The Prodigal Returns

Forgive me readers, for I have sinned.

The primary directive for bloggers who wish to be well attended: Keep your content fresh. Post frequently so that your legions of followers know they will always find something new every time they check your page.

In this, I have failed. Mea maxim culpa.

But I’m back, better than ever, so fatten up a calf for me and gather round to hear my plans.

First off, you may ask yourself: How can I (the reader) trust this bounder (your inconsistent correspondent) to keep up his end of the bargain, to toil diligently so that I (the reader) might enjoy high quality distractment at my (the reader’s) beck and call. Because instant gratification is the coin of the realm, evidently.

Hey, just trust me, okay? I swear on my grandchildren…

Besides, there is so much more that I want to write about that nobody wants to pay me to write about that I might as well just start typing and putting it up here for free.

I’m working on a site re-design, because four years is plenty for the same look. But that’s just cosmetics. Expect a great deal more of the music/lit/tv/film content, starting with the annual wall-to-wall cogitations about the2019 Big Ears Festival. The scope of this year’s festival is making me dizzy. It is not just the challenge of navigating performance schedulesSaturday afternoon’s lineup in particular is a fantod-inducing embarrassment of riches, thanks very much. that trigger my most extreme option anxiety. Even the (allegedly) simple task of sorting and categorizing the proceedings – something any decent music writer has to be able to do – is an exercise in recursive Venn diagramming and cross-category perplexity that would make a lesser writer quail, if you could find one. The tidy process of an orderly mind

So get ready for some flailing attempts at exegesis and grand- scheme syncretism. I’ll get my head around this thing or collapse trying. From the 50th anniversaries of ECM records and the Art Ensemble of Chicago to the brand new ballet (yep) from Rhinnon Giddens, this festival has got my blood all het up. Don’t even get me started on the guitarists on tap.

The blog will also pay more attention to the cultural highlights here in Tallahassee. It still isn’t quite NYC, but significant things are happening here and there is a real scarcity of arts coverage in this town. I’ve noticed several significant events come and go lately with scarce a word of notice, to the point where we only find out about some of these happenings after the fact. I will do what I can to fill the gaps.

The April calendar is chock a block with world-class creative work. It also happens to be Tallahassee’s most lovely time of year: temperate climate, azaleas in bloom, and enough pollen to stun an elephant. Get your travel plans ready.

The Tallahassee Film Festival brings an expanded scope of activity April 5-7. On top of smartly curated films, there will be a Saturday night shindig atThe Wilbury featuring Baltimore-based electronics wizard and DJ Dan Deacon, described as “notorious for his wild and spontaneous live shows that meld the vibe of a performance-art happening with his free-thinking permutations on decades of avant-garde music lineage.” More details on this cool fest as the schedule firms up, but it promises to be a big treat.

The weekend of April 12-14, our annual Word of South Festival is gonna be terrific (lineup is under press embargo for now, but trust me…LIT!). Aside from a ticketed concert on Friday night, everything is free. The fest sprawls across Cascades Park in everything from small tents to bigger tents to huge tents to the mainstage amphitheater. Once again, the crew at The Bitter Southerner is programming their own stage for the weekend. They were so well attended last year that they have been moved to the large stage adjacent to The Edison. It’s a smart move. More details on WoS here when the schedule is released.

(I also have a WoS feature landing in Tallahassee Magazine first week of March and a review of last year’s hoolie here on the blog.)

Piling on. Saturday, April 13 – smack dab in the middle of Word of South, finds the sonic blasts of the Nels Cline / Larry Ochs / Gerald Cleaver trio at 5th and Thomas.5&T is establishing itself as a first rank room for listening to good music. Primarily a venue for touring Outlaw Country and roots rock bands, this booking happened almost by accident, but let’s just genuflect for a moment at good fortune and get our assess out to fill the joint for this one so we can convince management to bring more in this vein. Cline is one of the most active and influential guitarists on the scene, or rather, on many scenes, maybe even every scene. Best known as the guitarist for arena rockers Wilco, Cline’s curiosity ranges across every style you can imagine and his trickery with electronics and sheer souuuuuund will leave you wondering how/what the hell happened. On this gig, you get to see him up close. I pity the fool who misses this. And I pity lovers of creative music in Tallahassee if we don’t fill the room for this one.

Larry Ochs, one of the founders of the Rova Saxophone Quartet, is a beast on tenor and soprano, a thoughtful composer and arranger, and restless seeker of high grade collaborators like Anthony Braxton, Kronos Quartet, John Zorn, and Sam Rivers. Drummer Gerald Cleaver is a veteran of the jazz and free jazz world, often heard alongside creative giants like Roscoe Mitchell, Henry Threadgill, and Craig Tabor. People, this is a true creative music supergroup. You can listen to and order their first recording, released last month, at the Clean Feed website. You will be hearing a lot more about Clean Feed here in the coming months, too. It is an insanely prolific and high-quality record label based in Lisbon. Yowsa. Recommended track: “Shimmer Intend Spark Groove Defend.”

What else can I offer to regain your trust and traffic? How about thoughts on the use of moral philosophy as a plot platform in (ostensibly, perhaps) funny television programs? Or maybe the intersection of racial discrimination, education policy, banking practices, and criminal justice reform? Maybe you just want the occasional reading recommendation, or maybe just a recipe for a good soup.

I am not running away from the political, but damn if anything I write about the ongoing atrocities does not seem outdated by new atrocities before I can even hit publish. But campaign season is nigh upon us, a full year before the first caucus or primary, so I’m sure I will find a way to make myself look foolish soon enough. As always, I love hearing from readers. Complaints, outrage, fawning praise, whatever. Seriously, there’s no money in this here bloggy vineyard, so let me know you are out there.

Unless you aren’t. In that case, carry on.

My Favorite World #33

Amy Shumer is funny as shit. She’s bawdy and profane and smart as a damned tack. And apparently, she’s pissed off the Disney/Lucasfilm monolith with her parody photo shoot of Star Wars icons. That alone is enough to earn her solid hero status. Hung like a goddam robot.

I wouldn’t bother to post about her because she is literally everywhere in the media these days, but a friend the other day declared, “I literally have no idea who this person is.” So on the off chance that one of my 7 readers is one of the 13 people in the world who aren’t hip to Amy, here goes.

Her “project”As the lit/art eggheads like to say. is primarily an exploration of what it means to be a young White woman in the media/world at large, the judgements/assessments of a Woman as an object first and foremost, and then perhaps having some sort of talent or other redeeming quality that might/might not deserve consideration based on whether she is hot/not hot. Also, too, whether a woman has a right to enjoy sex/food/drink to excess and without concern for what anyone else might have to say about it. At a recent awards ceremony, she declared herself well out of fucks to give, but happy to take them as she wishes.

“I’m probably like 160 pounds right now and I can catch a dick whenever I want, like, that’s the truth. It’s not a problem!”

She had been introduced by AbFab’s Jennifer SaundersAnother very funny woman who also ran out of spare fucks a long time ago., who was a puddle of hysterics by the time it was all done. I’ve also watched Shumer reduce EllenNo last name necessary! to speechlessness. She takes no prisoners.

I could recommend any number of clips as exemplars of comedy- meets-art-meets-social-commentary that deserves placement in the imaginary hall of fame occupied by Lenny, Carlin, Pryor, Rock, &c.And why, oh why, mister pale patriarchal penis person is there not another woman on that list? The problem runs deep, and it damn sure ain’t the fault of funny women like Silverman, Diller, Rivers, Boozler, &c. Mea culpa. The extended piece on rape culture in a Texas high school football team is pitch perfect; jokes about rape are pretty difficult to pull off without being an asshole, and she nails it. The pastoral luncheon with Tina Fey and Patricia Arquette celebrating Julia Louis Dreyfuss’ “last fuckable day” before she is relegated to cronedom is superb. The trial of Bill Cosby is cruel and spot on. And even better, very funny.”I believe it was my mentor, the great Bill Cosby, who said, ‘Here, take this.'”

But for my money, the best thing yet in her work is this episode-length “remake” of 12 Angry Men. The cast alone is to marvel at; it’s a sign of her clout and the respect she garners that this little show on basic cable could attract Jeff Goldblum, Dennis Quaid, Paul Giamatti,Vincent Kartheiser, Kumail Nanjiani, Chris Gethard, and John Hawkes for a single episode. But the genius is in the execution: a faux shot-by- shot remake, but instead of a murder trial, these men are to determine whether Amy is hot enough to be on television. Well does she?

Watch it. http://www.cc.com/full-episodes/d6vl24/inside-amy-schumer-12-a ngry-men-inside-amy-schumer-season-3-ep-303

My. Favorite. World.

The Atticus of My Life

In the book of love’s own dreams Where all the print is blood Where all the pages are my days And all my lights grow old — Attics of My Life, by Robert Hunter

THIS POST IS FULL OF SPOILERS: If you hate spoilers and plan to read Go Set a Watchman, skip this post for now. But please, come back when you’re done. A piece of free advice: If you have not read To Kill a Mockingbird recently, read it before you read Go Set a Watchman. You’ll be glad you did.

I’m one of those peculiar people who take literature too seriously. I’ve never doubted the power of a good writer to create worlds that are as real as our own and, at the same time, to conjure reflections and echoes of a reality we haven’t quite earned yet.

Characters in books become as real to me as my friends and family, my banes and enemies. I grant that this is a sign of deficient mental health, but I hope I’m not the only one who, for example, bursts into tears when Gavroche Thénardier dies on the barricade or when Edgar Derby is executed for pocketing that damned teapot he found in the rubble. I guess most times for most people, characters remain on the page where they belong and don’t much interfere in our day to day. Lucky them?

But some characters escape the page and grow larger than life, become icons. Some, like Atticus Finch, become moral exemplars and redeemers of collective wrongdoing. And if there’s anything we can’t stand, it’s for someone to reveal the flawed man behind the myth.See also, Huxtable, Cliff.

So let’s cut to the chase. Atticus Finch is a standard issue Southern gentleman – a man I recognize well in several of my Deep South forbears – a genteel fellow of manners and decency who also happens to hold racist views that are extreme enough to make the daughter who once idolized her Perfect Father literally throw up when she discovers his true nature.

It’s easy to see why so many long-time Harper Lee fans are outraged.

In To Kill a Mockingbird, Lee created the Great White Father, the man of infinite patience, rectitude, and sense of fairness who could redeem our (White folks, that is) sense of guilt and discomfort over racial injustice. In Go Set a Watchman, she pulls the curtain back to reveal that Atticus, the Great and Powerful, is just another worn out, cranky uncle forwarding conspiracy emails and ranting about Those People. Once again, hero worship turns out to be a sucker play.

At the end of Mockingbird, we were given permission to tut-tut the horror of Tom Robinson’s predicament and to feel joy at the progress we’ve made, pass the chicken please. The white trash Ewells excelled in the Judas role in this passion play, lowly creatures who took welfare and kept their kids out of school and couldn’t be bothered to shift for themselves. Our own hands were never dirtied like the coarse and common Ewells. They were the evil in our midst, and if only we better whites could follow the shining example of Atticus Finch, the world would be our Nirvana, and hallelujah, pass the gravy, if it’s not too much trouble.

Watchman‘s Chapter 17 is one of the most painful reading experiences I’ve ever suffered. Even knowing ahead of time that Lee was going to reveal a “dark side” of Atticus, I was unprepared for the casual, genteel, typically Southern bigotry coming out of his mouth. And Lee wrote this exchange with no wiggle room: Atticus is basically a disgusting racist. He laughs at Jean Louise’s arguments, he taunts her for her naivete.

There’s no turning away: the Great White Father is a son of a bitch. The revelation of Atticus’s repellent attitudes hits as hard as if a sequel to the gospels revealed that Jesus and Judas were the same character. Everything you know is wrong.

A few days before GSAW hit the stores, I re-read Mockingbird for the first time in years. I was surprised at the extent to which the movie depiction replaced the book itself in my memory.Like I said: re-read TKAM before you read GSAW. Mockingbird the movie revolves around the trial of Tom Robinson; everything else that happens travels in orbit around that event. In the book, the trial is critical, but the book as a whole explores the curve of small-town childhood in the South with fondness and wit. (White children, naturally.) As with so many movies/books/tv shows about race, actual black folks are pretty much in the margins.With the notable and long overdue exception of the movie Selma, though it too has its own issues of Great Father drama and hagiography. And this gets to one of the key problems with Mockingbird – on the one hand, it asks us to empathize with the ‘poor, poor Negro’, even while bestowing upon us a glimmering savior to make us all feel okay again. That nice (hell, impossibly perfect) Atticus washes our sins away.

While theories abound as to Watchman’s origin, I readily accept that this was an early shot at Lee’s Maycomb chronicle; after reading Watchman, Lee’s editor told her go back and tell the tale from Young Scout’s perspective. It took her two years to re-write, and the result was the structurally and stylistically superior Mockingbird. The Watchman version is clearly unfinished; it lacks the cohesion that extended editing and re-writing would have instilled.It is also unmistakably the work of Harper Lee. This is no hoax, and it sure as hell is not Capote. But I can also see how this might have become, later on, an effective sequel. In fact, it takes great effort to read this as anything other than a sequel or amplification of the original: the same characters, 15 years later on the fictional timeline, in a book published 50+ years later. It’s of a piece, and it provides an essential corrective element that turns the saga into something other than a happy fairy tale, albeit one where that poor Tom Robinson &c., pass the black eyed peas.

Mockingbird gave us a feel-good fantasy. Watchman fills in the blanks and gives us a truth that does not encourage happy mealtime discussion. Mockingbird is still a great novel. Lee’s depictions of the rhythms and rhymes and smells of Southern life are as good as anybody else, Faulkner, O’Connor, Percy, you name your favorite. But Harper Lee is not a great novelist. For the same reason the John Kennedy Toole and Joseph Heller are not; the body of work is just not there to justify such a judgement. She spread a dusting of fiction over the people she knew growing up, the place she knew. She had a story worth telling, and perhaps even recognized that the time had come for white southerners to address race in a different way. But she had one good story, told it, and went silent. Wondering whether she could have become a great novelist is no better than a parlor game along the lines of could Wilt Chamberlain outplay Michael Jordan and such.

While Watchman is not a great novel by any stretch, it’s probably not fair to judge it too harshly given that it never even made it to galleys until its rediscovery. But it is an important piece of work for two key reasons. First off, it sheds light on the author’s struggle, the process of taking a work from idea to paper to woodshed to completion. This alone would make GSAW a worthy curiosity for literary scholars and a fun what-if exercise for Mockingbird devotees. But more important than this: Watchman uses the Freudian/Oedipal device of kill the father to allow Jean Louise to become an adult in her own right. And in so doing, Lee strips the mask from a false idol that has captivated her fans for several generations. And that shit comes with some heavy dues.

So first: The similarities between TKAM and GSAW are evident and plenty, with several paragraphs that describe Maycomb life appearing in both without so much as a comma’s difference. But the divergences are where we get a glimpse at the evolution of a book that has been read by millions of people over the past half century.

Famously, Tom Robinson is convicted and then killed trying to escape prison; everybody knows that. But inWatchman , the “trial” is dealt with in a paragraph or two, with the throwaway reference that Tom was acquitted.And a more disturbing suggestion that Atticus fought hard for Tom only to sustain the fiction of equality under the law. More later. In the retelling, the “trial” transformed from a mere trifle to the centerpiece of one of the nation’s great moral fables.

Then there’s the fiance in GSAW, Henry, who Jean Louise describes as her oldest and dearest friend, a boy who lived across the street at the same time the trial and the adventures with Jem and Dill and Boo played out. This character does not exist in Mockingbird. Perhaps even more revealing, Boo Radley does not exist in the Watchman universe, and there is no mention of Bob Ewell’s attack on Jem and Scout, the event that provides the bookend beginning/ending of the entire Mockingbird narrative.

And of course, there is Jean Louise’s discovery and outrage that the Father and her fiance are, if not card carriers, at the very least fellow travellers of the White Citizens Councils who made damned well and sure that Jim Crow remained the law of the land and kept Those People from getting above their station. Not to be outdone, Jean Louise reveals herself to be a states rights fanatic of the first degree, and declared herself angry and outraged that the Supreme Court would force people to do the right thing when they would certainly get around to it in their own good time and why are they rushing things so. Between the two of them, you have the complete package of racial oppression. And they’re both so damned reasonable about it.

The heart of Watchman‘s ultimate importance lies in that last disparity between what might be viewed as the canon of TKAM and the heresy of GSA, lies in Harper Lee’s forcing us to squarely face the myth of the Great Father, to see the truth of the complexity and the ugliness and duplicity, and to, well basically, grow the fuck up. Look, she says – you worshipped this False Idol, you used him to absolve your sins, and you’ve been a dupe the whole time. And by the way, your stand-in Scout ain’t all that either, what with her love of states rights and eventual acceptance of the way things are.To be sure, the ending of the book feels hurried and undeveloped, something I feel would have been addressed in re- write/editing. But Lee said publish it warts and all, so this is the text we have to unpack, to use a term that I hate but why not at this point, my god, the world is in tatters and the Great Father is dead. Cut me some slack.

Lee created the Perfect Father, the man who could resolve any argument, cure any scratch or scrape. And Gregory Peck made that character flesh. Go ahead, try to imagine any other actor of the past 100 years in that role. None of them will stick. One stupid internet poll after another has put Atticus near the top of the “perfect father” sweepstakes. People name their children after Atticus. He’s a goddamned monument.

And this is exactly where Watchman delivers the blow that makes it an important contribution to this corner of the literary world: Lee shows us that our Savior is a fraud, tells us to wake up and be adults in our own right. Lee shows us the essential error of putting our faith in mythical heroes and asks us to stand on our own. Sure, it’s tough when we discover that the pleasing fairy tales of our childhoods are fictions that cover up a more complex and disappointing set of truths. Step up and deal.

Watchman comes along at a particularly fraught moment in our 400 year struggle with the wages of America’s original sin. Any pretense to having arrived at a post-racial moment withers with the first serious investigation. No matter how “good” we whites think ourselves, no matter how much we congratulate ourselves on how far we’ve comeGuilty as charged. Mea culpa. – the fact remains that we live in a segregated society, and it is primarily White America’s obligation to ensure that the structural changes necessary to allow this issue to reach resolution are squarely in our own laps. (Like it or not, Blacks have no obligation to make things better; we shit this bed and it’s ours to clean.) Unlike TKAM, Watchman does not offer any bromides to make that pill any less bitter. In fact, by making Atticus’ noble defense of Tom Robinson an act of expedience rather than principle, Lee drives home a disturbing and cynical point: good deeds may not quite be what they appear. Even your own, so stay awake and question, question, question.

Another heartbreaker in Watchman: Jean Louise pays a visit to Calpurnia, the Negro woman who essentially raised her and Jem. In TKAM, Calpurnia was for all intents the only Mother Jem and Scout knew. Now long since retired and removed from the White world, Calpurnia barely acknowledges Jean Louise, and certainly display no affection. Jean Louise is deeply hurt, but also outraged: how dare she not remember me, how dare she turn her back on how good we were to her, how we treated her as though she were just like family, etc. Jean Louise has not found the maturity to accept her own complicity in racial oppression. It’s too much for her to take. In this, she is the perfect representation of too many “enlightened” whites on the question of race, with our plaintive whines of “can’t they see how much we/I have done for them already?”, largely blind to the overwhelming privilege we claim as our birthright without even recognizing it even exists.

In the end, I find myself at this: despite the fact that Mockingbird is likely to remain the preferred version of Lee’s Maycomb tales, it is dishonest to ignore the details of Watchman in our overall view of what Maycomb means in its literary context. Memories are imperfect, and stories told over time shift and morph to reflect new experiences, changed attitudes, or something as simple as wish fulfillment. When Lee wrote Watchman, she told a story of a young woman’s disillusionment about her once revered father; when she rewrote the story from the young Scout perspective, she transformed Atticus into the perfect father, the perfect man.

This is not necessarily a contradiction. But the fuller portrait that emerges from the combined tellings – even though it is a real heartbreaker – brings us closer to an understanding that is probably more useful and true in the long run: we are none of us perfect – even/especially the people you’ve placed on a pedestal – and you can bet there’s a dark side to your own character that needs serious work, some whining cling to privilege that we mostly don’t even see. And there is no Great Father who can fix everything for us; it all depends on our own imperfect efforts. It is surely impossible to bear, to go on without our Great Father; but the alternative – giving up and throwing in the towel – is even worse.

I’m not sure Harper Lee intended anything of the sort. It may be that she truly felt the story delivered in Mockingbird is the “way it is”, and I’ve no doubt many will hold to that reading. But I’ll hold to this one: Harper Lee knew what was in the earlier manuscript, and she allowed its publication as a favor to us all. Watchman delivers a harsh but necessary message: Give up the fantasy and face the world as it is. Shit’s too damned serious for anything else.

Your Electric Picture Radio Box Matters #2: Don Draper and the Flitcraft Parable

MAD MEN & MALTESE FALCON SPOILER ALERT!!!

Dashiell Hammett was one hell of a writer, wrongly denigrated as a “genre” scribbler.As were/are PK Dick, Raymond Chandler, Walter Mosley, &c. His most famous work likely is The Maltese Falcon, which is itself probably better remembered as a great movie starring Humphrey Bogart, Peter Lorre, Sidney Greenstreet, and Mary Astor and directed by John Huston.

The stuff dreams are made of

But one of the great passages of the book never made it into the movie. It’s become known as the Flitcraft Parable, a little story Sam Spade tells Brigid O’Shaughnessy to pass the time while they await the arrival of the oily Joel Cairo.

Flitcraft was a successful Tacoma banker, family man, well- respected man about town doing the best things so conservatively. And one day, on his way to lunch, he passed a construction site.

A beam or something fell eight or ten stories down and smacked the sidewalk alongside him. It brushed pretty close to him, but didn’t touch him, though a piece of the sidewalk was chipped off and flew up and hit his cheek. He felt like somebody has taken the lid off life and let him look at the works.”

Awakened by this near-death episode, Flitcraft kept walking“He went like that,” Spade said, “like a fist when you open your hand.”, leaving work behind like Don Draper fleeing a Miller Lite meeting, just chucked it all and took to the road, wandering and drifting and looking for whatever. And then he finally settled in Spokane, just a few hundred miles away from his first family where he became a successful car dealer, family man, well-respected man about town doing the best things so conservatively. And pace Don, under a new name.The name? Charles Pierce! I am slain.

He wasn’t sorry for what he had done. It seemed reasonable enough to him. I don’t think he even knew he had settled back naturally into the same groove he had jumped out of in Tacoma. But that’s the part of it I always liked. He adjusted himself to beams falling, and then no more of them fell, and he adjusted himself to them not falling.”

It’s not as though he forgot the falling beam, the sense of the thin line between life and death. He just got used to it.

So about Don/Dick. All along he has told himself that the things that came before, no matter how traumatic, don’t matter, that all he needs to do is move ahead, determined. Recall when Peggy gave birth to a son that she would never know, Don told her in the hospital, “Peggy, listen to me, get out of here and move forward. This never happened. It will shock you how much it never happened.”

It’s been pretty easy to see how untrue that’s been for Peggy, and how, as a life strategy, it’s been pretty much disastrous for Don. Even in this final episode, he’s trying that line out on Anna Draper’s niece, Stephanie. But where Peggy tried so desperately to live Don’s advice, Stephanie was having none of it, and she soon left our ‘hero’ stranded in the Esalen simulacrum to face his past alone.

And face it he did. There was no near-death experience here a la Flitcraft. Instead, it was Don/Dick coming face to face with himself, or his many selves, and seeing pretty clearly how badly he’d screwed the pooch.

I messed everything up. I’m not the man you think I am… I broke all my vows. I scandalized my child. I took another man’s name. And made nothing of it.

And despite it being completely true, Peggy tries to prop up her crumbled hero the way he did years earlier. With a lie.Note that Peggy’s late redemption in the show followed upon her confiding in Stan about the child she gave up. Facing the truth, and not changing much as a result…but just enough to make space for her and Stan to finally get together.

And then Don, in what may have been the hardest realization of all – that Peggy had been a true and devoted friend for years, a fact he had often not appreciated in the least – Don barely gets out this last comment:

I only called because I realized I never said goodbye to you.” This is not Don having a brush with death. This is a man experiencing internal annihilation. This is his Flitcraft moment.

But soon after, we see this:

Serenity Now!

Don has stayed at EsalenWorld long enough to find his bliss. His moment with the invisible man in group therapy was the falling beam. He is truly a changed man. This is perhaps the most human and humane moment we’ve seen from Don in the entire series. We just want to be loved. Is that so wrong?

But like Flitcraft, he’ll be back to the same old same thing soon enough.

There’s been some Internet squabbling about what the quick cut from blissful Don to this Coke ad meant. My take is that Don truly has changed, that he has had an insight into his nature and the ways he’s fucked everything up, and that he is on his way to forgiving and accepting himself in a way he never has before, and resolving to do better from here on. And that his experience sitting cross-legged on the ocean cliffs has given him the insight he needed to create one of the most legendary advertisements ever. And please note: I do not view his little grin as a moment where he cynically realizes that he can convert this moment of personal growth into a great ad. At that moment, he’s just grooving with the moment. And later, when he appropriates that genuine moment for an inherently inauthentic commercial moment, he likely has no inkling of the inherent cynicism of the conversion. It’s just who he is.Refer to the parable of the monkey and the scorpion crossing the river. Nature!

So what?

One of the ongoing themes of Mad Men has revolved around the question of “Can people ever change?” And I think the show has come squarely down on the same answer Hammett offered in the Flitcraft parable: Absolutely. Sort of.

I’d go with this. As with Flitcraft, Don experienced a true, honest, gut-wrencher of a life-altering experience, and I’m willing to accept that he has changed, maybe even for the better; maybe not. And that, like Flitcraft, he gets used to the after-effects of his epiphany, and slowly resumes the life he knows: ad man, probably re-married somewhere near where he once lived, subtly altered, somehow, but still the same Don/Dick as ever. The only difference now is that he is willing to admit – to himself, to others – his failings, and to remember them. And rather than deny the past – the identity theft, the affairs, &c. – he acknowledges it and accepts it as part of himself, and then gradually gets used to the beams not falling any more.

Because I think that’s how it works for most of us.I accept that there are people who radically alter their lives and habits and everything about themselves, either as a response to experience or as an act of pure will. If you are one of these, I suspect you are one in a (b)(m)illion. The rest of us muddle ahead as best we can. We experience these moments, these transformative events, and swear that we will never forget the lesson learned, the way we feel, the glimpse of truth. And we mean it, absolutely, but over time, the comfortable rhythms resume, and we are still pretty much who we were before.

Changed? Yeah, you bet, just as everything we experience makes an impression on our psychology, our exchange with and understanding of our world. But are we any different? I’m not so sure.

To borrow from another Bogart moment, I’m not sure any of this blathering amounts to a hill of beans in this crazy world. I believe that the stories we read in books and on the screen and stage and on the electric picture radio box matter because, at best, they reflect something back our way that helps us understand ourselves more clearly, or maybe to understand other people differently. That our effort to read the stories tills fertile ground for that urge we (some of us!) have to know ourselves better, and to, perhaps, find a way to incrementally change over time, perhaps even for the better.

My thought? Mistrust the epiphany! It’s too grand. But the little glimmers of a-ha? Gather them like a squirrel gathers nuts.

Or not. Not for nothing, after Spade relates the Flitcraft story, femme fatale and murderess Brigid is utterly unimpressed. “How perfectly fascinating,” she says, eager to turn the conversation back to her favorite subject: herself.

Some people just don’t do self-reflection. And sometimes, I envy them. But not often.

Your Electric Picture Radio Box Matters #1 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 includesLes Miserables, Infinite Jest, Catch-22, The Sopranos, and The Wire. Yeah, programs from the electric picture radio make the list.Wanna make something of it? 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. Peg is an ace copy writer, or as we prefer to be known, cunning linguists.

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. Warrior Princess

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 endsThough 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., but I also can’t stand the idea that we won’t get to follow the characters beyond the final page.Not that I want anything to do with sequels, prequels, spin-offs, board games, Mad Men-labeled scotch or filterless cigs, &c.

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

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.e.g., even the implacable Javert seems to have been sitting on a shelf whenever we are not with him on the page.

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.

That’s me, second from the left. I swear I had that same shirt.

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.The death of Gavroche Thénardier on the barricades caused me to burst into tears. But no heart-tearing sobs. (For that matter, I rarely laugh out loud while reading, but often do so while watching tv or movies.That Your Narrator may be an unwashed Philistine is a question disposed of quickly. He most certainly washes.)

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.

My Favorite World #21

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 deviceHellloooo Lebowski, 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.Grant’s cocktail of choice in the film, basically a martini with a cocktail onion instead of the olive. 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.Who actually combines the dame persona with the hapless mistaken identity victim in one character. 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. Roger hearing something the rest of us did not.

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.Somebody could write a cool film studies dissertation on this. The fourth Doctor waiting for a plane

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.The less said about the teased-hair, shoulder-padded 80s the better. But that suit that Grant wears pretty much the entire movie? Good god, people…that is a piece of clothing! I want that suit. Hell, I want that dress, too.

In this scene, Thornhill believes Eve to be one of the bad guys.Which she both is and isn’t. 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.All credit toTom 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.

I still want that suit.

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. Just like a Holiday Inn Express

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

And this scene, in one of my favorite places.

Glory days of Grand Central. A recent restoration has pretty much brought it back to full gorgeousity.

Also, too…Hitchcock knew how to paint a picture. Check out this overhead shot of Grant fleeing the UN Building. I can tell ya, the UN Building can’t look that good these days. It was already falling apart when I was a kid.

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.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. Nice digs.

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

I would so live in this house.

I mean, come on. A McMansion or this? Even with the gun entering frame left, I’d still live there.

Another cool film nerd tidbit…look again at this still from the cafeteria. I still want that suit.

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. A couple of real creeps

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.And partly because I am a little oblivious. 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. There is nothing wrong with your electric picture radio machine.

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 GrantI’m barely even Archie Leach on my best day. Probably more like Archie Rice., but I can pretend.

My Favorite World. My Favorite World #14

The regular visitor to My Favorite World has probably noticed that I love movies. Here we go again.

A couple of weeks ago, the family was having a celebratory dinner and we spontaneously decided to go see a movie. This never happens. We all have so many schedule issues, but this night, we tossed it all aside.

We dashed to the theater with son using his hand-held intertubes google machine to find something worth seeing. The listings were grim. Would I endure the never-going-to-go-away Matthew McConaughey trying to sell me a Lincoln from the depths of space? How about another animated romp with soulful animals sporting overlarge eyes? Perhaps a celebration of someone who hides in trees and shoots people in the back? Things were not looking good.

Then he mentioned one that I had heard of, vaguely, and since it was the only one that fit our timing, we gave it a spin. And wow.

Two Days, One Night turned out to be one of those little films that really stick with you. Made by the Dardenne brothersThink a Belgian-flavored Coen Brothers partnership, in French with subtitles, this is the story of Sandra (Marion Cotillard). Recovering from illness and all set to return to her job, Sandra gets word that her co-workers have voted her out so they could each receive a thousand-Euro bonus. Dogs eat dogs. But she convinces the boss to hold another election to give her the weekend to convince her co-workers to change their vote. That’s the setup, and the rest of the movie shows Sandra going from one co-worker to the next, making her case. Occasionally groveling, always a bundle of nerves barely contained by her Xanax, the reactions she elicits run the gamut. From people who felt such shame at their greed to people who wanted her to understand just how important that money is for her family and wouldn’t she just see it their way, to actual outbursts of violence that she would dare ‘stir the shit’.

In lesser hands, this setup could devolve into simplistic characters playing out obvious cliches. In Hollywood, there would have to be gun play or a big speech about shared humanity and triumph of the spirit or some such bushwah. But here, every character has a human dimension.Even the dickhead supervisor and boss who thought it was a swell idea to pit these people against one another in the first place. Fucking motherfuckers. You see that everyone is struggling; that even good people who know right from wrong can succumb to the pressures of not having enough money to make ends meet; that the conflict within the working class – conflict often deliberately instigated by the Galtian superheroes – creates degrees of rightness/wrongness that makes moral judgement nearly impossible, because you know how much it costs to send your kids to school/take care of medical expenses/&c.Again, with the exception of the dickhead bosses. Fk those guys. I recognized them as though I had known them personally.

And in Hollywood, you can bet there would be at leastsome makeup. Cotillard, one of Europe’s most financially and artistically successful actors, is a beauty, a fashion model, and spokesperson for a variety of glamour products. But here, she is washed out, an aging woman of former beauty who has endured too much to trouble with her appearance. Too tired to care

A mother of two, married to an underemployed man who also happens to be filled with love and devotion, Sandra is at the end of her rope. She looks tired and beaten. The question at the core – will she persuade enough people to give up their bonus to save her job – seems at once impossible to achieve while we believe “of course she can, it’s the movies!”.

And Cotillard is just stunningly perfect in the role. (She was nominated for the Best Actress Oscar for the role.) Of course we’re rooting for her, and of course we see there is no way in hell she can possibly succeed. We know that she is fragile, and in many ways barely even alive to her world anymore. And yet…

So, no spoilers. This movie held us in the palm of its hand for 95 minutes. Along the way, we meet some truly good people, some people who wish they were good but aren’t quite, and a couple of people you wish would slip and fall down some steep stairs. It’s kind of like life that way.

Two Days, One Night. Just the kind of unexpected surprise that makes this My Favorite World. Go. Watch. Thank me later.