Category Archives: Mad Men

My Mad Men Obsession Continues…

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I just caught up to the rest of the world and I saw this Vanity Fair article on Mad Men.

Honestly, I’ve not read the article yet because I’m loving the photographs. I mean, seriously, just look at them:





Annie Liebovitz’s photos are stunning. Sort of a Norman Rockwell throwback quality to them. These images are a little genteel by comparison. However, if you can dig back into your memory, or perhaps you might have missed W Magazine’s photo essay with Brad and Angelina.




Both sets are extremely narrative. However, Steven Klein’s photos show a menace in marriage that lies beneath the surface. There’s a softer hint of tension with the images of Mad Men protagonists, Betty and Don. I love both sets. I think by default, my generation is still captured by the imagination of life in 1960s America.

I don’t know. I’ve been thinking about marriage a lot lately, particularly because I’m revising a short story of my own that has a character looking side-eyed at it.

Maybe it’s time to read more Yates.

A Beautiful Mine

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Mad Men Season 3 Premiere is a short but distant two and half weeks away.

AMC’s website has an awesome interactive program that for a fan like me, was irresistible.

The cultural history is layered. It’s doubtful you’d see someone like me, even in my Mad Men avatar, move so freely in that space without it signifying some aspect of the past social contract. But it’s nice to imagine that animated me could be patron in a bar, rather than server. It’s a period of history I’d rather pretend never existed, and skip to the good part, when we got civil rights and I get to experience integration and live in a ‘post racial’ society. However, Weiner’s drama is still compelling. The nuanced day to day interactions of race, gender and class in what we can now refer to as modern America, are so exquisitely rendered that I can’t help but watch the show as if it were a cultural document. For our post-modern, ‘post-racial’ society, it’s an interesting history to watch unfold week to week, a close examination of how far we’ve come in our own narratives, and a reminder of how far we still have to go.

As a writer, I find Don Draper, Betty Draper and Peggy Olson fascinating. I grew up poor, so suburban ennui, unhappy marriages, or inhibited women are fascinating for me. The women in all of these narratives seemed to be silently screaming. The tension was building last season with the women. Over drinks last weekend, three very liberated women (me and my friends) got to discuss the implications of psychotherapy from that era. We were trying to convince our friend that she needed to get caught up on the show; we were talking of the scene where Betty’s psychologist talks to Don about what Betty discussed in therapy earlier. A detail that we found alarming. It was such a common practice, no one questioned it, until 1970. A lawsuit created what we’ve come to accept culturally as doctor-client privilege.

It just makes me want to reread John Cheever and Richard Yates. Maybe Patricia Highsmith, too. It also makes me want to listen to RJD2 on repeat.

Go Mad Men Yo’self.

Happy Hour

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The grown ups are back.

Seriously. Didn’t you feel a little of that when people talk public, national policy in press conferences, speeches and inaugural addresses? Or maybe it’s me. Maybe I’ve grown up, and stopped looking to the previous generation as the older, wiser pool of people who have all the answers. Time has proven that they don’t. They’re still trying figure it out. Then there’s all this talk of responsibility, accountability, owning up to mistakes. What’s that? For a better part of a decade, we’ve had folks obfuscate facts that sent young men and women to war. That’s the least of the grievances, but to continue the list is going a little off topic.

Grown ups. There’s a maturity in the air. Old has become new again. And keeping with the time, if you’re on the east coast, you’ll notice a trend. The return of the cocktail hour. A refinement of alcoholic consumption.

It sort of explains why Mad Men hit such a cultural nerve with me. Set in recent, distant past, it also feels relevant. The cocktail culture is central to movement of the story. It’s gesture and setting. It makes me crave an Old Fashioned. I don’t even know what that is, but Don Draper drinks it. It looks intriguing.

Drinking had become a dirty word. Paved the way to excess and irresponsibility. So much so that the 43rd President, a reformed alcoholic, kept the White House dry during his term. But the new guy, he begs to differ. The cocktail hour has returned to the White House.

Grown ups. They talk, they drink, they share ideas. It’s a pretty American tradition. The ideals of this still very young nation were discussed and debated ad nauseam in company of spirits. Alcoholic spirits. The pubs and apothecaries distributed Paine’s Common Sense. That led to the insurrection of thought which ultimately led to the insurrection of deed.

Across the pond, it was in a bar in Paris that some random mathematician talked to Einstein and Picasso independent of each other that sent them both on directions that affected our physical world and perception of it. The big idea was fortuitous. We could use some of that now.

So cheers to the return of the cocktail hour and the grown ups who drink them, may it shift boundaries and manifest the big idea that can advance society and culture to its greatest good.