Lee Heidhues 1.24.2023

I am not speaking of San Francisco today where 37 pedestrians were cut down on City streets in 2022.

https://sfstandard.com/transportation/pedestrian-killed-in-san-francisco-is-second-traffic-death-this-year/

I am today writing about New York City where 255 pedestrians, motorists and cyclists were killed last year.

The carnage on America’s roadways is a nationwide disgraceful epidemic with government officials, for the most part, making vacuous pronouncements and doing nothing to stop the carnage.

As long as the car rules supreme in America nothing will change. People will continue to be killed.

Excerpted from New York Magazine 1.24.2023

Maybe in the scheme of things, the death toll from driving through New York City isn’t worth fussing over.

When drivers who kill rarely suffer any punishment more severe than a ticket and then get right back on the road.

More than three times as many New Yorkers were murdered last year as died under the wheels. Several thousand overdosed. Many froze to death on the streets. If we’re going to accept those ratios, let’s at least be honest about it and admit that, yes, some people are going to get hit by cars and die, and we don’t care, or don’t care enough.

The advocacy group Transportation Alternatives has just issued its annual report listing the names of all 255 pedestrians, motorists, and cyclists killed on the city’s streets in 2022. Nearly half were on foot.

The Department of Transportation boasts of having “driven” — its word — “traffic deaths to historic lows,” which is true if by “history” you mean since last year. If you compare it to the actual historic low of 2018, when the carnage was limited to “only” 202 people, the stats look less rosy. Nine years into the Vision Zero era, we should really be calling it Vision 125: the average number of pedestrians killed each year in New York since 2014. One every three days.

Apparently, all this is fine, the unfortunate, acceptable by-product of a city where people in cars and people without them mix.

That, at any rate, is the signal we all send when we shake our heads, shrug, and move on.

When city officials mumble pieties and let lifesaving street designs get bogged down in endless studies. When the Department of Transportation has only a sparse staff and limited budget to cope with 6,000 miles of streets and an endless supply of fractious New Yorkers eager to tweak, delay, and even block the lifesaving street redesigns.

https://www.curbed.com/2023/01/upper-west-side-zone-pedestrian-death.html

Top photo – The scene at 97th Street and West End Avenue in New York City after Cooper Stock was killed by a taxi driver in 2014. Photo: Pearl Gabel/NY Daily News via Getty Images

Lee Heidhues 1.19.2023

We are over. We lost. We are devastated. We are demoralized.

The victors can gloat and rejoice in their triumph. Aided by 30BN insurance carriers. Ruthless attorneys. Terrible Judges in the judicial system. All allowed this to happen.

It is so horrific.

A Court ordered Mediator finally beat us into submission. “Why do you keep fighting?” we were asked over and over.

All this because eight years ago I said “You can build a fence where the previous one stood.” Those few words were the conduit for our destruction.

Now we must live with this legally sanctioned theft of our land for the rest of our lives. The State has successfully stolen a portion of our property we have owned and lived on for 39 years.

My wife sits downstairs and has the scariest look on her face. I, too, am completely upended. I really don’t know how we will continue living peacefully and feel any kind of tranquility.

We only have each other.

The entire apparatus of the State is destroying us for our free, independent, outspoken, honest behavior.

I have no idea what will happen next. But for sure neither of us are in a good place this evening.

This is such a devastating blow.

January 20, 2023

This afternoon a morbidly obese Notary came to our home. We would not bring him into the house.

It is a painful moment when we must sign the Agreement and effectively surrender a portion of our land.

We are drained financially and mentally. It pains me to think how much worse, after spending over 400K, if we had to continue funneling money into the legal system.

I feel like early 1972 when we returned to San Francisco after years abroad with only $125.00. Broke and wondering, “What comes next?”

Lee Heidhues 1.18.2023

“Character assassination.”

That’s how some observers in New York are describing the rejection of Latino jurist Hector LaSalle to be the Empire State’s top Judge.

New York Progressives view it from a different perspective. They feel Governor Kathy Hochul (shown in photo above) should have named a known Progressive to the Bench.

Progressives are still smarting from a lack of support from moderate Democrats resulting in the loss of several Congressional seats in the New York City area last November. These defeats at the ballot box may well have cost Democrats control of the House of Representatives in Washington.

Now the Progressives are exacting a measure of revenge and sending a message to the moderate Governor Hochul. We demand more respect.

Excerpted from The New York Times 1.18.2023

ALBANY, N.Y. — Gov. Kathy Hochul’s embattled nominee to become New York State’s top judge was rejected on Wednesday, an unprecedented repudiation that underscored a deep division among Democrats on the direction of the state’s judicial system.

Senator Luis Sepúlveda, a Democrat from the Bronx who is Puerto Rican and voted in favor of Justice LaSalle, said the judge had been the target of a “character assassination” because he was Latino.

After a combative hourslong hearing, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 10-9 against the nomination of Justice Hector D. LaSalle, whose nomination was strongly opposed by progressives who saw him as too conservative.

The committee’s rejection — the first time that New York lawmakers have voted against a governor’s choice for chief judge — laid bare how vulnerable Ms. Hochul, a Buffalo-area Democrat, may be to a challenge from her own party.

All 10 senators who voted against the judge were Democrats; two Democrats voted in favor of Justice LaSalle, while one Democrat and all six Republicans on the committee voted in favor “without recommendation.”

The rejection does not necessarily mean that the LaSalle saga is over. The governor has not ruled out taking legal action to force a vote on Justice LaSalle’s nomination on the full Senate floor, raising the specter of a constitutional showdown.

Despite pressure on her to withdraw her nomination, the governor has forcefully defended Justice LaSalle. Over the weekend she rallied support alongside other top Democrats, including Representative Hakeem Jeffries, the U.S. House minority leader, stressing the symbolic importance of elevating a jurist of Puerto Rican descent to the upper echelons of state government.

Indeed, Justice LaSalle’s nomination has split Latino elected officials, with some suggesting that he was subjected to a double standard because of his ethnicity.

Lee Heidhues 1.15.2023

On January 15, 1919 Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were assassinated in Berlin.

In America, the assassinations and life histories of these socialists and anti-war activists is totally unknown and unrecognized.

The lives and political activities of Luxemburg and Liebknecht are widely known and remembered in Germany. There are yearly memorial demonstrations.

Books and movies have been made about Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Perhaps the most famous is the 1986 film Rosa Luxemburg is a 1986 West German drama film directed by Margarethe von Trotta. The film received the 1986 German Film Award for Best Feature Film (Bester Spielfilm), and Barbara Sukowa won the Cannes Film Festival‘s Best Actress Award and the German Film Award for Best Actress for her performance as Rosa Luxemburg.

https://mubi.com/films/rosa-luxemburg/trailer

Excerpted from Wikipedia – Last updated 1.3.2023

Rosa Luxemburg  5 March 1871 – 15 January 1919) was a Polish and naturalized-German revolutionary socialist, Marxist philosopher and anti-war activist.

Successively, Luxemburg was a member of the Proletariat party, the Social Democracy of the Kingdom of Poland and Lithuania (SDKPiL), the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), the Spartacus League (Spartakusbund), and the Communist Party of Germany (KPD).

Born and raised in an assimilated Jewish family in Poland, she became a German citizen in 1897.

After the SPD supported German involvement in World War I in 1915, Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht co-founded the anti-war Spartacus League (Spartakusbund) which eventually became the KPD. During the November Revolution, Luxemburg co-founded the newspaper Die Rote Fahne (The Red Flag), the central organ of the Spartacist movement. Luxemburg considered the Spartacist uprising of January 1919 a blunder, but supported the attempted overthrow of the government and rejected any attempt at a negotiated solution.

Friedrich Ebert‘s majority SPD government crushed the revolt and the Spartakusbund by sending in the Freikorps, government-sponsored paramilitary groups consisting mostly of World War I veterans. Freikorps troops captured and assassinated Luxemburg and Liebknecht during the rebellion.

Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were abducted in Berlin on 15 January 1919 by the Rifle Division of the Cavalry Guards of the Freikorps (Garde-Kavallerie-Schützendivision). 

Its commander Captain Waldemar Pabst, with Lieutenant Horst von Pflugk-Harttung, questioned them under torture and then gave the order to summarily execute them.

Luxemburg was assassinated by being knocked down with a rifle butt by the soldier Otto Runge, then shot in the head, either by Lieutenant Kurt Vogel or by Lieutenant Hermann Souchon. Her body was flung into Berlin’s Landwehr Canal. In the Tiergarten, Liebknecht was shot and his body, without a name, brought to a morgue.

The assassinations of Luxemburg and Liebknecht inspired a new wave of violence in Berlin and across Germany. Thousands of members of the KPD as well as other revolutionaries and civilians were killed. Finally, the People’s Navy Division (Volksmarinedivision) and workers’ and soldiers’ councils which had moved to the political left disbanded. Luxemburg was held in high regard by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, who recognized her revolutionary credentials at the Third International.

In Berlin a Liebknecht-Luxemburg Demonstration, shortened to LL-Demo, is organized annually in the month of January around the date of their death. This demonstration takes place on the second weekend of the month in Berlin-Friedrichshain, starting near the Frankfurter Tor to the central cemetery Friedrichsfelde, also known as the Gedenkstätte der Sozialisten (Socialist Memorial). In East Germany, the event was widely considered to be a mere show for Socialist Unity Party of Germany politicians and celebrities, which was broadcast live on state television.

In 1919, Bertolt Brecht wrote the poetic memorial Epitaph honouring Luxemburg and Kurt Weill set it to music in The Berlin Requiem in 1928:

Red Rosa now has vanished too,
And where she lies is hid from view.
She told the poor what life’s about,
And so the rich have rubbed her out.
May she rest in peace.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rosa_Luxemburg

Lee Heidhues 1.14.2023

Checking out the foreign films available at my neighborhood Library I came upon this French film.

It is riveting and intriguing. It fascinates me to see how film makers and performers in other countries capture the human spirit and the way in which these people deal with life’s unexpected events and resultant crises.

Excerpted from The New York Times – 10.11.2012

Identity theft may be rampant nowadays, but “The Big Picture” explores the other side of the coin — the claustrophobic notion that it is increasingly difficult for a person to disappear.

On the deepest level, Paul Exben’s adopting the identity of a man who pursued the very dream Paul abandoned has paradoxical ramifications. Even after he becomes what he might have been, he can’t follow through.

The adage “It’s never too late to be who you might have been,” ascribed to George Eliot, is given a cruel twist in the terrific French thriller “The Big Picture.”

This loose adaptation of Douglas Kennedy’s 1997 novel might be described as “The Talented Mr. Ripley” for the age of Google. Its story of Paul Exben, a successful Parisian lawyer who assumes the identity of a man he accidentally kills, belongs to a select circle of twisty top-notch Gallic suspense movies that include Lucas Belvaux’s “Rapt” and Guillaume Canet’s “Tell No One.”

If some of the plot details defy credibility, Romain Duris’s electrifying performance makes you overlook any inconsistencies, as his likable character becomes a man on the run barely able to stifle his panic.

Mr. Duris, 38, has been a major French star since “The Beat That My Heart Skipped,” Jacques Audiard’s 2005 French adaptation of James Toback’s “Fingers.” In “The Big Picture” he is as compelling, if not more so.

Mr. Duris’s Paul has the springy agility of the young Mick Jagger and the same crinkly mischievous grin that conveys a Mephistophelean charm; the resemblance is so striking that in many shots he suggests a hairy-chested fraternal twin of that Rolling Stone.

Unlike “The Talented Mr. Ripley” and Antonioni’s “Passenger,” “The Big Picture,” directed by Eric Lartigau, doesn’t bear down heavily on its themes of exchanged identities and second chances. Paul is not a sociopath like Tom Ripley, and the movie does not convey the same diabolical Hitchcockian sense of being manipulated by a slightly sadistic master puppeteer. As the story sprawls across the screen, it darts from one incident to the next as though it were inventing itself as it goes along.

Lee Heidhues 1.11.2023

I was saddened to learn of the sudden passing of English musician Jeff Beck at the age of 78.

Beck’s 1968 LP ‘Truth’ is one of my favorites. There are several memorable songs. My favorite is the final piece on the 10 song album, ‘I ain’t Superstitious’.

Excerpted from The Guardian and Variety 1.11.2023

Jeff Beck, the celebrated guitarist who played with the Yardbirds and led the Jeff Beck Group, has died aged 78, his representative has confirmed.

Beck died on Tuesday after “suddenly contracting bacterial meningitis”, the representative confirmed. “His family ask for privacy while they process this tremendous loss,” they added.

Often described as one of the greatest guitarists of all time, Beck – whose fingers and thumbs were famously insured for £7m – was known as a keen innovator. He pioneered jazz-rock, experimented with fuzz and distortion effects and paved the way for heavier subgenres such as psych rock and heavy metal over the course of his career.

A fleet, imaginative soloist, Beck brought formidable instrumental firepower to British band the Yardbirds, which he joined in 1965 as a replacement for Eric Clapton. Entirely at home with the group’s blues roots, he burnished their pop hits with an adventurous and virtually unprecedented use of feedback, sustain and fuzz.

After a precipitous exit from the Yardbirds — where he had been joined by another future guitar star, Jimmy Page — he established his own band, the Jeff Beck Group, which was fronted by vocalist Rod Stewart, soon to become a solo star. The unit proved as unstable as it was powerful, and lasted for just two albums.

During the ’70s, Beck assembled a second, more R&B-oriented edition of his group, and briefly formed a short-lived power trio with bassist Tim Bogert and drummer Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge and Cactus.

He reached the probable apex of both his critical and commercial success with a pair of mid-’70s all-instrumental albums, “Blow by Blow” and “Wired,” that found him moving into jazz-fusion terrain. The latter LP was recorded with keyboardist Jan Hammer, formerly of the top fusion act the Mahavishnu Orchestra.

He was an eight-time Grammy winner, recipient of the Ivor Novello for outstanding contribution to British music and was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame both as a solo artist and as a member of the Yardbirds.

Musicians and longtime friends began paying tribute minutes after the news broke. On Twitter, Jimmy Page wrote, “The six stringed Warrior is no longer here for us to admire the spell he could weave around our mortal emotions. Jeff could channel music from the ethereal. His technique unique. His imaginations apparently limitless. Jeff I will miss you along with your millions of fans.”

“With the death of Jeff Beck we have lost a wonderful man and one of the greatest guitar players in the world,” Mick Jagger wrote. “We will all miss him so much.”

Pink Floyd’s David Gilmour wrote, “I am devastated to hear the news of the death of my friend and hero Jeff Beck, whose music has thrilled and inspired me and countless others for so many years … He will be forever in our hearts.”

https://www.thaliacapos.com/blogs/blog/jeff-beck-s-truth-an-unsung-rock-classic

Thaliacapos – 12.16.2020

When I chat with friends about all-time great hard rock albums, I’m always surprised by how few of them bring up Jeff Beck’s “Truth.” Beck’s 1968 solo debut is a seminal album in the development of blues-based hard rock, laying down a template that bands like Led Zeppelin would push into the stratosphere in the following years. 

https://www.theguardian.com/culture/2023/jan/12/legendary-rock-guitarist-jeff-beck-dies-aged-78

https://variety.com/2023/music/news/jeff-beck-guitarist-dead-dies-1235486491/

Lee Heidhues 1.8.2023

Two years after now infamous January 6, 2021 when American insurrectionists, at the urging of Donald Trump, attempted a Coup d’etat history is repeating itself in Brazil.

The scenes of the violence being caused by supporters of defeated President Jair Bolsonaro are eerily reminiscent of what happened in Washington DC two years ago.

Excerpted from The Guardian 1.8.2023

Hundreds of hardcore supporters of Brazil’s former president, Jair Bolsonaro, have stormed the country’s congress, presidential palace and supreme court in a stunning security breach that was immediately compared to the 6 January invasion of the US Capitol by followers of Donald Trump in 2021.

“What we are witnessing is a terrorist attack,” the news anchor Erick Bang announced on the GloboNews television network as word of the upheaval spread. “The three buildings have been invaded by coup-mongering terrorists.”

Shocking video footage showed the pro-Bolsonaro militants sprinting up the ramp into the Palácio do Planalto, the presidential offices, roaming the building’s corridors and vandalising the nearby supreme court, whose windows had been smashed.

Soon after another prominent Lula ally, André Janones, shared footage that showed scores of radicals inside the grounds of the Palácio do Planalto, the presidential offices where last week’s inauguration ceremony was held.

“Terrorists have invaded the Planalto,” Janones tweeted.

Portugal’s foreign minister, João Gomes Cravinho, told Reuters that he believed “without a doubt” that Bolsonaro was responsible for the scenes, adding: “His voice is heard by these anti-democratic demonstrators.”

World leaders were quick to condemn the upheaval, which Chile’s president, Gabriel Boric, denounced as a “disgraceful” and “cowardly and vile attack on democracy”.

Spain’s prime minister, Pedro Sánchez, condemned the stormings in a tweet on Sunday night, saying: “I offer my full support to president Lula and to the institutions that were freely and democratically chosen by the Brazilian people. We categorically condemn the assault on the congress of Brazil and call for an immediate return to democratic normality.”

Observers have spent months warning that Bolsonaro hardliners might stage a South American version of the US’s Capitol invasion in the hope of overturning Lula’s win. During his tumultuous four-year administration, Bolsonaro repeatedly hinted that a military takeover might be in the works and battled to undermine Brazil’s internationally respected electronic voting system.

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2023/jan/08/jair-bolsonaro-supporters-storm-brazils-presidential-palace-and-supreme-court

BBC – 1.8.2023

‘This is about more than just the Bolsonaro defeat’

Katy Watson

South America correspondent in São Paulo

It’s important to state that this is not just about Jair Bolsonaro’s defeat – it’s more than that.

Many of the supporters I’ve spoken to in the past couple of months have said he’s less relevant than he was.

What the hardline protestors want more than anything is Lula back in prison, not in the presidential palace.

It’s their fear of communism and incorrect view that Lula is a communist that is fuelling their anger more than anything.

Jair Bolsonaro was the vehicle for that anger – he was the person to displace Lula.

But he has been very quiet since losing (even flying off to Florida to avoid the inauguration) – and even he has not been as hardline as those backing him.

Some people argue Bolsonaro is irrelevant – it’s only the army that can save Brazil.

This a country where military rule is still very acceptable among a sizeable part of the population.

So while it is straight out of the Trump playbook in many ways, there are deep Brazilian roots in all of this and a throw back to the Cold war fear of communism.

https://www.bbc.com/news/live/world-latin-america-64206148

Lee Heidhues 1.6.2023

It’s almost time for Academy Awards season. A film sure to be considered for a number of Oscars is Tar.

Just watching the Trailer is enough to send me to the nearest theater.

Cate Blanchett leaves it all in the orchestra pit in a marvelous, edgy performance.

Excerpted from The New York Times – A.O. Scott 10.7.2022 and Michelle Goldberg 10.21.2022

Midway through the enthralling new film “Tár,” the heroine, a brilliant and imperious classical music conductor named Lydia Tár, is talking about the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer with her elderly former mentor.

“Schopenhauer measured a man’s intelligence against his sensitivity to noise,” her mentor says.

“Didn’t he once also throw a woman down a flight of stairs?” asks Tár.

“Yes,” he responds. “It was unclear that this private and personal failing was at all relevant to his work.”

This question — how to weigh a genius’s private and personal failings against her work — is at the center of “Tár.” It’s a movie about a woman, played by Cate Blanchett, who has built herself in the image of the great, arrogant male cultural titans of the 20th century, only to be undone by the less indulgent mores of the 21st century. In other words, it’s a film about cancel culture, making it the rare piece of art that looks squarely at this social phenomenon that has roiled so many of America’s meaning-making institutions.

We don’t care about Lydia Tár because she’s an artist; we care about her because she’s art.

Early in “Tár” there is a shot of a Wikipedia entry being edited by unseen hands. Whose hands? That question will turn out to be relevant to the plot, but for the moment it is overwhelmed by the mystique of the page’s subject, who is also the protagonist of Todd Field’s cruelly elegant, elegantly cruel new film.

Her name is Lydia Tár, and in the world Field has imagined — one that exists at an oblique angle to our own — it’s a household name. She is introduced to us by the New Yorker writer Adam Gopnik, humbly playing himself as he interviews Lydia, regally played by Cate Blanchett, on a Manhattan stage. Gopnik’s introductory remarks provide a Wikipedia-style summary with a bit of Talk of the Town filigree, establishing that this is a person who surely needs no introduction.

Field, whose chilly, psychologically charged style evokes Roman Polanski and Stanley Kubrick — he had a small, memorable role in Kubrick’s “Eyes Wide Shut” — records it all with ruthless detachment and fanatical control. He moves smoothly from dry backstage comedy to something like gothic horror. We can’t be sure if Lydia is the monster, the victim, or both.

It invites you to think hard about Lydia, about the meaning of her work and the consequences of her actions, about whether she is someone you should admire or revile, about whether artists should be judged by their work or by how they live their lives. In different contexts, Lydia herself argues both sides of that question, as many of us do, and to search the movie for a consistent argument is to miss the point and fall into a category error, misconstruing the extraordinary coup that Field and Blanchett have pulled off.

Lee Heidhues 1.5.2023

It was a wild New Year’s weekend for San Francisco’s Mayor while the City was submerged in an Atmospheric River.

I am not begrudging Mayor London Breed her party time in Las Vegas. On New Year’s Day The Mayor camped out in a luxury box watching the 49ers battle the Raiders.

However, the optics look bad. Particularly when one watches the video of The Mayor hangin’ with Rapper E-40 shouting “Bang!!! Bang!!!

Meanwhile back in San Francisco, The Mayor’s constituency was recovering from a deluge of 5.46″ of rainfall in 24 hours. The second most recorded rainfall for a day in The City’s history.

What makes The Mayor’s jaunt to Vegas annoying is the fact the Mayor, after her return, blamed The National Weather Service for an alleged failure to warn City Hall about the severity of the storm which hit on New Year’s Eve.

Excerpted from San Francisco Standard 1.5.2023

San Francisco found itself deeply under water on New Year’s Eve to the surprise of Mayor London Breed and other city officials, who said they were expecting less than an inch of rain.

But a day after parts of the Mission, SoMa and other to watch the San Francisco 49ers play the Raiders from a private luxury box with rapper E-40. Two days later, Breed blamed the National Weather Service for the city’s failure to adequately prepare for the storm. 

E-40, the celebrated Bay Area hip-hop entertainer and entrepreneur, posted an Instagram reel Tuesday that shows Breed with him and others in a midfield luxury box at the Raiders’ Allegiant Stadium in Paradise, Nevada.

Breed’s trip to Vegas took place just hours after she attended a lavish New Year’s Eve party in San Francisco with some of the city’s most powerful elected officials—as well as a convicted felon involved in the corruption scandal that has rocked City Hall for the last three years.

The mayor’s revelry took place less than a day after the city was caught off guard by a historic storm.

Photos posted of the “Glitterati” party on social media by a mayoral staffer show guests drinking champagne, dancing to a live band, watching acrobats take flight and even taking in a burlesque show. The party took place at Saint Joseph’s Arts Society.

As an atmospheric river over the holiday weekend dropped more than 5 inches of rain, New Year’s Eve marked the second-highest recorded day of rainfall in San Francisco history.

City agencies in San Francisco were unprepared for the weekend storm as multiple neighborhoods were flooded, and low-lying parts of the Mission District were hit particularly hard. More storms are expected in the days to come.

https://sfstandard.com/politics/sf-floods-mayor-london-breed-las-vegas-e-40-49ers/

Lee Heidhues 1.1.2023 (Updated 1.2.2023)

The road from 48th Avenue in the northwest corner of San Francisco winding down the hill past the Cliff House is still closed as The City ponders the danger resulting from the New Year’s Eve landslide.

It was an incredible never to be witnessed, again, moment at the San Francisco coastline by the historic Cliff House.

It made me think of the final piece in Modest Mussorgsky’s 1874 Pictures at an Exhibition – The Great Gate of Kiev. After all the northwest corner of San Francisco is the Gateway to the Pacific Ocean. The orchestral piece is attached below.

On this morning, because of a landslide across from the Cliff House during New Year’s Eve Atmospheric River, vehicular traffic was banned.

For a brief shining moment on this sunny January 1, 2023 the roadway leading to the car free Great Walkway was devoid of cars.

It was all pedestrians, cyclists and runners as the following photo montage will forever memorialize.