In Which I Don't Think You've Done It Before This Way

Doesn't That Mean Anything To A Person Like You?

by ELEANOR MORROW

I do believe in a fate that will fall on us if we do nothing.

— Ronald Reagan

Never trust anyone who takes politics seriously. An old friend and I had a falling out recently. She's the sort who takes every happening as an omen or some call to greater purpose. Now she reminds me of Don Draper, for whom a vibrant women sweating in the wee hours in the morning is a signal from the Gods.

Coincidences are everywhere. A world without them would be stranger than a world in which our perceptions, shaped by our innate desires, seem an oracle for our own behavior, and the future of a nation.

The irony of "I have a dream" is that he had no such dream. He had a wish, a desire, and helped turn it into fate. Don Draper is the same man, his wife isn't so different. She writes in the same flowing lefty script as our president - like him and Conrad Hilton, the plan is to bring America to the world whether they like it or not. Under their purview, the wants and desires of others mean nothing.

Our own will becomes immaterial in such matters. A greater concern takes over: the repressed or overt desire of how one wishing to dominate another. It's fun to see Don so oppressed by another, so subject to the wishes of a man exactly like himself.

the actual conrad hilton This is the Mad Men obsession, titling the show Various Rapes of the 1960s Period would be more honest. Matthew Weiner is consumed with lording his superiority over others (even his own writers), and yet he wants to show dominance in a light beyond the mere threat of violence, the subject of The Sopranos. This is men and women as lords, more royalty than any English court, summoning and unsummoning themselves until everything is in the exact right position from its opposite.

This is politics, not life. Politics is gross opposition and summary, not substance. Real life, on the other hand, consists of men who believe they're ordained pronouncing their own personal moralities on others. They achieve nothing in particular except to scare the most decent among us into submission.

But these are minor foibles of lesser men. You're only really taking fate into your own hands for sure if you sex Don Draper's wife. You have to be one fucked up little bursar to attempt that trick. And if you can't close off that, you deserve the blue-balled result. When you concoct a plan whereby Don Draper's wife comes to bang you at your office, you don't have to be Tucker Max to seal the deal.

"You had to come to me," says Betty's graying little fuck puppet. Adulterers have such entertaining moralities. Many of them still lecture us on what we should be. To watch the honest, decent people crushed under this morass is difficult business, and this might be why Mad Men isn't wildly popular among the regular people like The Sopranos was. They see enough injustice on the news.

Now we are simply waiting for these indiscretions to come to light. Betty dances at the periphery of our visions - the most likely way for the subplot of her affair to be resolved is by her on the floor of City Hall, realizing she's not exactly sure what impulse she has surrended to. Destroyed by a fleeting vision of his own personal God, Sal tries to surrender to as many impulses as he can in the Central Park gay scene.

As Sal weeps in his office among his art, he blames himself and his own churlish nature for the unlucky result. Perhaps he curses the fates, nevermind that. Power is transient, fleeting - as a smarter one than Don once said, "you can't take it with you."

The obsession with smoking permeates the milieu. It is Mad Men's recurring cameo, the cigarette, always a joke to represent both the innocence and the impurity of the age. Don marvels at how naive (or stupid) his schoolteacher crush is for making her students read the words of Martin Luther King Jr. We recognize it is he who is either innocent or stupid. He believes that the way he acts is other than the mere caprice. He believes his life is art. He is wrong.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in Manhattan. She tumbls here.

"First Chance" - David Gray (mp3)

"Breathe" - David Gray (mp3)

"Nemesis" - David Gray (mp3)

In Which We Broadcast From An Observatory In The Chilean Andes

Science Corner: Saturn's Return

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Sloth and primate fossils found in underwater cave

Dinosaur dads co-parented, watching eggs and baby dinos

Ancient sharks nommed on plesiosaurs

oh I am real old don't you know, born 10 billion years ago

Newfound tiny (cutest) T-Rex had horns

Magnetic fields guide star birth

Water officially found on the moon

a moving galaxy being blown around in the space wind

Speeding galaxies distorted by space winds

Cosmic rays hit a fifty year high

Solar system's longest continuously observed lightning and thunderstorm is on Saturn

bet you wish you were being levitated instead

Monster plant eats rodents and insects

Levitating mice in a lab

Wolves are smarter than dogs on logic tests 

time lapse of the rogue comet getting ensared in Jupiter's orbit

Jupiter turns a comet into a moon

Mental health issues may be byproducts of the over-functional human brain

Predicting extraterrestrial weather 

Galaxies NGC 1532 and NGC 1531

Observations from the Gemini South telescope in Chile (pictured at top of post)

Red Leaves vs. Yellow Leaves 

Scientists can see numbers inside your head.

dreaming of Atlantis, forgetting about the Atlantis in Reno Nevada

Sietch Nevada wants to build a canal city beneath the desert

Robot to gets a human's brain cells

Strange dwarf planet Haumea has a dark red spot 

NO TORUS IUS???

The giant elliptical galaxy M87 lacks a torus around its central black hole, or else this doughnut-shaped ring of material is extremely faint.

Enormous new ring found orbiting Saturn 

Electric fish can hit a personal dimmer switch

pictured: a comet explodes into lots of little comets

Comet spews up lots of baby mini comets

Nine previously unknown species of worms found on whale cadavers in the ocean.

Maggot therapy gains in popularity

male squirrel monkeys are all somewhat color blind

Therapy fixes color blindness in monkeys 

Hyenas are unexpectedly good at cooperating

Animals think about thinking, just like human beings

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here.

"Ambulance" - Simian Mobile Disco (mp3)

"Cruel Intentions" - Simian Mobile Disco (mp3)

"Off the Map" - Simian Mobile Disco (mp3)

In Which We Like To Appear In The Fashion of the Time

Honorable Gentlemen and Weaker Vessels

by PAUL JOHNSON

In clothes fashions, honors were evenly divided between London and Paris. It was during these years that the great axiom of modern sumptuary law was laid down: for fashions, men looked to Savile Row, women to the Rue de Rivoli. The French Revolution had brought about dramatic changes in women's dress, introducing a simplicity that the French believed they had taken from the English rustic custom.

Women's dress was supposed to be puritanical, but with its skimpy, clinging textiles and low neckline it rapidly developed not only a high exposure of female flesh but underlined the curves of what was still nominally covered. The English notion of "gay Paree" dates from the brief Peace of Amiens, 1802-1803, when English visitors flocked to the French capital and brought back shocked-intrigued tales of how little the Parisian ladies wore. From that moment, French fashions dominated the lives of middle and upper-class Englishwomen, who pored over Parisian magazines smuggled in at some danger, along with the brandy and scent.

Once Waterloo was over, the grand Whig ladies actually bought their clothes in Paris. They also adopted another French innovation, the corset, originally known as a divorce, because it was the first undergarment to separate the breasts, pushing them up to form a fleshy shelf.

What women would not do, for a long time, was wear drawers or knickers, which the new style really demanded, partly because, until now, drawers were worn only be men, prostitutes, and high-kicking opera dancers, especially in Paris. Instead, women wore "invisible petticoats," like strait waistcoats but drawn down over the legs, forcing the wearer to take short steps. But gradually, as the 1820s progressed, the disadvantages of ladies not wearing drawers became apparent — Thomas Rowlandson specialized in depicting one of them — and by 1830 the basic components of modern women's underclothes were in place.

Equally if not more important for most women was the growing cheapness of easily washable cottons. The reformer Francis Place (by trade a tailor), in his manuscript notes on "Manners and Morals," now in the British Museum, welcomed the dramatic improvement in the appearance of working-class women in the 1820s, made possible by "cleanly cotton gowns made pretty high round the neck."

For men, modernity came with the adoption of trousers, perhaps the greatest of all watersheds in the history of men's fashion. Indeed, it might be said that of all the enduring achievements of the French Revolution, the most important was the replacement of culottes, or breeches, by the baggy trousers worn by peasants and working men, the sans-culottes. The adoption by the new French ruling class, in the 1790s, of trousers as a sign of solidarity with the masses was greeted with horror elsewhere. Several countries tried to ban them.

But the term trousers that was generally adopted was, significantly, English, dating back to the late sixteenth century, and once the Savile Row tailors began to produce the garment, they quickly took it up-market, making it tight fitting and attractive to wear. One of the key innovations of George "Beau" Brummell was to introduce a strap at the bottom of each leg, which went under the shoe or boot and stretched the trousers still tighter. These fashionable versions were made of light-colored nankeen, a close-woven cotton, or of fine doeskin leather for riding.

The result was that they showed off the male leg to even greater advantage than breeches and satin stockings, which did justice only to the calf. Older men in authority, whose spindle shanks did not benefit from advertisement, denounced them as obscene and Pope Pius VII condemned them outright in a bitter rearguard action which lasted until his death in 1823.

We now come to an important historical point, a change which in some ways permanently altered the relationship between the sexes. Until the second decade of the 19th century, both sexes had dressed for display, wearing the richest fabrics and the brightest colors their means afforded. As part of their uninhibited masculine display, men sought to draw attention to the best points of their bodies, just as women did, and were admired accordingly. This was the last period in history in which men could closely scrutinize the physical beauty of their own sex without being thought homosexual and women could comment on the male form without raising eyebrows.

By 1830 male makeup had been virtually abandoned. By this date, indeed, the modern sartorial chasm between the sexes, with the men moving towards monochrome society and uniformity, was beginning to open, at any rate in English society. In appearance, at least, men were becoming more obviously masculine; the line that marked them off from women was being more firmly drawn that ever before. Yet, paradoxically, there was one exception to this trend. In the early 19th century gentlemen ceased to wear swords and took to carrying umbrellas instead.

Paul Johnson is a historian living in Great Britain. In 2006, he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom. This excerpt is taken from his book The Birth of the Modern: World Society 1815-1830, which you can buy here.

"You Are Here" — Sam Goodwill (mp3)

"Entertainment for the Cultured" — Sam Goodwill (mp3)

"Hanging Heads" — Sam Goodwill (mp3)