Hopping Mad

NBC affiliate KSL-TV has informed the network that it won't broadcast the drama series "The Playboy Club" that is scheduled to begin in September because "significant portions of [the station's] audience may find [it] objectionable." According to Joe Flint, entertainment blogger for the Los Angeles Times, KSL's refusal to broadcast network programming "isn't a huge deal" because NBC will probably find another station in the market that will air the show, and if not, "odds are episodes will end up on Hulu or some other website. In other words, people in Salt Lake who really want to see the show won't be denied."

I agree with Flint that technology provides solutions to this issue, but I think it should work in the other direction. Rather than letting KSL decide what its viewers should and should not be allowed to view, let the viewers choose what they want to see. From what I hear, "The Playboy Club" contains less "adult" content than a typical episode of NBC's "Law & Order: Special Victims Unit" (a police drama that features frank discussions of rape and other violence in pretty much every episode), and KSL seems to trust its viewers to change channels or turn off the TV if they object to that show. Parental control features are built into most TVs, cable and satellite receivers, and DVRs these days. Parents who are unable or unwilling to deal with configuring those appropriately could take the drastic step of just chucking television from their homes entirely.

Bill Baker, writing in the Christian Science Monitor, says "...KSL’s decision to stick with its values in the face of NBC’s disapproval is admirable and courageous. No matter how profitable it may be for some, I, for one, do not want to live in a world where local communities have no say in what they watch on television." "Local communities" don't watch television; individuals watch television, and most communities let individuals decide what they watch on television. KSL's community is special, though. It's in Salt Lake City, Utah—in fact, it appears to be the only NBC affiliate in the state—and its parent company Bonneville International is owned by the Church of The Latter-day Saints. KSL President and CEO Mark Willes says, "The Playboy brand is known internationally. Everyone is clear what it stands for." Yes, and those who don't like what it stands for can find something else to watch or do when the program runs.

Remembering One, Remembering Millions

A friend invited me to a showing of the documentary "Inside Hana's Suitcase" on Sunday. The film is about a young Jewish girl named Hana Brady who perished in the Holocaust, Hana's older brother George who survived and now lives in Canada, and Fumiko Ishioka, the executive director of the Tokyo Holocaust Education Resource Center. In 2000, Fumiko visited the museum at the Auschwitz concentration camp, and asked if some of the museum's objects that had belonged to children could be loaned to the Tokyo center. She was sent several items, including a suitcase labeled with Hana's name, date of birth, and the German word for "orphan." Fumiko was curious about the girl who'd owned the suitcase and began researching Hana's story, eventually finding the surviving brother George. Fumiko's search and her interactions with George Brady led to news stories, documentaries, a play, a web site, and a best-selling book, Hana's Suitcase, that would eventually be translated into dozens of languages. Were it not for an old suitcase, an average little girl who suffered what was an all-too-typical fate for Jews at the height of the Nazi regime would have been forgotten by everyone except those few who knew her personally and managed to survive the war.

Only...the suitcase wasn't Hana's. That suitcase, along with others like it, was destroyed in 1984 in a fire that was deliberately set at an English warehouse that held artifacts being prepared for an exhibit. The suitcase that Fumiko received was a replica of Hana's. The management at the Auschwitz museum had decided to recreate Hana's suitcase because so few possessions of children had survived the Holocaust, and because a clear photograph of the original suitcase was available—a photo taken by a childhood friend of Hana's who had seen the original in 1962 while touring Auschwitz. Fumiko didn't know that the suitcase she'd received was a replica, and Hana's family didn't spot the minor differences between the replica and the 1962 photograph until after they'd returned from Japan, where they'd met Fumiko and viewed what they thought was one of Hana's possessions.

Interacting with an object that belonged to someone who's departed from life but not our memories or our hearts can be a powerful experience. I drink tea from one of my late grandmother's mugs, one I remember her using. I sleep under a quilt that was hand-sewn by my great-grandmother. How would it feel to learn that the original mug or quilt had been lost and the ones I use actually came from a secondhand store or a stranger's garage sale? Disappointing, of course, but the older I grow, and the harder it becomes to organize and store and preserve all the things I've accumulated, the more I realize that what's really precious to me is not "stuff," but the ideas and memories that the stuff provokes. If the mug isn't really Grandma's, well, that's OK. It keeps the memories of Grandma alive for me.

"Disappointment" is likely an inadequate word to express what George, his family, and Fumiko felt when they learned that "Hana's suitcase" was just a replica. Given the shortness of Hana's life and the tragedy of its ending, any object that she'd owned would have been precious to them, but they realized that if it weren't for the loss of the original suitcase, Hana's story would probably have faded into obscurity. I don't know if "happy accident" is an appropriate term for these circumstances, but I'm grateful that I got to learn about Hana.

Staying Power

On Jerry Coyne's recommendation, I rented "Never Let Me Go" and watched it last weekend. Jerry had written of this movie, "You’ll either love it or think it’s meh." My initial reaction tended towards "meh"; I thought the film was well acted and beautifully shot, but it didn't have much emotional impact on me at the time. In the days since I watched it, though, scenes have been replaying themselves in my head, a sure sign that it worked its way into my consciousness even though I wasn't giving it my undivided attention. (That happens a lot when I watch movies at home—too many distractions.) The movie is based on the novel of the same name by Kazuo Ishiguro (who also wrote "Remains of the Day"), and now I want to read the book to more fully explore ideas that were only briefly touched on in the film.

Some words and images hit you immediately: Racial or sexual epithets directed at you, or someone you love. Photos of a coed screaming as she crouches over the body of a fallen student, a man in a white shirt blocking the progress of a line of tanks, a Y-shaped trail of smoke and debris from an exploding space shuttle. Other inputs seem to need a while to sink in: Seemingly offhand remarks that don't trouble you until late at night in the quiet darkness, when your mind is mulling over the day's events. Images that were viewed only briefly but intrude on your thoughts hours or days later, demanding your attention. You can't escape them; you will deal with them, or they'll keep dealing with you.

As I watched "Never Let Me Go" a second time this evening, two lines from the school song that the students sing at the beginning of the movie—"When we are scattered afar and asunder, parted are those who are singing today"—took on an entirely new meaning. Now I understand that this film will be with me for a long, long time.

Playing the Hand You're Dealt

I wish I could find the quote—or even remember who said it—about the difference between a "writer" and an "author." The gist was that a writer is a craftsman who cares about doing the best possible job, and an author is a pretentious git who cares about royalties. The elusive quote is nagging me because I just finished watching the third and final part of the dramatization of the novel "Any Human Heart" on Masterpiece Theater. I mean "Masterpiece." No, I mean "Masterpiece Classic," which I think is a silly name for a TV show that features dramatizations of works that haven't existed long enough to be "classics" yet, but I suppose that "Masterpiece Period Pieces" would be long and redundant.

Anyway. "Any Human Heart" is about the fictional English writer Logan Mountstuart. I'd have loved the story just for the following conversation between Logan and his friend (and fellow English writer...hmm, maybe the term "author" applies here) Peter Scabius. Peter has just completed a new book titled Guilt, which is about his wife Tess, who committed suicide because of his multiple infidelities.

Logan: (as he reads the title of Peter's new book, Guilt) "Oh, please tell me you're joking."
Peter: "It couldn't be further from a joke. It's part of my penance. The penance I owe to Tess."
Logan: "Penance? 'Guilt'? Anyone would think you were..."
Peter: "I'm converting. I'm becoming a Roman Catholic."
Logan: "Oh, no. What, like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh?"
Peter: "No, like Peter Scabius."
Logan: "Why is it that all English writers are converting to bloody Catholicism? Why not just be a very devout Anglican?"
Peter: "Because I need a savage, unforgiving, brutal god. Since Tess's death...don't you see? I don't want some bourgeois Anglican god I can have a nice cup of tea with. I want to be frightened of my deity. In awe."
Logan: "You do know it's all complete mumbo-jumbo, don't you? Life's about luck. Good luck and bad luck. The good luck you have, and the bad luck you have, that's all."
Peter: "What utter nonsense. You can't live with a philosophy like that."
Logan: "Forget it."

Logan does live with a philosophy like that. He has bad luck aplenty—lovers, friends, and family members leave his life, sometimes tragically, and World War II leaves its scars on him—but he appreciates the good luck when it comes. And he writes, in spurts. Not so much professionally, although his early works had some success and his journalism skills were well respected; mostly he writes in his journals. He takes breaks, sometimes for years, but he always starts up again eventually. And when he has his "final bit of bad luck" and his "individual journey" ends, he is buried under a (crucifix-free) tombstone that labels him as an "Escritor -  Writer - Ecrivain," in reference to his Uruguayan mother, his English father and upbringing, and his final years and death in the south of France.

What defines a writer is the undeniable impulse that results in the act of writing. Whether one's words are paid for or not, published or not, ever seen by anyone else or not, is irrelevant. A writer writes.

N.B. I haven't read the novel Any Human Heart (although I now plan to); I've only seen the dramatization, which may well differ from the book.

Seeking Solutions

Last month while I was watching the ITV miniseries "Downton Abbey" (which is already available to "watch instantly" on NetFlix - unpd. advert.), it occurred to me that while communication methods have changed, or at least multiplied, we're not necessarily any better at tracking information now than we were then.

The first season (or "series," in Brit-speak) of "Downton Abbey" is set in England in 1912-1914, a time when electrical power still seemed strange and not necessarily useful, and the ring of a telephone was considered a hideous racket. Mrs. Patmore, the cook for the aristocratic Crawley family, was probably expected to produce hundreds of different dishes and had to organize her recipes somehow. Perhaps she had a commercial cookbook or two, but more likely she wrote her recipes in notebooks, or on note cards, or just scribbled them on slips of paper that were stored here and there. Surely there were times when she knew that the recipe she needed was somewhere in her collection, but had no idea where...in which notebook, or on which bit of paper, in which drawer? (Not that there weren't highly organized cooks serving in English manor houses in 1912, but I doubt Mrs. Patmore was that sort of cook.)

My company is dealing with the same sort of disorganization, just many times larger and in digital format. I know the developer and I discussed that bug sometime in the last few weeks...or was it a few months ago? Did we talk about it in person, or by phone? In an email? Did one of the techs create a trouble ticket in our CRM app? Did we document it in a Google Wave? Or did we write it up in a shared document, and if so, is that document on the hard drive of my desktop or my laptop, or on a network share, or out in the cloud? If somebody typed it up, I can at least search for it, but if I don't know where to start searching or some specific terms to search for, it's gonna take a while. I don't even remember which client reported the bug.

I probably deal with more bytes of data in an hour than Mrs. Patmore's real-life counterparts did in their whole lives, but some days it seems like that just makes me more efficient at losing stuff.

Talking Down to the Audience

I've been watching the new miniseries "Downton Abbey" on "Masterpiece" on PBS.† Like most Americans, I find many British customs, slang phrases, etc. a bit puzzling, and I appreciate screenwriters who can explain unfamiliar situations by working cultural references into conversations naturally, without resorting to stilted or out-of-place dialog. On the other hand, I get irritated with screenwriters who realize that they need to explain something to a potentially clueless audience (in this case, Americans, and probably also young Brits to whom the Victorian and Edwardian eras seem as distant as the Paleozoic), but just plop explanations in clumsily. Would the housekeeper of an English manor house in 1913 really need to tell her friends that cooks and housekeepers are always addressed as "Mrs." whether they're married or not?

The dialog is quite good in spots, though:

Lady Grantham (played by the always-awesome Dame Maggie Smith): "You are quite wonderful, the way you see room for improvement wherever you look. I never knew such reforming zeal."
Mrs. Crawley: "I take that as a compliment."
Lady Grantham: "I must have said it wrong."

† "Masterpiece" was formerly known as "Masterpiece Theater," and that's how I still think of it. It's been merged with the "Mystery" series and contemporary dramas have been added, so depending on whether the fare is a period piece, a mystery—which might also be a period piece, like a dramatization of an Agatha Christie book—or a contemporary work, the time slot is billed as "Masterpiece Classic," "Masterpiece Mystery," or "Masterpiece Contemporary."