A Few of My Favorite Things

I've mentioned the Ricochet website and its weekly podcast a few times now and I'm here to recommend both again.  I can attest that this week's podcast is a treat and I've only listened to the first thirty minutes or so.   James Lileks dominates the conversation, which is good because he is perhaps the most perceptive and interesting cultural commentator we have today, and a really funny guy to boot.  Rather than politics, the podcast takes off in a pop-culture direction and a more enjoyable conversation you will not find this week, for me anyway, because they end up talking about two of my favorite things.  The first of those is Mad Men.  Peter Robinson, one of the other hosts, mentions that he's just begun watching and cannot figure out what all the fuss is about.  He claims that The Sopranos was a much better show.  To which Lileks take immediate exception and explains to Robinson what Mad Men is really all about:

It really is about the identity that people construct about themselves in their personal and public lives and how it relates to advertising, which is a tool we all use to construct our lives.  There's a speech that Don Draper gives at one point about what advertising is supposed to do.  He says you're driving down the highway and you see that billboard and it says "You're all right, things are all right, what you're doing is right"....but it's also about something else.  It's about what we lost and what we gained...what we gained was liberation of females...we gained more respectful work places, we gained more sophisticated advertising, we gained the freedom not to sweat all day in a tie.  But what we lost was the solidity of a self-confident culture that you still feel in Mad Men and that's all going to go away and evaporate completely in the sixties and what comes afterwards.

I can hardly disagree with that considering some of my own comments about the show in this space:

The show about a group of people in the advertising business, whose job it is to construct an identity for the products they sell, is really about the identity we construct for our own selves, the veneer we put on day by day to show the outside world. Don Draper, Betty Draper, Peggy Olsen, Pete Campbell, Sal Romano, now even Joan Holloway, all have built an identity that is at odds, sometimes by a little, sometimes by a lot, with who they truly are. And so it is with us all. We’ve all got something to hide.

...and more recently:

one of the appeals of Mad Men, for me, and as Foster argues, is the sense that we’ve lost something that those people had. I’m not even sure I can define what’s been lost but I’ll try. What’s lost is a sense of decorum, a sense of style, an agreement on how people behaved in public, the way men treated women in public, a sense of dignity, a confidence, an optimism....[but] here come “the sixties.” From our viewpoint we know what that means for America – all the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off – but what it means for Don Draper is still to be seen.

I'd like to flatter myself and say that James Lileks and I are saying essentially the same thing in slightly different words.

The other favorite thing of mine they discuss is the recent PBS live broadcast of Lincoln Center's production of South Pacific.  Peter Robinson mentions how he and his wife stumbled upon it while flipping channels the other night:

It was a beautifully done production of South Pacific...with a full orchestra...the actors and actresses could all sing and they could all act and it was beautifully staged, nothing camp or ironic about it, it was just a production of South Pacific.  And one by one the children in my family came in and saw this thing and sat down entranced, unable to pull themselves away...and what I thought was, "there's beauty here, unselfconsciously beautiful.  Rodgers and Hammerstein were striving for real beauty."

And oh my goodness did they achieve it.  My wife and I saw South Pacific at Lincoln Center twice and we watched the broadcast the other evening.  It is as well-done a show as we've ever seen, beautifully put together, as near to perfect as a staged production can be.  It is SO MUCH FUN.  Funny, sweet, emotionally moving.  And corny and silly.  It's set in the South Pacific but it's pure Americana.  And, oh, the songs! As played by the full orchestra, sung in those wonderful voices - they give me goosebumps.  The show closes in a few weeks after a run of a few years.   Still, even if you missed the live broadcast the other night, PBS repeats their broadcasts often and I'm sure you can still catch it. If you have any affinity at all for Broadway musicals it is a not to be missed production - it gives you an idea of what the glory days must have been like, all the excitement and the grandeur and, yes, the beauty.