The Wrong Stuff

Primed with shakers full of my favorite cocktail, ample quantities of Chinese take out and oodles of self indulgent stamina, I spent the better part of last weekend immersed in the first two seasons of AMC's Breaking Bad.

The show is a critical darling and it's easy to see why.

Terrific performances, penetrative writing, and adrenaline-fueled plot lines packaged with slick production values, assured directing and cinematic flourish, it makes for compelling viewing. The plot centers around a terminally ill and chronically underemployed high school chemistry teacher, Walter White, who decides that the only way he can pay for his cancer treatment and not leave his family destitute is to use his formidable scientific skills to make and sell crystal meth. Throw in the complications of a very pregnant and even more suspicious wife, a CP afflicted teenage son, a kleptomaniac sister-in-law and her crudely effective DEA husband and what ensues is the mother of all fish-out-of-water stories.

Still, it made for an oddly antiseptic viewing experience.

In this economy where PhDs deliver pizza to make ends meet and penny pinching insurance companies  humiliate and impoverish us at our most vulnerable moments, we're meant to empathize with the lengths that someone as accomplished as Walter has to go to in order to die with any of his dignity and finances intact. Like many today, his intelligence and creativity are crushed by the confederacy of dunces that populate sub-divisions, schools, strip malls and board rooms from coast to coast. And as is the case with any anti-hero, we're pulling for him to succeed, to show the knuckle draggers who the real genius is.

Yet watching him deal with the inevitable murder and mayhem stemming from his burgeoning criminal enterprise is nothing we haven't seen depicted before. Someone as smart as Walter shouldn't necessarily be thrown by the revelations that drug dealers get killed and that laundering the proceeds of his sales is a logistical nightmare. Not anticipating the cost of doing business does make me think that he's unfamiliar with just about any gangster movie from the last 80 years or so, but that's not really where the series falls tantalizingly short of transcending it's crime drama roots. As entertaining and engrossing as the story lines are, plot seems to trump character development at every turn. The writers seem far more interested in concocting entertaining situations along than delving into the inner workings of the players in this particular morality tale. And yes, inventive plot structure is necessary, but like the truly scary addicts in Albuquerque, NM (a bumbling couple of ATM thieves are particularly memorable), I greedily want more.

Comparisons are odious and hardly fair, but just to single out a few of my personal favorites: The Sopranos was a character study masquerading as a mafia soap opera; Deadwood depicted the profane, brilliant lack of impulse control  upon which the world's fortunes rise and fall; The Wire was a scalable depiction of motive, elemental nature and ambition (ok, so I'm a homer on this one). AMC's own Mad Men delivers profund historical and societal commentary, filtered through themes of relentless self invention. Watching these dramas unfold felt excruciating, exquisite, exhilarating and so very personal.

Which is not to say that I'm bashing Breaking Bad. It's very good for what it is. The story moves along at a lively clip, the cinematography and locations are superb and even occasionally breathtaking. There are hilarious homages to classic film images, memorable riffs of sparkling dialogue, and one of the more powerful depictions of the dissolution of the husband-wife dynamic that I've ever seen. The series brims with curious revelations and a wickedly cynical world view. Not to mention that the on-screen chemistry  between Walter and his slacker sidekick Jesse is the stuff of which casting directors' wet dreams are made.

I don't have to be under the influence to recommend the show though. It may not be groundbreaking, but it's great television.

The Only Game That Matters

Something funny seems to have happened to coverage of the looming World Cup tournament here in the good old USA. Sure there's some predictable griping from baseball / football / basketball beat writers who give the normal reasons why the game never catches on here. But for the most part, the sports-media-industrial complex is embracing the event. Helped no doubt by ESPN's heavy investment in advertising and airtime which lends some much needed mainstream authenticity to the proceedings, I'm getting the feeling that us fans of the beautiful game may finally be getting some respect.

Casually interested in what's going on way out there, my non-footie friends? Consider:

• If it's one thing that sports fans do understand is spectacle and drama and there's nothing like fanatical jingoistic rivalries to provide ample quantities of that. You didn't have to be Italian to gasp in amazement at Fabio Grosso gutting the Germans with a sublime goal as time wound down in the 2006 semi final. Soak in the atmosphere at the stadiums and revel in the tension.

• Viewing times here on the east coast aren't going to be as brutal as Japan - South Korea 2002 but about 10+ hours of games and coverage for the opening two weeks will undoubtedly put a dent in your personal productivity. Take long lunches and keep the Guinness flowing.

• Lionel Messi is good. Really good.

• No Iran this year, so don't feel guilty about rooting heavily against North Korea. 

• My man crush on Gerard Pique dates to when he was clad in red (eventual betrayal notwithstanding). But then as a plodding full-back myself, I've always had a soft spot for tall, rangy defenders who suck up everything thrown their way. Stam, Hiero, Lucio, Desailly. Get a feel for how defense works in the game and embrace it. 

• At least you'll be able to tell your SO that you hate Cristiano Ronaldo with a passion. And mean it. 

• Be prepared to be outraged by at least one galling moment of blatant gamesmanship per match from the Argentines, Spaniards, French, Portuguese and of course the Italians. They're all multimillionaire athletes with the collective maturity of 11 year olds.

But what the hell. Me and a couple billion of my closest friends are going to be joined at the hip for the next few weeks. Enjoy.

It's Complicated...

...and I don't care.

Last month Sprint launched a new and enhanced website that purported to be an improvement over the existing way that the company interacted with it's customers. Their IT magicians flipped the switch to dazzle us with their latest creation but instead ended up releasing the kracken. For the better part of an entire week, users trying to perform functions as basic as paying their bills, activating a new phone or contacting customer service were met the image of a jaunty yellow construction hat and a perfunctory apology for certain portions of the site being inaccessible.

Following current PR disaster control protocol, the company used social media tools to tweet and blog about the issue, reassuring their customers that they were trying to fix the problem and invoking the one excuse that we in the wider world should consider totally unacceptable: These are complex issues.

Message to any vendor in the tech arena: That's not our problem, it's yours.

It's frankly insulting for companies involved in anything from building websites, to designing software, to providing cable service, to tell us, the users of their products and services, that they're toiling so very hard to fix something. We should be patient because it's, you know, so damn intricate. After all, there are all these lines of code and all this wiring and you should consider yourselves fortunate that we're smart enough to deal with it while all you have to do is pay/buy/subscribe. So quit griping about things not performing as advertised, you just don't understand how clever we are to provide you with this technology in the first place.

IT practitioners are talented professionals, but there's a bit of a god complex at work in their grandiose self perceptions. They picture themselves as somewhere between Gene Kranz and Mr Miyagi.  Too often though, when things go off the rails, they pronounce with cryptic sagacity that if only we understood how incredibly complicated it is to do what they do then we would accept their gifts from Mt. Olympus with nary a complaint. Mix this aloof defensiveness with evasive PR language and what you really wind up with on the other end are angry, alienated customers who simultaneously need and despise you.

All we the users know is that what you offered wasn't what we got. You sold us something that's not working. It doesn't matter to us why, nor should it. We pay for something, it had better do what you say it does. How you make that happen really isn't my concern.

When I pay $40 for box seats, I don't want to hear my slumping $15 million-a-year cleanup hitter telling me how hard it is to hit a breaking ball. Just swing the bat and shut up.

Honor Amongst Thieves

Don't you just love it when they dip into each other's pockets?

According to the complaint, Goldman Sachs essentially designed an investment that was designed to fail, then made money when it did. Lovely.

One of these days we're going to stop admiring the geniuses who grease the economy. I suspect that it's just a giant shell game where they move our money around and get rich doing it, but then I just don't have the sophistication to understand any of what our titans of business and industry are really up to.

Don't Call It A Comeback...

Neglected General Ripper for a while but the normal posting schedule should resume shortly. Planning to make the leap from sporadic to infrequent but we'll see how that goes.

A Gilded Cage

There is much to admire about Roman Polanski the artist.

Brilliant, perceptive, eloquent and courageous. Part of the 60s and 70s cadre of auteurs who's work continues to excite and enthrall. A child of the Holocaust, escapee of communist Poland, bereft husband of the doomed Sharon Tate. He would normally be a sympathetic figure, an inspirational and star-crossed survivor.

But here is an inconvenient truth. In 1978 while he was 44 years old, coming off the masterpiece that was Chinatown, the acclaimed director plied a 13 year old girl with alcohol and drugs. Over her repeated protestations and objections, he then proceeded to have sex with her.

Faced with the prospect of a balky judge who seemed set to renege on a soft plea agreement and instead impose a long term prison sentence, Polanski fled to the safe confines of his native France. There, a limited extradition treaty meant that he could live out his life free of the consequences of his actions in far away California. Until his recent arrest in Switzerland, he may well have done so.

The foibles of the rich and famous are such that they're often just one unfortunate decision or act away from plunging into personal chaos. And when the inevitable occurs, it's almost understandable that those who inhabit the world of the well-off and well-connected look after each other's interests. As their excesses lead to brushes with the law, they close ranks and protect their own. This is particularly true with people blessed with some kind of artistic talent where those who come into contact with greatness are too willing to give reprehensible behavior a pass in light of the body of a person's work.

Polanski's friends and admirers in the business have leapt to his defense, demanding that he be released. The irony of no less than Woody Allen, the subject of his own brush with questionable pubescent coupling, signing a petition to that effect says a lot about the tone deafness of the denizens of the entertainment industry. The director should be spared prosecution because so much time has passed and besides he is, after all, blessed with the kind of gift we all wished we had. Even the victim in the case, then as now, just wants the whole sordid affair to go away.

While the prosecutors in Los Angeles seem determined to make an example of the fugitive, the burning question as to the long term efficacy of delayed justice is one that must be asked. The open and shut case of 30 years ago has further devolved into a battle between those who think that nobody is above the law and those who think that no purpose is served by dredging up decades-old wrongs.

There is an argument to be made that we are all imperfect and don't fulfill the lofty ideas we hold, or in Polanski's case, the transcendent art we produce. History is, after all, replete with examples of colossal men with feet of clay. The acknowledgement that someone can be flawed in one way yet inspirational in another represents a mature and sophisticated understanding of human nature. That a middle aged man forced himself on a girl barely in her teens challenges our notion of just how much deviation from the tortured artist script we're willing to accept.

Whatever his achievements, Roman Polanski is a rapist. Given the circumstances of the crime, living a life of swanky comfort, personal fulfillment and adulatory bliss hardly seems like justice.

Ok, I'll Say It...

...they can pretend he never existed as much as they want to, but just as I feared, Manchester United have no way of replicating the impact of having Cristaino Ronaldo on the pitch.

It's early days in the season and the standings say that everything is fine. They managed to thump the Spurs while short handed and triumphed on derby day to overcome some spectacular defensive blunders, but what I've seen of the team thus far gives me reason to be concerned. Berbatov has nowhere near the selfless work rate requisite for a striker in the premiership. Sir Alex Ferguson's infatuation with the one dimensional and unrepentantly negative Park continues to mystify. The reliance on Scholes and Giggs, legends now in the twilight of their careers will be costly. The flatlining of Nani and the failure of Anderson to emerge as our version of Michael Essien or Javier Mascherano. Not to mention that Ben Foster evokes the very worst of Fabien Barthez.

But nothing worries me as much as the lackluster play of the midfield.

With CR in the lineup, we had a player that the opposition feared to the point where he would draw constant attention and disrupt the shape of the other team. With the versatility to play right or left, supporting or attacking midfield, or out and out striker, he could befuddle you and leave your defenders scrambling for position all afternoon long. His presence led to acres of space for the other midfield players to rove and dominate. No more. They lack the room to play, the creative spark and yes, the imperious arrogance that we've been accustomed to for the last few years.

Valencia's instincts always take him wide, he just doesn't seem to have the willingness or ability to cut inside looking for shots on goal. Owen is injury prone and it remains to be seen if he can be the impact player he once was. The gamble that these two in combination can replace the irreplaceable is one of the great challenges of SAF's career.

Never thought I'd miss the diving, whining, annoying, supremely skilled, spectacular bastard as much as this. But I do.