Excerpt

"What [the Westerner] defends, at bottom, is the purity of his own image - in fact his honor. That is what makes him invulnerable. When the gangster is killed, his whole life is shown to be a mistake, but the image the Westerner seeks to maintain can be presented as clearly in defeat as in victory: he fights not for advantage, and not for the right, but to state what he is, and he must live in a world which permits that statement. The Westerner is the last gentleman, and the movies which over and over again tell his story are probably the last art form in which the concept of honor retains its strength."

- Robert Warshow, from his 1954 essay, "Movie Chronicle: The Westerner"

Lonesome Dove

I scheduled this week off some time ago hoping to play golf and spend as much time outdoors as possible but the weather hasn't cooperated. It's been pouring rain all over the east coast this week and it's still raining now as I look out my window. Earlier this week I stumbled across this radio interview with Robert Duvall, whom I consider the finest actor in American films over the past fifty years (hell, he might be the finest ever) in which he mentions that his role in the 1989 mini-series Lonesome Dove was his favorite ever. I'd never seen "Lonesome Dove" so I took the opportunity this week, watching all four 90-minute long episodes over the past three days, streaming from Netflix. Perhaps it is the inevitable melancholia that builds up in one during long stretches of dreary, rainy days, but right now I think "Lonesome Dove" has had as powerful an emotional effect on me as just about any television I've ever seen. A wonderful story, and Duvall's portayal of Augustus McCrae is a triumph. The story is about two retired Texas Rangers (Duvall's McCrae and Woodrow Call, played by Tommy Lee Jones, who is also excellent) who leave their two-bit Texas town of Lonesome Dove to drive cattle up north to begin the first cattle ranch on the Montana frontier. I won't go into more plot detail but suffice to say it is vastly entertaining and visually brilliant, with breathtaking shots of the frontier - you understand the attachment those men had with the country. At bottom "Lonesome Dove" has what all the best stories of the West contain: love of the land, love of adventure, a sense of duty and honor, the choice between staying and going, between what will be lost and what can be gained, and an acceptance of the burdens that come with such a life. I cannot recommend it highly enough.

Here is a little taste, but watch the entire six hours. You won't regret it:

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No Apology Necessary

I just finished watching Bret Baier's Special Report program on Fox, which I do nightly. I watch little else on Fox but I rarely miss Special Report. I was worried when Brit Hume left as anchor a few years back, assuming the show would go downhill without him. Instead, I believe Bret Baier has made the show better. A genuinely nice guy, his calm, confident demeanor is perfect for a news anchor, and the show's supporting reporters are excellent from top to bottom. It is a terrific news program, very informative, and I particularly like to hear what the panel at the end show has to say about the day's events. I've been reading Charles Krauthammer since he first started publishing his column in the Washington Post back in the 1980's, and I believe he can now be considered, due to his presence each night on Special Report, the most influential of all the conservative columnists (a position George Will was in for years.) Steve Hayes, who I once saw while walking downtown and stopped to introduce myself, is as interesting a commentator as Krauthammer. Juan Williams sat in the panel's middle chair tonight, the liberal chair.

Tonight's panel discussion focused on the events in Libya. With Qaddafi about to fall, there is some finger-pointing going on at those of us who thought the Libyan action was a mistake. This is an attitude I just don't understand. Juan Williams observed that Michelle Bachmann has yet to apologize for her position against U.S. involvement in Libya. Ms. Bachmann's position, as I understand it, was that we should withhold action because Libya under Qaddafi posed no threat to the national security interests of the United States. Now that it appears Qaddafi is about to fall, Williams and others on the left (and some on the right) think that this somehow proves us wrong. How so? As I said, Libya under Qaddafi posed no threat. That was never the reason for the "kinetic-military action," as the administration so cynically put it. The stated reason for the war was to stop Qaddafi from killing his own people. That Qaddafi is now gone, or nearly gone, does not change the fact that he was not a threat, nor does it make our involvement in Libya more justified. Of course we could take Qaddafi out, if we really wanted to. Did anyone ever doubt it? The question is, is it now our policy to take out the leadership of every country which is brutal towards its own people? We are going to busy indeed. If anything, Libya is now more of a threat to U.S. interests than if we had left things alone, simply because we have no idea as to the nature of those who will end up in power. Being such a tribal nation, at this point we don't even know who will end up in power, or how long if ever it will take for some stability to come to the region. I fear the brutality the Libyan people are about to face will make Qaddafi's seem mild and it is very possible we could end up seeing a regime dominated by Islamists with sympathies towards Al Qaeda or Iran. Who would need to apologize then?

While Williams was pointing his finger tonight I could not help think of this quote by Edmund Burke in Reflections on the Revolution in France, one all conservatives may want to pause and reflect on:

When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air, is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgment until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of a troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before I venture publicly to congratulate men upon a blessing, that they have really received one. Flattery corrupts both the receiver and the giver; and adulation is not of more service to the people than to kings. I should therefore suspend my congratulations on the new liberty of France, until I was informed how it had been combined with government, with public force, with the discipline and obedience of armies, with the collection of an effective and well-distributed revenue, with morality and religion, with solidity and property, with peace and order, with civil and social manners. All these (in their way) are good things, too; and without them, liberty is not a benefit whilst it lasts, and is not likely to continue long. The effect of liberty to individuals is, that they may do what they please: we ought to see what it will please them to do, before we risk congratulations, which may be soon turned into complaints.

Eventually we will know how things turn out in Libya. But, whether good or bad, the principle that many of us stood on six months ago - that the United States military should only be used when our national security is threatened - will stand either way. Those of us who were against the Libyan adventure have nothing to apologize for.

O’Reilly on Muslims

There's been some kerfuffle over Bill O'Reilly's comment on The View the other day. When asked why he was against the Ground Zero mosque, he responded, "Because Muslims killed us on 9/11!”

Let me preface my remarks by stating that I've never been an O'Reilly fan. I rarely watch his show and when I do it's never planned, it's only because I'm flipping channels and see that he has an interesting guest on. I don't consider O'Reilly a conservative. He's more of a populist and a self-promoter. There's nothing wrong with that and it's not the main reason I don't watch him. The real reason is because I find the man's belligerence off-putting in the extreme. His attitude that he is the arbiter of all that is right or wrong may make for popular television but it makes me boil. I find him nearly unwatchable for more than ten minutes at a time.

And I've never watched The View. I've seen plenty of clips of the show posted on conservative blogs and that is quite enough for me, thank you. Beyond that I won't comment on my opinion of the show (cop out!).

At any rate, I watched the clip of O'Reilly making his comment and a couple of the panelists walking off the set (including Whoopi Goldberg, who wins the award for the most unfunny comedian in history.) It seemed to me ridiculous.

What Bill O'Reilly said, "Because Muslims killed us on 9/11!” is true, factually. That the 19 men who flew the airplanes into our buildings and killed nearly 3000 people on American soil were Muslim is without doubt. Furthermore, they did it in the name of Islam. No one denies that.  Could he have said what he meant more artfully?  Sure, I suppose. But no one can argue with the factual basis of the statement. So why all the fuss? I dismissed the panelists walking off the set as a couple of loony leftists making a grandstanding gesture and the ensuing kerfuffle as nonsense.

Now, along comes Peter Wehner, a man for whom I have great respect and whom I've praised often on this blog, posting on Commentary's Contentions blog that O'Reilly was wrong. He explains why he thinks so by stating the following:

Assume that Sam Harris went on The O’Reilly Factor and, based on the child-abuse scandals that tarnished the reputation of the Catholic Church, made the sweeping claim that “Catholics are child molesters.” My guess is that O’Reilly would (rightly) respond, “No. Some priests molested children, and it was a horrific thing. But you can’t indict an entire faith based on the sins of a relatively few number of priests."

I disagree with Wehner because I think his analogy is wrong. To say, "Catholics are child molesters" is indeed a statement that indicts all Catholics. But O'Reilly did not indict all Muslims with his statement. He was plainly speaking of the 19 men who commandeered those airliners, not all Muslims. A more proper analogy to the O'Reilly statement would be, "Catholics molested those children." That is an inarguable fact, just as O'Reilly's statement is. So Wehner's analogy is incorrect.

I would add a few more things.  The Catholic priests who molested those children did not do it in the name of Catholicism, as the 9/11 killers did in the name of Islam. The priests did it because they were weak, dishonorable men who could not control their vile impulses. You could argue that they got into the priesthood for the purposes of putting themselves into closer proximity to children and to better gain their trust, but that is a different thing than committing their outrages in the name of the Church.

Furthermore, the vast, vast, majority of other Catholics were as horrified as anyone else (perhaps more so) when the facts of the child molestations came to light, and they condemned it as much as anyone (again, perhaps more so.)  I do not believe that the same percentage of Muslims throughout the world had similar reactions when learning of the 9/11 atrocities. I seem to remember dancing in the streets. Afterwards there were many Islamic extremists claiming support for the murderers. Even those prominent Muslims who condemned the actions of the 9/11 terrorists often did so in equivocated language, often hinting that our actions may have provoked and justified the attacks. While I am sure there are millions of Muslims who reacted with the same horror and disgust as the rest of us on 9/11, their voices are seldom heard. To me, and others, there seems to be many Muslims who, while they would never engage in terrorism themselves, give tacit approval to those who do. And that is a problem (about which I plan to post more about soon.)

So please spare me the outrage over O'Reilly's comment. What he said was true and those that are feigning outrage over it are frauds. They know what he meant.

Mad Men, “The Suitcase”

Mad Men continues to amaze. Sunday's episode was a tour de force for Jon Ham (Don Draper) and Elizabeth Moss (Peggy Olson), as well as the writers. It was also a huge risk, a show concentrating almost entirely on Don and Peggy. Throughout they argue, accuse, push each other's buttons, and finally, come through on the other side, at reconciliation, understanding, perhaps even love. (I'm not necessarily talking about romantic love, but I wouldn't rule that out in the future.) Don receives an urgent message from California early in the show and he knows what it's about: Anna is dead, or dying. He doesn't have the strength to return the call. Instead, he manipulates Peggy, who's birthday it is, into staying that evening and helping him with the Samsonite luggage campaign. Peggy winds up cancelling her plans with her boyfriend, who, rather than planning the romantic dinner she was expecting, has invited her entire family as a surprise. "We're supposed to be staring at each other over candlelight, and he invites my mother? He doesn't know me," she says. Later, when Don has called California and gets the confirmation that Anna has died, he describes her to Peggy as ""the only person in the world who really knew me." Peggy replies, "that's not true." Don and Peggy know and understand each other better than anyone else. They both live for the work, not only because they love it but because it's the only place they truly feel comfortable. "I know what I'm supposed to want," she says, "but it just never feels right, or as important as anything in that office." That's true for both of them, and the quote immediately brings to mind the child Peggy has given up for adoption and Don's visit to her when she was in the hospital. The two characters had been linked from the start but Don's visit, when he tells her to get out, that "this never happened," is one of the pivotal moments in the show's history for it defined and deepened the relationship between the two and set Peggy off on the path she is now on: a young, liberated woman more interested in her career than in marriage and family. That was not an attitude that was likely to gain widespread favor in 1965 but she has accepted its truth. For his part, Don, who is in a alcoholic spiral downwards, opens up to Peggy as he never has to anyone else. It's almost a shock when he begins to cry at the news of Anna's death. He's crying not just for her but for himself too. He knows that his life is a waste. Later in the morning, after Don shows Peggy the idea he's come up with for the suitcase, he holds her hand and gives her an almost pleading look of thanks, one that says, "I need you." Don sees in Peggy a path back to normalcy, to salvation perhaps. Will Peggy Olson save Don as he once saved her?

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.

Breaking Bad

About eighteen months ago in this space I said this:

Contrary to popular belief, I think the past ten years have been “The Golden Age” of television, not the 1950s or 60s. The Sopranos, The Wire, The Shield, Mad Men, Curb Your Enthusiasm, 24, Entourage, among others, are better entertainment than what was produced back in the day.

I have not changed my opinion on that and I found some supporting opinions while listening to this week's Ricochet podcast (which, if you don't listen to you should, especially now that James Lileks is part of the crew.)  The discussion was about the paucity of decent movies coming out of Hollywood this summer and Jonah Goldberg, a frequent guest and another reason to listen to the podcast, mentioned that while movies are a dead-end these days (I'm paraphrasing) TV keeps getting better and better.  Rob Long followed with the observation that TV is the place you go to now to see interesting stories while you go to the movies to see the earth explode.  That's a dramatic simplification but it's pretty much on the nose.  The current dreck coming from the movie industry is for the most part aimed at children, or adults who still think like children.  They are video games writ large intended for a generation that grew up on video games.  To find a well-told story, these days, you turn to television.  In the age of big screen hi-def TVs, that's not so bad a thing. While I miss the old movie-going experience, the anticipation and excitement we get when the lights go down, there is little reason to go if the movie stinks.  Better to curl up on the couch at home in front of your big screen tv and watch a well-told story.

Jonah mentions on the podcast that Breaking Bad is the best show on TV, and he may be right.  I'd heard little about the show, which recently began its third season, but what I had heard was all good so I threw the first season into my Netflix queue.  My wife and I have watched the first six episodes of season one and it is excellent.  At the end of episode six, the timid, mild-mannered high school teacher Walter White, stricken with inoperable lung cancer, his head newly-shaven, walks out of a confrontation with a local drug kingpin, having won.  He lets out a scream of exhortation, of total release, and I think here we see the crux of what the show is about.  It's not simply about a man who is trying his best to make some money for his family before he dies; it's about a man standing up and taking control of his life, a life he's never had control of before.  He's always been stepped-on, ordered around, saying little, never complaining.  Even the news of his cancer he takes with a certain resignation: things like this are supposed to happen to him.  He's always been done to.  After the confrontation and the release - and we see it building in him from episode to episode - he is now the one in charge, the one who'll be doing the ordering around.  And he likes it.  The change we see in Walter White seems to me the essence of good story-telling.  It's not simply the action on the screen.  It's the internal motivations and desires of the characters that cause the action on the screen.  That's a big part of what the movies have forgot.  Technological development has replaced character development.

So, once again, with Breaking Bad, television has come through where the movies fail.  I think we'll continue to see the steady migration of well-told stories over to tv and also a change of some sort in Hollywood among actors.  Whereas once movie actors would never consider television - it was too small-time, and it was an indicator that your time on the big-screen was over - more and more we will see the best actors turning towards television.  They'll follow the best writers, who have already made the migration.

Life, Mad Men, and America

Life has been a bit of a whirlwind lately, and that's a good thing. I've been busy at work not only with normal duties but also studying up on data warehousing concepts, the reason for which will be forthcoming. In my sparetime I've moved the blog from Blogger over to Wordpress, hosted by Dreamhost, and have been happily learning all the new capabilities for audio, photos, posts, etc., to try to make it look more professional.  I've also started a photoblog, still in its infancy, and am building a web site for my brother's business, which is still a work in progress but should be ready soon.  I'm enjoying these endeavors immensely - it's fun.  One of my upcoming projects, I've decided, is to become expert at javascript and php so I can develop my own websites from scratch.   I'm fairly well-versed in HTML - I built a bunch of websites for our group back at my old job but the layout and formatting of them was pedestrian at best.  I want my stuff to look professional and the only way to ensure that really is to dig in.  Which is no problem.  That's when I have the most fun at work, when I'm learning something new, testing it, learning it, becoming expert at it.  It's something I look forward to.

We also visited Mom and Dad down in Florida this past weekend, a quick trip but very enjoyable.  I've always loved my mother's company.  We started talking about her childhood just before we had to leave for our flight back and I pretty much decided then that I need to get her talking about these things on tape.  I don't want to lose those stories before it's too late.  Not that there is any rush.  My mom is in about as good a shape as someone her age can be.  She still has lots of energy and is as sharp in in mind as always - and that's pretty sharp. Plus she has her interests - she's a world-class, award-winning quilter, and she teaches quilting classes down there.

I've had almost no time for reading or other sorts of entertainment.  The book I'm reading currently is wonderful and normally I would gobble up something so good in a couple of sittings over a couple of days.  Alas, a month later and it is still unfinished, though I am determined so sit and relax with it today and finish it up.

I did watch the fourth season opening episode ("Public Relations") of Mad Men.  And I loved it.  Things have certainly changed and the show had a different feel to it than the previous seasons, and I think that's a good thing.  The times are changing (it's almost 1965), the workplace is new, Don is divorced and Betty is now married to Henry - it's right that the show has a new feel because life has a new feel.  The opening question, "Who is Don Draper?" is something that may never be answered, though by the end of the episode it's clear Don has decided the future of the new agency, Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce, will be shaped by him.  He throws out potential clients who don't want to do things his way and he sets up an interview (a previous one having failed due to his reluctance to talk about himself) with a Wall Street Journal reporter in which he brags about himself and his new agency.  Not that anyone minds Don taking charge.  It's expected of him.  Roger, Bert, and Peggy all indicate their reliance on him at different points in the episode (Peggy: "We're all here because of you, you know.  All we want to do is please you.")

While Don takes charge at the new agency, his personal life is less settled, to say the least.  The publication of the initial failed interview characterizes him as a 'cipher' and this may be close to the truth.  He has reinvented himself, taking on a new name and leaving the past behind, but there's no there there once he steps outside the professional side of Don Draper.  He knows how to sell products and he knows how to sell the character he's created named Don Draper, but once he's alone and on his own, when there's nothing to sell, there's nothing left to the man.  So he indulges himself with prostitutes, whom he pays to play out his sexual impulses ("Hit me.  Harder.")  As Mad Men reinvents itself for season four, as Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce introduces itself as a new, hip, agency with Don Draper the master at the helm, perhaps we should also keep a watch out for what becomes of Don Draper the cipher.  Can he find value and fulfillment in his private life?  Or is it too late?  There are hints that he may be able to remake himself in his relationship with his children (will Sally and Bobby be his salvation?  He's clearly a better parent than Betty.)  But watching it play out, with no idea what's ahead, is a lot of the fun.

So what else is new?  It's still to be determined if we are seeing a sea-change in attitude towards the government or if this is a passing thing.  By "this" I mean the tea-party movement, the idea that America is being buried under a mountain of debt that we'll never dig out of if something doesn't change soon.  It does seem that it's part of the zeitgeist, the feeling that we're in trouble and something needs to be done.  I expect the mid-terms will be a disaster for the Democrats - don't rule out the Republicans will take over the Senate along with the House - but whether this will be the necessary spur to change is still a question.  Things will change, yes, but will they change enough?  We need drastic transformation, a remaking of government from the top down, large cuts in expenditures, a rollback of the Obamacare and other atrocities, a commitment to balanced budgets and pay down of the debt, and none of these things will be easy.  Obama can veto any proposed change he doesn't like for the next two years and by then will the passion we're seeing now among the rank-and-file have died down?  Add that to the near inevitability the newly elected will go native once they arrive in D.C. and count me skeptical that a change is gonna come.  Still, I hold out the hope that if ever there was a chance for transformation, the time has never been riper.

Mad Men's Decent Drapery

The fourth season of Mad Men premiers this Sunday night and as regular readers know, we are big fans here at What's New. Part of the fun is reading everyone's take on the show - people love to discuss it. Some love the show and love Don Draper, others love it and hate Don Draper.  They see him as representative of a particular type, indeed of the entire pre-1960s era, so how you feel about the Draper character and perhaps about the show in general has much to do with how you feel about that type and that era.  Daniel Foster had an interesting take on it earlier this week at NRO in response to a fellow NROers column:

It seems to me that the brilliance of Draper, and of Mad Men as a whole, is its ability to make people born in 1974 or 1983 or 1990 nostalgic for a world they never knew, except through a second-hand public school narrative that paints it in the gray flannel and sharkskin tones we've been trained to find so stultifying. Note, I'm not just talking about the Romanticism of a generation of liberals and feminists waiting pins-and-needles for the deliverance of the 60s. It's a bona fide sense that something was lost that we can't ever get back.

I think Foster gets to the heart of the matter - for me at least - in this excerpt. I remember reading a column about Mad Men last year that insisted that if you weren't watching the show as a critique of the era and its attitudes then you were watching it wrong. I felt that was wrong at the time and clearly others, including Foster, agree with me. Certainly one can read the show as a comprehensive critique if one is intent on it. Take for instance Don and Betty's treatment of their children, who are often ignored or told to go somewhere and play. If one is a practitioner of today's smothering, full-court press type of parenting then Don and Betty would indeed seem to be terrible parents. But when I think of my own childhood, contemporary with that of Sally and Bobby, I must admit that my upbringing was similar. We were often told to go outside and play and we didn't expect our parents undivided attention. And while I don't actually recall my mother being overly loving, I certainly never felt unloved - and I adored my mother. As I've argued before, I think Mad Men plays it pretty straight, trying to show the era as it was. It lets us make up our own minds about what's being presented.

So 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. What Burke called "the decent drapery of life." Yes, these things were operative primarily in the public sphere but there can be no doubt that they carried over into the private. And while I understand that Don Draper's private behavior is often monstrous, it's his public behavior that we find so attractive about him, the decent drapery. To give you a better understanding of what I'm getting at requires a more extensive excerpt of Burke:

All the pleasing illusions, which made power gentle, and obedience liberal, which harmonized the different shades of life, and which, by a bland the simulation, incorporated into politics the sentiments which beautify and soften private society, are to be dissolved by this new conquering empire of light and reason. All the decent drapery of life is to be rudely torn off. All the super-added ideas, furnished from the wardrobe of a moral imagination, which the heart owns, and the understanding ratifies, as necessary to cover the defects of her naked shivering nature, and to raise it to dignity in our own estimation, are to be exploded as ridiculous, absurd, and antiquated fashion.

Mad Men shows us the decent drapery and the "naked shivering nature" side by side. It's part of what makes the show so fascinating. Season four will be set in 1964: the president is dead, the war in Vietnam is beginning to escalate, they are marching for civil rights in the south, The Beatles have just arrived in America - 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.

Notes From the Underground

It's been awhile, I know. But it’s not like you can't live without this, my musings and ramblings. I mean, who cares? Most of the time even I don't. But, just in case anyone out there still checks in on this blog, here's a few of the random thoughts that having been running through my brain lately.

• I’m very much looking forward to HBO’s The Pacific, which starts this Sunday night.  I’ve long thought that Band of Brothers, HBO’s 10-part series about the 101st Airborne’s experience in the western theatre, was some of the finest television I’ve ever seen.  Maybe the finest.  My wife and I are re-watching it in preparation for The Pacific and it’s as good as I remember.  If The Pacific can match its predecessor, we are in for a treat.
• The Obama administration has apparently come to the conclusion that health-care must be passed if they are to have any future success at all.  Moving on to other things is not an option, they believe, because if health-care fails Obama’s presidency is as good as over.  He’ll suffer the same fate that brought Jimmy Carter down: the abandonment of an administration by the president’s own party.  People forget that it was the loss of faith in Carter by the Democrat-controlled Congress that finally made him a non-entity as president.  The Obama administration knows that the failure of health-care reform means they will suffer a similar fate.  The Democrats legislators who walked the plank for Obama on cap-and-trade and health-care only to watch him fail (over and over again) will never do it again.  They’ll know his political muscle has all but vanished and they’ll go back to looking out for their own skins.  So Obama and Reid and Pelosi are doing everything they can to get this monstrosity passed, damn protocol, damn Senate rules, damn the Constitution.  The “Slaughter Rule” of “deeming” a bill to have passed when it’s never been voted on, the use of reconciliation for purposes it was never intended, the contemplation of using a Biden override of the Senate parliamentarian’s rulings, are all outrages worthy of banana-republic style political thuggery.
• Of course, if health-care does pass, especially using the tactics under consideration, the mid-terms could be Armageddon for the Democrats.  Dick Morris is claiming up to 80 house seats could switch to the Republicans if that happens.  I don’t know about 80 but I think 60 is a good bet, and the Senate would be up for grabs.  I’ve long argued that it would be the best thing that could happen to Obama because, like Clinton after the 1994 debacle, he’d be forced to govern from the center.  Rich Lowry over at NRO is arguing the same thing this morning.  But the question remains: can Obama govern from the center?  Can such a committed ideologue sacrifice his life-long beliefs and certainties and actually compromise?  I’ve said it here before and I’ll say it again: I don’t think he has it in him.  He said as much himself when he claimed he’d rather be a one-termer who got things done that a two-termer who didn’t affect much change.  His health-care gambit is his shot at history and he knows it.  If it passes, even if he doesn’t get re-elected, he believes he’ll go down in history.  I believe it will be more like infamy.           
• I’m happy to hear that Tiger Woods is planning on returning to golf soon.  The game needs him.  While I was disappointed to learn of his behavior I was not overly surprised.  A young man, the most well-known athlete in the world, has dozens of beautiful women throwing themselves at him everywhere he goes and he succumbs, happily, to the temptation. Why is that surprising?  Surely it was wrong given that he is married, but the media coverage was more than a little creepy.  Moreover, why Tiger felt the need to apologize to anyone but his wife, his family, and his sponsors is beyond me.  He certainly didn’t owe me an apology.  For those who feel like he let down parents who’d held him up to their children as a role-model, well, I’d argue that those parents were being naive, knowing what we know about the behavior of the average athlete.  The whole thing was ugly, as much for the media’s behavior as Tiger’s.  I’m just glad he’ll be back on the course soon.  Hoping that the media will concentrate on his golf game rather than his personal life is probably too much to ask for.
• American Idol has got a lot to answer for.  The wretchedness of the singers on the show have ingrained a certain style of singing into an entire generation of American youth.  You know what I mean, that cloying, over-emoting, hyper-melismatic style that most of these children employ.  They think it’s the way to show emotional expressiveness but of course it does just the opposite, revealing them to be the phonies that they are.  Add to that the song choices of many of them, the type that dominates in this musically-challenged age: dreary, lacking in melody and personality, lyrically without imagination, like reading pages from a diary.  Where have all the songwriters gone?  We watched one season of American Idol, the year when Carrie Underwood won, and then we swore off it. Until this season, which I am watching because my wife is forcing me to.  She is watching because her sister is forcing her to and she didn’t want to do it alone.  And you know what?  I’m glad I’m watching. Why?  For one reason only, and her name is Crystal Bowersox.  Have you seen her perform?  This girl is the real deal, a young lady just dripping with talent.  And, glory of glories, she knows how to sing. (There are many, many people with vocal talent who don’t know how to sing.)  This sweet young thing who grew up on a farm and had never watched American Idol before she appeared on it, is steeped in the style and aesthetics of mid-60s Atlantic Records soul and rhythm and blues. Her voice, her guitar playing, her very persona, are saturated in it. Toss in a little country rock and gospel, shake it up, and you’ve got Crystal Bowersox.  And she has taste – she knows a good song when she hears it, no doubt because she has grown up listening to good songs.  So far she has sung songs written by Carole King, John Fogerty, and Tracy Chapman.  And every song has had her own personal stamp on it.  I’m tempted to call her a natural but performances like those she has given so far are the product of much thought and practice.  To seem effortless takes hard work.  Whatever happens to her on the show from here on in doesn’t really matter – she’ll get a recording contract (I’ll be in line for her records) and she’ll go far, so long as America still has any musical taste whatsoever.  One of my favorite things about her is the way she looks at the judges when they are telling her what they though of her performance.  Rather than being giggly or intimidated by them, the look on her face is almost contemptuous, though it’s probably more accurately described as indifferent.  And she’s right to be indifferent.  There is nothing those judges can tell her that she doesn’t already know.  Single-handedly, Ms. Bowersox can help American Idol atone for many of its sins, simply by reminding Americans what good music sounds like.  She is the very opposite of everything American Idol has always stood for.
• My own personal music education continues. I am well on my way to reaching my goal of learning fifty new classical music pieces during the 2010 year.  I’d itemize them all for you but it’s too much work.  Suffice to say I’m immensely enjoying much of the new music I’ve learned.  A lot of it is chamber works, string quartets mostly, by Beethoven, Schubert, and Haydn.  Beethoven is and always will be the master in my book but Schubert’s later string quartets, his piano trios, and his string quintet are all marvelous – he was a man of the first rank and he wrote music of astounding depth and beauty.  I love, love, love it. 
• To end this thing, let me give you a little Beethoven, with whom I’m ending this post, and a little Band of Brothers, with which I began this post.  Episode 9 of BoB is the one where the 101st discovers the concentration camp.  Who else is the history of western music can evoke the sorrow and tragedy of such a thing but Beethoven?  The below is the beginning and the end of Episode 9.  The middle shows the horrors of the Holocaust and it’s what the music being played is referring to.  It’s music of utter beauty, sorrowful beauty, despairing beauty, set against the backdrop of human tragedy. 

Dropping Out

I sent this Victor Davis Hanson blog post to my wife a few weeks back and she responded that I could have written it, so closely did it resemble my own experience.  The post’s subject has to do with Hanson’s alienation from contemporary culture and, judging by the responses in the comments section, Hanson and I are clearly not alone.  Like Hanson, I once was deeply engaged with the popular culture.  But also like Hanson, alas, I never go to the movie theater anymore and I only watch a few current movies per year on DVD.  There’s simply very little coming from Hollywood these days that interests me as most of what I see is predicable, trite, and boring.  Likewise music.  I have no idea about music being produced today or who is producing it. I couldn’t name a popular hit song over the past decade if my life depended on it.  As I’ve mentioned before, modern popular music is a world that doesn’t exist for me.  And so on: I don’t read the newspaper beyond a glance at the morning sports page, I very rarely watch or listen to public TV or radio, and I watch less sports than I used to.  For instance, I loved professional basketball from the time I was a child until the day Larry Bird retired but I never watch it anymore.  Like other once glorious things, it has devolved.  Rather than being a team game, it’s now a one-on-one or two-on-two affair, with little of the teamwork, ball movement, movement away from the ball, and beauty (think the old Celtics teams from the 60’s, 70’s and 80’s) that once epitomized the game.  Pro basketball these days seems to be about clearing out for one player to go one-on-one to the basket against his defender and, if that doesn’t work, to pop it out to a teammate for a three-pointer.  Indeed, the three-point shot is one of the problems with the game today.  The twenty-foot jump shot is a thing of the past as is working together to get the best shot under the best circumstances. 

I watch a smattering of TV.  I still watch Entourage, which isn’t as good as it once was, and I’ll watch Curb Your Enthusiasm until it’s run is complete.  And, as any reader of this blog knows, I love Mad Men.  I started watching 30 Rock last year but it got unfunny after its first season.  I’m thinking about starting to watch The Office because I watched a few episodes recently and found it quite good, particularly how they handle the relationship between Jim and Pam, which is touching.  I had a bit of a bias against it when it first came on because my wife and I had watched the original British version of the show, which was brilliant, and I thought the American version could not possibly match it.  Perhaps not, but my cursory viewing of these recent episodes tell me it’s well-made.  We’ll see if it’s worth watching the full run.

I don’t want to be this way.  To anyone who reads this blog, clearly I love movies, music, television, books, and sports.  But in the desert called modern culture it’s more rewarding to look backwards.  There’s still lots out there to find so long as you know where to look. 

Too Marvelous For Words

Last night I watched Turner Classic Movies’ delightful documentary celebrating Johnny Mercer’s 100th birthday, Johnny Mercer: The Dream’s on Me.  While he was a singer and a composer as well as the co-founder of Capitol Records, Mercer’s greatest fame came as a lyricist, the finest America ever had.  That’s not just my opinion.  Gene Lees, who knew Mercer, in his book, Portrait of Johnny: The Life of John Herndon Mercer, writes this: “Every American lyricist I have known considers, or considered, him the best of them all.”  The list of standards Mercer wrote seems virtually endless and while people may no longer recognize his name, it is well-nigh impossible, even in this musically-impoverished age, for them not to know some of his songs, so ubiquitous have they become.  He differed from Larry Hart, Cole Porter, Ira Gershwin, and some of the other great lyricists of the day in that he was purely American.  A southerner from Savannah, Georgia, shaped by the blues and jazz of his birthplace, Mercer had no old-world European influences and as such his songs had a looser, more natural feel to them.  He spoke the American language, sprinkling his songs with colloquialisms, catch phrases, place-names, and slang, all in a conversational style that hid their technical brilliance.  Terry Teachout captured Mercer perfectly in this excerpt from his 2004 appreciation of Mercer in Commentary magazine (subscription required):

Mercer's brand of lyricism—unabashed yet unsentimental, and expressed with a colloquial directness that conceals extreme technical sophistication—is unmistakable. No one else, for example, could have written a lyric like “Skylark” (1942): “Skylark,/Have you anything to say to me?/Won't you tell me where my love can be?/Is there a meadow in the mist/Where someone's waiting to be kissed?” In its precise rhymes and beautifully shaped cadences, it is obviously a product of the golden age of American songwriting. But no other golden-age lyricist, not even Oscar Hammerstein II, could have aspired to its air of uncontrived simplicity.

Mercer had dozens of collaborators though perhaps his most prolific partnership came with Harold Arlen.  The two wrote some of the most satisfying songs in the American songbook: “That Old Black Magic”, “Blues In The Night”, “One For My Baby”, “This Time The Dreams On Me”, “Come Rain Or Come Shine”, and many more.  In the TCM documentary, which is filled with glorious old footage, Mercer explains that he wrote differently for different performers, tailoring his lyrics to the performer’s personality.  This versatility also conveys to his composing partner.  The same man who wrote the blues-tinged lyrics for Arlen’s compositions would write the wistful lyrics to “Moon River” with Henry Mancini and the melancholy, meandering lyrics to “When The World Was Young” with M. Philippe Gerard.

Johnny Mercer is an American treasure, “America’s Poet” as someone described him in the documentary.  The documentary runs again on November 18 and you should catch it if you can.  Better still, go get some of his music.  Here’s just a taste, Sinatra doing the definitive version of “One For My Baby (And One More For The Road)”: 

[audio:12 One For My Baby.mp3]

Mad Men, “Guy Walks Into An Advertising Agency”

I haven’t blogged about Mad Men recently simply because I’ve had no time.  Last weekend we were in New York, the weekend before time just got away from me.  I’ve been a little disappointed with the season so far.  It’s good, but it didn’t seem to have the juice of seasons 1 and 2.  The story arc was missing and each episode seemed like a one shot, or preludes setting up situations to explore later in the season.  But five episodes into the season seemed a lot for a prelude.   I kept waiting for the season to get going.   

Well, season 3 just got better.  “Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency” was brilliant, not least because of the story line involving Joan Holloway (now Joan Harris after her marriage.)  Christina Hendricks get to show off her acting chops in this episode, to marvelous effect.  At the close of the scene with her husband, when he informs Joan that someone else has been made chief resident and that he may have to leave New York to practice somewhere else, like Alabama, she turns away from him to turn off the light.  The slight hesitancy in her movement and the look on her face as she clicks off the lamp tells us everything we need to know.  In a show where subtext is all, Joan’s disappointment in her husband, and her misgivings about her own choices, are clear.  Later, sitting in the hospital waiting room with Don, I couldn’t help thinking, “they belong together.”  Their parting scene, wordless for the most part, when she kisses him on the cheek and then wipes off her lipstick, tells us they think the same thing.  Under different circumstances, Don and Joan could have been a couple.  Knowing Joan’s disappointment in her own choice of a husband, the scene is that much more effective. 

Roger Sterling also gets a big part in this episode.  He realizes before and certainly after the reorganization meeting that, in the view of Sterling-Cooper’s new owners, he is obsolete.  When Bert Cooper says, “Mr. Sterling isn’t even on that chart,” and Guy replies “Well, that was an oversight,” everyone in the room knows what Sterling is - he’s an afterthought.  Later, after Guy’s foot has been severed by a runaway lawnmower, Roger can barely conceal his glee when he’s in the office with the associates.  “He may lose his foot,” Sterling is told, to which he replies, “Just when he got it in the door.”  Roger, of course, knows what it means.  The organizational changes that were to be put in place, with Guy on top and Roger an afterthought, were out the window.  The status quo, with Lane Pryce (who was about to be exiled to India) on top would remain in place. 

Poor Guy.  He had it all, and then an idiot secretary cuts off his foot.  In 1963 this meant the end of your career.  As Joan says to Don in the hospital, “That’s life: One minute, you’re on top of the world; next minute, some secretary’s running you over with a lawn mower.”  Again, because of Joan’s earlier scene with her husband, the words resonate even more clearly.  Joan hasn’t had her foot severed but her life has changed in a way she never expected, or wanted.  When the British owners arrive they confirm what we already suspect, that Guy’s career is over.  “The doctors say he’ll never play golf again,” Saint-John says, in perhaps the funniest line of the episode. 

Conrad Hilton reappears, this time to ask Don or some free advice.  In a perfect Don Draper reaction he tells Hilton, "I think you wouldn't be in the presidential suite right now if you worked for free." Don Draper is subservient to nobody.  Later, when Hilton tells Don that the next time someone like Hilton offers him an opportunity like this he needs to ask for more, Don replies, “One opportunity at a time.” 

The final scene, with Don holding his baby boy Gene, and with Sally is sitting in his lap, is wonderful.  Sally is scared to death of the baby, thinking he’s the ghost of her recently deceased grandfather.  “He’s only a baby," Don tells her. "We don't know who he is yet or who he's going to be. And that is a wonderful thing."  Of course, we can’t help but think of Don himself, the farm boy with the abusive father and resentful stepmother who has made himself into a sophisticated and successful ad man on Madison Avenue.  He’s changed his name and left his past behind.  No one is more aware than Don of the American opportunity to make (or remake) yourself into whoever you want to be.  In mid-1963, pre-assassination and pre-Vietnam, when America was young and optimism was in the air, Don sees those possibilities for his son and it was indeed a wonderful thing.  Again, as I often do when watching Mad Men, I thought of The Great Gatsby.  Don Draper is Jay Gatsby, the self-made man.  Dick Whitman was James Gatz, the man he left behind. 

Mad Men: My Old Kentucky Home

In order for you to fully understand my comments about last week’s episode of Mad Men you must first read Will Wilkinson’s post regarding same (hat tip: Jonah Goldberg.) Will’s main point is this:

I see Mad Men as a show about status and status anxiety in an age of cultural ferment.  

In order to demonstrate this point, Will contrasts the situations of Joan and Peggy.  Joan, as I pointed out last season, is the keeper of the keys at Sterling-Cooper.  She thrives in the man-dominated world at SC, using her charms and looks to get what she wants.  Here’s what I said last year:

She's the ultimate 1950's woman, a woman who revels in being a woman, who loves the attention of men. She'll use her looks to get what she wants without ever questioning whether to do so is wrong. She's comfortable in a man's world. This new beat generation is threatening to her. She's the keeper of the keys at Sterling-Cooper and the world SC thrives in and she doesn't want it disturbed.

Will says something about Joan similar in his post:

Joan is omnicompetent, authoritative, and in full control of her abundant femininity. She has fully mastered the arts of mid-century haute bourgeois womanhood and she knows it.

Peggy, on the other hand, was a virtual non-entity in that world. Shy, not particularly attractive, she was noticed by the young men at SC early in the show’s run only for her status as a potential sex-partner.  Once she got fat (during her pregnancy) she became the butt of their jokes.  Only Don noticed her talent.  But change is clearly in the air.  Peggy’s story has dominated the last two episodes and in ways that make it clear she is to be the embodiment of the social and cultural changes that take place in the 1960’s: two episodes ago it was her new-found sexual freedom, last week it was her experimentation with marijuana (“My name is Peggy Olson and I want to smoke some marijuana.”)  Her growing confidence is shown in other ways also, as when she scolds Harry during the diet soft drink commercial auditions, telling him to remember he was only a guest there.  Will again:

She is anxious and awkward about how she stacks up in the world of women and she is anxious and awkward about how she stacks up in the world of men. But she is toughly confident in how she stacks up as a creative worker. The new willingness of the world to reward her for what she does rather than for what she is grants her a power to independently realize her ambitions unavailable to perfect, normatively realized women.

Peggy, show by show, is realizing that the world is opening up for her.  By the end of last week’s episode she is assuring her old-school secretary that she should worry about her: "I am going to get to do everything you want from me." 

For others, however, the curtain may be closing.  Joan is perhaps one of them.  She’s doing what is expected of her: she rose as far as she could expect at Sterling-Cooper and now she has married a dreamboat doctor, Greg.  However, the dreamboat was unsupportive of her when she was proof-reading the television scripts last season (something she clearly loved) and he later forced sex on her in Don’s office, implying that she must have done it before.  Last week during their dinner party for the chief of surgery she discovers quite by accident that Greg may not be so hot a surgeon after all – it comes out that he blundered an operation.  To cover his embarrassment, he forces Joan to take out her accordion and sing for their guests.  She sings Cole Porter’s "C'est Magnifique," which should be the perfect song for Joan.  But the look in her eyes betrays her sadness.  It’s a heart-wrenching scene. 

Last week’s episode made it pretty clear that Roger Sterling and his type are not long for the world.  I was more than a little uncomfortable with how Roger was portrayed in the episode, perhaps because I like his character so much.  His devil-may-care, don’t take the world or yourself too seriously attitude gives the show a breath of fresh air but those days seem to be over, which. for me, is too bad.  I suppose I see nothing wrong with this quintessential 1950’s rake.  They meant no harm.  They just wanted to have a good time.  But the show last week made it clear that Roger is to be a fool – Don actually tells him he’s foolish, echoing my comments last week that Roger was now seen by others as frivolous.  Perhaps Roger’s sin is that he has started taking himself seriously.  He’s searching for happiness, the middle-aged man’s excuse for leaving your wife for a younger woman (though Roger’s ex-wife Mona is much more attractive than Jane.)  I thought last season he was ready to give it all up for the prostitute Vicki (played by the gorgeous Marguerite Moreau).  Instead, he threw over Mona over for Jane, to whom he is now married.  In last week’s episode, he and Jane give a reception at their country club.  But I think the show over-stepped with his black-face routine.  Would a man as worldly as Roger Sterling not know in 1963 how grotesque this appeared?  Remember, as the show itself made clear, this was a gathering of Rockefeller (read: liberal) Republicans.  They were pro-civil rights.  There was much talk of civil rights legislation and there were marches going on all over the country.  Roger Sterling is an ad man on Madison Avenue.  It’s his job to know what’s going on in the world.  It is impossible to believe that he was not aware of the cultural trends that would make the black-face routine an abomination.  Likewise, I also found it hard to believe that everyone but Don Draper would laughingly approve of such a thing.  I think the show got the cultural zeitgeist of the time wrong (perhaps this was plausible in 1953, but not in 1963) but what is worse is that they could have gotten the point across – that Roger and his type are dinosaurs on their way to extinction – in a much subtler way. 

The less said about the storyline with Sally and her grandfather, the better.  I’ll mention one thing.  The book Sally is reading to Gene is Gibbon’s “The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.”  This must be considered another hint at where the show is going.  New York City is in decline, the man-dominated world of the 1950’s is on its way out, another world and other cultural types are on the way in.  That’s the direction the show is going.  I may have more to say about this later in the weekend but I’ll leave it here for now.

Mad Men: Love Among the Ruins

“New York City is in decay” – Don Draper

New York City was indeed in decay in 1963, the year in which season three of Mad Men is set.  Liberal social and economic policies had begun to take its toll, sending the city into a downward spiral marked by two decades of rampant crime, disillusionment, and near bankruptcy.  Don utters the line during a conversation with the head of the organization that is about to tear down the old Pennsylvania Railroad Station and replace it with the new Madison Square Garden.  Now, New York has always been famous for its unsentimental attitude towards its historical architecture, tearing down and building back up at will, always in the name of progress, and nearly always with the approval of its denizens.  But no other episode in its history has shown the downside of this attitude as the tearing down of Penn Station.  This:

was replaced with this:

Is it any wonder the Penn Station episode caused such furor among the natives?  Recall architect Vincent Skully’s famous quote comparing the new and old buildings: “One entered the city like a god; one scuttles in now like a rat.” 

The grief over the loss of such a grand building is conveyed in last week’s episode of Mad Men by Paul Kinsey, the beatnik-wannabe in resident.  But Mad Men, as is its norm, refuses to come down on one side or the other.  For everyone else at Sterling-Cooper, if it means more business in the form of a relationship with the owners of the new Garden, tearing down Penn Station is a good thing.  The only hint that the producers may be sympathetic to the Paul Kinsey side of the argument is that the demolition plays such a large part of an episode entitled “Love Among the Ruins,” inspired by a Robert Browning poem of the same name whose subject is that of two lovers who meet in a turret of the last remaining tower of a once great city, now overrun with nature:

That a girl with eager eyes and yellow hair
Waits me there
In the turret whence the charioteers caught soul
For the goal,
When the king looked, where she looks now, breathless, dumb
Till I come….

But he looked upon the city, every side,
Far and wide,
All the mountains topped with temples, all the glades'
Colonnades,
All the causeys, bridges, aqueducts,--and then,
All the men!
When I do come, she will speak not, she will stand,
Either hand
On my shoulder, give her eyes the first embrace
Of my face,
Ere we rush, ere we extinguish sight and speech
Each on each.

Like the lovers in the poem, the characters in this episode of Mad Men are shown searching for love and fulfillment amidst a decaying city.  It does not come so easy for them as the poem’s narrator.

The largest part of the story, I think, was the sexual awakening of Peggy Olson.  The early Peggy was sexually naive to the point that she didn’t even know she was pregnant until she was about to give birth.  Her prudish nature otherwise has been well-documented through the series run, and it is reinforced in “Love Among the Ruins” in her reaction to Ann Margaret’s performance in the Bye, Bye, Birdie ad.  She seems threatened by both it and the men’s reaction to it, especially Don’s.  But when she notices how men react to Joan’s flirtations she goes home and sings Bye, Bye, Birdie in front of her mirror – she’s seeing if she can be that girl, the kind of girl Ann Margaret was portraying.  And she can.  Later on she picks up a young man at a bar.  She does the picking up as he seems almost incapable of it – she seems worlds more experienced than he.  Later at his apartment when he doesn’t have “a Trojan” and she refuses intercourse, he is ready to dismiss her (“It’s getting late”), but she is the one who suggests “there are other things we can do.”  As she leaves, he drops hints that he’d like to see her again, which she ignores.  On the way out the door, though, she turns back and says, “This was fun.”  While Peggy has grown and matured in front of our eyes the past few years, it is unimaginable that she would have said something like that, or acted like this, in season one or even season two.  She is a harbinger of the sexual revolution to come within the next few years.

But in 1963, some of the old attitudes still survive, even on Madison Avenue.  Roger Sterling’s divorce and remarriage to a girl young enough to be his daughter has cost him respect.  His daughter, Joan Holloway, Bert Cooper, and even Don all have new attitudes towards him – they see him as frivolous, or worse.  The most interesting part of this new attitude is how his relationship with Don will be affected.  At the restaurant meeting with the Madison Square Garden executive, Don’s contempt for Roger is barely disguised. 

Another aspect of how the episode shows “Love Among the Ruins” is the date set for Roger’s daughter’s wedding: November 23, 1963.  President Kennedy will be assassinated the day before her wedding and one has to think that, due to this, there might not even be a wedding.  Even if there is, it will be against the background of national grief and mourning.  Love among the ruins, indeed.   

As for Don, he continues his attempt to be a good husband.  He intercedes in the disagreement between Betty and her brother about what to do about their ailing father, telling the brother how it will be.  Don does the right thing, taking the old man into his home.  Don Draper, the serial adulterer, often does the right thing.  In many ways he is the most sympathetic and humane of all the characters on Mad Men.  Witness his reaction last season to the younger associate’s jokes about Freddy Rumsen and this season to his discovery of Sal Romano’s homosexuality.

Still, he struggles.  At the outdoor Maypole event, Don lapses into reverie about his daughter’s young teacher, a young pre-hippy type, watching her intently as she circles the pole.  Almost subconsciously, he reaches down with his hand to touch the grass, caressing it, getting in touch with the earth.  It’s a startling effective scene.  You can feel the summer heat, you can feel Don’s desire.  Mad Men does scenes like this, scenes with subtle, subliminal messages, told without words or with words that obscure the scene’s true meaning, better than any show in television history. 

The final scene is another example of this.  The show ends with a sort of rapprochement between Don and Peggy, as she comes to his office to discuss a Pampers ad.  They sit together, wordless, until the picture cuts away to black.  The two characters with the most to hide, with the most formidable facades, share a common bond, one that need not be spoken about or acknowledged, but one they are aware of nonetheless.  Every scene with these two alone together has echoes of the flashback scene is season two when Don visits a disoriented Peggy in the hospital and tells her to get up and get out of the hospital and get on with her life.  “This never happened.  You’ll be shocked how much it never happened.” 

Much, much more went on in this episode but since I have other things to do today I better end it here.  I wish I could get to these Mad Men reviews earlier in the week but having a full-time job gets in the way.  I’m a slow writer and I don’t have time to get to them during the week.  Anyhow, I’m enjoying writing them but they will necessarily have to wait until the following weekend. 

Mad Men, Season Three, Episode One: Out of Town

Mad Men’s third season begins with Don Draper in the kitchen, standing at his stove late at night. He’s warming up some milk for his pregnant wife Betty, who can’t sleep. It’s the night before his birthday – not Don Draper’s, but Dick Whitman’s. Suddenly he is lost in thought, recalling the circumstances of his, Dick Whitman’s, birth by a common whore. His natural mother dies immediately after delivering him and the midwife brings the baby to Dick’s stepmother, who had miscarried in previous attempts to have a child. A musical motif is playing as we watch this scene. We’ll hear it twice more later in the episode.

The first time the music returns is when Don is with the stewardess in the hallway of the hotel in Baltimore. This time he’s the one being chased. While not quite reluctant, he’s certainly reserved and there's a question about whether he’s really going to go through with it. When the stewardess expresses doubts about whether they should sleep together Don tells her, “It’s my birthday.” Coming from anyone else this would seem like a sleazy plea offered to convince the stewardess to bed down with him - “please sleep with me, it’s my birthday.” Coming from Don Draper it’s a release. He can tell her, a stranger whom he’ll never see again, that it’s his birthday. No one else can know.

The final time the music is heard is in the episode’s final scene, when Don and Betty tell their daughter Sally the circumstances of her own birth. Sally has just found the stewardess’s airline pin in Don’s luggage and assumes it’s a gift. As his betrayed wife puts the pin on Sally, Don is stricken with guilt about his infidelity (a reaction we’ve seen Sally provoke before, in an episode last season when Sally is in the bathroom with Don while he shaves.) At this moment the man with the dual identity he knows exactly what he is – an utter fraud.

As the episode’s initial scene closes, Don scrapes off the skin that has formed on the warm milk and discards it. This is meaningful though I’m not sure in what way. Are the makers of Mad Men saying that Don Draper can shed Dick Whitman as easy as skimming the skin off some milk, or are they saying that the skin, the veneer, the persona that Don Draper has constructed to cover who he really is – Dick Whitman – is starting to come off? As always with Mad Men, they keep you guessing but by the end of the episode I was guessing the latter.

Thus begins Mad Men’s third season and I think I’m getting the overall theme now, if there is one. (Forgive me if this seems like old news to you but I’m a slow learner.) 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.

It is, of course, the tension between the constructed identity and the truth that makes Mad Men so compelling. The bombshell this week was the outing of Sal as a homosexual. He is horrified, as well he should have been, that Don knows his secret. In 1963 such news made public would brand him a social outcast and could well cost him his job and his wife. But Don’s reaction is perfect. The man who has spent a lifetime hiding who he really is simply tells Sal, in the context of describing a new ad campaign for London Fog raincoats, “limit your exposure.”

The other main threads were all set ups for future shows. Pete Campbell and Ken Cosgrove are made co-heads of accounts at Sterling Cooper. Their reaction to the news tells us much about the both of them, and sets up some future conflict. The cockamamie decision to make them co-heads is made by the new folks from London who are running the show now at Sterling Cooper. I like it that they make Lane Pryce, the new finance officer, seem to be a decent and reasonable sort, even if the London people are clearly the enemy. The show did the same thing with Duck Philips last year. He was a nice guy, not a stock villain, whose demise came as a result of a character flaw, his problem with the booze. You knew it would end badly for him but it was hard not to feel badly for him once the end finally came.

That said, I don’t think this was one of the show’s more successful episodes, but then I thought the same thing about last year’s season opener and season two turned out to be excellent. We saw little of the woman of the show and I hope this is remedied over the next few episodes. Betty, Peggy, and Joan are in many ways more interesting than some of the male characters. We saw little of Roger Sterling too, another reason the show seemed a bit off. One can’t get enough of Roger Sterling. Otherwise, it took a second viewing before I started to appreciate some of the more subtle aspect of the episode - almost all the show’s episodes benefit from a second viewing. You become aware of things you missed the first time around, like the Dick Whitman musical motif I described above. There is no on-the-nose dialog on Mad Men. People never say what they really mean. It must be teased out and even then it leaves you with questions. That ambiguity is part of what makes the show so fascinating.

I Love This...

...ad. Normally during sporting events I switch the channel to some other event during commercials but not this one. It’s probably my favorite commercial ever. I think it's an absolutely brilliant concept and it's perfectly delivered. The dog is an absolute sweetheart and I wish he were mine.

As an aside, it also reminds me of my grandfather - "Papa". When the dog turns the corner near the end there is a sign in the background for "Pasquale's Pizzeria". Pasquale was Papa's name, though he often went by Pat when out in the world. The reminder of my beloved grandfather just adds to the pathos of the ad. I'm posting it here so I can get back to it whenever I need a tug at my heartstrings:

Mad Men - Season 3

Mad Men's third season starts a week from today. It's the best show on television. I had planned on blogging last year's entire season but only got through episode four before I lost the blogging bug. No promises but maybe I'll try again this year. Not that any of you care. If anyone out there reads this blog and has opinions on the show, or what I've written about the show, it might be fun to start a conversation in the comments section after each episode. Feel free.

The Rural Juror, etc.

I'd never watched 30 Rock until a few weeks ago. After hearing a few good things about it I started watching it from the beginning, on my computer via Netflix. I'm about half way through season one and it's terrific - very funny stuff. I didn't think they could make funny shows anymore on network television. The whole "Rural Juror" gag is hilarious - I can't remember the last time I laughed so hard. Perhaps because I can't say it myself. I've always had trouble putting r's and l's together, for instance the word "scholarly" - can't do it unless I talk real slow. Anyhow, if you haven't seen "The Rural Juror" episode and plan to you don't want to watch the below video. If you have seen it and enjoyed it, enjoy again:

Jack's Back?

I mentioned awhile back that 24 had jumped the shark last season. Always implausible, it nonetheless had been riveting television for many years and served the useful purpose of reminding Americans that there are people out there who want to kill us. But last season descended into pure ridiculousness, what with a man cutting off his own arm (in silence no less, while Jack Bauer stood on the other side of the door), Russians smuggling nuclear weapons into the country and then threatening to go to war with us (!) because, after Jack secured the bombs, one of them went missing and it had all the Russian defense secrets encoded on it's internal computer chip (idiots). Then there were Jacks' dad and geeky brother being involved with the terrorists, some shady Chinese, a comatose Audrey, and other various and sundry howlers. The whole season was a mess and I looked forward not at all to the coming season. I figured I'd give it a shot for a few episodes but if it hadn't improved would drop it and never look back. It's very rare for a television show that's jumped to jump back.

I've watched the first three hours of this season and am so far pleased. It really got going in the third hour when (spoiler alerts!!!) Jack (along with old faithfuls Bill Buchanan and Chloe O'Brian) helps Tony Almeida escape from the FBI - Tony hasn't turned terrorist after all, he's under "deep cover" trying to find out who has infiltrated our government. The plot is quite intriguing and I'm looking forward to finding out what happens next. One quibble: did they have to use the execrable Janine Garofalo as the FBI's version of Chloe? Who knows though, she might be perfect for the part: maybe we're supposed to hate her. At any rate, my wife and I got a kick out of "the battle of the Chloes" with the real Chloe breaking into the FBI's computer system and the other, no doubt lesser Chloe, trying to keep her out. Being 24, you know our girl will always win out. We love Chloe.