#4

Podcast

This American Life (Ira Glass)

How to describe This American Life? It's a radio show on WBEZ Chicago. There's a theme to each episode, and a variety of stories on that theme. It's mostly true stories of everyday people, though not always.Sometimes there are fictional short stories on the theme. You can read more about it at thisamericanlife.org, where I found this brief description. The show is incredibly well produced and in a world where we either hear about school shootings, fiscal cliffs, natural desasters and wars on the one hand or about Honey Boo Boo's shoes, Kim Kardashian's boobs or Kate Middleton's hat on the other, it reassures my faith in humanity to hear these extraordinary stories about ordinary life. And there's really not much more I can say about it other than go and listen to it.

TV Show

 Breaking Bad (Vince Gilligan)

Breaking Bad is the story of Walter White's transformation - as series creator Vince Gilligan puts it - from Mr. Chips to Scarface. Diagnosed with cancer, chemistry teacher White (Bryan Cranston) begins to cook meth to cover his medical expenses to provide for his family. As his cancer goes into remission White is well on his way to becoming a criminal overlord. He has found something he excels at (cooking meth) and he is not willing to give it up even if it dooms everyone around him.

The eight episodes aired in 2012 constitute the first half of the fifth and final season of the show. With Giancarlo Esposito's Gus Fring meeting the glorious explodo in the season four finale, Walt is looking to inherit an empire and most of the season deals with the issues that arise. The first episode, though, opens with Walt alone in a diner celebrating his 52nd birthday (therefore, it takes place a year in the future) with guns in his trunk and a fake ID in his pocket. Seems like the endgame the whole series is moving toward. At the end of episode eight, the police, namely Walt's brother-in-law Hank, finally have a clue who this blue meth cookin' Heisenberg dude really is. This can only end badly.

It's hard to describe what makes this show so good. Clearly it's performances by Cranston and Aaron Paul, both Emmy winners for their roles on the show by now. It's beautifully shot and extremely well written, and you get an arc for the protagonist that you don't usually see on TV. Unless something unexpected happens it's not Walter White's redemption but his damnation that we're watching and the show is making us care about the fate of what turns out to be a human monster.

If you're not watching already mabe you should wait and watch the whole thing when it is finished. I, for one, can't wait to see how this turns out.

Book

Inherent Vice (Thomas Pynchon)

Thomas Pynchon published his first novel, the critically much acclaimed V., in 1963, after which the literary world's most notorious recluse spent much time in California. In his most recent novel, 2009's Inherent Vice, he returns to the California of the late 60's. It features much of the usual trappings of a Pynchon novel including a detective protagonist, a mysterious organization, the counterculture and the Man, too many characters to keep straight, lots of them with silly names, and humor that is sometimes easy to miss while one is busy decoding the language it is buried in.

Of Pynchon's seven novels The Crying of Lot 49, Vineland, and now Inherent Vice can be considered easy reads compared to his more sprawling efforts. While the latter have received the most critical acclaim and the most academic attention and Lot 49 is often used as an introduction to Pynchon because of its brevity, Vineland and Inherent Vice may be the most accessible. They are all, however, recognizably by the same author and they are all roughly about the same things. If I had to sum it up in one simple sentence I'd say Pynchon writes about the struggle for freedom and the temptation to give in to the forces of control. If you like him and his idiosyncratic style of constructing both sentences and plots - and having read all of his novels and his short stories I clearly do - you will enjoy Inherent Vice, even though it offers essentially nothing new.

Movie

The Avengers (Joss Whedon)
 

I can trace my involvement with the Avengers franchise to my early childhood. I'm sure I read my first Avengers comics while still in elementary school. When I started reading original issues instead of the  German reprints in the mid-80's, the Avengers were among the titles I had sent to my house from a comic book store in Munich. My love for the franchise has never really waned, unlike that for many other characters. And then they put it in the hands of Joss Whedon, creator of such nerd greatness as Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Firefly and Doctor Horrible's Sing-Along Blog. How could I not like this? 

Turns out I wasn't the only one that liked it. People liked it to the tune of 1.5 billion dollars. Of course, that movie was the culmination of years of build-up in the Iron Man, Captain America, and Thor movies. We've seen super hero groups on the big screen before, but this was different from The Fantastic Four and the X-Men. This was done by someone who had an idea how to capture the essence of these characters in their interactions without being on the nose, someone who can write funny dialogue, and someone who knows which buttons to push when. As a fan of both Whedon and the Avengers, I couldn't be happier.

Needless to say this is not a cinematic masterpiece, this is not Citizen Kane. This was an example of a summer blockbuster done extremely well while delivering something new that people had been anticipating for a while. It will be hard for Whedon to even reach that kind of success again, let alone top it. However, if either Spider-Man or Wolverine (or possibly both) show up in the sequel (and I've recently read the possibility exists) my nerd brain may have a nerdgasm and this vale of tears may be transformed into one unending nerdvana. And this is why I loved The Avengers: it was both the successful climax of a development years in the making and also the opening act of the Marvel Cinematic Universe, which allows me to consider the Bendis era Avengers line-up as a big screen possibility.