And Again

In a self-imposed break from the near-fanatical pace I've been working at over the last few days (nine days, to be exact, with no precise end in sight), I've taken some time to prepare myself for the approaching fall telly season. As regular readers might imagine, I'm particularly excited to watch (tomorrow night, recorded) the return of JUGHEAD PETRELLI et als. Rumor has it that Jughead will be sporting a beard. And thank goodness, because the only thing his long face, square jaw, and poorly conceived mind uttering terrible lines needs is more hair.

We were completely disappointed by the US version of Ramsay's Kitchen Nightmares. The present farce is a total sham compared to the UK version, which remains one of the only series we could - and have - watch more than once ... four times, to be exact. The whole series. On the UK version, there is no spanking-new kitchen for the downtrodden chefs. No, even Ramsay is (by all appearances, anyway) scrubbing, dumping, scrubbing, tossing, etc. It's a dust-to-dust kind of operation, and so the FOX program budgets have ruined it for everyone.

We started watching Ken Burns's The War, despite highly mixed reviews. It's true that the sections on the contributions of Hispanic Americans seems tacked on, and for sure some of the footage and foley work is way over the top. (AV: "He could have saved an hour if he had shown one explosion instead of three.") Is the account exhaustive? Certainly not - and I don't think it has pretensions of being exhaustive. But it does tell an American story about a war that was not singly American.

In addition, it's living history. Who better to learn from than people who lived through it? The subjects tell their stories with candor, and frankly I find it mesmerizing - it's because I'm learning and watching at the same time (*gasp!*). I don't think every single bit of the criticism is warranted - the more I watch, the more I think I understand how Burns has conceived this part of history to fit in our collective experience.

When I was in college, our history department initiated the Stories from Wartime Series, which morphed into something called the Center for the Study of War Experience at the Reeg. Each spring, the Center brings in veterans to give first-person accounts of their experiences. Among the speakers I was fortunate to see in college were Paul Murphy, a survivor of the USS Indianapolis; Gen. Felix Sparks, among the liberators of Dachau; Clay Decker, a survivor of the Bataan Death March (he's the spry fellow in the photo of the rescued marchers at the front of the pack); WACs and WAVES, a member of the Tuskeege Airmen, Japanese-Americans interred on the basis of Ex Order 9066, you name it ... we saw it.

I joke that my history degree in college was really a degree in one of two things: WWII or Germany. This of course is not true (thanks to Father Guyer), but Ken Burns's project is bringing back a lot of latent information, lodged in my "history department" of my brain, and and memories of our exposure to those veterans.

A running commentary to continue ... provided I stop working and have a break.