As the week progressed, growing concerns over the rapid spread of coronavirus took hold of cultural events and international travel and trade. At the start of the week, a public health emergency for the Coachella Valley brought the cancellations of the Indian Wells Masters tournament, the biggest event on the tennis calendar outside of the four Grand Slams, and the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, which followed hot on the heels of the postponements of Ultra Music Festival and South by Southwest. By the middle of the week the World Health Organization had officially declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Angela Merkel warned that up to 70% of the German population could catch the virus, and the United States took the major step of suspending most travel from Europe for a provisional thirty days.
The sporting world was further rocked in America upon the suspension of the NBA season, and film fans gasped at the news that Tom Hanks and Rita Wilson had tested positive for the disease. On Thursday Broadway sent its regards but drew its curtains, and the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam followed the Louvre in Paris by shutting their doors to the public, as the Netherlands banned gatherings of more than 100 people. Meanwhile stock markets suffered their worst day since Black Monday in 1987, though they had rebounded by the close of business on Friday afternoon. Serie A matches had already been cancelled as Italy emerged as the new epicentre of the virus, and more football followed suit, with the Premier League and other football across the United Kingdom called to a halt just prior to the weekend. Likewise with Ligue 1, the Bundesliga, and La Liga, despite suggestions that some matches would take place out of view.
Italy led the way last weekend with a quarantine of 16 million people in the country’s northern regions including Lombardy. As the week began, Prime Minister Giuseppe Conti extended the emergency measures nationwide, enforcing travel restrictions and a ban on public gatherings, and advising people to work from home while confirming sports bans and the closure of schools. On Wednesday the restrictions were tightened further with all shops, bars, and restaurants beyond pharmacies and supermarkets ordered to close. As the weekend neared Germany followed Denmark, Poland, and the Czech Republic in announcing border controls, and Spain and France echoed Italy’s emergency measures. Ireland shut its pubs, the Netherlands closed its coffee shops, and Austria banned gatherings of more than five while telling residents to stay home.
Donald Trump’s impromptu suspension of European travel caused havoc at airports on Sunday morning, as citizens attempting to return to the United States faced screenings and the perversity of jam-packed terminals and long queues, especially at Chicago’s O’Hare International. As cases grew and the virus began showing signs of community transmission, South African president Cyril Ramaphosa declared a state of disaster. Countries began looking towards success stories in South Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. By Sunday COVID-19 was in 143 countries, with 153,517 cases and 5,735 deaths worldwide. The bulk of the devastation remained in China, even as a dramatic fall in the number of new cases and deaths allowed the easing of quarantine measures. Yet by Sunday afternoon Italy reported another steep jump from 1,441 to 1,809 deaths, an increase of 25% on Saturday as cases also soared to 24,747.Ā With 13,938 cases and 724 deaths, Iran lagged precariously behind.
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The Swedish actor Max von Sydow, who with his aquiline face, piercing blue eyes, and distinctive scowl served as an emblem of European cinema for more than half a century, died last Sunday at the age of 90 years old. A couple of bit parts in films directed by Alf Sjƶberg and a spell at Malmƶ City Theatre under then chief director Ingmar Bergman prompted what remains Sydow’s most iconic role, as Antonius Block in The Seventh Seal, a disillusioned fourteenth-century knight who returns with his squire from the Crusades to a plague-stricken Sweden. As Block and his squire wander the countryside and encounter an acting troupe, his quest for meaning is punctuated by a chess match versus Death, which Block seeks to prolong as a means of escaping death’s clutches.
Following The Seventh Seal in 1957, Von Sydow went on to appear in eleven of Bergman’s films, including The Virgin Spring (1960) and Through a Glass Darkly (1961), both of which won the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, and Winter Light (1963). He continued a stage career in his native Sweden under the auspices of Bergman, reluctant to embark on international roles until in 1965 he played Christ in The Greatest Story Ever Told, directed by George Stevens. The following year he starred alongside Julie Andrews as a missionary in the epic drama Hawaii, the second-highest grossing film of 1966, but despite prominent parts in films by John Huston and Sydney Pollack, it was the role of Father Lankester Merrin in The Exorcist (1973) which established his commercial reputation. Von Sydow portrayed an arch villain in Flash Gordon (1980) and Never Say Never Again (1983), and played in David Lynch’s Dune (1984) and Woody Allen’s Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), before in 1987 Pelle the Conquerer won the Palme d’Or at Cannes and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film, with Von Sydow receiving a nomination for Best Actor. He followed up with Katinka (1988), his only directorial foray, and the television thriller Red King, White Knight (1989) for which he received an Emmy nomination.
In the 1990s Von Sydow reunited with Bergman, who scripted The Best Intentions (1991) and Private Confessions (1996), the latter directed by Von Sydow’s longtime screen collaborator Liv Ullmann. His role opposite Tom Cruise in Steven Spielberg’s Minority Report (2002) commenced another seam of critical and commercial Hollywood successes. These included such various films as Rush Hour 3 (2007), The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007), Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island (2010), and Ridley Scott’s Robin Hood (2010), in which Von Sydow played a series of villains and father figures. More recently he completed the transition from formal austerity to familiar face, still with an otherworldly edge, as he played the explorer Lor San Tekka in Star Wars: The Force Awakens (2015) and from 2016 appeared in Game of Thrones as the Three-eyed Raven. Tipping his king but leaving his queen standing, his death in Provence, France was confirmed on Monday by his wife Catherine.
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In a case that shone a spotlight on sexual harassment and assault within the entertainment industry and beyond, served to inspire the Me Too movement, and stuttered through the criminal system, finally on Wednesday in Manhattan Supreme Court the movie mogul Harvey Weinstein was sentenced to twenty-three years in prison. The long list of Weinstein’s accusers eventually grew to ninety-five women alleging more than a hundred cases of harassment and assault, while fifteen women recounted eighteen instances of rape, but at his trial in New York Weinstein faced just six witnesses with the charges resting on the complaints of two women. Miriam Haley, a former television production assistant, testified that Weinstein forcibly performed oral sex on her at his Manhattan apartment in 2006, and Jessica Mann, an aspiring actress, alleged that Weinstein raped her in a Midtown Manhattan hotel room in 2013. On 24 February, Weinstein was acquitted of two counts of predatory sexual assault, but the jury found him guilty of criminal sexual assault in the first degree and rape in the third degree. Dawn Dunning, Tarale Wulff, and Lauren Young, whose testimony sought to establish a pattern of abuse, and the actress Annabella Sciorra, who alleged an historic rape, comprised the other witnesses.
Sentencing Weinstein, the presiding judge James Burke said, ‘Although this is a first conviction, it is not a first offense. There is evidence before me of other incidents of sexual assault involving a number of women, all of which are legitimate considerations for sentence’. Weinstein’s defence team, led by Donna Rotunno, have already indicated that they intend to appeal the verdict. With the allegations stretching back more than thirty years, New York’s statute of limitations prevented further charges. Yet as Weinstein’s accusers, Time’s Up, and Hollywood at large reacted to the sentencing, the district attorney’s office in Los Angeles began the process of extraditing the former producer to California, where he will face charges of rape and sexual battery pertaining to February 2013.
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As coronavirus caused the cancellation of festivals and tours and live performances streamed out from behind closed doors, still there was no shortage this week of stellar new music. Album releases flowed and reached full throttle from artists including JFDR, Jay Electronica, Four Tet, Dogleg, Hilary Woods, and Code Orange, while on Sunday Donald Glover delivered a surprise courtesy of the website Donald Glover Presents. The full-length collection – looping on the website and presently unavailable via other streaming services – includes the Childish Gambino single ‘Feels Like Summer’ and a couple of other songs stemming from the This Is America tour alongside new tracks featuring Ariana Grande and 21 Savage. If you’re feeling suitably inspired, this week the electronic instrument companies Moog and Korg released free synthesizer apps, with the mobile versions of the Minimoog Model D and the Kaossilator available for download until later this month.
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Genesis P-Orridge, performance artist, occultist, and founder of the iconoclastic industrial band Throbbing Gristle, died of leukemia on Saturday at the age of 70 years old. Born in Manchester as Neil Andrew Megson, the fledgeling artist developed an early interest in occult literature, surrealism, and underground music, publishing free-form magazines and adopting P-Orridge as their nom de guerre. After dropping out from the University of Hull and spending three months in an Islington art commune, upon returning to Hull in late 1969, P-Orridge established the collective COUM Transmissions. Working alongside Cosey Fanni Tutti and Spydeee Gasmantell, adopting the symbol of a semi-erect penis, and drawing inspiration from such diverse sources as the cut-up techniques of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin, Mozart’s opera buffa CosƬ fan tutte, and the far-out psychedelia of the Merry Pranksters, the collective gained notoriety in the art world for their increasingly scabrous performances.
Combining music with performance art that skewed towards the lewd and lascivious, in 1974 COUM Transmissions received a grant from the Arts Council of Great Britain, and in 1976 their Prostitution show at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, replete with pornography, transvestite guards, and used tampons, saw them decried in the House of Commons as ‘wreckers of civilisation’. In the meantime P-Orridge and Tutti, joined by Peter Christopherson and Chris Carter, ploughed popular forms by virtue of the band Throbbing Gristle. A vital part of the underground scene in the five years prior to their dissolution, the band became one of the founding forces in industrial music even while their embrace of elements of post-punk, psychedelia, tape manipulation, and fascist regalia defied easy categorisation. The band reformed in 2004, and released three more studio albums, before the project wound down following Christopherson’s sudden death in 2010.
Following the break-up of Throbbing Gristle in 1981, P-Orridge collaborated with the Scottish guitarist Alex Fergusson to form Psychic TV, while through Thee Temple Ov Psychick Youth, they headed one of the decade’s most influential associations of occultists. In 1993 P-Orridge met Jacqueline Breyer, a nurse in New York who by night worked as a dominatrix. Breyer took the name Lady Jaye, and together the couple embarked on a lifelong ‘pandrogyne’ project, undergoing a series of body modification surgeries in an attempt to express pure consciousness and merge as one single entity. Scandal punctuated P-Orridge’s career: in the early 1990s, they were falsely accused of engaging in satanic ritual abuse, in 1998 they won a $1.5 million lawsuit stemming from injuries suffered in a fire at the home of producer Rick Rubin, and after Tutti published a memoir, P-Orridge was compelled to deny accusations of violence and abusiveness. In recent years career retrospectives showed at Invisible-Exports and the Rubin Museum of Art, and P-Orridge even became something of a pop-cultural icon before their death, asĀ the art world commemorated a unique legacy.
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Following UFC 248 last weekend in Nevada, where Israel Adesanya and Zhang Weili retained their middleweight and strawweight titles courtesy of decision victories ranging from the spectacular to the mundane, for mixed martial arts fans the focus turned on Saturday to BrasĆlia, the federal capital of Brazil. There for the first time in the promotion’s history, concerns over coronavirus necessitated an event held behind closed doors, as at the climax of Fight Night 170, Charles Oliveira upset Kevin Lee by means of a guillotine choke in the third round. UFC president Dana White insists that the promotion will continue with its schedule, despite wavering public sentiment and the suspension of most major sporting events in the United States. The extension of the federal government’s travel ban to cover the United Kingdom and Ireland leaves White scrapping to relocate next weekend’s card, which was scheduled for the O2 Arena in London.
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At the end of a long haggling process and ten days of voting, on Sunday NFL players narrowly approved a new collective bargaining agreement. With an estimated 2,500 professional football players eligible to vote, the agreement passed with 1019 votes in favour versus 959 against. The league’s owners had already given their approval to the deal, after voting last month. The new collective bargaining agreement will run until 2030, and beyond player advantages including higher minimum salaries, an increased share of the league’s revenue from 47% stretching beyond 48.5%, improved benefits for current and former professionals, expanded rosters, and changes to the league’s drug and discipline policies, the deal will also allow the NFL to expand its regular season from sixteen to seventeen games starting in 2021. Changes to the postseason will be introduced even sooner, as from the 2020 season, scheduled to commence in September, the playoff field will be expanded from twelve to fourteen teams. Soon after the results of the vote were announced and the new collective bargaining agreement confirmed, the NFL revealed that the salary cap for the 2020 season will rise by $10 million to $198.2 million per team.
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On Sunday the Italian architect Vittorio Gregotti died at the age of 92 after contracting coronavirus. Graduating from the Politecnico di Milano, Gregotti worked for the Italian architectural magazine Casabella between 1953 and 1963, first as an editor and later as editor-in-chief. In 1974 he founded Gregotti Associati International, and his studio worked on the BelĆ©m Cultural Center in Lisbon, the Grand ThĆ©Ć¢tre de Provence in France, and the Teatro degli Arcimboldi in Milan while carrying out urban planning projects in Milan and Shanghai. As a curator, Gregotti headed the visual arts section of the Venice Biennale in the mid-1970s, presaging the Mostra Internazionale di Architettura di Venezia, the architectural section of the exhibition which opened in 1980. Between 1979 and 1998 he directed the design and architecture magazine Rassegna, and between 1982 and 1996 he served as the director of Casabella, amid professorial roles as far flung as Cambridge, Harvard, Princeton, SĆ£o Paulo, Buenos Aires, Tokyo, and Lausanne. Yet Gregotti and his studio were perhaps best known for their work on sports stadia, as they rebuilt the Marassi in Genoa in time for the World Cup in 1990, and helped to renovate the Estadi OlĆmpic in Barcelona ahead of the Summer Olympics in 1992.
