I hope the odd hours gave different people a chance to play. You always ask for that.
Archive for July 9, 2008
Late Tuesday Trivia: Quotes of the 1940s
1. Strange that a man can live with a woman for ten years and not know the first thing about her.
Solved by Hazel (comment #4).
2. I’m going crazy. I’m standing here solidly on my own two hands and going crazy.
Solved by George (comment #1).
3. This is the land of milk and honey for the health racket. Every woman in California thinks she’s either too fat or too thin or too something.
Solved by Melville (comment #6).
4. Ever hear of the decline and fall of the Roman Empire? That was our crowd.
Solved by Evn (comment #5).
5. Yeah, yeah, I know that bromide. Something borrowed, something blue – old, new! Rice and old shoes, carry you over the threshold, Niagara Falls – all the silly tripe I’ve made fun of for years. Is this what I’ve come to? I can’t go through with it. I won’t marry you and that’s that!
Solved by Dawa Lhamo (comment #8).
6. Hey look, Mister – we serve hard drinks in here for men who want to get drunk fast, and we don’t need any characters around to give the joint “atmosphere”.
Solved by George (comment #1).
7. My dear, since Eve picked the apple, no woman has ever been taken entirely unawares.
Solved by Amy (comment #3).
Trivia will be a nighttime event today
Or tonight.
So busy now.
Monday Not-Movie Review: “Mad Men” Season 1
Mad Men Season 1 (2007) 10/10
It’s 1960 and Don Draper is the Creative Director of Sterling Cooper, a mid-sized Madison Avenue advertising company. The series follows the lives and uncovers the secrets of Don, his secretary Peggy, the staff of Sterling Cooper, and their families.
Okay, so I haven’t watched a movie in two weeks. Has that ever happened before? But my Mad Men DVDs came, and I’m obsessed with this show. Yes, so obsessed I’ve got a blog.
You’re probably not watching Mad Men, even though it was on everybody’s “Best of 2007” list and won awards and shit, because it wasn’t well-promoted. But season 2 starts on July 27 (AMC, 10pm Eastern), and there’s a season 1 marathon on July 20 (AMC, noon-1am), and you can watch the first episode of season 1 online. But why do you care?
Each Mad Men episode is constructed like a movie. The strongest influences on th show are The Apartment and the films of Alfred Hitchcock. (If the opening credits don’t remind you of Vertigo, and Saul Bass in general, you’re not paying attention.) I was noticing that episode 3 pulls a trick that Notorious is famous for; it folds in on itself. In Notorious, it’s a back-to-front reflection, with the final scene echoing the first scene, the penultimate scene echoing the second, until it meets in the middle. In the Mad Men episode Marriage of Figaro, it’s divided in two; the first half in the city on a Friday, the second half in the suburbs the next day. Each half begins and ends similarly, with similar events happening throughout. You don’t really notice it cognitively (unless you study it obsessively) but it gets under your skin, building the sense of claustrophobia in the second half.
I could choose any episode to discuss its imagery and motifs. Episode 5, Babylon, is about exile, and we see people isolated from each other, strangers in their own lives, romances that cannot be, and the longing for a promised land. We see that simply, in scenes of home life, extramarital affairs, and advertising pitches.
Much has been made of the pitch-perfect depiction of the era, complete with smoking, drinking on the job, rampant sexism and sexual harrassment, and routine racism and anti-Semitism. Yet Mad Men is one of the most feminist shows on television. One episode focuses on female desire, and two female characters discover masturbation; one of whom is even able to discuss it (albeit with an enormous amount of hemming and hawing and blushing and shuffling). These are women discovering whether or not they can be free, and can succeed, and can have their own lives, and desire is an important part of that.
On Mad Men, no one behaves predictably, and everyone has a secret self they dare not share. They hide desire, they hide rage, they hide mistakes. And, like real people, the things they say are not the things they think; words are masks; they are advertising pitches, not truth.
The DVD package is robust. The first release is a limited edition box that resembles a Zippo lighter. Some people have reported trouble fitting the DVDs back into the fancy but perhaps impractical box (I’m not having trouble). The extras are top-notch, including commentary tracks for each episode (often more than one), and several high quality additional features.
If you watch the first episode (which I strongly recommend), you may be irked by a couple of coy jokes (like the line about how there’s “no magic machine that makes copies”). That’s not what the show is about, and the winking is pretty much gone by episode 2. Other than that, I think the first episode is an excellent representation of the series.
Gods of the week: Marduk and Tiamat
(We’ll see if I stick with this…I might switch it to a different weekly topic. For now, it seems enjoyable and interesting.)
You are probably familiar with the Genesis 1.7: God made the firmament and divided the waters. And perhaps, when you were a kid, you said, as I did, huh?
In Babylonian creation myth, the waters were also divided in order for the world to come into being. There were sweet (fresh) waters and bitter (salt) waters. Tiamat, the bitter waters, was the goddess who created the world, and was also a sea monster. Apsu, her husband, was the sweet waters. In the blended waters of Apsu and Tiamat, all the gods were born. Marduk was one of their children.
Marduk was a storm god, a sort of Babylonian Zeus. He rallied his brothers and sisters to make war on their parents. They were (understandably) reluctant, both because, hey, parents, and because their parents were immensely strong. Sea monsters, y’know.
But Marduk had weapons; the mace and spear as well as the lightning. And he said to his brothers and sisters that if they served him in this battle, the gods would be able to rule over nature, they would have power to change fate.
When the gods attack, Apsu urges Tiamat to fight back, but the goddess will not harm her own children, and ultimately allows herself to be killed. From her body, Marduk creates the world, and rules over the gods.
There’s a lot of metaphor and cultural history going on in this one story. Many interpret it as patriarchy defeating matriarchy, and order defeating chaos. You can certainly see how natural powers (sea monsters) are overwhelmed by civilization (the spear and mace). Joseph Campbell points out that matriarchy is always tied with fate, with the inevitability of natural cycles. As society develops, the desire to rule over nature is profound and, to a great degree, necessary, and Marduk represents the success of that desire. It’s easy to look back a few thousand years later and say, BAD IDEA, but living past the age of forty, eating nutritious food, taming animals for husbandry and the land for agriculture, these were all damn fine notions.
Tiamat is the inevitability of being overpowered by nature. Nature is, and it is bigger and stronger than you. But Marduk is the civilizing force that overcomes her; that says, we will not be destroyed by fate or by flood. And that, too, is worthy of worship.
Useless psychic powers
So, I had to get my tires balanced. There’s a joke in there, but whatever. I read a novel while waiting and then it feels like enough time and I get up to check on when my car will be ready just as the guy is printing my receipt. So I said, “That’s a useless psychic power!” and he laughed and relayed the following story:
Trucker comes to him for work periodically. Trucker tells him this story. He was driving and had a sudden, compelling intuition that he had to buy a scratch-off lottery ticket. So he stops at the first available place, gets on line for the register, and the guy in front of him is just about all rung up and paid and done when at the last second, he says “You know what? I’d like a scratch-off ticket.”
Guy in front of him won a million dollars.
Great story, right?
Thing is, people say, If magic works, why don’t you do magic to win the lottery? Har har, snort snort, because the people who say that are always people who think magic is bullshit. But the truth is, everyone is doing magic to win the lottery, so it’s a crowded field; it ends up putting you on line right behind the winner.
30s Quotes: Solutions
All solved, well done!
Tuesday Trivia: Quotes of the 1930s
1. You know you’ve got the brain of a four-year old child, and I bet he was glad to get rid of it.
Solved by Ken (comment #3).
2. I never did like the idea of sitting on newspapers. I did it once, and all the headlines came off on my white pants. On the level! It actually happened. Nobody bought a paper that day. They just followed me around over town and read the news on the seat of my pants.
Solved by Melville (comment #1).
3. She’s a female! And all females is poison! They’re full of wicked wiles!
Solved by Ken (comment #3).
4. Now, hold on! Hold on. Don’t get excited here. I’m just tryin’ to tell you that I ain’t got any guns. You see if I woulda had a gun then, why, one of us might have been hurt and it might be me. I wouldn’t want that to happen… would I?
Solved by Melville (comment #1).
5. Well, I guess you can’t break out of prison and into society in the same week.
Solved by George (comment #4).
6. I think I’ll have a large order of prognosis negative!
Solved by Hogan (comment #5).
7. Look, someone upstairs is playing musical chairs with an elephant. Move one of them out, will you? I want to get some sleep.
Solved by George (comment #4).
