There’ve been different theories over the central theme of Breaking Bad’s third season.  The AV Club argues control, which, if you look at how much power and choice have been stripped from Walter, from the very start of the season, it’s hard to argue otherwise.  It’s also been about fallout, literal (Walter and the eye) and metaphorical.  Ripples from Tuco’s death, Jane’s death, the plane crash, Hank’s brief stint in El Paso, and that second cell phone, were all primary motivators for the majority, if not all of the season.

Regardless, the show has always been a character study in morality.  It’s carved out a story that uniquely unmotivated by redemption.  Each step gets us further away from our origin point, through immutable, irredeemable action.  This season was all about shading in the gray area.

There’s a classic magic trick involving a saltshaker and a handkerchief.  The handkerchief is placed on top of the saltshaker.  Using misdirection, the saltshaker is dropped from the table, leaving only the outline in the cloth, so that when the magician strikes down on the outline, it seemingly disappears.  By the end of Breaking Bad’s second season, it becomes clear that, from the beginning, Walt’s cancer was the saltshaker.  The foundation for his actions is taken away.  Which leaves the question, “Who is Walter White?”  This parallels with Jesse’s struggle as well, as he tries to absolve himself for Jane’s death by accepting his place as “the bad guy”.  What is revealed when the saltshaker is removed?  It could then be argued that the third season has been about identity.

In Breaking Bad, every death is a gamechanger.  Starting with Krazy 8 and his partner, out of self-defense, to the passive death of Jane with “fatherly” intentions, to the active deaths of the drug dealers in “Half Measure” out of loyalty and family, finally landing on the death of someone relatively innocent, motivated purely out of self-preservation.  And on top of that, cornering Jesse into pulling the trigger.  Couple Walt’s chilling cockiness with Jesse’s shattered face prior to his shooting Gale.  I’ve never known any show to wring it’s characters out as far as Breaking Bad has.  Just when you think they can’t dig themselves any deeper… It’s a train wreck you can’t turn away from.  But it’s also about watching the conductor drink himself into a stupor and fall asleep on the accelerator.

Supplemental reading:

Donna Bowman from the AV Club’s been killing it with some great analyses

So has Time Magazine (link to an article, but the blog has some good write-ups as well)

Maureen Ryan from the Chicago Tribune documents her sorta-getting-into the third season.  I disagree with a lot of her assessments of the show (especially since she only caught sporadic episodes in the 2nd season), especially concerning pace and character dynamics, but there’s some interesting stuff there from another perspective.

I did videography and light editing for this!

Loved how it turned out.  Pass it around and let everyone know about the Story Pirates, because they’re some of the best people I know.

I was naive to consider a channel within the MTV Networks to be my enclave, and that made the aforementioned subversions that began taking place over the next few years even more painful.  There was something in the zeitgeist that screamed to executives “The people want anti-intellectual escapism!  Reality shows, pop culture acid spewing, and a never-ending series of lists and commentaries on those lists.  Where the fuck’s my bucket of beer?”  Maybe I’m just looking back with rose-colored glasses…

Anyway, the first time I saw Conan was a revelation.  It was like being born.  The bit involved Conan, Max, and Joel (the announcer) doing investigative “stings”, a la the local news.  Of course, as is his style, each piece involved ridiculous amounts of self deprecation taking aim at their personas, with Conan “the virgin loser”, Max “the one obsessed with barely legal pornography”, and Joel “the one most affected by Megan’s Law”.  As someone desperately trying to figure out a way to deal with my own insecurities, oscillating between fits of rage and soul-crushing social anxiety, I saw how Conan went out there night after night and turned his weakness onto the people, saying, “This is who you think I am, so this is what I’ll be.  But I’ll do it better and with more integrity than any of you can imagine.”  People feel shame because society enforces a set of desirable and undesirable behaviors.  Conan O’Brien, his on-screen persona at least, is without shame, and I can honestly say that Conan O’Brien taught me how to feel better about myself.

II.  Comedy is filled with people with axes to grind and chips on their shoulders; the jaded cynicism that makes you feel dirty after seeing it.  Part of me thinks that when people watch someone like Jay Leno, it fills a need in them to laugh at something in a display of dominance.  ”Oh, look at these people on the street who don’t know the current vice president.”  Ironically, it becomes the comedy of the insecure.

On the other hand, comedians like Steve Martin, Jack Handey, and the writing staff of Late Night understand that funny and self-protection are often opposing forces.  They embrace the silly.  Silly is forgetting that watching a masturbating bear is stupid, and just enjoying the brazenness of it all.  People can call Conan’s humor “elite”, but that doesn’t really address the truth of it.  The truth is that Middle America needs to get in touch with itself and embrace the “uncool”.

III.  Conan O’Brien was put in a position (he was given an ultimatum) to shift the Tonight show (destroying its ratings and Fallon’s ratings), or to save his dignity and leave his entire writing staff and crew jobless.

To those defending Jay Leno, notice how he squeaks out here.  Jay Leno, who was supposed to leave gracefully, who is lamenting the death of his failed experiment of a show, and joking about NBC executives while they give him fellatio.  Tonight he even made a joke about Conan underperforming.  How dare he.  Conan’s audience wasn’t there because Jay drove them away with his piece of shit show.  On top of the low ratings, the affiliates were threatening to drop Leno because of the lousy lead-in to the local news.  Leno’s audience never gave Conan a chance.  Why would they?  They still had Leno.

So there’s a complete failure at the executive level to understand why the Tonight Show’s ratings were down 20%.  And there’s a complete failure in the media to recognize the fully formed evil scheme that Leno hatched to reclaim his 11:35 timeslot.  But at the end of the day, good people, some of the most talented people in the industry, and many of my personal heroes, are out of work.  After uprooting their entire families from New York.  Run through the wood chipper after giving 15 years of their lives to NBC and Late Night.

IV.  This whole week has been personally crushing for me.  Here’s the fellow I’ve been attempting to model myself after, as someone who’s gotten by in show business while maintaining his integrity and being truly kind to others.  Someone who never had the parasitic need Leno had for people to touch him, or to own a goddamn fucking warehouse full of cars (which can be exploded, btw).  Someone who just wanted a great franchise to push it as far as it could go.  I know it seems trite in the wake of the earthquake in Haiti, but to me, it symbolizes something of far greater significance.  To me it’s a blithe tragedy, the complete destruction of a man whose sole dream in life was to put on a great show.  It’s the victory of mediocrity; quantity over quality.  It represents the complete failure of the top few to register even a shred of empathy, and proof that the bottom line rides above all else.  I don’t intend on legally watching NBC ever again.

Quick note: Jimmy Kimmel has been doing some REALLY great work on this.  Tonight he absolutely skewered Jay on his own show.  Find the clip if you can of Jimmy doing the 10 @ 10 (a hacky, piece of shit, celebrity-worship, “they’re just like you and me!” segment).

3. Pixar folks- What else is there to say?  I’ll stand by Wall-E as a modern day masterpiece.  With the exception of the not-so-great Cars, each Pixar film since Monster’s Inc has been riskier than the next, with non-traditional protagonists and more subtle storytelling than your average childrens fare.  They nurture their filmmakers, encouraging them to research, explore, and follow their inner child.  I’m still wondering how they made a grouchy old man eminently watchable.

2. Chris Nolan- Here’s a director who doesn’t get enough credit for his work.  Nolan’s a master storyteller, but can also string together sequences better than anyone behind a camera today.  His films move fluidly towards their eventual climax, and haunt and surprise at every turn.  The Prestige, vastly underrated and misunderstood, is an exercise in structure, while also being one of the scariest films I’ve ever seen.  His films have the polish of mainstream thrillers, and act as a subterfuge for his fucked up views of human emotions.

1. Joel and Ethan Coen- Despite genre hopping more than any other director this decade, they’ve always been able to maintain their twisted, quirky worldview.  Watching a Coen Brothers film is like stepping into a bizarro universe.  Semi-fatalistic where a cruel god and random chance play as much a role as character and action.  But not in a bullshitty-Guillermo Arriaga-”everything is connected” way.  On top of that, no one makes violence seem as un-masturbatory, inconsequential, yet utterly devastating as the Coens.  Think Brad Pitt getting shot in the face in Burn After Reading.

It’s a combination of their undefinable aesthetic and an incredibly respectful DIY business model.  They started off selling tapes off the back of a truck at shows to at least put to tape the great stuff that was going on in NC during the late 80′s early 90′s.  Even now, with heavy hitters like The Arcade Fire and Spoon, they’re able to nurture and promote up-and-coming artists (Telekenesis), and cult favorites who would have been long dropped on any other label (Lambchop).

This year they celebrated their 20th anniversary with a slew of goodies.  Mixes from celebrities like Amy Poehler and Zach Galifianakis (even Momofuku’s David Chang), an excellent covers album (from which this amazing b-side is taken), a remix album, and shit-ton more that hurts me to think of now (too poor to get the $200 box set).

Anyway, as far as I’m concerned, Merge was the king of the 00′s, releasing most of my personal favorite albums of that era.  They were the king of the 90′s too, with Neutral Milk Hotel, The Magnetic Fields, and a bunch of amazing Superchunk albums.  Here are some of my favorite Merge releases of the 00′s.

Portastatic- Summer of the Shark/Bright Ideas/Be Still Please/De Mel, De Melao
Superchunk- Cup of Sand/Here’s to Shutting Up/Leaves in the Gutter
Crooked Fingers- Dignity and Shame/Bring on the Snakes
Camera Obscura- Let’s Get Out of This Country
Spoon- Ga Ga Ga Ga Ga
Richard Buckner- Meadow
Lambchop- Damaged
Destroyer- Rubies/Bay of Pigs
The Ladybug Transistor- Can’t Wait Another Day
Oakley Hall- I’ll Follow You
Shout Out Louds- Our Ill Will
M.Ward- Post-War
Wye Oak- If Children/The Knot
Telekenesis- S/T

If I had to rank 9 of them:
1. Portastatic- Summer of the Shark
2. Crooked Fingers- Dignity and Shame
3. Portastatic- Bright Ideas
4. Camera Obscura- Let’s Get Out of This Country
5. Destroyer- Rubies
6. Crooked Fingers- Bring on the Snakes
7. Portastatic- Be Still Please
8. Superchunk- Here’s to Shutting Up
9. The Ladybug Transistor- Can’t Wait Another Day

No more lists!

Just read it.

Richard Pryce probably has a better ear for dialogue than anyone working today.  To hear him rattle off a story from memory, I swear it’s like hearing great cinema described to you beat by beat.  David Simon packs more vitriol into a paragraph than most authors have in their entire catalogue.  After reading “Until Gwen”, an acclaimed short story by Dennis Lehane initially published in the Atlantic Monthly, I tore through as many interviews of Lehane I could find, and found a bunch of fascinating nuggets of wisdom.

He was able to defend the crime fiction genre in a way I was previously unable to.  For some uncanny reason, it has been demoted to pulp, forced to live among crappy gloss covers and subway ads.  But to Lehane, the crime novel is the social novel in disguise.  These are authors dealing with life, the blood and guts of it.  Whereas, for some — dare I say elitist — reason, “literary fiction” has become synonymous with the woes of middle-aged men and women who reside in the upper-middle class, floating around ivy league schools with tenure and 2nd/3rd wives.  It perpetuates this idea of literary worth being wrapped up in the mind of a narcissistic, contemptible John Updike character.  Whereas there’s plenty of race and class struggle out there continuing unabated, undocumented, and at worst, treated with an ironic detachment.

I’m reminded of so many of my classmates at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, wearing the fact that they live in the “ghetto” as a badge of honor for their friends back home.  Four years later, they’re out and swimming alongside “Real Housewives” and personal tanning beds.  It’s like those games you play with your friends when you’re little, demarcating amorphous zones as “lava” and then seeing how far someone is willing to venture out into the “lava zone”.  Social stratification apparently exists as a way for the suburban elite to play Lava Zones well into their twenties.

Which isn’t to say that I’m some sort of crusader for the underclass.  I grew up in a wealthy suburb of New Jersey.  I’ve given two lifetimes worth of handjobs to consumer culture.  Malls still provide nostalgic comfort for me.  It’s something inborn, like knowing all the words to “Born to Run” out of the womb.

Anyway, I think that’s all I’ll mention on that topic for now.  I encourage you to find a digital version of “Until Gwen” to sink your teeth into.  I’ve read it four times now.  It’s one of those brutally efficient short stories that you don’t discover new things about when you return to it.  Everything’s there the first time around, except when you come back, you can appreciate the mastery that goes into ultimately forging that emotional response.  The order of the details.  The things left unsaid.  The characterization on and off the page.  The voice, the POV.  Lehane described it as an exercise to define a character solely by his actions (a very Aristotelean theory).  The result is undeniably cinematic, but something that can ultimately only exist as a short story (although he did turn it into a two-act play called Coronado).  Find it and read it and hopefully you’ll understand.  I’d love to discuss it with someone.

I’ve always had a sort of morbid curiosity towards year end music critics’ lists.  In one sense it’s a validation for your taste (although who knows what that really means), but in another sense it’s just one of many categorization systems we feel is necessary for our survival.  We strip complexity from anything and everything because uncertainty is scary and being wrong is a death sentence.

I was looking at Pitchfork’s Best Albums of the 00′s list and couldn’t help but notice how many of their top albums have been ultimately pointless in the scope of personal worth and cultural significance.  So many that are well hyped, but empty.  Bands that sound like a rehashed (fill in a semi-obscure band from the 70s or 80s, be it Joy Division or Gang of Four), or are indistinguishable, harmless portmanteaus of (underappreciated genre) and American pop.

It breaks my heart that the albums that truly get under people’s skins will eventually disappear from the history books.  I’m going to start compiling a list of my personal favorite albums of the past 10 years, but in the meantime, take your Vampire Weekend and your fucking Strokes and jump out of a boat.

Sometimes I find myself talking about my musical penchants like it’s a religion.  Like everyone else is lost and needs to get smart lest they want to end up worshipping false idols.  Even worse is that I’ve practically stopped listening to new music.  However I do want to recommend St Vincent’s Actor, as it’s one of the year’s most compelling albums.  Seriously, fuck Animal Collective.

The genius that is Ricky Jay and my fondness for sleight of hand.

or

Why Garden State and 500 Days of Summer make me punch things.

I’ll get to them one of these days.

First I’ll be working on a few things for my other site.  Food blog, will be up shortly.

The number of albums I purchased this year has been a record low.  After moving back from DC, I spent the first winter months juggling time between commuting, applying for work, and sleeping way too late in the day.  The sleeping was an expertly calculated attempt to make myself feel better about being unemployed.  Sleep away the hunger to remove the need for food.  Sleep away the day, to avoid plunging myself into daytime consumer culture as most stores aren’t open at 3AM.  Sleep away that sense of idleness that inevitably expands into a depression that would threaten to put the brakes on my (relative) pro-activeness!  And the tubs of ice cream… well that’s to defend against the cold.  The crying is for the saline.

I also spent much of this year immersed in the Mountain Goats, which would give them a record long stretch as my favorite band (since 2005, I think).  I don’t really like going back to look at “comfort music” because it reveals things about myself that I’d prefer not to confront.  Like my love of western chord structures and wussy alt rock.  And my fascination with tragedy and avoidant despair, finding the light through the trees, and other telling narrative threads.  The Mountain Goats have songs that, on the surface, possess these qualities, but have the ability to morph into wholly different beasts.

Take Golden Boy for example.  A deceptively simple song:

You just try to lead a good life / You must do unto others as you would have them do / so that when you die you’ll have Golden Boy peanuts / waiting in the afterlife for you.

There are no Pan-Asian supermarkets down in hell / so you can’t buy Golden Boy peanuts

If thine enemy opresseth you / You must let him oppress you some more / So that when you go shopping in paradise / You’ll find those magnificient peanuts from Singapore / With the drawing of the young Chinese farmer / with the Eastern sun behind him smiling at you from the shelves / if we want to spend eternity in happiness / we must learn to watch ourselves

You must give to the march of dimes / you must be on guard against wickedness at all times / if you’ll find that your efforts have brought you great joy / when your spirit is munching on that Golden Boy

Stylus wrote up two divergent critiques of this song, which essentially take completely opposite perspectives.  Based on my own knowledge of Darnielle, his own religious beliefs, his dripping irony, but also his unadorned love of so many things, they’re two sides of the same coin.  The song’s “inspirational” message is one that he truly believes in his heart, one that he feels should be broadcast.  But he can’t, in his conscience, do it without adding some sort of fine print.  A drawing of a smiling Chinese farmer on Singaporean peanuts is hardly pure in by any stretch of the definition.  Even this minute pleasure is still seeped in consumerism, third world conditions, and a spattering of racial stereotypes.  This, coincidentally, my very first foray into the band.

Let’s move over to Alpha Omega, another song involving peanuts.  This is the final song in the “Alpha Couple” song cycle, which is a set of 30 or so songs (estimating offhand) about a married couple who move down to Tallahassee, Florida, tear each other apart, drink, fight, and (most likely) fuck with a furious energy that can only be called love, goddamn it.  They live in a “house like a Louisiana graveyard, where nothing stays buried” (Southwood Plantation Road) and say sweet nothings to each other like, “And I know what you’re saying.  I know what you’re saying it for. But I’m not listening.  I’m not listening anymore.” (Alpha Double Negative) and “I hope the fences we mended fall down beneath their own weight.  And I hope we hang on past the last exit.  I hope it’s already too late.  And I hope the junkyard a few blocks from here someday burns down.  And I hope the rising black smoke carries me far away and I never come back to this town again.  In my life.  I hope I lie and tell everyone you were a good wife.  And I hope you die.  I hope we both die. (No Children)”  All sung with the buoyant air of sea chanty.

Anyway, Alpha Omega is the first and only song written after the wife finally leaves.

On the morning you went away / the air was humid and the sky was gray / I had boiled peanuts for breakfast from Cairo, Georgia.

The air was wet and my face was wetter / the pink flowers along the western window made me feel better / I turned the air condition on / found the note on scented stationary / You were long gone / I had boiled peanuts for breakfast from Cairo, Georgia.

Popped the top off the aluminum can / let the brine slide down my fingers man / it was warm, it was warm on my skin / but I felt the cold blast looming on in / I had boiled peanuts for breakfast from Cairo, Georgia.

One writer mentioned “almost carnal sense of relief” in the narrator’s eating of the peanuts.  The truth is, I read this, but also a dread waiting in the wings.  I read that relief, but also a lingering love and sweetness, and I see the future ghosts that will soon haunt him (the scented stationary).  There’s also a feeling that the pain will be in no way worse than the pain they caused each other when they were together.

This past Tuesday, John Darnielle was on the Colbert Report promoting the release of his 17th full length album The Life of the World to Come. Myself and other members of the Goats commune felt a great sense of pride as we watched our gawky hero present himself to the world.  Colbert geeked out himself, and used the opportunity to join John onstage for a duet of one of his favorite songs “This Year” (off the Sunset Tree).  Footage of this exists, but hasn’t been released to the public on account of it will make your face explode.

This post wasn’t really supposed to be another Mountain Goats critique.  You can probably search this blog and my last one for a combined twenty posts I’ve written about them.  It was supposed to be a roundabout way of asking for divorce album recommendations, but I got sidetracked.

Here’s the gist.  I was listening to Yo La Tengo’s And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside Out, which is one of the best albums of the decade if you haven’t heard it.  I was listening to it and thinking how close it sounds to a subtle and painful falling apart, contrasted with Tallahassee melodramatic catharsis of love and hate, attrition and mutually assured destruction.  The breakup album is obviously heavily treaded ground.  Most of the artists I listen to nowadays had their minor success in the early to mid 90s.  Bands like Superchunk and Archers of Loaf (Crooked Fingers) have spent the past decade distancing themselves from their college indie rock reputation by producing more thematically ambitious albums.  They’ve also settled down with families and are still trudging up heartaches from earlier days (as far as I can tell).  Far be it from me to secretly want a divorce sometime soon.  Which got me thinking, how many great divorce albums are there?  Ones that come aged and refined, not over a shotgun wedding.  And from a real place, too– not an imagined perspective.  I want to hear your recommendations, but not Tunnel of Love.  I already know that one.