You guys know this one. That soft beginning ramping up to a cacophony of stomping brass! This is a truly awesome composition, by which I mean it evokes total fear. It was composed by Grieg for Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt, and this particular opus accompanies Peer’s escape from the Mountain King’s castle, pursued by his many minions. The theme begins softly to describe Peer’s soft and careful footsteps, and is then contrasted with the theme of the King’s trolls looking for him. When the two themes collide, the music hits its loud peak as the chase begins. Timpani rolls conclude the piece as the mountain collapses, and Peer has successfully escaped.

WHO is the Mountain King in Mad Men, you ask? And WHO is Peer? This little opus gets a whole episode named after it in season 2, the episode where Don visits Anna and decides to return to Betty. Is Don Peer, trying to escape from the frightening Mountain King’s castle in Ossining? Or is Don the Mountain King, a member of a race depicted in the play to be concerned primarily with self-interest? Or is Don the Boyg, a creature who, when asked, “Who are you?”, responds with “Myself.”?

All very interesting!

• footnote - by Natasha Simons

4:56pm | 31 notes | mad men playlist | mad men season 2

December 14, 2009

“Bras are for men. Women want to see themselves the way men see them.” — Paul Kinsey

Looks like Maidenform went ahead and took Paul’s campaign! After all, it wasn’t doing much good wasting away in Playtex’s archives. The (real) 1960s ad on left bears a striking resemblance to the Jackie/Marilyn dynamic theme from the episode “Maidenform”.

Paul’s brilliant campaign resulted in a bit of a downer for Pegs — she realized she’s not a Jackie or a Marilyn. Someone meanly snickers she’s more of a Gertrude Stein, and Don compares her to Irene Dunne, but really what the girl is, is Katharine Hepburn. You know?

The Jackie/Marilyn (Madonna/whore) dichotomy has been around for much longer than the two women. I don’t know how Paul came up with such a thing (it’s Paul for God’s sake) but it plays very deeply into a part of the female psyche that has struggled with these two perceptions ever since we began talking about sex openly.

• footnote - by Natasha Simons

December 3, 2009

Given her modeling background, it’s no wonder Betty is big on appearances. Before modeling was a awash with coke-addled tanoerxic teenagers it was industry for ‘nice girls’. Plucky, pretty young ladies who wanted swish around department stores, a local 4H club, and even a small run way show for the newest manufactured styles. If you were lucky enough to be immortalized in advertisement, say for a national soda pop brand, There were some guidelines outlined by a 1958 modeling pamphlet:

What to include in your model-bag:

half slip
strapless bra
dress shields
extra hose (seamless) black opera pumps
clean, short white gloves (fabric and string)
strand of pearls
pearl choker
two pairs of earrings
(plain pearl and simple gold)
clean comb, spray net
scarf to protect hair

Further, the pamphlet echoes Betty’s philosophy that “You’re painting a masterpiece; be sure and hide the strokes.”:

’ Beautiful models and beautiful diamonds are not unlike. Both evolve by perfecting each and every facet so that the whole product or being will shine with brilliance. By giving all the phases of modeling the attention they deserve, you’ll polish every facet of the diamond - and the diamond is, of course, you!’

You better work, Betts!

4:42am | 21 notes | mad men season 2 | betty draper | modeling

Bert Cooper’s 1,000 page hyper Libertarian stocking stuffer.

3:54am | 14 notes | mad men bookshelf | mad men season 2 | ayn rand

December 1, 2009

“Oh, it’s just smudgy squares.” - Jane.

There’s also this explanation.

3:30am | 36 notes | mad men season 2 | rothko | modern art

November 30, 2009

One of the things Don actually admits to, under extreme interrogation by Bobby and extreme alcohol intake, is he likes the movie La Notte! Well, what a svelte cineaste Don is. Notte was directed by Michelangelo Antonioni (Story of a Love Affair, Blow-Up), it stars a personal favorite actor, and Draper-esque prototype, the above pictured Marcello Mastroianni.

Have you ever read James Joyce’s The Dead? Imagine that, but way more Italian. There’s a focus on memory and the resurgence of the past, on intangible relationships, on wandering through life like sleepwalkers, half alive, half dead. (But keeping with the Italian thing, there’s also some DANCING.) It’s about a man and his wife who engage in flirtations and affairs until the end, when she wakes up one morning and tells him she doesn’t love him anymore. Hmmmmm.

There’s a big party scene where Giovanni, the husband, socializes and gladhands while his wife lingers on the edges of things, there as a trophy, lonely in a crowd of people. The similarity should strike you pretty quickly if you recall Don and Betty at the Kentucky Derby party. It doesn’t end there. Giovanni is a restrained man-child, someone who has everything he could want but can’t manage to connect to the happiness those trappings ostensibly entail. His indecisiveness, his recklessness, and his creative frustration (he is a writer) remind us of our own leading man.

P.S.! As a film history side note, are you interested in why Don loves foreign film so much? Well, I’ll tell you! The educated consumer, middle class, with tendencies toward art, totally gave up on American cinema around the 50s and into the 60s. In short, this is because American 50’s cinema sucked. Badly. It was all gimmicks and wide screen and teenage idols like James Dean romping around — not serious enough for a man of Don’s taste. This is when imports took off, and in particular, Italian cinema boomed. The neo-realist movement, referred to by some as “male weepies”, really got an American audience interested. The French Nouvelle Vague and the British working class “Kitchen Sink” movement was also right around this time, and provided a foreign escape route from the American chaff of the day.

• footnote - by Natasha Simons

November 27, 2009

It has been said before of Joan, but she does seem to have some uncanny Holly Golightly traits. Particularly, with her choice of roommates.

How could have a savyy lil sex kitten like Joan have not seen this coming?

Remember when she kissed Sal at the election party and that dumbfounded look came across her face? We get the sense that Joan’s gaydar is very keen. So how did she not notice that her roomie was a big old Lezzie? The night of the big confession, Joan smiled it off and even brought men back to their apartment!

Perhaps Joan was doing what Lightly did which was to make sure there was no missed opportunity. Joan, well intentioned but sometimes clumsily, believes that she can teach girls in her life how to get the most from men. Even if Carol chose to be a lesbian, surely, that didn’t mean that she should live in poverty as a spinster. According to Truman Capote, who wrote Breakfast at Tiffany’s some of the best kept women in New York were actually lesbians.

From a 1968 Playboy interview:

Playboy: Holly Golightly alludes to her onetime Lesbian roommate and obliquely expresses a sexual interest in other women. Was Holly a Lesbian?

Capote: Let’s leave Holly out of it. It’s a well-known fact that most prostitutes are Lesbians—at least 80 percent of them, in any case. And so are a great many of the models and showgirls in New York; just off the top of my head, I can think of three top professional models who are Lesbians. Of course, there’s a Lesbian component in every woman, but what intrigues me is the heterosexual male’s fascination with Lesbians. I find it extraordinary that so many men I know consider Lesbian women exciting and attractive; among their most treasured erotic dreams is the idea of going to bed with two Lesbians.

So while Joan doesn’t seem to have an enlightened view of homosexuality, she does seem to have only the best intentions for Carol. But like, Golightly, Joan, of course, abandons her roommate to find her own sort of happiness. Though, Joan’s vision of contentment more domestic than Holly’s it’s still equally as elusive.

November 26, 2009

Other popular pieces that ran inside the pages of The Atlantic in 1961-62:

*The Captivity of Marriage

“Wives are lonelier now than they ever used to be. In older, gentler times, when age still had its privileges, the old folks never harbored any guilt feelings about being a drag on the young.”

*Are Americans Well Adjusted?

“As its title indicates, Americans View Their Mental Health is concerned with self-diagnosis, with people’s own estimates of their well-being and their troubles. Such estimates are apt to be colored by defenses and failures of insight, but the authors are right in emphasizing their relevance to the study of mental health, since it is subjective evaluations which decide what the ordinary person does about his emotional difficulties”

*The Century of the Child

“This realization has placed new and complex responsibilities on parents, teachers, and community services. Many parents are now well aware how much their presence or absence, their words, their actions, indeed, their whole emotional state affect their children. This is an important gain.”

*Why People Smoke

“Girls do not lag far behind boys in early adoption of smoking, but the boys appear to be consistently heavier smokers. Adolescent smoking is by no means a recent phenomenon, yet the last decade has seen a highly accelerated shift to an earlier age for beginning smoking, and young teen-agers characteristically smoke cigarettes only.”

*And of course Kenneth Cosgrove on the craft of tapping a mapple trees in Vermont!

5:05pm | 11 notes | Ken Cosgrove | Mad Men Season 2 | mad men bookshelf

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