What Happened Today: August 18, 2022
Finland’s Fun Police; Europe’s record breaking wildfires; tennis adds court coaching for U.S. Open
The Big Story
Leaked video clips of Sanna Marin, Finland’s prime minister, dancing at a party this past weekend have gone viral, flustering lawmakers and members of the Finnish press who are scandalized by the images of a politician’s exuberance. The videos were culled from Instagram posts of Marin at a private residence, where she was partying with other prominent Finnish personalities and politicians, including the singer Alma, radio host Karoliina Tuominen, and the fellow Social Democratic Party member Ilmari Nurminen. Some Finnish press suggested voices in the background of the videos are making veiled references to cocaine, a charge that Marin denied as the controversy surrounding the footage bubbled up into a scandal that required her to hold a press conference on Thursday.
A “shadow of doubt” hung over Marin, according to Riikka Purra, the leader of the opposition party, who echoed the call of lawmaker Mikko Karna that Marin should take a voluntary drug test to clear the air. The youngest prime minister in the world when she was elected in 2019 at the age of 34, Marin told the press that she had “no problem taking tests” and that she had “not used drugs.” Previous uproars over Marin’s social life, including one incident when she had to apologize for missing a text message that she should remain isolated after a COVID-19 exposure, have ruffled the feathers of some opposition party politicians and even members of the media unaccustomed to a capable head of state who goes out at night with other people her age. “I have a family life, I have a work life, and I have free time to spend with my friends,” Marin said. “I am going to be exactly the same person as I have been until now, and I hope that it will be accepted.”
Read More: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-europe-62588480
In the Back Pages: The New York City Aesthetic, 1962 - 1997
The Rest
→ Intensifying droughts and waves of extreme heat are amplifying a record-breaking number of fires across Europe, with 1.6 million acres of land in flames already this year across the continent. The European Commission has tried to tamp down the blazes popping up in a dozen nations, deploying some 360 firefighters, 29 planes, and 8 aircraft to try to contain the breakouts. The current total area affected by the fires is 56% above the previous 2017 record and twice the usual average for annual fires going back to 2006. Thousands so far have died because of the rising temperatures that are a major factor in drying out land, which then more easily sparks into breakout blazes, with Spain and Portugal hit hardest by the fires. Hundreds of E.U. firefighters tried to stave off the most recent blaze in the southwest of France, as pine forests near the famed Bordeaux vineyards caught fire.
→ Allen Weisselberg, the longtime CFO of the Trump Organization, pleaded guilty to 15 felonies this morning, which include taking as much as $1.7 million in unreported income, as Manhattan’s District Attorney Alvin Bragg pushes on in his investigation of the Trump Organization’s criminal tax violations. Bragg alleges that Weisselberg’s plea deal “directly implicates the Trump Organization in a wide range of criminal activity.” While Weisselberg’s plea deal does implicate Trump’s company—part of the plea deal is that Weisselberg testify against the organization at trial in October—it does not implicate Donald Trump himself. Last week, meanwhile, Trump was questioned by New York Attorney General Letitia James in a civil investigation looking at the organization’s misleading statements to tax authorities; Trump invoked the Fifth Amendment more than 400 times.
→ Tennis fans are paying thousands of dollars per seat to catch what’s likely to be Serena Williams’ last run at the U.S. Open, but that won’t be the only historic moment at the August championships.
This week, the pro tennis tour announced it would permit “off-court coaching” for the second half of the 2022 season, making the U.S. Open the first major tournament where coaches are permitted to coach their players while competing.
“The trial aims to create additional points of intrigue and insight to enhance the fan experience,” the Association of Tennis Professionals said in its announcement. The move is an attempt to capitalize on what has long been a reliable source of controversy as players, some more notoriously than others, have skirted the poorly enforced no-coaching rule to receive unsubtle if elaborate hand signals and verbal instruction from their coaches in the stands.
Now coaches will be able to signal at any time and speak with players when they’re on the same end of the court.
If made permanent, the new rules would compromise the game’s psychological rigor and level of difficulty, as players have previously spent upwards of several hours alone on the court to overcome their opponents, and themselves, without their coach’s aid.
“It’s a dumb rule. Because tennis is an individual sport. Why are we making it not an individual sport?” American tennis player Taylor Fritz wrote on Twitter. “Tennis is as much mental as it is physical, and a big part of it is you need to be figuring it out on the court for yourself.”
→ Graph of the Day:
Data from a February Pew Research poll showing Americans’ views of public health officials from 2020 to 2022, with the CDC’s favorability looking especially dismal. This was surely part of what inspired Wednesday’s announcement from CDC Director Rochelle Walensky that the agency would need to “transform”—especially how it communicates with the public. “For 75 years, CDC and public health have been preparing for COVID-19,” Walensky said in a statement. “And in our big moment, our performance did not reliably meet expectations. As a longtime admirer of this agency and a champion for public health, I want us all to do better.” The CDC conducted two internal reviews showing that CDC employees have reached similar conclusions to those reached by much of the United States: As one CDC official put it, the organization “needs to make some changes for how it communicates and how it operates—to be faster, to be nimbler, to use more plain spoken language.”
→ What do you do when the Bed Bath & Beyond stock you bought for $5.50 a share balloons to $27 a share, earning you some $110 million in the process? According to the Financial Times, Jake Freeman, a sophomore at the University of Southern California, sold his hundreds of thousands of shares of BBBY stock and then “went for dinner with his parents in the suburb of New York City where they live, and on Wednesday he flew to Los Angeles to return to campus,” where he’s sure to make a lot of new friends. Freeman had invested around $25 million in the company (a 6% stake), which he raised from family. Like GameStop, Bed Bath & Beyond is a meme stock—or an investment made popular on social media—but its explosive growth surprised everyone, Freeman included. “I certainly did not expect such a vicious rally upwards,” Freeman told the Financial Times. “I thought this was going to be a six-months-plus play … I was really shocked that it went up so fast.”
→ Number of the Day: 66%
The increase in revenue hauled in by sports-betting companies in the first half of 2022 compared to the same period last year. And with sports-betting websites like FanDuel and DraftKings raking in record-breaking revenue, they are now going to pull back on their ad spending—what has amounted to hundreds of millions of dollars in promoting their websites and apps—so they can begin turning some of that revenue into profit. “It is very hard to make these businesses be profitable when they are in growth mode,” said one industry analyst. But now it seems that the time has come. All of this industry growth comes on the heels of the 2018 Supreme Court ruling legalizing online sports betting, with 36 states and counting now allowing residents to lose money on the Yankees’ late-season collapse.
→ Freya the walrus, who began climbing onto small, docked boats earlier this summer in the Oslo Fjord—and in some cases sinking them—has been put down by the Norwegian authorities. Though walruses are protected in Norway, officials had grown concerned that the more than 1,300-pound animal would accidentally hurt someone, especially given the rising popularity of the walrus souvenir selfie. So, after weeks of worry, those officials killed the country’s newest tourist attraction. “We have sympathies for the fact that the decision can cause a reaction from the public, but I am firm that this was the right call,” said the head of Norway’s Directorate of Fisheries. “We have great regard for animal welfare, but human life and safety must take precedence.” It is unknown how many dinghies Freya crushed before her untimely demise.
→ Quote of the Day:
Because there’s a lot of really, really nice mullets out there that are deserving of a trophy. And there are other guys out there with really great mullets who I would love to be able to feel the way I did when I won.
Clint Duncan, after being named the USA Mullet Champion of 2022 this past week in Indiana. Spectators posted pictures of youth finalists Rustin, Landry, and Epic to Twitter while Duncan spoke graciously about how his mullet has brought him nothing but good luck. Since growing it out at the start of the pandemic, “a bunch of really good things started happening to me”: He fell in with a community of fellow mullet-men, fell in love with the woman he’d go on to marry, and has now been named America’s mullet champion.
Additional reporting and writing provided by The Scroll’s associate editor, David Sugarman
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The New York City Aesthetic, 1962-Now
By David Sugarman
Reviewed in this article:
New York: 1962-1964 (The Jewish Museum, July 22-January 8)
Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel (Directed by Maya Duverdier, Amélie van Elmbt)
It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him (By Justin Tinsley; Abrams, 2022)
A trio of new works tracks some 60 years in the cultural life of New York City: an extraordinary exhibition at the Jewish Museum showcasing the “new art” that emerged in 1962; a eulogistic documentary about the Chelsea Hotel; and a hagiography of hip-hop legend Biggie Smalls. Beyond chronicling the city and its scenes, these works capture what, since Walt Whitman, has been New York’s clearest aesthetic through line: that we “behold this compost and behold it well!” From Robert Rauschenberg, whose art of litter and filth is prominently featured in the Jewish Museum’s new survey, to Biggie Smalls, a sensitive narrator of urban catastrophe, the artists featured in these works turn to waste and detritus to reconfigure the ruins of their present into something different altogether—sometimes into something sublime.
Entering the Jewish Museum’s New York: 1962-1964 exhibition, a large neon sign—‘Liquor Store’—glows over a room wrapped in a giant wallpaper-photograph of the corner of 8th Street in Greenwich Village in 1962, signaling the curator’s intentions: to envelop us in the neon illumination of three years that saw an America in transformation. It was then that Robert Rauschenberg created his famous “combines”—mixed-media sculpture-paintings that mined materials from the gutters and dime stores of New York City—and Andy Warhol printed silkscreen copies of pictures pulled from tabloids and magazines. It makes sense to immerse the exhibition’s viewers first in these shots of the Village; it had long been an epicenter of America’s avant-garde. Newer to the avant-garde in the ’60s, however, and in many ways the subject of the exhibition itself, was the Jewish Museum. Under the leadership of Alan Solomon, who served as the museum’s curator from 1962 to 1964, the Jewish Museum exploded onto the avant-garde art scene as one of the foremost institutions of what Solomon called the “new art,” which drew inspiration from “the rawness and disorder” of the city. For Solomon, Rauschenberg epitomized this moment—especially, as Solomon put it, in the artist’s “optimistic belief that richness and heightened meaning can be found anywhere in the world, even in refuse found in the street.”
The new exhibition at the Jewish Museum achieves just this effect—and gives new meaning to today’s trash-strewn streets of New York City, our own age’s genius for producing garbage and waste.
The show also demonstrates the awesome impact that Solomon and the Jewish Museum had in supporting these artists. Under Solomon’s auspices, the Jewish Museum held the world’s first museum retrospectives of Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns. Solomon was also central in Rauschenberg receiving the International Grand Prize for Painting at the Venice Biennale, a prize that underscored New York’s position as the capital of the 20th century.
Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel similarly mines the past to intervene in our city’s present. A meditative (if occasionally ponderous) film about the Chelsea Hotel and its current renovation—an enormous redevelopment project that transforms the storied dump into a luxury hotel—the film teases out the hotel’s history through dream-like vignettes and ghostly recordings. Built in the late 1800s with 250 guest rooms, the hotel housed generations of writers, painters, and musicians who came through New York: In 1953, Dylan Thomas was rushed from his room at the Chelsea to the hospital, where he later died of pneumonia; in the early 1960s, Allen Ginsberg and Gregory Corso would regularly be seen hanging around, getting stoned (“you could get high in the elevators on the residue of marijuana smoke,” Arthur Miller wrote) and hawking copies of Fuck You magazine; Arthur C. Clarke finished 2001: A Space Odyssey while staying at the hotel; Larry Rivers’ paintings hung in the lobby (fare for a room, in all likelihood); and Leonard Cohen was moved to song by what he did with Janis Joplin at the Chelsea (Joplin, for her part, is said to have written “I’m the best fuck in the world” on the wall of her own Chelsea Hotel bedroom). Such is the storied lore of the Chelsea.
The film’s focus, though, is the dregs of that lore: a building now bustling with construction crews, covered in tarp, upcycled into yet another product in the gift shop of the city’s history. These efforts at renovating the building, however, have encountered tremendous resistance from the hotel’s last tenants—a group of artists and weirdos who have managed to hold onto their rooms for decades. “There are people here who are remnants of another time in New York when Manhattan was a bohemian and avant-garde center,” one tenant muses, construction crews pounding at the door. “Now I think that time is gone.”
That time is gone, of course, but the filmmakers, Amélie van Elmbt and Maya Duverdier, enact just the kind of aesthetic intervention that the exhibition at the Jewish Museum chronicles so well. The final residents of the Chelsea, sweet and strange and lost, are the waste of an earlier era. “We’re not people,” one resident laments. “We are ghosts.” This is not a judgment of these people so much as a description of the place they’ve been forced to occupy in the world, tiptoeing around an active construction zone as a gleaming new hotel goes up all around them. (And what could better capture the feeling of living through the city’s constant renovations?) All but left behind by the rest of Lower Manhattan’s frenzied creative destruction, Van Elmbt and Duverdier turn to these ghosts as a way of capturing (and perhaps reanimating) the commitments of the hotel’s earlier inhabitants, who lived in a time when being proximate to beauty was a holy calling.
By the 1980s and 1990s, the Chelsea was already becoming a cultural artifact (even as Madonna went there for a photo shoot and Ethan Hawk was among the hotel’s tenants). Meanwhile, across the crime-ridden city that would soon elect Rudolph Giuliani mayor, Chris Wallace (also known as Biggie Smalls or the Notorious B.I.G.) was rapping and making demos but mostly working in the drug trade—a booming business during the height of the crack epidemic. It is this twinned history of hip-hop’s growth into the planet’s most popular music form and its emergence in the cradle of the crack epidemic and America’s war on drugs that is at the center of Justin Tinsley’s new book, It Was All A Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him (Abrams Press, 2022).
Tinsley, a senior reporter with ESPN’s The Undefeated, paints a vivid picture of the world that Biggie was born into. Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace, immigrated to the United States from Jamaica as a teenager and became a primary school teacher in Brooklyn, where Biggie was born. Voletta raised Chris in Clinton Hill, a neighborhood shaped by legacies of housing discrimination and the city’s assault on the crack scourge—a disastrous response that exacerbated a public health crisis. While Tinsley’s book doesn’t add much to the growing literature on race in the postwar city or on hip-hop’s late-century transformations, it does a fine job braiding these histories together to show how Biggie brilliantly lifted the world of violence and terror that stalked the streets of Brooklyn into something lyrical. By focusing on the urban crisis in the background of Biggie’s life as a drug dealer and then as a rap icon, Tinsley shows how Biggie’s music and storytelling lived at the tense intersection between poetry and violence. “Shit, it’s hard being young from the slums,” Biggie lisps in “Things Done Changed,” the second track of his first album. “Eatin’ five-cent gums, not knowing where your meal’s coming from.” In one line of verse, Biggie captures a generation’s trauma while transforming it into mellifluous wordplay, the artist turning his ruined city into a song.
Sugarcubes
New York: 1962-1964 (The Jewish Museum, July 22-January 8)
5/5. I’m going back again before it closes.
Dreaming Walls: Inside the Chelsea Hotel (Directed by Maya Duverdier, Amélie van Elmbt)
3/5. Slow but beautiful—a moving film about urban ruins, art, and aging
It Was All a Dream: Biggie and the World That Made Him (Justin Tinsley)
2/5. Not much here you can’t find in the 2021 documentary Biggie: I’ve Got a Story To Tell, currently available to stream on Netflix
A man and his mullet. This is why we read The Scroll.
“As one CDC official put it, the organization “needs to make some changes for how it communicates and how it operates—to be faster, to be nimbler, to use more plain spoken language.””
I love the “plain spoken language” part. These idiots apparently think the public doesn’t trust them because they use too many big words. The reality of course is the public doesn’t trust them because they engage in rampant fraudulent science to support political and ideological agendas. Talk about a missed opportunity for some real soul-searching.