumphed over Petra Kvitova at the WTA Finals.

There was just time for a trio of wrestling events to round out 2015. WWE Survivor Series slapped fans in the face with first Roman Reigns and then Sheamus snatching the World Championship – it was hard to say which was worse, but either way it was a frustrating end to the title tournament called after Seth Rollins injured his knee. WWE TLC ended the year on something of a question mark, featuring two entertaining tag matches, and closing with a revamped Roman Reigns still firmly on top. Once again, NXT showcased the best that wrestling has to offer, the brand’s first major foray abroad in the shape of NXT TakeOver: London excelling at every step, with big wins for Asuka, Bayley, and Finn Balor. But there was a sad end to the sporting year on Culturedarm, with the death of former Newcastle United goalkeeper Pavel Srnicek on 29 December.

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Songs of the Month