On the Mark: Online options are a saving grace during pandemic

Since Covid-19 crept into our communities, many of us have descended into a strange solitude. Neighbors, co-workers and merchants whom we love to patronize hunker down the way we do: behind closed doors, wearing masks, waiting for the virus to wither. Our parents, grown children and grandkids may be far away.

It’s amazing, though, how new technologies enable us to connect, meet and make group decisions, patronize performers we love, participate in yoga classes and listen to gorgeous music. My Day-Timer is increasingly punctuated with competing options and Zoom links.

I miss live jazz at the Oldenburg House and the Duluth Depot. But many musicians and venues have created their own channels for viewing, hearing live music, singing or performing together, and providing income streams for artists. The Twin Cities Jazz Festival, for instance, produced shows at the Dakota, free to everyone with opportunities to comment and contribute. I miss the electricity of fellow audience members, and there’s no point in clapping when home alone, but you can read on a sidebar what other listeners/watchers are saying.

Some jazz artists are offering performances and/or recordings online. My New York City-based godson Jonah Parzen Johnson plays his baritone saxophone for you at jonahpj.com/music. I’m listening as I write this.

Individual artists are offering their music online, for listening or purchase. The Twin Cities’ Sarah Greer, a frequent Oldenburg soloist, sings for us from her crowded office online and conducts group singing sessions on Songtaneous.

For opera lovers, there is the Metropolitan Opera’s “Aria Code” series, hosted by the beautiful Rhiannon Giddens. You can tune in at any time and hear the arias from your favorite operas. I listened recently to an aria from “Cenerentola,” Gioachino Rossini’s take on the Cinderella story, with Giddens translating the words from Italian.

The Met is also offering online viewing of its current season, including Philip Glass’s astonishing “Satyagraha,” an opera based on Mahatma Gandhi nonviolently fighting apartheid in his early years in South Africa. I remember seeing this staged at the Lyric Opera of Chicago, where the action consisted not of confrontation but of Gandhi continually lifting up, physically, his downtrodden, often beaten fellow protestors and encouraging them to continue.

And group decision making. I am a founding board member of the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project, which surveys arts graduates of undergraduate and high school degree programs to learn how they rate and reflect on their educational experiences, data that we both package for participating schools and make available to researchers and the public in a series of reports on themes, such as how arts graduates rate their internship opportunities. We’ve been meeting via Zoom for over a year, and it works wonderfully, each of us via computer-mounted camera around the edges of the screen while whoever is talking appears, larger than life, in the center. After Covid, we’ll return to those marvelous lunches and dinners where so much learning and sharing goes on.

I’ve loaded up on yoga classes, once with my venerable teacher Angela, who leads us from her home studio on Lesbos in Greece, where she lives with her yoga husband, and once a week with my much-younger New Jersey friend Gopali, who manages to keep track of us all in our own studio spaces, giving helpful instructions. Quite magical.

This week, I’m participating in my second Concordia Spanish Language Camp week, via Zoom. I spent the whole week at El Lago del Bosque two springs ago. But now we have to do it online. We spend the morning session on Zoom with one other student and our teacher, Eli, who is from Mexico, followed by two class sessions on vocabulary and grammar, an optional conversation for half an hour with one of the other teachers, and an afternoon class hour. Every day ends with an episode of the telenovela that the counselor teachers have created for us.

Public policy think tanks also produce excellent webinars that you can access by Zoom. I’ve variously learned from one on the terrible conditions for workers, many of them undocumented immigrants, in the Covid-ridden meatpacking industry. I sat in on several on what’s happening to the U.S. labor movement under Covid, a complex story depending on what industry you work in and where you live. From the Economic Policy Institute, whose board I used to serve on, one on what’s happened to U.S. workers’ pay and productivity since 1948. Short answer, since the late 1960s, productivity has risen at more than twice the pace of wages.

So a big thanks to Zoom and other conduits for connecting us to learning, expression, fun, and governance in this stretch where we’re mostly “home alone.”

Ann Markusen is an economist and professor emerita at University of Minnesota. A Pine Knot board member, she lives in Red Clover Township north of Cromwell with her husband, Rod Walli.