The Awl

Dark AMC Now Booking Comedy and Reality Shows

Choire Sicha — Mon, 16 May 2011 10:30:50 +0000

"AMC, on the other hand, this year alone passed on 'Boss,' starring Kelsey Grammer with Gus Van Sant attached to direct the pilot (the project went to Starz). It turned down a J. J. Abrams pitch for a noir show one insider compares to Sin City. A high-profile pass Stillerman won’t name (it was Kevin Spacey’s 'House of Cards') 'was a very solid piece of material, needed a little work. But they wanted us to commit straight to series. And we were going to be deliberate developers. And a very good piece of talent walked out the door, because someone else was willing to order six or eight episodes right away.' That someone was, interestingly, Netflix."
—What's next for AMC and its magical TV touch? Comedy, baby. (Fellow wonks will be most interested in the financial stuff—for instance, AMC gets 40 cents per cable subscriber, while ESPN gets $4.)

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Footnotes of Mad Men: Full of Demands, Empty of Offerings

Natasha Vargas-Cooper — Mon, 18 Oct 2010 10:05:23 +0000

Don's right-about one thing, at least: teenagers are sentimental. The cynicism with which adults rebel comes from the nihilism of doing what you know is bad for you because you're old enough to understand that these things usually go unpunished. The kind of joyless self-indulgence that adults traffic in doesn't exist for teenagers. For the young, it's unfathomable that act of self-indulgence can bring anything but joy. In the twilight of childhood, you're not sure what's like to be an adult but you know what it feels like to not be a child. Every brush with adult behavior-anything from smoking, to sneaking out, to driving, to fucking-is wrapped in a gauzy, loving haze. (It's bittersweet though: as the twilight of childhood dims, there is within the heart of every teenager a dull throb that comes with the mourning of lost innocence.) What's alarming, then, is when grown-ups act like teenagers: denying themselves nothing, cherishing their transgressions like merit badges, constantly chasing the beginning of something, unable to parse the sensations of joys from despair.

• At the close of season two, we see Don greeting the Pacific Ocean with his arms outstretched. Wading in Southern California's baptismal waters, it seemed as though Don had found himself. But unlike prior visits, where Don has slinked out of the life he'd constructed on Madison Avenue, this time Don carried visible markings of his inability to conduct his life back home. There's Don on a California poolside patio, one of the most informal settings in the world... wearing a hat and a tweed jacket. By 1965, this outfit was severely old-fashioned and out-of-date. But it's not really a fashion faux-pas. It's Don's crisis: he's so hermetically ensconced in his own emotional life and its decadent dramas that he seems to have lost that once-sure grip on the world around him.

• Oh, Betty! We leave her sprawled out on Sally's stripped bed after getting (at last) reprimanded by her husband for acting out ("There are no fresh starts!"). One of the problems posed by the increased spending power of middle class families in the post war era is that they could now access the services once reserved for the aristocracy-namely, servants! Is Carla a nanny or a cleaning lady? A babysitter? Betty once said she didn't allow Carla to take the kids to the playground but does allow her to take young Sally to her shrink's office. Before the economic boom, nannies and maids were worlds apart. The sole responsibilities of nannies was the care of the children-like Marry Poppins! Some were formally trained to be maternal surrogates, while maids kept the house in order. The two were separate and there was a whole Victorian caste system and social mores about dress, expectations and wages to keep the whole thing in place.

In Maud Shaw's memoir about serving about serving as a nanny to Caroline and John Kennedy Jr., White House Nanny, she wrote, "The seven and a half years I was with her, [Jackie Kennedy] never as much asked me to pick up a pin for her. Even in the White House, she never once asked me to do anything that was not strictly within my province."

While Betty is from money and had a close relationship with her own nanny, she hasn't in her married life had the means to have a full-time live-in staff member. What you see transpire between Betty and Carla, with full-time, non-live-in domestic workers occupying the space between homemakers and housekeepers,creates the terrible and volatile dynamic that plays itself out in millions of homes today.

• In this season's penultimate episode, Don sat across from Midge and asked her, in earnest, why she didn't â€˜just quit' heroin. Her response later inspired Don to write his full-page-Times-ad tobacco letter. But we know something that Don may not have the wherewithal to recognize. He's an addict too. When Don doesn't have booze, and even sometimes when he does, he medicates with women.

In 1965, Life magazine did multi-page photo spread on two New York heroin junkies named John and Karen. Accompanying the shoot was James Mills' famous account of life in Needle Park (it would later become The Panic in Needle Park, staring Al Pacino).

Mills wrote:

Almost all addicts are childishly immature; full of demands, empty of offerings. When they want something, they it want it yesterday, and they want it effortlessly. Nothing is their fault-the addiction, their degradation, their desperation.... Psychiatrists who have studied them over long periods know that most of them are extremely narcissistic, that their intense preoccupation with heroin is a surface manifestation of a more profound emotional preoccupation with themselves.

In his village apartment, Don's fiancée sleeps in the crook of his arm. Outside, New York City is beginning to slip into one of its darkest periods. But not to worry. There's a lovely haunted house in Ossining that just went on the market.

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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Footnotes of Mad Men: Calling All Trumpeter Swans

Natasha Vargas-Cooper — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 10:30:57 +0000

Who knew that the advertising industry housed so many men of integrity? The ad above is by Bill Bernbach, a founder of Doyle Dane Bernbach and the Great Father of modern advertising. It was Bernbach who popularized the technique of counter-intuitive advertising. "Now I'm not talking about tricking people," Bernbach said. "If you get attention by a trick, how can people like you for it? For instance, you are not right if, in your ad, you stand a man on his head just to get attention. But you are right to have him on his head to show how your product keeps things from falling out of his pockets."

But what happens when everyone starts imitating the vanguard?

Bernbach choose to stick with the formula that set DDB out from the rest of Madison ad: use the flaws of a product to your advantage.

If we use Sally Draper's Land O'Lakes example of the lovely Indian lady holding a box of butter of a lovely Indian lady holding a box of butter to infinity, in this ad, Bernbach was critiquing not just the butter but the whole box. Advertising companies did not publicly acknowledge that they were advertising companies. (As in the words of Patron Saint of Serialized Drama, Tony Soprano: "THERE IS NO MAFIA!")

That is to say, when you admit that you are in the persuasion business, it speaks immediately to people's fears: you are persuading them with lies. Then Bernbach pulled this stunt, breaking down the fourth wall in a mea culpa that simultaneously trashed the whole industry and valorized one of the biggest companies in the industry. Think of the Etta James song that crooned at the end of the episode, "Trust In Me"

"Trust in me in all you do
Have the faith I have in you."

• Another master of public pith was David Ogilvy. He took the same strategy as Bernbach in calling the rest of the business a confederacy of hacks in this recruitment ad that ran in a series in several trade papers:

• "Although a crusader of the first order," ad man Leo Burnett wrote in the pages of Reader's Digest, "[Reader's Digest] does not preach, but helps me reach my own conclusions."

It was customary that the Digest would ask newsmakers to write a letter about why they read the magazine-to this day it has the highest paid circulation in print. It's also one of the few magazines that has never run a tobacco ad. The Digest was also the first of its kind to publish findings about the link between cigarettes and lung cancer.

So Leo Burnett was an unlikely endorserment, seeing as how he was synonymous with smoking. Burnett created the most seductive cigarette icon: the Marlboro man. Nevertheless, the image of Burnett ran in the only magazine that refused to run images created by Burnett. In the ad, he praised the Digest's decency, editorial sense and courage for taking on "knotty" or "abstruse" issues (like "some of the basic clues to the mystery of cancer"). And with a wink to his own reputation, Burnett warns the reader that the magazine "is habit forming."

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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Footnotes of Mad Men: Charismatic Domination, or, When Daddy Is A Disaster

Natasha Vargas-Cooper — Mon, 04 Oct 2010 12:20:43 +0000

Don! Since the beginning of "Mad Men," all have been agog about Don Draper's magnetism. What is it? Why do women wilt and men follow? How does his staff endure his endless floggings? (Ahem.) And how does he turn the most banal products into objects of desire? Granddaddy sociologist Max Weber provides an answer: Don is a charismatic. Charismatics draw their power from the mystic and divine. For the early Christians, a charismatic was a human vessel through which a god revealed its power. Charismatics are theatrical, eloquent, and fervent. We first saw a glimpse of Don's supernatural power when he coolly walked around a conference table of skeptical clients and said, "Listen, I'm not here to tell you about Jesus. You already know about Jesus, either he lives in your heart or he doesn't." The domination of the charismatic resides in the emotional response he arouses in his followers-and, of course, in the cash that he dispenses at his whim: "The followers share in the use of those goods which the authoritarian leader receives as donation, booty or endowment." Oh yes.

There are two other forms of this authority: traditional and bureaucratic. You can find their incarnations as well on the masthead of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce.

Bertram Cooper serves as a figurehead for the company; a vestigial authority whose power is drawn from tradition and formality. Cooper's right to rule is no longer based on his skill or prowess but solely due to custom. He is a monarch, priest, clan leader, a family patriarch whose authority is reinforced through myth and symbol. Weber classified traditional authority as pre-modern, feudal, but nevertheless, it's the most popular form of government (see: world history)! What does Bert Cooper do any more exactly? It doesn't matter! He is power because tradition is still sacred. As Weber put it, he is a part of the "the eternal yesterday."

Lane Pryce is the model of what Weber called "rational-legal authority," commonly known "bureaucratic authority." The legitimacy of bureaucratic authority comes from a shared system of rules, procedures, goals with â€˜members' of the organization. Rational/bureaucratic power is stable, central, disciplined, and without personality. Indeed, they are immune to personality ("Consider me the incorruptible exception," Lane barks at Joan when she tries to seduce). James MacGregor Burns described this sort of authority as "transactional": an efficient transfer of rewards and punishment between followers and their leader. Weber deemed this structure modern; Alexis De Tocqueville saw this same sort of system as something much more nefarious. It is "an immense and tutelary power" that "covers the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd."

What Lane and Bert have is stability. Don's power however is also combustible ("I WON A CLIO!"). Charisma is as volatile as the emotion that it inspires in others. Intense attraction can easily tip into intense hate and resentment. Charismatic authority is also unsustainable. A miracle worker's fulltime job is to make miracles, otherwise his followers turn. It's been torturous to watch Don lose his magic touch.

There is no leadership category for Roger Sterling because he is not a leader. He is a frail, collapsing charmer. Charmers have little to offer.

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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Footnotes of Mad Men: The Delinquent Hero on Hands and Knees

Natasha Vargas-Cooper — Mon, 27 Sep 2010 11:30:48 +0000

For drama, in the Greek sense, to resonate with the modern viewer it needs have three elements: Acknowledgement of the universe's benign indifference, recognition of the utter loneliness of human existence and a commitment to something or someone outside oneself even in the face of those two principles.

â€¢ The philosophical underpinnings of modern drama stem from the myth of Sisyphus. This is what Albert Camus described as the conflict between what we want from the universe (such as meaning, order, explanation) and what the universe gives us (a big rock that never makes it uphill). The great art produced in the latter half of the 20th century and this last decade embodies this existential stance.

â€¢ The exact moment of no spiritual return would have to be the use of the atomic bomb. In 1957, Norman Mailer diagnosed the unfathomable havoc the atomic bomb wreaked on the human psyche:

For the first time in civilized history, perhaps for the first time in all of history, we have been forced to live with the suppressed knowledge that the smallest facets of our personality or the most minor projection of our ideas, or indeed the absence of ideas and the absence of personality could mean equally well that we might still be doomed to die as a cipher in some vast statistical operation in which our teeth would be counted, and our hair would be saved, but our death itself would be unknown, unhonored, and unremarked, a death which could not follow with dignity as a possible consequence to serious actions we had chosen, but rather a death by deus ex machina in a gas chamber or a radioactive city; and so if in the midst of civilization-that civilization founded upon the Faustian urge to dominate nature by mastering time, mastering the links of social cause and effect-in the middle of an economic civilization founded upon the confidence that time could indeed be subjected to our will, our psyche was subjected itself to the intolerable anxiety that death being causeless, life was causeless as well, and time deprived of cause and effect had come to a stop.

The bleak realities of World War II, the camps, the annihilation of millions, according to Mailer, "presented a mirror to the human condition which blinded anyone who looked into it." The traditional values and expectations-the guilty are punished, the virtuous are rewarded, the authority of the church and state stand as legitimate-could no longer hold the same guarantee.

â€¢ A secular world is a lonely world. Isolation, the absence of wholeness; the longing for some structural integrity to the psyche permeates modern drama. Nietzsche said that once we reject the Christian myth, chaos ensues inside of us: "Are we not perpetually falling? Backward, sideward, forward, in all directions? Is there any up and down left? Are we not straying through an infinite nothing."

Science then validated our sense of isolation and insecurity with two words: kinetic theory. The discovery that solid objects were comprised of negative and positive electrons bouncing off one another in a constant state of gyration destroys the assumption that we can trust what we see or touch in front of us, let alone what we feel in our own bloody hearts. This insecurity translates itself, in narrative, into an identity crisis for our heroes, the very essence of himself questioned and unknowable.

â€¢ How did you feel when Don wolfishly smirked at his next possible sexual conquest? If you're like me, it was a twinge of disgust, then a rallying sense that "we got our boy back." While the afternoon of spooning post anxiety attack seemed delightful, it's Don's delinquency that enthralls us. Characters with mass appeal win their audiences not by demonstration of their heroic dimensions but through their display of weaknesses and ambiguities. When we get glimpses of nihilistic, fuck-all instinct in our hero, it's difficult not to feel twitches of worship. Pauline Kael, in an essay on appeal Dean and Brando called this certain kind of charisma "the glamour of delinquency":

One thing seems evident: when the delinquent becomes the hero in our films, it is because the image of instinctive rebellion expresses something in many people that they don't dare express...these kids seem to be the only ones irresponsible enough to act out, not the whole system of authority, morality, and prosperity.

If we know that attempts at individual decency go unrewarded, then it's up to the delinquent hero to test our limits of how much self-indulgence we can stomach. Kael points out that we're uneasy about the rebel's moral indifference. "When he attacks the weak or destroys promiscuously" then we realize what are necessary values. Otherwise it's all just too grim and disturbing. So we formulate our own ethical schema through their folly, always a bit on edge that we'll unwittingly beg our hero to go too far. Anyhow, that's why last night's episode was so damn good.

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Footnotes of Mad Men: Mrs. Draper, You've Got a Lovely Daughter

Natasha Vargas-Cooper — Mon, 20 Sep 2010 12:00:33 +0000

I don't need to tell you what going through puberty feels like, with all its urgency, eroticism, and ugliness. You went through it yourself. If you didn't go through it as a female, I can tell you that the desire to appear adult is consuming. Whenever there's role-playing to be done, the pubescent female will assume the role of Teacher in School, Doctor in the Hospital, Mother in House-and beware the girl who played student, patient, baby. For young girls, the thinking goes, if they exude an air of maturity, they'd be chosen to enter the world of adults. A young girl's desire to play cook is not only a demonstration of her ability to be an alchemist, converting raw globs of yoke and salt into something edible, but also to show that she can successfully manage adult responsibilities. This is to wriggle into the world of grown-ups. So there's no greater shame to be exposed as a fraud-when, despite a girl's best efforts, she finds herself reflected in the pitying leers of adults. There are few positions more shameful than face down on the hall floor of your father's office.

â€¢ Let's spend time in Sally's pre-teen world. It was likely that she would have subscribed to or at least thumbed through the teen magazines-an enduring badge of maturity for the aspiring adolescent. The most widely read teen glossy of the era: Seventeen. Also popular were Mademoiselle and Charm. While Mademoiselle modeled itself as a miniature Vogue-a self-serious catalogue of fashion, décor, and girl glamour-Seventeen followed in the tradition of Woman's Home Companion: home-spun advice on manners, recipes and thrifty clothes-shopping (not "fashion"). Fashion trends were acknowledged: for example, the cover girls, always with energetic smiles instead of a smoldering stare or pout, would be in step with the times (cropped clam-shell coifs were replaced with flips and bouffants), but the emphasis of the magazine was on wholesome living. In the essay "Up the Ladder: From Charm to Vogue," a history of women's magazines, Mary McCarthy described Seventeen this way:

Thoughtfulness is the motto. The difficulty between being both good and popular, and the tension between the two aims (the great crux of adolescence), are the staple matter of the fiction; every boy hero or girl heroine has a bitter pill to swallow in the ending... Poorly gotten out and cheaply written, it has, nevertheless an authentic small town air....

Another major motif of Seventeen is groupy-ness. "Get your gang together!" Each issue had a litany of projects that required every one's cooperation: games to play, after school theme parties, management of a high school prom-and even "how to stop a family quarrel."

â€¢ As far music goes, we can only imagine the sophistication Sally's musical palette. But if she's like most tweens of that era (with little cash to burn on obscure musical acts) then her tastes would be guided by what was popular and accessible. The Beatles were at their squeakiest in 1965 with "I Want To Hold Your Hand." In 1965, there was huge glut of girl groups, thanks in part to the success of the Supremes, who by that summer were having their fifth number-one hit. The major themes of the girl groups were ready-made for teenagers: puppy love, anxiety over chastity, loneliness, hopes of marriage, talk of boyfriends. The groups ranged from the soulful New-Jersey-founded Shirelles, who had sex laced throughout their lyrics, to the more proper lyrics of the Bronx-born Chiffons. Compare the lyrics of the Chiffons' Carole-King-penned "One Fine Day"....

One fine day
You'll look at me
And you will know
Our love was meant to be
One fine day
You're gonna want me for your girl

The arms I long for
Will open wide
And you'll be proud
To have me by your side
One fine day
You're gonna want me for your girl....

To the Shirelles, on the opposite tip, from 1963:

Foolish little girl, fickle little girl
You didn't want him when he wanted you
He's found another love, it's her he's dreaming of
And there's not a single thing that you can do

"Forget him cause he don't belong to you"
"It's too late he's found somebody new"
"There's not a single thing that you can do"

But both groups were on their way out with the tide-even though Motown was just five years old. Jefferson Airplane was forming. Phil Spector was about to retire (for the first time). The Rolling Stones were on the top of the charts.

â€¢ Speaking of boyfriends, we already met the man who brought Sally to slip her hands under her nightgown: David McCallum, our man from UNCLE. Another male who could have seized her heart (and hands) was Luke Halpin, the often-shirtless, tawny star of "Flipper," both the films and the TV series that began in 1964. Halprin was the Zac Efron of the afternoon airwaves.

But Sally has already displayed a taste for more mature objects of erotic fantasy. For Sally's gaze, then, Warren Beatty.

He had become one of Hollywood's most formidable sexual personae (cough) by 1965. He was still boyish, still too young to be considered anything but beautiful. He was fresh off his turn as a gigolo in 1961's "The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone" (co-starring Lotte Lenya!), in which his sex appeal could not be undone by his horrible Italian accent. Though Beatty oozed sex more freely than Brando or Dean, he was withholding, mischievous, cerebral, a bit troubled on screen. Critic David Thomson wrote of Beatty, in 2004: "Beatty was not open or generous. He seemed reluctant to yield himself up... Despite valiant efforts, Beatty the actor never persuaded me that he knew how to lose control... Control is his thing and maybe his curse."

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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Footnotes of Mad Men: The Promethean Woman, or, Our Dog in the Parthenon

Natasha Vargas-Cooper — Tue, 07 Sep 2010 11:40:08 +0000

â€¢ One myth that arose from some proponents of the women's liberation movement is that a terminated pregnancy doesn't change a person. The idea that it does was reasonably considered fodder for the other side-that this view enhanced the notion that not caring for a child conceived in your body is an abandonment of biological and moral responsibilities. In reaction then, a PR move has often been adopted into an unconvincing pro-choice ideology: a woman can go through a pregnancy without some lasting change to her psyche and system. The enlightened woman, the idea was, could go through terminating a pregnancy or putting a child up for adoption without the burden of sin or shame. This idea discounts that a pregnancy can, and often does, change everything.

â€¢ Simone de Beauvoir wrote that "one is not born a woman; one becomes a woman." Even postmodern feminism and materialist feminism in some ways express the same: that there is no essentialness to womanhood, merely constructions-in the eyes of the postmodernists, totally linguistic constructions. But the act of childbirth and abortion are unique to women and there's much violence associated with both. Blood, suction, tearing, screaming, stitches; all civilization falls away when you enter and exit the birth canal. In both situations, birth or abortion, a woman is at the mercy of nature. Not only is her body surging with chemicals that tell her to bond with the creature metastasizing inside of her-even when the creature is beyond her body-but biology creates a ricochet. The female circuitry is shorted; enormous emotional triggers are switched. A darkness can fall that seems impenetrable. Woman swells, transforms and experiences carnage, she cannot grasp nature's bare blade without shedding blood. She does this alone and the knowledge derived from this confrontation will always set her apart.

â€¢ The Promethean narrative in Western Civilization is an inherently male one. There are exceptions, when women strike out and create their own lasting fires, usually in the arts, sometimes in science or industry. But in general, the protagonist is a man. (Perhaps because he is unencumbered by nature's strong arm?) The diversion-or destiny-of woman's will to power in the domestic sphere has been one of our great dilemmas, especially when that ambition for achievement and desire for hierarchical dominance pushes in her into the race with men. Domestic affairs, then, inspire the anxiety of creative annihilation. Especially for women-because not only are you fighting with men all day for glory, recognition and resources, but then having to face the threat that your life and heart could be ensnared in a domestic drama by a man? Ghastly. This is why a woman with the Promethean ambition kindles and protects her spark with the sacrifice of domestic harmony (and at great peril). Any man who does not share her Promethean spark should be regarded as a distraction (sometimes, of course, a welcomed one.).

â€¢ For the Promethean woman, most men are a race of confederates, with the frequent exception of two: one's dad and one's boss. The latter assumes the role of the former when she becomes an adult. But a boyfriend offers a predestined biological path. The ultimate consummation of that relationship will end with her becoming nature's conscript: a mother, a wife, the vessel for a lineage. Whereas, what she could achieve with an admired professional patriarch is glory, power, even empire.

Sometimes these desires misfire (Freud's "erotic transference"); a woman's desire for approval gets scrambled and mistaken for a desire to conquer. A mistaken lady may endeavor to exploit or control the power dynamic and the intensity of her admiration by bringing her boss down to the level where men most often see her: as sexual object. This undermines his authority and gives her the advantages of other women. With the right amount of backbone, a male boss could resist the storm of her advances in exchange for achievement of their shared goals. If he's smart, he could tell the difference between admiration and attraction, even when she doesn't. Acting on these emotions is behavior reserved for equally predatory and pathetic men. But a real boss is equipped to meet the psychological needs of a real, unconfused Promethean woman. He serves as a father-figure, existing as one of the few men in the world who make no biological demands of her. At best, like a father, he is there to reward her best behavior with attention, praise and advancement.

This is why the approval of your boss outweighs that of your boyfriend.

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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Footnotes of Mad Men: From Lubricated to Morose

Natasha Vargas-Cooper — Mon, 30 Aug 2010 11:42:42 +0000

Don Draper didn't know his father, so he examines figures of male authority that he dreads becoming. One is Roger Sterling. Unfortunately, Don's current trajectory points to a Sterling finish. Right now, he's an entitled lush who skips out on his family, cuts corners, sleeps with the secretaries and-worst of all-he settles for mediocre copy. One day you're taking a drunken self-congratulatory lap around a conference room of potential clients, the next day you're in a dusty corner office wistfully dictating your memoir to a bored secretary.

â€¢ The Vicks Chemical Company for which Peggy and the beastly art director strip down to brainstorm plays a significant role in the liturgy of advertising. Vicks is where Draper Daniels got his start in the industry. The Chemical Company offered aspiring ad men a crack at copywriting in their New York offices if they spent a year in the field pitching Vicks' products door to door. "A salesman," Daniels wrote in his autobiography, Giants, Pygmies and other Advertising People, "traveling, or otherwise, was the last thing in the world I wanted to be, but the â€˜plus expenses and a car [offer]' shattered any sales resistance." After a year of canvassing the South in the name of cough syrup and vapor rub, Daniels landed in the New York headquarters and was eventually hired by Young and Rubicam, the premier ad agency of the 1940s. Per Daniels: â€˜Young and Rubicam was heaven, or the next door to it, and God's name was Rubicam."

â€¢ Cold medicine also served as a histamine-free muse for one of the other advertising greats: Julian Koenig.

Koenig, a copywriter, and George Lois, art director, were the first ad and copy team to break off and start their own boutique company (Papert, Koenig, Lois) after their success with the Volkswagen campaign (Think Small and Lemon) at Doyle Dane Bernbach. The upstart ad agency garnered a good deal of esteem in 1964 when their commercial for Xerox nabbed a Clio for this quite dry but very effective ad.

â€¢ The April 1965 copy of Playboy that the Stan was thumbing through featured the following pieces:

–An interview: Art Buchwald

–Excerpt from â€˜Man With The Golden Gun' by Ian Fleming

–"The Force of Habit" by oil tycoon J. Paul Getty.

Getty had this to say:

The individual who wants to reach the top in business must appreciate the might of the force of habit and must understand that practices are what create habits. He must be quick to break those habits that can break him and hasten to adopt those practices that will become the habits that help him achieve the success he desires.

â€¢ So what of the â€˜Klan-ad' cameo in the new art director's resume?

This was part of the historic Lyndon Johnson presidential campaign against Barry Goldwater from 1964. President Johnson hired DDB to produce the spots. The Klan commercial never ran, largely because the first spot in the series caused such a furious reaction from the GOP and television viewers. This was the Daisy spot.

(Better resolution here.)

It only ran once but that was enough (50 million people were watching). News programs ran the ad, newspapers covered the reactions: anyone who hadn't seen the ad was sure to have been told about it. The GOP chairman, Dean Burch, filed a formal complaint to the Fair Election Practices committee: "This horror-type commercial is designed to arouse basic emotions and has no place in this campaign."

Well, Burch was right. "The commercial evoked a deep feeling in many people that Goldwater might actually use nuclear weapons," said Tony Schwartz, the ad-man responsible for Daisy and the never aired Klan spot. Schwartz, whose major client before the White House was American Airlines, also said: "the stimuli of the film and sound evoked these feelings and allowed people to express what they inherently believed."

There is, however, no Clio award to be had in the category of political advertising.

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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Footnotes of Mad Men: A Century of Roger Sterling

Choire Sicha — Mon, 23 Aug 2010 11:50:34 +0000

I went to bed angry and I woke up angry over 1. what a horrible, nasty, vicious monster Betty Draper is and 2. that little contrivance in last night's "Mad Men" episode. Roger Sterling dropped a name, which was then echoed by Pete Campbell, all seemingly intended as a psychological experiment to see what would happen on the Internet as a result. I thought it was an irritating meta-joke about advertising and I, for one, am not having it. You can Google the name of the doctor referenced if you're curious. SPOILER: IT'S NOT ANYONE. I don't want to play their little viral reindeer games! (Someone please make me an animated gif of a viral foaming reindeer? Thanks!) Let's look instead at the passage of time.

â€¢ Our racist Roger Sterling was born circa 1912. The year Woodrow Wilson beat Taft and Theodore Roosevelt. The year New Mexico became a state... THE 47TH STATE. The year the Titanic sunk. You know how they say social change comes from waiting from older people to die? Well.

â€¢ And Sally Draper was born in, what, 1954? At least, this piece of slash fiction places her as five years older than "30 Rock"'s Jack Donaghy.

â€¢ But what about 1965? And the cultural scene? Somewhere off-camera, lots of stuff is happening. By now, Ken Cosgrove was already reading Everything That Rises Must Converge, which had by now been in print for a couple months. (And our show's homosexual pal Sal may be long missing, but over in England, Francis Bacon and George Dyer were setting up home together and preparing for a trip to New York.) Here's what's to come as 1965 rolls along.

Natasha Vargas-Cooper is on vacation this week.

Still, you can always find more footnotes right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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Footnotes of Mad Men: The Youth Machine and Godzilla Handjobs

Natasha Vargas-Cooper — Mon, 09 Aug 2010 12:00:14 +0000

The main ingredients of American counterculture formation all guest-starred in last night's "Mad Men" episode: abortion, Berkeley, Vietnam and, most ominously: young people. The â€˜youthquake' is not just an explosive population boom, it's when, supposedly, teenagers and college students seized control of culture from adults. At the very least, they seized control of the consumer goods market. Beginning around the 1920s, a common theme in advertising was to offer a return to youth and vitality (and relevance in the towering industrial age) through consumer goods. Oatmeal, face creams, sodas all made mention of youth in their slogans. But that was selling youth to the aging. In the 60s, the symbolic role that youth played in American culture-honesty to self, renewal, rejection of ancient values-became a driving market force. This notion was really that becoming an adult meant participating in consumer culture. This is perhaps the most loathsome legacy of the Boomer's ascent to cultural dominance: the perpetual teenage mentality of rebellion through buying things.

â€¢ The dogma of parental authority was being slowly dismantled through the early 60s and was eventually bulldozed, thanks in part to the protest movement coming from Don's Long Beach Lolita's college. Throughout much of 1963, Berkeley students were actively involved in mass protests against banks, grocers and city government for racial discrimination taking place in nearby Oakland-a suburb that played host to a tiny affluent population and a large, mostly black population mired in grinding poverty. After enough business owners and politicians complained to the school's administration for their unruly and cantankerous student body, the Berkeley dean took action: student political groups were banned from using the school's plaza to solicit support for "off campus political and social action." This sparked giant and immediate demonstrations on the plaza, in front of the administration's building and eventually inside of the dean's office. In the melee, a charismatic young man with wild hair and a riveting manner became the de facto leader of the protests when he gave this impromptu speech in late 1964, before leading students into halls of the dean's office for a sit-in.

There is a time when the operation of the machine becomes so odious, makes you so sick at heart, that you can't take part; you can't even passively take part, and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears and upon the wheels, upon the levers, upon all the apparatus, and you've got to make it stop. And you've got to indicate to the people who run it, to the people who own it, that unless you're free, the machine will be prevented from working at all.

â€¢ Joan has had abortions or, as she refers to them "procedures," but now Joanie would like the option to have a baby. Though her doctor has proven himself to be a condescending finger-wagger when it comes to ladies and family planning (remember in season one, when he warned Peggy not to become the "town pump" if he gave her the pill?), he was willing to put not just his medical license on the line but possibly his own freedom, as he once performed an abortion for Joan. Aborting pregnancies in 1964 in New York, depending on the length of pregnancy, could mean jail time for physicians.

If Joan were to find herself with an unwanted pregnancy-as a married lady-she could have put in application to the Mount Sinai abortion panel in New York. She would have needed the recommendation of a psychiatrist that her life would be in danger if she were to become pregnant-due to threats of suicide or a promise utter mental collapse. Then two consultants would have to be consulted and one would have to testify before the abortion panel. 1 out of 4 abortions approved by the panel in 1958 were given to married women. It wasn't until 1965 that abortion reform would begin to loosen state laws around performing legal abortions for rape and incest victims.

â€¢ Lane Pryce with his lower-upper class accent and prim disposition! He makes me want to salute the Union Jack every time he comes on screen. (Or, apparently, off-screen.) He was finally on camera long enough to get a look at that distinctly continental apparel. The English suit that Pryce dons is heavy even for winter, nothing like the less-elaborate suits of Wall Street in the 60s, or the slanted pocket Italian suit with the barely-there-lapels. Pryce's suit is purebred English: with vest, tie with a full Windsor knot, in muted browns, grays, and blues-if you want to get cheeky you could go cream-a white pocket square (no patterns), with the shirt quite starchy with hard collar. (He's an interesting contrast as Don's ties are getting ever-thinner.) And on the jacket, beautiful buttonholes. As Oscar Wilde wrote, "A really well made buttonhole is the only link between art and nature." An Englishman's business style rested upon the idea that through conformity to tradition there is dignity.

You can always find more footnotes by Natasha Vargas-Cooper right here, or, you know, you can get a whole book of 'em.

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