It’s a genuinely sad day in San Francisco history.  

We live close by the historic Cliff House and walk by it regularly.  We ate dinner there on several occasions. It was always a great experience.

The Cliff House has been a life long presence. Now what the fog, wind and climate could not do has been done by the Federal government. Its unwillingness to sign a lease with the restaurant owners signaled the end of the landmark Cliff House.  

It’s just more collateral damage inflicted on this country by Donald Trump.

NBC Bay Area 12.31.2020

The Cliff House restaurant in San Francisco closed its doors for good Thursday after 157 years, and the iconic sign atop the building was removed, much to the chagrin of dozens of revelers who gathered at the Bay Area landmark.

Workers removed the sign one letter at a time Thursday, the restaurant’s official last day of operation, though it has been closed for months because of coronavirus restrictions. Proprietors Dan and Mary Hountalas have said the building will no longer be a restaurant but instead a federal office building, according to their sources.

The permanent closure can be attributed in part to the coronavirus pandemic, which has restricted operations for much of the past year to takeout service. But the restaurant also has been mired in a contract dispute with the National Parks Service over concessions.

The owners say a 20-year contract expired in June 2018, and since then, the parks service has issued one 6-month contract and two consecutive one-year contracts.

The last contract expired Thursday.

The Cliff House no more. December 31, 2020

The closure put 180 employees out of work, the owners said, adding that they “attempted to institute takeout service in early June but after 10 weeks could not continue to sustain the unbearable losses associated with takeout.”

The historic restaurant has been operating since 1863, and it is one of San Francisco’s legendary landmarks.

https://www.nbcbayarea.com/news/local/cliff-house-restaurants-last-day-to-be-marked-by-removal-of-iconic-sign-in-sf/2434686/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cliff_House,_San_Francisco

Photos – Lee Heidhues

”Must be from a real estate agent,” Renee says when a mysterious videotape arrives on the doorstep. Probably not: the tape spies on Fred and Renee when they thought they were alone.

No. “Eerie Visions with a Mood of Menace” is not a retrospective on The Year of the Pandemic.

It is the title for New York Times columnist Janet Maslin’s review of the 1997 David Lynch film “Lost Highway.”  An appropriate way to look at this horrific year is to watch this disturbing over the top piece of cinematic Art. 

If watching the film is not on your New Year’s “do” list I invite  you to take a listen to the soundtrack. It is bizarre as the film.  Nine Inch Nails, Trent Reznor, Lou Reed and Marilyn Manson are part of the eclectic brew in this soundtrack delight.

A link is attached at the conclusion of the article along with a Wikipedia look at Lost Highway

New York Times – Janet Maslin 2.21.1997

SOME artists have to strain for the shock effects that leave a spectator haunted and unnerved. Not David Lynch. The unnatural is second nature for Mr. Lynch, whose twisted, libidinous imagery yields nightmare films of such strange and menacing flair. At their evil best, which is also their worst, they leave you in no great hurry to be alone in the dark.

David Lynch

”It’s like when you are sitting alone, you sometimes have the feeling that there are different parts of you,” Mr. Lynch has said, explaining the state of mind summoned by his new film. ”There are certain things that you can do, and there are certain things that you would never do unless there was a part of you that took over.” That’s reason either to see Mr. Lynch’s coolly ominous, attention-getting ”Lost Highway” or to dial 911.

”Lost Highway,” an elaborate hallucination that could never be mistaken for the work of anyone else, finds Mr. Lynch echoing the perversity of ”Blue Velvet,” the earlier film of his that this most closely resembles. Both films share an eerie, mocking tone and some of the same aural and visual vocabulary. (Foreboding sounds like a dull roar. Certain walls have a womblike reddish hue. Women excite a furious mix of lust and loathing. Drivers hurtle down the middle of dark roadways, racing along the yellow line.)

Never again is a Lynch film liable to be as radically original or disturbing as ”Blue Velvet”; this director repeats himself too readily for that. But ”Lost Highway” holds sinister interest of its own. Much less shrill than ”Wild at Heart” or ”Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me,” the only other Lynch features since the 1986 ”Blue Velvet,” this one constructs an intricate puzzle out of dream logic, lurid eroticism, violence, shifting identities and fierce intimations of doom.

In describing the film’s deliberate ellipses and the weird, unexplained transformation of its main character, comparisons to Kafka and Lewis Carroll are invited. A more useful point of reference may just be ”The Wizard of Oz,” since there’s no indication that Mr. Lynch, for all his skill in manipulating this story’s strangeness, is any less baffled by his film’s conundrums than the audience will be. And he allows a too-deliberate pace to lessen the tight grip this material needs. When exploring the scarier realms of the subconscious, it’s best never to let the viewer get the upper hand.

Patricia Arquette

The plot, a conversation piece to set the Internet buzzing: Fred Madison (Bill Pullman) and his red-haired wife, Renee (Patricia Arquette), are essentially strangers. Everything about Renee leaves Fred alienated in the extreme. He feels humiliated. He can’t interest her sexually. He doesn’t trust her, and for good reason (everything about Ms. Arquette’s sexy, deadpan delivery suggests new frontiers in marital treachery). When Fred, a musician, goes out to play at a jazz club, Renee says she will stay home and read. No heroine of Mr. Lynch’s has ever looked ready to curl up with a good book.

”Must be from a real estate agent,” Renee says when a mysterious videotape arrives on the doorstep. Probably not: the tape spies on Fred and Renee when they thought they were alone.

It doesn’t take much more of this for Fred to be ready for a crackup. It happens when he goes to a party and meets the film’s ghoul, played in truly frightening fashion by Robert Blake in whiteface. (Mr. Lynch’s tricky humor, manifest in many of the film’s smaller touches, provides background music that sounds like the pop song ”Spooky” to welcome Mr. Blake, who is exactly that.)

A cellular phone and a video camera are all it takes to turn Mr. Blake’s character into the scariest screen gnome since the red-cloaked dwarf in ”Don’t Look Now.” Next thing Fred knows, Renee is a bloody corpse and he himself is on Death Row without a clue about what exactly has happened. The film enjoys its well-timed moments of deliberate confusion, even though audience patience will eventually wear thin.

In jail, Fred suddenly changes so greatly that he becomes a young garage mechanic named Pete Dayton. Pete, played by Balthazar Getty with the same guarded, desperate manner as Mr. Pullman’s, hasn’t killed anybody, and so he is entitled to be set free. Pete’s half of the film mirrors and distorts Fred’s story, and then it introduces Ms. Arquette a second time. Now she’s the blond moll of a gangster named Mr. Eddy (Robert Loggia). And she has become a much hotter number, sexually desperate for Fred/Pete.

The fact that both Ms. Arquettes show up in the same photograph, or that she repeats some identical dialogue in both incarnations, is the sort of detail that ”Lost Highway” invites its audience to ponder. A structure that begins and ends at the same moment in time, with a debt to the Mobius strip (or to ”Pulp Fiction”), is another intriguing feature. But the film has more of these touches than it has explanations. Eventually it raises the overwhelming possibility that nobody is entirely in the driver’s seat.

As the film moves closer to its vision of oblivion, it presents Mr. Eddy as a leering sadist (a Lynch fixture) who traffics in pornography and seamy thrills. Mr. Eddy’s transgressions are supposedly perverse, but the movie exploits Ms. Arquette as frankly as he does. As ever, Mr. Lynch brings much more gusto than is absolutely necessary to the crueler, raunchier, more misogynist aspects of his material. It says something about the film’s target audience that the rock stars Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails (on the soundtrack) and Marilyn Manson (playing a porn actor) are part of this show.

The film’s subtly fascinating aural track credits Mr. Lynch for sound design and once again employs the wonderfully unsettling music of Angelo Badalamenti. (It’s worth the extra trouble to see this film in a theater with decent speakers.) The screenplay is by Mr. Lynch and Barry Gifford, who wrote the novel ”Wild at Heart.” Another of his books, ”Night People,” included the phrase ”lost highway.” Those two words apparently gave Mr. Lynch all the inspiration he needed.

”Lost Highway” is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian). It includes violence, profanity, supernatural strangeness and graphically rendered sexual situations.

LOST HIGHWAY

Directed by David Lynch; written by Mr. Lynch and Barry Gifford; director of photography, Peter Deming; edited by Mary Sweeney; music by Angelo Badalamenti; production designer, Patricia Norris; produced by Deepak Nayar, Tom Sternberg and Ms. Sweeney; released by October Films. Running time: 135 minutes. This film is rated R.

WITH: Bill Pullman (Fred Madison), Patricia Arquette (Renee Madison/Alice Wakefield), Robert Blake (Mystery Man), Balthazar Getty (Pete Dayton), Robert Loggia (Mr. Eddy/Dick Laurent) and Marilyn Manson (Porno Star No. 1).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lost_Highway_(film)

https://www.google.com/search?sxsrf=ALeKk032yXr0aQWvsTQDe9S9_0wohODspw%3A1609383022142&ei=bjztX8qUCJaS0PEP0_az2AQ&q=lost+highway+soundtrack&oq=lost+highway+soundtrack&gs_lcp=CgZwc3ktYWIQDFAAWABgi1toAHABeACAAQCIAQCSAQCYAQCqAQdnd3Mtd2l6&sclient=psy-ab&ved=0ahUKEwjKg976mvftAhUWCTQIHVP7DEsQ4dUDCA0

The Chinese government in a brutal act of suppressing the media has jailed a citizen journalist. What was her alleged crime?

Zhang Zhan exposed the government’s botched response to the Covid-19 outbreak in Wuhan. For shining a light on government incompetence Ms. Zhan will spend the next four years in a Chinese prison. She is in the midst of a hunger strike and may very well perish.

What the Chinese government has done is criminal and an assault on human rights.

Excerpted from The New York Times 12.28.2020

Zhang Zhan, 37, a former lawyer, is the first known person to be tried for challenging the Chinese government’s narrative about the coronavirus pandemic.

Excerpted from The New York Times 12.28.2020

A Chinese court on Monday sentenced a citizen journalist who documented the early days of the coronavirus outbreak to four years in prison, sending a stark warning to those challenging the government’s official narrative of the pandemic.

Zhang. Zhang’s trial, at the Shanghai Pudong New District People’s Court on Monday, lasted less than three hours. The official charge on which she was convicted was “picking quarrels and provoking trouble,” a vague charge commonly used against critics of the government. Prosecutors had initially recommended a sentence between four and five years.

Ms. Zhang appeared for the trial in a wheelchair, one of her lawyers, Zhang Ke Ke, wrote on Monday on WeChat, a messaging app. Mr. Zhang had written in a post a few days earlier that she had lost a significant amount of weight and was almost unrecognizable from even just a few weeks before.

Ms. Zhang barely spoke during the hearing, except to say that people’s speech should not be censored, wrote Mr. Zhang, who is not related to Ms. Zhang.

One of Ms. Zhang’s lawyers, Zhang Ke Ke, outside the Shanghai Pudong New District People’s Court on Monday.Credit…Leo Ramirez/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

Zhang Zhan, the 37-year-old citizen journalist, was the first known person to face trial for chronicling China’s outbreak. Ms. Zhang, a former lawyer, had traveled to Wuhan from her home in Shanghai in February, at the height of China’s outbreak, to see the toll from the virus in the city where it first emerged. For several months she shared videos that showed crowded hospitals and residents worrying about their incomes.

In China, the news media is tightly controlled by the state. Some citizen journalists try to offer more independent reporting, which they post on the internet and social media platforms. But their work is often censored and they are routinely punished.

Ms. Zhang was fiercely critical of the government in her dispatches, asking why it had tried to silence whistle-blowers about the virus and questioning whether Wuhan’s lockdown had been enacted too harshly.

It just boggles my mind that Americans blithely ignore the reality that over 300,000 people have died this year during the Pandemic.

The grim reaper reality has yet to sink in.

Americans insist on pursing their normal lifestyle as if the Pandemic never hit this country.

I’m shocked. I shouldn’t be.

Art above – Liz Heidhues

Excerpted from Washington Post 12.28.2020

https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/air-travel-hits-pandemic-record-amid-surging-infections-and-hospitalizations/2020/12/28/c9d27114-494d-11eb-a9d9-1e3ec4a928b9_story.html

Acts of wanton racist violence and vandalism in America are all too common.

It is even more disturbing and disconcerting when such cowardly acts take place in the so called “progressive” Oakland-Berkeley-San Francisco community.

Sick and twisted people are free to spew their toxic acts in any place at any time.

San Francisco Chronicle 12.27.2020

After Breonna Taylor sculpture smashed in Oakland, artist denounces ‘racist intimidation’

Police are investigating an act of vandalism against a bust in downtown Oakland honoring Breonna Taylor.

The ceramic sculpture, which was erected in Latham Square just two weeks ago with the phrase “Say Her Name Breonna Taylor” on a plaque, had sections smashed off Saturday, artist Leo Carson said.

Taylor, a 26-year-old emergency room technician, was shot by Louisville police when officers entered her home in March during a botched drug raid. Protests spread across the country in the name of Taylor and George Floyd, as well as other Black Americans killed by police.

Carson, who lives in Oakland, got tipped off to the vandalism on Saturday and headed to the scene. He found the damaged bust, its broken pieces placed back on the pedestal.

“I was really devastated emotionally. I was sad and angry,” he said. “Really, it’s an attack on Breonna Taylor and Black Lives Matter and it’s racist intimidation.”

An Oakland police spokeswoman said the department is “aware of the incident regarding the vandalism of a bust honoring Breonna Taylor.” A police report has been filed and the incident is under investigation, police said.

“I was a participant in the Black Lives Matter protests and inspired to put my artist skills to work,” Carson said of what inspired the artwork.

“I will be repairing it, piecing it back together as best I can, but the damage will be visible,” he said.

Carson has created a GoFundMe account to raise money to have the bust cast in bronze and said any excess funds will be donated to Taylor’s family.

https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/After-Breonna-Taylor-sculpture-smashed-in-15830875.php

Trump’s abhorrent  What about me?  is the total responsibility of his Republican enablers beginning with Mitch McConnell.

The tawdry and reprehensible antics of Trump and the Republican party were best summed up by a fellow Republican earlier this week.

Michael Steele, the former chairman of the Republican National Committee and a critic of the president, noted that,

“The Republicans are getting punked again by the guy they shilled for, who does not care about their interests or any principle they stand for,” Mr. Steele said.

“He made a four-minute video in the White House ranting about things his own administration did, and meanwhile some mom is trying to figure out how she can avoid eviction and get Christmas presents under the tree for her kids. That’s the heartbreaking part.”

Excerpted from New York Times 12.26.2020

WASHINGTON — Expanded unemployment benefits were set to lapse for millions of struggling Americans on Saturday, a day after President Trump expressed more criticism of a $900 billion pandemic relief bill that was awaiting his signature and would extend them.

Mr. Trump blindsided lawmakers on Tuesday when he hinted he may veto the measure, which he decided at the last minute was unsatisfactory. The most pressing issue prompted by the president’s delay was the fate of unemployment benefits. At least a temporary lapse in those benefits is now inevitable.

The sprawling economic relief package that Congress passed with overwhelming bipartisan support would extend the amount of time that people can collect unemployment benefits until March and revive supplemental unemployment benefits for millions of Americans at $300 a week on top of the usual state benefit.

If Mr. Trump signs the bill on Saturday, states will still need time to reprogram their computer systems to account for the new law, according to Michele Evermore of the National Employment Law Project, but unemployed workers would still be able to claim the benefits.

Graphic – Deutsche Welle 12.26.2020

Further delays could prove more costly. States cannot pay out benefits for weeks that begin before the bill is signed, meaning that if the president does not sign the bill by Saturday, benefits will not restart until the first week of January. But they will still end in mid-March, effectively trimming the extension to 10 weeks from 11.

The country is also facing a looming government shutdown on Tuesday and the expiration of a moratorium on evictions at the end of the year because of the president’s refusal to sign the bill.

Jack and I took a midday holiday walk just inside the Golden Gate National Recreation Area (GGNRA) as the rain began to fall on December 25.

So quiet, peaceful and beautiful.

Photos – Lee Heidhues

The life of a journalist can be treacherous and life threatening.

The brutal murder of American Wall Street Journal reporter Daniel Pearl, kidnapped and beheaded in early 2002, is a horrific crime against humanity.

Deutsche Welle – various news reports

A provincial court in Pakistan on Thursday ordered police to release Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh, the man charged with the 2002 murder of American journalist Daniel Pearl, according to the defense lawyer, Mehmood A Sheikh.

British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh was acquitted by a provincial court earlier this year for the murder of Daniel Pearl. The Supreme Court had barred his release following the Sindh High Court decision.

British-born Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh

In September, the country’s Supreme Court ruled that Sheikh must remain in custody while an appeal against his acquittal was heard.

“The court has set aside the detention orders,” his lawyer Khawaja Naveed told DPA news agency.

Earlier this year, the Sindh High Court overturned the death sentence for Sheikh, who had been on death row since his conviction in 2002, along with three alleged accomplices. The decision sparked outrage, with US Secretary of State Mike Pompeo expressing contempt for the decision.

Wrong men convicted?

Nine years after Pearl’s murder an investigation led by Pearl’s friend and former Wall Street Journal colleague Asra Nomani and a Georgetown University professor made chilling revelations, claiming that the wrong men were convicted for Pearl’s murder.

The report claimed the reporter was murdered by Khalid Sheikh Mohammad, the alleged mastermind of the September 11, 2001, attacks, not Ahmed Omar Saeed Sheikh.

Khalid Sheikh Mohammad in Court after capture and arrest

Mohammed — better known as KSM — was arrested in Pakistan in 2003 and is being held in Guantanamo Bay.

A US psychologist who interviewed KSM said the prisoner had told him that he had beheaded Pearl.

At the time of Pearl’s murder in 2002 the Wall Street Journal released a statement.

 Publisher Peter Kann and managing editor Paul Steiger said: “His murder is an act of barbarism that makes a mockery of everything Danny’s kidnappers claimed to believe in.”

Both the Pakistani government and Pearl’s family have appealed against Sheikh’s acquittal. The Supreme Court will resume its hearing on January 5, 2021.

Who was Daniel Pearl?

Pearl, the New Delhi-based South Asia correspondent for the US newspaper The Wall Street Journal, was kidnapped and killed in the southern Karachi city in 2002.

Pearl traveled to Karachi from New Delhi following the attack on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, and was kidnapped and killed in early 2002.

A graphic video showing the beheading of the 38-year-old journalist was delivered to the US Embassy around one month later.

https://www.dw.com/en/daniel-pearl-pakistani-court-frees-man-charged-with-us-journalist-killing/a-56051259

December 23, 2020

My dear friend Charly moved to the Pacific Northwest several years ago.

Charly is an artist, free thinker and traveler. He sent me these drawings as he marks nearly a year of The Pandemic living in a tranquil place far away from the urban craziness.

The drawing above is titled Pandemic Puppy Parade.

Several more follow.

Crowded Covid or Social Distancing is Relative

The House that Covid Bill Built

Pandemic of Oz

P is for Pandemic Peril

This is tawdry international politics.  Or the incompetence of American law enforcement. Or just plain stupid.

I wrote about this in an earlier blog post. This is the update.

Last month the Justice Department cut loose former Mexican Defense chief Salvador Cienfuegos.  He had been charged in Federal Court for taking bribes in exchange for protecting cartel leaders.

The move to drop charges and Cienfuegos back to Mexico, where he likely will never face prosecution, was a political chess move by DOJ to protect American law enforcement assets in Mexico.

The Americans say “foreign policy considerations” were a factor. That’s for sure.

So, what happened? The Mexican Congress immediately passed a law restricting American Drug Enforcement Agency (DEA) activity in Mexico.

The 50 year war on drugs has been a travesty. This is just another example.

Excerpted from The Wall Street Journal 12.21.2020

Explosive U.S. drug-trafficking allegations against Mexico’s former defense minister Salvador Cienfuegos rely largely on circumstantial evidence, diminishing the chances that the Mexican government could bring a case against him to trial or could convict him in a Mexican court if it did, according to people in both countries familiar with the case.

The surprise arrest, which angered civilian and military officials in Mexico who thought the U.S. overstepped its bounds, was followed by a bigger shock when the U.S. dropped the charges just over a month later and returned Gen. Cienfuegos to Mexico.

U.S. officials said foreign-policy considerations, including law-enforcement cooperation between both countries, played a big role in the decision.

They passed the results of their investigations to their Mexican counterparts and let Mexico decide whether to investigate and possibly charge the general.

U.S. federal prosecutors insisted in court hearings and filings that the evidence was strong against the retired general, who played a leading role in Mexico’s counternarcotics strategy when he headed the armed forces.

Justice Department spokeswoman Nicole Navas said the agency dismissed the case because of foreign-policy concerns, “not because of any perceived weakness in the case.”

Despite U.S. hopes that releasing Gen. Cienfuegos would safeguard security cooperation between the U.S. and Mexico, Mexican President Andres Manuel López Obrador this month pushed a law through the nation’s Congress that U.S. officials say could cripple bilateral law-enforcement ties.

The law, which requires strict regulation of meetings between local, state and federal Mexican officials and foreign agents, would regulate the activities of the 50 Drug Enforcement Administration agents stationed in Mexico.

The law “can only benefit the violent transnational criminal organizations and other criminals that we are jointly fighting,” U.S. Attorney General William Barr said earlier this month.