A suitcase means death.
Peg cries in the ladies' room.
Don cries at his desk.
*
It's Peggy's birthday.
Duck calls her a whore, and Don
Swings wildly, too drunk.
*
"I got rid of him."
So fix me a drink and we'll
Sleep in the office.
*
Clay knocks out Liston.
Listen: Roger talks too much.
Not Miss Blankenship!
*
Put mouse in suitcase?
Lovely ghost in green dress and
Green suitcase walks in.
*
A suitcase means you
Will take a long trip. A great
Ad is a knockout.
-- DL.
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Kyra Sedgwick, what
the hell? Connie Britton, you
were robbed, football muse.
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MAD MEN
Betty slaps Sally
Children are playing outside
Don drinks in the pain
EMMY AWARDS THIS WEEKEND
Jane Lynch will win prize
Great glee splurge through cameras
If Conan wins, too
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First of all, I would like you all to know that I keep putting my name in the heading titles not because I am an unrepentant narcissist (or at least, not just because) but as per Stacey's instructions. Stacey, if I'm allowed to stop doing this, or somehow misunderstood--which is possible, even probable--please let me know.
Bon. On y va.
I'm egregiously late in posting today. I wish I had a good excuse, but there's only one I can muster: it's that today is a Monday. Some of you may know what that means. It means that apart from my other commitments--eating, washing, therapy, Googling my own name, crushing the dreams of young actors trying out for my new play--I spent the entire day online, reading recaps of Mad Men. And reading the accompanying comment threads about Mad Men--sometimes several hundred comments long. And then watching the behind the scenes video about Mad Men. And communicating with other people about Mad Men And the rewatching last night's episode of Mad Men. And then reading yet more recaps of Mad Men.
In short, I spent my Monday, as I do many Mondays (ah, the aimless life of the freelancer!) engaging with Mad Men the way I once did with works of literature.
On its face, this isn't particularly surprising. I have written at length about my overidentification with Betty Draper, in styles both humorous and grave. I even wrote this, which I felt pretty damn smug about. So I'm definitely a little more invested than the average bear, or even the average New York City Media Professional who consumes the show the way she consumes vodka sodas at a Lower East Side one-hour open bar. And Mad Men, it has often been noted by cultural critics far more astute than I, seems to think it is a novel. The parallels and narrative threads, the long pauses before anybody speaks pregnant with unspoken prosaic description; the way everything is a symbol and nobody quite says what they mean.
It cries out for analysis. It fairly begs for it. If there's not a college course teaching it alongside Cheever and O'Hara, there will be soon.
Yet, I finish my day feeling empty. I'm not going to say cheaply snide things about how it's just a TV show, that these characters aren't real and it's stupid to care about them, because if that was true, then we would all be out of a job. Sometimes, the only things worth caring too much about aren't real. But it did leave me hungry for simpler days, before television got so ambitious and self-important and wonderful. When you didn't have to engage with things. When you could just watch Perfect Strangers after you finished your homework and not talk about it all fucking week. When the world looked perfect, with nothing to rearrange.
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From the great TV genius, Ernie Kovacs. People are hot or cold about him: either you find this hysterical or you don't. It makes me ROFLMAO, as the kids say in cyber.
Trivia: Kovacs is the one getting beaned. Edie Adams, Ernie's wife, is playing the piano. Who is the one with the mallets? No fair looking it up.
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I urge you to watch tonight’s episode of Breaking Bad, which finds Bryan Cranston’s Walter White adjusting to the dissolution of his marriage while declining to abandon one big reason it dissolved: He still wants/needs to make meth to pay the bills. He goes to a new location to ply his chemistry-teacher skills and acquires a new assistant, played by David Costabile (the scruffy villain from last season’s Damages, among many other credits).
New Assistant finds it comforting to quote Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard The Learn’d Astronomer” to justify his illegal, and let’s face it, immoral ways to God and to himself. Cut to our Walt sitting in his new cheap apartment, a copy of Leaves of Grass on his lap, poring over the pages silently.
It’s a terrific moment in a terrific new season of Breaking Bad, which digs deeper, with each succeeding episode into questions of what makes a man or woman “bad,” what needs to be done to protect one’s loved ones, and constantly asks the viewer: “How far would you go? Not here, you say? You’re lying to yourself, then.”
Breaking Bad airs on AMC, home of Mad Men, which returns with a new season in July, it was announced earlier this week. Me, I can easily await MM when there are new hours of Breaking Bad to watch. The two shows could not be more different. If Mad Men is a novel of manners for TV (John O’Hara meets Louis Auchincloss in Updike/Cheeverville), Breaking Bad is working thriller territory mapped out by the likes of Charles Willeford, David Goodis, and Jonathan Latimer.
It’s
lean and
mean (a cop takes an axe to the back of the head in the opening minutes
tonight), but thanks to the inspiration of creator Vince Gilligan to insert a
middle-class nebbish into the role usually occupied by the cynical sharpie in
most thrillers, it never lets ordinary folks like you or I to step back and
say, “Oh, I’d never do that.” Breaking Bad is all about what you’d do if you
were desperate enough. “And from time to time,” as Whitman writes, the show
makes sure that you have “look’d up in perfect silence at the stars,”
contemplating the full measure fate.
--Ken Tucker
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From a distance, Britain (the UK), can appear a weird place – especially these days. It’s just had a week of travel chaos with its skies completely shut down due to an Icelandic volcano. It is in the midst of a major election (to be decided in 12 days) that has been wildly galvanised by its first ever leaders debate on television (!). And one of its most popular TV shows is (still) Doctor Who, about an undying eccentric “time lord”. Current hit records include Kate Nash’s “My Best Friend Is You” where a chirpy British lass writes about sex and dating in frank terms, and Paul Weller (of The Jam) wanting to “Wake Up The Nation”.
Britain has been slow to come out of the recession, and, with its youth knife crime, wildly drunken villages and inner cities, class divides (whole swathes of the population still can’t easily access college education), and obsession with celebrity (especially overpaid footballers and size-zero models and starlets) is sometimes called Broken Britain. For others, like Harry Potter star, Daniel Radcliffe, richer than Prince Harry, Britain seems to be working just fine. It’s been observed that America and England are divided by a common language, and, as Hugh Kenner was one of the first critics to point out, the British love-affair with international modernism in art and poetry was of limited duration, to say the least.
Charles Bernstein and John Ashbery are coterie poets here, read by few and feared by most who do read them – let alone Hart Crane or William Carlos Williams. Few American (or Canadian) poets are published in the UK. There is a sense of isolation, even xenophobia, in some poetry quarters – and why not? The popular Tory party wants to pull out of membership in Europe. This is a kingdom united, more often than not, in the idea of its superior difference.
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First off, let me say right now that I know next to nothing about cars. I do know how to drive (both automatic and manual, I'm proud to say); I know where to put the gas in; and I know not to leave the headlights on when I turn the car off. Other than that, I'm pretty much clueless. I can stay clueless, too, because both my husband and my son Micah are total gearheads, and I refer all things automotive to them. Despite this -- or maybe because of this -- I am completely addicted to the BBC car program (or programme, as they spell it), Top Gear.
(left to right, Jeremy Clarkson, James May, Richard Hammond)
For those unfamiliar with the show, it is a combination talk show/automobile review/stunt extravaganza/three-ring-circus. It is co-hosted by three presenters: Jeremy Clarkson, a very large (six foot six inches, I believe) car expert, journalist, and hater of all things green; James May, a shaggy, highly intelligent and exceptionally well-read journalist, whose nickname is "Captain Slow" and whose rumply, absent-minded professor mien I confess I find quite appealing; and Richard Hammond, a Davy Jones (of the Monkees, not the ocean) lookalike who nearly lost his life five years ago when an Indy-style racecar he was testing for the show flipped and speared him headfirst into the ground.
There is also the Stig, Top Gear''s "tame racing driver," who tests the featured cars and whose identity is ever-secret, although we do know he is a professional driver and that he is fond of listening to self-improvement tapes in foreign languages while hurtling around the test track at very high speeds.
The talk-show element of Top Gear consists of short interviews with celebrities, usually from British television and most of whom Americans have never heard of, then the celebrities do their own laps around the test-track in cars which most Americans have also never heard of (the steering wheels are all on the wrong side, too). The celebrities' lap times are then posted with much ceremony - for a long time, the fastest celebrity driver was Simon Cowell, whom, though British, I have heard of.
Top Gear also does serious reviews of cars, and, according to Micah, the reviews are thorough and honest; I wouldn't know, and as I said, I am completely unfamiliar with most of the cars, anyway (what the hell is a Panda?).
For me, the best part of the show are the challenges. Every other week or so, the three hosts are given a task by the producers, usually something that is well nigh impossible, like driving from Germany to northern England on one tank of gas. Each man chooses his own vehicle, and the winner gets bragging rights. Did I mention that they are each given a (very) limited budget with which to purchase a vehicle? So the cars in question tend to be very vintage and very decrepit (no brakes, for example), and sometimes the challenges are really insane, such as driving across the Kalahari Desert or over a 17,000ft Bolivian volcano (this last challenge almost killed both the presenters and the vehicles from lack of oxygen - they had to turn back and go around the volcano before they all died of altitude sickness). In most of the challenges, Clarkson provides the most bluster and bravado; Hammond is the pluckiest; and like the tortoise, May is slow but steady, as his nickname implies. They spend a lot of time arguing and getting lost and so on; they also accidentally set things on fire a lot, and it really is very funny.
The best and funniest challenges are when they have to modify their clunkers, as in the following clip. In this episode, they are tasked with creating cars that will also function as boats; the finish line is on the far side of reservoir.
In this second clip, we find out what a trio of gearheads would do with an Olympic ski jump, a team of rocket scientists, and a Mini Cooper. What indeed?
So that's my confession. Ridiculous as it is, I love Top Gear.
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to plan for tonight's The Thin Air poetry cable show. Producer Mitch Corber brings us another episode in this landmark series, with footage of David Lehman's recent reading from Yeshiva Boys at the New School, along with footage of fave's John Ashbery,
Kenneth Koch, and others. Set your alarm for 8:30 p.m, and tune your TV dial to Channel 67, Manhattan Neighborhood Network. Associate editor Cindy Sostchen-Hochman tells us it's going to be a great show!
Thanks, Cindy
-- sdh
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I Am Your Slave Now Do What I Say
by Anthony Madrid
A creative communications, branding, and resources consultancy founded by Victoria C. Rowan
