Month: July 2020

Bollywood star and former Miss World Aishwarya Rai Bachchan and her 8-year-old daughter have been discharged from a hospital after testing negative for COVID-19, Aishwarya’s husband Abhishek wrote on Twitter.  
 
Abhishek also wrote that he and his father, legendary actor Amitabh Bachchan, remained in the hospital over two weeks after they first tested positive.Thank you all for your continued prayers and good wishes. Indebted forever. 🙏🏽 Aishwarya and Aaradhya have thankfully tested negative and have been discharged from the hospital. They will now be at home. My father and I remain in hospital under the care of the medical staff.— Abhishek Bachchan (@juniorbachchan) July 27, 2020Amitabh Bachchan, who has starred in over 200 Indian films since the early 1970s, tweeted July 11 that he had tested positive for the coronavirus.   
 
He has been a prominent figure in India’s campaign to stop the spread of the novel coronavirus, filming ads about wearing masks and appealing to citizens to stay home.  
 
Still, despite enforcing one of the strictest lockdowns in the world earlier this year, India’s case numbers of COVID-19 are rising.   
 
India has reported over 1,435,000 confirmed cases of COVID-19, the third highest case number in the world following the United States and Brazil.
 
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Major League Baseball last week opened its sharply curtailed season nearly four months late because of the coronavirus pandemic. Now one team, the Miami Marlins, has been hit with an outbreak of infections. The Marlins played a three-game weekend series in the eastern city of Philadelphia but canceled its Monday night home opener in Miami against the Baltimore Orioles when eight more players and two coaches tested positive for the coronavirus. The new infections brought the total on the Marlins team to least 14 in recent days. The team stayed in Philadelphia Sunday night as it weighed health precautions. In addition, the Phillies, the Philadelphia team that played the Marlins, called off their Monday night game at home against the New York Yankees. Major League Baseball cut its normal 162-game regular season schedule to 60 games and started the season with empty stadiums in hopes of averting a widespread health disaster. Some reserve players have been sitting in the stands to give their teammates ample room to socially distance in the dugouts. Even so, several star players have contracted the coronavirus, including Freddie Freeman of the Atlanta Braves and Juan Soto of the Washington Nationals, the 2019 World Series champions. Some coaches, players and on-field umpires have been wearing face masks during the opening games. The Toronto Blue Jays were banned by Canadian authorities from playing at its home field. The Canadian government balked at allowing U.S.-based teams from repeatedly crossing the border when it has already blocked U.S. tourists from entering the country. Toronto Blue Jays’ Brandon Drury celebrates with Danny Jansenafter scoring on a two run single by Bo Bichette off Tampa Bay Rays relief pitcher Andrew Kittredge during the sixth inning of a baseball game, July 26, 2020, in Petersburg, Fla.Two other U.S.-dominated professional sports leagues, the National Basketball Association and the National Hockey League, have opened training camps and hope to restart their seasons in the next few days after halting play for four months. All basketball games are being played in Orlando, Florida, rather than at the normal home arenas of each team, while all hockey games are all being played at arenas in two Canadian cities, Toronto and Edmonton. The National Football League is opening training camps this week but has already canceled the usual four exhibition games each team plays in August in advance of the start of the regular season in September.
   
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Outside, the soundtrack of sirens wailed, each another death blow to the city that had nurtured my development as a musician for so long. But from inside my life on lockdown, an unexpected reconnection to my catalog of sounds was handing me hope for New York’s future.
When I moved here in autumn 1996, as I learned to engineer and produce music, I started recording everything from found sounds to late-night jam sessions to my own dabbling. And I’d saved everything.
In January, my longtime musical collaborator suggested we catalog, curate and upload my decades-rich audio archive to the online music site Bandcamp. Under normal circumstances I would’ve said no; I’d considered those recordings unfinished, meant for private enjoyment and reflection.
But within the context of a pandemic, I pushed aside insecurity and instead saw opportunity.
And so the excavation of long-forgotten boxes began. From their depths came microcassettes. MiniDiscs. CDs. Hard drives. What emerged was a historical document shaped by my personal and professional journey in the city.
To a wide-eyed 23-year-old from Las Cruces, New Mexico, New York offered unexpected adventures and limitless possibilities. Inspiration was always around the corner.  
One night I ended up in the basement of the fabled CBGB, rubbing elbows with Iggy Pop, Joey Ramone and Neil Young while watching Sonic Youth perform a private set. Another evening, I landed in a makeshift studio, deploying my nascent recording skills for a session with Gordon Gano of the Violent Femmes.
New York’s serendipitous moments have long been fueled by the streets and subway tunnels, its arteries. These great equalizers compel coexistence, pushing inhabitants into its daily motion, fabric and swell. What is left when the people — the hemoglobin in this multicultural organism — disappear? Does New York die?
I decided to keep my city alive by revisiting my relationship with it one audio file at a time. Each box I opened yielded a different medium, a different state of mind.
My first instrument was the microcassette recorder. I’d play it like a turntablist, jerking the forward/reverse switch to “scratch” the sounds I’d collect — from a radiator to a frozen lake to a revving engine. I found recordings of interviews I’d conducted with artists including Mike Patton, Marc Ribot and Latin Playboys.  
A synergy was taking place, I realize now. Journalism was granting me access to master classes on songwriting and production; I would use what I’d learned to feed myself and The Associated Press, where I became de facto in-house composer and created music tracks for our journalism.
Sitting in my studio surrounded by artifacts, I pieced together a memoir from lo-fi samples and Alan Lomax-inspired field recordings: Mexican songs from family singalongs. Church hymns sung by relatives. Rancheras played by prison inmates in Juarez, Mexico, where I was researching a documentary.
As lockdown days dragged on, I dug deeper. Next up: nested folders inside my first laptop, the Apple Powerbook G3, the model used by Sarah Jessica Parker’ in “Sex and the City.” While Carrie Bradshaw was recording observations on romance, I was sampling, layering and manipulating New York’s sounds in ways unimaginable prior to 1998.
The laptop would become my mobile recording studio — and, in the mid-2000s, my ticket into music venues and apartments of the musicians who appeared on my AP podcast, “One Mic, One Song.”
As I listened to the episode featuring Lila Downs, who displayed her range with a jaw-dropping acapella rendition of “La Noche De Mi Mal,” I thought of my late parents, who grew up listening to its songwriter, Jose Alfredo Jimenez.
Their voices, prominent throughout my archive, were fresh in my mind alongside the countless other people who have participated in — and defined — the soundtrack of my life in New York City.
During the past four months, we have each sought refuge in different ways. I found mine. I have reframed my New York narrative, moment by unearthed moment. Along the way, I’ve discovered a years-long song that I never realized I was writing.
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So you’ve probably read a lot about “cancel culture.” Or know about a new poll that shows a plurality of Americans disapproving of it. Or you may have heard about a letter in Harper’s Magazine condemning censorship and intolerance.  
But can you say exactly what “cancel culture” is? Some takes:  
— “It seems like a buzzword that creates more confusion than clarity,” says the author and journalist George Packer, who went on to call it “a mechanism where a chorus of voices, amplified on social media, tries to silence a point of view that they find offensive by trying to damage or destroy the reputation of the person who has given offense.”
— “I don’t think it’s real. But there are reasonable people who believe in it,” says the author, educator and sociologist Tressie McMillan Cottom. “From my perspective, accountability has always existed. But some people are being held accountable in ways that are new to them. We didn’t talk about ‘cancel culture’ when someone was charged with a crime and had to stay in jail because they couldn’t afford the bail.”
— “‘Cancel culture’ tacitly attempts to disable the ability of a person with whom you disagree to ever again be taken seriously as a writer/editor/speaker/activist/intellectual, or in the extreme, to be hired or employed in their field of work,” says Letty Cottin Pogrebin, the author, activist and founding editor of Ms. magazine.
— “It means different things to different people,” says Ben Wizner, director of the ACLU’s Speech, Privacy, and Technology Project.  
In tweets, online letters, opinion pieces and books, conservatives, centrists and liberals continue to denounce what they call growing intolerance for opposing viewpoints and the needless ruining of lives and careers. A Politico/Morning Consult poll released last week shows 44% of Americans disapprove of it, 32% approve and the remaining 24% had no opinion or didn’t know what it was.
For some, “cancel culture” is the coming of the thought police. For others, it contains important chances to be heard that didn’t exist before.  
Recent examples of unpopular “cancellations” include the owner of a chain of food stores in Minneapolis whose business faced eviction and calls for boycotts because of racist social media posts by his then-teenage daughter, and a data analyst fired by the progressive firm Civis Analytics after he tweeted a study finding that nonviolent protests increase support for Democratic candidates and violent protests decrease it. Civis Analytics has denied he was fired for the tweet.
“These incidents damage the lives of innocent people without achieving any noble purpose,” Yascha Mounk wrote in The Atlantic last month. Mounk himself has been criticized for alleging that “an astonishing number of academics and journalists proudly proclaim that it is time to abandon values like due process and free speech.”
Debates can be circular and confusing, with those objecting to intolerance sometimes openly uncomfortable with those who don’t share their views. A few weeks ago, more than 100 artists and thinkers endorsed a letter co-written by Packer and published by Harper’s. It warned against a “new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity.”
The letter drew signatories from many backgrounds and political points of view, ranging from the far-left Noam Chomsky to the conservative David Frum, and was a starting point for contradiction.  
The writer and trans activist Jennifer Finney Boylan, who signed the letter, quickly disowned it because she “did not know who else” had attached their names. Although endorsers included Salman Rushdie, who in 1989 was forced into hiding over death threats from Iranian Islamic leaders because of his novel “The Satanic Verses,” numerous online critics dismissed the letter as a product of elitists who knew nothing about censorship.
One of the organizers of the letter, the writer Thomas Chatterton Williams, later announced on Twitter that he had thrown a guest out of his home over criticisms of letter-supporter Bari Weiss, the New York Times columnist who recently quit over what she called a Twitter-driven culture of political correctness. Another endorser, “Harry Potter” author J.K. Rowling, threatened legal action against a British news site that suggested she was transphobic after referring to controversial tweets that she has written in recent months.
“The only speech these powerful people seem to care about is their own,” the author and feminist Jessica Valenti wrote in response to the Harper’s letter. “(‘Cancel culture’ ) is certainly not about free speech: After all, an arrested journalist is never referred to as ‘canceled,’ nor is a woman who has been frozen out of an industry after complaining about sexual harassment. ‘Canceled’ is a label we all understand to mean a powerful person who’s been held to account.”
“Cancel culture” is hard to define, in part because there is nothing confined about it — no single cause, no single ideology, no single fate for those allegedly canceled.This combination photo shows, from left, morning news show anchors Matt Lauer and Charlie Rose, filmmaker Woody Allen and actor Kevin Spacey, who have all been accused of sexual abuse and harassment.Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, convicted sex offenders, are in prison. Former television personality Charlie Rose has been unemployable since allegations of sexual abuse and harassment were published in 2017-18. Oscar winner Kevin Spacey has made no films since he faced allegations of harassment and assault and saw his performance in “All the Money in the World” replaced by Christopher Plummer’s.
Others are only partially “canceled.” Woody Allen, accused by daughter Dylan Farrow of molesting her when she was 7, was dropped by Amazon, his U.S. film distributor, but continues to release movies overseas. His memoir was canceled by Hachette Book Group, but soon acquired by Skyhorse Publishing, which also has a deal with the previously “canceled” Garrison Keillor. Sirius XM announced last week that the late Michael Jackson, who seemed to face posthumous cancellation after the 2019 documentary “Leaving Neverland” presented extensive allegations that he sexually abused boys, would have a channel dedicated to his music.  
Cancellation in one subculture can lead to elevation in others. Former San Francisco 49ers quarterback Colin Kaepernick has not played an NFL game since 2016 and has been condemned by President Donald Trump and many others on the right after he began kneeling during the National Anthem to protest “a country that oppresses black people and people of color.” But he has appeared in Nike advertisements, been honored by the ACLU and Amnesty International and reached an agreement with the Walt Disney Co. for a series about his life.
“You can say the NFL canceled Colin Kaepernick as a quarterback and that he was resurrected as a cultural hero,” says Julius Bailey, an associate professor of philosophy at Wittenberg University who writes about Kaepernick in his book “Racism, Hypocrisy and Bad Faith.”
In politics, Virginia Governor Ralph Northam, a Democrat, remains in his job 1 1/2 years after acknowledging he appeared in a racist yearbook picture while in college. Sen. Al Franken, a Democrat from Minnesota, resigned after multiple women alleged he had sexually harassed them, but Lt. Governor Justin Fairfax of Virginia defied orders to quit after two women accused him of sexual assault.
Sometimes even multiple allegations of sexual assault, countless racist remarks and the disparagement of wounded military veterans aren’t enough to induce cancellation. Trump, a Republican, has labeled cancel culture “far-left fascism” and “the very definition of totalitarianism” while so far proving immune to it.
“Politicians can ride this out because they were hired by the public. And if the public is willing to go along, then they can sometimes survive things perhaps they shouldn’t survive,” Packer says.
“I think you can say that Trump’s rhetoric has had a boomerang effect on the rest of our society,” says PEN America CEO Suzanne Nossel, who addresses free expression in her book “Dare to Speak,” which comes out next week. “People on the left feel that he can get away with anything, so they do all they can to contain it elsewhere.” 
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A lawyer for British tabloid The Sun said Monday that Johnny Depp abused Amber Heard during their relationship, committing acts of violence fueled by misogyny and unleashed by addiction to alcohol and drugs.
Attorney Sasha Wass was summing up at Depp’s libel case against the newspaper over an article alleging he physically abused ex-wife Heard — a high-stakes celebrity trial in which the reputations of both former spouses are at stake.
Depp is suing News Group Newspapers, publisher of The Sun, and the newspaper’s executive editor, Dan Wootton, at the High Court in London over an April 2018 article, which called him a “wife-beater.” He strongly denies being violent to Heard.
The case is due to end Tuesday, but judge Andrew Nicol is not expected to deliver his ruling for several weeks.
In closing arguments, Wass said the newspaper’s defense “is one of truth — namely that Mr. Depp did indeed beat his wife.”
Wass said there was “overwhelming evidence of domestic violence or wife-beating behavior, cataloged over a three-year period.”
She said Depp was “a hopeless addict who repeatedly lost his self-control and all ability to restrain his anger.”
“Permeating all of the evidence in this case is the character of Mr. Depp himself — his well-documented evidence of violence and destruction over his adult life which have occurred when he was under the influence of drink and drugs.”
She said Depp “was subject to irrational mood swings and abnormal behavioral patterns, which would not have been present when Mr. Depp was clean and sober, and Mr. Depp has a name for this metamorphosed entity — namely, The Monster.”
Depp, 57, and Heard, 34, met on the set of the 2011 comedy “The Rum Diary” and married in Los Angeles in February 2015. Heard filed for divorce the following year, and the divorce was finalized in 2017.
The former spouses have both been in court throughout three weeks of testimony at the grand neo-Gothic court building, though Depp did not attend on Monday morning. His lawyer is due to sum up on Tuesday.
Lawyers, journalists and members of the public have heard lurid details of the couple’s tempestuous relationship, including prodigious drinking and drug consumption, furious arguments, hurled objects and a deposit of excrement left in a bed — whether by dog or human is disputed.
The Sun’s defense relies on 14 allegations made by Heard of Depp’s violence between 2013 and 2016, in settings including his private island in the Bahamas, a rented house in Australia — where Depp’s finger was severed in contested circumstances — and the couple’s downtown Los Angeles penthouse, which was trashed during the couple’s altercations.
Wass said that the first year of the couple’s relationship, during which Depp was sober, was “idyllic,” but that the violence started in 2013 after he relapsed.
During four days in the witness box last week, Heard claimed Depp flew into jealous rages and turned into violent alter ego the “Monster” under the influence of alcohol and drugs. She accused him of slapping and hitting her and throwing bottles at her “like grenades,” and claimed that she often feared for her life during their relationship.
Heard’s evidence was backed by witnesses including her sister Whitney Henriquez, who said she had seen Depp hit Heard “multiple times” during a fracas at the couple’s Los Angeles apartment in March 2015.
Depp, who gave evidence for almost five days, denies all the allegations and claims Heard was the aggressor during their volatile relationship, which he has likened to “a crime scene waiting to happen.” Several current or former employees gave evidence backing his version of events, and former romantic partners Vanessa Paradis and Winona Ryder said in written witness statements that he had never been violent to them.
He acknowledged using a wide variety of drugs including marijuana, cocaine and opioid painkillers, but denied drugs made him violent.
Summarizing the defense case, Wass said that “a deep misogyny … lay at the root of Mr. Depp’s anger.”
“He created a misogynistic persona of (Heard) as the stereotype of a nagging woman,” Wass said. She said Depp branded Heard “a gold-digger, a shrew and an adulterer” in order to discredit
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