Cultureteca 05.01.20

Australia’s bushfire season continued to burn with unusual intensity, wreaking devastation to land and homes especially in the south-eastern states of Victoria and New South Wales. Amid record-breaking high temperatures, which have seen Australia record hotter than average temperatures for every month over the last three years, prescribed burning which might otherwise have reduced the fuel load has been curtailed because of the heat, and ongoing drought and a dry bush have allowed fires to ignite and burn with relentless ferocity. As the bushfires rage, in some instances they have developed their own weather systems, with strong winds and dry lightning causing fires to ignite and rapidly spread. In addition, the Liberal government of Scott Morrison has been widely accused of a negligent response to the crisis, alleged to have cut funding to national park services and New South Wales firefighting budgets, while Morrison was forced to cut short a holiday in Hawaii as the fires reached a new peak in late December, the prime minister facing further criticism for continuing to downplay the role of man-made climate change.

The bushfire season in Australia began in September, and by early November approximately 150 bushfires were burning across New South Wales and Victoria, with the authorities warning of worse to come. On 12 November, a catastrophic fire danger warning was issued for New South Wales. In late December, the fires surged again as Australia endured another heatwave, with successive days of record-breaking average temperatures, which reached an average maximum across the country of 41.9 °C. New South Wales premier Gladys Berejiklian announced a seven-day state of emergency, as air pollution beset cities from Melbourne to Sydney and the smoky haze stretched as far as New Zealand. This week – as Prime Minister Morrison beat a hasty retreat from the south coast town of Cobargo after being heckled by locals – states of emergency were again declared in New South Wales and Victoria, with road closures, forced evacuations, and hundreds of thousands of people urged to leave their homes.

Having already deployed the military, including transport and waterbombing aircraft and several naval vessels, on Saturday Scott Morrison called on thousands of reservists, as firefighting experts flew in from Canada, France, Singapore, and the United States. So far, approximately 6.3 million hectares of land have burned over Australia during the course of the bushfire season, a figure which grows daily and has already provoked various comparisons: an area larger than the breadth of Wales, bigger than the combined countries of Belgium and Luxembourg, with more land already burned than in the recent wildfires in both California and the Amazon. At least twenty-one people, including three volunteer firefighters, have died as a direct result of the fires, with several more known to be missing. Thousands of homes and buildings have been destroyed, and one expert has estimated a death toll among Australian wildlife in the region of half a billion.

While dramatic scenes in Australia garnered much of the media coverage, Indonesia is also in the midst of an environmental crisis as its capital city Jakarta was this week beset by flash floods. Starting on Tuesday, some parts of the city witnessed more than a foot in rainfall over one 24-hour period, and the rain persisted over the course of the week. In what are the worst monsoon rains in more than a decade, at least 182 neighbourhoods were submerged in the capital, whose metropolitan area is home to 30 million people while 40 percent of the land lies below sea level with swampy areas and a history of floods. By the weekend, at least 60 people had died due to hypothermia, drowning, landslides, and electrocution caused by the flooding, with 400,000 people displaced, the majority from the suburb of Bekasi. Swathes of the city went without electricity as rescue workers and military unites were deployed. Last August, Indonesia’s president Joko Widodo announced a plan to relocate the capital from Jakarta in Java to Kalimantan on the island of Borneo, though amid repeated delays to infrastructure projects, the government also pledged $40 million to save what is the fastest-sinking city in the world.

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While the Davis Cup stood for decades as the premier team event in men’s tennis, the last few months in particular have seen a revolution in the form. First a reformulated Davis Cup made its debut in November: the brainchild of footballer Gerard Piqué and his Kosmos Tennis investment group, it upended the old season-long, home-and-away knockout format, replacing it with a condensed tournament held in one location over the course of a week. Best-of-five matches and best-of-five sets were replaced by best-of-three matches and shorter best-of-three sets. Eighteen nations took part, but as the Davis Cup is not an ATP Tour event, participation was optional and decided partly by sponsorship considerations: top players including Roger Federer, Alexander Zverev, Dominic Thiem, Stefanos Tsitsipas, and Daniil Medvedev missed out, with Federer and Zverev opting instead to play in front of sold-out crowds in South America. Meanwhile the Laver Cup, spearheaded by Federer, which takes place in September and in its third year became an official ATP Tour event, echoes the Davis Cup’s roots as an annual tournament between Team World and Team Europe.

With the Laver Cup thriving and the new-look Davis Cup still boasting brand recognition as it takes its first tentative steps, is there room in an already jam-packed tennis calendar for another international men’s team event? The ATP tour seems to think so, as this week saw the debut of the ATP Cup. This is the first team event organised by the ATP Tour since the demise of the World Team Cup back in 2012, an event usually held in May on the clay of Düsseldorf, but which increasingly struggled to attract sponsors and the sport’s biggest names. Positioned as a prelude to the Australian Open and replacing the enjoyable if fairly lightweight, ITF-organised, mixed-competition Hopman Cup, the ATP Cup is taking place across the three Australian cities of Sydney, Brisbane, and Perth.

Beyond its organisers and its tripartite location, the ATP Cup is otherwise much like the Davis Cup. Six groups will be competed in a round-robin format, with a knockout stage starting at the quarter-finals, and best-of-three matches decided over the course of best-of-three sets. The ATP Cup boosts its numbers for a total of twenty-four competing nations. And crucially, with qualification based on the ATP player rankings and ranking points at stake, the ATP Cup has managed to both qualify and confirm all of the biggest names in men’s tennis: of the sport’s top players, only Roger Federer is absent, having announced his withdrawal back in October for personal reasons.

In fact with a maximum 750 ranking points on offer for an undefeated singles player, the ATP Cup is potentially more lucrative than any tournament beyond the Grand Slams, ATP Finals, and nine Masters 1000 events. That’s not to mention a total prize pot of AU$22 million. Technical innovations being trialled at the event include the use of video replay to sort out contentious decisions, with moment-to-moment statistical information fed to team captains and coaching staff. Boris Becker and Marat Safin will be among those team captains, while Spain head into the event as favourites thanks to the top-thirty trio of Rafael Nadal, Roberto Bautista Agut, and Pablo Carreño Busta. And with all of the preparatory work done, group action commenced over the weekend, with the knockout stages scheduled for the end of the week. Considering the similarities between the Davis Cup and the ATP Cup, Novak Djokovic has said, ‘Looking long term, I don’t think that the two events can coexist six weeks apart. It’s just a bit too congested’. But until the players feel worked to the bone or the novelty wears off, we have plenty more tennis to watch.

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Still one of the most successful musical outings in the world, the lineup for the 2020 edition of the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival was announced on Friday, and will see a reunited Rage Against the Machine headline along with Travis Scott and Frank Ocean. They will be supported variously by Run The Jewels, Calvin Harris, Megan Thee Stallion, Thom Yorke, Lana Del Rey, Lil Uzi Vert, FKA twigs, and many more, across three successive nights repeated over two weekends at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California, between 10-12 and 17-19 April. While Rage Against the Machine’s headline slot was widely expected and Frank Ocean represents something of a coup for the festival, the announcement was still met with criticism over the lack of female headlining artists, while others noted the burgeoning of virtual reality and K-pop.

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The 77th Golden Globe Awards were held on Sunday night, broadcast live from their usual home of the Beverly Hilton in Beverly Hills, California, with Ricky Gervais serving for the fifth – and he reiterated final – time as a still humorous but increasingly sour and reactionary host. Much of the talk when the nominations were announced in December swirled around the rise of Netflix, which led the way with 34 nominations, including six for Noah Baumbach’s Marriage Story and five for Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman, both distributed by the streaming platform, while HBO also boasted a slew of nominees in the various forms of Chernobyl, Big Little Lies, Barry, and Succession.

HBO fared well in the television categories on the night, with Chernobyl and Succession each picking up two awards, for Best Miniseries and Best Television Series – Drama and for the actors Stellan Skarsgård and Brian Cox. Fleabag was gleefully triumphant as it took home the award for Best Television Series – Musical or Comedy, the show’s writer and creator Phoebe Waller-Bridge also claiming the category gong for Best Actress. In film, the hitherto overlooked and only recently released World War I drama 1917 emerged as the big winner of the night, snatching the awards for Best Motion Picture – Drama and Best Director, a second victory in the category for Sam Mendes following American Beauty back in 1999. And Once Upon a Time in Hollywood basked in an amber glow as Quentin Tarantino won Best Screenplay, Brad Pitt won Best Supporting Actor in a Motion Picture, and the film won Best Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy, though Tarantino missed out in the directing category and Leonardo DiCaprio left empty-handed as Best Actor in a Motion Picture – Musical or Comedy went to Taron Egerton for portraying Elton John in Rocketman.

Netflix was largely left to sit and suffer as from all of its nominations, it claimed just two awards, Laura Dern winning Best Supporting Actress in a Motion Picture for her role as a high-powered divorce lawyer in Marriage Story, and Olivia Colman clasping the award for Best Actress in a Television Series Drama for playing Queen Elizabeth II in The Crown. Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson, the leads of Marriage Story, lost out respectively to Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker and Renée Zellweger’s turn as Judy Garland, while Al Pacino and Joe Pesci’s supporting roles in The Irishman went unrewarded, with Robert De Niro not even making the shortlist.

Awkwafina became the first Asian-American woman to win a Golden Globe Award for best actress, as she emerged victorious in the musical or comedy category for The Farewell, but the American production lost out to Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite in its contentious bid for Best Foreign Language Film, and its director Lulu Wang joined the likes of Greta Gerwig and Marielle Heller on the sidelines, with no women nominated for Best Director or Best Screenplay. On the other hand Hildur Guðnadóttir became the first solo woman to win Best Original Score for her work on Joker. Michelle Williams made headlines for her valiant defence of reproductive rights as she claimed the award for Best Actress in a Miniseries for Fosse/Verdon, and Russell Crowe sent a climate message from Australia as he triumphed in the acting category for The Loudest Voice, on a night of vegan meals and drunken revelry, which wasn’t short of celebration or substance but nevertheless carried an air of controversy, as across the country Harvey Weinstein began his trial on charges of sexual assault.