In a Better World a Portrait on How Hard it is to Turn the Other Cheek

HAEVEN (English Title: In a Better World) [2010]

Directed by Susanne Bier

Sony Pictures Classics, 119 mins. R (for child violence).

 In Danish, English, and subtitles

* * * *

How many religious and humanitarian traditions have versions of the injunction to “turn the other cheek” when confronted with violence? How easy is it to do? And how much harder is this for children to understand? These are questions that Susanne Bier poses in an intriguing little film that scarcely made a dent in English-speaking lands (perhaps because only New Zealand and Canada make lists of least-violent nations), despite winning the Best Foreign Language Oscar in 2011 and some Golden Globes prizes as well.

Bier not only asks these questions, she ruffles some feathers while doing so. She’s Danish and, according to most measures, Denmark is the 2^nd least violent nation on earth (after Iceland) and its people are the world’s happiest. By setting Haeven in Denmark, Bier signals that not everyone is content in the land of Hans Christian Anderson, and that includes the children for whom Anderson fashioned fairy tales. Bier also blows the lid off of Denmark’s reputation for tolerance by centering the violence on unaccepted outliers. The film opens in Africa, where Anton (Mikael Persbrandt) is on a Doctors Without Borders mission. He’s Swedish, but he now lives in Denmark, near his estranged wife Marianne (Trine Dyrholm) who has custody of their son Elias (Markus Rygaard). Elias is the target of bullies at his school, an object of scorn for his accented Danish and Swedish features. School is a nightmare for the passive Elias, until another new kid, Christian (William Tøhnk Nielsen), shows up. He’s rejected also, both for his time abroad and for fear he might be psycho. But when he puts the fear of sudden demise into Elias’s main attacker, he and Elias become best friends even though Christian is everything he’s been warned to avoid.

Christian is indeed a mini mite of rage. He and his widower father, Claus (Ulrich Thomsen), have just returned to Denmark from London, where Christian’s mother died of cancer. The pre-teen Christian cannot come to grips with the unfairness of her death and he’s sullenly taking out of his anger on whomever gets in his way. He’s also very attracted to fantasy, the ledge of a towering grain elevator, and Internet bomb-making sites. Add to this a hard-to-take lesson in cheek turning from Anton when he is confronted by a loutish auto mechanic, and the potential for pyrotechnics is high.

Are we priming for a Danish version of Columbine, or will peace reign in the end? Watch this gripping little drama and find out. All I will say is that the plot is further seasoned with an interesting twist involving an African warlord.

Haeven–available on Netflix–falls into a category of films aptly labeled “hidden gems.” It’s no masterpiece, but it’s taut, tense, and provocative. It’s also very well acted. Both Persbrandt and Thomsen are well known in Europe, hence they’ve garnered praise there, but the hands-down stars are the two boys, Rygaard and Nielsen, who remain steadfast in their 12-year-old logic systems and never sully their performances with mawkish cuteness. This one is well worth a rental, but be prepared for some eye-shielding tension.

   

Lincoln: Spielberg's Middle-of-the-Road Biopic

Big ideas. big performances, and downsized script. 

LINCOLN (2012)

Directed by Stephen Spielberg

Touchstone Pictures, PG-13, 150 minutes

* * *

When rumors surfaced that Steven Spielberg intended to direct a biopic of Abraham Lincoln, historians worried that he would turn the 16^th president into Indiana Jones, while action movie fans fretted he was going to make another didactic film in the spirit of Amistad (1997), Saving Private Ryan (1998), or Munich (2005). Lincoln will throw some raw meat to be both howling packs, though it won’t slake the appetite of either. The first thing you need to know about Lincoln is that it’s neither a masterpiece nor a bomb; it’s a most uncharacteristic Spielberg film–a middle-of-the-road effort that, were it not for several sensational performances, would probably be forgotten very quickly.

Spielberg and scriptwriter Tony Kushner wisely opted to forego a Lincoln biography and concentrate on the five-month period between November of 1864 (Lincoln’s reelection) and April of 1865 (his assassination). They truncated the story even further by concentrating of the battle to pass the 13^th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which officially banned slavery. Kushner’s script was based on Doris Kearns Goodwin’s Lincoln biography, Team of Rivals, an intriguing but flawed book from one whose scholarship is not always as careful as it should be. But Goodwin isn’t the problem here; Kushner is. He provides a script that’s long on quips and zingers, but devoid of pacing. The first half of this two-and-a-half hour film feels epic, and not in a good way. Virtually every character in the Congressional debate is introduced, even though most end up making little more than cameo appearances. One might applaud an attempt at thoroughness, or one might conclude that this level of detail is the job of biographers and that there are just too many players to keep straight unless you are a history junkie. (I am a historian, but I come down on the “too many” side.) Nor can we dimsiss Kushner’s plodding pace as being true to the historic record; prior to the publication of the Congressional Record after 1873, there was no verbatim account of Congressional debate, just notes. (And even today members can “edit” their remarks prior to publication.) This means that nearly every scrap of dialogue in Lincoln is imagined rather than literal. This includes Lincoln’s own words and thoughts; he was a deeply private man who did not keep a diary and from whom precious few private letters exist. Most of what we think we know of the man comes from secondhand accounts from friends and foes.

At the end of this review I will append some scholarly observations but first, back to the film. Everyone is talking about the performance of Daniel Day-Lewis as Lincoln, and well they should. I can’t imagine that Day-Lewis won’t win the Best Actor award for this performance. He looks the part­–right down to unkempt hair, the unwashed clothing, and the haggard ashen face of a leader whose vitality, like the flower of male youth, was drained by four long years of bloody warfare. Even the voice is right; Lincoln had a high squeaky voice, not the sonorous tones we hear in plays and heroic film bios. Day-Lewis also humanizes Lincoln to the degree that Spielberg allows him to. Like the president he plays, Day-Lewis is in command. Just wrap the Oscar now and spare us the long ceremony.

While we’re at it, reserve one for Tommy Lee Jones as Thaddeus Stevens, the leader of the Radical Republicans and one of the few white men in North America who believed in African-American equality. Jones is a volcano whose explosion is being (barely) contained by a pot lid, the hope that the 13^th Amendment is the first step in racial justice. Shout-outs also for James Spader as Republican Party “fixer” William Bilbo, and for Jackie Earle Haley’s wily-meets-oily portrayal of Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, the head of a delegation hoping for a last-minute ceasefire and appeasement that might preserve slavery in the South. As always, David Strathairn is emotive and strong, this time as William Seward, Lincoln’s Secretary of State.

Other good things include the crisper pace of the second half of the film, one which actually made Congress’s deliberative ways seem exciting; the film’s humor; and the story it tells. If you thought the Emancipation Proclamation freed slaves, you are the victim of a very old myth. (See below) As the film shows, it took the 13^th Amendment to end slavery, and it was vital that it be done before the war actually concluded. Kudos to Spielberg for deciding to cut to the chase of what the Civil War was really about.

The weaknesses? The film is too long, Kushner’s script stripped of its witticisms is pretty ordinary, and there’s still a bit too much deification of Lincoln–aides looking up with doe-eyes, diaphanous lighting that presages angelic transformation, and brass fanfare from John Williams. The soundtrack is cloying, as if Williams was trying to outdo Aaron Copeland’s A Lincoln Portrait in solemnity or Fanfare for the Common Man in anthem-like majesty. This is especially noticeable in the film’s telescoped coda that takes us from the amendment’s passage in December of 1864, to Lincoln’s murder less than four months later. Spielberg is also ham-handed in this section as he covers events in lightening speed that could have dispatched more cleanly by either a voiceover or a rolling text scroll. Parts of the film also feel too modern, as if Spielberg was trying to slip in some of those Hollywood liberal values that the political right so despises. I was happy that Spielberg presented slavery as an intractable problem that only government could arbitrate, but I also half expected an impromptu soliloquy on the virtues of strong central government.

Grade this one a low B. Shows promise, demonstrates rudimentary understanding of events, and has moments of insight, but could use some greater fact checking, often makes speculative leaps, and needs a stiff edit for clarity, flow, and continuity. In movie terms, that’s three of five stars.--Rob Weir

Addendum for History Nuts

Let’s give Spielberg credit for some things he got (mostly) right. These include:

·      Buying Congress: People love to say that today’s politicians are crooked, and so they might be. But they are pikers compared to those of the 19^th century. Congress was so corrupt that money was handed out openly and most principles could be compromised if the price was right. All manner of political bribes were used to get the 13^th Amendment through the Senate. It didn’t unfold exactly as shown, but deals were made.

·      The Overrated Emancipation Proclamation: In the film, Lincoln called it a “war measure.” That’s right (it also had the purpose of helping dissuade the British Parliament from giving aid to the Confederacy, as it would appear that Britain was supporting a practice-slavery-it had outlawed). The Emancipation Proclamation was of dubious legality and it freed almost no slaves as it was confined to “those areas under rebellion,” not those under federal control or those that has surrendered. It is one of history’s great symbolic documents, but it did not free slaves.

·      Victory was still in doubt: No, the Civil War wasn’t just a mop up after the Battle of Gettysburg. The biggest threat to the Union was always political, not military; it was never a question of which power was stronger, but whether the Union had the political resolve and public support to win the war. The Southern strategy was to wage a war of attrition and many Northerners had had enough by 1864. Lincoln faced strong pressure to negotiate an end as late as the opening months of 1865.

·      Not all the Democrats were in the South: Lincoln feared he might lose the election of 1864 and that was not paranoia. The Democratic Party remained strong in the North, especially in the Mid-Atlantic States. Many Democrats­­–including the execrable Fernando Wood of New York–were “Copperheads” who sympathized with the Confederacy. 

·      The Republicans were a nest of vipers: Southerners stereotyped the Republicans as a party of fanatical abolitionists and social levelers, but that was not the case. Only the party’s extreme left wing (typified by Stevens) believed in equality. Not even Lincoln was an abolitionist until 1864; he supported gradual emancipation prior to then. More to the point, the GOP was so faction-ridden that it would have won the presidency in 1856 if the party had united behind one candidate. Lincoln was that one candidate in 1860, solely because he was the least objectionable to the factions. Lincoln was surrounded by men who felt they, not he, should rightfully be president, and some were openly disrespectful.

·      Most whites were racist: Right again. Anti-slavery was not the same as pro-equality. Many (probably most) Northerners hated African Americans, a large number disliked Lincoln for changing the war’s purpose to one for black emancipation, and very few of those seeking to end slavery felt that whites and blacks could live in harmony. (Many wished to deport freedmen to colonies in either Africa or Latin America.)

The Dodgy Stuff!

Spielberg also took liberties that make a lot of historians cringe, including:

·      The cracker-barrel president: Lincoln, by most accounts, loved stories and jokes, but Spielberg/Kushner give us a president who, whenever things were toughest, trotted out shaggy dog tales filled with uncommon wisdom that cut through the crap. The president does stand-up? No. 

·      Mary Lincoln was no Sally Field: “Lovable” is not a word used by many to describe Mary Todd Lincoln. She was known for being vain, cantankerous, and quite probably bipolar. Some of her critics even accused her of being a Confederate spy! Granted losing one’s child and (later) her husband could drive one to despair, but the film’s suggestion that Mary had a temporary nervous breakdown is probably too optimistic; she might have been nuttier than a Snickers bar well before Abe was felled.

·      Thaddeus Stevens and his ‘black’ mistress: This was a story told by his enemies to slander Stevens, but it’s more complicated. Lydia Hamilton Smith, his housekeeper and lover, would indeed have been viewed as “black” by the standards of the day, but she was a quadroon who, by outward appearances, looked white, not like S. Epatha Merkeson, the African-American actress who played her in the film. Which came first, Stevens' belief in equality or the affair? Unclear.

·      Congressional capers: The caper-like pacing of recruiting supporters for the 13^th Amendment is surely cinematic invention modeled on Keystone Kops hijinks. 

·      Lincoln wasn’t Lincoln yet: Did two soldiers, one white and one black, recite the Gettysburg Address to the president from memory? Call it a Hollywood moment! Like John Kennedy, Lincoln was more beloved in death than in life.

·      Congress isn’t a courtroom: But Kushner and Spielberg played it like one for the final vote on the 13^th Amendment. Roll call voting was done alphabetically, not by state. This scene is pure TV courtroom in its staged drama.

·      Word up: A final reminder that most of the dialogue, except when documents are being quoted, is imaginary. Don’t quote this film and think you’ve quoted Lincoln lest first you verify. Especially if you’re in my class!

Ken Burns’ Dustbowl Blows Too Long

The Dust Bowl

Directed by Ken Burns

Public Broadcasting System

November 18-19, 2012

* *

If Ken Burns were an undergraduate student, his professors would take him to task for padding his work. Last week’s Dust Bowl would have made a superb one-hour show; alas, at four hours it’s redundant and tedious. Even more unforgiveable for what Burns rightly called “the greatest man-made environmental disaster” in U.S. history, it ultimately bores its viewers. And this isn’t my assessment, rather that of the students in a university course I teach titled “From Roosevelt to Reagan,” who have studied the Dust Bowl and were primed to view it. Just two of twenty managed to get through all of it, which put those two one up on me; I feel asleep for about 15 minutes the first night.

Burns is a nonpareil researcher and, once again, has unearthed several personal narratives that had the potential to humanize the tragedy. For a ten-year period between 1929 and 1938, every state in the union except Vermont and Maine experienced periodic drought conditions. Higher-than-normal temperatures, winds ripping across prairies that should have sported grass rather than plowed fields, unscientific farming, and no water made for storms analogous to Hurricane Sandy, except that they were made of dirt, not rain. Soils blown from Montana routinely blocked out the noonday sun in Chicago, Buffalo, Boston, and Washington days later. Burns focuses his attention on the Panhandle region of Oklahoma, where it intersects with Texas, Colorado, Kansas, and New Mexico.  Through diaries, interviews, and newspaper accounts he further refined his study to a handful of families that he uses as avatars to propel us through the “Dirty Thirties.” Not a bad idea. Nor is there any faulting his historical data.

Burns’ problems are threefold. First, he’s been recycling the same filmmaking techniques for decades, so there’s very little we don’t see coming from across the metaphorical prairie. Second, he steadfastly refuses to work with editors that would pare his work. Third, he knows how to research, but not how to draw conclusions.

If you’ve seen anything Burns has done since his Civil War series, you know how The Dust Bowl looks. iMovies has a special application in which a still is displayed in tight and then the camera pulls back; it’s called “The Ken Burns Effect.” Add some talking heads (Dust Bowl survivors, grandchildren of survivors, and some academics), and an omniscient narrator—Peter Coyote in this case–and you pretty much have the film’s structure, look, and modus operandi. There is some archival film footage, but it’s not in the best of shape, hence the screen in static for most of the time. And for God’s sake, if Burns uses Stephen Foster’s “Hard Times Come Again No More” as the soundtrack for one more film, I will dig up Foster, reanimate him, and underwrite his lawsuit to recover royalties from Burns!

The repetitious filmmaking methods wouldn’t be nearly so noticeable if Burns didn’t repeat everything else. The film feels like it was made by a hoarder afraid to let go of anything. Here’s what the film tells us: the Dust Bowl was preventable and man-made; it was bad; people struggled to survive and some didn’t; it was really bad; children’s health was adversely impacted more than that of adults; it was really, really, really bad; the government tried to help, but met with limited success; things were just awful; the Dust Bowl transformed the region; oh-my-God it was terrible. Burns is so enamored of his human sources that he allows them to say the same thing over and over again. I admired the attempt to personalize the tragedy, but once we get the scope of it, what more is there to say, really? Is there any point to comparative catastrophes?

The inability to think like a scholar is what ultimately trips Burns. First, by choosing the hardest-hit region of the country, he gives us a view of the Dust Bowl that is both skewed and myopic. It looked quite different, for example, in the Cotton Belt, where many of those blown out were black sharecroppers. (Burns doesn’t have a clue on how to do Black history; nearly all of his work is lily white.) Burns is certainly right that the Dust Bowl was very, very, very bad, but it didn’t last ten years in most of the nation. Second—as several students pointed out to me—Burns truncated government actions. We hear informants tell us about how President Roosevelt tried to help but, oddly for such a long film, he crunches all of New Deal into a recited litany that occupies just a few minutes and does so in a manner that elides programs that occurred in 1933 with those that take place five years later. He also gives the same weight to programs that delivered direct aid with spectacular failures deemed overly radical (like resettlement villages and attempts at collective farming). What we don’t get from this is why farmers continued to idolize FDR even though nothing seemed to work.

The other thing we never see is what really happened: small farmers were destroyed by the Dust Bowl and corporate farming took over the prairies. This was already underway dues to forces that contributed to the Dust Bowl that Burns ignored: technological change (hybrid seeds, the internal combustion engine), post-World War I government farm policy, corporate tax breaks…. Draw a straight line (the first dot of which was first drawn in the 1870s) through the 1920s, into the Dust Bowl, and to the final destruction of family farming that occurred in the 1980s. Burns doesn’t tell this story because he has a Whiggish view of history—one in which some mystical indomitable human spirit triumphs over potentially soul-crushing adversity. Would that it were so. Burns confuses history’s actors with its forces; usually the latter are more powerful. Reality: the Dust Bowl was so awful that what came next looked very little like what went before. One could almost say, “From dust ye came and to dust ye shall return.”—Rob Weir

Ho Ho, No! Opting Out of Christmas

Here’s our annual Black Friday “How to Opt Out of Christmas” piece.

We opted out of Christmas years ago. It wasn’t the money; we simply wanted release from the stress, crowds, and mindless consumerism associated with the most intensely crass and secular of all American holidays. Spare us the Babe in the Manger speeches; Christmas in America has more to do with Adam Smith than Baby Jesus. 

We decided to reinvent December as a month of dining with friends, making contact with family, and consuming fun rather than getting caught up in rituals of reciprocity and gluttony. The breaking point came about 12 years ago, when our nieces were still children. One Christmas morning they were literally swamped under a mound of gifts. (Seriously! The wrapping paper debris was piled to twice the height of the youngest.) Our nieces no sooner opened one present than another was thrust in front of them so that every relative under the sun could snap a photo of the bewildered lasses. Soon, they were dazed and numb. As clichéd as it sounds, by mid-afternoon they were having more fun with the wrapping paper and boxes than with the presents. (The boxes made a nice makeshift fort.) And here’s the worst part: the wreckage represented expenditures of hundreds of dollars, much of it from folks that could have used the cash for much better purposes.

Christmas was even more crass when we bought for adults. It had degenerated into a zero sum game–you buy me the item on page 72 of the L.L. Bean catalog and I’ll buy you one from page 104. Christmas shopping sucks in two types of adults: those who can afford to buy things and have all they need (but nonetheless invent things to want “in the spirit of the season”); and those who shouldn’t engage in consumer frenzy, yet are pressured into doing so. If you fall into the second category, for heaven’s sake stop! Consider this sobering statistic–if you rack up $6,000 on your credit card and try to pay it off by making the minimum payment, it will take roughly 54 years to do so even if you never use the card again! Fa, la, la, indeed! In trying to conform to manufactured images of seasonal jollity you have placed yourself in economic thralldom akin to that of 19^th-century sharecroppers.

It’s our seasonal prayer that none of you are in that sinking boat. But even if you have plenty of dough, there’s simply no reason to put up with the stress and the madness. Just say no. Here’s a how-to-guide for opting out.

1. Step One: The Power of Guilt. We must ask ourselves how Christmas got to be such a mess in the first place. The answer is simple: We’ve been sold a bill of literal and metaphorical goods on what a “perfect” Christmas is supposed to be like. Don’t underestimated how powerful that imagery is. To counter it, you need to present an equally powerful counter image.

As Christmas approaches, subtly drop remarks to loved ones such as “We have so much and there are others who have so little. What do you think about scaling way back and making donations to charity instead?” My guess is that about three-quarters of your friends and relatives will breathe a sigh of relief and get on board immediately. Your job is to follow up by continuing to drop reminders. Don’t call a week before Christmas and say, “We’re no giving presents this year, right?” Instead, make a plan in the next few days, and follow up in a week by reminding down with the plan that they said they wanted to give to charity. Tell them you are writing a check for a donation in their name and ask which charity they’d like you to support.

2. Step Two: Phasing In the Plan. There will be some people on your list who won’t buy in immediately. One or two may even feel hurt and assume you don’t care enough to buy them something. You need to go gentle with these folks. Start by scaling back instead of going cold turkey. Appeal to their soft side. Do they love animals? In addition to a modest gift, get a really nice card and insert a Heifer International brochure with a note that you’ve given a donation in their name. It may take a few years before these folks stop the gift cycle altogether, but they will.

3. Step Three: Be True to Your Principles. It’s not enough to say you want to spend time with friends and family instead of gift buying; you need to do it! Make sure you schedule dinners out (or potlucks in) with close friends and family. The goal is to make the holidays joyous, not to become the Grinch.

4. Step Four: Replace Consumer Goods with Thoughtful Ones. What people really want during the holidays is a reminder that you care. A plate of home-baked cookies can say this louder than an item plucked from a catalog. So too can cleaning someone’s gutters, fixing a squeaky door, or taking their car for an oil change. Are you craft-oriented? Phoenix makes earrings that cost next to nothing to make, but resonate with friends more than those $50 mass-produced “holiday” earrings you see all over the country. I’ve written a few stories and songs that I’ve shared. Want to do something really simple? Rent “It’s a Wonderful Life” and watch it with someone you care about. Provide the buttered popcorn. The biggest gift you can give is your time!

5. Step Five: Buy Your Kids a Pen Pal. If you have little ones, it’s hard to eliminate gifts totally, but the U.N. and other agencies have programs that allow you to sponsor a child abroad. Do this for your kids and spend part of Christmas with books, pictures, and maps that illustrate where their pen pal lives. Help your kids write a letter to that child. Follow it up in the weeks to come with language lessons, food, and other such items. I had pen pals as a kid and it made me think about the world. I remember a correspondent from Peru way more than I remember most of my toys.

6. Step Six: Remember the Box Rule. Overindulge children and you run the risk of overwhelming them (or having them grow up to be pampered brats!). Kids need to exercise their imaginations more than they need some toy from China that will be broken by Easter. Buy and make things in which they can participate, not merely consume. The box fort was fun. So too are time-tested things that last: Lincoln logs, blocks, Legos, Slinky, bikes, fantasy dolls, train sets, interactive books, musical instruments…. Google “top ten toys of all time” and you’ll find none of the glitzy über-expensive “hot” toys of this or any other Christmas. Those things are just ads-of-the-moment that will fade from consciousness as soon as the latest “next big thing” comes along (and proves not to be the next big thing!)

7. Step Seven: Treat Yourself in December. Take some of the dough you’re not spending on prezzies and go out. Take in a concert or a show. Fun is always a good antidote for stress!

8. Step into the Light: If you live in the North, the stretch between Thanksgiving and Ground Hog’s Day is filled with (way too much) darkness. Turn this time into something pagan: festivals of light. Go for hikes in the daylight and gather pinecones, bittersweet, pine boughs, and other such things to make into Christmas decorations. We made an “Electric Forest” one year–an unsightly welter of pine boughs through which we strung dollar-store lights. It was as ugly a hound dog’s fanny, but it’s a memory over which we laugh years later. Other light-themed events include taking short drives to see electric displays, after-sunset window shopping, bonfires, and hitting an after-hours spot (ice cream shop for kids, cafes and bars for adults) in which the darkness is tempered by holiday or atmospheric lights).

9. Step Nine: Replace Old Rituals with New Ones. Okay, I admit that If I hear “Silent Night” at a mall one more time, I may spew. I loathe Christmas carols, plastic reindeer, and blow-up lawn displays. But I’d be the last to say that rituals are bad. If you dislike the old ones, make some new ones. We buy a new tree ornament every year, label it, and try to recall when we bought it when it comes out of storage. We also have some invented holidays, such as Moosemas on December 16, which is celebrated by eating clam chowder and drinking Scotch. A small ritual is walking amidst the downtown lights on Christmas Eve after the stores have closed. Another is a short walk in the woods behind the house on late Christmas morning. Still another is playing CDs of English and Scottish carols that we’ve not heard a billion times. Our most cherished is an annual pre-Christmas dinner at a restaurant with our dearest friends.

10. Step Ten: Make a Wish. Some families may find it impossible to eliminate Christmas presents altogether. Fair enough. But let’s not confuse quantity with quality. Even if you have kids, there’s nothing wrong with limiting their desires. Break out The Rolling Stones and listen to “You Can’t Always Get What You Want” until it sinks in. Instead of buying everything under the sun, ask people in your lives to set priorities. If you could only get one thing, what would you really like? (If you have kids, ask for a list of three or four and tell them you’ll ask Santa to bring one of them so that he doesn’t run out of gifts for other children.)

11. Socks are not Stinky! Everyone loves to open presents. It’s horribly environmentally unsound, but a certain degree of debris is part of Christmas. So who says the stuff inside has to cost an arm, a leg, and a kidney? Sock gifts are a lot of fun–dollar store Etch-a-Sketches, crayons, and wind-up toys for kids, inexpensive foodstuffs for adults, card games to share…. You can get very creative about sock gifts; you can also fill one for a fraction of what it costs to provide gifts that will soon be forgotten.

12. Step Twelve: Make Christmas all about the Food. When you ask most people to name their favorite holiday, it’s usually Thanksgiving. Why not? It’s about food, family, and a relaxed pace. So make Christmas into a second Thanksgiving. Prepare foods that take a long time to make. Buy a really, really good bottle of wine. Have a multi-course meal that unfolds over several hours. And, above all, share it with friends and family. Don’t forget to mention how lucky you are to have so much when others have so little.   

Did Racism Play a Part in the AL MVP Vote?

A tribute to the six who didn't vote for Miggy!

In the end, it wasn’t close—Miguel Cabrera was the runaway winner for the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award. All Cabrera did was bat .330, hit 44 homeruns, drive in 139, and win the first Triple Crown in 45 years. All is as it should have been—sort of.  There were six “baseball writers” out of twenty-eight who voted for Mike Trout instead of Cabrera. Each of the six—Jeff Passan, Joe Haakenson, Jim Caple, Tim Britton, Roger Mooney, and Sean McAdam—trotted out lame sabermetrics to justify their vote. Who knows? Maybe one or two of them actually believed what they said, but let me offer a different explanation for a few of those votes: racism. Several of those guys are known conservatives and it’s easy to imagine personal preference for Trout over the darker-skinned Venezuelan Cabrera. Call it a vote for the Great White Hope.

Oh, there were sincerity tears shed. Trout, we are told, is a “more complete player” than Cabrera. As if a rookie could be a more polished player than a nine-year veteran. I think Mike Trout had a lovely year, but let’s see if the lad can sustain it before we declare him the next Babe Ruth, okay? We were also told that Trout is speedier than Cabrera—most runners are—and that the slick-fielding, swift-of-foot Trout covers more terrain and hence, is more valuable. We also get weird sabermetrics such as numerous variants of WAR (Wins Above Replacement), as stupid a category as ever devised. WAR is a classic Straw Man debate in which A (a real player) is compared to B (a hypothetical player). What hogwash! By such reckoning, abject poverty compares favorably to death.

So let’s strip the Gang of Six from the bullshit. First of all, Trout won the Rookie of the Year Award, as he should have. But is he anything special in the outfield? He’s flashy, but he did not win a Gold Glove, and his .988 fielding percentage was just the 9^th best among MLB centerfielders, and pretty close to the league average. Cabrera plays third base, a harder position. He’ll never win a Gold Glove, but his .966 fielding percentage was the 6^th best among third basemen. He made thirteen errors to Trout’s four, but ask Trout’s team, the Angels, is they would have gladly exchanged Cabrera’s glove for the three guys they trotted out at third who collectively committed twenty-four errors.

When it comes to offensive categories there are just three in which Trout surpassed Cabrera: stolen bases (duh!), walks (by +1), and runs scored. But, if the name of the game is total runs—and baseball is supposed to be a team game—Cabrera more than compensates for the fact that Trout scored 129 times and he just 109. If we add RBIs to runs, Miguel Cabrera was responsible for 248 total runs, Trout just 212. And if we start looking at power numbers, it’s not even close. Cabrera has a higher on-base percentage (.393 to .363), a higher slugging percentage (.606 to .564) and a higher on-base + slugging (.999 to .963).

Let’s get down to the real nitty gritty. An MVP doesn’t impress the sabermetrics crowd; he makes his team better. In August, it looked as if the Tigers would not make postseason play, but the Angels were threatening both first place and a Wild Card berth. The Tigers went to the World Series and the Angels failed to make the playoffs. In August, Cabrera hit .357, slapped 8 homeruns, and drove in 24 runs; Trout went .284/7/19. In September, when it really counted, Cabrera hit .308 with 10 homers and a stunning 27 RBIs. Trout hit an earthly .257 with 5 homeruns and knocked just one other player besides himself. The Angels could have finished third without Trout, but the Tigers could not have won the AL Central if Cabrera hadn’t put up superhuman numbers. How is there even room to debate who was more valuable? In fact, a dispassionate vote would have placed Adrian Beltre second in MVP voting and Derek Jeter third. But I guess those guys are also too black for the Great White Hopers.

Let me reiterate: I don’t blame Mike Trout for any of this; I hope does become the next Babe Ruth. But Lord deliver us from writers who twist numbers for inexcusable reasons. Miguel Cabrera is AL MVP—as it should be. There are only two explanations for those who think Trout was more valuable than Cabrera—they don’t understand the difference between theoretical math and real performance, or they are racist. Alas, my nose detects a whiff of the latter.

Michel Sajrawy Album the Antidote to Sterile Jazz

MICHEL SAJRAWY

Arabop

Dasam 001

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If, like me, you find too much contemporary small combo jazz little more than noodling masquerading as meditative, check out guitarist Michel Sajrawy. The Palestinian-born Sarjrawy titled his new album Arabop, which is also a nice handle to describe his sound. He works his magic in a band that includes two saxophonists, two bassists, an oud player, and a percussionist but his explosive guitar riffs are what stand front and center. They come in bursts that emulate the linguolabial sounds a kid makes when flicking the tongue against the upper lip, but there’s nothing child-like about the music. Sarjrawy plays muscular guitar with the abandon of Jimi Hendrix and the precision of Larry Coryell. He also offers flashes of humor. The title track, for instance, has the sort of giddy feel that could serve as a soundtrack for an animated Matt Groening Akbar and Jeff caper. Sarjawy also has a contemplative side, as heard on a track such as “1 Count Before 40,” and mines a few classics—one Syrian and one Egyptian—but his main approach is summed by the self-explanatory “Syncretic Beliefs.” His energy is the perfect antidote to the torpor of jazz guitarists more interested in talking to themselves than connecting with an audience. Give it a spin and prepare to stir. --Rob Weir

Genticorum Nagez Rameurs a True Delight

GENTICORUM

Nagez Rameurs

Mad River Records 1024

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Québeçois music is known for its frantic pacing and ragged tempos, but the first track of Genticorum’s latest release signals the ways in which this trio takes a smoother approach. The song, “Tout le long du voyage” is a cautionary tale for young men informing them that life in Hudson’s Bay isn’t always the stuff of romance. It has the constant clogged percussion one expects from tunes from La Belle Province, but also polish, precision, and deliberate timing. This is typical of Genticorum’s approach.  “Turlutte hisuite,” for example, is energetic and exciting, but listen carefully to the way in which Pascal Gemme’s cascading fiddle runs neatly intersect the rhythms he lays down with his feet. Listen also to the gliding wooden flute of Alexandre de Grosbois-Garand on “Les Menteries.” Genticorum delight in defying expectations. You’d expect a song written to synchronize the strokes of rowers to be sweaty and driving, but the title track is more of a casual glide than a strained-muscle sprint, and the call-and-response vocals are marked by delicate harmonies. Or how about a Cape Breton log drivers’ song (“Grand voyageur sur la drave”) as slow and melancholy--more wistful than lustful? Mix in some pastoral waltzes, and you have plenty of contrast for the unabashed double-time tempos of the barn dance-like “Galope Deux Bedon,” the appropriately named “Reel Circulaire,” and the frantic “Quand chus parti du Canada.” The last is the funniest song on the album–a quirky tale of a French-Canadian world traveler dismayed over the shortness of women’s skirts around the globe. For the record, I’ve chatted with many Québeçois men over the decades, and this is not a problem that a single person has ever mentioned to me!

This is a sublime album that balances what we expect with what we might not anticipate. Genticorum keep up us off balance to the end. The final cut, “Canot d’écorce” pays homage to the fur-trader voyageurs who established European colonies in Québeç, but does so with an understated sweetness, the nonsense vocalizations of the chorus notwithstanding.--Rob Weir