is dedicated to the enjoyment of audio and visual stimuli. Please visit our archives where we have uncovered the true importance of nearly everything. Should you want to reach us, e-mail alex dot carnevale at gmail dot com, but don't tell the spam robots. Consider contacting us if you wish to use This Recording in your classroom or club setting. We have given several talks at local Rotarys that we feel went really well.
Peggy Olson got laid you guys! And nothing terrible happened. It's the lesson every Catholic girl must learn, preferably not after dropping the love child of the less sexy Head Of Accounts, the married one, the neurotic one, the one who has won no awards for his evocative New England set short stories.
Ann-Margaret in 1963 is like Megan Fox right now. Telling a "normal" girl that's what is sexy is retarded, even if it's true. Lots of things are sexy. Most of them are less glaringly "sexy" than Ann-Margaret or Megan Fox. Peggy didn't score because she channelled Ann Margaret. It's because she's gonna slam dunk the Patio account.
Sometimes a girl just has to venture outside her Brooklyn apartment, go to a bar, and make small talk with someone not necessarily as smart as she is but certainly passably attractive enough to go home with. Sometimes a girl just needs to have sex.
In the first two episodes of this season Mad Men has done the fanservice of giving sex scenes to the two characters most desperately in need of them, Peggy and Sal. After the nonstop Bon Temps Bang Bus that is True Blood, it's nice to come down to a level where sex is not as easy as wandering down to your local Maenad orgy bacchanalia.
Meanwhile adulthood is a total drag, as Don decides that Betty insist on taking in her dementia suffering father. Knowing Don, he will be out there high fiving crotches with stewardesses like the premiere's Slutty Betty in no time. Real depressed Betty's life will probably continue to get worse, given another reason to be confined to the house. But hey, after you take the kids to Tarrytown they can get a Cookiepuss at Carvel!
"I can see by what you carry that you come from Tarrytown"
Don is going to sell the new Penn Station based on the idea that it belongs to the future, and setting up the corporate fantasy bonanza of the 1964 New York World's Fair. The new Penn Station will be ugly and everyone will hate it until enough time has passed that the people have forgotten the old one. Such is progress.
Who knows what the future holds? Who among us wants to believe that our decisions influence our lives? Where the fuck is Joan Holloway? What's going on with her douchebag doctor husband? You know Joan would be asking this shit right off the bat, because she is a good gossip. Unrape my heart.
And no, Ann-Margret can't sing. Or she couldn't sing well enough for "Bye Bye Birdie." But who cares? She's adorable. It's gonna sell truckloads of Patio diet soda.
Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here. She twitters here.
Compleet Molesworth (Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle)
Hilariously illustrated, the Molesworth series recounts the eponymous character's years at St. Custard's, a 1950s English boarding school. Half the fun is deciphering the slang; the anti-hero's misadventures prefigure Harry Potter and Burgess' Nadsat lingo. Also clears up any niggling questions you might have about parts of speech:
Social snobery. A gerund 'cuts' a gerundive:
Against Nature (Joris-Karl Huysmans)
For the budding aesthete and all levels of control freak (meaning, of course, all New Yorkers), Huysmans offers a solution for anyone who wants to escape the discomfort and ennui of seaside and summer. I took another look during a bad trip to Nettuno, which is the Italian twin city to Belmar, NJ.
This is anti-beach reading in the best sense. A wealthy Parisian retreats to a country house in order to devote himself to a life of aesthetic refinement and dies as a result of his excessive pleasure. The book's plot is said to have directed the behavior of Wilde's Dorian Gray, causing the main character to live an amoral life of sin and hedonism.
You Can Get There From Here, Shirley MacLaine
I love Hollywood memoirs and I love Shirley MacLaine. She can be the most scenery-chewing of actors and often writes the purplest prose; she is also candid, funny and connected—she knows everyone. In this volume (there are quite a number), she chronicles working for the McGovern campaign and traveling as a delegate to China.
Scandinavian authors who I'm going to read: IMPAC award-winning Per Petterson's Out Stealing Horses; the Norwegian Norwegians read instead of Nazi-sympathizer Knut Hamsun, Tarjei Versaas (The Ice Palace); and Scandinavian crime writer Henning Mankell (The Man Who Smiled).
The Best of Myles (Flann O'Brien)
Collected works of the Irish humorist best known to Lost viewership as author of The Third Policeman.
I just spent a month rooming in an 100 degree, un-air conditioned apartment with three PhD students who felt compelled to quote Homer at the dinner table: "That would be Chapman's Homer—the Homer of Keats? The version used by Shakespeare?"
These vignettes kept me from triple homicide. O'Brien, writing as Myles na gCopaleen, composed the columns for the Irish Times. Keats and Chapman are depicted as Hope and Crosby-esque pals whose misadventures conclude in puns worthy of the Marx brothers.
Karina Wolf is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbles here. She twitters here.
The Third Reich is too large to be absorbed from any one angle. The Nazis were the darkest enemies of mankind, and it is hard to believe they even existed. The central Nazi in Inglorious Basterds is Col. Hans Landa, a captain in the SS who got the anecdotal slag of 'Jewhunter.' Young Jewish men everywhere, encouraged by the perpetual sneer on Col. Landa's mug, rumble with plans to destroy this villainous creature. Quentin Tarantino makes the other wet dream of every Jewish boy a reality.
Only the boy isn't really Jewish, he's a Gentile. Tarantino loves all sorts of people, all different types of directors. He's also not exactly subtle about showing off his allegiance to each of them. Tarantino's uncircumsized ex-Baptist Aldo (Brad Pitt) is Errol Flynn part seventeen, a hunkering lout of virtue and good will towards men. He joins the 800+ filmic references in Basterds, from Footloose to Godard to DePalma to Kiarostami to Kubrick and around the world entire.
Tarantino is suggesting that the culture of the Jew should be expanded to include the plight of people of color, the plight of his own Italians, and the plight of blonde-haired "Jews" with blue eyes who believe they also to have something to fear. Quentin isn't the first wannabe Jew, everyone quakes in delight at being 'chosen.' Like the formality of an SS uniform, it allows us our darker pleasures.
Because the Gentile shares the aims of the Jews, wishes to become a Jew, Aldo's mixed fighting force of Basterds is the result. Tarantino lets his horror f-buddy Eli Roth star in the film along with Jews like Samm Levine and B.J. Novak, and to no one's surprise they are all pretty terrible. The Gentile members of the crew aren't much better. Tarantino's method of shooting demands excited, if not particularly-inspired performances from his actors. Even Goebbels is more gigglish, immature fop than serious obstacle.
As Hans Landa, the villain around which ethnicities oscillate, Christoph Waltz is the exception. He carries Inglorious Basterds through the total embodiment of evil, throttling a woman if the situation demands it, or simply suggesting he'd prefer milk over wine. Each is equally sinister. It is an ongoing surprise to us all that Earth contains these creatures who ruled the Gestapo and were the hardest of the orc-like men.
In contrast, the film sets up a would-be hero and dismisses him savagely. No one is safe from Tarantino's characteristic bloodshed, and once again that's eternally the point. Looking at any part of the Third Reich can be confusing, as with the dark side of an object viewed from the front. Can we really believe that another part of it isn't there?
This movie drew a considerable Jewish audience at a theater in Manhattan, but there is much to recommend for the Gentile in Inglorious Basterds as well. Really this film is for him, for no moral query about this period could be asked of a Jew. We know his answer. The question is posed to the Gentile; he must respond to the intractable Jewish question. Should hatred and fear be countered with even larger levels of violence, or shouldn't they? Is it wrong to take pleasure in killing the men who end the world?
It isn't, and once you get that under your hat, you're halfway towards grasping the particular psychology of Shosanna Dreyfus, which to my ear is a rather Gentile-sounding name. Handed a star-making role, our Jewess heroine is no Barbra Streisand, she isn't Rita Hayworth. She is an icy blonde who confines her hirsute relationship with her French African employee to chaste kisses.
In the film's climactic moment she invites a movie star into her quarters and gives over to him more than she would a mere fling. We require the Nazis to remind Gentiles of what they can become upon giving in to such disturbing moments. Without them, how would we measure how to stretch ourselves, how much we treasure human decency and love?
War is harsh, Tarantino writes. He makes it flashy and he casts Diane Kruger for throaty Uma Thurman laughs, but there is no suitable reaction to the violence that surrounds such frivolity. At more than one point more than 20 men die in mere seconds. This is real sacrifice, Tarantino says, what war takes from its soldiers: everything.
Why did America defeat the Nazis after resolving to ignore them? Our later certainty over our moral role in the fate of Europe's Jews flattens the real debate that occurred over whether this was America's war to be involved in. Many resolved that the United States would ignore the fractious bickering of European powers.
Inglorious Basterds takes place mostly in France when it was occupied, one of the more polite occupations in human history. The French people weren't alone in being cowed by the Nazis, but surrender often looks better with victory behind you. Watching the Nazi vermin walk among the high places of France is a test run for how they might have lived with dominion over the larger world. "I'll get a few paintings from the Louvre to spruce this place up!" Goebbels laughs.
When it came to it, a Nazi in hiding in this country could look like other men, blend into the fabric of the land and renounce the evil he served. Therefore the Basterds mark those they leave alive by carving a swastika above the brow, for a permanence that no longer exists in our world, where mad ideologies comfort each other on the internet.
Tarantino puts women in the center of his action. (His part of the Grindhouse double feature Death Proof is perhaps the most feminist film of the 2007 period.) He loves women, loves to watch them press and push through the stolid workings of men. He adored Uma Thurman's earthy sexuality, and he's equally eager to worship at the altar of French actress Melanie Laurent. This is my favorite scene with Laurent, where she prepares for her life as a beautiful but deadly destroyer of Nazi-kind:
She and Kruger operate as scale models of themselves in miniature. They do what needs to be done to further the aims of the Republic. In this way, they are like Jedis, or at least highly eroticized llamas.
There is nothing else like the abandon Tarantino shows in these moments. He is a fearless filmmaker, marking the treads between people like hands on the clock of history. He may mix metaphors worse than that, but each "chapter" — as the sections of the films announce themselves — is a beginning worthy of the masters he first saw when he worked as a clerk in a video store.
Since video stores are going out of business and will soon be relegated to the place where horse-drawn carriages and telegraphs await us, it is appropriate to credit them for making Mr. Tarantino, who can foist such evil on us with a knowing delight.
Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here.
TV 
