Cultureteca 22.03.20

As COVID-19 put the world under lockdown, at the start of the week global cases of coronavirus surpassed those in the former epicentre of China, as the worldwide total beyond China reached 87,000 and cases within the country at 80,860 remained relatively stagnant. While the government in the United Kingdom set out broad guidelines on social distancing, advising people to avoid pubs, clubs, and theatres and to work from home as a new study shifted the focus from mitigation to suppression of the virus, governments in France and Germany went further by imposing effective lockdowns, closing schools, restaurants, and non-essential businesses and enforcing travel restrictions. Peru and Chile were among the Latin American countries to close borders and order curfews, and while the United States set out strict new guidelines on a federal level, six counties in the Bay Area including San Francisco issued ‘shelter in place’ orders directing people to stay home, Pennsylvania shut down non-essential businesses, and Denver closed all restaurants except for takeaway and delivery. Meanwhile stock markets plunged, as the S&P 500 in the United States dropped by 12%, eclipsing a fall of 9.5% last week which was already the worst daily performance since Black Monday back in 1987.

On Tuesday the European Union confirmed a collective closure of the bloc’s external borders for a provisional thirty days, and on Wednesday the United States – which had already halted European travel – agreed that it would suspend non-essential travel between Canada. Stock markets continued to slide, New York governor Andrew Cuomo ordered businesses to keep half their workers at home, Burkina Faso recorded the first death from the virus in sub-Saharan Africa, and cultural events including Glastonbury and the Eurovision Song Contest found themselves next in line to be cancelled. On Thursday some upbeat news from China, which recorded no new domestic cases for the first time since the beginning of the outbreak, was eclipsed by the rising toll in Italy, which took a distressing lead on the world stage now with 3,405 total fatalities. Argentina announced a mandatory quarantine, restricting people to their homes as part of the most extensive lockdown in Latin America, and cultural events continued to fall with the postponement of the Cannes film festival, but potential new treatments and plummeting pollution levels offered dimmed silver linings.

By Friday morning, California governor Gaving Newsom had issued a statewide stay at home order, Illinois told its citizens to shelter in place, and the United Kingdom followed much of continental Europe in closing pubs and restaurants. Italy and Spain registered their highest single-day death totals, with 627 and 235 new deaths respectively, as Italy closed parks and called in military assistance as the number of new cases hit 5,986. The worldwide death toll had now exceeded 10,000, but there was no respite over the weekend as Italy recorded a staggering 793 deaths in one twenty-four hour period, and daily deaths in Spain surged beyond 300. Despite the stringent measures and technological assistance widely praised for controlling the spread of the virus in Asia, cases crept up in places like Hong Kong, Singapore, and South Korea. Australia closed beaches as cases breached 1,000, while Colombia and later Bolivia followed Argentina by enforcing nationwide quarantine measures.

Spain extended its state of alarm, Greece announced an impending lockdown, and stricter measures ensued in Lombardy, which banned exercise outdoors, even as the daily death total at least subsided across Italy. In Germany Angela Merkel announced a ban on gatherings of more than two people, before the chancellor isolated herself after learning that she had received a pneumonia vaccination from a doctor now carrying the coronavirus infection. Australia opted to close pubs, clubs, cinemas, gyms, and places of worship, Singapore barred short-term visitors, and India followed up on a voluntary fourteen-hour curfew with wider lockdown measures extending until the end of the month. Lockdowns and flight bans also started to take hold in Africa, as countries recorded their first cases of the virus and infections across the continent topped 1,000. The first two cases of COVID-19 were reported in Gaza, numbers climbed in Israel, and in Iran – still the country with the third-most fatalities after China and Italy – the death tally reached 1,685. By the end of the week, cases of coronavirus had passed 300,000 with more than 13,000 deaths around the world.

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Amid global lockdown, with the cancellation of major sports and music tours and the shuttering of concert halls, soundstages, and theatres, still positive stories emerged from between the clouds of coronavirus. The Metropolitan Opera in New York City began streaming free nightly encore presentations, featuring the world’s best opera singers from fourteen years of Live in HD. Living Room Concerts and Stars In The House brought Broadway to the small screen. Jazz at Lincoln Center began curating daily live jazz, the Melbourne Symphony Orchestra streamed out Rimsky-Korsakov’s Scheherazade from an empty Hamer Hall, and the Berliner Philharmoniker opened up its vast catalogue of digital concerts. Meanwhile in the realm of popular music, Pitchfork began an ‘Isolation Check-In’ of live streams and playlists, while Zola Jesus, Devon Welsh, and web developer Erik Zuuring founded Koir as a new platform to support digital performances beyond the mainstream. Concerns remained around the economic proposition, but Bandcamp played its part on Friday by waiving its revenue share to give more money directly to artists. Labels including Dead Oceans, Merge, Sacred Bones, and Hyperdub followed suit.

NFL Game Pass and NBA League Pass began offering periods of free access, to classic games and documentary films. Gyms and yoga studios rolled out online exercise classes, so that people under quarantine could remain hale of health from their homes. In England, Wales, and Northern Ireland, the National Trust opened up its parks and gardens, but beat a hasty retreat when guidelines changed over the weekend. With cinema drapes drawn and popcorn machines saltless, movies like Birds of Prey, Downhill, and The Invisible Man made the early move to streaming services. And acclaimed actresses Amy Adams and Jennifer Garner joined with the education company Scholastic to launch #SAVEWITHSTORIES, in which celebrities read children’s books while hoping to drive donations to Save the Children and Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry.

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If theatre and filmmaking exited stage left, festivals lost their backstage pass, and live performance venues dropped the mic, the world of sport also clattered into the hurdle of coronavirus. The 2020 UEFA European Football Championships were postponed by a year, prompting a potential clash with the Women’s European Championships, the Nations League, and the European Under-21 Championships. To the consternation of players and schedulers alike, the Fédération Française de Tennis took a unilateral decision to delay the French Open until September, a wicked slice into the backcourt of the US Open and the Laver Cup, which take place in the same period. In golf the PGA Championship followed the Masters into the rough, placed on indefinite hiatus. Somewhat implausibly, both Shinzo Abe and the government of Japan and Thomas Bach at the International Olympic Committee reiterated their support for the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics, beyond the appeals of several athletes, as the Olympic torch touched down on Japanese soil in Higashi-Matsushima. More robust still was WWE, which confirmed that WrestleMania 36 would not take place in Tampa Bay as planned, while switching the showcase event for the company’s performance center in Orlando.

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After twenty years and six Super Bowl rings, including four Super Bowl MVP awards and three seasons as the NFL’s Most Valuable Player, on Tuesday via Instagram Tom Brady announced that he was set to leave the New England Patriots. The most successful player in the history of the NFL, commonly referred to as the greatest quarterback of all time, noted for a partnership with head coach Bill Belichick that brought unprecedented success as well as repeated accusations of skulduggery, for the first time since he joined the Patriots in 2000 in the sixth round of the draft, Brady was an unrestricted free agent and could not come to terms on a new contract. In a couple of Instagram posts, Brady thanked Belichick, team owner Robert Kraft, his fellow players and the Patriots fans, adding ‘my football journey will take place elsewhere’. By Friday Brady had signed for the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, on a two-year deal worth a guaranteed $50 million.

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On Wednesday Playboy magazine, repository of men’s lifestyle and entertainment, pored over by academics for its short stories, interviews, and cartoons, vaunted archive of the best in twentieth-century breasts if only the pages weren’t all stuck together, announced that owing to the disruption caused by coronavirus, the Spring 2020 issue of the magazine will be the final quarterly print publication. Playboy will focus on digital publishing for the remainder of 2020, incorporating the Playboy Interview and Playmate pictorials, before returning to print in 2021 with one-off special editions. Founded by Hugh Hefner in 1953, and carrying short stories by authors including Vladimir Nabokov, Arthur C. Clarke, Haruki Murakami, and Margaret Atwood alongside its pictorials and interviews with major public figures, Playboy existed as a monthly publication until 2017, when dwindling circulation spurred a switch to bi-monthly and later quarterly publication.

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The death of Danny Ray Thompson was announced this week, for five decades a cornerstone of Sun Ra’s Arkestra as the cosmic jazz ensemble’s baritone saxophone player. Thompson died in Philadelphia on 12 March at the age of seventy-two years old. Born in New York City, Thompson spent his childhood in Los Angeles, where his mother Elgie was an interior designer while his father Oscar Leonard worked as a research scientist after becoming the first black graduate from the University of Texas. ‘Pico’ returned to Harlem after high school, and enrolled in night classes at the Juilliard School of performing arts, before beginning his music career under the auspices of the Nigerian drummer Babatunde Olatunji. Through Olatunji, Thompson met the saxophonist Marshall Allen, who introduced him to Sun Ra, leading Thompson to join the Arkestra as saxophonist and flutist in 1967. His first performances with the Arkestra took place at Carnegie Hall in April 1968, and he made his recording debut the following year on the album Atlantis.

Thompson followed Sun Ra and the Arkestra to Philadelphia, where he became integral to the ensemble’s sound while also briefly operating the Pharaoh’s Den, a convenience store and art space in the city’s Germantown neighbourhood. By the beginning of the 1980s, Thompson was also serving as the Arkestra’s tour and business manager. In the 1990s he took a leave of absence from the band, which continued to perform after Sun Ra’s death in 1993, but by the early 2000s he had returned as the ensemble advanced its founder’s legacy. In 2014, Thompson was part of the Sun Ra centennial celebration at Berklee College of Music, and in 2019, he released Ceremonial Healing, a ten-track avant-garde jazz album alongside Marshall Allen, Jamie Saft, Trevor Dunn, Roswell Rudd, and Balazs Pandi. The Arkestra, currently led by Allen, posted a message on their website confirming ‘Danny Ray Thompson has left the planet’.

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Country music legend Kenny Rogers died of natural causes on Friday at the age of eighty-one. Beloved by audiences for his husky voice and polished take on some of the rough-hewn tropes of country rock, Rogers was responsible for a string of crossover hits after embarking on a solo career in the middle of the 1970s, eventually becoming one of popular music’s best-selling artists with more than 200 weeks atop the album charts in the United States and over 100 million records sold worldwide. Nourished on country music as the fourth of eight children growing up in Houston, Texas, Rogers dabbled in doo-wop and teenage rock and roll, joined a jazz trio the Bobby Doyle Three, and played double bass for The New Christy Minstrels before he and several of his bandmates left that roving troupe of folk revivalists to form The First Edition. Playing bass guitar and singing lead vocals, Rogers scored his first hit with The First Edition when ‘Just Dropped In (To See What Condition My Condition Was In)’ climbed to number five on the Billboard Hot 100 in the autumn of 1967. A psychedelic detour for a band that mined the sounds of the period, from jangle pop and country to songs with a little more swagger and funk, ‘Just Dropped In…’ would become an iconic part of the dream sequence in The Big Lebowski, while back in 1967 it landed the band their first national television appearance on The Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

As the eclecticism of The First Edition saw diminishing returns, in 1976 Rogers signed a solo deal with United Artists. Success came swiftly, as at the beginning of 1977 ‘Lucille’, from his second solo album Kenny Rogers, reached number one on the Billboard country chart and number five on the Billboard Hot 100, establishing Rogers as a crossover star. ‘Lucille’ became an international bestseller and notched Rogers his first Grammy Award for Best Male Country Vocal Performance. Working alongside the producer Larry Butler, a slew of country hits ensued, including ‘The Gambler’, an aphoristic card tale about knowing when to hold and fold which became Rogers’ signature song, ‘She Believes in Me’, ‘Coward of the County’, and ‘Lady’, written and produced by Lionel Richie and providing Rogers with his first Billboard Hot 100 number one. Now distinguished by sleek balladry in addition to his neatly trimmed beard, fruitful collaborations with Dottie West, Kim Carnes, and Sheena Easton preceded in 1983 the major triumph ‘Islands in the Stream’. A duet with Dolly Parton, from the album Eyes That See in the Dark which was helmed by the Bee Gees’ Barry Gibb, ‘Islands in the Stream’ gave Rogers and Parton their second domestic number ones. At the same time Rogers became a familiar face on television, with a string of minor Westerns loosely based on ‘The Gambler’, an appearance on The Muppet Show, and the comedy Six Pack as he made a winning transition to the big screen.

A household name, Rogers won his final Grammy Award in 1987 for the duet ‘Make No Mistake, She’s Mine’ with Ronnie Milsap, and as the hits dried up he turned towards commercial interests. In 1991 he established Kenny Rogers Roasters, a frequently spoofed chain of chicken restaurants, and lent his name to the Sprint car racing manufacturer Gambler Chassis Co. Musically he recorded jazz standards and an album of consumer selections that was released exclusively on QVC. At the end of the 90s, he returned to number one on the country charts with ‘Buy Me a Rose’, featuring Alison Krauss and Billy Dean. Rogers continued to sell records at a steady pace through a string of greatest hits packages. His final single was the duet with Dolly Parton ‘You Can’t Make Old Friends’. In 2013 he performed a well-received set at Glastonbury and was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame, and in 2015 he announced a farewell tour The Gambler’s Last Deal. Before ill health caused an early retirement, Rogers saw ‘The Gambler’ selected for preservation by the Library of Congress, while an all-star concert in Nashville in October 2017 saw him surrounded by longtime collaborators and admirers including Dolly Parton, Lionel Richie, Don Henley, Alison Krauss, Kris Kristofferson, Chris Stapleton, Little Big Town, and the Flaming Lips.

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Inaugurated by UNESCO in 1999 – switching the date from the anniversary of the Roman poet Virgil’s birth on 15 October, which had served as a de facto day of celebration in the United States and beyond – 21 March is World Poetry Day. The proclamation of the day carried with it noble goals, meant to ‘encourage a return to the oral traditions of poetry’, to foster teachings, publications, and recitals, to restore a dialogue between poetry and its fellow arts, and to support linguistic diversity while offering endangered languages new voice. This year’s iteration of World Poetry Day saw the usual recognition of great lines and social themes, with the added twist of social distancing during coronavirus. Meanwhile UNICEF launched the Poems for Peace initiative, with young people living in conflict zones around the world sharing their poetry in a call for awareness and resolution. Reading their poems were youngsters from Afghanistan, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Iraq, Mali, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, Ukraine, and Yemen.