And, I tell ya, August and I have really missed doing our Mad Men write ups the past few episodes, especially since, as far as I’m concerned, this has been the show’s strongest season yet, but on the plus side, it’s probably spared you an incredible amount of Nora Zehetner photos that I would’ve just bombarded you with…
I was all set to fill in for Marco and write up a Mad Men recap, but then I noticed that OS X now blocks screenshots of protected content. I don’t know when they worked in that wrinkle, but well done sirs. I’m far too lazy to search for screencaps online, so I’ll just drop some general thoughts.
Don: Is it a problem that I now root for Don Draper the same way I do for Jason Stackhouse? I’m like, “Attaboy, Draper! For an encore, do your neighbor!” Probably. I don’t know if television has ever given us one character, let alone two, who deal with this kind of “pussy overflow” on such a regular basis. Old Don would be hopelessly drawn to to the self-assured marketing analyst, because just like Rachel Mencken, girls who say no turn him on. New Don… well, we’ll see how much he’s really changed. He’s single now, so women are viewing him as a potential partner instead of just a fling now, and he’s having trouble getting used to it.
Peggy: Her talk with Freddy was a little “on the nose,” as they say, but we get the picture. Peggy knows this dork isn’t marriage material, so she’ll fuck him for now, knowing this will hasten his exit. While we’ve certainly gotten hints of feminist angst from her before, I think this episode was the closest she’s come to outright voicing them. I liked the half-grimace she, Joan and the marketing chick all seemed to share when White Pants were brought up in the meeting.
Roger: I think SCDP will not end the season with Lucky Strike as a client.
Betty: Fuck Betty.
Glen: Him too. Creep. The world, August Bravo aside, was not asking for more Glen.
——-
But what’s really on my mind tonight/this morning is the new Arcade Fire album: The Suburbs.
As soon as I read about the title of this LP, I had a feeling I’d like it. I’ve always had a complex connection with suburbia, and it sounds like Win Butler does too. I’m only on my second listen-through, but I can tell that this is an album that’s going to keep growing on me.
It’s a sort of choppy, stream of consciousness series of vignettes on the love/hate relationships between the suburbs and the city. The sprawl is an inescapable malaise of crushed dreams, but go downtown and maybe those shallow hipsters aren’t your kind either. Two years into an economic catastrophe and a lot of those downtown bohemia promises can start to sound like so much happy bullshit. Something fascinating about the line, “Now that San Francisco’s gone, I guess I’ll just pack it in.” There’s a theme of weary resignation here. But in The Suburbs, resignation feels a lot like growing up, and who says that’s a good thing, even if it’s unavoidable.
Most of the kids in my generation — if they could afford to, if they didn’t get shackled with a burdensome spouse or child, or military service — they moved to the city as soon as they could get away. Me, I moved back to the suburbs. I guess I’ve always felt there was something important going on here. Something that, if I came to understand it, would understand everything about modern American life. I don’t think I do yet, but I’m getting closer.
I’m confident that one day I will, and then I’ll leave.
Right off the bat, let’s lift a shadow off this evening: The only people for us are the mad ones and there’s nothing nearly eloquent enough to explain our excitement about the return of Mad Men tonight (and the return of us gabbing about each new episode afterward) with the fourth season premiere, “Public Relations,” but August is going to start us off with…
August Bravo: One of those guys is going to leave New York with a VD.
Is it me or shouldn’t this episode have been titled “Don Fucking Draper,” right?
Marco Sparks: Seriously. That would have been a great title for the season premiere of the show for rich people and rich minds alike.
August: Seriously. This episodes taps into the psyche of Don and who he is now. Maybe who he always was.
Marco: I feel like every single season we’re told that there’s a larger question hanging over that particular year or story arc, and there is no resolution, not clearly. There’s milestones. There’s totems on that timeline. There’s road blocks and rest stops, but that probing question only gets more complicated, more faceted…
But it’s nice that no matter how despicable some of Don’s actions can be, he’s still one of our better role models for men on television. Right? Well… no, probably not. There’s obviously a very masculine energy to him, a complicated creature of intrigue and overflowing with a talent that can’t be denied and a certain enviable confidence. But it’s a weird time for men now, not unlike the 60s in some regards, and it’s hard to find good male role models in this day and age…
Though it’s interesting to watch the new era of Don Draper. The single Don, a man living a sadder life perhaps? It’s like watching an actor without a real role. Don’s always a little more in his zone when he’s lying to a woman effectively and it’s got to be hard for him when the possible new girl in his life sees through a little of the old tricks of his. But, Don being Don, and knowing the ways of the world like he does, and being in advertising after all, he relies on kindly women from the oldest profession who can give him what he wants, a literal expression of what has happened to him thus far: A good slapping around.
August: No need for the hooker to take off her brassiere, she already knows what Don wants.
Marco: Even if perhaps Don himself doesn’t.
August: I’m not sure a lot of people could have imagined Don throwing himself down to this level. But I don’t think it’s like that.
Marco: I’m sure the events of his life sure haven’t helped. The confusion at work as they build a new company. The constant struggle to move out of the darkened corners of invisible anonymity in the creative department to becoming the poster boy, the handsome cipher, the face of the company.
It’s 1964 at this point, it’s Thanksgiving, and Don isn’t finding himself a whole lot to be thankful for. This new found freedom isn’t necessarily good for him, it sure as hell isn’t glamorous in any way, and divorced guys are seemingly considered basically damaged goods. And I think a lot of people came up with a lot of reasons for why Don like or wants or needs a bit of the rough stuff in his sex life, specifically being slapped, but the very first thing I got out of it was a reminder of Betty slapping him back in the season finale last year.
August: Life is just slapping him around at this point. I think it’s about what he said earlier. Every day he works is an investment for the company. He has no time to pick up women and seduce them into copious amounts of sex, to play that particular game that he plays so well. He has work to do.
Marco: Cause in every single way, Don is the star of this show.
I love the use of “John And Marsha” by Stan Freeberg, one of the kings of early satire, and the song is both a lovely inside joke when it comes to the world of advertising and a nice joke on soap operas. And it only becomes so much more meta when you consider that that’s really what Mad Men is.
August: Johnnnnnn.
Marco: Marshaaaaaaa.
August: In the metamorphosis from Sterling Cooper to Sterling Cooper Draper Price I’m glad they’ve updated from their shanty of an office in a hotel room to an actual floor, which unfortunately enough for Harry Crane doesn’t have more than one story, with their name on the door. Sorry Pete, guess they did end up having a lobby. But still no table…
Marco: I think we’re all holding our breath in anticipation of more Joan. And the possibility of Joan and Don… you know. That’s the difference, in just some regards, between a show like Mad Men and True Blood… True Blood is all soft core fan service (at some point everyone on that show will have fucked everyone else on that show for our amusement) and Mad Men is cerebral teasing all the way. It’s about dangling and snatching away at the last moment.
I especially think that’s true in light of this episode of Mad Men, which is all about not being able to close certain deals and not wanting to close others. You gotta love Don’s orchestrated “fuck off” to the prudes manufacturing sex in swim wear and thinking they’re better than they are.
August: I enjoyed the ruse Peggy and Pete conjured in order to garner press for the ham company. Didn’t go as planned, but that’s life I guess.
Marco: “It was going great… until it wasn’t.” Is this the beginning of real publicity stunts as prominent and regular tools for advertising?
August: It’s hard out there for the boys and girls in America. Especially in the 60′s. 1964, if I’m not mistaken?
Marco: It certainly is.
August: Sad to see no one from the old Sterling Cooper in the episode, but I’m sure we will in due time.
Marco: Like your beloved Ken Cosgrove.
August: Ken had cool hair. Terrific few parts of the episode? Don and Roger bickering back and forth about the one-legged reporter and his inability to write a real story. Maybe they should talk to a whole reporter next time? Ha-ha. Roger sure as shit was the comedy relief in this episode as a lot of things/people were so morose.
Now back to Don, who has always been the main character of the show, I guess the protagonist, if you will, who really made this episode what it was. I think he feels this is temporary, this won’t last with Betty…
Marco: Henry Francis just feels like he’s about to get hit by a car or walk off the top of a skyscraper any moment now, doesn’t he? His patheticness almost makes Betty look even more cruel and horrid. It leaves where she ends up because of her frustrations from the past few years even more unchecked. Just as the kids are scared of their mother, I can’t imagine Francis not growing bored of her and then where will Matthew Weiner deliver her( and us)?
August: Will Don get back with her? Will he want to? The man with no key to his own house. I love his ability to take the jabs by his attorney and Roger in this episode. Usually so defensive, I think he’s just too shot down. Or just doesn’t give a shit anymore.
Marco: I’d be hurt if Benjie Light doesn’t have a few words to share with us about Betty, but I like where they’re taking the kids here, story-wise and post-divorce, the way they’re building on what we’ve seen so far concerning Sally and Bobby Draper. Sally, of course, is going to rebel and be repulsed by the way her little life is going so far and Bobby is going to grow up to be fucking creepy. If they ever do an episode flashing forward to where all the characters ended up, I want to see Bobby Draper, with his new striving to be liked by everyone now, as a politician.
And since they cast Matt Long as Peggy’s little partner, I’m wondering just out of curiosity since I never actually watched Jack And Bobby (and I don’t believe that anyone else did either)(though I think John Slattery was on there too), but didn’t Bobby end up being the one who grew up to become President?
August: No need for Don to try to defend his failing marriage, he’s got other things to worry about. Like mentioning jai alai…
Especially since Henry’s idea of recapturing the magic between involves them fucking in the car, seemingly echoing back to when they had to sneak around? Only one episode in and I already feel like these characters feel like they can’t handle the a-changin’ times around them and they’re flirting with the soft seduction of the past and all of it’s elements, the moments when they felt happier or more dangerous.
August: I couldn’t tell you where this episode may take us, as far as the new season is concerned. I’m just hoping I get to see more of Pryce.
Marco: And Joan. And maybe more Trudy/Alison Brie? And maybe we can slowly grasp our way towards something resembling that eternally elusive question that this show constantly is hanging over us…
Thank fucking God that Mad Men is coming back, right? Right? After the end of Lost, I kind of felt like I wanted to take a break from TV, and for the most part, I have. The only shows I tune in regularly to in any regard are Party Down and Doctor Who, though by “tune in regularly,” I do, of course, mean via the internet. Oh, and True Blood too. And yet, all that said, it’s funny how I realize what a Mad Men-sized gap there’s been in my life once I really start to visualize the return of the show. Does that make sense? Do I care? Either way, I think we can all take a vote on it and it’ll come out unanimous that it’s time for Mad Men to return, yes?
Various upcoming movies: Inception, The Green Hornet (which looks, if possible, more terrible than I could’ve imagined in my wildest dreams), Pumzi (a short film by Kenyan director Wanuri Kahiu about a world decimated after “water wars”), and A Topiary, the second movie by Shane Carruth, who directed Primer.
Oh, and just so there’s no confusion: According to Wikipedia, “Public Relations” is currently listed as the title of the first episode of Mad Men‘s upcoming season.
Some of these pictures are by Tauba Auerbach, and I found them here, and one of the photos below is from right here. David Markson died twelve days ago but I didn’t find it out until today when I read it on somebody’s blog. This picture makes me laugh and makes me want to email it to Peanut St. Cosmo, but instead I’m just hyperlinking to it. No one wants to have sex to this song. Nor this one. And if they do, that’s just fucking weird.
I don’t care what anyone says, the word “doppelgänger” is still really cool and maybe, just maybe, I should get some badass venetian blinds for my johari window? The male gaze of the internet can be so fucking weird. And when I say that, I’m really talking about all you clavicle lovers out there. This song could get you pregnant if you’re not careful. Don’t you just want to sell everything you own and roam the country in a lamborghini? That and I really want to go swimming in the ocean right now. If not today, then tomorrow. If not tomorrow, then when?
The nuclear bomb will turn warfare into the juggling of images.
The printing press was at first mistaken for an engine of immortality by everybody except Shakespeare.
Once we have surrendered our senses and nervous systems to the private manipulation of those who would try to benefit from taking a lease on our eyes and ears and nerves, we don’t really have any rights left. Leasing our eyes and ears and nerves to commercial interests is like handing over the common speech to a private corporation, or like giving the earth’s atmosphere to a company as a monopoly.
Anyone who tries to make a distinction between education and entertainment doesn’t know the first thing about either.
Man becomes, as it were, the sex organs of the machine world, as the bee of the plant world, enabling it to fecundate and to evolve ever new forms. The machine world reciprocates man’s love by expediting his wishes and desires, namely, in providing him with wealth.
Diaper backward spells repaid. Think about it.
We drive into the future using only our rearview mirror.
Art is anything you can get away with.
There are no passengers on spaceship earth. We are all crew.
I don’t explain—I explore.
(and personally, I believe that the above could and perhaps should be the motto of most writers and bloggers, but maybe that’s just me?)
Oh, that Nic Cage. Amazing and strange as usual. And totally an animal lover.
2.Molly Lambert’s piece about Tina Fey/Jon Hamm on This Recording today. It’s a wonderful, honed bit on comedians and characters and gender politics and objectification, and it’s brilliant. And aside from that, as she frequently is, so is Molly Lambert, who stands out amongst most internet writers for me in that she writes in quick bursts of sharp, insightful thought on a subject, but also survives in the long form where as so many other writers on the interwebz only seem to generate a few decent pull quotes to be linked to and reblogged ad nauseam. She tackles issues both old and new in a fresh way, in a smart way but one that’s also accessible to all the various levels of the hoi polloi, and she has that quality that you loathsomely envy: She writes in a way that feels like it’s resonating both with the thoughts you had on an issue, but are always worded better through her view on the matter, or, more honestly, she says the things you wish you were thinking/saying.
3.Praising Molly Lambert isn’t exactly a new thing, nor should it be, but the post about Jon Hamm/Tina Fey/Don Draper/Liz Lemon is really that good. And I love that it tackles how weird these characters are in so many ways, but refreshingly weird, but also that these are sex symbols for smart people, or for anyone with eyes, sure, but also for us sapiosexuals in the audience as well.
And she mentions something that I’ve never thought of before, but the idea that masculinity is basically a performance, not just between “bros,” I wouldn’t think, but in general. All the world’s a stage, I suppose, and all the men and women on that stage are players in a game of some sort. Especially those of us with the Y chromosome, which I feel. I mean, it’s not something I really considered before, though I kind of did, but now I really feel it. Never mind, that sounds stupid, but you get what I’m saying?
3A. Can we ever talk about just how fucking weird Jon Hamm the real life person seems? I kind of love the impression that I’ve gotten that he’s the exact opposite of Don Draper, not stupid (but more than a little dorky maybe)(but endearingly dorky, you know?), of course, but closer to his character on 30 Rock. Is Don Draper the ultimate vista to the wider landscape of manhood?
4.This article here from the BBC, about how scientists have made a breakthrough in “artificial life,” developing the world’s first synthetic living cell. I saw this at work today and shared it with this guy that comes in sometimes, my local atheist friend. He and I have bonded over the years over our hatred of intolerance towards scientific exploration and a favoring of antiquated notions like “organized religion” instead of advancement of all the wonderful aspects of the human race. This phenomenon reached something of a fever pitch during a particularly turbulent period in our country called “The Bush years.”
Anyway, so my atheist friend and I were talking about all of this as we tend to do and laughing and riffing on it and basically griping about how science (especially things dealing with like stem cells, for example) is held back or considered not interesting in America or, my favorite, the work of the Devil. We had a good laugh about that, talking about science as “the work of the Devil,” and because I have a vivid imagination, I literally imagined a guy who looks like this…
…in charge of a lab somewhere, ordering scientists around, approving budgets, and demanding more breakthroughs. “We’re trying to save them, but they refuse to see!” the Devil would say (as I said in my beast throaty demon voice), shaking his cloven hoof/fist angrily, and then they head into the break room to celebrate the birthday of one of the girls in the geophysics department, ha ha.
5. Today I had to make a nearly impossible decision, but also an incredibly mundane one. All the same, it was a tough one. It was the eternal debate of which movie to watch over my lunch break, and the choices came down to…
When Harry Met Sally vs. You’ve Got Mail. I know, I know. Fucking ridiculous, right?
But I do like them both. I appreciate them both. And, well, I kind of hate both as well. But I put it to you, gentle readers, before I say which one I picked, I’m a bit curious, which would you have picked? Metaphorically, the lady or the tiger?
“Writers take words seriously – perhaps the last professional class that does – and they struggle to steer their own through the crosswinds of meddling editors and careless typesetters and obtuse and malevolent reviewers into the lap of the ideal reader.”
…intended for use in air defense systems between the two World Wars.
2. Artist Lynda Barry who serialized her graphic novel ONE! HUNDRED! DEMONS!, a work of “Autobiofictionalography,” on Salon a while back, and had a famous story in it entitled “Head Lice and My Worst Boyfriend.” Anyway, the worst boyfriend of the title has finally been revealed…
…to be Ira Glass. It makes a kind of sense.
3. One of my favorite quotes about the art of words and the artists who do damage and paint portraits with it is, unsurprisingly, by this man right here…
…and it goes something like this:
“The difference between the right word and the almost right word is really a large matter — it’s the difference between a lightning bug and the lightning.”
-Mark Twain, in a letter to George Bainton in 1888.
Anyway. Something to think about on your Sunday night. Personally, I’m in a bit of a fog, if you couldn’t already tell…
“The purpose of writing is to inflate weak ideas, obscure pure reasoning, and inhibit clarity. With a little practice, writing can be an intimidating and impenetrable fog!”
“Writing is a form of personal freedom. It frees us from the mass identity we see in the making all around us. In the end, writers will write not to be outlaw heroes of some underculture but mainly to save themselves, to survive as individuals.”
-Don Delillo
And, yeah, I mentioned it last week, but I have to say again how excited I am about a new Don Delillo coming out this year – next month, in fact – entitled Point Omega. It’s a short novel, but one that sounds classically Delillo, and here’s a plot description for you:
In the middle of a desert “somewhere south of nowhere,” to a forlorn house made of metal and clapboard, a secret war advisor has gone in search of space and time. Richard Elster, seventy-three, was a scholar – an outsider – when he was called to a meeting with government war planners. They asked Elster to conceptualize their efforts – to form an intellectual framework for their troop deployments, counterinsurgency, orders for rendition. For two years he read their classified documents and attended secret meetings. He was to map the reality these men were trying to create “Bulk and swagger,” he called it. At the end of his service, Elster retreats to the desert, where he is joined by a filmmaker intent on documenting his experience. Jim Finley wants to make a one-take film, Elster its single character – “Just a man against a wall.” The two men sit on the deck, drinking and talking. Finley makes the case for his film. Weeks go by. And then Elster’s daughter Jessie visits – an “otherworldly” woman from New York – who dramatically alters the dynamic of the story. When a devastating event follows, all the men’s talk, the accumulated meaning of conversation and connection, is thrown into question. What is left is loss, fierce and incomprehensible.
It’s kind of funny now how relevant Delillo has stayed over the years, but how he’s become more relevant as events began to mirror things he’s been talking about for decades. He’s essentially been writing 9/11 novels for thirty years and talking about the race between terrorists and novelists and those who try to make sense of things, either by persuasion or by force. He’s been trying to blend in a post-apocalyptic world into the one we already live and exist in, and it would appear to be a frighteningly easy and seamless fit at times.
And like Pynchon, he’s certainly been mapping the increasing ubiquitous paranoia that has become part of our American DNA. “It was as though Hemingway died one day and Pynchon was born the next,” he’s said about the contributions of both men to the changing nature of fiction, “from pure realism to something more cosmic.”
And I think it’s fascinating that he used to work in advertising when he was younger, back when it was primarily print work and hadn’t quite jumped into the medium of television yet. The difference between the advertising industry and writing fiction? At least one is honest about what it’s doing and selling you. Most, including his friends, assumed he left the business to begin writing, but he says: “Actually, I quit my job so I could go to the movies on weekday afternoons.”
Delillo has been called, along with Cynthia Ozick, one of the English languages’ two greatest writers by David Foster Wallace, and that’s fitting here since DFW’s great big 12 years in the making novel, The Pale King, is finally coming out (although not til next year, sadly) in it’s unfinished but edited form. The book deals with a group of IRS workers and the monotony and “intense tediousness” they encounter in their jobs, and also employs a little of the good old classic meta post-modern.
Here is an interesting look at DFW’s career, his final years, and his work on The Pale King.
And four excerpts from the novel have already been published in US magazines:
And again, the new Delillo short story, “Midnight In Dostoevsky,” unrelated to the new novel.
And “Still Life,” an excerpt from his previous novel, Falling Man.
Who knows, “The Year We Make Contact” could very well become the year of many happy returns. Hell, one writer is even making contact with us again from beyond the grave. Makes you wonder, doesn’t it? How’s your writing going?
Mad linkage:
Jon Hamm: “If Rob Lowe had been cast in the part, it would have been different. There was no backstory with me.”
An interesting write up on Phonogram: The Singles Club.
5 mind blowing ways that your memory plays tricks on you.
January Jones: “I need not to think about my character. Betty is so blissfully ignorant in certain ways, so I feel like I should be too.”
Speaking of Arcade Fire: Their new collab with Google folks, The Wilderness Downtown.
Some of these pictures are, of course, from Rolling Stone, which will be featuring Mad Men on the cover of their new issue. Great idea. Bad photoshopping on that cover though.
And, I tell ya, August and I have really missed doing our Mad Men write ups the past few episodes, especially since, as far as I’m concerned, this has been the show’s strongest season yet, but on the plus side, it’s probably spared you an incredible amount of Nora Zehetner photos that I would’ve just bombarded you with…
Seriously.
Creepy artificial arm from the 1800s.
Blah blah blah bedbugs.
There’s some NSFW happening in the new Conan movie.
Wormholes in NYC.
Oh, and hey, the next post will be the 750th!
Here
Lady Gaga 
There’s always time in time and space 
Person of the year
