The Footnotes of Mad Men.

Don’s right—about one thing, at least: teenagers are...

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 17:30:55 -0400

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.

Footnotes of Mad Men: Full of Demands, Empty of Offerings

One of my favorite podcasts ‘Never Not Funny’, that...

Fri, 15 Oct 2010 15:10:18 -0400

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...

Wed, 13 Oct 2010 04:12:00 -0400

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 the Velvet 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.

*Footnote by- Angela Serratore

Beloved muse Matt Weiner is doing a livestream webcast with...

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:48:00 -0400

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’s The 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.

Lynn wrote in: I remember the very popular book...

Tue, 12 Oct 2010 15:42:00 -0400

Lynn wrote in:

I remember the very popular book THE GAMES PEOPLE PLAY and instantly recognized the dust cover. Faye was shown reading it while stretched out on Don’s couch.

Kurt Vonnegagut reviewed the book for Life Magazine in 1965:

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.

Welcome to the Village, 1965!

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 21:35:13 -0400

Welcome to the Village, 1965!

Who knew that the advertising industry housed so many men of...

Mon, 11 Oct 2010 16:55:15 -0400

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?

Footnotes of Mad Men: Calling All Trumpeter Swans

Don! Since the beginning of “Mad Men,” all have been...

Mon, 04 Oct 2010 14:16:51 -0400

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.

Footnotes of Mad Men: Charismatic Domination, or, When Daddy Is A Disaster

Mad Men Reading List | New York Public Library

Fri, 01 Oct 2010 14:45:00 -0400

Mad Men Reading List | New York Public Library:

Well, look at this! The NYPL has put out a full list of some of the books we’ve covered here 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)

Here’s a depiction.

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.

• footnote - by Natasha Simons

“We like our apartment. We enjoy mixing up cocktails and an hors...

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 15:05:57 -0400

“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

John Zobenica’s essay on the revolution and devolution of...

Thu, 30 Sep 2010 04:41:00 -0400

John Zobenica’s essay on the revolution and devolution of Playboy for the Atlantic piece is seminal reading for an understanding of mid-century sexuality:

“Yes, however paradoxical it may appear, I developed a respect toward women in part by reading Playboy as a young male. What’s more, I developed an interest in women that went beyond the sum of their anatomical parts, and did so at first out of sheer boyish faith in that supposedly bogus Playboy lifestyle. During my countless sequestrations with the magazine, I took in not only the powdered limbs and bedroom eyes but also the general atmosphere of adult men engaging with adult women. There they’d be, nicely—if, in hindsight, absurdly—dressed men and women, together at a housewarming or a holiday party or a favored night spot. (Picture, on the guys, Dingo boots, LeRoy Neiman–hued vest suits, and a glimpse of woolly chest hair that hinted at unabashed back shrubbery. And on the women, strategic cuts of every unnatural fiber known to man, all of it somehow unnaturally fetching.) Or maybe a lone couple would be smoking Viceroys and picking out some unfinished furniture, or tickling the ivories during a relaxing evening for two. Or groups of couples would be skiing or having a clambake. (In a scene of homely domesticity, there’s even an October 1970 pictorial featuring the hirsute Elliott Gould—wearing nothing but a big black watchband—laughing, nuzzling, and smoking with Paula Prentiss in a dingy bubble bath, while an equally hairy Saint Bernard looks on.) Call me naive, even romantic, but I was quite moved by the notion that someday I would—or should—enjoy trading tales of whimsy around the fondue pot with female acquaintances as much as I was currently enjoying riding my bike and grab-assing with my buddies.”

Are We Not Men?: Down the Ladder from Playboy to Maxim

How did you feel when Don wolfishly smirked at his next...

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 19:50:29 -0400

How did you feel when Don wolfishly smirked at his next possible sexual conquest? If you’re like me, it was a twinge of disgust, then a rallying sense that “we got our boy back.” While the afternoon of spooning post anxiety attack seemed delightful, it’s Don’s delinquency that enthralls us. Characters with mass appeal win their audiences not by demonstration of their heroic dimensions but through their display of weaknesses and ambiguities. When we get glimpses of nihilistic, fuck-all instinct in our hero, it’s difficult not to feel twitches of worship. Pauline Kael, in an essay on appeal Dean and Brando called this certain kind of charisma “the glamour of delinquency”:

Footnotes of Mad Men: The Delinquent Hero on Hands and Knees

MYTHIC CRYING. Scream it out, Sally.

Mon, 27 Sep 2010 01:46:50 -0400

MYTHIC CRYING.

Scream it out, Sally.

I don’t need to tell you what going through puberty feels like,...

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 12:46:56 -0400

I don’t need to tell you what going through puberty feels like, with all its urgency, eroticism, and ugliness. You went through it yourself. If you didn’t go through it as a female, I can tell you that the desire to appear adult is consuming. Whenever there’s role-playing to be done, the pubescent female will assume the role of Teacher in School, Doctor in the Hospital, Mother in House—and beware the girl who played student, patient, baby. For young girls, the thinking goes, if they exude an air of maturity, they’d be chosen to enter the world of adults. A young girl’s desire to play cook is not only a demonstration of her ability to be an alchemist, converting raw globs of yoke and salt into something edible, but also to show that she can successfully manage adult responsibilities. This is to wriggle into the world of grown-ups. So there’s no greater shame to be exposed as a fraud—when, despite a girl’s best efforts, she finds herself reflected in the pitying leers of adults. There are few positions more shameful than face down on the hall floor of your father’s office.

Footnotes of Mad Men: Mrs. Draper, You’ve Got a Lovely Daughter

Meet Betty.

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:01:00 -0400

Meet Betty.

Designer Christina Perry on the Ladies of Mad Men: Each of these...

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 11:00:00 -0400

Designer Christina Perry on the Ladies of Mad Men:

Each of these women have taken on a very different role this season. For this reason, I considered it timely to give them a ‘position description’ . These are taken from the commonly found departments in corporate structures which reflect and play on the new territories our heroines are exploring.

Put Mad Men Unbuttoned in your Amazon cart and win the set.

Reader’s of Wondrous Taste and Dubious Sexual...

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 10:50:00 -0400

Reader’s of Wondrous Taste and Dubious Sexual Caution!

Christina Perry has designed another set of Mad Men posters. We are going to give away some sets (Betty, Joan, and Peggy!) for folks who bought the book (which features more of Christina’s illustrations and my words; a glorious combination!). Forward over your receipt and win a set.

1965

Mon, 20 Sep 2010 06:10:45 -0400

1965

Millions: Do you see California returning to the show in...

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 16:04:00 -0400

Millions: Do you see California returning to the show in future seasons?

NVC: I hope so! Every time Don heads to the bungalow in Long Beach I go over the moon. Southern California should play a role in future episodes because more than any other city/region in the country, Southern California embodied all of the ideals that came to define the late 1960’s and beyond: youthful, informal, image-driven, ahistorical; a golden land of consumers.

Here’s an interview I did with the delightfully bookish site: The Millions.

The theme of the early Mountain Dew ads is that it was the juice...

Tue, 14 Sep 2010 15:54:32 -0400

The theme of the early Mountain Dew ads is that it was the juice that kept rascally hill folk perked up enough to go prospect, slaughter pigs, and toil in the hills of destitute poverty. Other tag line: “It’ll tickle your innards!”

Zippity Dew Dah.