SPOILER ALERT: Mad Men Season 7 spoilers below.

One of the best novels I’ve ever read is almost at an end. This book sits on a list that includes Les Miserables, Infinite Jest, Catch-22, The Sopranos, and The Wire. Yeah, programs from the electric picture radio make the list.<fn>Wanna make something of it?</fn> If I were to include short story collections, I’d mention Twilight Zone and Outer Limits, Chekhov, and Raymond Carver.

Last night I watched the 3rd-to-last episode of Mad Men, and out of seven seasons, that image above is one of the most evocative and cool and resonant and hallucinatory and plain badass moments of the entire book. The bare bones of the abandoned SC&P office; the closest thing left we have to play the grand patriarch, albeit thinly represented; and Peg of our Heart casting it all to the wind, drunk and roller skating through the ruins as Roger plays Hi-Lili, Hi Lo on a cheesy organ – the whole sequence felt like that revelatory acid trip moment where you really, really see, man.

Roger, the Pale King, grants the princess in disguise a token of power from the One True Patriarch in the form of an antique Japanese porn print (Lear and Ran meeting nicely). Peggy recoils; The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife is not the kind of art a nice Catholic girl would hang in her office.

And then, the best piece of Roger-Peggy dialog in the whole damn book: 

“You know I need to make men feel at ease,” she says.

“Who the hell told you that?” Roger replies.

Who told her that? Joan, the dethroned Queen Bee, back in the very first episode – 7 years ago in our time, 10 years ago in Mad Men time. Peg takes this advice to heart, this blessing of the dwindling patriarch to go and be as badass as she can muster. And while I thought I’d never enjoy an image of Peg as much as the drunken roller skating, I was wrong. Here we see her here striding the halls of McCann like a colossus, brandishing her cigarette and Asian porno like a sword and shield.

This is a woman who has run out of fucks to give, and who has the internal strength to not have to give them anymore. The sequence plays beautifully, rendered in slow-mo as the white collar drones stumble over their feet trying to get out of her way.

Like the best books of my life, I want Mad Men to slow down as we approach the end. I can’t wait to find out how it ends<fn>Though given their history of landing the biggest blows 2-3 episodes before the season finales, we may already know. For example: Joan told Peg in the first episode years ago to defer to men; she now knows she doesn’t need to. I think it means we’ve seen the last of Peggy. She’s done here.</fn>, but I also can’t stand the idea that we won’t get to follow the characters beyond the final page.<fn>Not that I want anything to do with sequels, prequels, spin-offs, board games, Mad Men-labeled scotch or filterless cigs, &c.</fn>

And yeah, it’s a novel. It’s as textured and considered and layered as any great novel. People have derided it<fn>To my face!</fn> as nothing more than a soap opera, as though many of the greatest pieces of literature don’t also fit that description.<fn>Paging Emma Bovary and Countess Olenska.</fn>

There are more fully realized characters here than in most great novels, and more than a few secondary characters rendered with greater depth and sympathy than most books/movies/ tv shows can muster for their central players. The detail accorded fashion and cultural context are damned near encyclopedic, on par with Hugo’s description of the Paris sewers or DeLillo’s shot heard round the world baseball game chapter in Underworld.

One thing Mad Men delivered that’s really striking is the sense that, even when characters are not on-screen for weeks (or years!) at a time, when they re-appear we get the sense that they have actually been living the whole time they were away. This is an impressive achievement, and one that not many of our favorite novels can deliver.<fn>e.g., even the implacable Javert seems to have been sitting on a shelf whenever we are not with him on the page.</fn>

And maybe even more pertinent to Your Narrator: I know these people. I lived in the NY suburbs during this period. My Dad was a marketing exec, right at the edge of the Madison Avenue gaggle. I recognize the bosses, the underlings, the sycophants. I know the secretaries whose job description included remembering the boss’s kids’ birthdays; to recognize their voice on the phone; to ‘take care’ of us when we visited the skyscrapers at inconvenient moments. I wore the pajamas that kid wore, and I had some of the same toys, and the houses looked that way, and the moms and dads acted that way. The clothes and cars and hairstyles and music all changed the way we see it unfold in this book.

And then one day, they sit you down and tell you that mommy and daddy aren’t going to live together anymore, but don’t worry because nothing really is going to change and they both still love you very much and the earth opens up because you know it’s sugar-coated bullshit even if you’re too young to even know that word.

Don: “I’m not going, I’ll just be living elsewhere…”

Sally: “That’s GOING, you say things and you don’t mean them, you can’t just do that!

I can attest to the veracity of the dialogue, the setting, the emotion, the whole package. No cluster of words on a page has ever devastated me more than watching this scene of this “soap opera” on the idiot box. I don’t remember any printed words causing me to explode into broken-hearted sobbing like this one.<fn>The death of Gavroche Thénardier on the barricades caused me to burst into tears. But no heart-tearing sobs.</fn> (For that matter, I rarely laugh out loud while reading, but often do so while watching tv or movies.<fn>That Your Narrator may be an unwashed Philistine is a question disposed of quickly. He most certainly washes.</fn>)

So does the electric picture radio matter? Since I casually name-dropped Emma earlier, let’s hear from her on the delights of reading:

“You forget everything. The hours slip by. You travel in your chair through centuries you seem to see before you, your thoughts are caught up in the story, dallying with the details or following the course of the plot, you enter into characters, so that it seems as if it were your own heart beating beneath their costumes.”

Television at its best delivers the same experience. Sure, it serves up some weak sauce, but we don’t let Bulwer-Lytton or 50 Shades of Grisham keep us from the pleasures of [insert your favorites here]. The long-form format – especially on cable – enables stories that can contain Tony Soprano and Omar and Al Swearingen and Frank Pembleton, with characters and storylines that put to rest any argument that television cannot be as profound and literary as books.

It’s a fair bet that I’ll write more about Mad Men as time goes by. I’m going to take a break for a while and then re-read it, just like my other favorite novels.

I come here not to bury shame, but to praise it. Sort of.

There has been a surge in the media about the damaging impact of shame on our individual psyches. In general, these are pretty much outstanding discussions about how we internalize shame and allow it to debilitate our lives in ways subtle and not-so. In particular, I recommend this talk by Dr Brene Brown:

Dr Brown’s talk, and her fine book Daring Greatly, have been very useful in my recent evolution into whatever it is that I am about to be becoming. I’m not a big fan of the self-help genre, but I am glad I read this one. She’s funny and she has some humane advice for people who are susceptible to shame.<fn>Most of us, really. Just not the ones who should be. See below.</fn>

Right along these lines we’ve seen a recent TedTalk from Monica Lewinsky, and while it is not as essential as Brown’s talk, it is a pretty gutsy appearance from a woman who was put into the stocks in the public square on a scale that is still hard to understand.<fn>That she was not crushed to dust by that horrific ordeal is really hard to believe. Respect!</fn> In So You‘ve Been Publicly Shamed, writer Jon Ronson relates episode after episode of gang-shaming to illustrate the ways public shaming via social- and traditional-media has become a slithering beast that titillates and thrills the pitchforked mob as it consumes and spirits away everything in its path.

And I am in pretty solid agreement with these folks. Shame and shaming are powerful weapons, especially when turned on the basically powerless – children and teens, especially, but human beings generally. And as Lewinsky notes, it has devolved into a sort of blood sport that treats its targets as disposable widgets that exist outside of a human frame. It is random, cruel, and serves no real purpose, unless one considers the development of smug superiority a purpose.

But I have to admit to longing for a time when shame was a useful check on more egregious human behaviors. Now surely, I do not accept that a young man exploring his sexuality in the privacy of his dorm room is a worthy target, any more than is the careless Tweeter who is so-to-say exhibiting his/her ass through imbecilic tweets deserving ruination for what amounts to minor stupidity. Nor does a child deserve to be humiliated to ensure a change in behavior, an all too prevalent mode of adulting, one that is probably just as damaging as being quick with the belt.<fn>My first day of school in a new town, we arrived 3 days after classes began. One teacher, when I handed her my forms, snarled, “Class started 3 days ago and you’re late. Aren’t you ashamed?” I literally could not look at that beast for the entire school year. You bet I was ashamed, but I had no idea why. The shame should have belonged to her.</fn>

So true, a lot of the instances of shaming and humiliation amount to nothing better than blood sport, a distillation of the paparazzi-hounding that celebrities must endure. And it is a favorite tool of deflection among those who feel shame but wish it to belong to someone else.<fn>Let us consider the careers of the modern-day Savonarolas like Swaggart and Haggard and Westwood Baptist.</fn> Surely, we would be better off as a society if we could all just leave each other the fuck alone, or at least mind our own damned business. Most of what we are induced to pay attention to has absolutely nothing to do with us. Look away, fercryinoutloud.

But as rampant as this kind of shaming has become, we have lost shaming as a tool in the realm where it could really make a difference.

Some years back, a pal and I were philosophizing about the havoc St Ronaldus Maximus had wreaked upon our land. At one point, we came upon this damning formulation:

Reagan erased shame from our public vocabulary.

Rick Perlstein’s book The Invisible Bridge: The Fall of Nixon and the Rise of Reagan presented this idea in a different form:

…all that turbulence in the 1960s and 70s had given the nation a chance to finally reflect critically on its power, to shed its arrogance, to become a more humble and better citizen of the world – to grow up – but Reagn’s rise nipped that imperative in the bud…Then along came Ronald Reagan, encouraging citizens to think like children…”

This was amply demonstrated in the reaction to the movie Wall Street; when Gordon Gekko declares that “Greed is good!”, too many viewers mistook his character as the hero of the morality play, with Bud Fox seen as the schmuko loser for having some shred of human decency.<fn>A similar mis-reading came with the more recent Wolf of Wall Street, wherein the lunatic behavior of the main characters was received as some kind of model for emulation.</fn> Up until the Reagan raj, greed and excessive consumption were generally agreed to be shameful, poor behavior. No more: Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous should have set the tumbrels rolling and the pitchforks aloft. Its impact was the opposite – the repugnant people wallowing in their tacky excess became heroes. Did they deserve shaming for being rich? Hell no. But their tasteless and thoughtless exhibitionism certainly earned them the kind of revulsion one might feel for public masturbators or pet-torturers. Instead, what we saw was the elimination of shame as a response to shame-worthy behavior. Even those rapacious bastards Rockefeller, Carnegie, &c. had the wit to recognize that they had to offer philanthropic gestures to counterbalance their shameful behavior.

Why, asks the frustrated reader, is this worthy of 1000+ words at this particular moment in time? What spurs this unhinged diatribe?

Two words: Judith Fucking Miller.<fn>One of those words is a bonus.</fn>

Of late, this war cheerleader and proven fabricator has been making the rounds to promote her book, and is being treated on the electric picture radio machine as a reputable person who deserves respect. Yet she offers no apology for her part in the fraudulent sale of a war that claimed over 100,000 lives.

She has no shame. She should. She should wear sack-cloth and crawl on her knees cleaning bedpans at Walter Reed until her last breath. Instead, she is collecting checks.

Is Bill Kristol (to name yet another keyboard kommando) ashamed of being absolutely wrong on every major question while cheerleading other people’s children to war? This mendacious hack isn’t even worthy to clean the bedpans.

Are any of the architects of war ashamed? Are the Masters of the Universe, those geniuses of financial innovation who drove the economy into a ditch, ashamed?

Does Henry Kissinger feel shame?

Rumsfeld? Cheney?

Not so much. No matter how wrong or damaging these people have been, they never seem to have to pay for their track record. I mean, Jesus H Christ bearing false witness, what does it take for someone like that to be shunned, to be told firmly to please shut up and go away? I’m not asking for ritual seppaku – though I would not be opposed – but some sense of decency and remorse would be a good start.

Is the inability to feel shame a perfect definition of sociopathy?

OK, wise guy pointy headed liberal writer – who decides whether something or someone is shame-worthy?

Ah, the judgement call. And aye, there’s the rub. And it may be that any usefulness that shame once had is now gone, frittered away on our reflexive addiction to piling on whenever a Kardashian or a sportscaster or an athlete acts the public (or semi-private) tool. And our cultural tendency to focus on the trivial<fn>e.g., Jameis Winston’s asinine public performance of “fuck her right in the pussy”, which remains the only act that has earned him any disciplinary action</fn> renders shame that much less useful in cases where it is called for. Because if the tool we use to shame Kelly Clarkson for having the gall-durned nerve to appear in public before losing her baby weight is also the best we can do when a monster like John Bolton<fn>Yeah, this miserable fuckwit. </fn> can’t shut his goddam piehole no matter how many times he’s proved wrong, well, I’m not sure that opprobrium has any heft anymore.

I’ll give this much to Nixon – I believe he knew that his misdeeds were shameful, and knew it so well that it drove him to even more misdeeds to hide the first ones. Reagan and his gang were just the opposite: they replied with a wink and a nod, letting us all know that shame was no longer a reasonable response. You take what you want, do what you want, and never, never apologize.

I mean, really…some people just have no shame.

This wretched woman has been subject to a flood of online shaming. Does she deserve it? I say absolutely. Is it making any difference? Probably not. She’ll be out gunning down more creatures soon, no doubt, and Ricky Gervais is racking up the hit counts.

Still, I defend the potential utility of shame. Properly recognized, it should serve us all as a guide in our personal decisions and behavior. I agree<fn>Hell, I know too well</fn> that shame can become a distorting force that can cripple a person. But still, the old adage of ‘never do anything you wouldn’t want your Mother to see you do’ certainly has shame at its core. But that’s not necessarily so wrong.<fn>If you grew up under a Mommie Dearest scenario, my apologies. But there must be someone, living or dead, whose admiration you value. Let that person/entity be your invisible observer.</fn>

Maybe shame is just for the little people now? Or maybe it’s just another form of entertainment, the precursor to and inevitable outgrowth of reality teevee. If that’s it, we’re all the lesser for it.

PS – This is a great book that explores the notion of shame far better than I do, but in a different cultural context.

Some of My Most Favorite Things are the moving picture shows. This week, I got to watch North by Northwest again for the eleventieth time.

The movie is terrific in every way, really one of Hitchcock’s best. The story framework – a case of mistaken identity that draws the Cary Grant character, Roger Thornhill, into a spy vs. spy intrigue – is a classic ‘wrong man’ plot. It’s a common plot device<fn>Hellloooo Lebowski</fn>, and one that is at the core of so many of his great movies.

The dialogue has the kind of snap and charm that makes me want to listen to Cole Porter and drink a dry martini. Or a Gibson.<fn>Grant’s cocktail of choice in the film, basically a martini with a cocktail onion instead of the olive.</fn> Eva Marie Saint, playing Eve Kendall, is a classic Hollywood dame, a model of pluck and barely suppressed sexuality, a character that served as a template for dozens of femme fatales from the classic Bond girls (think Pussy Galore and Tiffany Case) to Romancing the Stone‘s Joan Wilder.<fn>Who actually combines the dame persona with the hapless mistaken identity victim in one character.</fn> She is not quite as overt as some of the pre-Code dames, but in some ways that may actually turn up the heat. Film nerd fact: During filming, Eve tells Roger that, “I never make love on an empty stomach.” The censors flipped and made them overdub a change: “I never discuss love on an empty stomach.” The change makes Grant’s double-take response a little less effective.

Many of the movie’s structural elements – like the preposterous chase in a ridiculous setting (e.g., scampering across the face of Mt. Rushmore or the crop duster chasing Grant across the corn field) have left their stamp on a flood of later productions like the Bond movies, the Die Hard and Lethal Weapon franchises, Bullitt, French Connection, even in a Dr Who episode.<fn>Somebody could write a cool film studies dissertation on this.</fn>

But forget all that. The thing that rang my bells with this viewing was the design sense of the movie. I grew up in the 70s and 80s, and there really has been no more dismal fashion era than that. Sure, we get a little campy buzz off of polyester bell bottoms in eye-popping colors, but nobody wants to dress like that.<fn>The less said about the teased-hair, shoulder-padded 80s the better.</fn> But that suit that Grant wears pretty much the entire movie? Good god, people…that is a piece of clothing!

In this scene, Thornhill believes Eve to be one of the bad guys.<fn>Which she both is and isn’t.</fn> He’s in gray, she’s in red: colors in opposition.

Here, we find Roger and Eve in cahoots. Same suit for Roger, but now Eve is dressed in a dress from the same color family: colors in concert.<fn>All credit to Tom and Lorenzo for getting me to think like this in the first place. My default mode had been “Hey, cool suit!”, if I even noticed it at all.</fn>

But the visual element that really tickles My Favorite World spot, even more than the fashion, are the sets. Much of the movie was filmed on location, as with this early scene in NY’s Plaza Hotel.

Now that, people, is what a hotel lobby should look like.

And this scene, in one of my favorite places.

Also, too…Hitchcock knew how to paint a picture. Check out this overhead shot of Grant fleeing the UN Building.

But the killer is the Vandamm House, a complete fabrication designed to look like a Frank Lloyd Wright-ish construction at the top of Mt. Rushmore.<fn>In fact, the area at the top of Rushmore is extremely restricted. Almost nobody gets to go up there, and there are definitely no cantilevered houses dangling over GW’s ear.</fn>

The exterior shots are matte paintings, and the interiors are all built on a soundstage.

Another cool film nerd tidbit…look again at this still from the cafeteria.

Just to the right of Eve, there is a child extra who has his fingers in his ears. From rehearsals, he knew that 1) there was a gunshot coming and 2) that it was loud. So he pre-emptively plugged his ears before the gunshot. Nobody noticed at the time, but apparently Hitchcock was pretty miffed about it when they noticed it later on.

More substantively, Favorite World-wise: this is the first film appearance by Martin Landau. He played Leonard, Vandamm’s (the awesome James Mason) assistant thug.

Hitchcock had asked Landau to play Leonard as “gay” to help explain his animosity and mistrust for Eve. I have to admit that I did not pick up on this the first few times I watched, probably because Landau was so understated.<fn>And partly because I am a little oblivious.</fn> This was considered pretty controversial at the time, and many of Landau’s friends urged him to refuse.

The great thing about the portrayal is how he avoided cliche. The menace of Leonard is front and center; hints to his sexuality are almost entirely background, although at one point he ad-libbed the line, “Call it my woman’s intuition, if you will.” Anyway, Landau went on to an impressive career, frequently working alongside his wife, Barbara Bain. His turn as Andro in The Outer Limits – The Man Who Was Never Born is one of my all-time favorite episodes on the electric picture radio box.

So let’s review:

• Gripping plot
• Great dialog
• Eye popping fashion
• Gorgeous sets and scenery
• Film nerdery goldmine
• Amazing cast
• Hitchcock!
• Cary Fucking Grant!

Admit it. Cary Grant is the coolest guy ever. As he once remarked:  “Everyone wants to be Cary Grant—even I want to be Cary Grant.” Well, I can’t be Cary Grant<fn>I’m barely even Archie Leach on my best day. Probably more like Archie Rice.</fn>, but I can pretend.

My Favorite World.

From fashion to futbol to absurdist political horror stories to fabulist fiction to the happiness to be found in an unspotted foot…it’s My Favorite World.

Fashion Statement(?)

Guys, there’s something about putting on a blazer. Amirite? You stand a little straighter, you carry a little more air. It’s not that it’s hard to slouch or slump with a blazer on, it’s just that it’s easier not to. I hold this truth to be self-evident: that all men being created equal, a blazer will elevate one over the other. It’s one of article of clothing guaranteed to confer gravitas. Or so I thought.

Imagine my surprise when I discovered Michael Davies and Roger Bennett – otherwise known as Men in Blazers –  while I was lying ill on the sofa. I was watching a Detroit- Boston NHL game<fn>Original 6 represent!</fn>, and when it was over the remote was too far away to flip over to Wolf Blitzer’s beard ejaculating speculation about another airline tragedy. So.

Here comes Michael and Rog, a couple of balding Brits in tragically ill fitting blazers, holding forth from what looks a janitorial supply closet and offering up, well, best let them tell:

We discuss football. And wear blazers. Usually at the same time. Men in Blazers is driven by the belief that Soccer is America’s Sport of the Future. As it has been since 1972.

And just that fast, I was laughing so hard I nearly rolled off the couch.

On Chile’s Alexis Sanchez, who likes to pull his jersey off after a goal:

His back is made out of Braille, and you know what it says if you run your fingers across it? It says…..sexy!

And how does this 5’4 runt score leap over the 6″1 goalie to score?

“His Drakkar Noir is like a trail of chloroform.”

Later, talking about – and showing hilarious examples of – the alarming decline of Mario Balotelli’s once prodigious skills:

His transformation from being an elite footballer to an avant garde slapstick comedian…”

…which apparently was caused in some wise by too much time cavorting in hot tub advertisements with super models…

He’s clearly suffering some shrinkage from that hot tub, Rog.

One of them later describe the owner of Man U (I think) as looking like a Muppet with too much starch.

I know next to nothing about British Premier League Football,<fn>FWIW, I like women’s soccer better than the men’s game – much less whining and flopping. Though I admit that saying that around “real soccer fans” makes me feel like I’m defending the layup/set shot laden WNBA.</fn>but if these guys are part of the broadcast squad, I’ll be watching more than I had ever imagined. Even though my philosophy of the Supremacy of the Blazer has been shattered evermore. Here’s a nice dose to give you an idea. Think Skip Carey and Pete van Wieren with posh British accents.

http://www.nbcsports.com/show/men-blazers?guid=nbc_bpl_mib_top10characters_141229

Also, too, they have a posh posh Latin motto:

viri recte vestiti

Men who are clothed. They qualify, but only just.

Posh. MFW.

The Never Ending Reading Challenge

I’ve finally finished Perlstein’s The Invisible Bridge, a surrealist drama about the so-called rise of the ever comical penis in a suit, Ronald Reagan. Fortunately, the story has a happy ending, where Reagan is denied his shot at the 1976 Republican presidential nomination at the last minute. The last line is a quote from one of the Wise Men Pundits of Washington, who notes that at age 65, Reagan is far too old to consider another run for the Presidency.

What a relief that was! The whole book long I feared that nothing could stop the Sainted Ronaldus Maximus. Can you imagine how catastrophic a Reagan presidency would have been for this country? We dodged a bullet there, for sure ya betcha.

Now after that chilling ride of absurdist horror, I turn my attention to something more down to earth and believable: Don Quixote. But not until I finish up the Italo Calvino collection of CosmiComics. Calvino introduces protagonists who have existed and evolved since the begining of time, with generally unpronounceable names (Qfwfq is the main “guy”), and who are not human – in fact, what they are beyond pure existence or unicellular being is usually uncertain<fn>Though Qfwfq’s romantic interest is called Priscilla, and it appears she evolves into a camel over the eons.</fn> – but who embody more humanity and insight into the human condition than most so-called flesh and blood co-called characters in 98.43% of so-called fiction. That a work of such playful, meta style evokes such heartbreak and yearning is testimony to a writing style that is learned, witty, tender, and above all, light. I cannot recommend this one more highly.

So many books. So little time.

Happy Feet

Main reason this is My Favorite World? This:

That’s my ankle/foot almost exactly six months ago. The rest of my pitiful corpus looked pretty much the same. Somehow I’ve made it to the end of 2014, and there were a couple of times I wasn’t so confident I’d get here. So, yeah pretty much good that I didn’t die.<fn>YMMV</fn>

My New Year’s Resolution for 2015 is simple and concise: stay the fk out of the hospital. I wish the same for all of you. Thanks for sharing My. Favorite. World.