May 1, 1969 finds many folks at the Federal Building in San Francisco singing the praises of Huey P. Newton who is serving a long jail sentence for allegedly doing in an Oakland policeman in 1967.
Many folks were there holding aloft “FREE HUEY” placards and several strolls were taken around the block as some 4000 folks chanted many slogans, including “Off the Pigs!!!” … “Free Huey!!!” and it was contagious as young blacks and whites did vent their anger at the outrages of society and discussed the revolution which will come sooner or later in some form.
“Free Huey” Rally at SF Federal Building – May 1, 1969
In one sense it’s very depressing to see how far down society has come that the only redress for grievances is in the streets and that’s what occurred today as Tactical Squad folks were called in to quell a small disturbance and these cats, as in the strike at SF State, do look mean and ugly, running down the block … true pigs.
During this time, I talked with an old Black man who chatted about the insanity that is America, then told me to get away since I was putting “up tight” his nice stroll in the country and, “This country is fucked anyway.” A sobering moment.
The Little Red Book
Many Blacks passed out Mao’s Little Red Book and at the proper moment held them high aloft. At this moment I could see why so many folks like Mao. Afterall, he took his cause and won over the biggest land mass next to Russia. So, he’s something of a hero. This was not the typical friendly type march. There were many angry folks ready, willing and able to “off the Pigs!!!”
…………….
Later I went over to City Hall and watched the trials (of several students arrested during the Strike at SF State) with six folks in the Docket, and in this Trial is John Webb, one other man and four women. So, life goes on and a horrid woman as District Attorney mercilessly grilled all the suspects, especially John … The DA with blonde hair all done up probably hates men and could have been an adequate Nazi to be sure.
Free Huey Poster SAN FRANCISCO, CA – 1969: A poster showing a Mass Rally on May Day 1969. The Black Panther Party held rallies across the nation demanding the jailed minister of Defense Huey P. Newton be set free circa 1969 in San Francisco, California. (Photo by Robert Altman/Michael Ochs Archives/Getty Images)
Democrats are wrong when they claim Republicans are “hitting a new low.” There’s no “new low.” This is the norm. Republicans have always been nothing more than reactionaries pandering to the lowest common political denominator.
Trump took the Republicans into the Land of Nonsense from which there is no way out. The latest. A false narrative about the President Biden taking away their hamburgers.
Excerpted from The Hill 4.30.2021
The conspiracy theory that Biden wants to ban beef gained steam in Republican circles and conservative media in the past week, fanned by lawmakers such as Rep. Lauren Boebert (Colo.) who accused Democrats of wanting “to limit us to about four pounds [of beef] a year.”
The false claim was sparked by a report in the Daily Mail, a tabloid based in Great Britain, that said Biden’s climate plan could limit burger consumption to one a month per person. Biden’s actual climate plan makes no such recommendation; the claim appears to come from a study unrelated to the White House that is itself based on a hypothetical question.
Another false story, first published by the New York Post, said Vice President Harris’s children’s book “Superheroes are Everywhere” was being included in the welcome packs of migrant children at the border.
Both stories became fodder for conservatives all week, underscoring a Republican fixation on cultural issues. Democrats argue it will end up hurting the GOP in the end.
“They’re showing everyone every day how f—ing small they are,” said one Democratic strategist bluntly. “This isn’t even a strategy. It’s carrying on Trump’s lies.”
Trump and his Beef
Some Republicans are also worried about the issue.
“Is it a strategy? I don’t think it’s a strategy,” said Tony Fratto, who served as deputy press secretary to former President George W. Bush. “I think these kinds of conspiratorial rumors are a feature of the modern Republican Party.
“This isn’t something that happened to the party,” he added, pointing to the party’s embrace of controversial figures such as Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.), who has been criticized for espousing conspiracy theories. “And they’re not just spreading these bizarre ideas. They have a hand in manufacturing them. They are part of the machinery.”
Sen. Mike Braun (R-Ind.) said his party shouldn’t be embracing the conspiratorial narratives.
Conditions in American jails and prisons are barbaric whether the incarcerated person is male, female, a person of any race or ethnic group. Even the wealthy and socially connected are not exempt from this heinous treatment.
The American penal system is designed to beat down and destroy the person behind bars. It is totally inhumane.
Daily Beast 4.30.2021
In the latest legal spat between Ghislaine Maxwell and the feds, lawyers for the alleged accomplice to Jeffrey Epstein suggest she got a “black eye” from shielding her face from the harsh lighting inside her jail cell at Brooklyn’s Metropolitan Detention Center.
“I am shocked my sister’s guards didn’t immediately refer her for proper medical care,” Maxwell’s brother, Ian, said in a statement Thursday night. “Instead they bullied and harassed her, effectively blaming the victim. The simple solution is to review the round-the-clock security camera footage to see what may have occurred. Apart from whatever happened in this ‘House of Horrors,’ I can report that Ghislaine’s family and friends continue to support her. We are confident, once this is over, it will be the prosecutor who has a proverbial black eye.”
Ghislaine Maxwell
The British socialite and accused sex-trafficker has been denied bail four times since her arrest for grooming minors last July. On Tuesday, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit rejected Maxwell’s request to be released on bond. At oral arguments the day before, her lawyer David Oscar Markus complained about her conditions in the federal lockup, claiming MDC guards were keeping Maxwell awake at night by conducting suicide checks and flashing lights in her cell every 15 minutes.
Ghislaine Maxwell – Before Jail
In its order, the appeals court said, “To the extent Appellant seeks relief specific to her sleeping conditions, such request should be addressed to the District Court.”
Bobbi Sternheim, another attorney for Maxwell, wasted no time writing to a Manhattan federal court judge over the 59-year-old’s supposed sleep deprivation. She also included a photo of Maxwell with a bruise under her left eye as an exhibit.
“While Ms. Maxwell is unaware of the cause of the bruise, as reported to medical and psych staff, she has grown increasingly reluctant to report information to the guards for fear of retaliation, discipline, and punitive chores,” Sternheim wrote Judge Alison J. Nathan on Thursday. “However, there is concern that the bruise may be related to the need for Ms. Maxwell to shield her eyes from the lights projected into her cell throughout the night.”
According to Sternheim, Maxwell “resorts to using a sock or towel to cover her eyes in an awkward attempt to shield them from disrupting illumination every 15 minutes.”
“Ms. Maxwell continues to be disrupted throughout the night by guards shining a flash/strobe light into her cell, claiming that her breathing must be checked,” Sternheim added. “The myth that Ms. Maxwell’s conditions of confinement are related to her being a suicide risk was laid to rest during the oral argument: There is nothing to support that contrived claim.”
On Wednesday night, Sternheim wrote, MDC staff confronted Maxwell about the bruise covering her left eye and warned they’d place her in the lockup’s Special Housing Unit, or solitary confinement, if she didn’t tell them how she got it.
The lawyer asked the court to direct MDC to stop its 15-minute checks of Maxwell or “justify the need for the disruptive flashlight surveillance.”
Nathan has ordered prosecutors and MDC legal counsel to answer whether Maxwell is being subjected to flashlight surveillance as described; what the basis is for doing so; and whether the jail can provide Maxwell with an appropriate eye covering.
Maxwell’s legal team has repeatedly claimed she’s suffering from “detrimental” conditions in the federal detention center. In response, the government fired off its own missive to the court claiming Maxwell was cared for as well as any other prisoner, and that jail staff had to remind her to clean her cell and flush her toilet.
When Maxwell appeared before a judge last week, the socialite did not appear to be frail or in poor health as her lawyers have claimed.
Maxwell faces trial this summer for allegedly grooming, abusing and trafficking four underage girls for Epstein from a period covering 1994 to 1997 and 2001 to 2004. Her lawyers asked Nathan to postpone the trial until next year.
Sociopath: a person with a personality disorder manifesting itself in extreme antisocial attitudes and behavior and a lack of conscience.
Citizen’s arrest is one of the most abused tools available to the public. The misuse of the citizen’s arrest can have devastating long term consequences for a person illegally and unfairly targeted for a citizen’s arrest.
Lee’s Perspective contributor Liz Heidhues wrote the following after she read of the Federal Hate Crimes indictment of three men charged with the February 2020 murder of jogger Ahmaud Arbery while he was running in a predominantly White Georgia neighborhood.
We need to start a conversation around repealing the citizen’s arrest law – NOW.
Another innocent victim will be wronged, humiliated, falsely arrested, or murdered if we continue to ignore the abuse or misuse of the doctrine of citizen’s arrest with its serious consequences for the arrestors and the arrestees.
Private persons, acting out their own depraved fantasies and manipulating the system to achieve their own hateful ends, abuse the citizen’s arrest as a tool for enacting Revenge, Racism, and Repression of another’s civil rights.
In every jurisdiction in the United States, a private person may lawfully detain another and may often use physical force to do so.
Citizen’s arrests arose in medieval England when it could take days for law enforcement to travel to a crime scene. Then, it was necessary for private citizens to help detain suspects for the arrival of law enforcement. However, citizen’s arrest is a doctrine whose time should have passed many decades – or centuries – ago. It has long outlived its usefulness.
People are unchecked from roaming the streets looking for “wrongdoers” to arrest, thus increasing the potential for abuse.
Citizens Arrest! Citizen’s Arrest!
The racist implications of the law cannot be ignored.
During the lynching era in America, white mobs would claim they were exercising the right of citizen’s arrest.
On 1.22.1912 four Black people in Hamilton, Georgia, were citizen’s arrested and lynched, accused of killing a White planter who was sexually abusing Black girls and women.
On 7.25.1946 two Black couples were dragged from their car in Walton County, Georgia, and shot 60 times by a mob of White men making a citizen’s arrest.
Police Officers abuse the citizen’s arrest.
In one instance, a Police Officer had a private citizen sign a blank citizen’s arrest form as a precautionary measure to permit Officers to arrest protestors if they became too rowdy.
The citizen’s arrest is a blanket authorization for a private person to arrest anyone for almost anything and compromises the usual restraints that are placed on a Police Officer’s power to arrest, such as actually witnessing the Incident. It alters the role of the Police Officer.
The citizen’s arrest transforms the Police Officer into a custodian who acts at the direction of the person making the citizen’s arrest.
The most recent grim reminder of an abuse of a citizen’s arrest is the 2.23.2020 shooting death of a 25-year-old Black jogger pursued by three White men in pick-up trucks during a citizen’s arrest of him in Glynn County, Georgia.
The armed White father-and-son duo, Gregory and Travis McMichael, were captured on video pursuing Ahmaud Arbery, the black jogger, in their vehicle through their Georgia neighborhood and gunning Mr. Arbery down.
Gregory and Travis McMichael charged with Federal Hate Crimes.
The third White man, William “Roddie” Bryan, followed in a second vehicle. Bryan later provided a statement to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation that the McMichael son, Travis McMichael, said “F—— N—–” as Mr. Arbery lay dying.
Local prosecutors blocked the arrests of the White men, the McMichaels and Bryan, for over 8 weeks. The McMichael’s and Bryan were eventually indicted for murder and other charges in late May 2020.
Initially, prosecutors citied Georgia’s citizen’s arrest law. The White men were declared to be legally in “hot pursuit’ and had “solid, firsthand, Probable Cause” that Ahmaud Arbery was a burglary suspect.
There was absolutely no evidence that Mr. Arbery was a burglar. Mr. Arbery was not armed as he jogged through the White men’s neighborhood.
The harm caused by the United States’ citizen’s arrest doctrine is long-standing and thoroughly documented. The abuses of it far outweigh the uses.
We need to stand up and take action. NOW.
There can be no more justification for private persons to enact false arrests AND to murder innocent citizens for deceptive, spurious, or untrue grounds.
Resources:
Vilifying the Vigilante: A Narrowed Scope of Citizen’s Arrest. Ira P. Robbins, Cornell Journal of Law and Public Policy. 2016.
House Judiciary Non-Civil Committee to Repeal Georgia’s Citizen’s Arrest Law. Hannah Riley, 7.12.2020. Southern Center for Human Rights.
“…..flying to New York to see her lover Ivan after dreaming about sucking a rabbit bone to its marrow on his Manhattan balcony.” Susan Taubes – Divorcing
This is a line from the 1969 novel Divorcing written by Susan Taubes (pictured above with her family). Shortly after its publication she committed suicide at age 41. The book was re released in 2020. It is the subject of a deep and thorough review by Leslie Jamison, herself an accomplished writer who went through her own divorce last year.
Divorcing was published two years after Susan Taubes own divorce was finalized.
Taubes and the author Susan Sontag were close friends. Sontag’s son David Rieff wrote the introduction to the newly released edition of Divorcing. Taube’s body was identified by Sontag. Years later Sontag told her own son, “I will never forgive her…and never recover from what she did.”
David Rieff and Susan Sontag
The review is fascinating for the insights it provides about the author Susan Taubes and the entire subject of Divorce. It really got me to think about the subject in a manner I had not previously. Plus, Leslie Jamison is an excellent journalist.
Susan Taubes 1928-1969
Excerpted from New York Review of Books – 5.13.2021 Issue – Leslie Jamison
Susan Taubes’s novel Divorcing begins with the death of its main character. Sophie Blind wakes up in an apartment by the Hudson River, still groggy from a dream, or perhaps still dreaming, to find her lover bending over her, saying, “you’re dead Sophie.” Then she remembers:
I died on a Tuesday afternoon, struck by a car….
The sensation of my head severed from my back is still vivid. My body growing enormous, its thousands of trillions of cells suddenly set free, spread, speeded, pressed jubilant.
It’s a vision of death that holds terror and freedom at once: the body enlarged rather than destroyed, its cells liberated. “Spread, speeded, pressed”: even the sibilance suggests a vaulting song.
Given that Sophie is in the midst of ending her marriage, this dream of death suggests itself as a metaphor for divorce: the death of an old self suddenly confronting the vertigo of freedom. And given the biography of Sophie’s creator, it feels less like metaphor and more like warning.
Divorcing – Susan Taubes
Only a few days after Divorcing was published, in November 1969, Susan Taubes committed suicide by drowning herself in the Atlantic. It’s hard not to read much of the novel as an extended suicide note. “Now that I’m dead,” Sophie jokes with her lover, “I can write my autobiography at last.”
Although her suicide happened soon after her novel’s publication—and even sooner after a devastating review in TheNew York Times,a timeline that invites causal speculation—Taubes had in fact been planning it for some time; she had struggled with depression for years. She was forty-one when she died, her son sixteen, her daughter twelve. Her body was identified by Susan Sontag, one of her closest friends. Years later, Sontag told her own son, David Rieff, “I will never forgive her…and never recover from what she did.”
Divorcing is a strangely provocative and unsettling work of art—a quilt of memories, dreams, arguments, trysts, snippets of motherhood, and dark fantasies, including an autopsy, a funeral, and a trial. The novel moves across national borders—her working title was To America and Back in a Coffin—and zigzags constantly between gruesome daydreams and mundane daily life. The thresholds that obsess it most are death and divorce, the latter as a kind of death-in-life. Both dangle the prospect of simultaneous anguish and liberation; both illuminate Sophie’s desire for self-possession.
It begins to feel like travel, sex, fantasy, divorce, and death are all handmaidens of the same siren call—to keep changing at all costs. As if Sophie and Taubes herself both embodied Sontag’s pronouncement that “I am only interested in people engaged in a project of self-transformation.”
I found the perfect music to accompany a review of Divorcing. A piece from the 2006 film directed by Robert DeNiro, The Good Shepherd. It’s titled Miriam, conducted by Marcelo Zarvos and Bruce Fowler. If you view the film you will see that this haunting creation fits right in with the character Miriam in the story line. It is apropos as a soundtrack for Divorcing.
It was one year ago today, April 28, 2020, that San Francisco made a 1.5 mile thoroughfare on JFK Drive in Golden Gate Park a car free zone. During the past year thousands upon thousands of cyclists, walkers, runners, people of all ages have used this oasis not polluted by automobiles.
Currently there is a serious campaign to make this section of land a car free zone forever. Various San Francisco agencies are studying the plan to make JFK Drive car free a reality for current and future generations.
Today a small, dedicated group of car free advocates gathered to celebrate the occasion and renew their vow to press on until JFK Drive is permanently car free.
Photos – Lee Heidhues
Jodie Medeiros – Executive Director Walk San Francisco
While most folks focus on local news and think little, if anything, about what is going on outside the American border, Russia policy has international ramifications.
Afterall America engaged in an over 40 year Cold War with Russia which resulted in billions upon billions in wasteful military spending and destroyed countless reputations during the absurd Red Scare era.
The widely held consensus during the Trump regime was that Vladimir Putin (pictured above with President Obama) was being given a pass to conduct Russian affairs without interference from the USA.
President Biden entered office in January promising to take a tougher stand towards our long time competitor. The merit of this policy is being debated. Its consequences are already being felt.
Regrettably, the Successful Campaign to Block Matthew Rojansky’s Appointment Is Ominous for Biden’s Russia Policy
Matthew Rojansky
The Nation 4.27.2021 – Katrina vanden Heuvel (Publisher)
When a new administration comes to Washington, the flowery rhetoric and springtime promises are often less revealing than who is put where to run the place. That’s why many of Washington’s most scurrilous campaigns are backstage fights over potential appointments.
That’s why the successful campaign to block the appointment of Matthew Rojansky as Russia director on the National Security Council is not only a sad reflection of the poisonous state of the debate on Russian policy today, but also an ominous sign for Biden’s foreign policy going forward.
As director of the Kennan Institute at the Woodrow Wilson Center, Rojansky has been an articulate advocate of a commonsense realism on US relations with Russia. Facing what President Biden calls “cascading crises”—the pandemic, economic collapse and growing inequality, racial upheaval, catastrophic climate change—the United States needs to avoid draining conflicts abroad to rebuild its strength at home and focus on meeting the real security challenges of our time.
President George W. Bush and Putin
With China becoming a “near-peer competitor,” according to the administration, we should be trying to divide Russia from China, not drive them together. As Rojansky wrote, “America’s task is not to replace enmity toward Russia with a partnership…. It is to manage the current competition in ways that protect vital US interests while minimizing risks and costs, and allowing space for selective cooperation.” The United States has real interests in cooperating with Russia in reviving nuclear arms controls, helping to stabilize Afghanistan after US withdrawal, addressing climate change and more. This would suggest more dialogue and engagement with Russia and less posturing and confrontation.
Katrina vanden Heuvel is editorial director and publisher of The Nation, America’s leading source of progressive politics and culture. She served as editor of the magazine from 1995 to 2019.
“District Attorney (Ann Marie) Schubert has always been committed to a failed, tough-on-crime approach where the powerful, and especially police who commit acts of violence, are never held accountable,” SF District Attorney Chesa Boudin said .
Boudin said Schubert is clinging to outdated views that increased incarceration numbers and exacerbated racial disparities in the justice system.
San Francisco’s progressive DA wasted little time and minced no words when asked to comment about the Attorney General candidacy of “Independent” (ex-Republican) Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento County District Attorney.
Schubert has been a prosecutor for 25 years. She will have the heavy financial backing of law enforcement PACs. Schubert’s campaign will be total slash and burn. A non stop attack on currentAG Rob Bonta and ‘progressive’ District Attorneys such as Boudin in San Francisco and George Gascon in Los Angeles.
Excerpted from San Francisco Chronicle 4.26.2021
SACRAMENTO — Anne Marie Schubert, the Sacramento County district attorney, said Monday that she will run for California attorney general next year and lashed out at progressive advocates of criminal justice reform such as San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin.
Boudin said Schubert is clinging to outdated views that increased incarceration numbers and exacerbated racial disparities in the justice system.
San Francisco DA Chesa Boudin at his inaugural – January 8, 2020
“District Attorney Schubert has always been committed to a failed, tough-on-crime approach where the powerful, and especially police who commit acts of violence, are never held accountable,” Boudin said in a statement.
Schubert has long clashed with criminal justice reformers over her handling of police use-of-force cases and support for longer sentences for some crimes.
In 2018, Schubert was criticized by some justice groups after she received campaign contributions from police unions days after Stephon Clark, a 22-year-old unarmed Black man, was shot to death in his grandmother’s backyard by two Sacramento police officers.
Schubert later decided not to charge the officers with any crimes. She said they believed that Clark, who was holding a cell phone, was armed with a gun and that they were in imminent danger. (See photo above)
Sacramento DA Ann Marie Schubert announces for AG
Schubert, a conservative-leaning career prosecutor, said she will run against recently sworn-in state Attorney General Rob Bonta, a former Bay Area state legislator, because cities like San Francisco are “in chaos” due to liberal policies that endanger public safety.
“In San Francisco, you have a district attorney … who is letting violent criminals out with little oversight or consequences, criminals who go on to victimize again,” Schubert said.
Although Bonta is her opponent, Schubert focused much of her attention Monday on Boudin and other progressive local prosecutors including George Gascón, a former San Francisco district attorney who now holds the same position in Los Angeles County.
Schubert, a Republican-turned-independent, evoked harsh descriptions of crime in San Francisco as she announced her candidacy in a hotel conference room in downtown Sacramento, surrounded by relatives of murder victims.
“Major conventions are pulling out of San Francisco because their executives are worried that their guests’ safety is at risk,” she said. “Tourists think it’s too dangerous to visit that beautiful city. … It is true and it is tragic that San Francisco is suffering.”
Schubert said she fears that Bonta, who was one of the most progressive state lawmakers as an Assembly member from Alameda, will bring the same type of polices to the rest of California if he wins a full four-year term.
California Attorney General Rob Bonta
Schubert entered the race just three days after Bonta was sworn in Friday following his confirmation by the Legislature. Gov. Gavin Newsom nominated him to replace Xavier Becerra, who resigned to become President Biden’s secretary of health and human services.
Schubert is perhaps best known for prosecuting Joseph DeAngelo, the Golden State Killer. DeAngelo was sentenced to life in prison last year after admitting to 13 murders and 13 kidnappings for robbery across California in the 1970s and ’80s.
Dana Williamson, a senior adviser to Bonta’s campaign, called Schubert a “tremendously flawed” candidate and noted that she is treasurer of a prosecutors group that is under investigation by the state attorney general for its use of funds.
The California District Attorneys Association siphoned $3 million that was supposed to be used for public-advocacy litigation, such as environmental cases, and instead spent it on training and lobbying, according to an audit conducted by an accounting firm the group hired.
“Now she wants to lead the Department of Justice, the same entity that is investigating her organization’s misdeeds,” Williamson said.
Schubert has been Sacramento County district attorney since 2015, and was a prosecutor in the county for 25 years before taking elected office. She left the Republican Party after she was re-elected in 2018 and registered as a “no party preference” voter.
She is the second person to announce a challenge to Bonta, after Nathan Hochman, a Republican and former assistant attorney general in the George W. Bush administration.
It’s reprehensible that the Chinese government feels so threatened by the 39 year old Director and now Oscar winner Chloé Zhao. Government censors have obliterated her achievement from all its social media platforms.
This is the same government which is engaging in a ruthless crackdown in Hong Kong, with its crackdown on free speech and the recent imprisonment of media mogul Jimmy Lai.
This is the same government which continues its brutal campaign against The Uyghurs: A Turkic-speaking Muslims from the Central Asian region. The largest population live in China’s autonomous Xinjiang region, in the country’s north-west. The Uyghurs are one of a number of persecuted Muslim minorities in Xinjiang, including the Kazakhs, Uzbeks, Tajiks, Kyrgyz and Hui.
Wall Street Journal 4.26.2021
After filmmaker becomes first Chinese woman to win top honor at Academy Awards, news disappears from search engines, social media and state outlets
“Nomadland” director Chloé Zhao made history on Sunday by becoming the first woman of color and first Chinese woman to win the Oscar for best director. Official media, major search engines and internet censors in her home country are making as if it didn’t happen.
Ms. Zhao’s win, just the second time a woman has walked away with best director, unleashed a flurry of congratulatory messages on Chinese social-media sites when it was announced Monday morning Beijing time. By midafternoon, nearly all of the posts had been erased.
Searches for her name on Baidu and Sogou, the country’s dominant search engines, produced numerous links to news of her previous accolades but only scattered links to deleted articles about the Academy Award honor.
State broadcaster China Central Television, the official Xinhua News Agency, and Communist Party mouthpiece the People’s Daily stayed silent on the award throughout the day. Two state media reporters told The Wall Street Journal that they had received orders from China’s propaganda ministry not to report on Ms. Zhao’s victory, despite what they described as her status as a Chinese national, because of “previous public opinion.”
Earlier this year, Ms. Zhao was pilloried online in China for critical comments she made about the country in a 2013 magazine interview.
China’s Foreign Ministry declined to comment on the removal of social-media posts during a regular news conference on Monday, saying it wasn’t a diplomatic issue.
“Nomadland,” which stars Frances McDormand as a recent widow who joins a community of transient gig workers roaming the American West, was the big winner at the 93rd Academy Awards, walking away with Best Picture and Best Actress in addition to Ms. Zhao’s award. Born in Beijing, the 39-year-old Ms. Zhao was also named Best Director at the Golden Globes.
China has long sought the soft-power prestige that comes with awards like the Oscars, which makes the official silence surrounding Ms. Zhao’s accomplishment particularly noteworthy. The reticence comes amid a surge in digital nationalism, fanned by China’s ruling Communist Party, which has led to explosions of online anger at Swedish clothing retailer Hennes & Mauritz AB, the National Basketball Association and others for perceived insults to China’s national honor.
Ms. Zhao experienced a Chinese social-media assault of her own earlier this year after her win at the Golden Globes in March. Chinese social-media sentiment, initially jubilant about Ms. Zhao’s success on the world stage, turned bitter after users circulated a 2013 interview with Filmmaker magazine in which Ms. Zhao made a reference to China, calling it a place she had grown up in “where there are lies everywhere.”
Ms. Zhao, who moved to the U.S. when she was in high school, referenced her childhood again in her Academy Award acceptance speech on Sunday, reciting in Mandarin the first line of a Chinese classic text that she said she and her father had memorized: “People at birth are inherently good.” Users on Chinese social-media platforms responded with a flood of excited reviews and a variety of happy-face emoticons.
“I am truly happy about it because a Chinese filmmaker has left a magnificent mark on global film history. It’s worth celebrating no matter what,” wrote a user on the Quora-like Q&A site Zhihu.
Hours later, that and similar posts had disappeared from the site. Users on the Twitter -like Weibo platform complained that Ms. Zhao’s accomplishments were being deleted by censors.
“Why is it I can’t find any news about Nomadland in the country at all, is that really necessary?” wrote one user. Others suggested using altered versions of the film’s Chinese name that would allow posts to evade detection by platforms’ automated filtering systems.
As with Baidu and Sogou, a search on Tencent Holdings Ltd. ’s do-everything app WeChat produced a link to a single deleted news article about Ms. Zhao’s Oscar win.
Weibo, Baidu, Sogou, Tencent and Zhihu didn’t respond to requests for comment.
The Global Times, a nationalistic tabloid published by the People’s Daily, published the lone state-media acknowledgment of the news on Monday, an English-language editorial that called on Ms. Zhao to become “more mature” and “avoid being a friction point.”
Ms. Zhao’s publicists didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
Ms. Zhao’s next project is Marvel Studios’ “The Eternals,” a superhero movie starring Angelina Jolie, Salma Hayek and Richard Madden. China has traditionally been a lucrative market for Marvel.
Filmed in Berlin, Counterpart is partial sci-fi, spy story, crime saga. I was hooked within minutes.
Perhaps the reasons for my interest is its locale. Berlin. A place I have been and where many Cold War novels and films have taken place.
Counterpart definitely grabs your attention and forces the viewer to pay attention, particularly the dual role played by J.K. Simmons (pictured above)
The Atlantic 1.21.2018 – Sophie Gilbert
The Starz show (now streaming on Amazon Prime) is a twisty spy thriller with endless layers.
What also makes Counterpart work is the Oscar-winner J.K. Simmons, who brings gravitas and emotional heft to a project that could easily careen off the rails toward crazytown.
Simmons plays Howard Silk, a mild-mannered civil servant late in his career who’s completely oblivious, like most citizens of Earth, to the mind-bending secret in the basement of the organization where he’s spent 30 years as a pencil pusher. Howard clocks in early every day and visits his comatose wife, Emily (Olivia Williams), at night.
But his innocence is shattered when he’s confronted by Alternative-Howard, a defector from the other dimension who will only work with himself.
It’s a smorgasbord of different concepts in one. The Berlin setting, the espionage plotlines, and the deceptively ineffectual protagonist bring to mind the novels of John le Carré, but there are also elements of Homeland, Harry Potter, and Stieg Larsson thrown into the mix. Information, as any intelligence agency knows, is currency, and Counterpart is precise in what it reveals, eking out twists in each episode, but keeping the larger narrative under wraps.
Olivia Williams who plays dual roles in Counterpart
Howard and Alt-Howard are revealed in the first episode to be shockingly different: One is a gentle but unremarkable soul while the other is a hulking, James Bond–style enforcer. Simmons embodies them perfectly, playing two totally distinct characters who somehow look identical. It’s a bravura performance that throws yet another question into the mix: What on either Earth happened to these two Howards to make them so different?
It’s notable that Counterpart borrows so heavily from existing tropes and yet feels so fresh. The first episode, directed by Morten Tyldum (The Imitation Game, Passengers), establishes that this is ambitious, expensive television—Howard’s workplace has the pallid, monochrome vibe of an adults-only Ministry of Magic, and the aesthetic of Alt-Berlin, an uber-modern city with hints of dystopia, is enthralling. It’s obvious early on that the two Howards are going to upend each other’s realities while also influencing one another. In the meantime, both are charged with investigating a larger conspiracy between the two worlds, and finding a stowaway in original-Howard’s reality—an assassin (Sara Serraiocco) who’s murdering agency employees one by one.
Nazonin Boniadi
Serraiocco’s character has palpable shades of the fictional hacker Lisbeth Salander, and the Italian actress brings surprising vulnerability to the role. The supporting cast also includes Homeland’s Nazanin Boniadi as a mysterious wrangler, Ulrich Thomsen (Banshee) as the grizzled director of operations at Howard’s agency, and Richard Schiff (The West Wing) as a diplomat who represents his world in negotiations with its double. These are the moments when the show is at its most riveting, when the infinite questions its premise presents are answered. How do the two worlds differ? How do they get along? Why does one look like Berlin and the other like 22nd-century Shanghai? Why are smoking and hand-shaking illegal?
Nicholas Pinnock
There are enough loose threads in Counterpart to make a tapestry, but the series seems committed to tying them together. Plus, for a show whose episodes run around 55 minutes, the pace is gratifyingly propulsive. It’s Simmons, though, who steals it, doing double duty as a milquetoast accountant and a braggadocious intelligence operative who wouldn’t be out of place in the Expendables lineup. Rather than turn either into a stereotype, he imbues both with a kind of emotional depth that insinuates they’re not as different as they seem.
Lee's Perspective 