"'Breaking Bad' is good," Jim said, "but there are no crime dramas better than 'Dexter'! It's based in Miami and it's just amazing!" "I don't care," I replied, "just so long as I can view 'Breaking Bad' without this damnable choppiness!"
The system Jim rigged isn't terribly slick: instead of Remote Desktop it features two keyboards and two mice, and more cables than seem warranted, but at least the choppiness problem is gone. With the purchase of a $32 Season Pass from AMC (plus the waste of $6 on duplicate downloads) I've been able to watch Season 3 of "Breaking Bad" with only slight choppiness.
Wow, this new TV addiction has cost something like $40 + $32 + $25 = $97. About $100.00! Let's see, $100.00 yields a blackjack addict like me about 45 minutes worth of time in a casino, so, as far as addictions go, this "Breaking Bad" addiction is relatively benign. I wonder how much meth $100.00 can buy? (perish the thought!)
iTunes hasn't made last night's show available yet, but I have caught up in Season 3 as far as last week's show (Hank Schrader's very, very bad afternoon).
Wow! What a great show! The best TV show ever! Featuring my hometown, Albuquerque, in an unfamiliar and disturbingly-lurid criminal light!
Season 3 starts out with very disturbing imagery - an unforgettable sequence of Hispanics (likely Mexicans, including two narcotraficantes) crawling along a dirt road through a small, tumbledown village towards a shrine in an attitude of abject suffering and religious supplication. A Devil's Tower-like mountain looms in the background. The atmosphere is absolutely menacing.
The mountain is familiar to northwestern New Mexicans, of course: Cabezon Peak! The village is either the nearly ghost town of Cabezon, or of San Luis. The valley in the distance is that carved by the Rio Puerco River.
In high school I visited the area, along with friend Dane. The story about the mysterious car accident that I posted two weeks ago was about this very trip. We spent the day climbing Cabezon Peak, which turned out to be easier to climb than I first feared (it's an older, more-eroded volcanic neck than Wyoming's Devil's Tower).
The upper Rio Puerco Valley was, and remains, a very, very hard place to make a living. In Spanish colonial times, the Navajos raided the area with impunity (reminds me of what Andy recently called a Woodland convenience store - the Navajo treated the Rio Puerco Valley as a "stop-and-rob"). If the Spanish couldn't protect the Jemez Valley, how could they possibly protect the Rio Puerco Valley, which is closer to the Navajo heartland? The soil there is remarkably alkaline, and the water too. And to top it all off, through the combined action of overgrazing and flash-flooding, the Rio Puerco has dug down deep enough into the soft soil that irrigation is all-but-impossible to carry out anymore. Thus, for traditional New Mexican agriculture, the valley is just one stop short of dead. It's no wonder that the towns there are hollowed-out ghost relics of a brutal past!
For television folks, however, these towns are visually amazing. Such vistas! No wonder the "Breaking Bad" folks were attracted to these towns: attracted like bugs to a light!
Cabezon Peak held a delightful surprise on top. The top is crawling with ladybugs! Similar phenomena can be found on other peaks in the Southwest and in California's Sierra Nevada. Here, in the middle of a near-wilderness not far from Albuquerque, the discovery seemed particularly welcome.
The imagery from "Breaking Bad" of people crawling through the dirt is so strong, however, that my memories of a real place, happy and trying memories alike, are in danger of being overprinted by memories of things that have never happened. Art is more real than reality!
In comments recently, my sister Michelle mentioned vivid views of the Sandia Mountains from the north that she thought might be filmed from near Cochiti Pueblo. When I saw the views, however, I realized that they had to be filmed further south than Cochiti: I thought perhaps near the intersections of NM Highways 528 & 44 - basically around Coronado National Monument. The "Breaking Bad" folks provide the final clue, however: the cop on patrol wears a cap from Santa Ana Pueblo. That's it! Has to be! It's in the right place!
Even as they weave a new story that strikes out in bold new directions these "Breaking Bad" folks are maintaining a striking fidelity to the landscape and the people of New Mexico. Better than anyone before has! The "Breaking Bad" folks are not treating the New Mexico as other Hollywood folks have - as the storytelling equivalent of a "stop-and-rob". The "Breaking Bad" folks are staying longer, and digging deeper....
As far as I can tell, "Breaking Bad" has yet to fully-explain the reasons Walter White adopted the moniker "Heisenberg", but I can guess. As physicists know, Werner Heisenberg is the brilliant 20th-Century German quantum physicist best known for the "Uncertainty Principle" :
According to Heisenberg its meaning is that it is impossible to determine simultaneously both the position and velocity of an electron or any other particle with any great degree of accuracy or certainty.or, more succinctly:
Similarly, one can know exactly where Walter White is, but not what he is doing, or one can know exactly what he is doing, but not where he is. One can never know both his location and his activities simultaneously. That's the conceit of the "Heisenberg" name!
I haven't watched many of the accompanying "The Making Of Breaking Bad" videos, but I did see one where Director Vince Gilligan called Walter White "the smartest dumb man he knows." The "Heisenberg" moniker is a perfect example. It's a clue! To a physical scientist, the nickname fairly-screams 'fellow physical scientist'. Even Hank Schrader should be able to see it!
We all tell stories to make sense of our world. For example, no matter what has happened since, Sacramento, together with San Francisco, remain the cities of the 1849 Gold Rush.
Albuquerque, like other cities, has several clashing identities; all true in various aspects: The Turquoise Trail, The Duke City; the crossroads of Rio Abajo; AT&SF rail center, the largest city in NM, a stopover on Route 66; Cold War capital not far from Trinity Site and Los Alamos; Space Age capital, a real estate frontier, etc., etc. The end of the Cold War imperils a huge part of Albuquerque's identity, however, and new tales - new stories - have had to come forward to help explain the city to itself.
The dark shadow of drugs looming from the south, and people's desperate struggles with it, is a new way with which to view the city and its history and people. "Breaking Bad" is vivid and unforgettable, and will leave an imprint on the Albuquerque story - the New Mexico story - that will last longer and drill deeper than the evanescent adobe homes of the Rio Puerco Valley ever did. Call "Breaking Bad" the imagination's blue crystal meth - just right for our new century....
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