Lost In Translation

Mad Men Ends

Another great season of Mad Men has come to an end there's a great recap of the last three episodes ("The Jet Set" / "The Mountain King" / "Meditations in an Emergency") at The House Next Door:

During the first season of Mad Men and throughout the second, much critical discussion centered on the the show's depiction of advertising, domestic life and gender relations in the late '50s and early '60s, the immense cultural changes America was about to undergo, and what opinion series creator Matthew Weiner might have on it all. After watching the last three episodes, I believe those aspects are mere means to an end. Like the mob storylines on The Sopranos—a series on which Weiner served as a writer and producer—they exist to inform and amplify Mad Men's real interest: the continual struggle between what Sigmund Freud called the id and the superego, between the deep, authentic self inside us—the sum total of our desires, appetites, urges and fantasies—and what we might call the constructed self, a superstructure of social conditioning that cages the beast within and lashes it with guilt and shame when it gets too rowdy. The third major component of the personality, the ego, referees between the id, the superego and the external world; in a sense, the ego is the locus of drama, because it's the place where decisions happen. The struggle is apparent in any story worth watching, but it's foregrounded in Mad Men, a series in which—like The Sopranos—dramatic decisions often come down to a blunt cost-benefit analysis. A character in moral quandary tries to choose between what he or she wants, and what his or her conditioning—and the expectations of family, friends or society at large—will allow.  

In addition, Alan Sepinwall has an in-depth interview with producer-creater Matthew Weiner as well:

On how he feels about the season:

I'm thrilled with it. It was very hard and very scary, and I have a great writing staff, and I had an idea for what I wanted to do, and I feel like I pulled it off. I'm very, very proud of what we did. The strangest thing is, the last script was really written about eight weeks ago, and emotionally, it's exactly where we are right now ,and it's exactly what I wanted to write about for this season. And it seems to be quite related to the emotional mood of the country.

The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2007

It’s always a pleasure to read the Dave Eggers edited The Best American Nonrequired Reading each year. 2007 is no exception.  Let’s see my favorite readings were: “Adina, Astrid, Cipewee, Jasmine” by Matthew Klam, “All Aboard the Bloated Boat: Arguments in Favor of Barry Bonds” by Lee Klein, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice” by Nam Le.  The little in-joke lists at the front are getting a bit tedious though. Otherwise, lots of interesting stories, comics, and essays.

The Drops of the Gods

My friend Ristu introduced me to this comic that discussed different wines, it was too advanced for me to follow, but I made a stab at it. Here it helps explain the gaining popularity of wine in asia, from the NY Times:

In Tokyo, wine sellers monitor his weekly pronouncements before adjusting their stocks accordingly. In newer markets like Taiwan and urban China, his recommendations are turning the newly affluent into wine converts. And in Seoul, South Koreans now hold forth on “terroir” and how a bottle “marries” with a particular dish without blinking.

Never mind that Shizuku is a comic-book figure, the hero of a manga series, “The Drops of the Gods,” created and written by a middle-aged Japanese sister-and-brother team. Asian readers who have never heard of Robert M. Parker Jr. scrutinize the comic hero’s every sip, learning about wine in words and images that may seem strange to traditionalists.

The series has evoked images as disparate as the painting “The Angelus” by Jean-François Millet (to explain a wine’s richness) and a marsh north of Tokyo (to describe a difficult yet rewarding vintage).

“These are images that emerged from wines that we actually drank,” said Yuko Kibayashi, 49, who created the series with her brother, Shin, 46. “It’s like a game.”
The Kibayashis, who write under the pseudonym Tadashi Agi, came up with the series while collaborating on another comic more than four years ago. During their work sessions, their spirits ran high as the wine flowed.

“We found ourselves looking for the drama behind the wines we were drinking,” Mr. Kibayashi said. “It started with one wine, ‘This wine is definitely a woman.’ ”

Rip It Up & Start Again: Post Punk 1978-1984

I was a bit mislead by Simon Reynolds’s book on the post punk scene, Rip It Up and Start Again: Post Punk 1980-1980. I guess in retrospect most of the bands I help dearly from that era would be described as new wave or punk. I think this branch was much more experimental and theoretical in its composition of music, but I think there are more than a few bands that I gained an appreciation for eventually found their roots in the post punk genre: Wire, Mekons, New Order, Talking Heads, Bow Wow Wow, Gang of Four, Adam and the Ants, Echo and the Bunnymen, Nick Cave (from The Birthday Present) etc… If PIL is the band that started it, then that explains why it didn’t capture my attention. However, the other early musical influences are closer to my heart: The Velvet Underground, Iggy Pop, David Bowie, Roxy music and Brian Eno. There is a lot of history about obscure British bands that never really made an impact here as well as lots of information on critically respected bands that I just didn’t get into like Devo and Pere Ubu. That being said the book is extensively research and has exhaustive interviews with many of the main bands of the era. Perhaps the quality of the research and the tangential interests of bands mentioned kept me going in the sections that were irrelevant to my musical interests.

Art Spiegelman's Identity Crisis

Art Spielgelman does wonderful covers for The New Yorker, but I was first introduced to his work when I taught his Maus comic series about the holocaust in my high school teaching training. here's a slide show essay about his work at Slate:

Apologies to Adorno, but I've got a question: Is it really possible for Art Spiegelman to make comics after Mauschwitz? That question hangs over every comic strip and book that he has penned sinceMaus: A Survivor's Tale, his path-breaking cat-and-mouse comic about his father's life in Auschwitz. The book, published in two parts, My Father Bleeds History (1986) and And Here My Troubles Began (1991), won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992.

In The iPod: Jenny Lewis, Calexico, and Ryan Adams and the Cardinals

Acid Tongue, Jenny Lewis’ solo follow up to the exquisite Rabbit Fur Coat, stakes the middle ground between the country stylings of that record and the more traditional pop styling of her latest with her band Rilo Kiley on Under the Blacklight.  As her first record attest, I think Lewis might be more suited for the country genre, however, that being said she can pull off some pop gems on occasion.  This can be seen in her latest album, which isn’t as strong as the previous recording but has plenty of highlights: “Carpetbaggers” with Elvis Costello, “Acid Tongue,” “Godspeed,” and “Sing A Song For Them.” There are several other guest including her boyfriend Jonathan Rice, M. Ward, and Zooey Deschanel.

 

Calexico has started a new tradition with a focus on lyrics and vocals in their last album, Garden Ruin, it is a tradition that continues with Carried to Dust. They have reunited most of the players from their high point Feast of Wire. Sam Bream (Iron & Wine) also makes an appearance on “Writer’s Minor Holiday” one of the standout tracks. Some others include “Slowness” and “Two Silver Trees.”

 

Ryan Adams and the Cardinals. After a brief detour with an album sans the band, Easy Tiger, are back with Cardinology. Apparently this is the last record for Lost Highway records, what that means I don’t know, I find it hard to believe someone this talented won’t land on his feet. So far I’m not sure what to make of this album, but some standout tracks are “Born Into The Light” and “Cobwebs.” 

Undecided

Here's a great little piece by David Sedaris in The New Yorker: 

I don’t know that it was always this way, but, for as long as I can remember, just as we move into the final weeks of the Presidential campaign the focus shifts to the undecided voters. “Who are they?” the news anchors ask. “And how might they determine the outcome of this election?”

****

To put them in perspective, I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. “Can I interest you in the chicken?” she asks. “Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?”

To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.

I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?

The New Cult Canon: Office Space

This Av CLub feature continues to impress me with their spot-on selections like Mike Judge's Office Space:

There have been many portraits of cubicle culture before and after Office Space—The Office, Clockwatchers, Dilbert, and the early scenes of Joe Versus The Volcano immediately spring to mind—but none have laid out the parameters of this soul-sucking modern world quite so comprehensibly. With that in mind, it's easy to see why the film was such a dud at the box office. For data processors and middle-managers across the country, the prospect of seeing your personal hell projected on a big screen is the furthest thing from escapist fun. But as legions have discovered on DVD, the experience is thrillingly cathartic; finally, someone who understands how a desk job can, in fact, be worse than logging time doing the drywall at a new McDonald's. There, at least, nobody's saying, "Looks like somebody's got a case of the Mondays!"

For my money, the signature shot in Office Space finds four employees at Initech—a technologies firm with the vaguest of mission statements—trudging across the lot at an industrial park. As they chatter anxiously about the company bringing in efficiency experts to clean house, they walk down and stumble back up a drainage trench dug out between the parking areas. Judge catches the moment from a medium-to-long distance, and the effect is like an anthropologist observing his subjects from afar, trying to get a feel for how they interact with their habitat. The shot underlines howunnatural their occupations are: Here are four of today's hunter-gatherers, each in a dress shirt and a bad tie (no jacket required), trudging through this banal piece of sculpted landscape in order to get back to a job that yields nothing of tangible value. There's no dignity to it.

When You Are Engulfed In Flames

David Sedaris has long been one of my favorite memoirists, but it seems that he is running low on material since his life has changed and he has used up most of his family remembrances. That is not to say that he is no longer worth reading, When You Are Engulfed In Flames is worthwhile, but that he doesn’t make me laugh the way he used to, and some of his observational essays drag on a bit in my opinion. I enjoyed his essays on his experiences traveling and his bid to quit smoking in Japan in particular. Furthermore, many of these pieces were first published in the New Yorker or esquire magazine, so I was already familiar with them. I still find his stories worthwhile to read and entertaining, but he is losing his touch so to speak.

Recovery Lit

I was listening to a podcast about David Carr's latest recovery memoir, The Night of the Gun, which mentioned a shorter piece he had written for The NY Times Magazine. The title of this piece was "Me and My Girls," it is a compelling story:

Where does a junkie’s time go? Mostly in 15-minute increments, like a bug-eyed Tarzan, swinging from hit to hit. For months on end in 1988, I sat inside a house in north Minneapolis, doing coke and listening to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car” and finding my own pathetic resonance in the lyrics. “Any place is better,” she sang. “Starting from zero, got nothing to lose.”

After shooting or smoking a large dose, there would be the tweaking and a vigil at the front window, pulling up the corner of the blinds to look for the squads I was always convinced were on their way. All day. All night. A frantic kind of boring. End-stage addiction is mostly about waiting for the police, or someone, to come and bury you in your shame.

After a while I noticed that the blinds on the upper duplex kitty-corner from the house were doing the same thing. The light would leak through a corner and disappear. I began to think of the rise and fall of their blinds and mine as a kind of Morse code, sent back and forth across the street in winking increments that said the same thing over and over.

W-e a-r-e g-e-t-t-i-n-g h-i-g-h t-o-o.

They rarely came out, and neither did I, so we never discussed our shared hobby.
I was lonely, but not alone. The house belonged to Anna, my girlfriend and dope dealer, who had two kids of her own and newborn twins by me. One night, Anna was out somewhere, and I was there with the kids. I had a new pipe, clean screens, a fresh blowtorch and the kids were asleep. It was just me and Barley, a corgi mix I’d had since college. When I was alone and tweaking with Barley, I’d ask her random questions. Barley didn’t talk back per se, but I heard answers staring into her large brown eyes.

Am I a lunatic? Yes. When am I going to cut this stuff out? Apparently never. Does God see me right now? Yes. God sees everything, including the blind.

Trapped in drug-induced paranoia, I began to think of the police as God’s emissaries, arriving not to seek vengeance but a cease-fire, a truce that would put me up against a wall of well-deserved consequences, and the noncombatants, the children, out of harm’s way.