It’s Monday so…
Chào các cô, ladies! Chào các cô!
Last week was very full. Much basketball, much work, much music. It wasn’t all great. Friday’s game turned out to be the last game of the post-season and it was rough and a hard loss. But the team got their out-of-uniform day for school today anyway, and in an 8th grader’s world, that can salve much pain.
Watching: Well, duh. It’s all Better Call Saul and Tennessee/Florida/Indiana basketball around here, although the Florida/Indiana fan has just about given up hope, hahahaha.
They seem to be really liking BCS. We’re just starting the third season, but this week will slow us down, what with work and Lent and all. I had been wondering what they’d think of it – it’s definitely slower paced than Breaking Bad and in a way more “mature.” That is, not in terms of possibly objectionable content, but thematically – it’s far more subtle than Breaking Bad is. It’s more of a character study than a weird, twisty, violent morality play. But the ground was broken by one of the older one’s teachers who would occasionally talk about both shows and who averred that he preferred BCS. So that kid was ready, at least.
BCS is characterized by, in part, long set-pieces in which we are watching someone simply do something. They’re figuring something out, they’re constructing something, they’re putting a plan into action. Sometimes I think the scripts for these episodes must average about three pages long, there’s so little dialogue. Contrary to my expectations, the guys are totally absorbed in these scenes, one exclaiming at the end of minutes and minutes of Mike tooling around with some tech, How is he so smart!?
As I’ve said many times before in writing about it, BCS is essentially about how you’ve become the person you are. Is it determined? Must you be this person, fated by the way others have treated you and your own choices? The trick is, of course, that we know how most of the major characters turned out by the time BB rolls around – including some of whom who die during that time frame – so it really is a masterful production that can keep us absorbed in character development of characters we already know turn out one way or another.
Writing: Finishing up revisions on a book this morning. That’s always a humbling process. You turn something in, thinking, “Well, this is pretty good,” and then it comes back, full of red marks and comments. Many of those red marks come down to a difference in opinion about style, but some of them – well, you think back to when you turned it in and how satisfied you were, and then you read what you actually wrote, those passages where the editor gently suggests, “clarify?” and you think…wow…how could I ever have thought this would make sense? I’m…an idiot.
So, yes. Lenten humility, early.
Once they get it up on their website, I’ll link to it here.
So, this morning, I’ll finish this post, take an hour, I hope, to finish those revisions, then write a post on A Burnt-Out Case, and then hit the fiction again.
In honor of the forthcoming season of Lent, I’ve put Mary Magdalene: Truth, Legends and Lies on sale at Amazon for free.
I’ll be in Living Faith later this week.
Don’t forget the Lent page and all my links there. Now that pre-Lent griping is over, check out what the saints have to say about fasting.
Note: feel free to use any of the graphics I’ve made that go with those fasting posts. Attribute or not – I don’t care. It’s fine!
Cooking: Made this Ida Garten pot roast recipe yesterday. The sauce is a lot more than I expected, but it’s good. Worth the afternoon’s oven time.
(For the record – I don’t own a slow cooker or Insta-Pot. I do all this kind of cooking stovetop and oven. I’m sure if I worked outside of the home a slow cooker would be invaluable, but I don’t so, I go old school.)
Listening:
Sorry, more BCS references here. We often (as in daily at some point) listen to the major Latino radio station here – LA JEFA! The other day, this song came on, and I immediately perked up – I’ve heard this before I claimed and my son said, “Well, you probably heard it, you know, on this radio station.” Maybe, I thought, but my memory is very attuned to context (which is why it’s better for me to read on real pages in books and magazines – it helps my retention) and it just didn’t seem as if that had been the context of my previous exposure to this song – a weird, funny, catchy tune. What was it?
Well, then the other night, this scene rolled onscreen – yes!
Mystery solved – and why it was so familiar to me, considering I’ve probably watched this episode three times so far…
One more musical note from BCS. The music director(s) on this and Breaking Bad is (are) masterful. Really, if you want to listen to some interesting, different music of tremendous variety and all high quality, look up playlists from either show on Spotify. It’s not simply that they have superb ears, but also that the matching of music and dramatic moment is usually perfect. The end of episode 6, season 2 is a case in point. I won’t link to the scene itself, but just know it’s a scene which wordlessly depicts a moment of subtle self-knowledge and self-acceptance and a determination to move forward.
This is the music – a Bengali song by an Australian group called The Bombay Royale – underlying the scene – the video’s winning and crazy. Crank it up for the office and get your week going!