In Which Boardwalk Empire Gives Us All New Heroes And Villains

Competition? Yes I Would Love Some

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Situations that are superficially identical can often be completely dissimilar. That's why there are no hard and fast rules that always apply across the board, except the golden rule, and even then you learn pretty fast that treating other people the way you want to be treated is very often the best way to brutally and categorically fuck yourself.

So even though I told Matt Weiner that using anachronistic music was the worst possible idea for Mad Men, I think Boardwalk Empire would benefit tremendously from doing that exact specific thing I expressly told Mad Men not to do ever again. I'm also sorry I initially went so hard on Steve Buscemi's portrayal of Nucky Johnson for not being James Gandolfini or Jon Hamm. Those are good burgers, Walter. 

All I could think about during Boardwalk Empire's season finale ending montage was how much better it would have been with some rock music. I might have to resoundtrack it for YouTube just to prove my point. It reminded me of how much I love season closing montages, and how good they always were on The Sopranos. 

Boardwalk Empire's closing montage was so visually perfect, but I was distracted by the stupid olde tymey song with its overly literal to the plot lyrics. I just wished they'd gone the full Scorsese/Sopranos and used a fucking Springsteen song or something. I expect too much from things I like, especially art. I always want them to be better.

Like as much as I have complained about the Brian Jonestown Massacre song in the opening credits, and how it's dumb to connect the sixties psychedelic subculture to prohibition, they should totally do more of that. Stop digging so deep in the victrola crates. Hire Lenny Kaye to be the music supervisor before season 2 starts.

Less ragtime, more garage rock, no historically accurate standup comedians ever again. I joke reference the "Golden Years" scene from A Knight's Tale but that scene is AWESOME! And the only memorable part of that movie! Let's face it, sometimes the most "obvious" things are actually also the best ideas! Sometimes! Other times, worst.

David Milch said he figured out pretty quickly that using old tymey western slang would have made all of Deadwood's characters sound like Yosemite Sam. It's true that the period details are what most often yank me out of full Boardwalk Empire immersion. The jokes just aren't funny, and I'd rather they work harder on making the world seem cool than having it be entirely historically accurate. 

So is being a showrunner exactly like being a mob boss? Certainly both professions attract a particular kind of volatile personality type. Addictive types with big personalities who express emotions by throwing things at walls. David Simon doesn't even pretend not to be crazy. Plenty of sitcoms are more fucked up than procedurals.

Showrunners like to create an enormous façade of power and respect around themselves, and then try to disguise their private intense vulnerability and terror of failure by slipping it inside monologues in the mouths of the characters that act as their personal avatars, so that if anyone ever calls them out on it they have the caveat that it's just fiction and imaginary creations and what the fuck are you talking about.

Matt Weiner coined "there's no geographical solution to an emotional problem," but Terence Winter coined "remember when is the lowest form of conversation." Both were said by Tony Soprano, eternal symbol of the human ego and all its indestructible trappings, in the last season of the first greatest cable television show of all time.

I felt like both quotes were meant to be Tony repeating something he obviously heard somewhere else (whether from Dr. Melfi or elswhere). Both of them were added instantly to the Bartlett's of my mind, and come up all the time, occasionally in This Recording's tags. What was it like in the Sopranos writers' room when David Chase wasn't talking? Are Winter and Weiner each other's Black Swans?

We define ourselves against the things that we are not, but also very much against all the things we almost are. That is the basis of close friendships but also rivalries, and all the things that fall into the gray area inbetween. There is no doubt in my mind that Winter and Weiner are watching each other's shows, in search of the specific masochistic pain that is seeing something you wish you had done being done well.

Weiner will deny it to his grave, because he is Pete Campbell. But I know he's been watching Boardwalk Empire (because he is Pete Campbell), and that its improvement curve made him seethe like a Ted Chaough despite/because he has had the best show in town for four years, and now he has a genuine challenger. The only other true critical hit cable drama since Mad Men started has been Breaking Bad, and that obviously served as a companion piece to reflect Mad Men and AMC's rise to glory.

Now HBO, who started this gangster shit, has rearisen like a Lucky Luciano/Stringer Bell/Tony Soprano swamp monster. Never forget that Matt Weiner pitched Mad Men to HBO first, and they turned his ass down. And now they are investing everything in Boardwalk Empire in an attempt to compensate for fucking up with Mad Men.

A few more Boardwalk thoughts before I go too much farther off the rails (no promises of a return trip back): I was weirdly excited to see Paz De La Huerta's Lucy again after raving about how the penultimate episode was the best of the season because it was Pazless and olde tyme orgyless. The writing for Omar is the least believable.

Michael Pitt is great, and so so so pretty. I can't wait until whenever he starts fucking Mrs. Schroeder and it turns into the R. Kelly video for Down Low, with Steve Buscemi as Ron Isley (YES). Michael Shannon instills the fear of god in everybody. Gretchen Mol really put it down in the Mary Harron movie about Bettie Page and convinced me that she can act. Everybody loves shattered face assassin guy (aka T-.00005).

Every microworld is equally incestuous and gossip-driven. Round up a group of people in [X] profession and it's a sure bet that they have all fucked or fought (or both!) whether it be porn stars, heart surgeons, or olympic athletes. And they're concerned somebody else is a better cardiovascular specialist, speed skater, or blowjob.

I made a grand statement recently that Boogie Nights is my favorite movie, and realized it was actually true the moment I said it out loud. My other favorite movie is Clueless, and the thing they share (besides Los Angeles based specificity, insanely good dialogue, and multiple perfect set pieces) is amazing ensemble casts. 

Ensemble casts para-socially replicate the experience of actual friend groups. Despite all the people you may know, the ones that actually personally matter to you could usually fit in an All My Children scrapbook. I have always felt the most comfortable in gender balanced environments, much more so than the times I have been the only girl in a boys' club or the times when I am one of many girls in an all girls' club.

Ensembles happen to also be a great way to trick men into identifying with female characters. It's possible to idolize and identify with somebody simultaneously. You want to fuck Bruce Springsteen but you also want to BE Bruce Springsteen. Nucky and Mrs. Schroeder both finally stepped down off the pedestals that attracted them to each other in the first place, and faced the reality that they might be into each other on a plane beyond the powers of physical attraction and symbolic representation.

Paul Thomas Anderson's black swan is the Coen Brothers. Darren Aronofosky's black swan is probably David Fincher. Christopher Nolan's is David O. Russell because of the time David O. Russell put him in a headlock for trying to poach Jude Law from I ♥ Huckabees over to The Prestige. Judd Apatow really needs one (HEY JUDD, SUP!)

Kanye's is Jay-Z but there's a whole weird There Will Be Blood father/son x mentoring/competition dynamic there. Beyoncé's is Rihanna (hence "Ring The Alarm"). How do you keep yourself from being Black Swancepted? You can't, and you shouldn't try to. You secretly want worthy competitors. Take comfort in the fact that your rivals and frenemies, much like spiders, are definitely at least as scared of you. 

Leonardo DiCaprio has gone on record a few times saying that Boogie Nights is the one movie he was offered that he still regrets not doing, even though Mark Wahlberg is the perfect Dirk Diggler, and Leo would have been a) nowhere near as good at playing somebody so cluelessly stupid as Wahlberg always is (he OWNS hotheaded dumb guy characters) and b) distractingly more famous enough than the rest of the cast so as to ruin the flawless balance of the multi-character based ensemble.

The takeaway is that Leonardo DiCaprio has spent some serious time wishing he were Mark Wahlberg. I can only imagine how much time Wahlberg has spent wishing he were DiCaprio. When will somebody make a Black Swan about dudes? A Fight Club where they actually end up fucking each other? I guess it'll have to be me.

Oh and hey that was a good season ender to Boardwalk Empire. I have a feeling the second season is going to be great and it'll also make for a spectacular next season of Mad Men, because Matt Weiner's going to work that much harder to win.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She tumbls here and twitters here. She's got the touch.

"Don't Let It Bring You Down" - Annie Lennox (mp3) 

"A Whiter Shade of Pale" - Annie Lennox (mp3)

"Put A Little Love In Your Heart" - Annie Lennox & Al Green (mp3)

In Which We Retell The Story Of Men Against Themselves

Empire State of Mind

by MOLLY LAMBERT

Humble brag time! For the past couple weeks I have been busy traipsing around the city of New York with the Gossip Girl Historical Reenactment Society, meeting the whole internet IRL and literally reenacting several Gossip Girl plot points from this season. Which ones in particular? You'll never know, XOXO.

You may remember that I called John Mayer and Taylor Swift before it even happened, or maybe after it actually happened but before the information got out, because I am a gossip batman who calls everything in advance, running around the downtown of the mind incepting people's sexual fantasies while they are floating down to earth. It is also entirely true that I have access to an alternate world internet that you get to through a special web portal (Platform 9¾) shaped like John Malkovich's brain.

I brought a printed out copy of this particular essay to read at Refresh Refresh Refresh, the event organized by Leon Neyfakh that brought me out to New York. I realized while looking for something to read that I have written Mad Men recaps almost exclusively for the past year, although they have served the double function of acting as my diary. If you play them backwards, you can find out what I did that weekend. 

I decided halfway through the reading that I would feel like a tool reading this essay out loud, because I am not actually as blowsy in real life as I am when I blog. I am also not generally ever as serious as this essay makes it seem like I am. I am 2% pretentious literary intellectual, and 98% total fucking goof.

Instead I mostly talked about Steely Dan and Taylor Swift, which if you know me you know is not at all unusual. I identify with Steely Dan and Taylor Swift because I am squinty and have curly hair and sometimes like music that other people hate (whether because too jazzy or too countrypolitan). How much Steely Dan talk is too much Steely Dan talk? Is there even such a thing?

Since I wrote this essay, men and women have continued to be much more alike than they generally think, and I continue to feel like fostering transparency about it is the best possible idea. The brain is still not a sex organ. Women are often bigger Don Drapers than men, and dudes in their heart of hearts sometimes feel like the Little Mermaid posted up on that fucking sea rock.

For every Taylor Swift there is a Miley Cyrus, and for every John Mayer there is a Jonathan Richman. Gender, like everything else in this world, is not an oppositional binary. And that is also how despite the minorly world-shattering identity crisis it has caused me I can finally accept that while Los Angeles is my birthplace and general home, New York is pretty fucking cool too. And I DO like saxophones.

Thanks to everyone who came out, hung out, and let me sleep on their couches. I'll be back, and probably sooner than later. Spread love, it's the Brooklyn way.

Men In Revolt

by MOLLY LAMBERT

This just in: according to the neurotic Jews and WASPs of the last decade's fiction, American men don't know how exactly they should be acting about sex. This is brand new information! Does masculinity focus on being too self-absorbed? Is femininity still too much about self-abnegation? Is literature self-absorbed? Did Warren Beatty tell Peter Biskind that Jane Fonda can unhinge her jaw like a python? Is Sol the cold sun?

Done are the days of Vice Magazine's tits and cocaine ethos, as are the nu-80s that were the 00s. Somebody tell John Mayer before he threatens to date rape us again. C'mon John, I'm a polymath too, there's no need to keep screaming out for approval constantly. You want to be respected as a comedian? Knock up Jennifer Aniston.

I kid, I kid. Everyone knows the problem with Jen An is that she's too submissive, and what John Mayer needs is a strong top. That's what Brad Pitt needed (also rimjobs). Maybe John Mayer should fuck Madonna? I like Madonna even more now that I know she taunted Warren Beatty at gay discos for not dancing with "hey pussy man!"

h8 u & ur aesthetic terry richardson

Meanwhile the not-a-girl, not-yet-a-woman demographic is flooded with New Moon and Taylor Swift. Transgressive as their popularity alone may be, both Twilight and Taylor ascribe to a world view that too many fourteen year girls are already inoculated with. An entirely boy-centric romatic one, where nothing is interesting unless it involves crushes and the surrounding drama. Even fifth wave feminist Megan Fox admits there's no such thing as Megan Fox. No wonder Mahnola is fucking pissed.

love ur raspberries t shirt chabon hope it's these raspberries

I read Michael Chabon's Manhood For Amateurs. The cover has a neat conceit, but it doesn't actually work, a metaphor for masculinity if ever there was one. There are essays about being a son and brother written in the kind of clean clipped front lawn style associated with Richard Ford and the dignity of restrained masculine emotions.

There are essays about fatherhood, married life, and courting his wife that seem overly tailored to the idea that his children might read them someday, which makes them read somewhat dishonestly. There are also a couple of essays about his first marriage and various youthful sexual indiscretions that are frank and detailed (which is not to say erotic) enough to give readers major secondhand embarrassment.

Maybe this is the worst kind of criticism to give these practitioners of the new earnest manhood, but god is it boring. Not that this validates the grand tradition of geniuses as tremendous bastards. One can be a tremendous bastard without being an author or a genius and vice versa. I'm not saying Chabon should go for a ride and never come back, but he should definitely at least stop over-supervising his children's playtime.

In another essay, Chabon admits his worst failing is an inability to write three dimensional female characters. Looking back, it's kinda true. While I commend his honesty, I never understand this, even though it's something I occasionally hear from men. I always say "write a male character, then give them a female name." 

As a girl you grow up seeing yourself in male characters, because (unfortunately) the cool ones are still mostly men. One of the reasons I picked Adventureland as my favorite movie of last year is that it had fully fleshed out and well written characters of both genders. Chabon recognizes that his tendency towards seeing women as mysterious is wrong, but finds it very hard to shake. There is no mystery to women. There is plenty of mystery to sex, but it's equally mysterious to everyone.

For my money, Wonder Boys is still Chabon's best book, and as much as he loves fantasy and genre, the farther away he gets from reality the less interested and invested I get in the characters. This is just a personal preference, I would rather read smaller scale character studies, but I also think that emotional observation is a core component of his talents as a writer. Besides, the genre fic thing is beyond played out. New novels by all writers starting now in 2010 are forbidden from involving the following things: comic books, detectives, baseball, magicians, the holocaust. 

let's talk about the giant stack of books Ayelet is resting her tiny legs on

Anyway if Katie Roiphe is underwhelmed and unoffended by the sexually neutered males of Brooklyn fiction, she should check out this vast cultural wasteland called the internet. The best writing about sex is currently being done by the people who are smart/stupid enough to date and write about it. Dating wasn't even really invented until the 1950s, it's no wonder nobody knows how to do it.

if I were a boooooooooooooooy, I'd b alec baldwin

If I were a man, which is something I've obviously spent a great deal of time thinking about, I would feel as insulted by the bulk of male culture as I am by most things steered to women. The men I know are nothing like the caricatures of "men" I see advertised to me everywhere. They are not oafs or jerks or lazy misogynists. They have more feelings than they know what to do with. They are real people, and they deserve to be insulted by what masculinity has come to represent.

The best advice I have ever heard about sex, romance, and masculinity is from porn star/P.T. Anderson muse John Holmes in Exhausted: John Holmes The Real Story.

"You don’t have to be overly macho. You don’t have to be over-complimentary. Gain her respect. And that’s treating her as an equal. Don’t bullshit her. Treat her as a human being. Treat her as you would treat yourself. As soon as you have that respect from her, she’ll treat you with the same respect that you show. Then you fuck the shit out of her." - John Curtis Holmes 

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is tricoastal like Julia Allison now. She tumbls and twitters.

"Heart and Soul (Martin Hannett mix)" - Joy Division (mp3)

"From Safety to Where (Martin Hannett mix)" - Joy Division (mp3)

"Passover (Martin Hannett mix)" - Joy Division (mp3)

In Which Once Jesus Leaves The Building He's Out Of Mexico For Good

Chapter Nothing: The Epilogue

by MOLLY LAMBERT

So I don't know about you, but I thought the Eastbound & Down finale was perfect. People seemed wary of this episode because the penultimate one was already so perfect it seemed mere folly to try topping it. But that's what Kenny Powers is all about; the dramatic gesture, the needlessly flamboyant exit, topping your own prior self-top.

I may have teared up slightly when we found out the baby was Kenny's. I didn't see it coming because I am very good at not jumping ahead in plots. I know everyone else figured it out the moment we saw April was pregnant, but I am kind of an idiot. Or maybe I just didn't want to think about it! Like Joan Holloway's baby being Roger's!

I don't understand anyone who didn't enjoy this season of Eastbound & Down. You will all miss Mexico secretly forever, just like Kenny. Comparisons to season 2 of The Wire are apt. Maybe it is my own personal affection for Mexico borne out of growing up in Southern California but I thought it was just as good as last season. I had no problem adjusting to the new setting and new set of characters. I miss them already. 

The best way around the sophomore slump is a curveball. And after your debut you're always a sophomore. Somebody will declare you over every time you come out. Like as much as I wish the new Kanye album were all Workout Plans I respect that his creative journey zigzags. Although seriously cool it with the guest appearances Ye. And stop trying so hard to impress the elite rich white art world. They're not worth it at all. 

Michael Peña's performance in this season of Eastbound & Down is my favorite thing of all time ever lately. His performance in Observe & Report is also a fucking tour de force, as is Danny McBride's cameo in that film. Several people whose opinions I really respect told me they hated Observe & Report, but they were ALL TOTALLY WRONG. One person who liked it a lot was Quentin Tarantino, another person is Molly Lambert.

jody hill and seth rogenI think Observe & Report is awesome. I think Seth Rogen is not totally right for the part, which seems tailor-made for Danny McBride, but that actually makes him way scarier because Rogen is so believable as a normal repressed guy who's kind of a wingnut. I think Anna Faris gives the best supporting performance in her already stellar career of supporting performances. I could write a sonnet about Jody Hill's direction.

I guess I love Jody Hill's direction so much because it's exactly what I aim for as a writer: sloppy enough that it looks like you're barely trying, but then the sloppiness is actually totally practiced and honed and purposeful. I like Jody Hill's Eastbound episodes a little more than David Gordon Green's precisely because they just fit my own aesthetic so deeply, which I kind of feel is Eastbound & Down's true aesthetic.

David Gordon Green is just more interested in traditional visual composition and nice shots and framing and other film school shit, and Jody Hill is decidedly not and always nails the tone perfectly. Tonal inconsistency is its own kind of tone. Some of the funniest things from the first season involved the complete personality shift in Principal Cutler. Fuck consistency. Fuck a direct route. Take the long way home. 

I am still thinking about the Mad Men finale weeks later. Mostly I am still thinking about Megan, but that is the effect she seems to have on people. I know I didn't spend this much time thinking about Mad Men after last year's finale, where Don marched into a shitty bachelor hotel on a downtown New York City set in the rain. I don't even know if it was really raining or if that is just my imagination embellishing things.

But this year's finale I have felt compelled to watch again since the moment I saw it, although for whatever sado-masochistic pleasure-delaying reason I haven't watched it yet. Maybe because it will remind me again that Mad Men is over (and now so is Eastbound) and I need to find other things to enjoy in the world in the seasonal interim and I know nothing I replace them with will compare to my two truest televisual loves.

At least there's still 30 Rock, for the time being. And in a just world Parks & Recreation will come back soon. I would like Liz Lemon's next boyfriend to be McNulty. Can you make that happen world, since you have been so decent about granting my innermost wishes lately? God already greenlit a third season of Eastbound & Down, so I'll catch you motherfuckers on the flip next year in Myrtle Beach. I'M FUCKING AUDI.

Molly Lambert is the managing editor of This Recording. She is a writer living in Los Angeles. She tumbls but not all that much, twitters all the fucking time, and is our nation's foremost producer of fuego.

Download a Kenny Powers mixtape today:

STRIKE 1: Spring Training

STRIKE 2: Regular Season

STRIKE 3: World Series

BALL 4: Extra Innings

STRIKE 5: MEXICAN BASEBALL