Mad About You
I rarely do reviews of television shows, because I am well aware that my taste isn’t for everyone. For example, virtually no-one but me wanted to see a documentary on the deleterious effects of bringing the cane toad into Australia, and that is their loss. I accept that a show which pleases me usually sends others frantically scanning up and down the channels, looking for re-runs of Dynasty or the Bass-Fishing Network. But, I must sing the praises of Mad Men.
Oh, how I love this show about advertising men in Manhattan in 1960. The writing is terrific and haunting, and the characters are flawed in totally satisfying ways. According to my mother, who wasn’t far from that world, the writers have gotten the whole mélange of sexism, racism, anti-Semitism and white-guy entitlement exactly right. I get to squeal is horrified delight when the eight months’-pregnant character is having a cocktail and a Virginia Slims. And over in the shallower end of the pool, it just looks so freaking good; all I want to do is tug my hair into a French twist and put on pointy-toed pumps. And that’s even remembering how my mother had to have bunion surgery in the 1980’s to repair the effects of pointy-toed 1959 shoes. And then there’s Jon Hamm, and he’s very nice, too.
But there was something else, something I couldn’t exactly define, which kept drawing me back to the show, leaving me in a near-opiatic state of contentment. What was it? On Halloween night, I was happy to find that friend Veronica felt much the same way. Well-drawn characters, blahblahblah, fabulous look, blahblahblah, Jon Hamm, blahblahblahblahblahblahblah(SIGH) blahblahblahblahblahblahblah.
“And don’t you just love it when he goes to work?” Veronica sighed, serving pizza to her daughter and mine, creating a base-layer of carbohydrates off of which the forthcoming candy could bounce.
I yelped, “That’s IT!”. Veronica’s children, unused to mothers who yelp, looked at me in confusion. Daughter, benumbed to me, gnawed away at her dinner. Veronica waited.
“You and I are fascinated by this show because the male characters go to work at the same time every day, come home at the same time every day, and wear grown men’s clothing all the time.”
She thought, and nodded. “You have to admit, it looks really good.”
We both love wonderful men who are terrific fathers to their kids. You would consider yourself lucky to have either as a friend. But the fact remains, they have weird careers. Veronica’s husband works in the entertainment industry on the production side; part of the reason he chose the job he did was so he could wear shorts to work for up to nine months a year. When he works, his hours are brutal and days frequently blur into one another. When he doesn’t work, he’s totally available to Veronica and the kids, but there’s also this undercurrent of “This was the very last job I will ever get. I will never work again.” This minor note becomes louder with each passing week until he gets hired and then he slips off to the dark side of the moon again.
Consort doesn’t work in the entertainment industry, a fact which relieves me this week when everyone else in Los Angeles is sweating about the writers’ strike. This doesn’t mean, however, that his job is the paragon of stability. Companies rent Consort’s brain. It’s a very nice brain, and I understand renting it, but it doesn’t lead to a life of great predictability. This is usually how a job contingent on brain-renting works:
1. In the first week, there are several meetings with the company at random times. This is the week I’ll see in him a suit, but I’ll also have no use of the big computer, because he’ll be printing out seemingly endless articles on something like “YouTube on the Space Station? How inter-planetary travel will affect advertising rates”. He mumbles a lot in the first week.
2. The company rents his brain and the Excel spreadsheet program springs into action. I don’t care what he’s doing; it’s improved by a spreadsheet showing the depreciation rate. The depreciation rate of what, you might ask? I asked for a few years, and now I don’t, because the answer was always very long and made me start eating my hair. It’s enough for all of us not renting his brain to know that things depreciate. Also, the phrase “Net Present Value” comes up; I’m not sure brain-renters feel they have gotten their money’s worth without that phrase splashed about. This is the time where our family relationship settles into 1) Quinn saying to Daughter, “Shh, Daddy is working”; 2) Daughter looking puzzled, because Daddy appears to be dressed like it’s a Saturday and is staring at the computer screen, and 3) Consort staring at the computer screen, mumbling. Sometimes during this week, he suddenly darts off to a meeting. These meetings inevitably take place across town and are called for rush-hour. Therefore, this is also the time where Consort is found at eleven p.m. sitting at the kitchen table, eating dinner and doing the crossword puzzle. If he sees me, he says things like “So, how are you two?” and “Has your hair always been that color?”
3. As we close in on the delivery date, Consort mumbles less, but swears more. Mostly, he sits at the computer breathing shallowly and typing. His wardrobe for this stage consists of jeans and t-shirts of such antiquity that they have the fragility of parchment and have all--no matter what color they started off--faded to the color of the water in which you rise off your watercolor brush. This wardrobe says “I am not going outside until this work is done.” Daughter and I kiss him gingerly as we leave for school each morning. Many congealed cups of milky coffee stand guard around the house. One night, he becomes fixated on fonts and margin-widths.
4. Finally, the project leaves, with a maddeningly anticlimactic click of a mouse. Consort makes the ceremonial trip to the dry-cleaners to pick up whatever part of his wardrobe is needed for the next meetings. I notice he’s writing an email with the heading of “Facebook and House Pets: The underserved market?”. Within days, he’s mumbling and Excel-ing again.
Without working up a sweat, I can think of fifteen families where the main breadwinner, be they male or female, works weird hours and rarely needs business clothes. I can only think of three families who have a parent who works from nine to five and wear traditional business clothing. Since we live in Los Angeles, that obviously weights my acquaintances towards the entertainment industry, but more than half of those families have parents who aren’t in the business at all. The greatest leap from Mad Men’s 1959 to now might not be that women aren’t just pointy-breasted objects of desire, or that Jewish and black people might actually be something besides two-thirds of a joke. Because, let’s face it, some men do still behave abysmally towards women in their office, and just because prejudice has become less socially acceptable doesn’t mean it’s gone. The thing which would be the most unrecognizable to those advertising men, those hipsters of their time, would be what we define as work.
Everything worth saying about what computers have done to our lives has been said, by people much smarter and better-paid than I am. In fact, I believe someone once rented Consort’s brain to talk about just that subject. I will only say this; I read once that Napoleon would have recognized how to command a Roman legion of nearly two thousand years’ earlier, because the weapons wouldn’t have changed all the much, but he wouldn’t have known what to do with tools from the Second World War, less than two hundred years after his life. Among all the other large concepts the computer has redefined (Friend, stranger, privacy), it has upended the idea of the job. The typical employee of the 1950’s might stay late at work, but when he left for the night, the work couldn’t follow him home. Their employees sat outside their office; Consort’s last employees were in the South Korea. No one I know expects to make it to getting the retirement gold watch with their job. Fewer and fewer companies are offering pension funds or even insurance. The average Baby Boomer held almost eleven jobs between the ages of eighteen and forty. The changing definition of work-hours is just the visible part of a fundamental change in the idea of work and our relationship to it.
I know what I make of the Mad Men; what would they have made of us?
Oh, how I love this show about advertising men in Manhattan in 1960. The writing is terrific and haunting, and the characters are flawed in totally satisfying ways. According to my mother, who wasn’t far from that world, the writers have gotten the whole mélange of sexism, racism, anti-Semitism and white-guy entitlement exactly right. I get to squeal is horrified delight when the eight months’-pregnant character is having a cocktail and a Virginia Slims. And over in the shallower end of the pool, it just looks so freaking good; all I want to do is tug my hair into a French twist and put on pointy-toed pumps. And that’s even remembering how my mother had to have bunion surgery in the 1980’s to repair the effects of pointy-toed 1959 shoes. And then there’s Jon Hamm, and he’s very nice, too.
But there was something else, something I couldn’t exactly define, which kept drawing me back to the show, leaving me in a near-opiatic state of contentment. What was it? On Halloween night, I was happy to find that friend Veronica felt much the same way. Well-drawn characters, blahblahblah, fabulous look, blahblahblah, Jon Hamm, blahblahblahblahblahblahblah(SIGH) blahblahblahblahblahblahblah.
“And don’t you just love it when he goes to work?” Veronica sighed, serving pizza to her daughter and mine, creating a base-layer of carbohydrates off of which the forthcoming candy could bounce.
I yelped, “That’s IT!”. Veronica’s children, unused to mothers who yelp, looked at me in confusion. Daughter, benumbed to me, gnawed away at her dinner. Veronica waited.
“You and I are fascinated by this show because the male characters go to work at the same time every day, come home at the same time every day, and wear grown men’s clothing all the time.”
She thought, and nodded. “You have to admit, it looks really good.”
We both love wonderful men who are terrific fathers to their kids. You would consider yourself lucky to have either as a friend. But the fact remains, they have weird careers. Veronica’s husband works in the entertainment industry on the production side; part of the reason he chose the job he did was so he could wear shorts to work for up to nine months a year. When he works, his hours are brutal and days frequently blur into one another. When he doesn’t work, he’s totally available to Veronica and the kids, but there’s also this undercurrent of “This was the very last job I will ever get. I will never work again.” This minor note becomes louder with each passing week until he gets hired and then he slips off to the dark side of the moon again.
Consort doesn’t work in the entertainment industry, a fact which relieves me this week when everyone else in Los Angeles is sweating about the writers’ strike. This doesn’t mean, however, that his job is the paragon of stability. Companies rent Consort’s brain. It’s a very nice brain, and I understand renting it, but it doesn’t lead to a life of great predictability. This is usually how a job contingent on brain-renting works:
1. In the first week, there are several meetings with the company at random times. This is the week I’ll see in him a suit, but I’ll also have no use of the big computer, because he’ll be printing out seemingly endless articles on something like “YouTube on the Space Station? How inter-planetary travel will affect advertising rates”. He mumbles a lot in the first week.
2. The company rents his brain and the Excel spreadsheet program springs into action. I don’t care what he’s doing; it’s improved by a spreadsheet showing the depreciation rate. The depreciation rate of what, you might ask? I asked for a few years, and now I don’t, because the answer was always very long and made me start eating my hair. It’s enough for all of us not renting his brain to know that things depreciate. Also, the phrase “Net Present Value” comes up; I’m not sure brain-renters feel they have gotten their money’s worth without that phrase splashed about. This is the time where our family relationship settles into 1) Quinn saying to Daughter, “Shh, Daddy is working”; 2) Daughter looking puzzled, because Daddy appears to be dressed like it’s a Saturday and is staring at the computer screen, and 3) Consort staring at the computer screen, mumbling. Sometimes during this week, he suddenly darts off to a meeting. These meetings inevitably take place across town and are called for rush-hour. Therefore, this is also the time where Consort is found at eleven p.m. sitting at the kitchen table, eating dinner and doing the crossword puzzle. If he sees me, he says things like “So, how are you two?” and “Has your hair always been that color?”
3. As we close in on the delivery date, Consort mumbles less, but swears more. Mostly, he sits at the computer breathing shallowly and typing. His wardrobe for this stage consists of jeans and t-shirts of such antiquity that they have the fragility of parchment and have all--no matter what color they started off--faded to the color of the water in which you rise off your watercolor brush. This wardrobe says “I am not going outside until this work is done.” Daughter and I kiss him gingerly as we leave for school each morning. Many congealed cups of milky coffee stand guard around the house. One night, he becomes fixated on fonts and margin-widths.
4. Finally, the project leaves, with a maddeningly anticlimactic click of a mouse. Consort makes the ceremonial trip to the dry-cleaners to pick up whatever part of his wardrobe is needed for the next meetings. I notice he’s writing an email with the heading of “Facebook and House Pets: The underserved market?”. Within days, he’s mumbling and Excel-ing again.
Without working up a sweat, I can think of fifteen families where the main breadwinner, be they male or female, works weird hours and rarely needs business clothes. I can only think of three families who have a parent who works from nine to five and wear traditional business clothing. Since we live in Los Angeles, that obviously weights my acquaintances towards the entertainment industry, but more than half of those families have parents who aren’t in the business at all. The greatest leap from Mad Men’s 1959 to now might not be that women aren’t just pointy-breasted objects of desire, or that Jewish and black people might actually be something besides two-thirds of a joke. Because, let’s face it, some men do still behave abysmally towards women in their office, and just because prejudice has become less socially acceptable doesn’t mean it’s gone. The thing which would be the most unrecognizable to those advertising men, those hipsters of their time, would be what we define as work.
Everything worth saying about what computers have done to our lives has been said, by people much smarter and better-paid than I am. In fact, I believe someone once rented Consort’s brain to talk about just that subject. I will only say this; I read once that Napoleon would have recognized how to command a Roman legion of nearly two thousand years’ earlier, because the weapons wouldn’t have changed all the much, but he wouldn’t have known what to do with tools from the Second World War, less than two hundred years after his life. Among all the other large concepts the computer has redefined (Friend, stranger, privacy), it has upended the idea of the job. The typical employee of the 1950’s might stay late at work, but when he left for the night, the work couldn’t follow him home. Their employees sat outside their office; Consort’s last employees were in the South Korea. No one I know expects to make it to getting the retirement gold watch with their job. Fewer and fewer companies are offering pension funds or even insurance. The average Baby Boomer held almost eleven jobs between the ages of eighteen and forty. The changing definition of work-hours is just the visible part of a fundamental change in the idea of work and our relationship to it.
I know what I make of the Mad Men; what would they have made of us?
posted by Unknown at 3:25 PM
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