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.
I made an appropriate streaming radio station playlist for you to listen to while you toil in the office today! Or you can listen to it while you roast something in your kitchen! Or drink and emotionally withdraw from your spouse! Whenever!
Throughout last season and this season there are framed Morton Salt ads in most everyones offices. In the last episode an ad is shown in Peggy’s office that is illustrated by Charley Harper (I’ve been waiting to see it for nearly a year!).
Harper was an illustrator for Procter & Gamble, Ivory, Morton Salt and Ford Times magazine. You can see his lush commercial work here. In the sixties he moved to drawing minimalist nature scenes and created a style that is defined the Modernist Mid Century: sleek lines, loud colors, and the fewest amount of visual elements. He called the style ‘minimal realism’.
When asked to describe his unique visual style, Charley responded:
“When I look at a wildlife or nature subject, I don’t see the feathers in the wings, I just count the wings. I see exciting shapes, color combinations, patterns, textures, fascinating behavior and endless possibilities for making interesting pictures. I regard the picture as an ecosystem in which all the elements are interrelated, interdependent, perfectly balanced, without trimming or unutilized parts; and herein lies the lure of painting; in a world of chaos, the picture is one small rectangle in which the artist can create an ordered universe.”
Did you catch the brief, hard-to-hear audio of Kennedy addressing the nation in the last Mad Men episode? (It plays over the L-cut from Peggy’s mother’s home to the Drapers’ house, where young Sally is in front of a TV set.)
“This is one country. It has become one country because all of us and all the people who came here had an equal chance to develop their talents. We cannot say to ten percent of the population that you can’t have that right; that your children cannot have the chance to develop whatever talents they have; that the only way that they are going to get their rights is to go in the street and demonstrate.”
And the kicker to the speech’s inclusion in the episode is that it was simulcast on all the networks—precisely the kind of profile that trust-funder wants for his idiotic sports league earlier in the show (all three networks covering the gala, etc.). This kind of structural brilliance happens approximately once per episode, and you can’t do a thing but doff your vintage-looking cap to the show’s writers.
