In Which I Love Getting Telegrams But I Never Send Them

Rules for Illicit Sex

by ELEANOR MORROW

Masturbation generally leads to our greatest moments of clarity. The sale of Sterling Cooper is meant to interest us in some way - perhaps is it a constant nod to the precarious existential nature of life. On this subject ad man Paul Kinsey muses in his magnificent little office, where drunk copywriters and symbolic janitors named Achilles try to tell him the real way of things. Gripped by the bottle, in a fervor to reclaim the idea he believed he'd lost, Kinsey insults his secretary and his coworker. Chastened by the experience, he becomes the symbol he formerly laughed at. As Don wryly observed, "I hate it when that happens."

Mad Men continues its preaching as the third season finale approaches. Reality occasionally intrudes. When you date someone, they always want you to meet their brother, who turn out to be a down-on-his-luck loser. The poor guy suffers from fits - usually code for a communicable sexually transmitted disease. Unfortunately Don isn't quite as familiar with the crazypants of the New York area as I am. I wish my older sister would hand me a small fortune adjusting for inflation and force her boyfriend to drive me to my job.

Having witnessed a variety of women who have captivated the attention of Don Draper, I think we can conclude that except for Midge Daniels (played by Rosemarie Dewitt), it's been a bunch of stone psychos. When you find yourself attracted to the insane, it's more crucial than ever to obey some simple rules.

1. Never appear at a workplace - such behaviour encourages cesspools of gossip and derringdo.

2. When doing a favor, always insist on a receipt.

3. Blondes are consistently lonely.

4. Elementary school teachers are by their nature insecure and wobbly. It is considered polite to quietly leave the apartment after the third anecdote about one of their students.

5. Never hold hands: this is no panacea on the tide of inevitable emotional attachment.

6. Jews are no more reliable than the population at large. In contrast, British people are generally unhappier.

7. Avoid meals except breakfast, which has the advantage of offering a quick exit upon its conclusion.

8. Never give your real name, occupation, or favorite Larry David phobia. Such things are better held close to the vest.

9. If the other person is also cheating, you may feel better about yourself, but you've doubled your exposure.

10. If you put the towels in the bathtub, the maid will give you new ones, but if it looks like they haven't been used, she might not.

All else stands in opposition to semiserious men and the decisions they make as if ordained by gods. Don must have an outlet! Mere danger isn't enough! Meanwhile, Suzanne is in bed and sleeping, or on a couch and waiting for news of her brother. She worries while grins and shakes and cash money are exchanged in cars, inscribed in boxes that turn up sooner or later at the most inopportune time.

This is the sexism and racism of Mad Men, which may or not be the same as what exists in the non-Sterling Cooper based world. "Racism" is so trifling it merits an episode a season, "sexism" is as common as the ever-present cigarette. Conveyed to the ball in dark limousines that creep dispassionately over the earth, men go to meet their betters.

Having Betty discover the vestiges of Don's ludicrous past life is a brilliant stroke of genius, although it surely could have been strung out over more episodes. Betty can't be surprised that Don's lies to her were hardly original. Maybe she's upset because she thinks Dick Whitman is an ugly name. In any case a pro-shark cause is even dumber than thinking autism is a made up disease. Sharks are killers, you daffy little melon.

When Sally tells her father how her day went, her brother objects. "Why do you always ask her and not me?" "Your answers are usually longer, so I thought I'd start with her," Dick Whitman tells his son.  Sometimes I feel all life would be essentially improved if parents provided a summary of their lives to their children. But instead we learn it in glips and glops, fits and starts. Sally's teacher tells Don the winsome anecdote of her student's question about reality, and asks what he would have told the boy. Implied is that she wouldn't have, and he wouldn't have, even considered telling the truth.

Why must life be such a waystation, each of us lonely passengers? Overcome with impatience, Betty puts away the box and the wine and goes to sleep when Don doesn't come home. The moment she was waiting for had arrived and as quickly departed. Later, a man is with you in the car. That person leaves whether you want him to or not. And when he's gone, you're all by yourself again.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She tumbls here.

"The Road" - Zero 7 (mp3)

"Sleeper" - Zero 7 (mp3)

"Ghost Symbol" - Zero 7 (mp3)

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 See Our Future In Halloween Costumes

In Costume

by ELEANOR MORROW

Seeing someone dressed up as someone else is never comforting. Only Matt Lauer is improved by such a transformation, and this because otherwise he's going bald. JFK found his kids' costumes entertaining. We find them somewhat morbid and ironic. For a disguise to work, context is everything.

katie couric & matt lauerHalloween more often exposes societal ills without suggesting a more nurturing, religous path. Ms. Glock suggests Halloween is degrading to women:

I walked past the displays for the sexy devil and the sexy bunny and the sexy leopard — which, confounding logic, was already sold out — before happening upon the wall of full adult costumes. The first was Tavern Lady, an off-the-shoulder dress and faux-leather vest. It was followed by French Maid (ruffled mini-dress with matching headpiece), Cheerleader (pleated micro-mini and fitted vest) and Wonder Woman, which had not only a nearly invisible skirt but also red vinyl boot covers that reached to the thigh.

 At $49.99, Wonder Woman was among the priciest costumes, along with the Geisha — both $20 more than Stewardess, which consisted only of a polyester wrap dress with a plunging neckline.

Heidi Klum usually dresses up as something objectionable. Looking at her on Halloween is the same way I feel about viewing Ross Perot's real face. For feminist ex-Muslim Irshad Manji, Halloween is simply the site of her entry into open society.

hubert humphrey on halloween 1964Let's face it though, Matthew Weiner is a secret racist and blackface of course is among the most famous of the degrading costumes. I mean, who would dress their child in such a fashion? It's a wonder he didn't become a Somali pirate.

ted kennedy in his pirate costume, 1934To dress oneself in an objectionable fashion is common even in the highest levels of our government. As an AP dispatch reported in 2007,

A Homeland Security Department employee has been placed on leave for wearing a Halloween costume that drew complaints from other workers as being racially insensitive, even as it won ''most original'' honors from managers at an agency party. An inquiry is under way to determine proper sanctions in the incident, said Michael Chertoff, the homeland security secretary. The unidentified employee's costume of dreadlocks, dark makeup and prison stripes was deemed by Julie L. Myers, assistant secretary of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement division, and two other managers to be the most original at the party.

This year I'm not going out on Halloween.

Eleanor Morrow is the senior contributor to This Recording. She is a writer living in New York. She last wrote in these pages about District 9. She tumbls here.

"Mockingbird Song (live)" — Katie Melua (mp3)

"Scary Films (live)" — Katie Melua (mp3)