I heard this no less than twice on the radio today on my way to work. It's a 40 minute ride.

I can't say I was a big Dave Brubeck fan, but Take Five always makes me think of orange sofas, kidney-shaped coffee tables with drink rings on them, shift dresses, beehive hairstyles, everyone smoking cigarettes, green wall-to-wall carpet, and other assorted midcentury Mad Meniana.

R.I.P. Dave Brubeck, who had a good long run.

Labels: jazz, Mad Men, music

I don't know what other parents were like in the 1960's, but for all that I always felt that my parents had really wanted to be beatniks but were born just a few years too early, my mother, at least, thought the Beatles were practically a sign of the apocalypse. So for me, Don Draper getting his daughter Sally tickets to see the Beatles at Shea Stadium in Season 4 just didn't quite ring true. There's just no way Don is that cool.

What I'm hearing now is that the Mad Men time jump will be to 1966, which means that Sally Draper will be 11 or 12 (I was 11) and if she's anything like I was (and God, I hope for the character's sake that she's not), she'll be fascinated by the new face of British Invasion fashion:



Music and television will become even more important for Sally this season. She'll come home from school and watch Where the Action Is, filmed in Southern California, where she'll see all the popular recording acts of the day, and for some strange reason, these guys:



She'll have a crush on Mark Lindsay, lead singer of the show's house band Paul Revere and the Raiders, who dressed up in the kind of costumes you now see on teabaggers at Joe the Plumber rallies.

In the evening she'll watch Hullabaloo:



...and Shindig!, where even white kids from the suburbs caught the beat of Donald "Duck" Dunn's (Yes, THAT Donald "Duck" Dunn of Blues Brothers fame) bass line in Green Onions --a tune sadly now used to sell Depends, which given what Sally's dad does for a living is kind of funny:



And of COURSE she'll also watch this obscure little program:



Roger Sterling may have given Lucky Strike's Lee Garner Jr. a Polaroid Land camera in happier days, but by 1966, Don could buy Sally a Polaroid Swinger for a mere $19.95 (Ali McGraw not included):



And that's just what she'll see on the television networks that are all you got in 1966....if she's lucky. Because somehow I think that Mom Betty and stepdad Henry, who's even older and less cool, are not going to like all this one little bit.

Labels: Mad Men

No one knows for certain in what year season 5 of Mad Men will be set, but I'm speculating it's going to be 1967, because it seems that the New York Times may have spoiled it today:

“Mad Men” returns to AMC for a fifth season on Sunday, and times have changed — again. African-Americans are now picketing on the street, chanting for fair employment and equal opportunity. It’s a tinderbox summer of riots and protests, and the reception from some who are working on Madison Avenue is less than supportive. Advertising may be a cool profession that draws talented, sophisticated people, but even some of them can be bigots.

The Watts riots were in 1965, but since Matthew Weiner tends to time-jump by about two years at a time, and since Kiernan Shipka, who plays Don Draper's daughter Sally (in whom I take a particular interest since Sally is approximately my age) is now twelve and usually plays a year or so older, I'm betting on the summer or fall of 1967 -- when riots took place in Detroit and Newark, NJ. place.

This newsreel, clearly scripted from the "Respect Police Authoritah" "ZOMG...Negroes!!" (sic) point of view, shows what the riots looked like for people like Don Draper:



In 1967 the U.S. had two worlds colliding in terms of race. At the same time as American cities were exploding from police brutality and institutionalized poverty, white Americans were inviting the first interracial buddy team into their living rooms as Robert Culp and Bill Cosby (who won three consecutive Emmys for his performance) starred in I Spy. People today know Cosby as Cliff Huxtable, the sweater-wearing dad from his eponymously-named show from the 1980s, but in I Spy, Cosby was kind of badass:



Now today Cosby would get the girl too, but this was still pretty groundbreaking stuff in 1967. A year later, Diahnn Carroll would play a black nurse with an impossibly angelic child, and then in 1971 Norman Lear would create All in the Family and in 1972, set the entire notion of the Black Person Who Didn't Make White People Uncomfortable on its ear by introducing proto-teabagger Archie Bunker to Sammy Davis Jr...



...which laid the groundwork for the urban Good Times:



But all that is in the future as we head into Season 5. I can't wait to see how Roger Sterling manages to keep his foot in his mouth in his dealings with race and how Don Draper deals with the emerging recognition that black peple buy products too.

Labels: Mad Men, pop culture

I'd never been able to much get into Mad Men, but this season I started watching and found myself getting sucked into it. Part of it is that we're in familiar territory this season, since I was about the same age in 1964-65, when the season takes place, as Don's daughter Sally. But I think much of it is that this season is more about the women than about a bunch of Guys Behaving Badly.

Part of what's fascinating this season is watching the interplay between the women and the men, as the early glimmerings of change start to take hold. Joan, the whispery-voiced somewhat aging sexpot who's the office manager, seems stuck in the previous decade, while Peggy, the secretary-turned-copywriter, sees a glimpse of a new way of being at a boho party, starts to find her own voice and begins to assert herself. I'm not sure that Peggy actually existed in 1965; her rise seems somewhat unlikely until a couple of decades later. But in this week's episode, when Peggy fires a freelance copywriter whose filthy drawing about Joan truly IS beyond the pale, Girl Solidarity backfires right in Peggy's face:

Peggy and Joan are in their own ways trying to find a way in a world that's still very much controlled by men and the rules (or lack of same) that men make.

The feminism for which Joan and Peggy are just a few years too early gave a lot of lop service to being about toughness. It had to. Look at the world that women who were trying to fight their way out of being baby-making appendages lived in. It's no wonder that the Rogers and the Dons and the Joeys of the world laughed at the women who dared to challenge the established order and called them ugly...and they still do.

The rise of Victim Feminists like Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell is perhaps a natural consequence of the fatal mistake that the 1960's feminists made -- of not realizing that "the system" that they felt enslaved them in the 1950's also enslaved men. As massive jerks as Don Draper and Roger Sterling and Henry Francis are on Mad Men, it's hard to argue that they're kings of the world. Roger and Henry have young pretty trophy wives, but they're still unhappy. Roger and Don are clearly alcoholics (though Don, being the show's protagonist, is starting to show signs of getting his shit together). These guys, like Leonardo DiCaprio's character in Revolutionary Road, have lives of mind-numbing sameness that were only marginally better than the stifling lives of 1950's housewives in the suburbs. EVERYONE was oppressed by the budding culture of consumerism that was given life after World War II. But the minute early feminism claimed the mantle of oppression, it lost any semblance to an empowerment movement and paved the way for Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell. That's why I was so disturbed last night to hear Howard Fineman opine that part of the reason for O'Donnell's victory last night was that Mike Castle, known in Delaware as a Really Nice Guy, hammered at O'Donnell too hard and that made women voters upset.

Of course Joan and Peggy don't know about feminism yet, but in the exchange in the elevator, Joan seems to be aware that in firing Joey, Peggy has succumbed to this kind of victimology. I don't know if pornographic drawings of the office manager were a commonplace pastime among the creative department in 1960's ad agencies, but I do know that when I was a secretary in an ad agency as late as 1980, I arrived every morning to find one of the bosses standing by the coffeemaker, mug in hand, waiting for me to make the coffee, and then expecting me to break into meetings any time his girlfriend was on the phone for him (but not if it was his wife). Peggy may think she's sending a message that this sort of behavior will no longer be tolerated as of today, but I suspect that the remaining assholes in SCDP's creative department are going to be testing their limits, asserting their dominance over Joan (who rightly knows that they see her as a "meaningless secretary" and treating Peggy like a "humorless bitch."

Fast-forward forty years and you have Sarah Palin and Christine O'Donnell, two mind-bogglingly stupid and unqualified women, wrapping themselves in the mantle of poor, put-upon fragile flowers being picked on by mean old men like Mike Castle and others who dare mention the obvious -- that if one is to participate in government, one is at least supposed to be coherent and not sound like the early boot on Survivor, kicked off for being useless in challenges AND around camp. Because for all that Sarah Palin talks about Mama Grizzlies, what stares us in the face is the smoking ruin of feminism -- and it looks a lot like corseted Victorians fanning themselves on fainting couches.

Sarah Palin came into the public eye with her guns and her talk about field dressing a moose and shooting wolves out of a helicopter and her aura of dominatrix. But it quickly became about the imagery of the soccer mom tied to her minivan, the Downs Syndrome mom, the poor widdew goilie being bullied by the "lamestream media." Any scrutiny of Sarah Palin was just mean old media men being mean to a girl. Palin appropriated the mantle of feminism as her own, but she's twisted it into a gargoyle of victimology. Palin feminism isn't about toughing it out in a man's world, and it isn't even about changing that man's world. It's about playing the victim card every time someone dares ask you to play on the same field as the guys. Christine O'Donnell has clearly studied her Sarah Palin very carefully. She looks like Palin (only without the psychopathic eyes), she dresses like Palin, and she won just like Palin -- by playing to victimhood. This is a woman who thinks masturbation is adultery, who checks the bushes outside her house for her political enemies, hasn't held a real job in years, pays her living expenses off her campaign donations, rails against people sucking at the government teat, but is running to collect a taxpayer-funded paycheck herself.

This is what feminism has come to? Last night in her victory speech, O'Donnell threw down the gauntlet when she talked about ordinary people being able to run for office without fear of "character assassination." This is a worthy goal regardless of party, but somehow I get the feeling that this goal is not going to apply to her Democratic opponent, who is a man and is no doubt already wondering how he's going to run against her when any criticism, no matter how minor, is going to be be met with cries of "character assassination." Because in the feminism of conservatism, women are just little fragile flowers, wilting under the slightest breeze.

Labels: faux feminism, Mad Men, pop culture, Sarah Palin, Teabaggers, television, wingnuttia