Cultureteca 17.11.19

Monday cheer came in the cherished form of Jeff Garlin, who revealed via a post on Instagram that Curb Your Enthusiasm is back in January with season ten. The ninth season of the HBO comedy aired after a six-year hiatus back in 2017, and confirmation of season ten came less than a couple of weeks after its climactic episode, which saw Larry David chased down the street in a belated attempt to carry out a fatwa. Confirming the show’s renewal, series creator David sagely observed, ‘As I’ve said many times, when one has the opportunity to annoy someone, one should do so’, while executive producer Jeff Schaffer assured us that Larry hadn’t been killed and confirmed the return of the core cast plus ‘a few more old friends from the Curb universe’.

Sadly they’ll be without the late great Bob Einstein, who died in January at the age of 76, so expect something in the vein of a Marty Funkhouser roadside memorial. Filming for the tenth season of Curb Your Enthusiasm began last October. In May Jeff Tweedy of Wilco was confirmed as an addition to the cast, and in September the talk show host Adam Carolla suggested a January release after speaking with David. In the meantime, as Jeff indicated in his post, his largely improvised stand-up special Jeff Garlin: Our Man in Chicago hit Netflix this week.

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The hotly anticipated Disney+ streaming service launched on Tuesday, at least in the United States, Canada, and the Netherlands, with more countries ready to receive the bounty in the coming weeks and months. At the moment, beyond the Werner Herzog vehicle The Mandalorian, the service is touting a legacy offering of Star Wars and Marvel films plus Disney classics and Simpsons reruns. That didn’t prevent a deluge of users and day-one technical difficulties however, sure to be ironed out as Captain America et al. come to the rescue even as Mickey and co. run amok.

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For seven years since its landing in August 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover has been exploring the surface of Mars, in an attempt to answer the fundamental question, ‘Did Mars ever have the right environmental conditions to support small life forms called microbes?’. So far the rover has travelled 21.31 kilometres and sent back 614,014 raw images, with its focus on the Gale crater, a crater 154 kilometres across and approximately 3.5-3.8 billion years old, a probable dry lake whose enormous central peak the Aeolis Mons rises 5.5 kilometres from the foot of the valley.

Now new analysis of the makeup of the Martian atmosphere has produced perplexing results: a study of seasonal patterns on Mars, carried out by the portable chemistry lab inside the Curiosity rover, shows that oxygen is behaving in a way that our scientists cannot explain using any known chemical processes. As carbon dioxide freezes over the poles of Mars in winter, it lowers the air pressure across the planet, likewise increasing the air pressure when the gas evaporates during spring and summer. In response two of the other gases which make up the atmosphere on Mars, nitrogen and argon, follow predictable seasonal patterns, ‘waxing and waning’ relative to how much carbon dioxide is in the air. Oxygen however appears to be following no such pattern. Instead, each spring, the concentration of oxygen measured at the Gale crater is rising unexpectedly by as much as 30%, a phenomenon that one researcher – part of a team that has just published a paper on the topic in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets – has described as ‘mind boggling’.

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The week brought devastating floods to Venice and raging bushfires across Queensland and New South Wales. Venetians woke on Wednesday to the highest tides in fifty years, with the water mark reaching 1.87 meters late on Tuesday, the highest level since 1966 and the second highest since records began in 1923. More than 85% of Venice was flooded, including shops and hotels and the iconic St Mark’s Square, and two people died as rain lashed down on the city. Meanwhile massive bushfires ravaged Queensland and New South Wales, with the authorities warning that worse is still to come as Australia heads into the summer season. Already six people have died, 476 homes have been destroyed, and more than a million hectares have burned since the start of the bushfire season in New South Wales in September.

Venetians condemned delays to the MOSE barrier protection system and commentators bemoaned rampant tourism. But with these environmental crises coming just weeks after the well-publicised Kincade Fire, which now stands as the largest wildfire on record in Sonoma County, California, burning through more than 30,000 hectares and causing widespread evacuations before finally being contained, the authorities and scientists alike were united in pointing to the impact of climate change. Just a couple of weeks ago, more than 11,000 scientists were signatories to research published in the journal BioScience which declared ‘clearly and unequivocally that planet Earth is facing a climate emergency’.

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The relationship between Netflix and Eddie Murphy has been heating up in recent months, first with his appearance on Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee and related tie-ins, then with the biographical comedy film Dolemite Is My Name and rumours of a lucrative new stand-up special. Now Netflix has acquired the rights to the fourth installment of Beverly Hills Cop, in a one-time licensing agreement with Paramount which will see Murphy star and producer Jerry Bruckheimer also on board. The agreement contains an option for a further sequel, and follows distribution deals between Paramount and Netflix for The Cloverfield Paradox and the critically acclaimed science fiction drama Annihilation, both in 2018. Netflix will help build Beverly Hills Cop IV from the ground up, while Paramount retains the rights to the Coming to America sequel, which is scheduled for a late 2020 release.

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In the days after a fire destroyed the spire and roof of Notre-Dame, the French Prime Minister Édouard Philippe appointed Jean-Louis Georgelin, an army general and former Chief of the Defence Staff, as the head of a special mission tasked with overseeing the cathedral’s reconstruction. That set the scene for months of dispute over the length and nature of the reconstruction project, which came to a head on Thursday as Georgelin told a shocked cultural affairs committee that Philippe Villeneuve, Notre-Dame’s chief architect since 2013, should ‘shut his mouth’ after voicing concerns over plans to modernise the spire’s appearance.

Just as Georgelin was appointed in the immediate aftermath of the fire, at the same time Prime Minister Philippe announced an international architectural competition, seeking designs for the reconstruction of the spire. Philippe said that the new spire would be ‘suited to the techniques and challenges of our time’, and a flurry of designers submitted their proposals. Then in July, after outcry from heritage experts and fierce debate in the French parliament, finally a law was passed by parliament which vowed to ‘preserve the historic, artistic, and architectural interest of the monument’. This law was taken by some to indicate that Notre-Dame, spire and all, would have to be rebuilt exactly as before, but Georgelin remained in charge of the project, and backed by President Emmanuel Macron, who has suggested that he is open to a ‘contemporary architectural gesture’, Georgelin continues to espouse a modern solution.

Widely criticised for the haste of the government’s response, Macron has stated that he wants Notre-Dame rebuilt within five years, a target which architects and academics have described as ‘unrealistic’. Villeneuve maintains that for both aesthetic and practical reasons, the spire must be built precisely as it was, adding ‘Either I restore it identically, it will be me, or they make a contemporary spire and it will be someone else’. In the meantime Notre-Dame remains enclosed in scaffolding and plastic, but a billion euros have been pledged to the reconstruction project.

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Qualifying for Euro 2020 reached its climax over the weekend, as a spate of teams confirmed their qualification for the finals next summer. Among them for the very first time was Finland, whose 3-0 victory over Liechtenstein in Helsinki on Friday night saw them guarantee a second-placed finish in Group J, and qualification behind Italy as group runners-up. The goals came from Jasse Tuominen and Teemu Pukki, his second of the night delivered from the penalty spot, and provoked passionate celebrations across the country: this is Finland’s first qualification for any major international football tournament.

That wasn’t the only momentous occasion in the usually workaday Finnish week: earlier they’d managed to cram a record number of nationalities into a sauna in Suomenlinna, with people from 101 countries enduring the heat. Euro 2020 will take place across twelve European cities, a ‘romantic’ gesture to celebrate the sixtieth anniversary of the tournament. London, Munich, Baku, Saint Petersburg, Rome, Copenhagen, Bucharest, Amsterdam, Dublin, Bilbao, Budapest, and Glasgow will host the matches as twenty-four sides meet in the group stage of the tournament, with Wembley Stadium in London allocated the semis and final.

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Harrison Dillard, one of the star track and field athletes of the 1940s, died from stomach cancer on Friday at the age of 96. Dillard remains the only man to have won Olympic gold over both the 100 metres and the 110 metres hurdles, and at the time of his death he was the oldest winning Olympian in the United States. Heading into the US Olympic Trials in Evanston, Illinois in early July 1948, Dillard was hoping for success in the 110 metres hurdles, his favoured event. It’s a perilous undertaking even for the best of athletes however, and he crashed out of the final, though he did manage to qualify for the Olympics when he finished third in the trials over 100 metres.

At the 1948 Summer Olympics in London the following month, Dillard edged out his compatriot Barney Ewell to take the gold medal in the sport’s prestige event. An unlikely champion over the flat distance, Dillard ran in the outside lane, and Ewell – who ran in the middle of the track – celebrated with his arms aloft before nascent photo technology showed that Dillard was the victor, in a time of 10.3 seconds, equalling Jesse Owens’ Olympic Record. Four years later in Helsinki, Dillard did manage gold in the 110 metres hurdles, almost inseparable from Jack Davis who finished with the same time in second place. At both Olympics, the United States triumphed in the 4 x 100 metres relay, giving Harrison a grand total of four Olympic golds. In later life he worked as a radio host and in scouting and public relations for the Cleveland Indians, in the hometown where he remained.

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The British photographer Terry O’Neill died on Saturday after a long illness. He was 81 years old, and had prostate cancer. A chance encounter with a sleeping Home Secretary, Rab Butler, while O’Neill worked in a photographic unit at Heathrow Airport gave the young photographer his break, and by the early 1960s he was taking some of the first popular images of The Beatles and The Rolling Stones. O’Neill would subsequently photograph iconic portraits of artists and world figures including a Diamond Dogs-era David Bowie, Faye Dunaway who subsequently became his second wife, Frank Sinatra, Brigitte Bardot, Queen Elizabeth, and Nelson Mandela. In 2011, O’Neill was awarded the Royal Photographic Society Centenary Medal, and in 2016 he published the book and starred in the accompanying exhibition Breaking Stones.

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In a tweet on Sunday replete with gold engraving, Kanye West announced his first opera, entitled Nebuchadnezzar after the famed Babylonian king. The real Nebuchadnezzar was the longest-reigning and most powerful monarch of the Neo-Babylonian Empire, depicted in the Bible as the oppressor of Judah and the destroyer of Solomon’s Temple, before he suffers madness and on regaining his sanity exalts and glorifies God. The analogy between him and West is one Kanye has made before: during last month’s Beats 1 interview with Zane Lowe, prior to the release of Jesus Is King, Kanye said “[God] is saying, let me take this Nebuchadnezzar-type character – Nebuchadnezzar was the king of Babylon, and he looked at his entire kingdom and said, ‘I did this’. I stood on the top of the mountain talking about Yeezus, saying ‘I’m a God’, I had a guy dressed as Jesus”.

As the Nick Knight-designed artwork indicates, Kanye West’s opera will be directed by his longtime collaborator, the Italian performance artist Vanessa Beecroft. Music will come courtesy of Kanye’s Sunday Service group plus Peter Collins & Infinities Song, and the opera will show at the Hollywood Bowl, Los Angeles on 24 November. Tickets go on sale from Monday.

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The ATP Finals took place this week from their usual home of the O2 Arena in London: not quite a fond farewell, as having hosted the event since 2009, Londoners can still look forward to next year before the end-of-season climax moves to Turin from 2021. Rather than simply bringing down the curtain on a long tennis season, the ATP Finals – the biggest event in men’s tennis, with the biggest prize money, outside of the four Grand Slams – usually provides fireworks all of its own, and this year was no exception with a tournament full of surprises and upsets.

There were schemes and intrigues too, around the battle for the year-end world number one ranking between Rafa Nadal and Novak Djokovic, and with the tournament set to host clashes between members of a younger generation who often struggle to get along quite as well as their older, more illustrious contemporaries. Stefanos Tsitsipas has called Daniil Medvedev ‘boring’ amid a hotly-contested losing streak versus the Russian, and while Alexander Zverev disputes that suggestion his own relationship with Tsitsipas has been tetchy at best. The three players – including Zverev as defending champion – were drawn alongside Nadal in Group Andre Agassi of the ATP Finals, while Djokovic was put together with Roger Federer, Dominic Thiem, and Matteo Berrettini in Group Björn Borg.

Federer, the six-time champion, fell to a 5-7, 5-7 defeat against Thiem in the first match of the finals, and when five-time champion Djokovic suffered much the same fate, he and Federer were left to face off to settle the matter of group qualification. Federer’s 6-4, 6-3 victory saw him progress at Djokovic’s expense, and confirmed Nadal’s world number one ranking, as he became the oldest player in tour history to claim the season-ending accolade and was honoured at the end of the week. That was despite Nadal’s own exit from the tournament in the group stage, as close three-set victories over Medvedev and Tsitsipas proved insufficient to overcome an opening loss. After beating Nadal, Alexander Zverev improved on a lacklustre performance against Tsitsipas by besting Medvedev in the final match of the group to send Nadal packing, despite Rafa, Zverev, and Tsitsipas sharing two victories and one defeat.

The semi-finals saw relatively straightforward two-set victories for Tsitsipas against Federer and for Thiem against Zverev. Then in the final, Tsitsipas came from a set down to beat Thiem 6-7 (6-8), 6-2, 7-6 (7-4). The twenty-one year old’s fourth career title and by far his most prestigious to date, after a week which brought marquee victories over Federer and Thiem and his first triumph over Medvedev, Tsitsipas celebrated while envisioning future Grand Slam success.