Breaking Bad...over half through with the first half of the first half of the probably last season!

Spoiler alert....attend to your DVR first...


Holy crap!  I have no idea where this is going!  I think for the first time in the whole show, I am getting the suspicion that Walt is completely manipulating everyone around him.  I think he is making everyone do exactly what he wants, from making Jesse break up with his woman to pushing Marie away from Skylar.  What in the world did he mean with that last comment about Gus killing Victor because he flew to close to the sun????  Is he going to kill Mike????  If he does try it... I am calling this....that vile of ricin poison that he hid behind the electrical face plate is going to have something to do with.  Mike never knew about it.  Or maybe that machine gun that he buys (in the future) in the first few minutes of the first episode is going to play into it??? So far this season is the quickest paced one yet.  Unfortunately, I just read that this is going to be drug out until the summer of 2013!!!     

Woody Guthrie and 100 years of ramblin'

Today is the 100th birthday of Woody Guthrie.  If you don't know who that is, you really should.  You already know a little about him.  In elementary school you probably sung the lyrics to his best known hit, "This Land is Your Land" (which he wrote in response to listening to "God Bless America" being over played on the radio).  And you know his son Arlo's songs, "City of New Orleans" and "Alice's Restaurant".  But you have to listen to more of his work to understand his influence on modern music.  He directly influenced singers from Bob Dylan (who at the age of 19 visited Woody when he was dying, trying to learn as much as he could) to Bruce Springsteen, and his sound has indirectly influenced every folk, country, and rock song with a social message for the past eighty years.  Pretty good for a guy who traveled around the dust bowl in the 1930's playing for farmers and migrant labor.  There are dozens of his songs on iTunes.  I think the Library of Congress recordings are the best because he is being interviewed in between his songs so you can hear his story behind each one, and the sound quality is better.  My favorites are "Dirty Overhalls", "Dust Bowl Talking Blues", "Talking Fishing Blues", "Hard Traveling", "Pastures of Plenty", "Jolly Banker", "Boll Weevil Song", "Do-Ri-Me", and "Tom Joad" (that he wrote the night he saw "Grapes of Wrath").  Check it out and you won't be disappointed.
 

Death of a Salesman

I think this is my second Miller play.  I have read "The Crucible" several times, but I think one this has a whole lot more artistic stage directions and changes in chronology.  Of course, the horribly depressing nature of this story is pretty much summed up in the title, but Miller really does hit on the futile aspects of what we consider as the "American Dream".  Willy has lived his whole life on hope, despite all that has gone on around him.  All he wants is the whole world for his family and he is determined to get it through the modern world of business, despite how horrible this world treats him.   When the reality of his life; the home choked by the city (ruining his garden that he can never plant), the shrinking pay, the lost job, the lost friends, the failures of his sports hero sons, conflicts against that hope to the greatest degree ever in his life, he simply cracks and loses all hold on reality.  He lives in the past, which is the only world he handle, until eventually his delusions convince him to commit suicide.  His brother Charley, says at his funeral:

"Nobody dast blame this man.  You don't understand: Willy was a salesman.  And for a salesman, there is no rock bottom to the life.  He don't put a bolt to a nut, he don't tell you the law or give you medicine.  He's a man way out there in the blue, riding on a smile and a shoeshine.  And when they start not smiling back - that's an earthquake.  And when you get yourself a couple of spots in your hat, and you're finished.  Nobody dast blame this man.  A salesman is got to dream, boy.  It comes with the territory."

That shoeshine and smile ultimately fail him.  This story tells us what is horribly wrong with the modern American Dream, but I have been trying to figure out what Miller is saying should be the "right" path, or the good American Dream.  I wonder if Biff (who is a ranch hand out west) and Willy's brother Ben (who tried to go to Alaska and went to Africa and became rich with a diamond mine, or at least he did in Willy's imagination) serve as the alternate to the world of appointments and groveling for nothingness that Willy's world revolves around.  At Willy's funeral, Biff repeats "He had the wrong dreams.  He never knew who he was."  Maybe  Miller is saying that our dream should be one of recklessness, of chances, of bronco riding and diamond mining, of starting for Alaska and ending up in Africa.