Berkeley police today announced the arrest of two suspects in the fatal shooting in December of a wheelchair-bound man.
Police arrested Gregory Foote, 19, this morning in Hayward and U.S. Marshals arrested Khalil Phanor, an 18-year-old San Leandro resident, in Everett, Washington on Thursday in connection with the Dec. 29, 2014 shooting, which killed 36-year-old Kamahl Middleton and injured a woman with him, according to police.
Today's announcement brings to four the total number of arrests in the shooting, which took place in a parking lot near San Pablo and University avenues around 9:45 p.m.
Police previously arrested, Carl Young, a 20-year-old San Leandro resident, on Thursday Feb. 19 in Oakland, as well as a 17-year-old San Leandro resident.
On Monday, prosecutors charged Young and Phanor with murder and the special circumstance of committing a murder during the course of a robbery, which carries a potential penalty of life in prison without parole or the death penalty.
An assault with a firearm charge was also filed in connection with the shooting in the arm of a woman who was with Middleton but survived her injuries.
Prosecutors allege that Phanor was the suspect who shot Middleton and the female victim.
According to Middleton's LinkedIn profile, he graduated from San Francisco State University in 2008 with a bachelor's degree in marketing.
Middleton said in his profile that he had been chief marketing officer for Natural Energy Company since 1996.
He said the company made natural energy drinks and his duties were "foreseeing various marketing activities which include distribution, advertising, research, sales, product development, customer service and pricing."
The case remains under investigation. Anyone with information on the shooting is asked to call homicide investigators at (510) 981-5741 or police at (510) 981-5900. Anonymous tips can be made by calling Bay Area Crime Stoppers at 1 (800) 222-8477.
Patrons of La Mediterranee restaurant in Berkeley may have been exposed to measles last Friday evening, Berkeley health officials said.
A San Mateo County resident who had measles visited the restaurant at 2936 College Ave. at about 6:45 p.m. and stayed until about 8 p.m.
The same day a San Mateo resident with measles rode a Richmond-bound BART train from Millbrae to San Francisco's Civic Center station. The person arrived in San Francisco at about 5 p.m.
Health officials haven't said whether the person who rode BART and the person who dined in Berkeley are the same person.
Measles is a highly infectious, airborne virus that can stay in the air for up to two hours, according to health officials. Patrons of the La Mediterranee who were at the restaurant until 10 p.m. could get the disease.
People who have been vaccinated have only a slight risk of infection.
People who visited La Mediterranee between 6:45 p.m. and 10 p.m. should watch for symptoms until March 13, health officials said. Symptoms can develop between seven and 21 days after exposure.
Symptoms include high fever, red and watery eyes and a rash that appears first on the head and face and can spread to most of the body.
People who develop symptoms should get in touch with their health provider for advice and help. Unvaccinated infants, pregnant women and people with impaired immune systems are at the greatest risk for developing symptoms.
"I encourage Berkeley community members to make sure they and their children have received the required two doses" of the measles vaccine, Berkeley's health officer Dr. Janet Berreman said in a statement. Berreman also suggested residents obtain records of their vaccination, which could be critical if there is a local outbreak.
Health officials said that measles is highly preventable. Ninety-nine percent of the people who get two doses of the vaccine are protected from infection. Ninety-five percent of people who get one does are protected.
Berkeley's Department of Health Services is working with La Mediterranee to notify and assess anyone who may have been exposed to the virus. The Department is also working with the County of San Mateo Health System to trace the people the infected individual had contact with.
Health officials don't know how the resident who dined at La Mediterranee got infected.
Measles can have significant impacts to a person's health and can lead to death in some cases. The impacts are especially significant among pregnant women and children, according to health officials.
A 63-year-old pedestrian who was struck by a van in West Berkeley early Wednesday afternoon is still hospitalized with injuries but is able to talk to traffic investigators today, police said.
Berkeley police Officer Jennifer Coats said the van driver, a 26-year-old homeless man, was driving north on San Pablo Avenue at 1:02 p.m. Wednesday when he turned left onto Allston Way and struck the pedestrian, a Hayward man who was in the crosswalk.
The van also struck an electrical box after it hit the pedestrian, Coats said.
The van driver remained at the scene and cooperated with police, Coats said.
Drugs and alcohol don't appear to be factors in the crash, she said.
The collision is still under investigation and the driver hasn't been arrested, Coats said.
Today’s issue contains two free-will-offerings from local writers which relate to a couple of topics which have been on my mind lately.
First, there’s Judy Shelton’s piece on discrepancies she’s uncovered between what promoters of the “Residences at Berkeley Plaza” 18-story monstrosity have told Berkeley’s Zoning Adjustment Board about the intentions of Landmark Cinemas and observable reality.
Members of the Committee to Save the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas contacted me a while back with their suspicion that something was amiss in the presentations which had been made to ZAB about the fate of the 10-screen movie palace now in the building which would have to be demolished. They asked if I could assign an investigative reporter to figure it out.
Alas, those days are over. You can find out what happened in Berkeley’s arcane planning process in the past in the Planet archives (mostly under Richard Brenneman’s illustrious byline) but there are no longer any staff reporters: No one home over here but us chickens, and I’m not getting any younger.
What I told them is what I told my kids as they grew up: if something needs to be done, but no one seems to be in charge, you are. I suggested that they just ask Landmark’s management what’s up, and guess what?
They did, and quelle surprise! Landmark Cinemas is alive and well, thriving in Berkeley.
Top Landmark execs were more than happy to talk to committee members Donald Goldmacher (himself a documentary film producer) and Judy Shelton, by phone and email. They affirmed their belief in the Berkeley market. (I can confirm that, having tried to get into “She’s Beautiful When She’s Angry” recently, only to learn that it was sold out.)
Here’s the lesson, which both the ZAB and the Berkeley City Council must keep firmly in mind as they contemplate allocating variances for the small number of high-rises allowed by the Downtown Plan: Don’t believe everything you’re told. None of the “testimony” presented to you is under oath. No cross-examination is allowed, and in fact the custom is to allow promoters extra time to make their pitch without interruption.
Yes, Virginia, sometimes some people lie under such circumstances. And sometimes the city mothers and fathers play Santa and give favored developers whatever they ask for, no proof needed, few questions asked.
Sometimes credulous news reporters even believe that developers’ promises will come true. Yeah, sure.
I remember the glowing pictures which Patrick Kennedy painted of the Gaia feminist bookstore which was supposed to be the anchor tenant of the Gaia building. I was on the city of Berkeley’s Landmarks Preservation Commission (no relation to the theater company) when he described the new Fine Arts theater which would replace the obsolete current model.
For those of you who aren’t paying attention, neither of those ever materialized, and there have been more similar instances.
I’m reluctant to use that loaded word “lie”, but sometimes people do lie, don’t they?
Do I remember correctly, was Mark Rhoades (now fronting for the company that wants to destroy the Shattuck Cinemas) the secretary of the LPC at that time? He had that job for several years when he worked for the city. If so, one worries that he might have learned at the LPC that deception pays off, and that he’s now calibrating his promises accordingly.
In normal English, that means he was paid by the city of Berkeley to write planning documents and now he exploits what he learned for private profit. Not a bad gig if you can get it.
Variances allowing builders to add extra stories to proposed buildings add millions of dollars in value to a given square footage of downtown land. The intention of the Downtown Plan was supposed to be to recoup that unearned bonus by getting developers to provide substantial public benefits in return.
But the decision-makers (ZAB and the City Council) too often put themselves at the mercy of the shaky (maybe even sleazy) financial information supplied by eager promoters. Former Planning Commission Chair Rob Wrenn has consistently requested that both of the mega-projects now in the works for Downtown Berkeley (the other one is the hotel/condo building at Center and Shattuck) be supported by professional-quality pro formas reporting on financial projections, not just vague general promises, but so far that hasn’t happened.
Let’s hope that Lincoln’s famous aphorism (that you can fool some of the people all of the time, all of the people some of the time, but not all of the people all of the time) will protect Berkeley from the truthiness of would-be scammers in this booming development environment. Berkeleyans owe a lot to resourceful fellow-citizens like Judy and Don and Rob who are diligent in the pursuit of genuine truth in a climate of hype.
P.S. And now for something completely different.
This issue also contains James MacBean’s laudatory review of last weekend’s production of Jake Hegge’s Dead Man Walking, the opera based on Sister Helen Préjean’s book about her experience counseling people who were later executed by the state. I can confirm his opinion, having gone myself on Sunday afternoon.
It was one of the most remarkable theatrical experiences I’ve ever had. We sat in the balcony, and in the final scenes all the people around us, not only women but grown men, even middle-aged conservatively dressed white men, were sobbing audibly. Seeing the reality of capital punishment as we did that day was profoundly moving. I went to the San Francisco Opera production at the San Francisco War Memorial Opera House 15 years ago, but I don’t remember people being so strongly affected. The Opera Parallèle version, in the much smaller Yerba Buena center, put the viewer inside the penitentiary, complicit in the execution process.
The Chronicle and now the New York Times in the past couple of weeks have been full of news about all and sundry excoriating Roman Catholic Archbishop Salvatore Cordileone for his strident advocacy of a new manual for teachers in Catholic schools which seems to require their adherence to church teaching on topics like gay marriage both in public and in their private life. The archbishop seems not to have noticed advice from pragmatic new Pope Francis to tone it down, for God’s sake.
Dead Man Walking reminded me of another aspect of contemporary Catholic thinking: opposition to capital punishment, now standard for at least 25 years. I was prepared to light into the archbishop for focusing on sex stuff, claiming to be pro-life but endorsing state killing, etc., but luckily I googled and discovered that he had indeed gone public with his opposition to capital punishment a couple of years ago. Nothing much has been said about it recently, however—but it would be a much better crusade for him to take up if he were living in the real world.
For starters, Governor Jerry Brown, once a Jesuit seminarian like Pope Francis, seems to still be some kind of a Catholic when it suits him. He “lived in sin” with Anne Gust for years, but eventually married her in a Catholic church. To his credit he’s on record as being against capital punishment, but he hasn’t done much to support that belief in his political career.
I missed my own Cal graduation (1961) because the speaker was Governor Pat Brown, Jerry’s father, who had just allowed author Caryl Chessman to be executed. Some of us skipped the ceremony altogether because of that, while others picketed in caps and gowns, but 50 years later the law allowing capital punishment in California is still on the books.
Here’s an idea: Why doesn’t the archbishop put some pressure on Jerry and other Catholics in state government to get that law repealed, instead of wasting his time obsessing over the sex life of teachers? It would be oh-so-much better for his P.R. image, and might actually accomplish something good.
Here is the exact quote of Mark Rhoades' statement about the future of Landmark Shattuck Cinemas at the ZAB meeting on Feb 8 which I attended: “We’re confident that there will be a theater space for some amount of time.” You’re free to translate that one too.
Consultant Mark Rhoades knew from the start that Berkeley citizens, who have a sentimental attachment to intelligent films, would object to his destroying the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas so he could build an 18 story high-rise there. To pre-empt our unreasonable outrage about this project, he asserted early on that the theaters aren’t doing well and that Landmark thinks they are “outmoded”; in fact, he assured everyone, Landmark wants to leave when their lease expires in 2018, so they’re just fine with demolishing their cinema complex. Right?
Wrong. Landmark’s President of Real Estate Michael Fant has twice told Don Goldmacher, from the Committee to Save the Landmark Shattuck Cinemas, that their Berkeley operation is quite successful and that they are happy here – so successful and happy that a few years ago they negotiated an extension of their lease, from 2018 to 2023.
In addition, Landmark’s CEO himself, Ted Mundorff, wrote in a February 4th email to me, “We have no plans to leave the City of Berkeley in 2018 or earlier”. And, understandably insulted, he added: “You are the first to tell me that the city believes that independent theatres are passé. Who in the city told you this?”
Well, some of the ZAB commissioners, actually. Last November, having heard our strong opposition to taking down the Landmark, Rhoades said okay, okay, he’d put a few movie theaters into the hi-rise (as though that promise made it okay to destroy an ongoing business). But then a few ZAB officials began saying that maybe what Berkeley really needs is yet another multi-use venue, could Rhoades look into that possibility instead? Because movie theaters are struggling, people don’t go to movies anymore, they’re over.
This is simply not true. The problem here is that mainstream and independent film are being lumped together. While the former is, indeed, losing customers, independent film is growing. Landmark specializes in independent films, attracting cinephiles in big numbers. You’ve probably seen the long lines that trail from their ticket booth on Friday and Saturday nights, and we all know that long lines usually signify a thriving business.
The discrepancy between what Rhoades says and what we see prompted several questions: Why would an apparently thriving business want to leave? Or if Rhoades is correct and they’re not thriving, where is the proof of that? Can ZAB please invite Landmark to one of their meetings, where the public can hear for itself what the company wants? Not that we would doubt the word of a man like Rhoades just because he stands to make a ton of money on this project, but still.
Now, having obtained answers directly from the source, we find ourselves at an interesting juncture. And when we add to this information another important finding – that the Landmark also contributes significantly to the success of many other downtown businesses, as has been previously reported in the Planet – the question becomes, what will Rhoades and City officials do with these facts? Will they continue to advocate for Landmark’s demise? If so, how will they justify that?
In what has been widely described as the largest intelligence leak since Edward Snowden, Al Jazeera has begun releasing a series of spy cables from the world’s top intelligence agencies.
In one cable, which is eerily similar to the CIA/Bush administration fabricated reasons for going to war in Iraq, the Israeli spy agency, Mossad, contradicts Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s own dire warnings about Iran’s ability to produce a nuclear bomb.
Former Mossad chief Meir Dagan publicly stated that a war with Iran would be a bad idea, a very bad idea. Other Israeli security officials have expressed frustration by Netanyahu’s rhetoric on the Iranian nuclear threat, accusing him of "messianic" political leadership pushing for military action.
J Street has placed a full page ad in the New York Times: "Presidents of Israel, and the US, five former Israeli ambassadors, dozens of elected officials and major Jewish leaders, all say :Postpone the Speech”.
The leaked cable is a huge embarrassment for Netanyahu just as he prepares his highly controversial US visit.
“Debt, n. An ingenious substitute for the chain and whip of the slave driver,”—Ambrose Bierce,journalist & writer
“The history of an oppressed people is hidden in the lies and agreed myth of its conquerers”—Meridel Le Sueur, author & activist
Myths are dangerous precisely because they rely more on cultural memory and prejudice than facts, and behind the current crisis between Greece and the European Union (EU) lays a fable that bears little relationship to why Athens and a number of other countries in the 28-member organization find themselves in deep distress.
The tale is a variation of Aesop’s allegory of the industrious ant and the lazy, fun-loving grasshopper, with the “northern countries”—Germany, the Netherlands, Britain, Finland—playing the role of the ant, and Greece, Spain, Portugal, and Ireland the part of the grasshopper.
The ants are sober and virtuous—led by the frugal Swabian hausfrau, German Chancellor Angela Merkel—the grasshoppers are spendthrift, corrupt layabouts who have spent themselves into trouble and now must pay the piper.
The problem is that this myth bears almost no relationship to the actual roots of the crisis or what the solutions might be. And it perpetuates a fable that the debt is the fault of individual countries rather than a serious crisis at the very heart of the EU.
First, a little myth busting.
The European debt crisis goes back to the end of the roaring ‘90s when the banks were flush with money and looking for ways to raise their bottom lines. One major strategy was to pour money into real estate, which had the effect of creating bubbles, particularly in Spain and Ireland. In the latter, from 1999 to 2007, bank loans for Irish real estate jumped 1,730 percent, from 5 million Euros to 96.2 million Euros, or more than half the GDP of the Republic. Housing prices increased 500 percent. “It was not the public sector but the private sector that went haywire in Ireland,” concludes Financial Times analyst Martin Wolf.
Spain, which had a budget surplus and a low debt ratio, went through much the same process, and saw an identical jump in housing prices: 500 percent.
In both countries there was corruption, but it wasn’t the penny ante variety of tax evasion or profit skimming. Politicians—eager for a piece of the action and generous “donations”—waved zoning rules, environmental regulations, and cut sweetheart tax deals. Hundreds of thousands of housing projects went up, many of them never to be occupied.
Then the American banking crisis hit in 2008, and the bottom fell out. Suddenly, the ants were in trouble. But not really, because the ants have a trick: they gamble and the grasshoppers pay.
The “trick,” as Joseph Stiglitz, Nobel Laureate in economics, points out, is that Europe (and the U.S.) have moved those debts “from the private sector to the public sector—a well-established pattern over the past half-century.”
Fintan O’Toole, author of “Ship of Fools: How Stupidity and Corruption sank the Celtic Tiger,” estimates that to save the Irish-Anglo Bank Irish taxpayers shelled out $30 billion Euros, a sum that was the equivalent of the Island’s entire tax revenues for 2009. The European Central Bank—which, along with the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the European Commission, make up the “Troika”—strong-armed Ireland into adopting austerity measures that tanked the country’s economy, doubled the unemployment rate, increased consumer taxes, and forced many of the country’s young people to emigrate. Almost half of Ireland’s income tax now goes just to service the interest on its debts.
Poor Portugal. It had a solid economy and a low debt ratio, but currency speculators drove up interest rates on borrowing beyond what the government could afford, and the European Central Bank refused to intervene. The result was that Lisbon was forced to swallow a “bailout” that was laden with austerity measures that, in turn, torpedoed its economy.
In Greece’s case corruption was at the heart of the crisis, but not the popular version about armies of public workers and tax dodging oligarchs. There are rich tax dodgers aplenty in Greece, but Germany, Sweden, and many other European countries spend more of their GDP on services than does Athens. Greece spends 44.6 percent of its GDP on its citizens, less than the EU average and below Germany’s 46 percent and Sweden’s 55 percent.
And as for lazy: Greeks work 600 hours more a year than Germans.
According to economist Mark Blyth, author of “Austerity: The History of a Dangerous Idea,” Greek public spending through the 2000s is “really on track and quite average in comparison to everyone else’s,” and the so-called flood of “public sector jobs” consisted of “ 14,000 over two years.” All the talk of the profligate Greek government is “a lot of nonsense” and just “political cover for the fact that what we’ve done is bail out some of the richest people in European society and put the cost on some of the poorest.”
There was a “score” in Greece. However, it had nothing to do with free spending, but was a scheme dreamed up by Greek politicians, bankers, and the American finance corporation, Goldman Sachs.
Greece’s application for EU membership in 1999 was rejected because its budget deficit in relation to its GDP was over 3 percent, the cutoff line for joining. That’s where Goldman Sachs came in. For a fee rumored to be $200 million (some say three times that), the multinational giant essentially cooked the books to make Greece look like it cleared the bar. Then Greece’s political and economic establishment hid the scheme until the 2008 crash shattered the illusion.
It was the busy little ants, not the fiddling grasshoppers that brought on the European debt crisis.
American, German, French, and Dutch banks had to know that they were creating an unstable real estate bubble—a 500 percent jump in housing prices is the very definition of the beast—but kept right on lending because they were making out like bandits.
When the bubble popped and Europe went into recession, Greece was forced to apply for a “bailout” from the Troika. In exchange for 172 billon Euros, the Greek government instituted an austerity program that saw economic activity decline 25 percent, unemployment rise to 27 Percent (and over 50 percent for young Greeks). The cutbacks slashed pensions, wages, and social services, and drove 44 percent of the population into poverty.
Virtually all of the “bailout”—89 percent—went to the banks that gambled in the 1999 to 2007 real estate casino. What the Greek—as well as Spaniards, Portuguese, and Irish—got was misery.
There are other EU countries, including Italy and France that, while not in quite the same boat as the “distressed four,” are under pressure to bring down their debt ratios.
But what are those debts?
This past summer, the Committee for a Citizen’s Audit on the Public Debt issued a report on France, a country that is currently instituting austerity measures to bring its debt in line with the magic “3 percent” ratio. What the Committee concluded was that 60 percent of the French public debt was “illegitimate.”
More than 18 other countries, including Brazil, Portugal, Ecuador, Greece and Spain, have done the same “audit,”, and, in each case, found that increased public spending was not the cause of deficits. From 1978 to 2012, French public spending actually declined by two GDP points.
The main culprit in the debt crisis was a fall in tax revenues resulting from massive tax cuts for corporations and the wealthy. According to Razmig Keucheyan, sociologist and author of “The Left Hemisphere,” this “neoliberal mantra” that was supposed to increase investment and employment did the opposite.
According to the study, the second major reason was the increase in interest rates that benefits creditors and speculators. Had interests rates remained stable during the 1990s, debt would be significantly lower.
Keucheyan argues that tax reductions and interest rates are “political decisions” and that “public deficits do not grow naturally out of the normal course of social life. They are deliberately inflicted on society by the dominant classes to legitimize austerity policies that will allow the transfer of value from the working classes to the wealthy ones.”
The International Labor Organization recently found that wages have, indeed, stalled or declined throughout the EU over the past decade.
The audit movement calls for repudiating debt that results from “the service of private interests” as opposed to the “wellbeing of the people.” In 2008, Ecuador canceled 70 percent of its debt as “illegitimate.”
How this plays out in the current Greek-EU crisis is not clear. The Syriza government is not asking to cancel the debt—though it would certainly like a write down—but only that it be given time to let the economy grow. The recent four-month deal may give Athens some breathing room, but the ants are still demanding austerity and tensions are high.
What seems clear is that Germany and its allies are trying to force Syriza into accepting conditions that will undermine its support in Greece and demoralize anti-austerity movements in other countries.
The U.S. can play a role in this—President Obama has already called for easing the austerity policies—through its domination of the IMF. By itself Washington can outvote Germany, the Netherlands, and Finland, and could exert pressure on the two other Troika members to compromise. Will it? Hard to say, but the Americans are certainly a lot more nervous about Greece exiting the Eurozone than Germany.
But the key to a solution is exploding the myth.
That has already begun. Over the past few weeks, demonstrators in Greece, Spain, Italy, Germany, Portugal, Great Britain, Belgium and Austria have poured into the streets to support Syriza’s stand against the Troika. “The Left has to work together having as its common goal the elimination of predatory capitalism” says Maite Mola, vice-president of the European Left organization and member of the Portuguese parliament. “And the solution should be European.”
In the end, the grasshoppers might just turn Aesop’s fable upside down.
During the last two years of a President’s second term pundits begin discussing his “legacy.” How will historians judge Barack Obama? Conservatives believe he will be loathed. Liberals tend to be more generous, however many of us believe Obama will be remembered as a mixed bag, a mixture of good and bad policies.
At this writing, the President’s approval ratings are the highest they’ve been in months and his favorability ratings are positive. 72 percent of those who watched Obama’s State-of-the-Union address believed the Administration’s policies “will move the country in the right direction.”
Whether you believe Obama has done a good job or a bad job depends upon your Party affiliation. The Gallup organization observed that the President’s approval ratings are historically polarized: “Throughout President Barack Obama's sixth full year in office, an average of 79% of Democrats, compared with 9% of Republicans, approved of the job he was doing.”
Typically, Democrats grade the President’s performance issue by issue and grade him positively for his handling of the economy. Most voters agree that the Obama Administration guided us out of the great recession. A recent Associated Press-GFK poll found there is growing support for the President’s economic policies and “51 percent approve of his handling of unemployment.”
But that doesn’t mean Obama gets an “A” for his economic leadership. Even though the economy is recovering, there’s record inequality. A recent report by investment bank Credit Suisse found that the ratio of wealth to disposable income is at its highest level since the Depression. And, as Senator Elizabeth Warren is fond of pointing out, Wall Street is back to business as usual. The President missed a historic opportunity to make fundamental changes to the US financial system.
On the other hand, Obama managed to get the Affordable Care Act passed. 11.4 million Americans are enrolled in Obamacare. (87 percent receiving some sort of cost assistance.) The latest Kaiser Tracking Poll found that while more Americans have an unfavorable view of Obamacare (46 percent) rather a favorable view (40 percent), the outcome is heavily influenced by political affiliation (64 percent of Democrats like it versus only 11 percent of Republicans.) Moreover most voters want to “fix” Obamacare rather than junk it. (64 percent fix versus 27 percent get rid of.)
In addition, President Obama also gets positive marks from most voters on his handling of Immigration and the Environment. The latest polls indicate 55 percent of voters support Obama’s executive actions on immigration. A November Pew Research Poll found that voters trusted the President more than Republicans to protect the environment.
Nonetheless, President Obama has promoted some bad policies. Since 2010, the United States has been negotiating a secret trade deal, the Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP). If approved by Congress, this pact between the U.S. and 11 of America’s Pacific Rim trade-partners would govern 40 percent of US imports and exports. US trade negotiators want TPP to get special, “fast-track” treatment from Congress, where it would simply get an up or down vote without Congress delving into the details. Polls indicate that voters do not want the President to have fast-track authority. Voters in blue states will likely oppose the entire trade deal.
Furthermore, the President is a mixed bag on foreign policy. Obama was elected, in part, because of his promise to extricate the US from Afghanistan and Iraq. While he’s removed most of the ground troops the “War on Terror” persists. As a result, voters disagree with President Obama’s handling of terrorism , 54 percent disapproval compared to 44 percent approval, and an even larger margin don’t like his handling of the Islamic State (ISIS), 57 percent disapproval compared to 40 percent approval.
On February 18th, the President asked Congress for an authorization for the use of military force against the Islamic State. There are three issues with this request: whether or not the President is authorized to send ground troops into Iraq/Syria (the domain of the Islamic State), whether or not the authorization has an expiration date, and how broad the authorization is.
Writing in Foreign Policy, law professor Ryan Goodman observed, “The decision on [the definition of “associated forces” of the Islamic State] may determine whether this [authorization for the use of military force] gives the next president the power to embroil America in conflicts and in countries that no current member of Congress could predict.”
What will Barack Obama’s legacy be? If a judgment were made today, it would be positive: the economic recovery and Obamacare. But the Transpacific Partnership trade agreement and the authorization for the use of military force threaten the President’s legacy; could turn it negative.
Bob Burnett is a Berkeley writer. He can be reached at bburnett@sonic.net
If you are a heterosexual man with mental illness and want to go out on a date, it is likely that you will be dating a woman with mental illness. In general, most women in mainstream society would not want to have a relationship with a disabled mentally ill man. (I do not know enough about the dating customs of LGBT people to give an opinion.) If you are female with a mental illness and are attractive, you have a better chance of dating a nondisabled man compared to the other way around. (This doesn't always hold true.)
Before I met my wife, a long time before, I sometimes placed or responded to singles ads. This was before computers proliferated our planet, and things were done with PO boxes, pens and paper. Anyway, I was talking on the phone to a prospective date, and the moment it was revealed that I was disabled and essentially couldn't work, it was instantaneous disqualification. A lot of single women will not consider dating a man with a perceived defect.
Relationships involving persons with mental illness have more problems than those of nondisabled people. When both partners in a relationship are mentally ill, they have more understanding of each other's predicament. When only one partner is mentally ill, the nondisabled one may not fully understand or even accept the mentally ill partner's problems.
However, when both partners are mentally ill, like a hot potato that gets tossed back and forth, the two persons' problems may magnify each other's. It requires a lot of resilience and tolerance for persons with mental illness to have relationships, or to be in a relationship with someone with mental illness.
Many persons with mental illness are socially underdeveloped. We haven't had enough of a chance to interact with people who are not mentally ill, and we haven't had the chance to learn the rules of socializing. This is a result of the segregation that occurs in which persons with mental illness are restricted from many arenas of life, at least in the U.S. This takes place through collective societal and economic pressures and not usually through legal restrictions.
Yet, relationships with persons with mental illness do happen, and in some instances they work about as well as those of people in the mainstream. I have been married to my wife for eighteen years. We have our ups and downs, we have our issues, but so far we have stuck together.
Couple's counseling has helped us. It helps me to recognize the issues that trigger upset emotions and deal with them. For example, if doing something brings up too much resentment, I refuse to do the thing rather than doing the thing and then becoming more resentful.
For example, I have put up boundaries concerning shopping. I can only participate in shopping so much, and then I have to draw the line. My wife goes shopping with her female friend while at the same time that friend's boyfriend watches television with me. Excessive money isn't spent, since my wife ends up returning most of the items that get purchased.
My wife and I are fortunate that we haven't produced any children. It is a nice fantasy to raise kids, but in fact it would be too difficult, too stressful, and too much responsibility. Other than that, I do not have the financial ability to provide for a child. If not competent enough to use birth control, maybe someone with mental illness should not embark on a relationship. But still, things happen.
If a woman with mental illness who is normally medicated becomes pregnant, she may need to go off most of her medications for part or all of the pregnancy, and this in turn may necessitate going inpatient.
If both parents of an offspring have mental illness, there is a very high probability that this offspring will develop an illness. In the past, psychologists attributed this to dysfunctional parenting, but it is now thought to be caused by heredity. Most psychiatric illness has a genetic component.
Overall, persons with mental illness deserve happiness, and sometimes this includes having someone to care for.
More often than not, religion is not a woman's best friend.
In Iran, women must dress in robes and not venture out. In Saudi Arabia women are not allowed to drive. And, in Israel, married women are not allowed to seek relief from a broken marriage. In Israel's rabbinical courts, only the man can grant a divorce.
This is the reality that drives Gett (the Hebrew word for divorce). The Amsalem's are barely on speaking terms. Viviane (Ronit Elkabetz) has moved out of the home she once shared with Elisha. Despite the rift, she continues to cook meals for her son and has them delivered by a friend who makes the ten-minute trek between homes. YHVH knows, she tries.
But not only is Viviane at odds with her distant, controlling spouse, she also has to deal with a trio of patriarchal rabbis who preside over a seemingly endless separation trial.
Visually, Gett is a simple film. The story unfolds inside a single Spartan room where the attorneys for the two disaffected spouses spar—badgering witnesses and casting aspersions in hopes of winning a nod from the trio of black-robed clerics appointed to preside over their fate. It's both a courtroom drama and an emotional cage-fight.
The trial proves to be a soul-wracking process of fits and starts. Subtitles mark the procedural slog: "Next Week," "Two Weeks Later," "Three Months Later." The process is Kafkaesque. There seems to be no way out. One disappointment, delay or humiliation only leads to another as the trial proceeds from one year to the next.
In this case, a resolution is only reached after five years of off-and-on rabbinical sessions. Resolved, that is, only to fall apart, excruciatingly, at the very last moment.
There's very little action to be had. The story transpires in a single drab, unfurnished room. At first, the film's pace and setting seem so uninviting that there's a temptation to look elsewhere for an evening's entertainment. But 15 minutes into Gett and you may find yourself sitting on the edge of your seat, digging your fingernails into your knees. The slow pace of the film and the silences can run a trick on the mind. Experiencing the tedium, the lack of resolution, the useless moments and squandered time, a viewer is forced into the same sterile state of quiet desperation that grips the gripping spouses and their two cantankerous lawyers.
There are long stretches of silence when no one speaks. We only come to learn about these two slowly, through the accounts of witnesses—family and neighbors—whose testimony is often questionable and tainted by conformity, tradition and small-mindedness.
Sometimes a witness is called to defend one of the parties only to veer off into personal recollections that damage the individual they're supposed to be defending.
The trial sessions are short and often brutal. The rabbis—bristling with male-chauvanist attitude—cut people short, tell the participants where to stand, when to talk and (with an impatient, dismissive wave of the hand) when to clear out of the courtroom because "this meeting is adjourned."
Such a simple request. These two people clearly are incompatible. A divorce would seemingly solve everything. But Elisha is unwilling to surrender his control over a woman who is no longer compliant. His only claim to control lies in the recognition that he is the man-in-the-marriage. (You may think your ears aren't playing tricks, but no. While others are speaking Arabic and Hebrew, Elisha is defending his position in French.)
Viviane is the one you root for here but even she is not without her flaws. You also root for her attorney, Carmel, a decent man driven to explosive extremes by the unendurable duration of the divorce-seeking process.
As the war of interrogations winds on, Elisha begins to look like a darker and even menacing character. If there is a divorce (you may find yourself thinking), Viviane should seriously consider a restraining order.
Gett has won numerous international awards for its screenplay, directing and acting—including Golden Globe and Academy Award nominations.
Ronit Elkabetz is pitch-perfect as the brooding, tightly wound Viviane. (You sense that she has the potential to snap and start striking back against the patriarchy with the fury of a Kung Fu warrior.) Simon Abkarian (a memorable Bond villain in Casino Royale) is an implacable presence as a weak and shallow man clinging to his only remaining lever of power.
Remarkably, Gett's award-winning lead actress is also one of the film's two directors—a husband-and-wife team, no less!
There are so many emotional peaks and crashes in this film that (more than once) I found myself on the verge of screaming: "Just GETT the bloody hell out of Israel and migrate to a country that has more respect for the lives of women."
Gett is the farthest thing from an action film but the stakes are so emotionally engaging that you may find yourself grinding your teeth and biting your nails as though the Fate of the Galaxy hangs in the balance.
PS: If you see Gett, save the following discussion for your post-viewing reflections.
Interview with the Film's Directors, Ronit and Shlomi Elkabetz
The title announces a trial—what is the dispute in question?
Vivianee, exhausted by her marriage, left the marital home several years ago and now wants a divorce in due form in order to avoid being a social outcast. Civil weddings still do not exist in Israel; only religious law applies, which stipulates that only the husband can grant a separation. However, Vivianee wants to count on the justice system, on the Law, to obtain what she considers to be within her rights. Her husband Elisha stubbornly refuses this divorce and Vivianee obstinately wants it.
Does this conflict apply to a specific community? Or a specific time period in the past?
Today in Israel, everyone's marriage is governed by religious law irrespective of which community they come from, or whether the couple is religious or completely unreligious. When a woman says "Yes," under the nuptial canopy, she is immediately considered as potentially "deprived of gett," in other words the right to divorce, because only the husband has the right to decide. The Law gives this outrageous power to the husband. The rabbis claim that they do everything to help the wives, but the fact is, within the closed hearings of the legal proceedings, the reality is much different, for it is the rabbis' sacred duty to do everything possible to preserve a Jewish household, and they are reluctant to put the personal wish to end a marriage above religious duty.
During what time period does GETT: THE TRIAL OF VIVIANEE AMSALEM take place?
Today. As this law has never evolved, the question isn't to know "when," but "over how much time" the procedure will take place. Precious time wasted for the women asking for a bill of divorce, without this holding any importance in the eyes of their husbands, the rabbis and the Law.
This lost time only has a value for the poor woman who is begging for the right to return to a normal life. For as long as she is not formally separated, a woman living outside the marital home will never be able to start a family again, and the children she might have outside of her marriage will be stigmatized with the "mamzer" status (the equivalent of a bastard, having no legal status or protection).
Moreover, this law forbids the woman any social life at all, for she would risk being suspected of having an affair with a man, which would forever prevent her from receiving a decree of divorce, if the husband still persists in his refusal. A woman who is waiting for her divorce decree is condemned to a sort of prison.
How did you approach the courtroom genre from a filmmaking standpoint? What were your guiding principles on the shoot?
In our eyes, staging a trial inevitably asks the question of knowing how a man and a woman are defined in view of the Law, the court, and in relation to one another. As a result, a rather extreme directing decision became self-evident: never film from the position of the director who is observing, but only from the protagonists' perspective. The camera is always positioned in the POV of one of the characters who is looking at another character. Characters who are not being looked at by another character can't be seen.
We, the directors, are not telling our story by imposing a single point of view on it, but through the multi-faceted prism of the people presented in the space before us. It is a subjective point of view in a place that is supposedly objective.
How does your staging differentiate itself from the two previous chapters of your trilogy?
TO TAKE A WIFE, where the conflict was between the individual and herself, essentially used close-up shots; SEVEN DAYS was filmed with wide-angle lenses that encompassed dozens of characters in a shot, for it was the family "clan" that Vivianee was confronting. In GETT: THE TRIAL OF VIVIANEE AMSALEM, Vivianee is facing the State through its applicable law. For our staging, we needed to reproduce the narrative space in which the story takes place, in other words, this rabbinical courtroom, capturing the multiplicity of convictions and emotions being expressed and circulating within this enclosed space. We also wanted our characters to be "bare(d)" faced with the Law: they face a blank wall, stripped of all artifice.
Then it's a film about words: in good or bad faith, tricks and ruses, testimony, pleas...To each his own truth?
Indeed, to each his own. But we also play with the different levels of language: profane versus sacred language. Comedy versus tragedy. In the courtroom, the formal language feels strange when used to evoke everyday facts before the court. This strangeness is almost contemptuous for the community members who have come to this place to express themselves. Moreover, we also used this distortion for the actors: the formal court language forced them to use particular gestures behind which they could hide.
What also very much guided us during the writing process and when creating the characters was to try and arouse compassion. Despite the uncompromising rigor of the Law enforced by rabbis who may appear inhuman, we wanted to have moments when they give in to a bit of humanity, when we can notice their feelings of distress and confusion, aware that this situation could one day concern them as well, as it may touch their wives, their daughters, their neighbors, their Aunts...
Ronit, how do you envision your character?
The rabbis have the mission to save every Jewish household. It's the shalom bayit commandment, "domestic harmony." So this woman's wish to divorce threatens the established order; but she is also threatening them on a personal level, because they don't want to be complicit in ending a marriage.
And because she is a woman, her voice counts less than a man's. She has no weight or leverage. She is constrained to silence by the power of the Law and those who enforce it, the rabbis. Yet, Vivianee learns to use this constraint to unremittingly continue the proceedings that everybody wants to stop. Even if it is imposed upon her, this silence is also a reflection of her inner strength.
The leitmotiv which inspired Vivianee's character is her determination, her inner peace of mind, her silence, which is the silence of someone who has seriously prepared herself and profoundly reflected on what she was doing before launching herself into this lion's den.
She is also a woman who is capable of violent outbursts, but she knows that if she gives in to the smallest fit, she will weaken her position in comparison with a man. If she doesn't control herself, she will immediately be kicked out of the trial, and be permanently discredited.
She isn't fighting on equal terms with her husband Elisha, who has the Law on his side. Even worse: he has the power. And he behaves accordingly, confidently. Nevertheless, his situation is more complex than a simple power struggle: he sincerely wants to keep Vivianee by his side.
And that also worsens Vivianee's situation: although she is a woman who brings about trouble, in particular because she goes against the sacred commandment to preserve a "Jewish home," her husband still wants to save her, despite herself, and to bestow upon her the honor of being his wife. Elisha's will and desire further soften the rabbis towards his position.
One of the strong points of Ronit and Simon Abkarian's acting is in their looks and expressions...We are almost in the category of silent film, or Hollywood films of yesteryear by Carl Dreyer, Robert Bresson...We are equally led to study the rabbis' faces...
These references are very important to us, notably classical films in which the tension relies upon a forthright issue. Here for example, Vivianee wants her freedom, which she is refused. And also, a complication is added: the defendant at the trial is also the person who has the power to determine the verdict. It's a fascinating set-up.
In our minds, the power of cinema lies in the point of view. In a frame, the eye is first attracted to the actors' and actresses' eyes. Then we look for what the actor is seeing, we dissect his soul through his vision. Thanks to these perspectives, the film exists beyond the dialogue.
These alternating perspectives also create the movement: a metaphor that we had in mind at the beginning of our work was that the trial would take place like a tennis match. Your head would turn from left to right, following the exchange of the balls, there would be a set won, a set lost, until the final victory.
The only thing left to do in such a situation is to lead a war of expressions in their eyes. Elisha's eyes are not devoid of suffering, but he also displays composure, self-confidence and inflexibility. Unlike Vivianee, whose expression encompasses a much more complex universe. Her eyes conceal pain, fear, despair, will and obstinacy, vigilance, and many things she would like to express as well as others that she prefers to keep to herself.
In the film's opening shots, the heroine is invisible. Her husband and her lawyer however are speaking about her—while she remains off screen. Is that to show that her existence is being denied?
Given the visual language we have chosen for the film, we are supposed to see her when her lawyer and husband are looking at her. But in order to shed a light on this woman's transparency from the very beginning, and the denial of her existence within a masculine judiciary system, we decided to begin with her absence. Afterwards, her presence will become permanent, because she is the one fighting, she is the one asking, she is the one who is dismissed. And she is one who carries the story forward, from hearing to hearing. It's her fate that is on trial. We wanted the audience to see her for the first time when she hears that she is refused the gett. The word "no." From that precise moment, faced with this refusal, and the denial of her being, she starts to exist on screen.
Vivianee wears dark colors during practically the entire film, thus further emphasizing the one scene where she is dressed in red. A scene where she takes down her hair...
In Orthodox Judaism, a woman's voice and her hair are considered the most scandalous tools of seduction. That's why women don't have the right to sing, and married women have to cover their heads with a scarf or a wig (and within some stricter sects of Orthodox Judaism, after having shaved their heads). In this scene, Vivianee is exhausted, possibly also because she is desperate. Up until this moment, nothing has been moving her request forward. Unconsciously, she puts on a red dress; red which translates the need for rupture, and her enormous weariness. She no longer wants to play this game. The moment when she takes down her hair is almost a reflection of her unconscious state. As if, at this point, she's letting herself go. Taking down her hair in front of the rabbis is an extremely impudent act. In Judaism, a woman's hair is even compared to her sexual organs. She doesn't do it on purpose, she is not looking to provoke them, but, at this instant, she no longer cares. She has been sitting on this chair for such a long time...she's practically at home.
In the scene that follows, the Law and the men who apply it will quickly call her back to order.
Part of the movie's strength comes from its alternating tones. Why did you decide to combine tragedy, comedy, revolt and farce?
The very essence of this story is tragic. What takes place is absurd, and at times ridiculous. The comedy arises from this contrast.
The existence of this law is absurd: a religious law that applies to everyone, whether they are religious or not. Even we simply can't believe that in 2014 in our supposedly democratic society, a woman may be considered to be her husband's property. And there is also something absurd in the rabbinic judges' determination to waste time, to delay debates and unhinge the plaintiff so that she will give up, renouncing her will and thus "saving" another Jewish household from "disaster."
From Mrs. Evelyne Ben Chouchan to Rachel, including the couple who are their neighbors—the husband being very enlightening about men and women's relations—the choice of witnesses overall is a sketch of social customs. The judges seem at times to be watching a play when faced with these characters.
There are a few legal grounds that would allow the judges to order a husband to grant his wife a divorce: if the husband is unable to clothe his wife, or fulfill her dietary and sexual needs. It is from this perspective that the judges have summoned members of the couple's community and the couple's neighborhood. Yet, once called in to testify, they can't refrain from taking this opportunity to make it about themselves. Vivianee's brother, his wife, a fifty-year-old bachelor, a friend from the synagogue, the neighbors: this gallery of realistic characters brings a multitude of points of view, perspectives from the outside, from towns and cities, their traditions, the synagogue. But can they actually give the judges a valid legal reason to order Elisha to grant his wife a divorce?
Three languages are spoken in the film: Hebrew, Arabic, and French. When and why do the characters switch from one language to the other?
People in Israel who come from North Africa often speak a jumble of Hebrew, Arabic and French. Just like the people who come from Europe pepper their language with Yiddish or their mother tongue. This phenomenon is dying out with the younger generations. Our generation rarely uses any other language besides Hebrew. But our parents' generation used Arabic and French when their honor or their secrets were involved. A language is a haven. When you feel more comfortable saying something in a certain language, you switch over to that language. This allows for a certain comfort level and creates intimacy among family members. When Vivianee's brother comes to testify, and he addresses her in Arabic, it's to soften the unexpected blow he is going to deal her when he admonishes her in front of everybody.
Elisha himself is very stubborn when it comes to Hebrew. He understands it perfectly of course, but he consistently chooses not to use it. Firstly, he can't express himself as well in Hebrew as he can in French, the language he was brought up in. Secondly, he, like the pious men, believes that Hebrew is a sacred language and it should not be used for commonplace, everyday conversations.
Ronit, do you believe that Vivianee is forever forbidden to all men, other than her former husband?
When Vivianee accepts this ban, she is buying her freedom at the price of her own liberty. It's a very heavy price to pay. What she will decide to do with her life depends upon her integrity and her ethics. I can't give you an answer because I don't know what she might do. But something is obvious to me: it's a choice that displays a great confidence in life. From her point of view, making this choice will open all the doors for her, even if it means remaining faithful to this man for the rest of her life... It's an important success and a victory, despite all. It's the victory of the spirit – mind over matter. From that moment on, a great realm of possibilities is opened for her.
GETT is thus anchored in the reality of Israeli society, and results from your desire to recount this struggle for freedom. How much of your personal experience is found in these situations and these characters?
All the facts and character traits we used to tell our story are plausible. Vivianee, the heroine of our trilogy, is as much inspired by elements of women's lives from our entourage as well as by our mother, who never stepped into a rabbinical court, and never expressed the desire for divorce, even though she may have thought about it.
So you are sketching a portrait of Israeli society rather than one of your family?
Yes, GETT isn't just Vivianee's story, but a metaphor for the condition of women in general who see themselves as serving a "life sentence" because of this law. Consequently, GETT represents the condition of women throughout the world, in all the places where—merely because they are women—they are considered by the law and by men as inferior.
Berkeley's Just Theater, in collaboration with the Shotgun Players, is in the midst of a critically acclaimed run of a new play, 'We Are Proud to Present ... A Presentation About the Herero of Namibia Formerly Known as South West Africa from the German Showestafrika Between the Years 1884-1815,' by Jackie Sibbles Dreury, directed by Molly Aaronson-Gelb, 7 p. m. Wednesday-Thursday, 8 on Fridays & Saturdays, 5 on Sunday, through March 7 at Ashby Stage, 1901 Ashby at MLK. $20-$25 general, $5-$15 students & under 25 years old (by reservation). justtheater.org; shotgunplayers.org
Fifteen years after its première at San Francisco Opera, Jake Heggie’s Dead Man Walking returned to the city in a scaled-down production launched by Opera Parallèle, an organization that specializes in offering new or infrequently performed operas in small-scale productions that are more affordable than the grandiose stagings often encountered in major opera houses here and abroad. Opera Par-allèle’s Artistic Director, Nicole Paiment, who conducted the three performances at Yerba Buena Center on Friday-Sunday, February 20-22, worked closely with composer Jake Heggie to re-orchestrate Dead Man Walking for a smaller orchestra than when it was first performed.
Although I missed Dead Man Walking at its San Francisco Opera première in 2000, I am happy to report that the scaled-down version works admirably well, creating an intimate drama that focuses on the inner thoughts and feelings of its protagonists. As most readers know, Jake Heggie’s opera, with a libretto by Ter-rence McNally, is based on Sister Helen Prejean’s landmark book Dead Man Walking: An Eyewitness Account of the Death Penalty in the United States, published in 1993. This book also served as the basis of Tim Robbins’ 1995 movie of the same title, starring Susan Sarandon as Sister Helen Prejean and Sean Penn as Death Row convict Joseph De Rocher.
For Opera Parallèle’s performances, stage director Brian Staufenbiel created a spare set augmented with video projection. During the opera’s brief instrumental Prologue, the scene of the crime—a rape and double murder on the shores of a forested lake—is projected. Onstage, in front of this backdrop, a teenage girl and boy undress, get naked, and start to make love, only to be attacked by one man, at least, who has been hiding in the bushes. A fight ensues. The boy is knocked down. The attacker mounts the girl and begins to rape her. A shot is heard. Who fired it is unknown. But it is all too clear that the man we see raping the girl kills her by stabbing her repeatedly with a knife.
Incidentally, it is never made clear who killed the boy; and the Prologue’s visualization of the crime only adds to the confusion when, at the opera’s end, Joseph De Rocher seems to confess to killing both the girl and the boy, whereas we have only seen him kill the girl. Moreover, by visualizing the crime this way at the outset, one whole level of suspense is eliminated, for when Sister Helen Prejean initially heard Joseph De Rocher’s adamant insistence he was innocent, she must have at least considered the possibility he was wrongly convicted of a crime or crimes he didn’t commit.
As Act I gets underway, Sister Helen Prejean, sung by mezzo-soprano Jennifer Rivera, leads the children of Hope House in a hymn, which her high spirits turn into a spontaneous dance. The music here is idiomatically American and folksy. As the children leave, Sister Helen tells Sister Rose she has been corresponding with a Death Row convict who asks her to visit him in Louisiana’s infamous Angola Prison. Sister Rose, beautifully sung by full-throated soprano Talise Trevigne, cautions Sister Helen; but Helen has decided to go. The next scene depicts Sister Helen driving to the prison. This is indicated by a video projection of a highway’s center line as seen from a speeding car, while Sister Helen simply sits in a chair at center stage. However, in a questionable move, director Staufenbiel has the till now anon-ymous murdered girl and boy sit in chairs behind Sister Helen. Since we haven’t seen their faces during the Prologue, we don’t know at first who these people are who sit behind Sister Helen as if they’re riding in the car with her. It’s confusing; and the confusion continues as these ghostly apparitions reappear throughout the opera.
When Sister Helen arrives at Angola Prison, she is met by the chaplain, Father Grenville, sung by tenor John Duykers. He sternly advises Helen not to have anything to do with Joseph De Rocher, whom he describes as beyond reach. She takes an instant dislike to Father Grenville and insists it is her duty to attempt to help this convict. She then meets the warden, George Benton, ably sung by bass-baritone Philip Skinner, who warns her that De Rocher may ask her to be his spiritual advisor and accompany him to his execution. He asks if she will have the fortitude to do this. Sister Helen admits she doesn’t know.
When she at last meets De Rocher, robustly sung by baritone Michael Mayes, things get off to a rough start. He declares his innocence, stating that his brother killed the two teenagers and got off easy by hiring an expensive lawyer while Joseph, who couldn’t afford one, got Death Row. He is bitter and aggressive; but he asks Sister Helen to accompany his mother to the Pardon Board hearing.
At this hearing, Mrs. De Rocher, sung by veteran mezzo-soprano Catherine Cook, emotionally pleads for her son’s life. Catherine Cook had a tall task in taking on this role, for in the San Francisco Opera première it was memorably sung by Frederica von Stade. Without having seen Frederica von Stade in this role, I cannot imagine her as being anywhere near as believable as was Catherine Cook. In fact, the very refinement of von Stade’s voice and her aristocratic demeanor would seem to work against her in this role of a lower class mother from rural Louisiana. By contrast, Catherine Cook’s dowdy demeanor and rough-hewn voice fit the role perfectly. Her moving testimony as a Death Row convict’s mother was a highlight of this production of the opera. At this hearing, however, the pardon request is denied.
In subsequent meetings with Joseph, Sister Helen urges him to confess to the crimes he has committed. Joseph remains adamant he is innocent. In the role of Joseph, Michael Mayes is utterly convincing, alternately pugnacious and fearful, yet singing always with full-throated conviction. There follows a scene, the last of Act I, which I find a bit pretentious. In this scene, Sister Helen begins to hear voices in her head—the angry parents of the dead teenagers, De Rocher calling for help, his mother pleading for her son’s life, and even the voices of her fellow nuns who are concerned about the emotional toll this is taking on Sister Helen. Conductor Nicole Paiement ratcheted up the orchestral volume in this bombastic music, bringing this scene to a fever pitch, until the warden tells Sister Helen that the Governor has refused to intervene to stay the execution. Sister Helen falls to the floor in a faint.
Aftter intermission, the inner drama of both Joseph De Rocher and Sister Helen is foregrounded. Joseph is told the date of his scheduled execution and angrily contemplates his fate. Sister Helen, back at Hope House, awakens from a terrifying dream and is comforted by Sister Rose, ardently sung by soprano Talise Travigne, from whom we hope to hear more locally. Next comes a scene at the prison where Joseph learns that he shares with Sister Helen a love of Elvis Presley. In this scene, Jennifer Rivera as Sister Helen is both amusing and utterly convincing as she does a nerdy dance imitating Elvis’s famous hip-swinging moves. Sister Helen renews in vain her urging of Joseph to confess.
There follows a moving scene in which Joseph’s mother and two younger brothers visit Joseph for the last time before his execution. Particularly wrenching are Joseph’s halting attempts to apologize to his mother and confess his guilt, coupled with her repeated refusals to hear his confession. To her, he is and always will be innocent, her little son Joey. Next comes a scene outside the Death House where Sister Helen again encounters the anger of the teenaged victims’ parents. Only the girl’s father, ably sung by baritone Robert Orth, who created this role, now admits to having some doubts about the case against Joseph.
In one final meeting with Joseph, Sister Helen elicits from him the full story of the crime. After confessing to her, he expects Sister Helen to hate him. Instead, she forgives him, saying we all make mistakes, even grievous mistakes; but that does not make us any the less God’s children. She promises to be there with Joseph when he is executed. Hers, she says, will be the face of love.
The opera’s final scene is in the Execution Chamber. Sister Helen expresses her love for Joseph and he responds that he loves her too. The warden asks if Joseph has any last words. Joseph asks forgiveness for his crime from the parents of the murdered teenagers. The execution proceeds, with Sister Helen looking on. Also looking on are the ghostly murdered teenagers. The ghostly girl even bends down to kiss Joseph farewell as the lethal injection courses through his veins.
With women worldwide beginning to speak out openly and assertively against the men who violently abuse and rape them, I find this “love even thy rapist and murderer” portrayal a bit much. Likewise, I have to remark that it seems odd— and politically incorrect—to have nearly all sixteen of the convicts on Death Row at Angola Penitentiary in Louisiana—with possibly one light-skinned mixed-race individual as an exception—portrayed as white males, when in reality they are overwhelmingly black African-Americans. Granted, this is an opera, not a documentary. But it seems a bit naïve—especially at a time when the disproportionate incarceration of African-Americans in the USA, especially on Death Row, is such a hotly contested issue—for Opera Parallèle to portray the inmates on Death Row as overwhelmingly white. With these few cavils about the staging, I found this Opera Parallèle production of Dead Man Walking an intensely captivating opera.
On Friday, February 20, Jordi Savall returned to Berkeley’s First Congreg-ational Church with his Hespèrion XXI Ensemble to perform music from diverse Balkan, Iberian and Middle Eastern traditions. For some fifteen years, Jordi Savall has immersed himself in researching the music of the Ottoman Empire based in Istanbul. Of great importance in this research was The Book of the Science of Music by Dimitrie Cantemir (1693-1723), a Moldovan composer and music theorist who compiled in this work the most important collection of 16th and 17th century Ottoman instrumental music to have survived to the present day.
For Jordi Savall’s current tour, Hespèrion XXI is comprised of two oud players—Driss el Maloumi of Morocco and Yurdal Tokcan of Turkey; Turkish kanun player Hakan Güngör; Spaniard Davıd Mayoral on percussion; an Armenıan instrumentalist, Haig Sarikouyoumdjian on ney and duduk; Jordi Savall on viola da gamba; and a Greek santur player, Dimitri Psonis. (The latter was unfortunately unable to perform at Friday’s concert due to ill health.) All these musicians have broad experience playing this repertoire of music. Yurdal Tokcan, for example, answered affirmatively when I asked if he had played with Ross Daly, the Irish troubador who lives in Crete, records with Greek, Turkish, and other musicians of many nationalities, and has done so much to foster our awareness of the cross-fertilization of Greek, Turkish, and other Balkan musical traditions. Daly hosts music festivals each summer in the Cretan village of Houdetsi where he lives. Central to the music played by Jordi Savall’s group at Friday’s concert is the makam, or mode, for Ottoman musical traditions are based on a complex modal system. Hespèrion XXI opened Friday’s concert by playing a makam ascribed to Dervis Mehmed and cited in Dimitrie Cantemir’s aforementioned The Book of the Science of Music. Hakan Güngör on kanun, a zither type instrument that is plucked rather than hammered, began this makam, then was joined by Savall and the other musicians. The second piece, La rose enflorece, is from the tradition of Sephardic Jews who were exiled from Spain in 1492, many of which settled in Turkey. The third piece was a plaintive Armenian lament played on ney, a Pan pipe, by Armenian musician Haig Sarikouyoumdjian, accompanied by Jordi Savall with a soft drone on viola da gamba. The fourth and final piece of the first set was another makam cited by Cantemir.
The second set began with an Ottoman lament, which was followed by a lively Greco-Turkish song. Next came another haunting Armenian lament on ney or duduk, again accompanied by a subtle drone on viola da gamba. The fourth and final piece before intermission was another makam cited by Cantemir.
After intermission, Hespèrion XXI opened with a Sephardic song from Sarajevo, “Paxarico tu te llamas.” Next came an Armenian song and dance, “Al aylukhs,” followed by another makam from Cantemir’s book. This third set drew to a close with a Sephardic traditional song. The fourth and final set began with a plain-tive Armenian lament on ney or duduk, exquisitely played by Sarikouyoumdjian, followed by a Turkish-Greek song and dance, Koniali, which featured clicksticks played by percussionist David Mayoral. Next came the beautiful song “Una pastora,” which was first noted in a Greek play performed for the Greek community of Smyrna in the 1880s, but which is attributed to the Sephardic tradition. The final piece of the concert was another makam cited by Cantemir. Hespèrion XXI also played an encore which featured oud player Driss el Maloumi on vocals. Following the concert there was a reception for Hespèrion XXI at The Musical Offering, which enabled those who attended to speak briefly with Jordi Savall and his fellow musicians.
