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Entertainment

‘Annette’ Evaluate: Love Hurts – The New York Occasions

‘Annette’ Review: Love Hurts - The New York Times

“Annette” is a musical about the unfortunate romance between two artists, a description that suggests an obvious relationship with “La La Land” and “A Star is Born”. Not for playing algorithms or anything, but if you enjoyed these movies, you will probably like this one too.

Or maybe not. While more or less part of the enduring genre of the backstage musical, “Annette” aims to be something darker and stranger than yet another fearful melodrama about the entanglements of ambition and love. It has some modern operas in its DNA – a garish strand of violence, madness and demonic passion that is reminiscent of Vienna or Berlin before World War II as well as classic Hollywood. Instead of breaking out into song or dance at appropriate moments, the characters pour their tortured consciousness through lyrics that are never as simple as they sound.

“We love each other so much.” That’s the chorus that stays in your head when you look at the tragic story of Henry McHenry (Adam Driver) and Ann Defrasnoux (Marion Cotillard), a performance artist and opera soprano whose marriage is catnip to the tabloid media . Their love is the premise of the film and its central dramatic problem. It’s also a red herring in a way. The sexual bliss and emotional relationship that fill the first act give way to anger and alienation, but this isn’t just a love story with a sad ending. It is more of a case study, a critique of romantic mythology on which its appeal seems to depend.

“Annette” is a collaboration between Ron and Russell Mael – better known as the long-lived, pigeonhole band Sparks – and director Leos Carax. “Annette” begins with an overture in the key of anti-realism. The Mael brothers who wrote both the script and the songs are in the recording studio. Carax and his daughter Nastya are sitting behind the mixer. The cast and crew take to the streets, and Driver and Cotillard slowly get drawn into their characters. He puts on a flowing dark wig and then a motorcycle helmet. She gets into a black SUV. You are now Henry and Ann. The boundary between artificiality and reality is clearly marked for us; for these two it will be blurry, permeable, and treacherous.

Carax, whose feverishly imaginative features include “Pola X” and “Holy Motors”, has never used the naturalism that most filmmakers use as a guide. The world of “Annette” has some familiar place names (including Tokyo, London and Rio, although most of it is set in Los Angeles), but it is a land beyond the literal, a product of set design, dream logic and hallucinatory expressionism. The fact that the characters sing more than they talk – even during sex – is in some ways the least weird thing about the film, which casts a series of mechanical puppets in the title role.

Annette is the name of Ann and Henry’s daughter, and to explain her centrality to the narrative, one could risk a spoiler or two. Not that the plot is terribly complicated or surprising; it unfolds with the relentless dynamic of a nightmare. First comes love, then marriage, then Annette comes in the stroller. What follows is drunkenness and murder; Shipwreck, ghosts and guilt.

But let’s go back to the beginning, Henry and Ann in their mutual enchantment. While everyone has a thriving career, it is Henry who gets the most attention. It’s partly charisma, partly narcissism and completely in line with his identity as an artist. He is the star and writer of “The Ape of God,” a one-man show (with backing singers) that deals with the kind of bellicose self-expression that popular culture sometimes confuses with honesty.

Henry storms onto the stage in a hooded bathrobe that opens to reveal tight boxer shorts and an impressively sculpted torso, preaching to the audience with intimate, often disgusting confessions. Shame and bravery are the changing currents of his deed, tensed by a hyper-articulate, cynical self-confidence. The audience laughs even though Henry isn’t telling jokes, but rather challenges the public to take his aggression seriously.

Is he an internal critic of toxic masculinity, or an exceptionally attractive example of it? That may be a distinction without a distinction. With Henry, as with some of his hypothetical real-life analogies, it is difficult to separate art from artist because the defiance of such a separation is the whole point of his art.

Ann is a different kind of artist and a less insistent presence in film. She seems at times to step back in the shadow of her husband’s larger, purer personality. This can seem like a failure of the filmmakers’ imagination, who portray them as the object of Henry’s lust, jealousy, and resentment rather than a creative force in its own right. She has more in common with the Cotillard characters in “Public Enemies” and “Inception” than with those in “Rust and Bone” or “La Vie en Rose”.

This imbalance turns out to be crucial in this film’s indictment of the cruelty excused in the name of the genius, his relentless dissection of masculine claims. This is less of a love story than a monster movie about a man unable to grasp the full reality of other people including his own wife and child. (The “not all men” objection is embodied by Simon Helberg, who plays a conductor who is Henry’s occasional rival for Ann’s affection.) The consequences are fatal, and the final reckoning is as devastating as anything I’ve come across in a recent one Saw the movie. musical or not.

Driver, whose so far best roles as restless men in the theater were (see also “Girls” and “Marriage Story”), wasted no energy to make Henry sympathetic or to exaggerate his villains. Instead, he’s completely believable, not because you understand Henry’s psychological makeup, but precisely because you can’t. His megalomania distorts everything. He’s not larger than life, but he thinks he is, and Driver’s performance perfectly matches that contradiction.

“Annette” masters her own paradoxes. It’s a highly cerebral, formally complex film about unbridled emotions. A work of art that is driven by a skepticism about where art comes from and why we value it the way we do. A fantastic film that challenges some of our culture’s most cherished fantasies. Totally unreal and absolutely true.

Annette
Rated R for Sturm und Drang. Running time: 2 hours 19 minutes. In theaters. On Amazon, August 20.

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Entertainment

‘Can I Really Sing?’ Meet New York Metropolis Ballet’s Songbird

‘Can I Actually Sing?’ Meet New York City Ballet’s Songbird

Before the pandemic, Clara Miller had a secret that she kept from her dance world at the New York City Ballet. Well the caretakers knew.

After dance performances, she went to empty studios to rehearse. But she didn’t dance. Armed with her voice and a piano, she wrote and sang songs – sometimes, she remembered, she didn’t raise her voice above a whisper.

Cover songs were also part of her repertoire. Once she used a rehearsal piano on the stage of the David H. Koch Theater and sang “Dancing in the Dark” in front of an empty house. “It felt like I was playing for an audience of ghosts,” she said in a recent Zoom interview.

She often made videos of herself performing; she didn’t know how to write down her compositions. But one question remained: “I would listen and say, ‘Does my brain only hear my voice?'” She said. “‘Or am I really bad and just don’t hear it? Can I actually sing? ‘”

“It was like my hidden, secret little passion,” she added, “that I didn’t want to share with anyone until I figured it out.”

She found out. She can sing.

Miller, 25 and a member of City Ballet since 2015, specializes in a mixture of indie folk and indie rock, with a voice – pleading, ethereal, elated – that hovers in a space of vulnerability. It feels exposed and tender, but there is also an underlying trust: she knows she is giving out secrets. “Oath”, their debut EP, was released this month. On Friday she will perform at Bitter End. (She has recorded and appears under the nickname Clanklin, but will begin to use her full name.)

Her songs don’t ignore the trauma she experienced, especially her difficult relationship with her father growing up – it’s better now – but they also deal with lighter subjects, like an unrequited crush.

She calls Phoebe Bridgers her queen – “Women save music,” she said – but she also loves Lucy Dacus, who founded the Boygenius group with Bridgers and Julien Baker, Fiona Apple, Samia and Soccer Mommy. “And I’m always a fan of Stevie Nicks,” Miller said with big and serious blue eyes. “I have her photo on my bathroom wall. She is everything. “

Miller recently released a video of the first track, “Graveyard,” which was filmed in Green-Wood Cemetery by Devin Alberda, a member of the City Ballet. Miller calls Alberda – who has also explored another type of art as a photographer – her mentor. (Wendy Whelan, the company’s assistant artistic director, republished the video, calling Miller “City Ballet’s own songbird.”)

Miller and Alberda became close friends during the pandemic. “She writes these songs for herself,” he said, “and we’re lucky enough to hear her and see her transform through them.”

Alberda added that he was impressed with “the empathy, tenderness and emotional maturity she can bring to her approach to life – she has gone through more physical trauma than almost anyone I know. I don’t know anyone who has had their backs opened twice. “

Miller had two spinal surgeries – vertebral body tethering – to correct idiopathic scoliosis. The second occurred in October 2020; She knew the pandemic would give her ample recovery time. (The cover of their EP shows an x-ray of her spine.) In 2016, tethers were used to straighten her spine. But instead of giving her body enough time to acclimate, she returned to dancing too quickly.

The tethers broke, “and my spine got curved again,” she said. “So they went in and fixed the tethers from the first operation and then they put on a whole different set of tethers and I was like, OK, I have to come back slowly.”

She released her first single “Old Car” from her hospital bed, where she had to stay for 10 days. “Songwriting was the only opportunity I had and I really appreciate that,” Miller said. “If I can’t dance, I have to express myself somehow, otherwise I will feel sick.”

As a musician, she is basically self-taught. As a high school student, she took piano lessons at the City Ballet-affiliated School of American Ballet, but taught herself to play guitar – she called it her first 18th birthday gift, Stevie – along with the ukulele, banjo, and the drums .

Learning covers served one purpose: it taught them how to perform. (“Oath” shows her take on Bob Dylan’s “One Too Many Mornings”.)

“It’s like learning a ballet variation and looking at old tapes of ballet dancers and trying to copy some of their artistic moments,” she said. “I just played the songs I loved on the piano. And occasionally a caretaker would come in and I was just about to buckle up and I got so shy. “

When the pandemic broke out, Miller was working from her loft on the Upper West Side, where guitars hang from a brick wall and drums sit on the side. In the early days, she had an inverted sleep cycle, going to bed at 8:00 a.m. and waking up at 4:00 p.m. It was the first time in her life that she didn’t have a strict schedule.

“I started playing the drums at 11pm,” she said, “and my poor neighbor came to my door and said, ‘Please stop.’ So I had to stop. “

What she has really tested in the last year and a half are her limits – both in terms of her dancing and musical self as well as her physical and mental health. Her relationships with several Juilliard alumni – friends who played a role in her musical development – helped. (Along with Steven Robertson, who shares the show with her at Bitter End, some of these friends, the “quarantine crew,” as she calls them, will be performing with her.)

After a period of depression, she was diagnosed with bipolar disorder and started taking medication, which made a real difference. “I had so much more access to my artistic voice because I was more stable,” she said. “And then writing just blossomed and when I wrote all of my EPs, that was from January to March.”

But Miller, who has regular sessions with her physical therapist and takes classes at City Ballet, has no plans to stop dancing, which she called her deepest love. “To me, dancing means becoming one with the music, just like making music,” she said. “For me, it’s all about the music.”

Before the pandemic, she found she danced more freely; she didn’t hold back. “Now I am rediscovering the same lesson with music,” she said. “Even the release of my album was a huge, huge public demonstration that I was nervous about – it’s a very illuminating thing. But at the end of the day my whole thing is, I never want to do anything out of fear. Just let it out. “

Busking, mainly in the Times Square subway station and Washington Square Park, was an important teacher. “The first time I played in Times Square, I was sweating all over my body like I was trembling,” Miller said. “I just thought, okay, you have to do this. And the people were so supportive. They took photos and videos and were just so cute. It helped me overcome stage fright. “

As a young dancer, she danced for years – modestly, as she emphasized – for a tiny audience and in competitions on concrete, where, as she laughed, “everything was kind of nonsense”.

Similarly, street musicians are about paying their dues. “I like the feeling of being humiliated and getting back to my roots,” she said. “It was definitely a test of my courage and my ability not to mumble. Sometimes I sing so softly. I mean, now I’m bringing a microphone because I just have to or people wouldn’t hear me. Yes, the microphone is necessary. “

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Politics

Russia Bans Bard School – The New York Occasions

Russia Bans Bard College - The New York Times

Michael C. Kimmage, a former State Department official who specializes in US-Russian relations, said the bard action sent a terrifying message to academics.

“I can’t think of a responsible administrator at an American college or exchange program who doesn’t take this seriously and is concerned,” said Dr. Kimmage, now professor at the Catholic University of America in Washington.

Russia has taken several steps to reduce educational exchanges between the two countries, despite trying to establish educational partnerships elsewhere and improve the quality of its domestic public universities.

In 2014, the Russian government withdrew from the Future Leaders Exchange program, a US State Department-funded initiative to promote US study by foreign high school students, after a Russian teenager studying in Michigan sought political asylum had. More recently, limited consulate services have made it difficult for Russian students to obtain a visa to study in the United States.

Suspicions have also increased in the USA. In 2019, a program at the American University in Washington was criticized as being too soft on Russia, and the Russian ambassador, Anatoly Antonov, accused the US news media of Russophobia while calling for increased cultural exchange between the countries.

Several American universities set up programs in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, but some of them have closed in recent years. In 2018, Stanford University announced that it was suspending its Russian study abroad programs, citing security issues. That same year, Clark University in Worcester, Massachusetts began phasing out its program at Astrakhan State University in Astrakhan, Russia, citing the cost and difficulty of managing its program from the United States as reasons.

The decline may be largely symbolic, indicative of the deterioration in relations between countries. Russia has never been a major partner in international study programs with the United States and ranks low on the list of countries whose students come to the United States. And according to the Institute of International Education, the number of Americans studying abroad in Russia fell to 1,305 in 2019, and data is available for the last year, from 1,827 in 2011.

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Health

New York Metropolis’s Vaccine Passport Plan Renews On-line Privateness Debate

New York City’s Vaccine Passport Plan Renews Online Privacy Debate

When New York City announced on Tuesday that people will soon have to show evidence of at least one coronavirus vaccine to get into businesses, Mayor Bill de Blasio said the system was “simple – just show it and you’re in”.

The data protection debate, which rekindled the city, was less straightforward.

Vaccination records showing proof of vaccination, often in electronic form such as an app, are the foundation of Mr de Blasio’s plan. For months, these records – also known as health cards or digital health certificates – have been discussed around the world in order to provide a safe gathering for vaccinated people who are less at risk from the virus. New York will be the first U.S. city to include these passports in a vaccine mandate, and potentially trigger similar actions elsewhere.

But mainstreaming those credentials could also usher in an era of increasing digital surveillance, privacy researchers said. This is because vaccine passports can allow location tracking, although there are few rules about how people’s digital vaccine data can be stored and shared. While existing data protection laws restrict the exchange of information between medical providers, there is no such rule for uploading your own data to an app.

The moment is reminiscent of the months after the September 11, 2001 attacks, said privacy advocates. Back then, changes in the name of national security had lasting effects, including taking off shoes at airports and the data collection made possible by the Patriot Act.

Without security, presenting a digital vaccination record every time people enter a public place could result in a “global map of the people,” said Allie Bohm, a political advisor to the New York Civil Liberties Union. The information could be used for profit by third parties or disclosed to law enforcement or immigration authorities, she said.

“How do we make sure that in 20 years we won’t say, ‘Well, there was Covid, so now I have this passport on my cell phone, which is also my driver’s license and also all the health records I have ever had? and every time I go to a store, do I have to leaf through it? ‘”said Ms. Boehm.

She added that the passports could particularly disadvantage groups who are more concerned about privacy, including those without papers. The New York Civil Liberties Union and other advocacy groups have supported laws to prevent vaccination records from being shared with law enforcement and to ensure passports don’t become permanent health trackers.

Vaccination records were introduced in the United States largely without a national framework. President Biden has ruled out a national vaccination record so that states, cities and private companies can decide if and how to have their own electronic systems to keep track of people who have been vaccinated.

Some companies that have developed digital vaccination records have tried to forestall privacy concerns. Over 200 private and public organizations recently joined the Immunization Card Initiative, a coalition aimed at standardizing the collection and protection of vaccination data.

Many developers said they went out of their way to make sure the passports didn’t break the privacy boundaries. Clear Secure, a security company that has created a health passport that is used by over 60 organizations, including many sports venues, said that its users’ health information has been “treated with the utmost care” and protected by a variety of tools. Employers or venues can only see a red or green signal that indicates whether a user has been vaccinated, it said.

The Commons Project, a non-profit organization that developed a vaccine passport called CommonPass, stores vaccine and test data on users’ phones and only temporarily uploads the information to a server to verify that a traveler meets the requirements. Airlines that have introduced CommonPass, including JetBlue and Lufthansa, can only see if a passenger has been cleared for travel, it said.

JP Pollak, a co-founder of the Commons Project, said the group’s vaccination record is “trustworthy” as users’ data has not been stored in the cloud and the passport restricts the information companies can see.

But while vaccine passports are still in the making, Covid-19 contact tracing apps that were introduced earlier in the pandemic have already been used by more authoritarian countries in a way that raises privacy issues. That gives researchers little confidence about how those vaccine passports might be used later.

For example, in China, a program called “reportInfoAndLocationToPolice” within the Alipay Health Code, used by the Chinese government to assess people’s health, sends a person’s location, city name, and identification code number to a server once the user agrees software access to personal data.

In Singapore, officials said in January that data from the country’s coronavirus contact tracing system had been used in a criminal investigation, despite leaders originally saying it was only used for contact tracing. In February, Singapore passed law restricting such use to “serious” criminal investigations.

“One of the things we don’t want is that we normalize surveillance in an emergency and we can’t get rid of it,” said Jon Callas, the director of technology projects at the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a digital rights group.

Although such incidents do not occur in the United States, researchers already see potential for a handover. Several pointed to New York City, where proof of compulsory vaccination begins August 16 and will be enforced from September 13.

For evidence, people can use their paper vaccination cards, the NYC Covid Safe app, or another app called the Excelsior Pass. The Excelsior Pass was developed by IBM under an estimated $ 17 million contract with New York State.

To receive the pass, people upload their personal information. In the standard version of the pass, companies and third parties only see the validity of the pass and the name and date of birth of the person.

On Wednesday, the state announced the “Excelsior Pass Plus”, which not only shows whether a person has been vaccinated, but also provides additional information on when and where they were vaccinated. Companies that scan Pass Plus “may have the ability to save or retain the information it contains,” according to New York State.

The Excelsior Pass also has a “Phase 2” which could include expanding the use of the app and adding more information such as personal information and other health records that companies could review upon entry.

IBM said it used blockchain technology and encryption to protect user data, but didn’t say how. The company and New York State did not respond to requests for comment.

Mr de Blasio told WNYC in April that he understands the privacy concerns surrounding the Excelsior Pass but believes it will still “play an important role”.

Some federal states and cities are proceeding cautiously for the time being. More than a dozen states, including Arizona, Florida, and Texas, have announced bans on vaccination records in the past few months. The mayors of San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Seattle also said they would hold back on passport programs.

Some groups of companies and companies that have introduced vaccine passports said the privacy concerns were legitimate but addressable.

Airlines for America, an industrial trade group, said it supported vaccine passports and urged the federal government to put in place privacy standards. The San Francisco Chamber of Commerce, which helps its members work with Clear, said it was preferable to use the tools to ensure that only vaccinated people enter stores than to have companies close again when virus cases rise.

“People’s privacy is precious,” said Rodney Fong, President of the Chamber, but “when it comes to saving lives, privacy becomes a little less important.”

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Health

What Causes I.B.S.? – The New York Instances

What Causes I.B.S.? - The New York Times

IBS is the most commonly diagnosed gastrointestinal disease. Although symptoms can vary from patient to patient, they often include cramping, abdominal pain, gas, gas, and diarrhea or constipation, or both. The condition affects more women than men and is most common in people under 50. The annual medical cost of the disease exceeds $ 1 billion in the United States alone.

It is a chronic condition that requires ongoing management strategies such as: B. Always know the location of the nearest bathroom or wear diapers when access to the toilet is restricted. The emotional distress it can cause often leads to depression and anxiety, and can lead others to mistakenly think that the bowel disease is self-inflicted.

There is a known connection between the brain and the gut, and excessive stress can certainly make IBS symptoms worse. Cognitive behavioral therapy can benefit some patients, and many find it helpful to practice relaxation techniques such as positive imagery, progressive muscle relaxation, or meditation.

Yoga and other types of physical activity can also relieve irritable bowel syndrome symptoms and improve patients’ quality of life. A clinical study of 102 patients found that those who did vigorous physical activity three to five days a week had fewer physical and psychological symptoms.

Another calming technique that can be used anywhere, anytime to relieve pain and stress is diaphragmatic breathing, the opposite of being sucked into the bowel. Instead of pushing the chest out while the lungs fill with air, the diaphragm is pushed down toward the stomach, which lifts the abdomen. Practice by placing a hand over your navel to feel your stomach rise as you slowly inhale through your nose, then pull it back as you exhale through your mouth.

Patients can also minimize their symptoms by avoiding the foods or drinks that appear to trigger them. Common troublemakers are wheat and other gluten-containing foods, dairy products, citrus fruits, beans, cabbage and related gas-producing vegetables, and carbonated beverages. People can also react badly to spicy or fatty foods, coffee, or alcohol.

Some patients find dramatic relief by adopting a strict FODMAP diet that eliminates all fermentable starches and sugars and then gradually adding one food at a time to determine which symptoms are causing symptoms and are best avoided. The FODMAP diet positively changes the microbial population living in the gut and reduces gas-producing bacteria that thrive on fermentable foods. (See this website for details on diet.)

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World News

Afghanistan Flood Kills 80 – The New York Occasions

Hong Kong Website Doxxing Police Gets Blocked, Raising Censorship Fears

KABUL, Afghanistan — At least 80 people were killed with a hundred more missing after a flash flood tore through a village in a Taliban-controlled area of eastern Afghanistan late Wednesday night, Afghan officials said.

The deluge swept away most of the village in the Nuristan Province, destroying around 200 homes, and caught most residents off guard because they were sleeping. By Thursday night, villagers had recovered around 80 bodies but as the search continues, local officials expect the death toll to surpass 200.

“It is wiped out, nothing remains after floods,” said Abdul Naser, a resident of the district who visited the village on Thursday. “No aid has arrived yet, and there are no measures for caskets, coffins and funerals.”

The flash flood is the latest blow for Afghanistan, where fighting between government forces and the Taliban has displaced hundreds of thousands of people in recent months and pushed the country to the brink of a humanitarian crisis, aid agencies say. Since international troops began withdrawing in May, the Taliban have made a swift military advance across the country, gaining control of more than half of the country’s 400-odd districts.

But as the militant group presses on in its offensive, raising the possibility of a complete Taliban takeover, many have questioned whether they could effectively govern the war-stricken and foreign aid dependent country if they seize power. The flood, in Kamdesh district, offered an early test for the Taliban’s ability to provide relief services — a sign of effective governance — in the areas they control.

On Thursday afternoon, local officials called on the Taliban to grant aid groups access to the district to provide emergency services. But by the afternoon, search and rescue teams had still not been able to reach the remote village largely because the Taliban control the roads into the district, according to a statement from the Ministry for Disaster Management. Local disaster management committees in nearby Kunar and Laghman provinces were working on getting their rescue teams to the area.

“The area is under Taliban control, if the Taliban allow us, we will take aid to the area,” said Hafiz Abdul Qayum, the governor of Nuristan Province.

In a statement Thursday evening, a Taliban spokesman, Zabihullah Mujahid, said that the group welcomed aid organizations’ assistance.

Floods in northern and eastern Afghanistan are not uncommon this time of year. In August last year, flooding in Charikar, a city on the foothills of the Hindu Kush mountains, in northern Afghanistan, killed at least 92 people and injured 108 others.

But the flash flood in Nuristan comes as extreme weather has taken a grim toll around the world this summer and scientists warn that warming caused by greenhouse gas emissions is changing the climate. Heavy rainfall is a visible sign of that change, they say, because a warmer atmosphere can hold more moisture — producing more powerful rain.

This month alone, floods deemed once-in-a-millennium or rarer killed at least 170 people in Europe and caused billions in damages after homes, businesses, vehicles and electricity and sewer systems were wiped away. Floodwaters trapped terrified passengers in submerged subway cars, swept cars away and caused power outages in Zhengzhou, China. And monsoon rains set off a flash flood in the Grand Canyon in the United States.

In recent decades, flash floods have become increasingly common in Afghanistan after widespread deforestation largely destroyed the open woodlands and closed forests that once slowed the flow of water down mountainsides. With weak governance and entrenched conflict putting people in additional peril, Afghanistan consistently ranks as one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change, according to the World Bank.

Of the 110,000 Afghans who have been affected by some sort of natural disaster so far this year, 75 percent experienced flooding, according to the United Nations.

Fahim Abed reported from Kabul, Afghanistan, and Zabihullah Ghazi from Jalalabad.

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Health

Twitter closes San Francisco, New York places of work as Covid circumstances surge

Twitter closes San Francisco, New York offices as Covid cases surge

Pedestrians use cell phones as they walk past Twitter Inc. headquarters in San Francisco, California, USA

Bloomberg | Getty Images

Twitter has announced that it will immediately close its offices in San Francisco and New York as Covid cases increase across the country.

Wednesday’s announcement comes just two weeks after the social media company reopened its offices in both cities.

“After carefully reviewing the CDC’s updated guidelines, and given current conditions, Twitter has decided to close our New York and San Francisco offices and to suspend future office openings with immediate effect,” a Twitter spokesman said in a statement Wednesday.

The company added that it continues to closely monitor local conditions and make necessary changes that “prioritize the health and safety of our Tweeps”.

Twitter is the newest company in the Bay Area to either delay its reopening or to close its offices due to the Delta variant.

On Wednesday, Google announced that it would postpone the return of the offices until October. One month later than the original September date.

This story evolves. Stay with NBC Bay Area for updates.

Categories
Entertainment

17 New York Arts Organizations Are Amongst These Receiving $30 Million

17 New York Arts Organizations Are Among Those Receiving $30 Million

The Queens Museum is among 46 cultural nonprofit organizations selected for a new $30 million program by Bloomberg Philanthropies that is intended to support improving technology at the groups and helping them stabilize and thrive in the wake of the pandemic. A Bloomberg Tech Fellow is being appointed at each organization, the philanthropies announced Tuesday.

Heryte Tequame, assistant director of communications and digital projects at the museum, was chosen as its fellow in what is known as the Digital Accelerator program and will be in charge of developing a digital project of her choice. In an interview she said that in 2020, the museum “realized where we needed to expand our capacity and invest more.”

“I think now we’re really taking the time to see what we can do that has longevity,” Tequame said. “And not just being responsive, but really being proactive and having a real future-facing strategy.”

The organizations don’t know exactly how much of the $30 million each will receive yet, but Tequame said she wants to use at least some of it on the museum’s permanent collection.

Another recipient, Harlem Stage, selected Deirdre May, senior director of digital content and marketing, as its tech fellow.

That performing arts center — which largely focuses on artists of color — aims to use the assistance in part to increase accessibility, Patricia Cruz, its chief executive and artistic director, said in an interview. “People who cannot leave their homes, for example, would be able to see some of the finest artistic performances that could be made,” Cruz said, because “that’s the core of what we do.”

The 46 organizations selected for the program include nonprofits in the United States and Britain. Among them are 26 in the United States, and 17 of those are in New York City, including the Apollo Theater, the Ghetto Film School and the Tenement Museum. The chief executive of Bloomberg Philanthropies, Patricia E. Harris, said in a statement that when the pandemic hit, cultural organizations had to get creative to keep their (virtual) doors open.

“Now we’re excited to launch the Accelerator program to help more arts organizations sustain innovations and investments,” Harris said, “and strengthen tech and management practices that are key to their long-term success.”

As Cruz from Harlem Stage put it, “We’re ready to be accelerated.”

Categories
World News

Your Monday Briefing – The New York Occasions

Your Monday Briefing - The New York Times

In the UK, an average of nearly 45,000 cases of the coronavirus per day were reported over the past week, an 83 percent increase from the average two weeks ago. The death toll has risen 141 percent as England’s chief medical officer warned hospital admissions could double every three weeks and hit “scary numbers”.

Despite these troubling statistics, England is set to lift its final restrictions today, even though more than 500,000 people were quarantined by the National Health Service’s test-and-trace app after coming in contact with someone who had positive for the coronavirus.

Prime Minister Boris Johnson and his chief financial officer, who both had contact with an infected cabinet minister, are among the quarantined. Downing Street originally said yesterday that they would avoid quarantine, which sparked a quick and violent backlash from critics accusing them of double standards.

British Politics: Johnson is under fire for refusing to condemn crowds who booed England’s national football team for kneeling in protest against racial injustice. His refusal is a strong echo of former President Donald Trump’s targeting NFL players kneeling in the U.S. for the same cause

Here are the latest updates and maps of the pandemic.

For other developments:

  • Indonesia, the fourth most populous nation, now has the highest number of new coronavirus infections in the world, with 57,000 new cases reported on Friday. Experts estimate that the real number is three to six times as high.

  • American tennis star Coco Gauff has tested positive for the coronavirus and will not be participating in the Tokyo Olympics, which is contributing to the first cases in the athletes’ village.

  • After scandals and outrages, congested host cities, and now a pandemic, some are wondering if the games are worth the effort.

  • Some local governments in China have begun requiring all students – and their families – to be vaccinated before students can return to school this fall.

First person: “The flash floods brought so much with them – cars and containers and torn trees – that it was impossible to launch lifeboats,” said one witness. “I’ve never seen such a raging, rushing river.”

Destruction: Videos, photos and a map show the extent of the damage.

Floods in Europe are just one sign of a global warming crisis, which highlights the reality that the world’s richest nations are unprepared for its aftermath. However, whether mounting disasters in developed countries, including forest fires in Canada and scorching weather in California’s wine country, will affect climate policy remains to be seen.

The extreme weather disasters come a few months before the UN-led Glasgow climate negotiations in November, which is practically a moment of reckoning whether the nations of the world will agree on ways to contain emissions enough to mitigate the worst effects of climate change.

The European Commission last week presented an ambitious roadmap for change that includes a tax on imports from countries with less stringent climate policies. However, it is widely expected that the proposals will meet with fierce objections both inside and outside Europe.

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Emmanuelle Polack is a 56-year-old art historian and archivist who tries to uncover the difficult history of some of the Louvre’s precious works – and to help them find their way back to their rightful owners.

France has been criticized for lagging behind countries like Germany and the United States in identifying and returning works of art looted during World War II. The Louvre has recently tried to change its image and examine the provenance of its works more thoroughly.

The museum houses more than 1,700 stolen works of art that were returned to France after the Second World War and for which no legal owners have yet reported.

For Polack, the key to uncovering the secret stories of works of art suspiciously changed hands during the Nazi occupation is to follow the money. She sifts through the Louvre’s voluminous files to see how works of art have been bought and sold over the years. The backs of paintings often give clues of sales, restorations, and framers that could lead back to their owners.

“During the occupation, I kept a secret garden above the art market for years,” she says. “And finally, it is recognized as a crucial study area.”

Read more about the Louvre’s restitution efforts.

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Categories
Entertainment

As New York Reopens, It Appears for Tradition to Lead the Approach

As New York Reopens, It Looks for Culture to Lead the Way

Broadway is planning to start performances of at least three dozen shows before the end of the year, but producers do not know if there will be enough tourists — who typically make up two-thirds of the audience — to support all of them.

The Metropolitan Opera is planning a September return, but only if its musicians agree to pay cuts.

And New York’s vaunted nightlife scene — the dance clubs and live venues that give the city its reputation for never sleeping — has been stymied by the slow, glitchy rollout of a federal aid program that mistakenly declared some of the city’s best-known nightclub impresarios to be dead.

The return of arts and entertainment is crucial to New York’s economy, and not just because it is a major industry that employed some 93,500 people before the pandemic and paid them $7.4 billion in wages, according to the state comptroller’s office. Culture is also part of the lifeblood of New York — a magnet for visitors and residents alike that will play a key role if the city is to remain vital in an era when shops are battling e-commerce, the ease of remote work has businesses rethinking the need to stay in central business districts and the exurbs are booming.

“What is a city without social, cultural and creative synergies?” Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo asked earlier this year in an address on the importance of the arts to the city’s recovery. “New York City is not New York without Broadway. And with Zoom, many people have learned they can do business from anywhere. Compound this situation with growing crime and homelessness and we have a national urban crisis.”

And Mayor Bill de Blasio — who could seem indifferent to the arts earlier in his tenure — has become a cultural cheerleader in the waning days of his administration, starting a $25 million program to put artists back to work, creating a Broadway vaccination site for theater industry workers and planning a “homecoming concert” in Central Park next month featuring Bruce Springsteen, Jennifer Hudson and Paul Simon to herald the city’s return.

Eli Dvorkin, editorial and policy director at the Center for an Urban Future, said, “The way I look at it, there is not going to be a strong recovery for New York City without the performing arts’ leading the way.” He added, “People gravitate here because of the city’s cultural life.”

There are signs of hope everywhere, as vaccinated New Yorkers re-emerge this summer. Destinations like the Whitney and the Brooklyn Museum are crowded again, although timed reservations are still required. Bruce Springsteen is playing to sold-out crowds on Broadway and Foo Fighters brought rock back to Madison Square Garden.

Shakespeare in the Park and the Classical Theater of Harlem are staging contemporary adaptations of classic plays in city parks; the Park Avenue Armory, the Brooklyn Academy of Music, and a number of commercial Off Broadway theaters have been presenting productions indoors; and a new outdoor amphitheater is drawing crowds for shows on Little Island, the new Hudson River venue.

Haley Gibbs, 25, an administrative aide who lives in Brooklyn, said she felt the city’s pulse returning as she waited to attend “Drunk Shakespeare,” an Off Off Broadway fixture that has resumed performances in Midtown.

“I feel like it’s our soul that’s been given back to us, in a way,” Gibbs said, “which is super dramatic, but it is kind of like that.”

But some of the greatest tests for the city’s cultural scene lie ahead.

Hunkering down — cutting staff, slashing programming — turned out to be a brutal but effective survival strategy. Arts workers faced record unemployment, and some have yet to return to work, but many businesses and organizations were able to slash expenses and wait until it was safe to reopen. Now that it’s time to start hiring and spending again, many cultural leaders are worried: Can they thrive with fewer tourists and commuters? How much will safety protocols cost? Will the donors who stepped up during the emergency stick around for a less glamorous period of rebuilding?

“Next year may prove to be our most financially challenging,” said Bernie Telsey, one of the three artistic directors at MCC Theater, an Off Broadway nonprofit. “In many ways, it’s like a start-up now — it’s not just turning the lights on. Everything is a little uncertain. It’s like starting all over again.”

The fall season is shaping up to be the big test. “Springsteen on Broadway” began last month, but the rest of Broadway has yet to resume: The first post-shutdown play, a drama about two existentially trapped Black men called “Pass Over,” is to start performances Aug. 4, while the first musicals are aiming for September, starting with “Hadestown” and “Waitress,” followed by war horses that include “The Lion King,” “Chicago,” “Wicked” and “Hamilton.”

The looming question is whether there will be enough theatergoers to support all those shows. Although there have been signs that some visitors are returning to the city, tourism is not expected to rebound to its prepandemic levels for four years. So some of the returning Broadway shows will initially start with reduced schedules — performing fewer than the customary eight shows a week — as producers gauge ticket demand.

And “Harry Potter and the Cursed Child,” a big-budget, Tony-winning play that was staged in two parts before the pandemic, will be cut down to a single show when it returns to Broadway on Nov. 12; its producers cited “the commercial challenges faced by the theater and tourism industries emerging from the global shutdowns.”

“What we need to do, which has never been done before, is open all of Broadway over a single season,” said Tali Pelman, the lead producer of “Tina — The Tina Turner Musical.”

A City Stirs

As N.Y.C. begins its post-pandemic life, we explore Covid’s long-lasting impact on the city.

Safety protocols have been changing rapidly, as more people get vaccinated, but there is still apprehension about moving too fast. In Australia, reopened shows have periodically been halted by lockdowns, while in England, several shows have been forced to cancel performances to comply with isolation protocols that some view as overly restrictive.

“On a fundamental level, our health is at stake,” said Lin-Manuel Miranda, the creator of “Hamilton,” which is planning to resume performances on Broadway on Sept. 14. “You get this wrong, and we open too soon, and then we re-spike and we close again — that’s almost unthinkable.”

Some presenters worry that, with fewer tourists, arts organizations will be battling one another to win the attention of New Yorkers and people from the region.

“There’s going to be a lot of competition for a smaller audience at the beginning, and that’s scary,” said Todd Haimes, artistic director of the Roundabout Theater Company, a nonprofit that operates three theaters on Broadway and two Off Broadway.

Another looming challenge: concerns about public safety. Bystanders were struck by stray bullets during shooting incidents in Times Square in May and June, prompting Mayor de Blasio to promise additional officers to protect and reassure the public in that tourist-and-theater-dense neighborhood.

The city’s tourism organization, NYC & Company, has developed a $30 million marketing campaign to draw visitors back to the city. The Broadway League, a trade organization representing producers and theater owners, is planning its own campaign. The Tony Awards are planning a fall special on CBS that will focus on performances in an effort to boost ticket sales. And comeback come-ons are finding their way into advertising: “We’ve been waiting for you,” “Wicked” declares in a direct mail piece.

The economic stakes for the city are high. Broadway shows give work to actors and singers and dancers and ushers, but also, indirectly, to waiters and bartenders and hotel clerks and taxi drivers, who then go on to spend a portion of their paychecks on goods and services. The Broadway League says that during the 2018-2019 season Broadway generated $14.7 billion in economic activity and supported 96,900 jobs, when factoring in the direct and indirect spending of tourists who cited Broadway as a major reason for visiting the city.

“We’ve pushed through a really tough time, and now you have this new variant, which is kind of scary, but I still hope we’re on the right track,” said Shane Hathaway, the co-owner of Hold Fast, a Restaurant Row bar and eatery whose website asks “Do you miss the Performing Arts?? So do we!!” “We’re already seeing a lot more tourists than last year,” Hathaway said, “and my hope is that we continue.”

At the tourist-dependent Met Museum, attendance is back, but not all the way: it’s now open five days a week, and has drawn 10,000 people many days, while before the pandemic it was open seven days a week and averaged 14,000 daily visitors. Plus: more of the visitors now are local, and they don’t have to pay admission; the Met continues to project a $150 million revenue loss due to the pandemic.

If the Met, the largest museum in the country, is struggling, that means smaller arts institutions are hurting even more, particularly those outside Manhattan, which tend to have less foot traffic and fewer big donors. The Brooklyn Academy of Music, for example, is trying to recover from a pandemic period without when it lost millions in revenue, reduced staff and had to raid its endowment to pay the bills.

The city’s music scene has faced its own challenges — from the diviest bars to nightclubs to the plush Metropolitan Opera.

According to a study commissioned by the mayor’s office, some 2,400 concert and entertainment venues in New York City supported nearly 20,000 jobs in 2016. But the sector has had a hard time.

Many are waiting to see if they will get help from a $16 billion federal grant fund intended to preserve music clubs, theaters and other live-event businesses devastated by the pandemic. But the rollout of the program, the Shuttered Venue Operators Grant initiative, has been slow and bumpy. Some owners, including Michael Swier, the founder of the Bowery Ballroom and the Mercury Lounge in New York, were initially denied aid because the program mistakenly believed they were dead.

Elsewhere, a music and arts space with a 1,600-person capacity in the heart of hipster Brooklyn, cut its staff from 120 people to 5 when the pandemic arrived. After the state lifted restrictions on smaller venues in June, it reopened and began hiring back some workers, but its owners fear it could take a year or two to return to profitability.

The club got help in the form of a $4.9 million shuttered venue grant from the federal government, which it said would be used to pay its debts — including for rent, utilities, and loans — and to fix up the space and pay staff. “Every dollar will be used just to dig ourselves out from Covid,” said one of the venue’s partners, Dhruv Chopra.

And the Met Opera is still not sure if it can raise its gilded curtain in September, as planned, after the longest shutdown in its history. The company, which lost $150 million in earned revenues during the pandemic, recently struck deals to cut the pay of its choristers, soloists and stagehands. The company is now in tense negotiations with the musicians in its orchestra, who were furloughed without pay for nearly a year. If they fail to reach a deal, the Met, the largest performing arts organization in the nation, risks missing being part of the initial burst of reopening energy.

Some cultural leaders are already looking past the fall, at the challenge of sustaining demand for tickets after the initial enthusiasm of reopening fades.

“We have a lot of work to do to make sure that people know that we’re open,” said Thomas Schumacher, president of Disney Theatrical Productions, “to make people comfortable coming in, to keep the shows solid, and to get through the holidays and get through the winter.”

Laura Zornosa contributed reporting.