The Footnotes of Mad Men.

The Drapers go to The ‘mighty’ Theater.

Wed, 23 May 2012 01:10:00 -0400

Excerpt above from America Hurrah. Below are some...

Wed, 23 May 2012 01:06:31 -0400

Excerpt above from America Hurrah. Below are some reviews:

—“Fascinating! Brilliant! … perhaps the most consistently fascinating, frequently brilliant evening of drama produced so far this season.… “ Wall Street Journal.

—“Hurricane of horror.” Boston Globe.

—“At last something new.” New York Review of Books.

—“Brilliant.” Harold Pinter.

—“His plays don’t develop, they explode.” Variety.

—“I was especially impressed by America Hurrah. It is possible that Motel is the best one-act play I’ve ever seen.” Norman Mailer.

America Hurrah is a trilogy of short plays written by Jean...

Wed, 23 May 2012 00:56:00 -0400

America Hurrah is a trilogy of short plays written by Jean Claude van Itallie, a Belgium native who immigrated to the states during WW2 with his family and educated by way of Harvard. The trio of plays— considered ‘experimental’— premiered in 1966 and it ran for 634 performances. The plays were as follows:

* * *

Interview- Referred to as a ‘fugue for 8 actors’. 4 actors play unemployed job applicants: a house painter, a scrubwoman, a banker and a lady’s maid. The other 4 actors are masked, anonymous, job interviewers. Each question they hurl is meant to be more humiliating and invasive than the next. The interviewees struggle for their dignity. The play toggles between a subway station, a city street, and psychiatrist’s office (this is the scene Megan and Don were watching.)

* * *

TV- Three workers in a television studio glancing at monitors. They work and chatter while being utterly disconnected from the performers on screen. From the NYT review: ‘[The television performers] look like so many up-ended zebras - go through all the violent, cloying, synthetic motions that pass for entertainment on the national airwaves. But there is no relation between the workers and the work: a yawning gulf, big enough to drown us all, has opened between the real concerns of real people and the imaginary concerns of our imaginary archetypes.”

* * *

Motel - This play is done with actors in full face masks or sometimes puppets. An ‘excursion into theater of the absurd.’ A blonde and a man check into a nameless motel on route 66. The female motel keeper is the only person who speaks. She extolls of the virtues of self-flushing toilets and hook rugs, while the blonde and the man crawl around on the floor and scrawl obscene graffiti on the wall. Here is an excerpt:

Motel Keeper’s Voice: Myself I know it from the catalogue: bottles, bras, breakfasts, refrigerators, cast-iron gates, plastic posies…

(In the motel room, the Woman doll opens her negligee and the man doll pulls off her bra. The Man and Woman dolls embrace. The Woman doll puts lipstick on her nipples.)

Motel Keeper’s Voice: Paper subscriptions, Buick trucks, blankets, forks, clitter-clack darning hooks, transistors and antimacassars, vinyl plastics..

(The Man doll writes simple obscene words on the wall. The Woman doll does the same with her lipstick)

Motel Keeper’s Voice: …pickles, bayberry, candles, South Dakotan Kewpie Dolls, fiberglass hair, polished milk, amiable grandpappies, colts, Galsworthy books, cribs, cabinets, teeter-totters…

Speaking with genius pal, Angela, about which of the snoball...

Thu, 17 May 2012 07:26:00 -0400

Speaking with genius pal, Angela, about which of the snoball pitches were best. I thought Peggy’s was the most subtle and funny. She pointed out that it’s only funny to people who read the New Yorker which probably isn’t the same group of people who want Snoballs. We both agreed that hearing Don Drape ‘do’ a devil voice was sad and made us feel like lonely space monkeys adrift in an uncaring void. Ginsberg’s, Angela, said, was the best because it was the most youthful. The most in touch with a juvenile sense of glee and naughtiness. He is a big threat.

For normal people too.

Tue, 15 May 2012 20:53:00 -0400

For normal people too.

That damned nozzle!

Tue, 15 May 2012 20:35:09 -0400

That damned nozzle!

Just want to take a moment to endorse the benefits of talk...

Tue, 15 May 2012 20:18:00 -0400

Just want to take a moment to endorse the benefits of talk therapy. A couple of years later, Betty is finally thawing a little of that WASP perma-freeze with some fearless moral inventory! One day at a time, Birdie!

Weight Watchers 1966 Meal Plan: Breakfast: 1 egg or 1 ounce hard...

Tue, 15 May 2012 20:03:00 -0400

Weight Watchers 1966 Meal Plan:

Breakfast: 1 egg or 1 ounce hard cheese or 2 ounces fish or 1/4 cup cottage or pot cheese
1 slice bread, either enriched or whole wheat. No rolls, bagels, buscuits muffins, crackers, cereals.

Lunch: 4 ounces fish or lean meat or poultry, or 2/3 cup cottage cheese or pot cheese or 4 ounces farmer cheese or 2 ounces hard cheese or 2 eggs. Unlimited vegetables
1 slice bread

Dinner: 6 ounces lean meat or fish or poultry
1 portion limited vegetables.
Unlimited vegetables.

No midnight steaks :(

Of course, if anyone rises with “red hair” and...

Fri, 11 May 2012 16:02:05 -0400

Of course, if anyone rises with “red hair” and “eats men like air”, it’s our zaftig miracle Joan Holloway. Keep an eye on this space.

Lady Lazarus and A Chat About Death, Part 2

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:41:00 -0400

“Lady Lazarus”, in Plath’s own words, is about “the agony of being reborn.” And Megan spent a good deal of the last episode attempting a career rebirth — an agony we can all vibe with. Not only did she have to contend with her own ambivalence about the situation, but with the risk of bringing her all-id husband dangerously close to an existential meltdown. The man cannot handle even tacit questioning of his liiiiiife.

I am your opus
I am your valuable
[…]
Ash, ash—
You poke and stir.
Flesh, bone, there is nothing there—

A cake of soap,
A wedding ring,
A gold filling.

Operating not so much as her own character but rather an agitator of the characters around her, Megan may be bringing everyone else to a frothing analysis of her motivations before burning out in a flash of phoenix-like glory like the Lady Lazarus of the poem. (The peanut crunching crowd/Shoves in to see) Notice that “wedding ring” is one of the primary material symbols that the speaker claims does not represent her. Megan is impossible to analyze, refracting attempts to do so into a million opinions on how to feel about her (in us too!), but she is an extraordinary illuminator of the people around her.

Footnote by Natasha Simons

Lady Lazarus and A Chat About Death, Part 1

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:31:00 -0400

With all the death talk this season (cancer scares! nurse killings! snipers!), many Mad Menites are wondering if Matt Weiner is in the mood to finally pay up and off somebody. Rumors swirled last season about Greg Harris and Roger Sterling, but this season the likely friends we have on offer are either young sad Peter or young happy Megs. Let’s consider Pete first:

Do you remember all the way back in “Pilot” where there was some scoffing discussion of a small consideration called the death wish? Don may have blown it off then, but he’s not laughing (down an elevator shaft) now: the man is facing mortality somewhat brutally at the hands of his heedless young wife. Who wasn’t laughing all the way back in 1960? Why, Pete Campbell, of course, who has always understood the morbid urges we all feel: the man and his erstwhile rifle have been hurtling down that metaphorical Freudian highway onto an oncoming car for five seasons now. And now, he’s kind of literally hurtling down that highway. With a re-introduced rifle. And he’s a bad driver!

Speaking of metaphors and psychology, this episode is named after Sylvia Plath’s famous, stunning poem “Lady Lazarus”, which in large part is about the speaker’s fractured identities making it impossible for her to liiiiiiive. Based loosely on autobiographical circumstances, the speaker details her various suicide attempts, and the struggle to reconcile her reluctant, warring body and mind with the facticity of life. Pete, who attempts to mirror Don (and is now seeking out a brown[haired] Betty of his own) while maintaining a complex and frighteningly sad inner life of his own, has to balance his multiple personalities as well in what is becoming an increasingly tenuous situation.

Note well:

It’s the theatrical
Comeback in broad day
To the same place, the same face, the same brute

Which is clearly how Pete has begun to view his existence of coming home on the 525 train. Pete hasn’t attempted to kill himself (yet), but ever since his woeful Job-ian cry of “I have nothing”, it’s been clear he feels he’s dying a small death each time he lives a life he has begun to see only hollowness in. This was also an issue Plath wrestled with, loving her complicated and destructive husband and young children as well as seeking to free herself from it in due course.

Footnote by Natasha Simons

"There’d been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having..."

Fri, 11 May 2012 15:24:42 -0400

“There’d been no escape. What did she so desire to escape from? Such a captive maiden, having plenty of time to think, soon realizes that her tower, its height and architecture, are like her ego only incidental: and what really keeps her where she is is magic, anonymous and malignant, visited upon her from outside and for no reason at all. Having no apparatus except gut fear and female cunning to examine this formless magic, to understand how it works, how to measure its field strength, count its lines of force, she may fall back on superstition, or take up a useful hobby like embroidery, or go mad, or marry a disc jockey. If the tower is everywhere and the knight of deliverance no proof against its magic, what else?”

- Thomas Pyncheon, The Crying of Lot 49

What do you think Pete’s reading material means?? Consider the captive maidens (Betty, Beth, Peggy to some degree) and the women questioning that malignant magic (Megan, Joan) in your answer.

“As the company entered the 1960s, the company had a...

Wed, 09 May 2012 03:58:00 -0400

“As the company entered the 1960s, the company had a successful formula in place, and there were plenty of new Interstate highways being built providing prime locations for Howard Johnson’s Restaurants and Motor Lodges for years to come. The company went public, and Howard D. Johnson passed control of the company to his son, Howard B. Johnson.

In the mid 1960s, Howard Johnson’s was at the top of its game. In 1965, the company’s sales exceeded that of McDonald’s, Burger King, and Kentucky Fried Chicken combined. However, a few small leaks were beginning to develop in that brilliant orange roof.

Social critics of the 1960s were questioning the conformity of the 1950s, and a large chain of lookalike restaurants proved an easy target. In the early days, Howard Johnson’s sameness was seen as an improvement over the wildly inconsistent roadside food offerings of the day, but by now it was seen by many as bland and dull.” — Glenn Reynolds, Roadside Fans.

SOCIAL CRITICS HATE ORANGE SHERBET :(

“I’m a hard-headed, conservative, Midwestern,...

Wed, 09 May 2012 03:43:00 -0400

“I’m a hard-headed, conservative, Midwestern, Republican business man. Under no circumstances would I consider myself a person who goes around taking strange drugs. But my wife took LSD at a friend’s house and in order to get to agree to come home, I took stuff myself. We got in the car, and I had only drive three blocks, when suddenly over the pavement in front of me opened up. It was as though the paevement was flowing over Niagara falls…”

A Hard-Headed Business Man’s Vivid Memory, Life Magazine report on LSD, 1966.

You will want to read this 1966 10 page Life magazine...

Wed, 09 May 2012 03:31:00 -0400

You will want to read this 1966 10 page Life magazine report on LSD and all the teenagers and hard headed business men who are hanging out alone, in the truth.

Sorry, been on a trip.

Wed, 09 May 2012 03:21:00 -0400

Sorry, been on a trip.

A Meditation on Mailer, Pete Campbell and The Language of...

Thu, 19 Apr 2012 08:03:00 -0400

A Meditation on Mailer, Pete Campbell and The Language of Men

“His anger often derived from nothing: the set of a pair of far lips, the casual heavy thump of the serving spoon into his plate, or the resentful conviction that the cook was not serving him enough.” —Norman Mailer, “The Language of Men”

Pete Campbell presents a whole different kind of masculinity issue than does our mainstay Don. From S1E1 Pete’s been a mess of insecurities, all stemming from the essential Pete nugget that he simply doesn’t know very much about people. Wavering between the petulance of a child and the brimming over-confidence of a teenager, Pete is his own worst enemy.

He’s quick to lash out — recall this is not the first time he’s been in a fight at the office. He punched poor Kenny for his indelicate comments about fair Pegs back in season 1! Of course, that might have had something to do with his extreme jealousy of Ken — this comes only a few episodes after Ken gets his first story published in The Atlantic. And he’s become so used to shooting off his passive-aggressive sniping comments and being ignored that when Lane actually challenges him to a fight, he’s floored. He’s not used to being directly confronted or spoken to about much of anything, really.

Here’s Mailer again:

“He became aware again of his painful desire to please people, to discharge responsibility, to be a man. When he had been a child, tears had come into his eyes at a cross word, and he had lived in an atmosphere where his smallest accomplishment was warmly praised.”

Pete has some…issues with recognition and pride, no? He craves it desperately, and yet he’s either so unctuous or so biting that even when he does good work, people are reluctant to reward him. This man, who was so spoiled in his youth, finds that his peers don’t like him at all. When he pitifully says at the end of “Signal 30” that “This is an office. We’re supposed to be friends”, we get the sense that he actually means it. That SCDP holds the only friendships he’s ever known! This coming on the heels of Don telling Megan that the people at work are not her friends only underscores Pete’s essential misunderstanding about other people and his innate loneliness that comes from being excluded.

As decent as Pete has become at his job, he’s never gotten over his puppy love with Don Draper, the man he has been trying to get a reaction as long as he’s graced our screens. When flattery didn’t work, Pete turned to subterfuge. None of it seemed to work very well, but Pete is still giving Don the biggest steak.

“…with his heart aching he lunged toward Hobbs. He had no hope of beating him. He merely intended to fight until he was pounded unconscious, advancing the pain and bruises he would collect as collateral for his self-respect.”

“[He] began to wonder about the things which made him different. He was no longer so worried about becoming a man; he felt that to an extent he had become one. But in his heart he wondered if he would ever learn the language of men.”

So then of course, Pete does get called on his pervasive misanthropy and reflex anger toward the rest of the world. And in every glance and gesture, Pete has always tried to ape the standard masculinity: he tries to dress like Don, he blusters through work drinks living up to Roger, he commits adultery after the both of them. And yet even when he’s embraced the trappings of masculinity, he still can’t connect. He hates himself for it because it’s not what he wants, and Don hates him for it because it seems like such a poor imitation of the thing he himself does. Everything Pete does has an air of forcedness to it, because it just doesn’t come naturally to him — the language of men.

*Footnote by Natasha Simons

‘Signal 30’, the name of last night’s episode,...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 01:32:07 -0400

‘Signal 30’, the name of last night’s episode, is also the name of a super gory driving educational film sponsored/produced by the Ohio highway patrol. You will recognize the opening shot from Pete’s class with future Ohio State University* student and Handsome. It’s 30 mins of bloody asphalt terror!

*Things are going to get bloody at an Ohio college too.

Peggy says she read one of Ken’s stories in Galaxy. Galaxy...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 01:10:00 -0400

Peggy says she read one of Ken’s stories in Galaxy.

Galaxy Science Fiction was published from 1950 to 1980. It was the leading Sci-Fi magazine during its time. The magazine published many notable stories including including Ray Bradbury’s “The Fireman”, later expanded as Fahrenheit 451. The magazine was noted for its ‘intellectual subtlety’ and was considered to be one of the leaders in new wave of science fiction literature during the 1960’s. You can scroll through archives here and check out a luscious cover gallery here.

Thanks to Ben Hargrove aka Dave Algonquin aka Ken Cosgrove,...

Tue, 17 Apr 2012 00:40:00 -0400

Thanks to Ben Hargrove aka Dave Algonquin aka Ken Cosgrove, there’s finally a reason to post one of the most enchanting pieces of animation I’ve ever seen. Walt Disney had a six part show in 1957 that was ‘Science Factual’. The show explored the solar system, atoms, rockets, etc. The fifth episode, Life on Mars, is the most darring. Disney asked his ace team of animators to imagine what plant and animal life would be like on Mars. There are crystals spires, mysterious under ground animals, fantastic martian sculptures and spOoOky music. A real beautiful, triumph of imagination.