But aren't we all Mad?

After the season two premier of Mad Men, I began wondering why we're all so crazy about this early 60's period series—and why now? The simple answer is that the aesthetic is spectacular, the acting is superb, and with lines like "I’d like to dip you in bronze and mount you on the credenza," and "When God closes a door, He opens a dress," who wouldn't love it? Maybe it's also that we can relate to the characters on some level—they're all so lovably and despicably human. But that kind of gray-character humanity is timeless; we've been falling in love with those types since storytellers recognized the redundancy of purest good and evil. And besides, it doesn't tell us why Mad Men works just at this moment.

I think—and tell me if this crazy—we're in an era that in some ways parallels the early 60's. First, there's a loosening of sexual mores: Joan's on the pill, Peggy gives birth to an illegitimate child AND she's promoted to junior copywriter (in one episode!). Now gay marriage is in the mainstream; there are more stay at home dads; and women… well, who can tell what's going on when we almost had a female Democratic presidential nominee, BUT women are disproportionately laid off because of the crappy economy and everyone says they CHOSE to be full-time mommies.

Further, both periods exhibit changes in the methods of advertising and patterns of consumption. The Mad Men ad men begin to dispense with testimonials and expert opinions about products. They use negative space, like the full page Volkswagen ad with a tiny Bug in the center, and slogans that are all about style instead of substance: It’s Toasted! They are beginning to realize that an ad is not about a product; rather, it’s about the way we interact with a product and what it symbolizes, what the product says about the consumer. Now advertisements have shifted even further away from their products, growing subtler, more enigmatic, and entertaining. The Geico Caveman TV series tanked, but isn’t it conceivable that another advert show could actually make it? And think of all those iPod ads that have shuttled unknown music artists like Fiest and the Ting Tings to near stardom. Great ads promote multiple products, often without our conscious knowledge of it. Our love affair with products that started in the 60s has matured into a life- affirming relationship. What we consume defines who we are—and if you don’t believe me, just look at your Facebook profile listing your favorite books, movies, music and TV, depicting the places you go, and publicizing the events you attend—a pastiche of products telling the whole world who you are.

There’s also that Obama- Kennedy parallel. In the season two premier, our characters spent Valentine’s Day glued to their screens as Jackie O. gave a televised tour of the White House. Both Obama and Kennedy are these young savior types. They have the magical enigmatic quality of the leader who doesn’t quite belong: both are religiously or ethnically different, erudite and forward thinking, and handsome, amiable incarnations of hope.

Mad Men works because it’s really just us in vintage clothing, experiencing the same types of unexpected and often uncomfortable social changes. Everything seems to be tossed up into the air; nothing is certain, and we can’t quite put our finger on what has changed between yesterday and today.

- shoshi

Reason #80231 I want to have David Foster Wallace's baby

So these days I'm trying the literary world on for size by working at a literary agency. My motives for wanting to ingratiate myself into the domain of the the sad, the young, and the literary are not pure or simple by any means (friends, my motives are rarely pure and never simple.) This new career aspiration has inked up because, sigh, I've fallen in LUV4evs. I've loved David Foster Wallace a little bit before but not with this brand of flagrant intensity. He's an old flame that's metamorphosed into the Towering Inferno after being doused with gasoline and whiskey. A few years ago I read Broom of the System and Brief Interviews with Hideous Men and really admired his piece "Consider the Lobster" for Gourmet magazine. But after five years of constantly getting preoccupied and putting it down I've officially finished Infinite Jest --DFW's tres important, ambitious, and prolix piece de resistence of over 1000 pages. I was left thinking "this man's mind could sink the Bismarck," and "he makes my ovaries ache a little." In case you don't know who DFW is, he's the long-haired enfant terrible of post-modern gen-x literary bad boys. He makes those losers Martin Amis, Douglas Coupland, and Dave Eggers want to burn their MacBooks and throw their Van Der Rohe chairs out the window. I strongly urge everyone to go out and buy Infinite Jest. The rewards are generous. It's the best thing to come out of 1996 since Pulp's This is Hardcore, and that means a lot coming from me.

Love,
Mar Mar

A&F gives me scurvy

Cor blimey. So today I had to go to the Verizon Wireless store at the mall to get my Blackberry fixed (turns out if it dies you need to plug it in for at least 30 minutes before it responds. My bad.) These days I try to avoid the mall at all costs. This is because I suffer from a pretty treacherous condition known as post-traumatic Abercrombie and Fitch stress disorder (PTAFSD for short.)Everytime I walk by that store and smell that God-awful cologne (which smells like sixteen year olds giving blow jobs on Daytona Beach, sorry to be crass mom) and hear that heart cockle-shattering complaint house music I get a migraine for the rest of the day. This is not only testament to my being old and uncool. You see, when I was 17 years old I sold my soul and worked at Abercrombie and Fitch for the worst month of my life. The whole debacle started when I skipped school to go shopping one fateful day (cue horror movie B minor chords.) I was minding my own business, stocking up on BRUNETTES ARE HOTTER t-shirts, when the visual manager approached me and started kvelling over my outfit. The visual manager was gay as a window, had Bauhaus aspirations, and couldn't wait to leave his job as a smut peddler and become a true artiste. Obviously love at first sight. He asked me if I'd ever modeled before and if I would like to work at A&F because I had "a look." In retrospect, what a terrible A&F visual manager he was. I'm about as all-American as a pagoda and nearly had a coronary when I heard that black clothing was banned on the premisis. At 17 years of age, however, you'll sell out to the first person who tells you that you're blossoming into something. The chance to be a jailbait sex symbol? Hells yeah. It wouldn't be too long before I was in a boathouse on Lake Minnetonka running down a line of chaps with deltoids bigger than their heads doing fuzzy navel shots off their abdominal muscles. Hah. right.


At orientation I was introduced to Kurt. If anyone fit the bill for being "the worst" Kurt had to be it. He had blonde spiky hair, called everyone bro, and probably drank a lot of Miller Hi-Life in Seaside Heights on the weekends. He vaguely referred to being in med school at one time which means he was probably shtupping a med school student at one time. I like to think of him as the Iceberg Slim to my baby prostitute. He was the store manager and his job was to transform me from outsider child ruffian (like Oliver!!) to tanned half-naked Abercrombie goddess. His claim to fame was that he once refused to sell Lauryn Hill a jacket because it was pinned onto the mannequin. The golden rule at A&F is that you kill yourself before you sell any merchandise that is "property of the visual department." I promised that if Lauryn Hill came in I would sell her ten jackets off the mannequin. Girl killed in Sister Act 2.

My tenure at A&F was spent folding sweaters and opening up dressing room doors. On the job I had to exclusively wear Abercrombie and Fitch clothing, keep myself perma-tan, and pretend that this was a lifestyle that I really dug subscribing to. I also had to withstand the noxious noxious fumes of A&F cologne all day. I would find myself trying not to pass out on piles of torn baseball hats after holding my breath for minutes at a time. The residual smell would burn in my nostrils and keep me up many a night tossing and turning (that is, if I wasn't having a recurring nightmare about Kurt taking me boating on the pretense of getting tan together and then locking me up in his Igloo cooler a la Cherie on Punky Brewster.) I was promoting a lifestyle that was the antithesis to everything that I am. What a phony I was! I don't like boating, I don't like football, I don't like playing soccer, and I don't hang out in wooded areas in Michigan.

Every month or so the employees at the store would send half-naked photos of themselves to A&F headquarters (a cultish sort of place in Ohio presided over the Charles Manson of sexyhipcool Americana -- Mr. Mike Jeffries) hoping to be included in one of the catalogues or ads. This really fucks with the mind of a freshly minted 18 year old puppy. Working at a place that is so insistent on this uber-sexualized ideal of aesthetic perfection is a helluva lot of pressure for a young girl. I didn't like fraternizing with Kurt and his steroidal comrades. I didn't want to stand in my underwear outside of the store. I hated folding sweaters. And worst of all -- the smell of Abercrombie and Fitch cologne was giving me nosebleeds. I bolted and never set foot in that God awful place again.

So now I can't go to any malls because the smell of Abercrombie eu de vomit triggers a panic reaction. To be young and neurotic! -- mar mar