Death of a Show

I just watched the first 8 episodes of Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip , a great show that sadly got cancelled after 22 episodes. This show had it all: a great premise, sharp dialogue, believable characters I cared about. It dealt with corporate bullying, rasicm, sexism, religious bigotry, media hypocrisy and many more issues in deeply intelligent and very subtle ways.

Did the "greater audience" not get it? Who am I to blame? It's easy to be upset about networks making horrible reality-shows, but why blame them if that's apparently what audiences flock towards.

How do we deal with this cultural idiocy? Censorship is a serious issue in many countries, but a bigger problem is the general lack of interest in the quality that's out there. My friend B. is concerned with the little amount of knowledge people our age have in Iran of films that we've seen and have added to our cultural frame of reference. On his last trip to Iran he'd encountered very few people who had seen films by Jim Jarmusch or other directors B. admired, and a plan was hatched to send them over to friends and distribute them.

Even if he does, how many of our friends watch these films in Europe where they're readily available?

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In other news, I mailed some of my poems to the New Yorker, as Tori suggested:

"Thank you for submitting your work to The New Yorker poetry department. Owing to the large volume of submissions, we request that no more than six poems be submitted at one time. We prefer to receive no more than two submissions per writer per year, and generally cannot reply to more. Due to the number of queries we receive, it may take us up to three months to respond to your submission."