In Which It's The Universal Signal For Keys

Totally Broken

by DAYNA EVANS

Breaking Bad
creator Vince Gilligan

While watching an episode of Louie last week, I found myself mystifyingly turned on. It was the episode where Louis C.K. is out on a date with a pretty lady and a ruffian of a teenager threatens him. Louis doesn’t really do anything except back down, then follow the kid to his house in Staten Island. I couldn’t tell if it was his actions or his lack of action or his sad sack face, but during that episode (and as it turns out, every subsequent episode of Louie that I’ve watched) I wanted Louis C.K. more than I’ve ever wanted a person on my television screen.

With the exception of one Walter White.

Something about seeing an overworked, run-down jackhole who is trying to make it work in his terrible weird life gives me some creeping down there. It’s like some real husband heroism no matter how screwed up their version of reality is. You’re a piece of shit but you’re doing it for your family. And sometimes you happen to lose your mind at the same time. A family man who can also wield a gun and blow up a nursing home is highly attractive.

Over the course of four seasons of Breaking Bad, endearing ignoramus Jesse Pinkman reached new pinnacles that involved my analyzing and critiquing his fashion choices as they evolved from highlighter yellow hoodies to sophisticated black leather motorcycle jackets. I didn’t mourn the loss of his one-time girlfriend Jane one bit. Good riddance. But always in the background — from my viewing perspective, keep in mind — was the elusive Walt. Getting what he wants. Bossing people around. Taking control of shit.

The first episode of Breaking Bad's fifth season opens with Walter White and his breakfast. Walter has grown his fucking hair back. And he’s got on some stylish “young people” glasses — he’s either living in the metropolitan East Coast and driving a much hipper, more vintage car or running for his life. Has Walter traded in his Midwestern persona for a cosmopolitan version of himself in order to evade whatever is likely following him? To be determined. Maybe Breaking Bad is en route to becoming the Friends of meth making.

Each season of the show has started out slow and built into something maniacal from which one cannot turn away. But what bothered me about the season premiere isn’t that things are already unraveling too fast, it’s that it had a dumb setup. No one questioned the fact that Jesse, Mike, and Walt all knew that they were being filmed until now? Why did it take them until this point to figure out that the tapes are somewhere? Call me a skeptic, and yes, Walt and Jesse are still amateur criminals, all things considered, but Mike is not. I refuse to believe that that dude had not thought of this a long time ago.

In a moment of true Jesse Pinkman ingenuity, a plan is devised wherein a mammoth magnet is manipulated to destroy Gustavo Fring's incriminating laptop. The way Jesse tries to get into the conversation while Walt and Mike (Daddy and Mommy) figure out what to do is hilarious and frustrating. Just listen to the dude! They do, and he’s right, and of course he is, because we’re at a point where it’s okay to enjoy the highly satisfying role reversal this show has promised us from its first season. All would be perfect if that douchebag Ted Beneke wasn't still alive.

The revelation at the end of Breaking Bad's fourth season that Walt poisoned a child to get Jesse allied against their boss isn't so easily glossed over. We know that yep, dude is evil. And that’s an important thing to note. Because like Medea before him, we have to keep asking how much of what he does is actually defensible? I mean, is any of it?

Despite the new glasses, new hair, and new attitude, I felt most unnerved by Walter White’s new persona during his episode-end "hug" with wife. It was a long, unsettling embrace with several back rubs and not much squeezing. At the end of it all, Walt uttered a terrifying “I forgive you.” After all Walt has done, he has now granted himself the power to forgive someone else. Talk about egomania.

Some doors are left open. I’m not just talking about the car door that Mike brazenly left open after signaling the universal signal for keys. I mean a picture frame with a Swiss bank account written behind it, a truck precariously tilted on its side, a Ted Beneke who supposedly “won’t talk,” which is what I’ve been asking for since the day he was introduced, and Saul’s involvement, which continues to get heavier every day. But in the eponymous words of Walter White, “we’re done when I say we’re done.” I’m done.

Dayna Evans is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. You can find her website here. She last wrote in these pages about a river of ashes.

"You Could Be Mine" - Ben Taylor (mp3)

"Not Alone" - Ben Taylor (mp3)

The latest album from Ben Taylor is entitled Listening, and it will be released on August 14th.

In Which He Is The One Who Knocks

Better Business

by DICK CHENEY

Breaking Bad
creator Vince Gilligan
Sundays at 9 on AMC

Once Lee Iacocca asked me to serve on the board of Chrysler; I laughed in his face and told him to go fuck a Plymouth Prowler. I'm dumb but I'm not that dumb.

I'm sorry for what I said, Lee. I felt justifiable anger towards you on behalf of the all business owners who don't get a handout from the government every quarter. If that's not enough, a businessman today has to be insulted by Warren Buffett. Mr. Buffett, who knows only rich fucks like himself, thinks that the very rich can afford to pay more in taxes. Thanks, guy. Of course they can. Because some douchebag can write a check for what Buffett believes he "owes" to society doesn't make it right.

If you do feel so inspired, don't wait to write a NYT editorial on the subject. You can send your checks to

Gifts to the United States
U.S. Department of the Treasury
Credit Accounting Branch
3700 East-West Highway, Room 622D
Hyattsville, MD 20782

There's a dwarf waiting there whose only job is facebook the sender and emit a sinister chuckle. Warren Buffett has a goldplated portrait of himself hanging from his belly-button. It's a joke about "navel-gazing", don't ask me.

Breaking Bad's Gustavo Fring (Giancarlo Esposito) is another of these small business owners. He pays taxes on his straight business, a fried chicken restaurant called Los Pollos Hermanos that I would eat at every single day of my life were it to actually exist.

In the eyes of the law, Gus' food service venture is in the clear. They pay the handout required of them, they compensate New Mexico and the federal government by doling out "the cost of doing business." Gus doesn't pay taxes, however, on his real, high-margin enterprise: the production and distribution of crystal methamphetamine. This setup is identical to Google's in nearly every aspect except one company has far gaudier office parties.

Also, the only backtalk Google executives have to deal with at work is the poaching of their middle management. In order to convince Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) of his crucial role in the proceedings, Gus sets up an elaborate scheme in which Jesse manages to "foil" a robbery at one of their dead drops.

Gus' passive-aggressive management style strikes a real chord with me. I once made John Bolton launch a Navy Seal team into combat to make him feel more like a real man. It worked for about an hour and then the guy went back to playing Banjo-Kazooie on his N64. It was a different time, an era when you could touch yourself at the sight of Sonic the Hedgehog's female companions without irony or affectation.

Tipped off by his meth-cooking partner Walter White (Bryan Cranston), Jesse asks Gus why he has been chosen to leave the relative safety of the meth laboratory in order to venture out into the wide world of drug distribution. "I like to think I see something in people," Gus tells him. It is a cliché every chief executive in history has forced upon his proteges, but as a "let's get along" motivator it certainly beats Walter's stratagems.

Unlike Gus, Walter's business techniques originate in one of two places: acting from shame and desperation when confronted with jobs he can't do himself, or acting from shame and humiliation when things aren't going as he planned. A chemist is inured from the delicate work of manipulating people; to a drug dealer it's not just part of the business, it is the business.

We are always managing and recalculating the control we exert over others, ask Wesley Snipes. Walter White is not very good at exerting this control. He lacks empathy; he does not understand how other people stand in relation to him. He believes he is A, and when someone thinks he is B, instead of calculating the distance between the two points, he substitutes the new answer, the one he in his heart believes is more accurate, like any scientist.

Walter's wife Skyler (Anna Gunn) begs him to turn himself over to the police before Gustavo Fring tries to eliminate him again. She has been listening to an answering machine message he has left her under the pressure of his job. At first she had heard the strength and love in what he presumed were his last regrets, but a second time changes the story. This is not her husband, the man she married years ago.

Walter tells her that if he doesn't go into work, a business the size of those traded on the NASDAQ goes belly-up, ceases to exist. "You clearly don't know who you're talking to," he explodes. "I am not in danger, I am the danger."

Skyler White responds in the passive-aggressive fashion reminiscent of Walter's other boss. She drives their infant daughter to the Four Corners Monument at the intersection of Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona and Utah. She tosses a quarter into a wishing well that does not exist. The look of disgust on her face is equal parts anger at her husband and shame at having to live under the long, thieving arm of the law.

In last week's episode, Walter White purchased a car wash. If he knew the kinds of taxes he'd be paying to wash other people's vehicles, he might have thought twice before embarking on this plan. The government will ask Asian children running a lemonade stand to pay their "fair share", it is more a simple reflex than any kind of malice.

"You're the boss now," the outgoing car wash owner tells Walter. "Do you think you're ready?"

American life hasn't been this melodramatic since the 1920s; American television has never been this good.

I don't blame Gustavo Fring or Google for their tax evasion, no more than I would any man who doesn't want to pay money he does not owe. The super-rich already write checks you and I cannot even imagine. Ask for more, and can you really blame them if they take their business to a country that is satisfied with less than half? How does driving the wealthiest American citizens to foreign lands help our country?

You can't blame Mr. Buffett for losing perspective: everyone he knows owns an Olympic-sized swimming pool. Walk down the street of any rich suburb in America and envy will flow through your veins. Bravo. You have made being rich being bad. It is not. Money is no more a value than television. Some I know say, "I don't like television." Terrific. How do you feel about the microwave?

Dick Cheney is the senior contributor to This Recording. He last wrote in these in pages about Curb Your Enthusiasm.

"Magic" - GIRLS (mp3)

"Just A Song" - GIRLS (mp3)

"Myma" - Girls (mp3)

Father, Son, Holy Ghost is the new album from Girls, and it will be released on September 13th from True Panther Sounds.

In Which Everything Breaks Right For Once

Heisenberg

by ELISABETH DONNELLY

That homie's dead, he just doesn't know it yet. Walt H. White (Bryan Cranston), the high school chemistry teacher-cum-drug lord at the center of the most queasily compelling morality play on television, AMC's Breaking Bad, is going to die. Whether it's his case of terminal lung cancer or collateral damage from the whole drug thing, he's hurtling towards the end.

The looming threat of Walt's inevitable death is what makes Breaking Bad such a satisfying show. There's space to ruminate on the show's funhouse mirror look at utterly American worries like health care, immigration, and the drug trade, all the while staying focused on a man discovering his inner psychopath — and liking it! — on a nihilistic ride to the bottom. The show is gorgeously, strikingly filmed with an eye on big sky and neon like Wim Wenders' Paris, Texas or a William Eggleston photo. Breaking Bad's portrayal of the terrifying drug trade on the border is enough to make the casual viewer get an idea of the fear driving the state of Arizona insane.

And there is a dramatic pull beyond the pitch of "the ever-syndicated in perpetuity sitcom dad, Hal from Malcolm in the Middle, becomes a meth dealer!" — as the narcocorrido band put it in episode 2.7, "Negro Y Azul," "that homie's dead/he just doesn't know it yet."

For the uninitiated, Breaking Bad starts in media res — Walt is in his tighty whities and a gas mask, crashing an RV in the desert and recording an anguished goodbye message on a videocamera for his family. Then we speed backwards to see how such a buttoned down man got into these circumstances. It starts, of course, with a terminal cancer diagnosis where his HMO won't cover anything beyond lower quality care. Walt's situation is complicated by a middle class lifestyle in Alberquerque, New Mexico: no significant savings, a disabled son, and a pregnant wife who's willing to pay for cancer with credit cards.

With a diagnosis like this, some people would be staring into the abyss, flailing around in an attempt to square up finances and to figure out what really matters. Walt has no reaction; and he appears to take this death sentence as a blessing. He doesn't tell his family about his diagnosis for weeks. And when he does tell them, he refuses to seek treatment. Walt has become death.

While Walt is a chemistry genius with a degree in crystallography, he is also a stubborn, prideful bastard. So when his DEA brother-in-law takes him on a meth bust where an ex-student, Jesse Pinkman (Aaron Paul) is leaving the scene, and he learns about the easy money to be had — of course, the clear path is to go into business with Jesse as meth cookers and dealers. And soon enough, Walt is arguably a very successful meth cooker, with an accidental reputation as super-gringo meth lord "Heisenberg."

It's a choice motivated by money, pride, and desperation, and the bodies and fuck-ups pile up. Jesse is a dopey drug-addled degenerate speaking in 'yo's and 'bitch's, whose soft heart renders him potentially redeemable — whereas Walt is on a journey of discovery into his own innate psychopathic nihilism.

Breaking Bad is sharply plotted over the course of its strike-shortened first season, the amazing season two, and the currently-running season three. Creator Vince Gilligan (The X-Files, The Lone Gunmen, Hancock) and his team are amazingly adept at sending the audience through a variety of paces and subverting expectations every minute; some examples include one of the most disturbing hours of television that I'd ever seen (2.6, "Peekaboo," where Pinkman tries to extract justice on methheads while coming across their neglected, heartbreaking, smudge-faced and silent ginger kid) and an episode that's as tense as the Coen Brothers' No Country for Old Men (3.7, "One Minute").

Avoid watching Breaking Bad before bed, as it messes with your nervous system like a gory report on the evening news, encouraging visceral verbal reactions. Any episode will give you violence, explosions, and death: it's all surprising.

It's been quite a ride watching Walter White change from beige to drug lord, from ostensible hero to true anti-hero, and how his actions have affected Jesse's junkie spiral (season three Jesse is a clean Jesse, and finally Aaron Paul is allowed to be as attractive as he actually is), wife Skylar's Carmela Soprano-esque bitterness, and his DEA brother-in-law Hank's route from genial buffoon to PTSD suffer badass enough to chase after the great "Heisenberg" while taking out Mexican cartel thugs right and left.

Unlike other critically acclaimed dramas (what's up Mad Men?), something of game-changing consequence — not necessarily thoughtful symbolism — happens every week. And yet, it shares a certain clarity of vision with shows like Mad Men and The Wire. First off, it shows a man driven to psychopathic behavior by the stress, which is a hell of an indictment on the modern age. The cause and effect is clearer — since Walt is staring down death, his pride and worry snap him out of stasis, telling him to do something with his life, and the consequences are mighty.

In what is becoming a pattern on cable TV, Breaking Bad is as indebted to Cormac McCarthy as The Wire was forever 'Dickensian' or as Mad Men's blend of Don DeLillo and John Cheever fuels its mid-century American ennui. According to McCarthy, a story isn't worth telling if it's not about life and death, and Walter White is certainly a kindred spirit.

The show is preoccupied with the same issues surrounding McCarthy's Biblical tales of Southwestern justice and fate. Walt turns into a straight shooter out of a western, ready to kill or be killed for the sake of his manliness and to justify his existence. Scenes take place in a symbolic sunset under the wide-open desert sky. Judgment comes piling down on the characters. There are always indestructible sociopaths looming who would take Walt out in a heartbeat.

And ultimately, there's the wonderfully craggy face of Bryan Cranston. Playing a man of science and verve, he wipes all memories of Malcolm's Hal out the door. Walt's a man who lives in his head. He plays things close to the vest. To really understand what he's feeling, look at the wrinkles and worries in the canyons of his forehead. As long as he's wrestling with demons in New Mexico, Jon Hamm's slow burn is likely to remain seated come Emmy time.

Perhaps that's the way it should be; Cranston is the anchor of a show that reveals the screwy beauty, risk and emptiness underneath what was sold as the American dream. He's a man becoming himself in the light of life and death — and that is what's truly terrifying.

Elisabeth Donnelly is a contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. This is her first appearance in these pages. She tumbls here.

"Nobody Loves Me (Massive Attack remix)" - Portishead (mp3)

"Acid Jazz and Trip Op (remix)" - Portishead (mp3)

"You Find The Earth Boring" - Portishead (mp3)