Noiseless Chatter

On Noise to Signal

Over on his own excellent blog, John Hoare recently wrote up this piece about Noise to Signal.

I’ve alluded to Noise to Signal before, but never really spoke about it directly. There’s a reason for that, and that reason is I’m still not sure what to say.

There are things about it that I loved. Adored even. And there are things about it that frustrate me to this day. (That probably says more about me than the site, I admit, but there you go.) And so it’s difficult to just come out and say “Here’s what went down…” because…well…I’m not even sure I know.

But John’s belated farewell sort of inspired me to do one of my own. It’s not an airing of dirty laundry or anything like that…but rather a chance to look back at a site that I helped shape in some way, and that I wrote for over the course of several years, and that still feels to me like a brilliant experiment that didn’t go anywhere near where it could have gone.

It was a pop-culture website, but it was one — by design — without a particular focus. It covered music, movies, books, television, video games…is any of this sounding familiar? The fact that I carry an echo of the site in the title of my current blog wasn’t deliberate, but it might still be less than coincidental.

It was good. We had an extraordinarily talented staff. But, as John says, “the remit was just too wide, and the tone inconsistent. By trying to cover everything, we ended up covering nothing well.” (I’m excerpting there; I do encourage you to read the entire thing in context.)

And he’s right. Absolutely correct. If I take issue with anything there it’s that the remit was too wide, because I really don’t think that was the problem…it was more in how we handled (or failed to handle) that freedom. But otherwise he’s right. There was a variance in tone, simply because there were so many writers and no consistent style for which to strive. Everybody brought their own talents to the table, but there was no attempt made to join them together. I had A and John had B, and instead of figuring out how to maximize each of our skills we just stuck some A over here and some B over there. We could have done better.

And in terms of covering nothing well, he’s right about that too. Apart from my day-after reviews of The Venture Bros. season three, I don’t think I ever finished a series that I started. And while it would be bad form to mention anything another writer did or didn’t do, I’m sure you’d find that they could name plenty of big plans they never saw through as well.

That seems to be a lot of what John pulled from the experience. What I pulled from the experience, though, is the importance of having an editor.

I blame nobody for that. I was at the point in my career (ha ha!) that I would have bristled at somebody telling me I needed to be clearer, or halve my word count, or — heaven forbid — choose a subject somebody might actually want to read about.

But that was the younger me. I knew everything. And because I knew everything, and because I had a website to which I could publish everything, I ended up spinning mountains of bullshit. Well-intentioned bullshit, sure…but that’s still bullshit.

I got the job at Nintendo Life due to two articles that I wrote for Noise to Signal. I reviewed some WiiWare games and the Nintendo Life editors liked what I did, so off I went. What I found was an entirely different experience; this was a site that knew exactly what kind of content it was looking for, and it wanted writers that could produce content within those guidelines.

They hired me because they liked my writing…but I still had to play by the rules. They had certain points they wanted each review to hit. There was a format that needed to be respected. If I wanted to stick around, it was up to me to find a way that I could mix my A with their B. It took me probably a full year to finally adapt to that, and I’m amazed they stuck with me and my well-intentioned bullshit that long. But the fact was that it was a hard lesson to learn.

Having said that, it was also a tremendously valuable lesson to learn.

You don’t become a great writer by pounding out ream after ream of nonsense. That gets you nowhere. You become a great writer by pounding out a ream of nonsense, having intelligent people look it over and reveal to you how far you ended up from your intentions, and then pounding out another ream of slightly better nonsense. And you repeat that. If you really care about writing, you repeat it forever.

There were behind-the-scenes issues at play as well (which John alludes to), and the kind of drama you’d expect from getting 10 or so strong personalities together without rules and saying “Publish anything!” But, ultimately, that was my takeaway. The value of editing. If you think the stuff I post here is vague and meandering…baby, you ain’t seen nothin’.

I tried hard at Noise to Signal. We all did. And we had a great group of readers and commenters that it was really difficult to say goodbye to. (Of course some of them are here now, so…thank you.)

Ultimately, though, its formlessness meant it either had to adapt into something more solid, or dissolve totally.

It dissolved totally.

But I learned one of the most important lessons I’ve ever learned as a writer: that fact that I wrote it doesn’t necessarily mean it’s any good.

There’s a reason Detective Fiction is working its way through the hands of so many proofreaders / editors / critics before I’ll post even an except here. And that reason is that I finally know better.

Still though…it was a hell of a ride. RIP, NTS.

And Now?

And so, with Breaking Bad over and no other reasons to live, I’ve come to something of a crossroads.

There are a lot of things that I’d like to cover on Noiseless Chatter (such as a review of Pynchon’s Bleeding Edge, but I haven’t had time to finish it yet) and I still intend to cover them. And I also want to re-start Steve Zissou Saturdays, but that’ll have to wait until November at the soonest, due to some boring personal-ass horse crap I promise you wouldn’t care about.

But you know what? I kind of liked having a show I could cover regularly. Something that would force me to sit down and write. And you wonderful dudes and sexy ladies seemed to like it as well, so I thought I’d pick another show that I could do. Something I could review episode by episode, probably once a week, that would give this blog some focus, give me a reason to write even when I don’t want to, and give you a reason to return even though I know you promised yourself you wouldn’t.

And I thought I’d open it up to a vote. The “winner” won’t necessarily be chosen that way, but it’ll give me a chance to see what you guys are hoping to see around these parts. The way I see it, there are three ways I can go:

A Show I Know I Love: I could take a show I’m already enamored with front to back and write (hopefully) intelligent, deeper examinations of what makes them work quite as perfectly as they do. Some candidates here might be Party Down, The Venture Bros., The Office (UK), Peep Show, or all the old Breaking Bad episodes I didn’t review the first time around.

A Show I Have A Complicated Relationship With: I could take a show that frustratingly runs the gamut from absolutely brilliant to borderline unwatchable. This could be fun because I’d be able to both praise the things a show does right and deconstruct what made it go wrong. This would probably be something like Get a Life, Red Dwarf, The IT Crowd, Black Books or even The Simpsons. (Though in that case there’s no way in shit I’m doing every episode.)

A Show I Know is Fucking Awful: I’ve linked to Full House Reviewed before, and you really should check it out if you haven’t already. It’s made me wonder what other show I could put under a similar microscope…some piece of crap I spent so many hours of my childhood laughing at like an idiot, which would embarrass me endlessly to relive. My approach would be a bit different…instead of just ripping into it for maximum comedy I’d actually want to dig deep and figure out what they were trying to accomplish, and why the fruits of their labor don’t quite hold up. Of course it would be funny too. I can hear you laughing already! This would have to be something I remember quite well, but still know will suck through today’s eyes. So probably ALF, Perfect Strangers, Gilligan’s Island or Clarissa Explains it All.

I kind of want to go with option 3, but even then I wouldn’t know what to pick, so I figured I’d just open it wide.

What kind of approach would you like to see on a recurring basis? What show(s) would you like to see covered?

I’ll make a better effort to post frequently, so that it’s not just a weekly update, but I do think some direction would help. So have at it! What do you want from me???

Review: “Felina,” Breaking Bad season 5, episode 16

When I reviewed “Blood Money,” I had concerns about pacing, and what felt, at times, like sloppy story-telling. It was an episode designed to get Walt and Hank into that garage, so that we could open there the next week and the fireworks could really go off, but watching it on its own merits, without its promise followed up for another week, it left me cold.

Last week I reviewed “Granite State,” and all of the same things applied there as well. We had to gloss over a lot and stitch together the fractured storylines. We had to move Walt all the way out to New Hampshire…just so it could end with him coming back.

But like “Blood Money,” “Granite State” paid off. It was worth it. Absolutely all of it was worth it.

I don’t care how clumsy the re-introduction of the Grey Matter stuff was last week, because its payoff was one of the most graceful scenes Breaking Bad has ever done…a victorious exercise in gorgeous tension. Gretchen and Elliot joking and reminiscing and flicking on lights while Walt lurks in the shadows, closes the front door behind them, and admires their framed photographs.

You’ll never catch me defending the Charlie Rose stuff, but I’m absolutely thrilled to say that any roughness around the edges was unquestionably worth it if that’s where it led.

“Felina”…well, I’ll just come out and say it. This is easily going to be one of my favorite episodes. Maybe top 5. It’s impossible that it would be lower than top 10. For as much story as it felt like we were left with last week, the fact is there wasn’t that much.

The money. The Nazis. Jesse. Walt’s fate. And, if we have time, a proper farewell to the family. That’s all we really needed. The “largeness” of the story was always one of Breaking Bad‘s quietly brilliant misdirections. At times it felt downright enormous. But step back (or pull back, as we did at the end of this episode) and it’s really just one man.

It’s one man who did a lot of terrible things in service of some very noble ones, and then later some very selfish ones.

But it’s one man. The camera could have kept going. Beyond the meth lab. Up higher. Revealing the Nazi compound. And higher. Revealing the city of Albequerque. And higher, revealing all of New Mexico. The further we go, the smaller it all looks; the smaller it’s all revealed to be. We expected a larger amount of threads to deal with in the finale, but, really, this is just one guy. One unassuming, unhappy chemistry teacher who manages to look to us, for five seasons, like the largest presence on Earth.

But he’s not.

And he never was.

That bleeding body on the ground is Walter White. He was never actually any larger than he was in that final moment.

I loved “Felina.”

I loved, loved, fucking loved “Felina.”

The comedy of Badger and Skinny Pete* posing as snipers with their laser pointers, the phone call from Marie**, the positively heart-breaking final glimpse of his son before he’s gone forever***, the warm flashback of Jesse making the box he talked about a lifetime ago with his therapist.

Oh, and it caps it all off with a scene that ensures I will cry every damn time I hear “Baby Blue” on the radio. Technically, that might qualify as the episode’s biggest surprise.

I genuinely can’t imagine a better conclusion. Walt managed to go out on his own terms, but without it feeling like a cheat. The entire Nazi arc was justified by the moment Walt tackled Jesse to the ground. We got to watch Todd get slowly strangled to death.

I’m having trouble discussing the episode because I keep lapsing into lists of things I loved about it. I think that’s because I’m just in awe of how well it put a bow on the entire series. Going into this I think everybody was steeling themselves against at least some degree of disappointment. After all, you can’t please everyone.

And I don’t know if “Felina” will please everyone.

But it sure pleased the hell out of me.

As much as I wanted Jesse out of that cage last week, this was the way to do it. Walt passing Jesse the gun was the answer. It was the right way to end this. And the fact that it didn’t end this…that Jesse actually did manage to break the cycle of manipulation that he became aware of back in “Confessions”…that was perfect too. Because now, as much as Jesse would have wanted it…it was really for Walt. They both knew that. And Walt admitted it. Jesse is unchained in more ways than one.

And Walt’s left alone. His family is gone. His legacy is gone. All around him, just as they always have, machinations set into motion long ago keep turning without him. The empty gun never stops strafing. The massage chair comforts a corpse. It’s easy enough to set things into motion; it’s a much bigger job to stop them.

I didn’t think this episode could redeem Walter in my eyes. And I’m not sure that it did. But it gave me a conclusion that didn’t leave me hating him. And that, without exaggeration, is miraculous.

I guess that’s all I have to say, as “Baby Blue” goes. Walter White spent over a year building up a hell of his own creation, and he didn’t really deserve to escape that. But the others he dragged into that hell certainly did, and he did the best he could do, which was release as many of them as he could. Through death, through freedom, through financial security. He did what he had to do, and it cost him his life.

But whatever was going through his mind in those final seconds, as he caressed the machinery in the meth lab while the police closed in on him, I’m sure it was worth it. Those few, small moments at the very end of his life during which he could reflect on the relative good he managed to do. It’s a far cry from all the chaos and tragedy he caused that he’s had to reflect on since the pilot.

He could have gone out in a blaze of glory, but he chose a path that led to the fatal shot coming without fanfare. No dying breaths, no final monologues, no time for goodbye. He was here, and now he’s not here. He went out in a blaze of self-sacrifice instead, choosing for the first time in what felt like ages not to be selfish.

He doesn’t keep Skyler any longer than he promised. He lets his son pass without knowing he was there. He sets Jesse free, and he understands when Jesse says he won’t kill him.

He’s letting go.

He’s letting himself let go.

And maybe that’s what the whole show was about. Mike alluded to it earlier this season…if Walter had just kept his mouth shut and did as he was told he would have been fine. Instead he had to shake things up. Every time Walter takes command of the situation, he only — ultimately — makes things worse. He had his moments of triumph, and that’s what would give him the confidence to seize control again. But it was always just a larger snowball, a bigger boulder, a scarier figure looming in the shadows. Any triumph was illusory. He was only constructing a more complicated coffin.

In “Felina,” he lets go. And he dies a happier man than he ever could have otherwise. If only he had let go earlier…

Anyway, thank you to everybody out there who stuck around and read these reviews. It’s been a great eight weeks, and I appreciate that you chose to spend them with me. This was a great show, on that we can all agree, and if we disagreed here and there — or everywhere — on the specifics, I’m just glad to know that so many great commenters and readers chose to spend their time reading my drivel, and giving me their much-better-articulated thoughts in response.

And I hope you stick around. Until then…

—–
* I knew some kind of reveal was coming (what with Walter being just a bit too jovial about the whole thing…we’ve seen him when he’s about to take a life, and he’s not nearly that chipper) but I was hoping it would be Kuby and Huell. Not that Badger and Skinny Pete were unwelcome sights…but man I’m going to miss Kuby and Huell.

** Which, by the by, is the right way to dump exposition right into the show without it feeling forced. Of course Marie’s worried. Of course Marie would talk too much. Of course Marie would get just enough wrong in the way of detail that it still works as comedy. This is why the “he just so happens to be sitting here while someone changes the channels” crap last week felt sloppy. The show is better than that, and this is the proof.

*** I’m tearing up just thinking about that. Jesus Christ was this a brilliant, brilliant episode of television.

The Last Laugh…

Well, “Felina” is just around the corner, and I don’t have much time to write another before that, so if you haven’t seen it yet, here’s a scary looking (but nothing-to-worry-about) link to Conan O’Brien’s Breaking Bad-themed episode. It aired, I believe, this past Monday, and I just got to see it.

http://delishows.com/conan-season-3-episode-140-the-cast-of-breaking-bad-los-cuates-de-sinaloa.html

He has the entire principal cast on the show, along with Vince Gilligan and Skinny Pete sitting in with the band, and while I don’t think there’s much revealed that obsessive fans won’t already know, seeing the entire cast together with Conan is just delightful.

So much so that you probably wouldn’t regret also watching another hour-long interview filmed a bit earlier…

Anyway it’s a fun watch, and probably worth enjoying now, before “Felina” fucking kills every last one of us.

Review: “Granite State,” Breaking Bad season 5, episode 15

While not officially referred to as one, “Granite State” is the first half of a two-part series finale. It has to be, because as a stand-alone episode it doesn’t really accomplish much.

That’s not to say that nothing happens, but it is to draw the distinction between “movement” and “accomplishment.” “Granite State” consists almost entirely of the former, and that’s okay. It may well mean that the latter comes next week. There sure is a heck of a lot left to resolve, though, and that’s what worries me.

Speaking of movement, I’m already ahead of myself, so I’ll double back a bit.

The reason I say this episode doesn’t work quite as well as a standalone is that we’re in a new place. Or, rather, a hell of a lot of new places. Walt’s new identity, Marie’s life without Hank, Junior’s knowledge of his father’s doings, Skyler’s dealings with the police and the Nazis, Jesse’s slavery…everything’s new. This is certainly the Breaking Bad we’ve been following for five seasons, but it’s also, pretty clearly, a new situation, emblemized not only by the fact that Walt obtained a new identity at the end of “Ozymandias,” but by the fact that Saul is quite literally cycled out of Walter’s life now in favor of a new character in a similar — but not identical — role.

This isn’t Mr. White visiting his lawyer for advice…this is Mr. Lambert being visited by his deleter* for basic sustenance.

It’s a different show. Or I guess I should say a different story. Which makes “Granite State,” for all it does right, feel unflatteringly like “Blood Money” to me. A lot of setup, a lot of maneuvering. Some great moments. Some indelible images. But it exists not for its own sake…it exists for the sake of getting all the pawns into the right place for the start of next week’s episode.

It also doesn’t really help that so much is left unresolved at this point. We have about 45 minutes left of the grand story to tell, but it doesn’t feel like we’re any closer to the end than we were a few weeks back. Hank’s story, of course, is over, so I guess we’re mathematically closer to having the loose ends tied up, but that’s it.

The simple rock-and-a-hard-place situation Skyler suddenly finds herself in could have been good for a season-long arc. Now whatever happens will happen fast, and that’ll be the end of it. Walt Jr. processing his emotions** should structurally come at about this point, but it’s fending for screen time with everything else that’s going on, so you get him called to the principal’s office and that’ll have to do. The break-in at Marie’s house is conveyed by a speeding vehicle and a shot of the destruction. Even Saul’s departure gets one (admittedly great) single scene, and the logistics behind deleting his identity are glossed over simply because we’re almost finished here so, please, everyone, let’s hurry up.***

I want to like “Granite State” a lot more than I do. Maybe it would have done them better to open with Walt a month or so into his exile, because following the process just makes it apparent how many holes there are. Jump ahead in time and we’ll assume things, because we have to. Allow us to watch you at work, though, and we’ll know when there are pieces missing.

This is all — do I really even need to say this? — without having seen “Felina.” I could eat my words, and I look forward to doing so. Maybe viewed through the lens of the final episode, “Granite State” will reveal itself as a work of brilliance. At the very least, I’m sure it’ll work better simply because we’ll have a stronger sense of what the place-setting was in aid of. For now, though? It feels less like Breaking Bad and more like a series of skits about these characters, arranged like an FAQ.

If the Nazis know about the tape in Hank’s house, won’t they go and get it?
Yes. They will go and get it.

Even though Walt tried to distance Skyler from his crimes with last week’s phone call, won’t the police still try to get to him through her?
Yes. The police are trying to get to him through her.

Is Jesse still in the cage?
Good question. Yes, Jesse is still in the cage.

How is Walt Jr. handling all of this?
Here is a scene to show you how he’s handling all of this.

It just seemed a bit…rigid. And for a storyline that’s so obviously in flux, that’s bizarre and disappointing.

Don’t get me wrong…a lot of what it did worked, but it failed to cohere. Walt’s last ditch effort to rope Saul into his revenge, the snowy isolation of New Hampshire, the conversation with his son, the IV dangling from a deer antler…this is all great stuff. The ingredients are there, and they’re all mixed together, but nobody turned on the stove. And it culminates in what is probably the clumsiest bit of expository desperation Breaking Bad has ever resorted to: The Charlie Rose Show.

I like Charlie Rose. Awesome guy. It’s nice to see him here. And it’s nice to see him interviewing two characters from the early years of the show. I fault none of them…but I do fault the writing, which had Jessica Hecht (last seen in my single favorite episode) discussing the Heisenberg character as though she’s reading from somebody’s half-baked but well-intentioned YouTube comment on a “WALT IS A BADASS!!!!” compilation video.

End in the middle of a shootout, and I’ll trust you to make good on it. End on one character metatextualizing another and I’m not going to be quite as confident. That was sloppy.

I did like a few of the misleads in this episode — from thinking Uncle Jack was angry that Todd never told him about the boy all the way through making it seem like Louis was going to be a character that served an actual purpose — but for all the shuffling and shifting around, I’m left a bit cold.

There are some nice thematic callbacks to the grander scheme of things, reminding us that as detached as “Granite State” feels it’s still part of the same show. Such as Skyler phasing in and out during her discussion with the DEA, and Andrea joining the likes of Hugo, Gale, Gomez, Ted, and Jane’s dad on the list of good people steamrolled by the momentum of Somebody Else’s Evil.

I also liked how Jesse’s escape toyed with us. We’ve seen him gradually become more and more valuable and intelligent as an ally, to the point that he was outthinking both Walt and Mike earlier this season. The magnets…the train robbery…the conviction that Lydia didn’t betray them. Those were all Jesse. He was the cooler, leveler head…and he prevailed.

Granted, it doesn’t take much in the way of intelligence to stack up a bunch of crap and hope it reaches the top, but that’s okay. Because we want to read all of these things together. We want to see Jesse get out of the pit, and we want it to feel earned. We can read these things as foreshadowing so that it does…all we need is for Jesse to make it.

And, for a little while, it seems like he might. But there’s a fence. And he’s dragged right back down.

Which is a bit what it felt like to watch “Granite State.” For a little while, it feels like it just might climb out of the hole it’s dug. But it doesn’t, and we end on an even lower point. It’s up to “Felina” to get us out.

I am confident that it will. Just don’t ask me how, or why it needed a lead-in so uncharacteristically graceless in order to do it.

—–
* Did anyone feel like it was just a bit of a stretch that this happened, by the way? I always got the sense that this character would take your money, furnish you with some new docs, and disavow all knowledge forever. If you fucked up after that, oh well; it’s in his best interest to leave no connections, for just such an occasion. He did make a few comments to the effect that Walt was a special case, but I couldn’t really buy that as an explanation. He’s a special case, yes, but he’s special in the way that you’d want to get him out of your life even more quickly, and you certainly wouldn’t want to be establishing lasting links with the man.

** It sure was nice to see some “forgotten” characters back again though, I have to admit. Carmen, Gretchen and Elliott were welcome faces, even if they were wedged into an already overstuffed episode.

*** Seriously? I know the idea is to show that this deleter guy is Mike-like in his ability to GSD — or get shit done, as they say — but Goodman’s a regional celebrity with a mountain of active clients and active employees on his payroll. Not to mention shifty business associates that relied on him and aren’t going to be happy that he skipped town. And everyone’s somehow supposed to forget about him in a couple of days? Nebraska’s not the moon, and the kinds of people Goodman deals with are the kinds of people who would be perfectly happy to make the trip. These are steps that the show used to relish exploring, but now it feels like we’re just skipping things.