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Oh shit flashbacks? Mad Men is getting LOST up in this bitch. What's next, smoke monsters? Polar bears? Alternate histories? What if Chauncey the dog never really did run away? What if he's actually the new head of Sterling-Cooper? Then they could change the title of the show to Mad Dogs And Englishmen.
Let's be honest. Peggy only fucked Duck because Don negged her. Haven't we all done this? Transferred the neg from the person we actually like onto whoever happens to be around? Jeez though Peggy, just because you're being a slut doesn't mean you have to fuck everybody. I mean, it's Duck. He's gross and terrible, even if he does want to tear your clothes off with his teeth. He makes Pete Campbell look like a sensible choice.
He likes the smell of liquor on your breath. Run away Peggy! Run away!
Duck Phillips is a slimy creeper. Don doesn't read the bible. Betty is a child. Joan is MIA. I am starting to relate most to Bert Cooper. That guy knows what the fuck is up.
What are you going to be doing three years from now? Three years ago, what did you think you'd be doing now? If you want to retain personal independence and ultimate freedom, you better not let your boss know about your secret identity. Maybe it's because if you start thinking further than a week down the road it makes it a lot harder to justify boinking the hot elementary school teacher.
This is not Californication, Don! There are rules!
Some people get mad at Mad Men for being too oblique, setting up scenes that are shot suspensefully, as if something might go one way, and then it goes entirely another. This was also some people's criticism of There Will Be Blood, one I never agreed with. I'm not sure what to call this genre. Post-suspense?
We are often shown guns that never go off, usually to distract us from the unforseen ones that eventually do. Mad Men is full of red herrings and dead ends. In that respect it reminds me of the work of Paul Auster. However, two characters that seemed to serve no purpose initially, Henry Francis and Conrad Hilton, have both turned up.
Matthew Wiener has learned from David Chase the extreme comedic value of objects. The fainting chaise that Betty has now made the hideous new centerpiece of the hearth is a gag, of sorts. The lawnmower last week was an excellent gag. Sopranos objects of value that I recall are Gloria Trillo's steak, the Russian's leg, and Big Mouth Billy Bass. A well placed object can be poignant and funny instead of theatrically "symbolic."
There is a joke that Los Angeles has four seasons; Fire, Floods, Earthquakes, and Riots. (I didn't say it was funny). It is easy to feel like the world is always ending.
Because the world is always ending in Los Angeles, we are not necessarily surprised when it does. We are also not surprised when the world keeps going on after that.
How many times has the ground collapsed underneath you? How often have the forests of your hopes been razed by the flames of unforseen circumstances?
And yet after each trial and humiliation, there is the opportunity to rebuild. Even if it seems increasingly futile given that you now know it's unstable and impermanent.
But what is permanence? Is there such a thing? Even the most stable of situations might secretly be sitting on a fault line or border an accidental brush fire.
So then why do we aspire to stability, as if stability is something we can control? Why do we try to achieve what we already know is ephemeral if not impossible?
Is it because the alternative of accepting the constant destruction and restructuring of the world around us is just too existentially terrifying? We need something to cling to.
But clinging is what hurts us, what stops us from ever enjoying the present. We are too scared to let go, to accept that the earth might open up and swallow it at any time.
The alternative does not have to involve abject terror. We cling to stability because we fear the unknown, but the unknown is rarely as bad as we fear. Sometimes it is better.
And when picking through the charred remains of your former world sometimes you will stumble upon something you miss, and feel the pangs of nostalgia and saudade.
Accepting that you will sometimes feel terrible is the only way you will ever feel good.
Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here.
Phyllis Diller, Dave Chappelle, Lenny Bruce, Richard Pryor, the This Recording YouTube channel, Mary Hartman Mary Hartman, The Mary Tyler Moore Show, The Dick Van Dyke Show, Bob and Ray, SCTV, Wanda Sykes, Susie Essman, Cheryl Hines
When people tell you how they're going to say "fuck it" to life and move to some other city or country and then you see them three months later at a party and they're all "o, hai," Alex's crush on Ayn Rand, when Alex threatens to make a list of "The top 10 Women Of All Time" and asks for help because he can't come up with 10, culture-bound syndromes, fanfic, Ernie Kovacs
"Lesbians" who backtrack and start dating guys and are all "I know, we'll talk about it later," when Alex says something genuine and heartfelt and then I realize he's just fucking with me, When Marky Mark goes to record the song in Boogie Nights, religions, tumblr, Keeping A Notebook, Mary Rambin, when I looked up "self worth" on thesaurus.com and this happened:
South Park, Stephen Colbert, Bill Murray, Mark Twain, Mindy Kaling, David Sedaris, Becca Wiener, Emily Gould, Rachael Bedard, the internet, monkeys dressed up like people, Super Grover, The Muppet Show, Mah Nà Mah Nà, Huga Wuga
Ernest Hemingway and Orson Welles wrestling, Louis C.K. and Lucky Louie, Chunklet Magazine, Your Show Of Shows, Lindsayism, Chappelle's Show, Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry and Jeff Garlin trying to keep a straight face in their Curb scenes with Susie Essman, Nichols and May, Doug Benson, Oh my car
The Cable Guy, Clueless, Safe Men, Heathers, Mean Girls, Night Of The Lepus, The King Of Comedy, Dick, Caddyshack, Animal House, The Fish That Saved Pittsburgh, Brain Candy (the cab driver, toast fucking, Cancer Boy, Happiness Pie, Dunk The Drug! "It was only a couple of Flipper babies!")
Chris! I thought you said the drug was ready! I'm confused.
When sidekicks are vastly superior to the person they're supposedly a sidekick to (Garth Algar, Luigi, Donald Duck, Daffy Duck, Cameron from Ferris Bueller), Andrew Lasken's videos, his love song to Riskay, his tribute to Daniel Powter's exposed brain syndrome, interviews with Quentin Tarantino where the interviewer can't get him to stop talking, sloth babies:
Al Capp, Rube Goldberg, Edward Gorey, Jules Feiffer, B. Kliban, Quentin Blake, David Shrigley, Roz Chast, Charles Addams, Peter Bagge, Chick Tracts, Carl Barks, Lynda Barry, R. Crumb, Archie, Krazy Kat, Nancy, Little Lulu, Plastic Man, Julia Wertz
Daniel Pinkwater, Jean Shepherd, S.J. Perelman, Charlie Kaufman, David Sedaris, Woody Allen before he got creepy, The Marx Brothers (ranked) 1. Harpo, 2. Groucho 3. Chico, Mel Brooks, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, Mae West, Buster Keaton
Bob Dylan, particularly as uber-indie a-hole circa "Don't Look Back," Will Oldham, R. Kelly, Mariah Carey, Pete Wentz's man-crush on John Mayer, John Mayer on Chappelle's show, Prince, Prince's desire to call Apollonia's group "Vagina 6", the Mary Jane Girls, Klymaxx and Bernadette Cooper from Klymaxx
Ghostbusters, Ghostbusters 2, Godfather 3, all the comedies made by the Coen brothers and most of the dramas too, talking about Southland Tales and still not having seen it (although to be fair, I have watched long sequences on youtube, which seems like the way it was meant to be experienced), Santa's Village
The Tess And Molly Show, Gabe & Jenny, Kristen Schaal, Amy Poehler, Rachel Dratch, Missi Pyle, ONTD, fourfour and Rich Juzwiak, Flight Of The Conchords, The episode of The Sarah Silverman Show where Sarah tried to have a crush on Officer Tig Notaro, all the jokes on that show about Valley Village
Freaks and Geeks, Bill Haverchuck, Jason Segel's performances in the Apatow canon, especially as Eric on Undeclared, when Neal does the ventriloquism routine, Biff as Coach Fredericks, Dave 'Gruber' Allen as Mr. Rosso
Dorothy Parker, Kim Deal, Ellen Page looking super uncomfortable in a fancy dress on the red carpet, Frank Black shirtless, Pot Psychology, Emily Gould, Tracie Egan, when Moe Tkacik hasn't had sex in a while and she writes something really cranky and funny and awesome, picturing Nick Denton sitting on a cloud made of money like Zeus and laughing at all of us
Garry Shandling, The Larry Sanders Show, when Larry thought David Duchovny had a crush on him, when Hank's sex tape comes out and on it he's asking two girls if they want a "mouthful of Hank," everything Mary Lynn Rajskub does especially being on 24, and her deleted scene with Tom Cruise in Magnolia
Everybody on The (American) Office, but especially Toby, Meredith, Stanley, and Creed. Oh and also Angela, Kelly Kapoor and Phyllis, are my dream guests for a slumber party. When B.J. moved to New York and became a cokehead. The dinner party at Michael and Jan's house, Jan's scented candle business
The whole 30 Rock gang, especially Liz Lemon, Tracy, Jenna, Kenneth, and Jack, the Sheinhardt wig company. Everybody on How I Met Your Mother, especially NPH and Willow, T-Pain, Plies, rap beefs that don't end in death, Weird Al, novelty musical genres, Girls Aloud, kitten in a tissue box
Ernst Lubitsch, Billy Wilder, Preston Sturges, North By Northwest, Cary Grant, Warren Beatty in Shampoo and Reds, in Sullivan's Travels when they show the cartoon to the chain gang, Robert Altman, The Long Goodbye and California Split
Madeline Kahn, Carole Lombard, Diane Keaton, Joan Blondell, Jean Harlow, Marilyn Monroe, Barbara Stanwyck, Katharine Hepburn, Bernadette Peters, Cloris Leachman, Teri Garr
Tess Lynch, Tyler Coates, Alex Carnevale, Bridget Moloney, Danish Aziz, Sam Solomon, Mike Metzger, Lizzy Klein, Mike D, Amir Shoucri, Joni and Susanna , my parents, my whole family, my brother Ben Lambert and his Lambo drawings
Jack White's hair, Britney Spears, Pete Doherty, Dov Charney, Hippies, Punks, Noise Music, Hipsters, Techno, the Hennifer Lopez taco-flavored keeses, Butters, Matt & Trey, Home Movies, Brendon Small, the many alt white people of Portland
Shitty serious teen films that come on the movie channels at 2 am and usually star Dominique Swain, Bijou Phillips, or some combination thereof, the all-time best/worst one of these; Havoc, starring Bijou Phillips, Anne Hathaway, Anne Hathaway's breasts, and Freddie Rodriguez as a cholo from the east side of LA, the fact that Havoc was written by Stephen Gaghan, who also wrote shitty/serious non-teen movie Traffic
Zach Galifianakis, Patton Oswalt, Brian Posehn, and Maria Bamford, the Comedians Of Comedy DVD, the part where they go to a Cracker Barrel, Puns on WALL*E, Puns on "He's Just Not That Into You," the compulsive inability to stop punning known as witzelsucht, Larry David as the "temp Beatle"
When white people pick one rapper to like and it's Lil' Wayne, when rappers pick one white people band to like and it's Coldplay, pan flutes, people who sexualize The Chippettes, the parts in Walk Hard with Tim Meadows, "I'm just so tired of all these Star Wars" Mr. Show's Monster Parties: Fact Or Fiction:
Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She twitters here and tumbls here.
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