In Which They Spent The Whole Budget On One Rolling Stones Song

The Candy Machine

by MOLLY LAMBERT

"I looked up at the Barbizon and thought about all the women in there, one in every room, touching themselves to sleep." - Carrie Bradshaw

No just kidding that was Don Draper writing in his gournal, but way to make Carrie Bradshaw seem like a clever wordsmith by comparison! Monologues are hard. Look, I was a (Prezler award winning) playwright, I get it. But that's no excuse. Especially when there is the built in defensive mechanism against criticism of Don Draper telling us immediately that he's never written down his thoughts before. Sorry, still no.

Matthew Weiner is probably drunk on CLIOs and money from whatever company is funding those horrible meta ad-campaigns that run in the middle commercial break. If this was an attempt to stretch out on the bed creatively, like a sky-diver on some white satin sheets, or whatever dumb metaphor it was Don used, well, uh, splat.

I mean, coming off last week's triumph there was no chance of topping it, but for some reason Don deciding to get his swag back had more dramatic heft than actually getting it. Not that it wasn't super satisfying to see Don with swag again. It was just tentative swag. Bambi on the ice swag. The swag of a man going on dinner-dates with blonde teenage-dreams who still has to see his ex-wife and her daddy-husband.

Voiceovers are almost always the worst idea/laziest shortcut to describing a character's inner life. Just look at all the bad cuts of Blade Runner. And if those swimming pool scenes were supposed to be allusions to The Graduate, I'm sorry, I just can't. In general when it comes to The Graduate, I just can't. Overrated! (sorry Buck Henry)

If you want to hear my monologue about how The Graduate sucks, but could have made sense if it had starred Elliott Gould, and how Carnal Knowledge is Mike Nichols' real masterpiece, I'll be giving free seminars on my back porch every evening.

If Betty Draper is Grace Kelly, then Dr. Faye is Tippi Hedren. Don eavesdropping on Faye's phone call was LOL and so was realizing Don thought cool girls were as impenetrable as people think he is. Finding out that even really cool people are as fucked up and vulnerable as everyone else is perhaps THE revelation of adulthood.

Finding out that Dr. Faye is a mobster's daughter, and her assessment of Don as "another two-bit gangster" had some charm. Not enough to cover for that awful Aesop's Fables conversation. Hey writers, stop using wikipedia so damn much! I know you are learning interesting trivia all the time and you want to share it with the world, but hold back! Or be more subtle! I struggle with this every day of my life!

Natasha V.C. (who writes the great MM recaps at The Awl) and I were talking about last week's episode and decided that Joan's five seconds onscreen and the revelation that Miss Blankenship was a "hellcat" were meant to demonstrate Joan's potential dead-end future at a desk in front of Don's office. Joan has steered herself into a corner.

Joey calling Joan "the madam of a Shanghai whorehouse," not to mention "mom" was the stickpin in her current struggles, which also involve her husband trying to recapture their date-rapey honeymoon period by smooshing her while she cries. Joan's husband actually kind of reminds me of Ronnie from Jersey Shore, only hot. Joan is smart, but crippled by pride. We were all hoping she'd ask Lane for a raise or advice.

Harry trying to talk Joey into guesting on Mad Men's primetime soap forebearer Peyton Place to me seemed like an expression of the way we expect handsome successful alphas to live dream lives, the pressure Don is currently veering to escape. Bethenny Van Nuys may not be the smartest cookie, but she had a point about Don's inability to get close to anyone. Don has a point too though, that the prospect of somebody turning the firehose of their full attention directly on you can be terrifying.

The gender wars, like the wars on terror and drugs, are endless but also imaginary. For the current battles in the gender wars, you needed to tune over to MTV, where Kanye West and Taylor Swift were greco-roman oil wrestling for control of America's heart at the VMAs. Based purely on taste metrics, Kanye won. And like Peggy Olson in tonight's episode, Taylor just made herself look like a humorless bitch by comparison.

Taylor's new song was so terrible, I really wish Lady Gaga had stuffed a steak in it. Camille Paglia really needs to stuff a steak in it too. She's been trolling longer than I've been blogging. Joan and Peggy's terse elevator conversation banged home the real point: you can't win. You're fucked if you do and you're fucked if you don't.

If you accept "boys will be boys" as an excuse and you get to be in the boys' club, you then have to bite your tongue all the time as well as accept that you'll never be a "real" member, like non-Italians in the mafia who never get made. If however you call people out on crossing the line, you risk being branded as a "wet blanket" or way worse.

The line is very subtle and like pornography hard to define but instantly recognizable on sight. I can make rape and abortion jokes all day (and sometimes do) but if a joke is racist (which is different that "about race) or legitimately hateful I get offended and kind of genuinely horrified. Why did they describe Lane fucking Joan doggy style in a bowler hat but then Joey drew her blowing him? Those are two different things!

It's good that they're taking a pass at humanizing Betty Draper. I liked her tonight. The idea that people are capable of real change within themselves is very optimistic for a show that has been branded as relentlessly negative. But hey, the sixties were optimistic in a world that has been pretty much relentlessly negative since.

Now that Don's opening up about his feelings it's only a matter of time before Betty is marching in the streets for feminism. Don still needs a few more slaps in the face about his virgin/whore complex. Making a woman congratulate you for withdrawing sexually because you like and respect her too much is an Inception level neg.

In conclusion, Don Draper's diary sucks, but the face he makes while getting a blowjob remains super hilarious and awesome. This was probably the worst episode of the season, but it was still okay and I didn't care that much because it's my birthday!

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

"Chicago Train" - The Besnard Lakes (mp3)

"Glass Painter" - The Besnard Lakes (mp3)

"Albatross" - The Besnard Lakes (mp3)

In Which There's No Use Crying Over Fish In The Sea

It Was A Confusing Time

by ALEX CARNEVALE

Apart from the astonishingly disproportionate amount of attention it gets from the media, Mad Men isn't very popular. The show's ratings are worse than HBO's Hung or its AMC lead-in Rubicon, and dropped precipitously after the season premiere. The advertising industry itself is fond of saying that it markets to younger people, but while young people might do the buying, they don't do the watching. The people driving television ratings are the older crowd, and they don't like Mad Men.

The media loves Mad Men, and Hollywood loves Mad Men, but regular people don't like Mad Men. Despite its third consecutive Emmy for best drama, the show's audience has remained tiny in comparison to its inferior competition.

Although Mad Men is the best show on television, a fact that is not likely to change until Breaking Bad returns to the air, even the show's biggest fans can admit there are a lot of reasons not to like Mad Men. A few even seem to derive pleasure from speaking out against the show, as if not experiencing something were itself a badge of honor.

As we all know, exposure effect runs the world. In fact, social psychologist Robert Zajonc was doing his work on mere exposure effect during roughly the same period that Roger Sterling dumped his wife of thirty years. We not only are predisposed to like things that we've experienced, but if other people don't immediately share our view, there is trouble on the horizon. This line of sight runs both ways. We can barely stand to try to enjoy something that we are told we should enjoy. I know; I've tried to get my mother to read a particular novel for the last six months, and she can't even get past the first page. She also won't watch Mad Men. I should have told her it sucked.

Mad Men has a number of elements that make it incredibly unappealing to people of a certain generation. The first is that it's a lively caricature of a time period they already lived through, and the second is that it plays that time period entirely for laughs. In reality, the 1960s and 1970s wasn't all drinking in offices and waking up with your cleaning lady. It was a very scary time in American life for a lot of people, and reliving it must feel like it's happening all over again.

Older people don't want to hear catty jokes about how racist and sexist things were back then. Maybe they were a bit of both, come to think of it, but broadcasting it feels like an insult to the participants. On its own this could be overcome, because all period pieces bear more resemblance to the present than their own times. The more prevalent complaint that people offer about Mad Men is they don't find anybody on the show with which they can sympathize.

This is the least convincing of the world's slanders, primarily because people said similar things about The Sopranos. But in point of fact it is fairly hard to identify with characters on either show. It's no coincidence that the major relationship of both shows is a mentor-protege conflict. Peggy is really the protagonist of Mad Men, and it would be wrong to say that either Don or Tony Soprano is the antagonist, but in a very crucial way, they are the obstacle to the heroine getting what she wants.

Only, it was a little more obvious what Christopher Moltisanti wanted. He wanted Ben Kingsley for his movie Cleaver, and he wanted power, money, and even fame. Peggy just wants respect from her peers, equal treatment in business, and maybe a Clio. It's not a lot in comparison. And that's what we think she wants — we don't really know, and perhaps neither does she. She has dumped her sex-crazed boyfriend and seems willing to embark on a new adventure of some kind, but she is just as likely to castrate Pete Campbell and take the train back to Brooklyn as she is to come up with the Absolut Vodka campaign all by her lonesome.

Like many characters on both shows, we can't really say what we expect from them. It's gotten so bad that this misguided New York recapper insanely believes that Don and Peggy are about to embark on a sexual relationship. Believe me, that last thing Matthew Weiner wants to do to his protege is have sex with her.

We always knew what to expect from Tony Soprano, however, and that's how he became a hero in spite of himself. The Sopranos was one of the funniest comedies on television, because we usually knew exactly what Tony was thinking in every situation, and as such, his reactions — grimacing, snoring, rage — were their own mime show, the kind that you already know all the moves to, but you like anyway. We also have an easier time liking someone we're supposed to hate.

Don Draper replicates this utter sense of abandon; but because he is a mystery to himself, we don't know exactly why he's a piece of shit. There must be some reason every douchebag is one, but not everyone can be lucky enough to know it.

To new viewers of the show, Don must appear something like a hero, and no one wants to watch their hero drunkenly hit on every woman with a functioning vagina, and wake up with one named Doris. Don isn't a hero. He's not even nice, and he treats Peggy even worse than he treated his ex-wife. The only nice thing Don ever did was pay for a hooker that looked like Peggy for Lane Pryce, and that was more polite than genuinely good.

This makes it all more baffling that Jon Hamm's voice is being used to sell cars and insurance on radio and television. Clearly the advertising executives don't watch the show that is ostensibly about them, because if they did, they'd realize the voiceover is Satan's intonation. The most positive thing you can say about Dick Whitman is that he tells the truth when he's drunk.

So I can't blame people for not liking Mad Men. No work of art is intended for everyone, not even The Sopranos, the triumphant achievement of serial television from which Weiner's show takes so many of its tonal elements and characterizations. Besides being a period piece, Mad Men is a thinly veiled chronicle of how Matthew Weiner relates to the world. In brief, he mostly thinks we're his servants.

The culmination of four years of dealing with Don's garbage was last night's morality play, where the disease and poison of Don's own mental processes was reflected by mice, cockroaches, and the human vermin that is Duck Phillips. The late Mrs. Draper packs them all up in her Samsonite briefcase and takes off. The problem, as always, wasn't with the writing, although it took several unimaginative shortcuts to make the two closer — Don sobbing because he has to pay the mortgage for some Berkeley grad who wouldn't even give him an HJ, Peggy fishing for compliments about how 'pretty' she is (is that all this was about?) and Bert Cooper having no testicles.

The problem with having Don's protege relationship supplanting his love relationship is that while almost everyone has some kind of love relationship in their life except for Jennifer Aniston, not that many people can relate to the psychotic creative director-precocious protege relationship. And in fact, Peggy does a much worse job arguing her case than Don does his for treating her like his lapdog, making the conflict less than a battle of equals.

Peggy giving up her birthday dinner isn't the same as Don giving up his special time with Roger Sterling, whom he misses so much he plays cassette tapes of the man's voice. The mercurial Draper seems almost rational when he tells her that her time will come, avoiding the point completely; she won the Clio, not him. The work he stole from Roger's wife's cousin wasn't his either, it was just another drunken theft, the cure for the common being terrible at life.

It's fabulous that the new Don wants his door open, and that he shaved for the first time since his divorce. Congratulations. Jon Hamm gets to make out with Jessica Stein every night while Elisabeth Moss' ex-husband Fred Armisen has intercourse with every twenty-something in Park Slope. Peggy has to wake up in her own office with the Three Stooges when all she wants is to have Pete Campbell's baby inside her and the Popsicle account, and a fancy dinner where her mother isn't involved. (Really, she should probably be thankful she doesn't have to hear about Freddy Rumsen's arrowhead collection.)

When Mad Men attacks cliche, it usually does it in such an unusual way that you forget the basic storylines of Peggy's pregnancy, Don's infidelity, Joan's rapist doctor husband, and Betty's unfit mothering have been staples of daytime television since Susan Lucci was in diapers. In a way, it feels like this is the first time we're seeing these plots play out, and they take on a freshness other dramas can't approach. Don's Cassius Clay ad is now a terrible cliche itself, and let's face it, a million other agencies probably had the exact same idea that morning. But in his office, growing a slanted erection from the incidental touch of Peggy's hand on his own, it may as well be the face of the new sun.

This same sort of temporary enlightenment happened to Tony Soprano more than once. Each time he resolved to be a better man, it inevitably resulted in Carmela falling in love with Tony's imported henchman and Tony forgetting all about his resolution once he was crossed in any way. Don's not turning over a new leaf; his sickness may have been locked up in that eidolon's Samsonite briefcase, but his conscience carried it out the door and disappeared.

This season began with Don Draper's first fame, and he is now about to explode. If he takes Peggy along with him, it will probably allow us to enjoy the ride. Many people never watched The Sopranos while it aired, because they also felt they could not relate to its foreign milieu. This was their loss, and oh what a loss it was, like pretending Van Gogh wasn't painting or William Faulkner wasn't writing. No matter how many Emmys Mad Men wins, some people will stay away because of how little comfort the show offers us during a difficult time in American life. Matthew Weiner's show is no warm blanket, but taste is fickle, and nobody has to love every work of art, even when it's this good.

Alex Carnevale is the editor of This Recording. He tumbls here and twitters here. He last wrote in these pages about Fairfield Porter and the New York school of poets.

"Nobody Loves Me (Massive Attack remix)" - Portishead (mp3)

"Acid Jazz and Trip Op (remix)" - Portishead (mp3)

"You Find The Earth Boring" - Portishead (mp3)

In Which We Plan To Advertise in Ebony

Wading Through The Fog of Mad Men

by ALMIE ROSE

Don Draper is the Kanye West of the 1960s. They’re both creative man-children who get pissy when they don’t get their way. They also look great in shades.

Last night’s episode of Mad Men, aptly titled "The Fog" because the whole thing was a foggy mess, began with The Drapers at a parent-teacher conference in which Don takes the only available chair, leaving his pregnant wife to find her own goddamn chair. Don Draper is not a butler; he does not need to offer his chair to anyone. That’s such a slick Kanye thing to do.

Oh yeah so Sally is acting up in school and Betty has to pee. While she leaves the teacher gets all flirty with Don saying, “It’s going to be a beautiful summer.” Don gives her a look that says, “Yeah, for me to do you in.” Betty comes back in what has to be the shortest pee break in human history.

Back at Sterling Cooper Don gets pissy at a meeting and leaves, like Kanye at an awards show. The British dude tries to talk to Don and Don gets all pissy. Then Don goes home and no one is there to answer the phone and Don gets all pissy.

Don is so angry he could break his Mac Book Air!!!!

Then all of a sudden Duck Phillips appears on the screen and I gasp and do a Snoopy dance of joy. My God how I’ve missed Duck Phillips. But Pete Campbell’s being a total downer about it. If Don is the Kanye of the 60s then Pete is definitely the Pete Wentz of the 60s. Though Pete does have his share of Kanye moments, like when he threw his chicken dinner out the window. Gosh those were great times.

The teacher calls Don and tries to get him to reveal his soul or something and Don’s basically all like, “I got to return some video tapes” and shoots her down. For now, at least.

Then Betty goes into labor. God, it’s always got to be about you, Betty, doesn’t it? At the hospital the nurse is acting all Twilight Zone, being aloof and cold, but does offer Betty a complimentary enema.

Don, who looks a lot like Cary Grant in this episode, waits in the waiting room and starts talking to another expectant father. They reveal things about their lives, or something. I think this guy is a prison warden but I’m not really sure, because Dick Whitman’s Old Timey Tales are kind of dull.

In the delivery room, Betty has a drug induced Technicolor dream. Her acting is not that different from when she’s not supposed to be in a zombified dream state. Upon waking from the dream, Betty asks the nurses to leave her alone saying, "I’m just a housewife." It’s times like these when Mad Men really misses the mark on subtlety.

Then Lady Gaga won best new artist and accepted the award with her face covered in red lace. Then when I came back to Mad Men, Don Draper looked sad. I think I missed something.

This episode is more Lynchian than usual.

Betty gives birth without a hitch and wants to name their baby boy after her dead dad. Don is a dick about it but does not break his Mac Book Air!!!

Duck, meanwhile, borrows a plotline from Friends or Three’s Company in which he invites both Pete and Peggy to a business lunch without telling either one that the other one will be there. That’s so Duck Phillips!!! He’s such a rascal! Pete gets all weird and leaves. That’s so emo!

Duck tries to court Peggy into leaving Sterling Cooper for his agency and Peggy has her doubts. But Duck is wearing a slick turtleneck so it’s going to be really hard for her to turn him down. Peggy asks Don for a raise and Don gets all Kanye about it. Duck Phillips looks pretty awesome now, doesn’t he, Peggy?

Meanwhile Pete talks about "negroes" and makes an ass of himself with Hollis, the elevator operator. Pete thinks it would be a good idea to exploit the black demographic for an ad campaign, but the clients are appalled, because it’s 1963 and no one cares about black people. Roger does another blackface routine to smooth things over.

No, he doesn’t, but he does get angry at Pete and yells, "Are you aware of the number of handjobs I’m going to have to give?"! Seriously, he really says that! After that I kind of tuned out because all I could think about was Roger’s handjobs. I really wish he had gone into detail. Exactly whom would you need to give these handjobs to, Roger? And how? Could you describe it?

The episode ends with the baby waking up Betty from her sleep and she seems kind of bummed out by it. Don of course does not wake up. Don, how could you be so heartless?

Almie Rose is the senior contributor to This Recording. She writes here, and twitters here. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She last wrote in these pages about hot places in L.A.

"Kitchen Stove" — Henri Almond (mp3)

"Wolves and Laundry" — Henri Almond (mp3)

"Trois Ans Avec" — Henri Almond (mp3)