Cold Open (Abstract)

Ding...

Knowledge Nexus Mission Statement:

So, the goal of this blog/project/site/hot mess is, to prove the tao "The Meaning of Breaking Bad is the Meaning of Life." That was as simple as I could get it, I swear to Blog. "Huh, WTF!"...you prepare to type (...yeah, good luck scrolling down in time!). 

Surely this is an insane "thesis." But yeah, I'm gonna work on it; not on changing it (its in the URL already), but on using this network of knowledge to actually prove it. As you can see here or here, this wasn't something I could have stumbled on by myself, and I've been trying to craft my own path for a while (see my overly emotional sob story here). This comes out of years of being unhealthily obsessed with the show. I mean, I gained some cool friends from the scene, but definitely alienated many "outsiders." It never quite got to a rock-bottom scene like this one...

...but sometimes the child-like-desperation-to-understand-a-world-greater-than-myself was eerily similar.

It's an addiction, but one of the rare ones that doesn't just healthily alleviate the pain of in-dependent living, but is actually a vehicle to confrontation of the darkness within and without you (check out this article, and please be open-minded: I used to be a raving atheist, and am still in a state of free-[wheelin']-thought, but this both rocked and solidified my foundational beliefs in Breaking Bad, and in life). 

Like McLuhan sez, "the media is the message." 

In relation to Breaking Bad, we can also mirror that and say, "the message is the media."

Here were some other titles I was kicking around,

• "Breaking Bad is the Truth" pretty outlandish (if that was the main title for some stuffy academic essay I were crafting, the subtitle would be something really nerve-wracking, like "How Darkness showed Light to Our World" or "The Tense Bungie Jump into the Abyss and Back Up Toward the Enlightenment and Well Being Provided By Getting to Close to the Sun-as-it-represents-both-gods-saving-grace-and-cosmic-indifference-to-the-subject"

Luckily I didn't officially go there. It would really scare folks. Even folks with a fully open browser page, on a giant screen. The header alone would be like half the page. I wouldn't even want to think about what if would look like if I was browsing it on a cell phone.

• "Breaking Blog" seemed like the most Search optimal choice, but I didn't even want to bother finding out that it already existed, and needed some type of title that would contain the hot-mess of my free-wheelin' analyses (...maybe that is a poor way to put it).

Maybe I could of had fun with the whole double entendre of "oh, I'm also trying to break from the confines of the stereotypical blog...tehehe." But if I decided to codify that scheme I would instantly reveal myself as a prick. So, brevity and header spatiality be damned! The truth cannot always be compromised for accessibility and good taste.

So why did I think "The Meaning of Breaking Bad is the Meaning of Life" was the best bet? Because it the most authentic and encapsulating thing I could say about the show, near its final stretch. This project may be my attempt to always have the show ingrained into my day-to-day; but even though the final episode will arrive in bout two months, I know it is not goodbye, the episodes can be re-watched and appreciated anew. Seemingly constant renewal; "...no end in sight..."

I don't think I should meet the genius that made this; we may never stop our BB conversation

All Aboard the MoBBitMoL Train!

Based on the ideas recently presented in the masterful A.V. Club article by Todd VanDerWerff, and the thoughts in the slightly-less-recently-presented-ed but just as masterful-ful Article in the Same Really Awesome Website by Donna Bowman, the show already provides almost inexhaustible spectatorship (i.e. television viewery), and there are still eight episodes left which may all turn out to be rubix-cube-rube-goldberg-clockwork-orange-LSD-trip-meeting-god-losing-virginity type of cosmic mind-fuck. It's sort of like that other archetype about renewal, what's that bird...yeah, Phoenix, wait...oh shiiiit.

Mid-Script: Epic shout out to folks at 
Cleo Literary Society, those siblings of mine reading this probably just got the biggest mind-mess hoot out of the silly bit I just pulled with the phoenix.

The amount of various perspectives, conceptual-frameworks, stylistic choices, mood, theme, and over-all artistic precision that can be deconstructed out of any given shot is practically inexhaustible; keeping in mind this is a show which is a Five Act (seasons) take on the Shakespearean Drama with 61 episodes (ohhhh...could there be aflash forward to Walt's 61st...or maybe to the time where he would have "celebrated it," as a final post-script to the show...?)

With the recent surge of online criticism, one point I strongly disagree with is this one phrase from another AV Club article (their recent Breaking Bad Week of discussion inspired me to actually write all this jazz down), presented in block-quote form:

• Given the show’s history, though, the odds are low that any mistakes will be truly cataclysmic, and time has a way of eliding over the rough edges of a successful television series. More importantly, the security is inherent in that structure. Outside of making sure Walt’s fate is appropriate, and that Jesse and the others are accounted for, there are no mysteries to resolve here. Shows like Lost and Battlestar Galactica fumbled when they tried to mix complex mythologies with the seat-of-the-pants storytelling that television requires. Those mythologies demanded conclusions that would explain as much as they resolved. Breaking Bad’s mythology is elusive, symbolic, and largely unimportant. What we know about Gray Matter, the company Walt left behind (he claims they screwed him over; the implication is that his temper drove him out), is important only inasmuch as it tells us about him. There are no major questions left unanswered, apart from 'What happens next?'

As I hope I've been able to get-at-already, the mythos of the show is inextricable with its pathos. Yes, it is "elusive" and "symbolic;" but it i anything but "unimportant." It may be the meaning of life, for Christ's sake! And "no major questions left?" If so...then I really need to reflect on my life and start allocating my energy and time better...

Mid-Script: Yep, this ego-battle-straw-manery is how the professional academics often get'er'done when it comes to publishing a unique idea in a market that is already over saturated with excessively drawn out rhetorical babble (really, thinking the big thoughts is cool and all, but the world is kind of sort of burning around us, right?....I'm not alone in thinking this, right? All the "news stations" and transients down by my favorite convenience store seem to think so). I like to think of the archetypal passive intellectuals as those that "play with their fiddles, when in Rome, as it burns." I can parse this phrase so rudely because of how guilty I often am of it.

So yeah, the title is supposed to be a self-enclosed circle. Like that fancy piece of rhetorical charlatanry I tried to pull past y'all earlier with the McLuhan pun, the "Mission Statement" is read backwards as well, so I'm also getting at "the Meaning of Life is the Meaning of Breaking Bad." They are two sides of the same side of two coins. An ouroboros devouring its tail in a seemingly self-contained but actually amorphous circle of fluctuating progression-regression-thermodynamical-point-of-Heisenberg's-CERTAINTY principle. Another appropriate cultural symbol would be, I don't know, a Mandala or something, hey....oh, shiiiiit.

I had one idea for an all-encompassing "thesis" that struck me after I already dived into setting the content up, but I'm pretty sure I was being ironic...but at this stage it's hard to say...

• Break Bad to Build Good
• How an Arbitrary Anecdote Arising out of Gallows Humor and Economic Tensions Planted a Seed which Sprouted into a Televisual Zeitgeist Roller-Coast Ride to Hell and Back again (...and back again[...and forward again]...and a few more leaps back, all over yet again) Shattered Every Expectation to Break Badness (i.e. corrupt practices across many interlocked spheres of thought/existence); and How An Understandably Uneasy Audience/Market Machine Grew to Stop Worrying and Love the "Bomb." 

So yeah, we're gonna act as disciples to the great televisual God, and have a semi-contained site that can at-least-half-heartedly prove the so-mystic-it-is-kind-of-irrefutable thesis of the title.

Hmmmm, this sort of audiovisual devotion and blog's overall goal to create hybrid-cyborg-esque-television-spectator-inhabitants borderlines on perhaps an insane psychosis, I feel my media-memory stirring...oh, shiiiiit

So, to quote good ol' Walt in a Quote you've probably heard to death by now, "We have product...ready to go...are you ready?"

You already know exactly what this project is all about, now. This is the site that maybe-could-end-up-(who-knows-I-make-get-lazy-and-forget-to-write-anything-else-once-the-show-begins-again) being the site that killed (I mean, deconstructed in a humble, collaborative, and tributary way) BREAKING BAD. I'll do the name-calling for ya, "The Meaning of Breaking Bad is the Meaning of Life."

And, in conclusion, one final last ultimate end(of the abstract) mantra, from the divine words of the holy show-of-shows, and I don't mean this in a chauvinistic way....

...bitch