Travel Shows

I’ve been watching this show called “I’ll Have What Phil’s Having” on Netflix. It got picked up by PBS at some point, I’ve watched it there too. I think of it as my replacement for Bourdain’s "Parts Unknown." It’s centered on the same kinds of experiences, food, culture and history. This one’s heavy on the food more so than the history though. Phil Rosenthal is a former comedy writer for “Everybody Loves Raymond”; he’s funny in an observational way. He feigns goofy looks when tasting unusual cuisine and awkward faces when tasting ingredients he doesn’t like. The best segment is a video conference call to his parents where he updates them on his travel. The pair is at least as funny as him, spouting one liners and griping about past vacations. Where Bourdain was irreverent and prickly, Rosenthal is respectful and avuncular.

I’m sure most fans of travel shows have the same thought as me when watching, “I could do that”. Of course I don’t know if I actually could, but it seems like the type of career I would love. I am sure the travel would get stressful, as well as organizing the crews, schedules and finding local help. How many events don’t go as planned, we will never know. It’s fair to say a lot of the preparation for these shoots get tossed out by cooks that don’t show up or restaurants that won’t accommodate the host. Just getting everyone through the airports with all their equipment is a small miracle in some of these countries. Airports can be very stressful; flights get delayed, bags go missing, reservations are lost. Whoever is responsible for lining up all the disparate pieces of a film crew has a massive responsibility. To say nothing of the video editors and the local guests like chefs and guides responsible for the bulk of content. How many hours of footage are cut to make up a 50 minute segment? Maybe 20 hours? It’s just a guess but you have to figure it is quite a bit.

If I could do a travel show what type of niche travel would it be? The food and culture stuff is overrun with copycats. Whichever channel you prefer, chances are they have a version all their own. PBS has 3 that I can think of, “Rick Steves’ Europe”, “Globe Trekker” and “I’ll Have What Phil’s Having.” Steves’ show is probably the longest running but with the newer additions his version seems positively boring. It’s certainly the most PBSy of all of them, paintings and frescoes in slow pan, historical narration, silly 'need to knows'. He covers all the big ticket stuff, The Louvre in Paris and the Acropolis in Athens. Nothing against history but it could be more accessible by having a local tell some of it in interview form. TV is tricky though because it has to be visual above all else. Too many long shots and commentary and the audience tunes out.  Even Ken Burns changed his format a little with his latest Vietnam documentary. He used a lot of video and interviewed former soldiers, families of those killed and historians.

So we’ve established that the pattern of food and culture shows is full. What isn’t full though? Is this just an excuse to travel? Yes, definitely. Global travel has gotten significantly cheaper, as has the technology for the equipment. As long as the on camera hosts aren’t making outrageous sums of money, the project shouldn’t cost that much. Remember this is basically reality TV. Some of the best shows are those whose hosts were not well known to the public before it started. Most of them got famous because of their show. This means it’s relatively cheap to start. It also means a packed field where competition is fierce. I do worry that the mystique of foreign travel will cease a little with the glut of cameras and show ideas exploring every corner of the earth. Still, there is room for more creativity if the content is original. Content is king and great ideas have a way of rising to the top of any format. A low budget show with a clever hook will get picked up by larger services like Netflix or Amazon Prime if the audience numbers are there. When that happens the budgets increase, as does the crew and equipment.

I liked the Ricky Gervais model in “An Idiot Abroad."  Take a pessimistic Brit who doesn’t care about culture, complains incessantly about the weather, the foreigners, the food, the sites and the conditions of the hotel. He has a nervous breakdown near the end of nearly every episode. Gervais created the show but the man they send around the globe wasn’t known for anything except being friends with Ricky. It was a funny twist on a well-trodden formula. Unfortunately even I got tired of the ‘whinging’ and gave up after the first season. 

There are other ideas for doing travel stuff and it doesn’t have to be international. Mike Rowe is very successful with his “Dirty Jobs” show about American blue collar work. I’m not sure is he was popular in television circles before his breakout hit, but I doubt it. Dirty Jobs couldn’t work, on the same level, without Rowe’s charisma. It hangs completely on the likability of its host. Not a bad thing, but it does suggest he could do similar documentaries with the same runaway success.

For the upstart, any potential creator has to answer the question “What would I like to do?” In other words let the content develop around an interest or philosophy. Don’t try to figure out what people want to see. The work is too exhausting to try to gauge audience interest all the time. Do what you love and figure out the nuts and bolts later. It might fall flat. It might be a disaster. But if it’s even a little bit popular and interest grows as the show expands, the love for the idea will push the team through rough patches. I guess that’s true of anything creative.     

Separation Anxiety

Here is my advice on “full court press” stories from the media.  Do a little research before forming an opinion. By “full court” I mean, all out emotional hand wringing and calls for immediate responses from government. The sensational stuff is frequently wrong or skewed to elicit emotion instead of information.

   

Case in point is this latest immigration dust up over kids being separated from families. My internal radar started going off as soon I saw heard of crying kids and ‘mean-spirited’ border policies. We all know Trump is a hawk on border security so making the case that he gleefully detains kids is an easy one to make. But my instinct told me there was more to this story than brutal crack downs and forced separations, because isn’t there always more to the story?

 The best thing I read was Rich Lowry’s article on the situation at the border. I’ll retell as much of it here as I can but the best thing to do is read it. For starters most immigration at the southern border has been from Mexican men up until about 10 years ago. That’s important because a lot of the men arrested were alone, and got sent back to Mexico after being scooped up at the border. It doesn’t account for all the cases but does explain the majority of arrests and detentions. Many were caught and released into the US.  Unaccompanied minors would often get picked up as well. But holding kids in detention was bad policy so the court put restrictions in place.

The Flores Consent Decree (the current law governing hold times) puts limits on how long the government can hold onto unaccompanied minors, set at 20 days. This includes those traveling with families. The last 10 years saw an increase in families coming together. The problem is they don’t have the space to accommodate all family units that arrive together. ICE also needs to check the validity of the claims that the kids are actually traveling with parents and not random guys using them to get in. If the families picked up together want to go home, they are released together fairly quickly. If they don't want to go home, they can apply for asylum. Asylum applications gum up the works and delay the status of migrants. This is where most of the separation happens.

Families get ‘separated’ when adults apply for asylum after being arrested in border sweeps. Anyone arrested can apply and they have 10 days to get an attorney and plead their case. It isn’t easy to get though. The standards for political asylum fall along pretty neat lines. Either the state (of the migrant’s home country) has oppressed their religion or they face a genuine threat of death upon arriving back home. Think of dissidents, activists and Christians who’ve been beaten, impression and tortured. That could apply to some people in Central America crossing the border, but probably not thousands.

While awaiting asylum the adults (kids don’t get asylum) are separated from children because otherwise the government would have to hold them until the legal process completed. The government isn’t about to hold onto to kids for a legal process that may take over a year. So they either release the kids into the United States to stay with relatives or ‘responsible’ parties while the case for their parent is pending. The only other option is releasing both parents and children together into the United States and hoping they show up for the asylum trial. The problem is they aren’t likely to show up. Also, this is a big country with a lot of places to hide.

Ideally we would have enough space to accommodate whole families at the border while their application filters its way through the courts. But if it takes a year to process that means the family is essentially behind bars (even in good conditions) the entire time. Imagine how much worse this could be? Tens of thousands of families waiting in camps for long stretches over an unlikely outcome. If Congress dumped the Flores Consent Decree and allowed children to stay with their parents, we would expect to see it. As of right now, ICE only has room for a handful of families they can accommodate. 

Building Thousands of camps will play very badly with the American public.

 That’s exactly what’s going to happen though. President Trump signed an executive order the other day to do just that. If the public doesn’t like the sight of children being removed from their parents they will really hate the next phase. But without a new law from Congress, it's the only option. 

Congress is responsible to come up with a solution not the president. The executive branch enforces the law and the legislative branch (Congress) writes new ones. Ted Cruz proposed doubling the number of judges reviewing asylum cases as well as building additional facilities to house families. All with the exception that they weren’t already wanted in their home countries for crimes. It’s clear to me the only solution the Democrats want is to release the migrants into the country or turn asylum cases into a rubber stamp approval process. In other words, Amnesty. 

 Most people agree that keeping children and parents together is best, but the solution so far is large tent communities. If the asylum process becomes a quick backdoor for admittance into the country than a border wall would be pointless. Why build a massive wall when showing up a point of entry and demanding asylum practically guarantees a free pass? This is a tough problem to solve because we live in a prosperous country where others want to emigrate. It’s difficult to maintain borders when so many want in.

Putting pressure on Mexico to tighten their own borders could do some good. Mexico has no incentive to stop their own population from leaving. Remittances from the US to our Southern neighbor topped 24 billion dollars last year. That’s money send home from migrant workers in the US. It’s a major source of revenue for a country without a lot of investment. Either by heavily taxing the remittances (never popular) or finding some type of direct investment to offset the transfers, it must be in their interest. It wouldn’t stop the migration altogether but it could certainly stem the tide.

I don’t know the exact breakdown of people coming into the country from the Southern border, their nationalities, their ages, how many are escaping poverty, or how many are gang members selling drugs. A lot are probably interested in giving their children a better future than what they can expect at home. But without a rigid process for enforcement, this problem only gets worse.  

Running High

I’ve been consistently running on Sunday mornings for 3 miles when the weather is warm. I’m usually a finicky runner when it comes to cold weather but I do enjoy the heat.  3 miles is my limit for now. I have time in the morning to run further but so far I’m out of breath by 3 and I haven’t pushed it yet. I hope to be at 6 miles by the end of summer although the heat in Oklahoma makes 3 miles quite a challenge. The first leg of the job, say a half mile, is the worst. It takes me at least that far to get into a groove with steps and breathing. I run at a popular family park on a track that surrounds an 18 hole public golf course. Luckily it includes hills. If I ever get to the point where I want to run a half marathon, the hills are great practice. Nothing prepares you for those city runs like a park that includes hilly spots throughout. Most competitive events are early in the morning anyway where the heat isn’t a big issue.

There is something about running that helps clear the head. Walking works as well but doesn’t come with the constant discomfort of achy joints and labored breathing. It could be the sweat or the endorphins, but it feels like accomplishment every time I complete my goal. It isn’t just fitness and staying healthy. I enjoy the challenge of setting out on a journey, a short one for sure, and seeing it to the end. It feels like life I guess. 3 miles probably doesn’t seem like a long stretch for a lot of runners, but it isn’t the distance that counts, it’s the improvement. In other words where did you start? Can you look back after a few years and see an increase in distance or pace? I can’t really compare with the distance or pace that I keep at 20 years old in the Army. That’s an age thing though. Few people are more fit at 39 than 20. I took it for granted that I’d always be able to run without pain.

But compared to 30 years old I’m better able to handle heat and distance. The pace has dropped off a little but I guess that’s normal. Two miles used to be a great workout for me. I could finish at around 8 minutes per mile. As soon as I added another mile the time dropped precipitously to around 8 and a half. I don’t know what it would be at 6, twice the distance, but I imagine over 9 minutes.

I see others on the path, walking, running, pushing strollers and holding leashes for dogs. Some have ear buds and listen to music. I’ve tried that but it seems distracting to me. Besides I can’t run with a phone in my pocket. It bounces around and the cord comes unplugged. I must be a violent runner too because my arms swing getting caught up in the bobbing cord. Next thing that happens is the cord gets torn from either the phone end or the ear buds get ripped out mid stride. Even if I could run with music I wouldn’t want to. The point is to clear the mind and focus with the stress of an increased heart rate. 

I breath heavy too. Whenever I am passing someone on the side I watch their terror stricken face as I jog past them sounding like a frustrated mugger. Assuming they don’t have headphones in they hear me coming and brace for the worst. At least it seems so. I’ve tried to work on this too. I remember jogging on a very windy day and approaching two ladies out for walk. I knew they wouldn’t hear me yelling from behind “Left Side!” because of the strong winds. So I waited until I was within shoving distance and shouted “Left Side!” They both shrieked and jumped a little. My pathetic “Sorry!” was certainly lost to the wind as they regained composure.

I should increase the amount of time I run per week but I’m really content just doing one day for now. I still do other types of cardio and weight training throughout the week. I don’t care to replace those traditional workout days with a strict set of running guidelines. Besides, my feet need a break. I’ve had heel pain in the past and I’m not eager to increase the pounding that one day of running dishes out.

For now I’ll keep the routine I have.

Anthony Bourdain

Anthony Bourdain died a few days ago.

 Suicides are always so tragic. For stars, the loss is magnified though by an empty feeling that we will never again see their work. I think the old adage that people who commit suicide are mentally ill is being upturned on an almost daily basis. With celebrities we often know so little about their personal lives that isn’t negative, it’s hard to sort out truth from fiction. Just because they are popular figures doesn’t mean they don’t have the same struggles as the rest of us. The fame, money, prestige likely creates internal conflicts about what is means to achieve. Many get to a high point in life and realize, “This is it, I’ve made it and I am unhappy”. I'm not making excuses for them, just describing an alternate reality most of us will never know. I wonder how many self-reflect and internalize their progress and think about their achievements. It’s fair to say enough people (rich and poor) never find the illusive happiness that leads to contentment.

As a Christian I know exactly what is missing. It can’t be found in fame or prestige; it can’t be created through hard work and winning. Happiness is only found in surrender. A life surrendered to Christ, His sacrifice and grace can only occupy the empty space in our souls. How sad that so many don’t find it despite their tireless efforts to seek within themselves. We were never meant to create our own joy. Human beings are the handiwork of the Creator and not meaningless clusters of cells. It’s difficult to realize that too many people will never experience true freedom in their minds.

Bourdain went quite literally around the world in search of good cuisine, cultural anomalies and interesting personal stories. I was a huge fan of his show, both his Travel Channel epic "No Reservations" and his later CNN docu-series "Parts Unknown". The latter one focused more on history and culture, with a side of food politics. Tony could be a bit annoying when spouting lefty gibberish but I never held it against him. It was his story and we were free to shut it down if we didn’t like it. Plus he had a gift. He was a talented writer and always struck the right tone when encountering new food and cultural anomalies. He was masterful when interviewing locals about cuisine or recounting historical contexts around art and politics. His open minded attitude toward drugs caused him to battle addiction early in his life. Years of abuse take their toll on the mind and (I believe) contributed to long term depression. If not a clinical depression, certainly a deep sadness led to his tragic decision to end his life.

I think the most telling episode was his visit to a small town in Massachusetts that had been destroyed by heroin addiction and lost industry. The small city is a microcosm of all the former industrial towns that saw their jobs disappear and a generation of young people get hooked on substances. Tony followed a recovering heroin addict around for backstory on her life while recounting the city's recent history. He sat with her in a meeting (recovery group) and admitted his own addictive behavior. That episode might be the saddest, most poignant example of our current state of affairs in this country. It strikes a chord very close to home for him and for Americans in general. I’d rather watch episodes with colorful cooks and all night benders in Asian cities that never sleep. But the other side of that indulgence is the reality of artificial happiness it creates. We need to see that too.

The hope for me from these sad spectacle suicides is an awakening of sorts in matters of spiritual awareness. Kindness and empathy can go a long way toward recovery in individual lives. National programs can be helpful, but nothing is as personal as a friend.

I’m sure Anthony Bourdain had people around him who knew he had problems and encouraged him to get help. I’m also sure though that many accepted him, warts an all, and never bothered to dig a little deeper and offer help. It could be that Bourdain was a selfish jerk who didn’t care what anyone though. Either way, it’s tough to speak truth to people and risk losing their friendship or even a job. But without it, hurting people hit the wall. Those broken individuals may never understand that people around them care enough to tell them the truth, to offer help.

Likely those contemplating suicide give signals as to their struggles. The lesson for all of us is to listen more and be a friend. Ignoring problems isn’t love, it’s indifference. Sadly too many of us are indifferent, right up to the moment it’s too late.   

Abstract and the art of effort

Ever wonder what goes into logo design, creative architecture, bold photography? It takes a lot of skill to design art for consumer goods or create stage effects for pop singers like Beyonce and Kanye West.

Skill is overrated though. Just ask a creative person. Skill allows designers to start but practice is the key to their success. I've started to realize this lately. I’ve been watching this show on Netflix called Abstract. If you haven’t seen it I’ll give the basic blip. It’s a  series documentary that examines a creative person (different every episode) who is at the top of their game. I’ve watched specials on artists, designers, architects and photographers. Cameras follow the subjects as they describe their work, their failure, their ideas and a little of their philosophy. In other words, what makes them special? How do they define the creative process? When did they see their breakthrough?

They all work extremely hard. Most have to make themselves stop working at a certain point as a reminder to spend time with family. Tinker Hatfield, who designed the Air Jordan, quit working for a while. He went back once the kids were out of the house. Graphic designer Paula Scher works out of a studio in her apartment when not in the office.

If diligence creates its own success, than these designers are very successful. These are talented professionals who force themselves to work even when the inspiration isn’t there. They don’t wait for creative sparks to begin, they just do. They’ve learned that in order to create it’s essential to just work and let the magic happen. In the first episode artist Christopher Niemann begins by sketching on a tablet. He begins to draw familiar lines on the page and lets the process develop organically. He has a faint idea of what he is going for but mostly just needs to start thinking. I imagine he learned to do this very early in his career. He’s developed an effective habit that serves as a catalyst for creativity. Other artists, or writers, probably have similar techniques they use to get started.

One myth about creative types is that inspiration is all around them and they just perform. I always thought this at least. It goes against everything we know about human nature though. Mostly, that hard work is critical to success and failure happens to everyone. No matter how many times we hear that talent is secondary to effort, we assume skill is supreme. If Liz Phair writes amazing songs it’s because she is just more talented than me. If Michael Connelly writes interesting characters it’s because he’s a brilliant story teller.  I think its preservation that prevents us from seeing the truth. We want to preserve our notions about creativity and skill, that only a few select people have ‘It’. It keeps us from insisting on better quality in our own work. But listening to each one of the profiled guests on Abstract, it’s clear they constantly have doubts about their work.

To me this is wonderful news. It shows that with effort (a lot for sure) almost anyone can do more with less than they imagined. I try to keep this in mind when writing. Don’t worry too much. Progress is slow but rewarding . Spend time doing edits. Explain with fewer words. Learn how to be succinct and argue a point. Don’t give up on a thought or idea so quickly when the granules leap to mind and quickly slide away. Those are important little rocks that need shaping and polishing.

Documentaries are perfect for looking at process. I love to hear specifics about how disparate parts are brought together to form a whole. Most people like the finished product, the gleaming skyscraper, the photo shoot spread, the magazine cover. I enjoy hearing about the difficulty, the pieces that were rejected, the re-shoots, the re-design, the failed project, internal fights. I want to find out what was left out of an exhibit, and why it didn’t work. At what point did they nearly give up and scrap the whole thing? Failure can be a teaching moment for those strong enough to learn from it. Abstract shows that sticking with a passion really pays off.

If you like detail and creativity in design this show is for you. It’s certainly for me.