Don’s right—about one thing, at least: teenagers are sentimental. The cynicism with which adults rebel comes from the nihilism of doing what you know is bad for you because you’re old enough to understand that these things usually go unpunished. The kind of joyless self-indulgence that adults traffic in doesn’t exist for teenagers. For the young, it’s unfathomable that act of self-indulgence can bring anything but joy. In the twilight of childhood, you’re not sure what’s like to be an adult but you know what it feels like to not be a child. Every brush with adult behavior—anything from smoking, to sneaking out, to driving, to fucking—is wrapped in a gauzy, loving haze. (It’s bittersweet though: as the twilight of childhood dims, there is within the heart of every teenager a dull throb that comes with the mourning of lost innocence.) What’s alarming, then, is when grown-ups act like teenagers: denying themselves nothing, cherishing their transgressions like merit badges, constantly chasing the beginning of something, unable to parse the sensations of joys from despair.
One of my favorite podcasts ‘Never Not Funny’, that I gladly shell out money to listen to, just put up a 90 minute episode for free. Guess who the guest is? Jon Hamm.
It’s really rich. It will make your little belly tremble with LOL. You can hear the whole thing here.
Don’s first-season moments with Midge are as rosy as rosy can be—they listen to Miles Davis, smoke a little pot here and there, and go their respective ways—him back to Ossining, her back to Bob Dylan-types and ‘I love you, Grandma!’ greeting cards.
In Don’s mind, the women he medicates with never change. In reality, they stay in the Village too long and wind up slaves to the needle.
Yes, in a quickly decaying New York, it makes sense that counterculture rears its ugly head in the form of heroin-addicted Midge and her would-be pimp husband.
A year or so away from theVelvet Underground’s ode to the drug, Village heroin use was in full swing. A 1965 Life Magazine shoot takes us inside the claustrophobic world of two addicts—a young couple who steal and hustle to feed their collective habit and leave their squalid quarters only to score (don’t even get me started on how much like the recent activities of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce this is).
Don tells Midge that he’s expected to see her in the Village, and of course he has! Don Draper knows nothing of what it meant to be an early bohemian woman—remember, Midge is living the boho life in 1960, a solid six years before little Peggy Olsen dares to venture over to a loft party. By 1966, Midge’s art career has gone nowhere, and the Dons of New York have moved on to younger and brighter things, and Midge’s flouting of convention has left her (literally) high and dry.
Destruction is on its way—to our SCDP heroes, to the women they throw money at, to the very city in which they all ply their trade. In a few short years, the Village will be uninhabitable for besuited businessmen like Don. The walls are closing in, and Don Draper’s only starting to notice.
Beloved muse Matt Weiner is doing a livestream webcast with KCRW/NPR tonight. Santa Monica Community College, my alma matter, houses KCRW and it’s an institution we should support with our ears and our hearts! Listen to the great and powerful Matt-Oz!:
On TUESDAY, OCTOBER 12 at 8 pm Pacific Time,ELVIS MITCHELL, host of KCRW’sThe Treatment(and newly named co-host of Roger Ebert’s “At the Movies,” returning to PBS),engages in conversation with Emmy Award-winning Writer/Director/Producer MATTHEW WEINER, series creator and executive producer for the AMC drama “Mad Men,” now in its fourth season.
THIS CONVERSATION WILL BE STREAMED LIVE at www.kcrw.com/upclose and will be available as a podcast and on-demand at a later date.
I remember the very popular book THE GAMESPEOPLEPLAY and instantly recognized the dust cover. Faye was shown reading it while stretched out on Don’s couch.
In the opening move in a game of “Try and Collect,” for instance, a player runs up a big bill, which he is very slow to pay. (This is a game, incidentally, which the author says children usually learn from their parents.) The middle moves are the low-comedy threats and chases which deadbeats find delicious. The end, when the creditor either collects the money or gives up, often leads to a harrowing round of another game, such as “Now I’ve Got You, You Son of a Bitch,” or “Why Does This Always Happen to Me?”
The book recieved Vonnegut’s approval:
This is an important book—if not to scientists, then to laymen in their anguished need for simple clues as to what isreally going on. It also fricassees the canard that a novelist or playwright, with his magic intuition, can reveal more about life than any physician could ever know. The good Doctor, meaning only to add his insights to the healing arts, has provided story lines that hacks will not exhaust in the next 10,000 years.
To date, THE GAMES PEOPLE PLAY has sold over 5 million copies.
Who knew that the advertising industry housed so many men of integrity? The ad above is by Bill Bernbach, a founder of Doyle Dane Bernbach and the Great Father of modern advertising. It was Bernbach who popularized the technique of counter-intuitive advertising. “Now I’m not talking about tricking people,” Bernbach said. “If you get attention by a trick, how can people like you for it? For instance, you are not right if, in your ad, you stand a man on his head just to get attention. But you are right to have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets.”
But what happens when everyone starts imitating the vanguard?
Don! Since the beginning of “Mad Men,” all have been agog about Don Draper’s magnetism. What is it? Why do women wilt and men follow? How does his staff endure his endless floggings? (Ahem.) And how does he turn the most banal products into objects of desire? Granddaddy sociologist Max Weber provides an answer: Don is a charismatic. Charismatics draw their power from the mystic and divine. For the early Christians, a charismatic was a human vessel through which a god revealed its power. Charismatics are theatrical, eloquent, and fervent. We first saw a glimpse of Don’s supernatural power when he coolly walked around a conference table of skeptical clients and said, “Listen, I’m not here to tell you about Jesus. You already know about Jesus, either he lives in your heart or he doesn’t.” The domination of the charismatic resides in the emotional response he arouses in his followers—and, of course, in the cash that he dispenses at his whim: “The followers share in the use of those goods which the authoritarian leader receives as donation, booty or endowment.” Oh yes.
Well, look at this! The NYPL has put out a full list of some of the books we’vecoveredhere in the past.
Here’s a tidbit we never put up about Ship of Fools, by the way:
This 1962 novel by Katherine Porter is a satire that traces the rise of Nazism and represents its message as a “ship of fools” allegory. The ship of fools allegory traces back as early as the 1494 poem by Sebastian Brant, entitled same. The concept is basically that of a ship full of deranged or otherwise affected lunatics, on a directionless voyage with no captain/leader. The ship also serves as a satiric foil to Noah’s Ark, or the Ark of Salvation (a name for the Catholic Church)
The Porter book depicts the passengers on a ship headed for Germany from Mexico in 1931. The travelers are not insane; they are of different races (Spanish, Mexican, Swedish, American, German) though, and their tensions grow as they travel together. Inherent racisms come out, and a lot of exploration of common assumptions of the time that seem insane by modern times. But average people allowed the Holocaust to take place, and this book explores how such average people come to “know” things that we would find lunacy. The work has been compared to Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain, which takes place in sanatorium, and the atmosphere of the ocean liner Porter’s characters are on is very much like a sanatorium — cramped, unprivate, sick.
“We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors d’oeuvre or two, putting a little mood music on the phonograph, and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion of Nietzsche, jazz, sex.” — Hugh Hefner in the editor’s introduction to Playboy Magazine Issue 1. Vol. 1. 1953
