East Tennessee business helping to illuminate inauguration
Bandit Lites is painting the landscape of the National Mall in D.C. with lights. Tennessee Democrats plan to bask in the glow virtually. Author: Katie Inman Updated: 10:42 PM EST January 14, 2021
KNOXVILLE, Tenn. East Tennessee is turning a spotlight on the inauguration, with less than a week away from the presidential transition.
While Washington D.C. security is preparing every area for January 20, an East Tennessee company is working to illuminate the inauguration.
Bandit Lites is hard at work installing 2,000 lights, stretched across two miles on the National Mall in front of the Capitol.
The novel coronavirus did more than kill a third of a million Americans and freeze major swaths of the business and education worlds. By turning large gatherings into potentially virulent spreaders of disease, it also turned 2020 into the year the fun died â in the Napa Valley as across the nation and globe.
The Napa Valley Expo stood empty in late May, when tens of thousands of music fans had been expected to pack the fairground for the BottleRock festival. Not a note was played of a concert series planned for the Oxbow Commons, the summertime Porchfest music crawl was replaced by internet video feeds from bedrooms, and all that survived of the Town & Country Fair in August was an online livestock auction with cattle and goats dropped off by truck a few days later.
Aidin Vaziri December 23, 2020Updated: December 28, 2020, 6:07 pm
Scott Padden (left) and singer-songwriter Andrew St. James give a social distancing concert in front of the Balboa Theater in the Richmond District in San Francisco in May. Photo: Kate Munsch, Special to The Chronicle
The Bay Area music scene took a serious hit in 2020. Venues closed. Record stores shut down. Musicians had to shelter in place in their homes.As the coronavirus pandemic gripped the region in mid-March, it felt as though there would be no scene at all.
“We were the first to close, and we’ll be the last to open,” said Allen Scott, head of concerts and festivals at Another Planet Entertainment, the Berkeley promotion company that books local clubs like the Independent in San Francisco and the Fox Theater in Oakland, as well as the annual Outside Lands Music and Arts Festival in Golden Gate Park, which was canceled.
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Rolling Stone ‘We Saved the Music’: Amy Klobuchar on Getting $15 Billion for Venues Into Stimulus Bill
“People embraced music and culture more and more,” says Minnesota senator. “But they were just alone doing it on their computers and their phones, and they want it back”
By Jenn Ackerman for Rolling Stone
As the coronaviruspandemic began to destroy lives and livelihoods this spring, the music industry quickly realized the dire straits they were facing. Venues were some of the first businesses to close and will be one of the last to open, and critical PPE money utilized by millions of other businesses was less effective or useless to venue owners that were forced to lay off their entire crews.