Don’t you just love this?
So genius -- Don Draper watching from his new Miesian International-style office building at 'old New York' Art Deco skyscrapers, the insurgent Sterling-Cooper-Draper-Pryce agency ready to conquer old Madison Avenue titans. I am officially psyched.
Of course, there is the matter of Peggy's ridiculous new haircut. She looks like she's really regretting not bringing Kurt over to SCDP with her:
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The Bluest Eye (excerpt)
Toni Morrison is undoubtedly my favorite contemporary author [thinks for a moment: Michael Ondaatje? Cormac McCarthy? No, it's Morrison.], and for the last few years, I've been making a point of reading at least one Morrison a year.
I rather like this excerpt from Toni Morrison's The Bluest Eye, which I just finished. It's an uneven book - Morrison herself in the afterword accurately diagnoses a number of its problems - but nevertheless a pretty stunning literary debut. Here is an excerpt from the chapter about the central character's mother:
Although she was the ninth of eleven children and lived on a ridge of red Alabama clay seven miles from the nearest road, the complete indifference with which a rusty nail was met when it punched clear through her foot during her second year of life saved Pauline Williams from total anonymity. The wound left her with a crooked, archless foot that flopped when she walked — not a limp that would have eventually twisted her spine, but a way of lifting the bad foot as though she were extracting it from little whirlpools that threatened to pull it under. Slight as it was, this deformity explained for her many things that would have been otherwise incomprehensible: why she alone of all the children had no nickname; why there were no funny jokes and anecdotes about funny things she had done; why no one ever remarked on her food preferences—no saving of the wing or neck for her—no cooking of the peas in a separate pot without rice because she did not like rice; why nobody teased her; why she never felt at home anywhere, or that she belonged anyplace.
The book mentions on the next page that Pauline's youngest brothers were nicknamed Chicken and Pie.
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I Love Factory Tours.
This is something you may know about me. What's the best factory tour I've ever been on? The Celestial Seasonings factory tour in Boulder, Colorado, where you get to visit the room where they store their mint teas. I dare you to last more than ten seconds in there before the mint in the atmosphere makes you burst into tears. Great!
I take no shame in saying I just spent the last hour watching videos taken from a British television series about factory production. They've been uploaded by someone named Triwood1973, and they're just fun! Here are a few of the best:
(Combining two of my very favorite things: factory tours and pineapple)
(I had no idea so much work went into corks!)
("Bees?" "Beads!" "Beads?!")
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Two Videos
These are too important to wait for a Links of the Day post for tomorrow...
A response to that stupid Dodge Charger commercial:
And an awesome new Michel Gondry video for Mia Doi Todd:
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As if Community Hasn’t Given Me Enough Reasons…
...to love it, there was a Sonseed reference on this week's Holiday episode!
There are few viral videos that entertain me as much as Sonseed's early '80s public access performance of their inexplicable ska-inflected "Jesus is My Friend."
Evidently someone in the writers' room at Community also really likes this video:
It's like they know me.
City Trees by Edna St. Vincent Millay
Windy fall days in New York always remind me of this poem. My father was a huge fan of Millay:
CITY TREES
The trees along this city street,
Save for the traffic and the trains,
Would make a sound as thin and sweet
As trees in country lanes.
And people standing in their shade
Out of a shower, undoubtedly
Would hear such music as is made
Upon a country tree.
Oh, little leaves that are so dumb
Against the shrieking city air,
I watch you when the wind has come,—
I know what sound is there.
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Angels in America – Part One
Alex and I recently sat down to watch the entirety of Angels in America, Mike Nichols' grand television adaptation of Tony Kushner's Pulitzer-winning masterpiece of a play. Kushner's play, one of the 1990s' few definitive offerings to the literary canon (Harold Bloom, that incorrigible snob, lists the play chronologically last in his survey of the major works of The Western Canon), plays well to the cinematic media: upon its premiere, it was hailed as defiantly cinematic in scope, with elaborate set-pieces, short scenes, and a huge variety of characters and settings. Like its theatrical predecessor, Nichols film is poised between two media, combining Nichols' formalistic visual sensibility with Kushner's incredible use of spoken language. As a hybrid, it works precisely because it suits both its theatrical origins and televisual qualities equally; it's daringly artificial but filled with emotional naturalism.
Watching the film, I couldn't help but think of the subtitle Kushner gave to the published edition of the play's script: "A Gay Fantasia on National Themes." Yes, the film is literally about gay men (mostly), and its author essays a distinctly queer sensibility at times (dig the extended Wizard of Oz referencing), but I couldn't help but think about the word 'queer' with regard to all of the film's narrative threads - Prior Walter (Justin Kirk, fantastic) and his relationship with an angel as he comes to term with his mortality; Roy Cohn's (Al Pacino) antagonistic relationship with his dutiful nurse (America's Greatest Actor Under 60, Jeffrey Wright) Belize as he lies dying of AIDS, haunted by the vision of Ethel Rosenberg (Meryl Streep), whom he condemned to death in his early days as a prosecutor, and the decaying relationship of Harper (Mary Louise Parker) and Joe (Patrick Wilson), Mormon transplants in Brooklyn - she a Valium addict, he a Republican closet-case.
In a way, I think Kushner's address of 'national themes' - the end of the Cold War, the rise in public life of religious conservatives and the Mormon Church (I distinctly remember the preponderance of LDS advertisements on television in the late '80s), and the AIDS crisis - is an extended exploration of what it means to be outside the 'mainstream' of American society. Jewishness, political radicalism, interracial identity, and Mormonism are all offered as forms of 'queerness' - extraordinary identities that set one apart from a mythologized American mainstream never viewed in the film. Despite the film's setting in the 1980s, no image of Reagan or the 'Morning in America' nostalgia for a mythologized 1950s are presented - the film takes this mythology for granted as a lie, and instead posits an America defined by queerness, composed of those outside the mainstream. Much as the film constructs a new metaphysical reality upending Judeo-Christian notions of 'heaven' and 'angels,' the film reenvisions recent history as a story of those whose voices are obscured by hegemonic texts. (This tendency is most explicit in a sequence in which Harper, at the Mormon Visitors Center in Manhattan, contemplates the fate of a voiceless Mormon woman depicted in one of the center's life-size dioramas).
There are so many great things about this monumental film - surely one of the best of the decade (as a television property, it demands to be placed on the upper echelon of this decade's television productions with the first season of Mad Men, The Best of Youth, and Adam Curtis' The Power of Nightmares) - that I will return to it a few times over the course of the next few weeks, but before I end this post, I want to address the uniform quality of the cast, an astonishing group of actors whose work here largely outshines their contributions elsewhere. Pacino, for his part, gives his best performance since the '70s - he reigns in the Pacino loud-soft-loud dynamics mannerism and inhabits Roy Cohn as a malignant gasp of Cold War nastiness. Justin Kirk, Ben Shenkman, and Patrick Wilson are all fantastic in roles that their careers haven't touched since. (Don't get me wrong - Kirk is great on Weeds, but Andy Botwin is not half the character Prior Walter is. And Patrick Wilson, this film excluded, has the worst taste in roles of any actor in Hollywood). Mary Louise Parker inhabits a similar blankness here as she does as Nancy Botwin, but where that character's evasively forward eyes reveal a schemer always trying to get ahead, here they reflect the anxiety of a woman whose life is defined by a horrifying loneliness (Nichols' camerawork and staging in the expertly-directly sequences in Joe and Harper's apartment are like something out of Lynch, evoking terror out of a setting remarkable for its unremarkableness). Meryl Streep and Emma Thompson are both fantastic in a multitude of roles, and Farmer Hoggett gets two great scenes in as Cohn's physician.
And I know I say this a lot, but it needs to be said again: Jeffrey Wright. Dude cannot be overrated. A magnificently subtle actor who's nonetheless able to move into grandly stated emotion with incredible dexterity. For further evidence, here's a list of movies where he's the best thing about them:
Quantum of Solace
W
Casino Royale
Lady in the Water
Syriana
Broken Flowers
Ride with the Devil
Dude can spin gold out of anything.
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The Last Days of Disco on Hulu
Long out of print on DVD, Whit Stillman's underrated The Last Days of Disco is now available for viewing on Hulu. I'm going to rewatch it soon and write an appreciation, but suffice it to say it's a perfect third of his UHB trilogy, filled with impossibly articulate characters and a social/moral pitch somewhere between Jane Austen and Evelyn Waugh. Barely - just barely - not as great as Metropolitan and Barcelona. But just barely.
[Vulture]
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I Want One
A tiny pterosaur fossil was discovered in the western part of China's Liaoning Province. It is currently the smallest of the species of flying pterosaurs ever found in the world.
Oh, the adventures we would have.
[Some English-language Chinese propaganda news site]
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The Dirty Garage
Oh, if San Antonio had had a film festival when I was growing up - even San Antonio Mumblefest would've sufficed!
A totally pitch-perfect calling card, and immaculately studied, from the Amy Taubin pullquote to the ridiculous insertion of the director's friends' band to the pastel-and-sans-serif font title treatments, which are taken directly from IFC's trailers for their mumblecore festival pickups.
A big thanks to the lovely lady who pointed this out to me, Alex.
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Great Performance: Kiernan Shipka on Mad Men
Notice: Mad Men spoilers here.
Nothing weighty here, but I wanted to spotlight what I think has been one of the most underrated aspects of this terrific season of Mad Men: the emergence of young Kiernan Shipka as one of the best child actors working. Shipka plays Sally, the daughter of Don (Jon Hamm) and Betty (January Jones). Over the last few episodes, Sally's been featured in a startlingly emotional plot arc with her grandfather Gene (Ryan Cutrona) in which he gives her the attention she's been deprived by her emotionally distant parents.
Shipka has been doing eerily subtle work over these episodes. Seriously - this is Dakota Fanning/Haley Joel Osment-level child actor work. When she steals five dollars from her grandfather's money clip, her guilt has an active, living quality to it. Part of it is the writing: the way she 'drops' the five dollars and then discovers it in plain sight of her grandfather is a carefully observed child behavior. But so much of it comes from Shipka's ability to convey emotion through a few very small cues: the widening of the eyes, her slouching posture. Her breakdown upon hearing the news of her grandfather's death is maybe the most cathartic moment the series has offered in its three seasons, and it earns every bit of the tears it jerks: the way those interactions between Sally and Gene portend of his death while offering the sort of incredible details that color childhood: the way her grandfather sprinkled salt over his ice cream, the way she reads him The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
This is all the more remarkable considering Shipka spent the first two seasons excitedly crying out the word 'Daddy!' and mixing cocktails. I guess there was a reason why the show's gone through three different Bobby Drapers over three seasons, but kept the same Sally.