MAD MEN on AMC - Season 6

ama I just think that this show has always been boring/soapish/omg60sish, and it's lol to hear the same things every season as people reacclimate to this show being all those things just like it was before

you're the sort of guy who jumps into pools without dipping your toe

'je t'aime moi non plus' was a minor hit in the us (huge hit in the uk), i could imagine hipsters being aware of 'bonnie and clyde', plus using it is a twofer for period refs. scene might've been irredeemably ott if joan had met brigid berlin and they'd had a bitch off or something but as is it didn't seem too the 60s: the miniseries, the show generally does a good enough job of letting us know that 'the 60s' is something that isn't happening to these ppl that i'll cut it slack when it acknowledges the big 60s. was also just happy to see joan wearing something flattering again.

silby otm

were Americans really even aware of Gainsbourg in '68 (serious question). I mean, that song wasn't a hit, was it?

not a hit but in the context of Electric Circus and an art-rock, Velvet Underground type of crowd and music policy I think it's plausible someone would know it

I think Serge got more (in)famous when Je T'aime was banned but that wasn't until later

xpost

my fave period note 'god it must be fun to work on that show' detail was the greeting card

this was a little "the 60s: the miniseries" no?

but that's the only reason I watch this show!

The '60s did not really happen in the same way as we're given to believe for a lot of people who were born just a few years 'too soon'. My mom kind of resents heading straight out to work after graduating, thusly missing a chance to be part of some new wave of whatever.

i liked that joan seemed out of place and kinda square there but still game. everyone's don draper hanging out w/ beatniks now.

My mom kind of resents heading straight out to work after graduating, thusly missing a chance to be part of some new wave of whatever.

My mom, the Rush Limbaugh fan, agrees.

This is the root of all the early-boomer resentment filling Rupert Murdoch's pockets, I think. People who continued their studies or didn't climb on a treadmill of really boring lower-middle-class jobs aren't quite so Rush-receptive.

if you look at average yearbook from 68 or 69 you're going to see way more crewcuts than longhairs, the 60s doesn't really arrive and root itself in middle america until the 70s. hippies are something they see destroying america on tv (and love reagan for standing up to and making jokes about them), the closest direct connection is fear yr daughter will runaway and join them (i've always wondered if there was an actual wave of runaways in the late 60s/early 70s or if the numbers didn't really budge dramatically there was just new hysteria/focus from media and parents and a root cause they could point to - 'san francisco'; i know that dean corll was able to get away w/ his killings for so long cuz houston pd at the time just habitually chalked up missing children to runaway).

have you guys thumbed through copies of old JC Penny's catalogs? The reifying of sixties fashion doesn't happen until '72: when Dad wears plaid and doesn't trim his sideburns while Mom pours three gallons of mayonnaise in the olive loaf mix.

i mean betty draper looking for sally's non-prodigy friend amongst the hippies was part character beat for betty but also addressing the atmosphere that led to movies like joe.

interesting interview - http://cup.columbia.edu/static/Interview-Staller-Karen

yeah my inlaws have a big chip on their shoulder against an imagined stereotype of california trust fund hippie kids partying while they were already being responsible adults (had a kid at age 17). It's a weird resentment though because it's not like the age or the kid was holding them back. even if they grew up on haight street and turned 18 in 1967 they would still be squares.

I mean these two aren't young: http://www.flickr.com/photos/jbcurio/8472277837/in/pool-97769629@N00/

i swear more than fear or greed resentment is the biggest motivator in american politics today

the 60s doesn't really arrive and root itself in middle america until the 70s.

Rolling Stone had a weed column in its first year-and-a-half or so, and it would track polls on legalization. iirc, pro-legalization never polled at more than 25-30%, which RS presented as an encouraging sign.

Also, in 1969 things like this could still attract 30,000 kids.

http://www.mygen.com/users/ufo/images/Laurel_Canyon/VitoPaulekas.gif

My mom saw the Rolling Stones five years before Altamont and with only 199 others so it's not that. You didn't need to own a roach clip to hate Nixon.

Your yearbook picture is always taken in the first week back, and if you're a senior it's taken in the last August you will spend anticipating high school. The '60s as fashion culture were never gonna show up in a yearbook before that. My mom's public school had a dress code until 1970, when they also did away with capital punishment and making the boys swim naked in their single-sex lessons.

one of my fave parts of nixonland is all the square rallies that nixon's crew would invite a few protestors and hippies to to crack down on

yeah my dad saw big brother & the holding company and bands like that play little free shows on the berkeley campus, was at the anti-war march from berkeley to oakland where the hells angels were beating up protesters at the border, etc. but he's always been a total preppie. it was funny watching that merry pranksters magic bus documentary and seeing what a bunch of preppy jocks they all were.

xxpost

um, suzy do you mean corporal punishment or did your mom go to the world's harshest high school?

What the seventies were about imo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27096349@N07/4716137445

omg i love that photo

lol of course whoever's flickr stream that is would have a mad men avatar

corn on the cob with river pebbles for breakfast!

shag rug that blends with pooch!

truly a magnificent time

ugh, I can smell that photo from here

omg I love that so much, Alfred

virile beards and body hair loool

Barbarism imo: http://www.flickr.com/photos/27096349@N07/5053346213

for people who fucking HATE everything about prawns except the taste

goddamn that bums me out

This makes me feel like pulling out and scanning pictures from the Betty Crocker recipe card library from 1971 that my mom gave me.

we have a whole thread for discusting recipe cards, pleeeeease do that Nicole I will love you forever

I live for that

When I get home I will work on it.

except gaaaah I can't think what the thread was called, I'll see if I can find it

aha! found it:

Completely disgusting foods our parents ate

ahahhahahhaha Corporal punishment, yeah. Very stuffy head today, this is the closest I'll get to thinking tonight.

Both my uncles had blond heinies and wore Oxford shirts with chinos straight through until '70; they're to the left of my mom's politics now. Her older peer group were like the kids in Hairspray who wanted to dance to rhythm and blues by black artistes, not Pat Boone covers of same. She believes James Brown, Tina Turner and The Supremes had more to do with desegregating America than various social-justice leaders. The situ with my mom and 'the counterculture' reminds me of the denouement of Absolute Beginners when the Notting Hill ted/mod-era types return to the jazz club, see hippies, and know in their bones that culture is moving along to the next thing.

yeah i've heard 'sam cunningham did more to desegregate alabama than mlk or thurgood marshall'. which is bullshit obv but true enough in a certain way.

http://www.thingx.tv/articles/mad-men-poetry-recap-to-have-and-to-hold-2352/

From Slate's episode review, a well written conclusion I think:

Television is eating Don’s world. He wants to sell white space above some french fries so that people will live with ketchup all day long. The man from Heinz wants the bottle. Both are selling something hollow, but it’s Don who believes. And the people around him just aren’t buying it any longer. Peggy is gone. Megan is furious. Dawn, a relative stranger, knows that the whole business is rotten; she sees the fear that holds the place together. And Sylvia does as well. She doesn’t pray for Don to visit. She prays for him to find peace.

Oh, and there is, indeed, this:

As for Sylvia going up in the elevator? Well, I don’t know. I want her to have pigeons on the roof.

What was that anyway?

Full disclosure: I thought SCDP's ketchup pitch was far superior to Peggy's, which seemed way too unimaginative. Disregarding Don selling absence, I really liked it as a campaign.

And from Vulture's review, this is indeed something that is recurring lately:

Yes, I’m growing a bit impatient with my beloved Mad Men — with Don, at least. Granted, this is a slow-burn show in the mode of the last big drama that creator Matthew Weiner worked on, The Sopranos, so I still hold out hope that the writers are arranging pieces that’ll all come together in the season’s back-half — something to do with abortion or a Don Draper health crisis, I’m betting. (During Megan and Don’s dinner with the swingers, Don was warned off cigarettes yet again; they’re averaging one anti-tobacco reference per episode now.

I liked how the swinger wife advised Megan not to smoke, which was immediately followed by Don sparking her cig. Classic dick move.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cKIK8B0MjVc

yeah i'd thought the anti-smoking thing in the first episode was just a sign of changing times and then after that just what you'd expect from a doctor but it coming up at the swingers dinner seems to mean there's something deliberate to it.

Not relevant, but best Great Shakes ad: http://youtu.be/b3qbUQ9oPYw

Don tried to watch those Great Shakes ads, but turned them off because he didn't "get" it.

Then Stan got him high.

wondering what the results of a sal vs stan poll would be