Breaking Bad
Walter White soldered and unframed
Walter White with patina and came frame
Walter White wood framed and naturally lit
A homage idea had a growth spurt into a stained glass cartoon celebrating the brilliance of Vince Gilligan and Peter Gould’s Breaking Bad.
From the broken pieces of glass, with a meth blue background, emerged our tribute to Breaking Bad, the incomparable AMC thriller.
As the focus, protagonist Walter is transformed into a blood-red bespectacled Heisenberg.
To capitalize on Walter’s fall from grace, the stained glass, less than cryptically, highlights, above Walter’s head, the fly from the excellent eponymous bottle episode directed by Rian Johnson. In that episode, Walter’s Ahab is easily bested by the tiniest of whales.
Gus Fring, the chicken man from los pollos hermanos, gets a leg up on the unnamed fly at the right corner of the glass with an extra crispy chicken part and at the left center with a lethally used box cutter leaking poor, loyal Victor’s blood.
Walter’s underwear harkens back to a more innocent time of tumbling khakis and a stranded RV lab. It was a time when Jesse’s attention was rapt, learning the differences among beakers and cooks. Mr White was still his didactic teacher; and Jesse, unfortunately, had become a better student.
The stained glass at center bottom has a red berry from the plant that Walter used to poison a child, Brock. The poison’s source, a lily of the valley, appears as part of the final shot of season four.
Below the berry is part of the wreckage of the ill-fated flight, the eye of the teddy bear that Walter finds in his swimming pool filter. It is evocative of Jane’s death, the ABQ episode, the second season and the consequences of both Walter’s sins of commission and omission.
The untitled green book (Leaves of Grass) with WW painted in the corner represents a symbolic turning point for Jesse who murders Gale, the too fervent admirer of Walter, likely even in extremis. The WW itself stands for either Walt(er) Whit(e)man or Walter White. The book was Gale’s gift to Walter, a gift that kept on giving and was a pivotal laxative in Hank’s obstructed investigation.
The U-lock episode marks the beginning of Walter’s breaking bad, very bad. Crazy-8 (Ocho Loco), drug dealer and informant, is poisoned, tortured and killed after waxing nostalgic about bassinets, his dad and a local furniture store.
The chemistry symbols within the bike lock are iconic to the opening credits, a show all about the chemistry of evil.
Peaky Blinders
Tommy Shelby framed
lit by natural light
Red Right Hand
detail lit by natural light
Our second project, taking about five months, was a tribute to Peaky Blinders, a brilliant British crime drama featuring Cillian Murphy as Tommy Shelby. Peaky Blinders is approximately the same size as Breaking Bad, but more intricate.
In many ways, the show is a revisionist American western set in a desolate Birmingham, England.
Civilization in Birmingham is plunged deep within the shadows of sweat, mayhem and violence. Personal morality strains under the appeal of barbaric materialism.
At the start, a horse mounted Tommy Shelby canters through the demonic, moody Birmingham mists. Nick Caves’s red right hand heralds his appearance. Birmingham is ablaze with bludgeoning hammers and battered anvils.
We come to learn that Tommy Shelby, traumatized, had tunneled out of the Great War to reshape the new world around him, to recast commandments for others to obey and to manipulate friends, family and enemies along the way.
His family, the Shelbys, and their spectral bookmaker empire are helmed by Aunt Polly (the incomparable, late Helen McCrory). Aunt Polly corrals the sullen siblings and tillers their blood-soaked bookmaking.
Pipe smoking Major Campbell (Sam Neill) is the sanctimonious, sadistic personification of law in the world that Tommy tries to order mid the chaos.
Throughout the series, Tommy’s world is a house of betting slips. Whether it was Tommy's panic attacks or the night terrors or his brother Arthur's alcoholism with its chasers of uncontrollable violence, post traumatic stress is very much a part of the Shelby way of life.
Intrigues abound.
Atmospheric cinematography and a hip soundtracking usher in stellar drama in which an intrepid Tommy remains shackled metaphorically to family and especially to his mad-as-a-hatter brother Arthur. Modishly doffing flat caps pocketed with razor blades, the Shelby family is always first and foremost.
As all viewers come to realize, Tommy has things to do because Tommy knows well that a gangster life, foreshadowed in the terrors of night, will be foreshortened.
Steven Knight crafted these highly entertaining, human if not humane, escapades and set them in a traumatized England, slouching into the twentieth century. Peaky Blinders stars an excellent Cillian Murphy and has guest actors with the full mastery of all that is acting talent: Tom Hardy, Aiden Gillen and Adrien Brody.
Peaky Blinders is one of the outstanding streaming shows available on Netflix, and for that matter, on any other platform.
Tommy Shelby framed
lit from the front
Tommy Shelby’s horse
detail lit from the back
In January 2023 our third project, Better Call Saul, was completed; and we hung it in our front window on the third floor of our condo in Wrigleyville, about a block from Wrigley field.
Gilligan and Gould had painted Saul into the corner of Breaking Bad. What to do? Take down the abutting narrative walls with a sequel, a prequel and a parallel story.
BCS is a show about moral choice where there are many exits, but few takers.
Rhea Seehorn’s Kim schemes nearly as much as the next fellow, especially if the next fellow is Jimmy. Kim, her intelligence tempered, is a true believer, who appreciates Jimmy for many of the right and many of the wrong reasons … but as the show develops, the audience learns that she is not without guileful sin. In bespoke suits and tightly ponytailed, a self-reliant Kim, amid the laughs, struggles tragically along a road of bad choices. No one can forget that Kim could both blackmail the Kettlemans and blow a hole in her own ethical code with the mesa verde romp. It is Kim who decides to get Howard and also to help bail Lalo out of the clink. Her punishment: Kim puts herself in the penalty box of the sunshine state, sans the sunshine.
Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy-Saul-Gene never runs out of cons. He is slippin’ Jimmy; and there is nobody quite like him. He is a felonious Tracy to Kim’s Hepburn. With Jimmy, it is always showtime. Jimmy is attracted as much to the con as he is the money. He can sell a cell phone or sell somebody down a river of regret. Does he care? Sure, but never enough. If you fake it long enough, you become what you pretend to be. His world is the world of the long con. There are many slippin jimmys out there (just check your emails). But there is none to compare to Bob Odenkirk’s Jimmy from day one in BCS to his penitentiary good bye to Kim and all of us.
Let’s take a look around the glass.
On the left top, there is Chuck’s lamp. Chuck, Jimmy’s older brother, was perennially resentful of Jimmy because of Jimmy’s ongoing exploits, swindles and Jimmy’s energetic rizz. The only way to stop a rule breaker is to break some rules yourself. Chuck does. One kerosene lamp on the edge of Chuck’s table will end the need for space blankets, constant hypersensitivity and Chuck’s on the money conspiracy theories. Forced into retirement, Chuck will no longer teeter on the edge of sanity. Chuck may not have been lovable and Jimmy did care for him; but Jimmy was well aware that his responsibilities to his brother went beyond grocery shopping.
Above both Kim and Saul, is an inflatable Statue of Liberty, a lodestar to Saul’s thronging lonely, lost clients. Remarkably the resurrected, hoodwinking Betsy and Craig Kettleman animated their tax assistance office with a suspiciously similar and apparently equally supple memorial. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses … “ Blah, blah, blah.
On the right, the rear view mirror, introduced by air freshener, reveals Jeff’s eyes. Jeffie could spot a Saul on the lam when he saw one. Marion’s son easily put aside the denials of Gene Tacovic who knew well that his heels were being nipped at.
On the lower left, comfort for large swaths of America, the cinnabon. Is there such a thing as too much dough? Saul loved making jokes about donuts and authority figures. Well thanks to Ed, the joke was on Saul. Saul hoovered up what remained of his Albuquerque life and committed himself to a black and white Omaha life of frosting, drudgery and fear as Gene.
To the left of the cinnabon is Hector’s bell and finger about to summon all to hell. The Salamancas believe in family values and believe in hell. Sorry, Gus. Sorry, Nacho. Their family values: nobody else’s. Their family includes Tuco, the twins and Lalo.
Howard’s vanity plate on his green jag (akin to Saul’s lawyer-up plate) takes center bottom on the window:
NAMAST3
Howard (Patrick Fabian) is a perfect foil for Jimmy. He is the truth-teller to both Kim and Jimmy. But like so many Cassandras before him, he is ignored. So be it. But in Saul’s world, not so fast. Saul … and Kim … have to punish him for both perceived and vague wrongs. It is all good fun until isn’t.
Better Call Saul
Kim and Saul framed
on a cloudy day with no front light
Saul detail
back lit by natural light
Kim detail
back lit by natural light
Kim and Saul
back lit by street light
Kim and Saul back lit
by street light at night and front lit
by artificial light
Game Of Thrones
Daenerys and Jon unframed
front lit by natural light
GOT is many things to many people. GOT has a wall that Mexico didn’t pay for. GOT was and is must-watch streaming television. it is a tale with so many characters that even President Obama had difficulty remembering the fifty or so major characters’ names.
It is hard to recall a show with better production values, to recall a show with consistently excellent direction, or to recall a show that created such an immense world that used ravens in lieu of iMessaging.
Before GOT, we knew who the good guys were; and we were confident they would be a moral compass from one season to another. Before GOT, the bad guys stayed bad guys and stayed predictable.
Last season’s complaints aside, the show never lost the focus of the Game. The opening credits reminded us that we were entering a new world, familiar in a medieval sense, yet wondrously unknown … where only the unpredictable became predictable.
The George RR Martin’s narrative itself could have been ponderous, but showrunners D. B. Weiss and David Benioff introduced Salome-like storytelling, entwined with comical revelations of private parts.
It, ludicrously, worked again and again.
Amid the classic ruthless rulers, north and south, classic valiant knights, classic loyal and disloyal servants, and unrivaled siblings, Martin added to the narrative a Stormborn princess, a fire-born trinity of dragons, hilarious and horrifying weddings, and (sometimes in the foreground and always in the background) the threat of the coming of Winter.
Picking the subjects of our window was not difficult: Dany and her dragon would be primary and Jon, girded for battle, would be secondary.
Daenerys Targaryen is the most complex of characters, linked by birthright to the game, at first victimized by her crazed, despicable brother and later reborn as an avenging angel whose ennobling vision is consumed by the very fire that gave it birth.
Daenerys Targaryen, alternately conquered and conquering, brutally and shockingly captivates the audience, an audience that knows well that Emilia Clarke’s performance rightfully will be etched in memory for years.
Like Clarke’s Daenerys, Kit Harrington’s Jon Snow captured a Winter wight and the imaginations of millions.
In the penultimate episode of season six, Jon’s reckless stance against Ramsay Bolton’s cavalrymen and overwhelming odds is just the beginning of an end.
GOT’s brilliant director Miguel Sapochnik unleashed all of his many skills.
Jon’s horse is shot out from under him; and Jon draws Longclaw to fight the battle of the bastards, a battle that has the never-less-than-sadistic Ramsay ordering mindlessly the slaughter of his own men. The shielded phalanx chokes Jon’s forces; and the ensuing battle is breathtakingly chaotic.
It is a terrifying episode that underscores how Jon Snow, who ‘knows nothing,’ knows never to give up.
Jon Snow & Longclaw
detail front lit by natural light