Monday, May 18, 2015

soundtrack for remarks on the Mad Men finale

Robert Longo, Untitled, 1981 from Men in Cities, More here.




Father John Misty - Fear Fun
The War on Drugs - Lost in the Dream

Grateful Dead - Workingman's Dead
  • You know you wanted him to jump off that cliff, not create a singalong on the hillside.
  • But then his idea of "happiness" is like John Cage's concept of "silence" - a noisy thing constructed out of passively and openly consuming the noise/contentment of others and reframing it as your own.
  • It made me mad last night, in both viewings. I watched this whole thing so he could create that Coke ad?
  • But it is an acceptance of how the world works? Joan needs a second name on the marquis to make it hers, so she adds her own. That world's most desirable woman finds herself the most meaningful and fruitful partner. She becomes her own binary star around which she elliptically orbits. Not a boobs analogy, by the way.
  • Did Meghan get killed by the Manson family? She became so unimportant once that check was slid across the table that I had to consult Wikipedia to see if she was alive. Did she only exist to birth her mother into this world? Is Roger bagging the mom the last triumph of the Greatest Generation? Is this really Benjamin Buttons?

The National - Alligator
Slowdive - Souvlaki
Faust - Faust IV
  • The story goes that Bill Backer (similarly alliterative/descriptive kind of name as Don Draper) from the real McCann-Erickson had the Coke ad epiphany sitting in Shannon airport, watching a family lose it over flight delays until someone went and bought Cokes for everyone. He wrote "I want to buy the world a Coke" on a napkin and brought that back to the agency.
  • I put a theory out there that Don Draper is Scarlett O'Hara - down to the wearing of drapes and making people not give a damn. I was going to say also: relying on the kindness of strangers, but that was Streetcar. If he'd eaten a turnip at the ashram, I'd have felt validated in having such a theory and would have gone directly to the Internet with it in proud hand.
  • The race car on the salt flats? He already made a land speed record chasing the collapse of his myth from the tip of the Empire State Building, viewed in that sales meeting, to lotus sitting at the coast.
  • I wanted Don to become King Kong with the Empire State Building bit. Or Andy Warhol
  • Did Andy Warhol ever show up in the show at some point? I would have loved to see Peggy at a Factory party.

The Mountain Goats, Tallahassee
Fucked Up, David Comes to Life
Jimmy Cliff, The Harder the Come

  • What is Don and Betty's other kid's name? He didn't even get scandalized, poor guy.
  • I was going to say something profound about the importance of dish-washing in Mad Men but realized I was think about the dish-washing scenes in Olive Ketteridge, so never mind.
  • I still do and will forever think about that time Don came back home late to Connecticut and all Betty had for his dinner was chicken salad and crackers and how good that plate of chicken salad and crackers looked. I want some chicken salad right now.
  • Who got Lane's office after he died? Because, ew... And now somebody else will get that office without knowing, Remember how "this is home" they were being? Or was that even the same building? And does it matter when the trace of your death is as faint as the trace of your life?
  • As people are saying Mad Men/ SCDP/advertising/the '60s/'70s is purgatory, are they all dead on arrival, only to be born in how they leave? Are the virtuous pagans in the penthouse tier of hell, gazing over the rim, waiting for a harrowing? Is McCann-Erickson an uprising in Hell? The devil just doing business? A tide in which their trickle of darkness becomes manifest? Is Pete Campbell the Orpheus that successfully got his wife out of the shadows forever? I kinda knew Trudy was going to win out in the end.
Playlist in Spotify