Carousel of Nostalgia

My kids love to view, and print, photographs whenever they are at home. We went through hundreds of pictures with T the past few days, dating all the way back to when he was a baby. His favorites this go-around were photos of him at the Alexandria, Louisiana, Zoo. A caught on to T's fascination with photographs when T began returning to St. Mary's with dozens of prints every time he came home. A now has me printing photos, and A has had me drive past his old school and a few other places he used to love but hasn't cared about more recently.



This clip expresses my kids' nostalgia for photographs and drives past the old places better than I ever could. As I've already written, I just finished the first season of this show on DVD this past week. This is one of the final moments of the season, and it was on my mind when T and I were looking at photos. The kids' nostalgia habits were also on my mind when I was watching the scene, and I almost got a little weepy.

Mad on TV

I finished watching the first season of Mad Men the other day. I love everything about this show. It is extra-stylish and fabulously written, acted, and produced. On its face, it's a drama about the freewheeling advertising industry on Madison Avenue (hence, "Mad Men") in the early 1960s, with career-obsessed, promiscuous, unfaithful husbands, and emotionally repressed, deliberately ignorant (as the law defines that term), long-suffering, passive-aggressive, pre-feminist wives. Who said the sexual revolution started with the hippies? Thanks to the show being on AMC, the sexual aspects of the storyline are not shown explicitly, though there is one hilarious shadowboxing scene in one episode, where a janitor sees the shadows of two characters going at it through a frosted office window. Also, as DW pointed out, there is very little strong language used in the show. IOW, any gentle readers who are concerned about such things can actually watch this show without waiting for it to be sanitized a la The Sopranos on A&E.

Underneath its glittering surface, Mad Men about how we restless Americans are to a certain extent able to invent and reinvent ourselves however we choose and present ourselves to different people in different ways, sometimes genuine and honest; sometimes cynical and dishonest; sometimes all of those things at once. Don Draper, the main character, has actually invented Don Draper from someone else of very humble origins, and has become very accomplished in the cynical advertising industry. He's an astonishingly complicated and comparmentalized character with massive flaws and hidden insecurities, arguably the most fully realized character in television history. As a viewer, you can't help but love him, even when he's catting around while his terrific wife is depressed, lonely, and isolated at home. There is also a strong theme of longing for approval and validation in the show--particularly men seeking approval from other men--and that theme is played with great subtlety by several of the main characters. I can't wait to get to Season Two to see how these characters develop. I may have to download it from iTunes to tide myself over until the DVD set comes out next July.

You know your show has arrived when it is parodied on The Simpsons.

Oh, the humanity!

Tina Fey couldn't have thought this up. Gov. Palin pardons a turkey, then, well, you have to see it to believe it. Tip of the hat to The Cajun Boy.

Don Draper, role model

Sam Walton's Utopia

T has become obsessive about getting Incredible Hulk plush toys from the crane machines in Wal-Mart foyers. He generally has an adult manipulate the crane for him, but he has of late insisted on having a go or two at it himself, which is good for his hand/eye coordination and fine motor skills. The quest became personal for DW and I this past Saturday. We became obsessed as we tried to pull an Incredible Hulk away from the glass on the back of the machine, grab ahold of it, move it, and drop it down the chute. T stood beside the machine, jumping up and down and shouting “green! green! green!” and yelling in agony whenever DW had to go into the store to get change for another go-around. A couple of people looked around the corner into the machine nook to make sure I wasn’t abusing my kid. We moved the Incredible Hulk so that his head was lying on the edge of the chute, and T became increasingly excited and agitated. DW finally got the toy on the hook and over the chute--and then it didn’t drop! She had to insert another quarter and push the button immediately, and the Incredible Hulk was T’s. He opened up the baby seat on the Wal-Mart cart and placed the toy there, for a ride through the store. Victory!

A celebrated his 10th birthday on Monday, and he had a very happy time at home. We decided to put up our Christmas tree early this year and create a season for the kids, to compensate for the fact that Christmas Day sucks out loud for them because nothing is open.

Alas, I didn’t get the star up on the tree by the time A got home on Sunday, so I took him to look at the one true star in most North American households this time of year.

A also has a thing for the machines in the Wal-Mart foyer, but he likes to have me read individual letters from the logos. I mimic a mechanical voice as I say “c-o-k-e” and so on. I’m hoping that A may develop enough of an understanding that letters form words and words are powerful that he may learn to read, even if he remains without speech.

We had an odd mens’ room experience on the way back to Alexandria yesterday. I took A into the bathroom at a Wal-Mart, where he generally uses a toilet stall. Both of the stalls in this mens’ room were in use, so I made A stand next to me and wait. And wait. And wait. Finally, I had to take him over to use a urinal, and I changed his pull-up while he stood there (he has a bowel control issue, and it can injure his dignity to be seen wearing pull-ups, which we only use while traveling, so I wasn't happy about changing him in the middle of the mens' room). I wanted to tell the guys in the stall that they should do like everybody else and go log on the Internet if they wanted to spank the monkey, but that this was a most inappropriate venue for that activity. I mean, who takes that long to go, you know?

The id of the American Male--drill baby drill

Your humble correspondent gave into temptation last night and picked up American Movie Classics' dramatic series Mad Men on DVD. I'd not seen any of the show, as the first season aired opposite Burn Notice, and we don't have tivo. I suspected that Mad Men would appeal to me, as several members of the production team of The Sopranos are involved in the show. Still, holy crap, this show is great!

Mad Men is all about the Freudian id and ego of the well-off American male, during the early 1960s--a period when the uninhibited desires of men pretty much had free reign--and the fallout that the male id had on the more inhibited women of the same period. The show is set in a glamorous Madison Avenue ad agency, in a time when the advertising industry was viewed as sexy and hip (except maybe when Darren Stevens worked there). The ad industry in Mad Men cynically sold an illusion of happiness, even if the product was toxic (cigarettes in the first episode, which made me think of the movie Thank You For Smoking). There is a ton of overt sexist aggression and a fabulously politically incorrect amount of cigarette smoking. There are glimpses in Season One of some of the social changes that were to come about later in the '60s (the Pill, for one, and a few strong female character), but only glimpses thus far.

One thing that hit home was the deluded version of happiness that the agency was selling. How many of us have looked around at our relative prosperity, good educations, decent careers, and otherwise pretty good circumstances, yet felt somehow empty and unfulfilled? It's like our inner, subconscious selves are out of alignment with what our conscious minds tell us we are, and even more out of alignment with what we show of ourselves to the rest of the world. Classic Jungian neurosis, I suppose.

The central character is advertising artist Don Draper (Jon Hamm), who has a lovely wife and family and a house in the suburbs. Yet, as an artist, he has a bohemian side, so he has an artiste girlfriend in Greenwich Village. He also puts the make on a female department store, to whom he is attracted by her strength and her understanding of his detached, nihilistic worldview.

In terms of intelligence and production values, this show is on the level of The Sopranos and Dexter. DW agrees, and she noticed that the sexual content of the show is PG-13 at worst, even though there is a ton of skirt-chasing going on. I noticed that Season Two of Mad Men will be ending this week. I look forward to picking that up on DVD also.