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Does FLG really listen to Enya? Is he, by chance, a closet John Tesh groupie? Chasing after Yanni as fast as his Birkenstocks will carry him? It makes me uneasy somehow…And he was making such great progress too…
Some folks have asked what it is like living next door to the PP’s…Well, actually it’s no different from living several states away…Never see them, they never call, never stop by, turn out the lights when I knock, get an occasional email and I do see Mr. P about every other week for movie night. And that’s it.
I suppose now that they are fixed in the local social whirl, such as it is, there is no time for old Sir Basil. You know, if I had feelings, they would probably be hurt.
Well, I do have a few things to be glad about…FLG is actually learning how to dress in the proper manner. It might be he will soon be throwing out the Crocs and cargo pants and adopting a more Cary/Basil look…It will probably get him fired for not pretending to be egalitarian, but he will look marvelous. We’ll work on the rest of him in due course, but it is a promising beginning. And I did notice that Our Maximum Leader has remembered the secret to good art…Where there is fruit, there is art around someplace, and he is studying diligently. And you thought we learned nothing at the RCBfA…
Just so you know, and this isn’t old-crank-old school opinion but the explicit intentions of the show’s creators and writers, as described by them. Although, since the target audience for this show is, again explicitly stated, 30-something yuppies/bobos, it wasn’t too hard to figure out where they wanted to go with this.
Mad Men intends to show us that the White Males of the 50’s and early 60’s were so bad and so evil that there just had to be a revolution to get rid of them. They were sexist, racist, heterosexual, drunk, lying, cheating dirty rat finks, and what is most unforgivable is, they smoked and ate beef all the time. Bastards! Of course the un-PC behavior is overdone and over-played for shock value in typical Hollywood fashion as compared to what was really going on back in the day. I’m surprised they didn’t have all the white male characters just wear Nazi armbands, or white hoods, but of course, they wanted to be subtle. This is typical Hollywood mushy ideology and “important points” film making. The important point being that we were so lucky that the Sixties happened and we jettisoned tradition, decorum and good taste along with the evil white guys. Because we now know that it was all a charade anyway perpetrated by the EWGs to oppress everyone in sight. That is not to say that there were no “isms” or boorish behavior going on, there always has been and always will be. But, this is so over the top that it borders on parody. We must remember that the world was perfect and everywhere peace and happiness reigned supreme until the white guys showed up. And as soon as we can get rid of the evil white guys, all will be perfect again.
Of course the period detail and costumes are fun to look at, although the underlying message here is “look-what-the-evil-white-guys-make-the-women-wear-for-their-fiendish-not to mention sadistic-pleasure” and don’t you forget it.
Typically not only is the main character an evil white guy, but he is pretending to be someone else, having assumed Draper’s identity during the Korean War. Sometimes though, the fake Draper does show flashes of humanity. This must because he isn’t really an evil rich, white guy, but a poor, white guy pretending. We all know that a real rich, white guy could never fake humanity.
This is all, of course, just dandy to the show’s target audience, who believe all this bilge to start with. You really couldn’t call the show “neutral” in its presentation. Which is dandy too.
I, of course, turn it on its head, and view it as a training film on how to get back to the good ole’ days where men were men and the rest were hairdressers.
In The Atlantic…Good article.
And stop watching television for God’s sake…
Since the Countess requires everyone to speak in complete sentences (English or German) to use no slang, vernacular or profanity inside the house, TBL is a problematic film. There is also a strict prohibition against films featuring gratuitous sex and violence. The Countess still makes the Baron cover his eyes if an unexpected sex scene appears in a film we are watching. And the Baron is 16 years old and has spent his life in parochial schools, so he probably knows more about it than we do. So, you can understand that rarely is a film produced after 1965 ever viewed. Is TBL funny? Sure, in a nonsensical way. Classic? I think not. The Coen’s can be funny, and in some films they can explore morality and the question of right and wrong, but they are smart enough to realize that they must also be vulgar in order to become Academy Award winning film makers and make money in today’s world.
I think I’ll pass.
By the way, is this film the reason that the unwashed address each other as “dude” nowadays? If so, it is another reason to give it a miss.
Last weekend Mr. P, sans Mrs. P was in St. Louis. Therefore and whatnot I got a call and, needless to say, plans were laid for serious debauchery on a global scale. Howevah, there was another call placed that day, one without the sound of champagne chilling in the background, I might add…This short, quiet and altogether soul-destroying call between the Countess and Mrs. P put paid to all our plans.
Needless to say we still went out and about the town last weekend, but it was done under the baleful gaze of our personal Sauron, the Countess. She covered us like a free safety whose contract is up for renewal. Dinner Friday night at Mike Shannon’s downtown where Mr. P’s strange airs and stranger accent caused him to be suspected of being from Chicago, or worse, a Cubs fan, and we barely got into the joint. As it was they seated us near the kitchen just in case. And despite our “sentry on a hill”, there was a somewhat bewildering, long running argument concerning the proper color of a Manhattan, in which most of the restaurant staff and a few bystanders were also involved…I’m not quite sure what the answer was in the end, we were too busy drinking Manhattans to care.
Saturday night, after Mass, which we will not go into, except to point out that I did demonstrate to Mr. P the proper way of avoiding hugging, hand shaking, Mayfair kissing and other kum-bah-yah nonsense while attending the illicit Norvus Ordo community meeting. Mr. P did body block my attempt at tripping the liturgical dancer, (I was that close) and I’ll probably never forgive him for that. Spoil-sport. Anyway, our original plan was for a Japanese bath house, which became a Japanese Ginsu knife restaurant after the Countess Hays Code was finished adjusting our itinerary along more family friendly lines. We did accomplish some deft prank phone calls from our table, with the help of the Baron, to Mrs. P (which turned out to be one of the little Ps). I’m sure she’s scared for life. Just like my shirt which the Baron so liberally sprinkled with soy sauce when he mistook my arm for a plate of chop suey. The brute. Family friendly indeed.
We did get Mr. P back to the airport on time, somewhat a little worse for wear, but with a Countess Seal of Approval for a no sex, drugs, public drunkenness or violence weekend. Damn the luck!
Anyway, I guess Mr. P had a good time. I haven’t heard from him yet, but he’s probably still sleeping…I have heard from Mrs. P, but it’s probably best not to go into that here…
“…Why does anybody, other than thugs, policemen and employees of fast-food establishments that insist upon them as part of a uniform, wear a baseball cap? Even old people in increasing numbers now sport them. Is it some kind of perverse desire to look stupid, a form of auto-humiliation? Is it an attempt to persuade other people that they are humble folk who think that they are no better than anyone else?…”
“…We’ve lost our love for cars and forgotten our debt to them and meanwhile the pointy-headed busybodies have been exacting their revenge. We escaped the poke of their noses once, when we lived downtown, but we won’t be able to peel out so fast the next time. In the name of safety, emissions control and fuel economy, the simple mechanical elegance of the automobile has been rendered ponderous, cumbersome and incomprehensible. One might as well pry the back off an iPod as pop the hood on a contemporary motor vehicle. An aging shade-tree mechanic like myself stares aghast and sits back down in the shade. Or would if the car weren’t squawking at me like a rehearsal for divorce. You left the key in. You left the door open. You left the lights on. You left your dirty socks in the middle of the bedroom floor.
I don’t believe the pointy-heads give a damn about climate change or gas mileage, much less about whether I survive a head-on with one of their tax-sucking mass-transit projects. All they want to is to make me hate my car. How proud and handsome would Bucephalas look, or Traveler or Rachel Alexandra, with seat and shoulder belts, air bags, 5-mph bumpers and a maze of pollution-control equipment under the tail?…”
This is quite refreshing. I have just proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, with slide rule, geometric logic and all those funny graph chart things on the stat page, that I actually get more readers by doing absolutely nothing than I do by posting. Somewhat of a knock on the old ego, what? Although I must take credit for seeding the blog with those Julie Newmar photos. One can never get enough of a good cat suit I always say. Not that this is in any way surprising. My ego never went so far as to think anyone at all was listening to me, and my parents, friends, teachers, spouse, child and cat have proven it right again and again. But, it is rather a bore to see in on paper. Oh well, I think I’ll go and feed the cat, it seems to like me then…
