In Which Right Now My Life Is Very…

Did You Get Pears?

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Who else cheered when Allison chucked the golden snitch at Don? Yes that's right, Donald "This Never Happened" Draper, "this actually happened." You can't just stick the tip in one night and then pretend you forgot about it the next day because you were so wasted! I mean, you can! Unless you have to see them all the time by necessity, but that's why you don't dip your dick in the company cold cream!

Sometimes it's more important to tell the truth than to save face. The first three seasons of Mad Men were about the social pressures and restrictions that stop people from being honest with others, let alone themselves. So far this season has been about the unassailable internal problems that override those human constructed dams.

Everyone's an expert and a hypocrite when it comes to matters of the heart. When Allison's feelings about Don start leaking out in the conference room, Peggy tells her to stuff them in a sack. Later when Peggy finds out that Pete knocked up Trudy, she is unable to do anything but bang her head on a desk. Perhaps a more subtle gesture could've been used to indicate Peggy's feelings, but I thought it was very accurate.

Often when real emotional trash goes down you'll have a visceral physical reaction that feels especially unwelcome given that you are dealing with feelings, which theoretically ought to just give you mental anguish. And yet there you are, banging your head against the wall, or doubled over in violent pain, or throwing up in the hallway.

The difference between what should happen and what does happen is another one of Mad Men's major themes, along with the differences between the person you are and the person you present yourself to the world as being. Even if you want to keep your inner feelings entirely to yourself, as Don does, your body might still sell you out.

Don criticizes Faye Faith Popcorn for sticking her finger in people's brains and getting them to talk. One of Jon Hamm's greatest skills as an actor is his ability to convey simultaneously the many different levels of Don Draper's bluffing while making it fully believable that most other people would see only the very top layer. 

Peggy's cool downtown party was perfect. I swear I went to that party last weekend. The guy with the bear head turned out to be a bear. Telling a lesbian that your boyfriend rents your vagina is the kind of flirty neg cool art dykes live for.

How many sweatshop drug parties and exhilarating dashes from the NYPD will it take Peggy's new lady friend to unlock her potential bicuriousness? Who will get Peggy to cuckold her dopey fiance first, her new lesbian buddy or her metrosexual officemate? 

This episode was directed by none other than silver fox John Slattery! Perhaps that is why it was so very wry. It's like Matthew Weiner heard the internet complaining about how season 3 focused way too much on Don and Betty's marriage breaking down and not enough on the Sterling-Cooper office, and then granted us our dream of banishing Betty to a plotless corner so that we can spend more time with Joan, Pete, and Peggy.

We all know what the ancient couple with the pears signifies for Don's new secretary. Bobbie Barrett was a gateway drug and now Don's going to start banging old ladies on the reg. The real tragedy of this episode is that my intended, that all American idiot Ken Cosgrove, has given his dowry to some betch. Farewell to thee Kenny C, my blond prince of Vermont. I'm sorry your pretty boy swag was too much for creative. 

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find last week's Mad Men review here.

"We Shall Be Free" - Woody Guthrie (mp3)

"Oregon Trail" - Woody Guthrie (mp3)

"Springfield Mountain" - Woody Guthrie (mp3)

In Which I Have A Texas Belt Buckle And I'm Going To See Gamera

Dick + Anna '64 

by MOLLY LAMBERT

"Is that what you want? Or is that what people expect of you?" Mad Men's back in the motherfuckin' house pointing out the giant distinction between those two things. There's the person everybody thinks you are and the person you really are, and the latter is impossible to keep track of. Especially these days as the signifiers traditionally used to describe and define the former fade ever steadily out of American life.

Even if you figure out who it is you're supposed to be, who it is you're going to let people think you are, the whole world can shift out from underneath you as it inevitably will anyway with the passage of time. All the things that once defined you as cool can start working against you, because aging makes LOLs of us all.

Either you wait it out until the pendulum swings back and you are rewarded for having stayed the same, or you make a hamstrung effort to change and generally get served. Even Bob Dylan got served (by Jesus no less) when he listened to his critics, the ones who started declaring him "over" the second they finished anointing him.

Don's side trip to California is also the return of Deus Ex Machin-Anna Draper, a character whose lack of interior function belies a severe bone cancer eating her polio riddled fictional bones from the inside. Seriously, what is the deal with Anna Draper? Why does she pimp out Don/Dick to her stupid proto-hippie niece so hard? What exactly does she get out of being so selflessly mothering to Don? A shitty paint job?

Why doesn't Anna Draper want to fuck Dick Whitman? He clearly owes it to her. Is she gay? I mean, I know she is a Californian, and since Californians on Mad Men fulfill all the cliches of Californians (free-spirited, potheads, kind of dumb and sexy, like to paint the interiors of their houses weird bright colors) it would only make sense. 

Like her manic pixie dream aunt, the Berkeley student serves as an avatar for meaningful statements like "Nobody knows what's wrong with themselves. Everyone else can see it right away" which is a couple of mixtapes over from Elizabethtown.

Luckily, as has been the trend this season, Dick/Don gets negged by the annoying Blake Lively/Kate Hudson hybrid undergrad from South Pasadena. Granted, "you're so beautiful and young" is the worst pick-up line ever. Dick Whitman has always been a way for Mad Men to have it both ways, for Don Draper to be an all-powerful misogynist jerk as well as a good guy who truly respects women underneath.

Anna Draper, lesbian who enjoys watching Don paint her living room in his shorts, also thinks she has seen UFOs. Although not telling somebody they have terminal cancer is a total bitch move, who can really blame Dick/Don for wanting to get the hell out of there after the crazy high lady starts talking about aliens and you've just been humiliated trying to put the moves on a girl you knew before she had front teeth. 

Don Draper was always everyone's fantasy about what a powerful alpha male should be like in the early sixties, including Dick Whitman's. A big component of the fantasy was the idea that you could somehow avoid all vulnerability if you were just cool enough. In the past, Don was always that cool, but divorce has fucked up his game.

Former Übermensch Don Draper was always able to seal the deal with women without any problems, as if it it were possible to eliminate the awkward moment that happens when you lean in to kiss someone for the first time, where you open the window for them to reject you but must feign bravado in order to even go through with it at all. 

That you could somehow completely avoid any such awkward moments was illusory. Real life is about being raw red nerves vulnerable while covering for it outwardly all the time. Watching Don get rejected is both satisfying and super secondhand embarrassing, because we've all been there. At the start of 1965 Don Draper is more confused than ever about who "Don Draper" is, let alone Dick Whitman. 

The episode takes the familiar crazy last act turn into another kind of Mad Men episode, the buddy comedy/double date. Usually these plots revolve about Don and Roger, but Roger is sadly and mysteriously absent in this episode (as is, mercifully, Bets). This time it's Lane and Don, new divorced guy BFFs acting out the plot of every major comedy of the last ten years. In the Roger role, Lane gets all the best lines.

Isn't it funny how Don's awful apartment comes pre-furnished because bachelors don't want to spend any time furnishing their apartments? All the bachelors I know LOVE furnishing their apartments, more than anything else in the world. You cannot stop those dudes from buying stuff for their places. It's all they wanna fucking do. 

Peggy's reverence for Joan's "perfect marriage" is hilarious, as is Lane's love for Joan only blossoming after he sees her belittle somebody in the office. Joan's powerful feminine façade is every bit the lie that Don Draper's masculine front was. Now that Joan is trapped in her fantasy life, her own code won't let her complain about it.

Nobody wants to be topped more than a strong top. That's why Joan's attracted to Dr. Rapist, who turns down her meals and insists on stitching up her finger himself, and may be fucking a nurse or six on the side judging from his lack of desire for Joan so close to his deployment. Or what if Dr. Rapist is struggling with his own masculinity and like many embarrassed dudes just doesn't have that intense of a libido?

If somebody paid me twenty five dollars to go out with Don Draper I'd consider it the best day of my life and probably have to commit suicide afterwards because what the hell is going to top that. Before Don's suit just hid the existential dread of a person trapped in a bad marriage, now it hides the shame of a guy who sleeps on his bare mattress. Why they didn't take the escorts to see Gamera I'll never know. Anyone who goes to a stand-up show on purpose deserves everything they get. 

Because Matthew Weiner is a sadist, we don't get to see Don fuck the fake-Joan hooker this time, since Mad Men's sex scenes only exist to impart fear and dread. Even when it goes well, it never really goes that well. Last year Sal got his first handjob of life, and look what happened to him. Likewise it is likely that Joan fakes her orgasms in addition to faking her hair color, and we now know Don Draper is nothing without the idea of "Don Draper." How do you separate the person from the idea of the person?

I certainly don't know, but I do know this. Y'all ain't never going to Catalina for Easter.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls here and twitters here. You can find last week's Mad Men review here.

"Technocrat" - The Finkielkrauts (mp3)

"Writing a Song" - The Finkielkrauts (mp3)

"Lover Song" - The Finkielkrauts (mp3)

In Which I Don’t Hate Christmas, I Just Hate This Christmas

Thank You For Bringing My Keys

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Mad Men

Season 4, Episode 2

"Christmas Comes But Once A Year"

You know when you get out of a long relationship and you're thrust back out into the real world all fucked up on a heady cocktail of hormones and adrenaline, only to find out that you have no longer have any game whatsoever? And even though you're not terrible looking and are considered charming by many you now melt into an awkward puddle at even the simplest social interactions, talking way too much or not at all?

When you were unavailable people flirted with you all the time, practically threw themselves at you. Now you're free and suddenly your phone hardly rings and you break a sweat at the thought of trying to make smalltalk with one more uninterested idiot. It happens to the best of us. Why wouldn't it also happen to Don Draper?

During this freefall period it's conventional to make really terrible decisions, which is why Don ends up turning down an invitation to a party full of nurses (WTF Don), bobbles flirting with the hot HR rep (who's totally right about Don being married again in a year) and then zipless fucks his pathetic secretary Allison in the least sexy sex scene in the history of Mad Men (until Peggy and Mark's at the episode's close). 

Remember in season one when Joan talked about how Don never fucks anyone from the office because he knows better than that? Well, things change. It's like they realized Jon Hamm is too funny to be stuck playing a serious character all the time and decided to put Don Draper in embarrassing situations that make us laugh awkwardly so as not to cringe. He's stuck in the handsome bubble. 

In many ways Don resembles the protagonist of the other best show on television, Louis C.K.'s Louie. They are sad bachelors, illustrating the flipside of the lonely spinster cliché that so outrages Peggy when Freddy Rumsen springs it on her. Don's dingy new lifestyle and its attendant trappings are a balled up shirt's throw away from C.K. eating his slice of pizza over a garbage can during Louie's opening credits. 

Vibes between exes were also running high this episode, as they are anytime Pete and Peggy or Roger and Joan have scenes together. How did the magical samba line future office of 1964 become the soul killing cubicle farm of today? Does it have to do with the concurrent drop in social acceptance of getting totally loaded at work?

Peggy managed to find somebody to date with an even worse haircut than she has, and he finally spoke out against her reign of hand-jobs. All that "who we want to be" vs. "who we really are" stuff was demonstrated by Peggy's beau's Mark's clueless attempts to bully his girlfriend into doing him after assuming she's still a virgin (LOL). 

A Don Draper with no swag is a Don Draper that's a hell of a lot easier to root for. Desperation is never a good look, but "divorced loser Don" is certainly more relatable than "absurdly suave Don." Who among us hasn't passive aggressively done something incredibly hurtful to somebody we didn't really mean to hook up with?

You know who has mad game though? Glen Bishop. Breaking into your crush's house so her stupid new stepdad will want to move? Sheer brilliance. Glen is a little baller, even if he's only trying to get into Sally's pants as a pathway back to her mom's scalp.

Was this episode especially great because January Jones was barely in it? Who can say.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She twitters here and tumbls here. You can find past recaps of Mad Men here.

"Get Low" - Sun Araw (mp3)

"The Message" - Sun Araw (mp3)

"Hustle and Bustle" - Sun Araw (mp3)