Puddles of My Podcast - Episode 24

I haven't officially addressed the public since I ended this self-imposed hiatus on the blog, so I am going to take this space to do so.

First, I hope you are enjoying the new layout of the blog - I thought it could use some sprucing up.  Make sure to use the links to the left as this blog is really nothing without the people whose creative projects and other endeavours are marked by those little blue pieces of writing on the side.

Second, I hope you enjoyed that riveting and heart-wrenching Blonde on Blonde post; it will go down in the canon of English Literature as one of the pillars of its achievement.

In general, the blog is back.  I have a lot of material to share.  There will be a lot of theme podcasts coming up as well as some basketball talk as we get nearer to the start of the season.  We will also be welcoming in two guest columnists who will contribute each week.  One reason is to take some of the burden off myself from providing content for you selfish people five days a week.  The second, is that I wanted to expand the range of voices that are speaking to your from this blog space and I seriously trust the two voices of the people who will be contributing each week.  The first "guest" post will be this Friday. In general I hope to be opening up the blog to other guest writers from time to time in order to provide more fresh and interesting content to you all.  This blog is a space to express desire, to express a longing for life and an enjoyment of all the various wonders of life: which usually happen to come through Mad Men, sports (basketball), books and music.  I want to convey the passion that we all should have for observing and appreciating life - for chasing down that impossible spirit that urges us forward - on this blog and very often that ability is provided to me from the friends I have and the people I meet - so why not bring the ability to communicate on this space to those people as well. I hope you all have been enjoying the blog and will continue to enjoy the blog, because we all have Puddles of Ourselves, this is just the space that copyrighted the name and concept and tends to push that fact in your face.  There is a lot more to come and I know that you have missed me.

Now, for today's content.

The baseball playoffs are immediately upon us, so why not have a podcast completely devoted to baseball. In this, Episode 24 of Puddles of My Podcast, I welcome longtime friend and lead singer and guitarist for The Sanctuaries - David Stern.  In this installment, David and I predict the MLB Playoffs, the NL and AL MVPs, the NL and AL Cy Youngs, which team has the best color red, which Major League movie is the best, the concept of the "Reverse Major League Movie," the best characters and moments of the Major League movies, cursing in movies and also touch base with the current status of the Sanctuaries.  This is an hilarious podcast that I encourage all of you enjoy.

Welcome back.

Blonde on Blonde

I’m not a famous person, so I have no inkling as to the problems someone who is famous faces.  However, I have tried to be charming for most of my adult life so I know what it means to turn a certain face to the public world; to attempt to instill a feeling, - if not of confidence, then entertainment or amusement – to the greater world, whether that world be two people who know me, eighteen students who revere my eccentricity and care or a larger audience who couldn’t give a shit about my vanity.  I say this because there are many of us who desire to be famous, to change the world or at the very least be successful at our art, without an inkling of what kind of mental toll it can take or how it can warp one. 

Blonde on Blonde is not an album directly about the trappings of fame, but it is an album that shows you what can become of one when so much is expected of and assigned to that person’s image.  It is an album of red herrings and lyrical dead-ends with only the occasional sign of truth or non-fiction, which is why it is perhaps Dylan’s best work.  It is crafted in a non-perfect sense, that is, it is meant to reflect the nature of feeling dogged down by the press, being world-weary and having only fragments of thoughts, remembered phrases and emotions to convey it – and very often the time to convey these things is late at night, which is when I most recently listened to the album.  I was driving my friend’s white, 1996 Jeep Cherokee on Interstate 91 in Vermont at 2:00 AM.  My Friend With the Jeep was asleep in the passenger seat, his dog sleeping behind me curled up next to a cooler with beer and a compression pack for our sleeping bags.  I was revved up on strong gas station coffee and chewing nicorette gum.  The rain of Hurricane Earl intermittently spit down in meek waves while the fog rose from and across the newly paved, deep black highway.  My first thoughts were of Jack Burden driving a car alone in the night on the highway in All The King’s Men, ruminating on the nature of driving alone at night and how there is nothing more alone than being in a car at night in the rain and how at that point you are not you, because there is no one else there to make up the you that you are, for you are only you in relation to other people.  When you are alone in that car at night in the rain, says Jack Burden, you are another you, the you that is driving alone on the highway at night in the rain.  However, I was not alone.   The Friend With the Jeep was next to me sleeping, so there was no overwhelming vastness of the dark firs and pines and dim mountains, so there should be no other me.  But I was driving and listening to Blonde on Blonde and was enjoying driving and the nature of moving so I felt that I was not Me, although my friend next to me could easily wake up and identify Me as the Real Me, the Me that he had known since boyhood years of drinking beer on the back decks of beach cottages that hung over the water, that were still abandoned in early May when life was just beginning before summer would throw it into full relief against the heat.  But the Me chewing nicorette gum (I don’t smoke) and riding high on coffee singing Bob Dylan lyrics, was not that Boyhood Me or even the Current Me, but someone deep inside, someone that indentified with the Bob Dylan who was singing about drunken politicians and having a poison headache and who could make it without someone if he just didn’t feel so all alone. Although, that Bob Dylan was not even the Bob Dylan who sang those lyrics in 1966 – he was someone else entirely.  But the Bob Dylan on RECORD on Blonde on Blonde is the Bob Dylan of 1966: fatigued, pessimistic, romantic and bored.  And I suppose the Me driving that car through Vermont to see his Great Friend, who was living in a log cabin with his girlfriend in some vision of domesticity and peace, could relate to the Bob Dylan of 1966 more than the Great Friend who he had known in his boyhood; the legendary friend and friendship that the rest of the world was jealous of and could only understand through books and movies and never in their own lives. Maybe it was because that Me, that Other Me driving a car at night had left those other Me’s of the past behind and was trying to find a new identity to embrace like the Real Bob Dylan of 1966.  Before me, there was actual rural life, behind me New York dug its nails into my back and legs.  All this just like Bob Dylan when he crashed his motorcycle.

But as I drove through the night and the album spun forth, while The Friend with the Jeep and his dog slept, until finally the last harmonica and organ notes of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” faded away, I couldn’t help but think of those other Me’s; the ones who had crossed paths with this Bob Dylan of 1966; the Bob Dylan on record who created an artifice and a persona to shield him from a world of expectations and questions.  It was that “wild, thin, mercury music” that spooled from his imagination late at night and because it was necessity, it became art, it became his means of communication.  We all try to communicate in our own ways, whether its through our own art or through someone else’s and Blonde on Blonde is one of those great examples because it puts you in a world and a mood that allows you to take on a voice that is not your own and when you appropriate that voice, you can begin making your own fictions that will perhaps reveal the truth about you in small doses.  And so, as the fog turned tremendously white against the fresh black of the highway, and road signs flashed by, I let the album play again and let those other Me’s, those Me’s of the past rise and curl just like the fog that the high-beams of the Jeep were cutting through with each tenth of highway mile.

There was a First Me in a faded, tight blue t-shirt that said “Pearl S. Buck Elementary School Field Day on it.”  The color blue was still strong, vivid and royal, but the threads were worn and stretching, especially under the armpits because the shirt was meant for a eight or nine year old child and not a sixteen year old stoner.  The hair of this Me was shaggy and unkempt but not yet long and on top of the hair, there was a tight, ribbed brown skull cap.  And this me sat in the back of his Creative Writing class with another thin, though painfully thin, youth.  A kid with stringy long hair, that was dirty and on the verge of dreadlocks.  This young kid had wild bug eyes and sometimes wore a Jamaican hat over his dirty straw hair.  This youth whispered about William Burroughs and Lou Reed into this First Me’s ear and the First Me listened and nodded and wrote in his notebook, feeling excited about things but also very tired.  This First Me liked to look at the images of girls as they flashed by cars parked in the parking lot or yellow school buses and in the brick hallways and think about who they might be, but didn’t really care about who they were.  And this First Me wrote stories about kissing a girl in a parlor room with blue carpet while an ass played the piano, and in these stories the protagonist drove his car across the country to sit in a red wood forest with a jug of wine, to then hike to the beach on the Pacific Ocean and think about the distance of America.  This First Me had been “turned on” and had one day, with the slime of the mall still on his hairless arms, walked across the parking lot with a CD copy of Blonde on Blonde in his hands, ripping the cellophane off and hastily throwing it away, while throwing the CD onto his Discman. The First Me listened to songs like “Rainy Day Women #12 & 35” or “Visions of Johanna” and thought about being high; thought about Beat poetry and how he wanted to write it.  So, this First Me wrote Beat Poetry:

Alcohol stomachs raise,

    Drenched in rain,

Mind numbing,

    Hallucinatory craze.

Can’t get a feel for anything anymore.

    No more emotions

    Except pain, and not feeling quite right.

Wake up early in the morning,

     Can’t sleep anymore.

The drunkard, the drunken bard.

-2002

And this Me listened to the kid with the dirty straw hair, until one day the kid whispered in that Me’s ear about having sex and taking advantage of someone’s younger sister in and that Me realized that the kid was full of shit for that reason and for a variety of other reasons.  That First Me told the kid with the dirt straw hair off and then went running, listening to Blonde on Blonde along the way.  But that First Me didn’t have a good attention span, he couldn’t listen to fourteen lengthy tracks all the way through.  Sure, he was swept up in “Visions of Johanna,” “Stuck Inside of Mobile with the Memphis Blues Again,” “Leopard-Skin Pillbox Hat,” and “I Want You,” but he could never make it all the way to “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” and after awhile all the songs mixed together.  This First Me’s hair grew longer until high school was almost over and then this First Me cut his hair and introduced himself to a girl.  And that was when the First Me bowed out.

The roads grew darker on Route 91 and that Me driving the car, who you could call the Current Me, thought about how there was something funny about the fact that the main conflict in Bob Dylan’s catalogue, in his “life” was the rural versus the urban; and how, as many times as you could write about it, it would never get old.  For that might be the main conflict of American life in general: balancing a frontier identity with the necessity to be around people, to be the center of the world, to have the greatest cities and the greatest quality of life – to prove that Europe is nothing but a museum compared to whatever vitality is inherent in the word and shape of America. So, people will get lonesome and restless in their small space in a city and think of the country and those decisions that could have led them to a happy life there.  On the passenger side, through the trees, far-off lights glinted as the car rolled along, pulling slightly to the left.  And there are cities everywhere as much as there are forests and maybe that person in the log cabin, chopping wood, preserving food for winter and drinking water from a well will hear the train whistle and wish that they hadn’t left home and all those people that lived in the city: the drooping telephone wires, the reflections of light from a family room out onto a front lawn, the sound of the baseball game from a transistor radio on a front stoop, while firemen laugh in the pizza place next door and a bum goes through piles of leaking soda cans and beer bottles in black bags.  Those images will pile up, and whatever You is facing You in the mirror at that time will get restless and feel cornered and perhaps the only way to escape is to create another You, someone who can get to those places that the You that came before can’t – we splinter ourselves into a world of our own design in order to navigate through that world presented to us.  Like Bob Dylan holding a light bulb in a press conference in 1966.

My friend continued to sleep and the fog continued to press in against the windshield ahead of me and, even though I knew the song lay imminently at the end of the album, I thought about “Sad-Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” and about another Me, this was the Sad Me.  Now, don’t let the name fool you, this Sad Me was not just sad, but made up of a variety of experiences, this was the Me who had the mantra of “trying to forget something sad that happened to me a long time ago,” stuck in his head, which of course game directly from The Great Gatsby.  This Sad Me, had a short haircut (still remains) and asked barbers to cut his hair as if he “were just getting of the boat back home from WWII,” which pleased the barbers because they saw it as some kind of reverence for that great war, but it was really just vanity and confusion and trying to look like the real Jack Kerouac circa 1946. 

This Sad Me went to college and saw it as an idyllic paradise and seeing it as such, had to create himself into a persona that could be parlayed as a villain and proceeded to act that way along with the help of alcohol. Strangely, enough, he found similar souls who were interested in the same process and they proceeded to break things together and smoke lots of cigarettes.  This Sad Me left behind a girl he may well have loved and who may well have loved him as young as they were. And in an effort to chase after literary ambition and to get away from this love that he left behind and foolishly and unsuccessfully tried to get back, this Sad Me studied abroad in Ireland. Where, thinking of “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands,” he wrote poems:

Writing an elegy for the color red,

Was told to me as impossible,

Because it was a thing of the past,

Arching and piercing those tugging

Notions that rumble in my chest.

The summer is dark and smells of peaches,

And there lies the color red,

Bleeding upon me and my hot skin,

Which is drawn cold in mystery and the

Destruction of understanding growth.

I left my shoes behind me

Because they simply wouldn’t fit,

And also since you left yours

Lying on the wood, so that I could

Carry you and feel the color red.

Those pebbles of promise, who

Promenade in my veins and along

The thick ridges of my mind, Thump

When I am alone because I am gray

And longing for the color red.

“Why are tears so forceful?” I asked,

And why does their hue blaze,

And hurt me so much when all

You want to do is reach,

And cry and rest on my shoulder.

I was told that tears are as

Strong as you make them – just

As you proceed with your fears,

And all those rocks lightening your load,

But weighing down your companions.

Let me climb the bluffs which

You crash upon, and allow me to

Drown in the life affirming scent

That falls forth from your

Shoulders and runs down your back.

There is no hiding the coastline

In your smile, or the fingerprints

That will soon appear on your arms,

Which are completely foreign to me,

And cause me innumerable distresses.

I have been kicked from my throne,

Left to sit in a chair at night,

Like your father laying upon the porch,

Watching moths flicker in the light,

And hearing the mailbox open and shut.

Two men will sit side by side,

Whereas they once glared, absently

Trying to figure out that they

Were both the same person, and

Wanted to use the same color.

When your summer skin sighs,

Years after I knew how sweet it was,

I can’t help but see my downfall

In the future, and how

I was absent on salvation’s day.

However, in the end you are

Absolutely the color red, flowing

Forth through the streets and

Over the trees, reaching into my window,

And my chest, and leaving me

Alone on an airplane, far away,

As I notice the color of my shirt.

-2005

These poems made the Sad Me feel better, but not completely better, so in his restlessness, the Sad Me used to go down to the streets around St. Stephen’s Green and pan handle change, pretending that he was a bum.  The Sad Me didn’t go to class, but he did meet pretty girls from California who let him go to their hotel rooms – these kinds of girls had chauffeurs.  But this Sad Me rode buses across Ireland in the night and he listened to Blonde on Blonde in its entirety.  He grew to appreciate songs like “Fourth Time Around” and “Absolutely Five Believers,” he first noticed the manic and thrilling piano on “Sooner or Later (One of Us Will Know) and as the  hillsides passed he thought that he might be able to make it if he just didn’t feel so all alone.  He also thought of New York in the winter and how much he longed to go back there. So, when his time was up in Ireland, he went home, but the Sad Me couldn’t appreciate being back in New York, so, restless again, he walked the yellow lines on roads late at night in some attempt at a statement.  Then, one night, as the snow was melting on his college campus he spoke to that girl from years ago on the phone.  And as they spoke, he realized that time had changed.  He also realized that the two of them had both indeed changed as well - but that was OK.  So that summer, the Sad Me went home and spent most of the days outside and made sure that he swam in salt water every day. That was when the Sad Me bowed out.

The Current Me, the Me driving the Jeep, sped across slick patches on bridges that ran over creeks.  The Current Me hugged the side of the highway as the road construction made the lanes squeeze right and then left again, butting against concrete dividers and striped cones weighed down by water.  The Current Me looked over at the sleeping Friend with the Jeep and then thought once more about the Great Friend who they were going to visit.  The Current Me felt a sensation that was familiar and that was the sensation of enjoying the motion of travel rather than the actual destination, which was one of the sensations contained in Blonde on Blonde. That is, the idea of enjoying moving and not actually arriving anywhere.  When you’re stuck inside of Mobile with the Memphis blues again, you just want to be anywhere but where you are and the only place you can be anywhere but where you are is when you are moving, and perhaps that Current Me driving the car thought of that because when you are moving, like Jack Burden says, you don’t have to be anyone.  And that’s what Bob Dylan of 1966, the Bob Dylan on record was aiming for – a place of motion where he didn’t have to be any of the identities that had been placed on him.  When that car is in motion or when that train is in motion, you are in a world that is your own – there is nothing but that car, that contained space, that womb of upholstery, light and leg room.  And rain briefly pelted the windshield as that Current Me enjoyed moving, but still wanted to be somewhere. And that Current Me remembered one of those other Me’s that still roved amid the rain and the fog.

The European Me used to ride trains across Europe for a period of time. That Me had money from teaching and saving and he used that money to go to Europe to visit someone who he loved.  And at points during that trip, he was with the one he loved and those times were terrific and tumultuous.  However, the European Me had a profound revelation when he was riding on a train across the width of Italy and the tracks rose up through a pass in the mountains as it bore down from Venice to Rome.  He peeled an orange in his train seat and watched as tall, snow-capped peaks of the Apennine Mountains passed by underneath an absolutely blue sky.  The European Me ate his orange and then snapped into an Italian tea biscuit and as he did so, he realized how happy he could be if he was just in motion all the time.  Behind him in Spain the girl he loved lived, but their connection was impossible so it had to end at some point.  Ahead of him was a return to the United States and to trying to publish a novel he had already outgrown and to get a job he didn’t know or think existed.  Instead, it might be possible to travel forever.  For the European Me, when the train was moving, there was nothing else to existence – there was only his travel bag and its little pouches, pouches where he put market bought oranges and small loaves of bread, plastic packs of prosciutto and compact boxes of crackers.  The European Me could ride on these trains forever and watch the people that came and sat next to him; the European Me could look out the window and feel no attachment to the love he would need to leave behind, to the friends that waited for his return to the United States, to the family that cared about him; the European Me could ride and ride and explode in little pockets of electricity just like the cars of the train – the European Me was elemental and not made of any kind of substance, he could be something that existed at all places and at all times.  But that train stopped in Rome and the European Me sat outside of a Chinese restaurant in Rome and drank beer on the curb.  That European Me eventually went back to the girl he loved in Spain to figure out what to do.  The European Me eventually came back to the United States and used up his money trying to publish his novel, he lived with his parents until finally several things happened, time passed and that European Me was gone into the ether of life along with the First Me and the Sad Me.

Now, the Current Me has listened to Blonde on Blonde countless times and could tell you all of the mythology behind “Fourth Time Around” and its similarities to “Norwegian Wood” and the first time that the Beatles smoked pot with Bob Dylan and about how “Long, Long, Long” on The White Album is an ode to “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”  If you’d listen, the Current Me could tell you plenty of stories.  He could tell you a story about a game he and his friends played in Vermont in September one year, when they all picked the best going to sleep song and someone picked “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands.”  The Current Me could also tell you about listening to “Visions of Johanna” while riding the subway late at night and how that vision of country music playing soft from the opposite loft reminds him somewhat of what the word “romance” should mean, or rather how it could possibly be personified.  The Current Me would also be quick to tell you that there is nothing quite like listening to “Obviously 5 Believers” when walking in the Grand Central Station subway terminal on a rainy day, while people fumble with their umbrellas and insecurities and all you can do is strut and stride along to a searing electric blues guitar while Bob Dylan openly admits to feeling desperately alone.  There is something to that emotion and that tone in his voice that rings true to the Current Me. The Current Me would also tell you that he listens to “Sad Eyed Lady of the Lowlands” on random occasions and doesn’t really think of much anymore, other than perhaps how on a late summer day if you are on the right street corner and if the humidity is correct, you can absolutely smell the ocean in the middle of Manhattan and how that perhaps means something.

The Current Me made it to his friend’s home in Vermont, successfully listening to Blonde on Blonde twice in the pitch black of the highway night.  When he arrived, he was greeted by his Great Friend in the slow light of five in the morning.  The Great Friend showed him his bed in the loft space of his log cabin.  So, the Current Me climbed the large wood log steps to the loft, sneaking past the Great Friend’s sleeping girlfriend and laid out on his temporary bed.  Next to the bed, there was a small door that opened to a small wood log ledge.  The morning air blew in cool and the Current Me lay on the mattress looking at the slow light turn into blue dawn light.  The cool air came in streams and, although the Current Me was cold, he didn’t reach for a blanket, he simply let himself rest, knowing that next to him was an open door where cool air blew in and where outside the sun would slowly turn the light of the day to brighter shades as he slept on a bed that was not his own – on a bed that did not even truly belong to his Great Friend.  The Current Me would sleep knowing that this was a bed where he could stretch his legs and that there would be different beds from time to time, except that here, the next morning he would wake up and his Great Friend would be down in the kitchen frying eggs and making black coffee to drink.  The Current Me would wake up to find his Great Friend down there with his girlfriend, along with the Friend With the Jeep, and he would walk down and greet them all with a smile and make a joke because perhaps they would like that.  They would like that because they had the entire day before them, in fact they had a few days before them and those are the kinds of things that you like to enjoy along with the black coffee you drink.

A lot of people I know want to be famous or at least successful at their art.  Blonde on Blonde is what being famous sounds like.  It sounds like it in the way that 1966 Bob Dylan was famous.  Fame changes its sound with age, but its principles are always the same – trapped, constantly moving, feeling lonely, ungrounded, money, access to anything you desire, lack of desire, mistrust of love.  We all put up red herrings and other false meanings in our regular lives in order to keep people off our track, but when you are a public figure those things are more likely to happen – those things are necessary.  For Dylan in 1966, the language of Blonde on Blonde was the only way that he could communicate with the world.  He couldn’t give them anything direct, he could only give them cryptic word associations and images that they could put together.  There was passion behind the songs and they were structured, which of course gave them meaning in their loose stories.  Yet, it was a means of escaping and the escape was from a world of motion, a world of constantly escaping one town to the next, one show to the next, one press conference to the next.  The 1966 Bob Dylan would never have survived, which is why that motorcycle accident becomes a cosmic event – it seemed like it had to happen for the story of Bob Dylan to continue.  We all know that the myth of Bob Dylan continued on.  We all know that he retreated to a life of domesticity, to writing country songs with direct lyrics that were terrific, but that seemed to lack some kind of passion or epiphany that his earlier work, especially Blonde on Blonde exemplified. 

What Dylan’s work immediately after Blonde on Blonde exemplified was perhaps what the main sentiment of Blonde on Blonde was, which is (to take a line from Bruce Springsteen) “I’m just tired and bored with myself.” That is the sentiment that I am the most attracted to.  We are all made up of different versions and characters of ourselves that rise up at different points in our lives and who then fade away into that impossibility of time, love and friendships.  Those other versions of ourself seem strange but we can look to them to reveal something about ourselves; about how fragmented we are.  We can also look to those other versions to prove how far we’ve come and about how tired we are with ourselves as a subject, because the only way to become a better artist is to grow tired with yourself.  Then, you can take those fragments of yourself and begin to put them into other objects, put them into characters, put them into art in order to let those objects rise and flourish and take on a life of their own.  That also seems as though it is the key to life itself: growing past oneself in order to move forward with life, to care about others.  No one ever claimed that Bob Dylan didn’t care about himself or that he actually moved unselfishly forward with his life; perhaps the best he did was to present the world with a vision of the weary, successful, famous artist who longs for something else.  No one knows if Dylan ever did find that something else.  We know his story and we attempt to know his myth, but we’ll never know for sure and that’s OK.  It’s OK because we have this album and his other albums and our different selves can listen to them on all the different roads of life.  Perhaps Blonde on Blonde will be that beacon of light that we look to when we ourselves are famous and looking for a way out.  When we realize that there is nothing but exhaustion and it is only when we are exhausted with ourselves that we can begin to forge ahead to whatever may be next - that next version of yourself that will hopefully contain and trump all the others.

Just Another Brick

At this point in the series of “Mad Men,” it seems somewhat redundant to say that a specific episode touches on the main themes of the show.  Nearly all of the episodes at least touch on a variety of the many themes that run throughout the entire series. I go back and forth debating over which of  the topics that the show covers interests me the most.  There is a part of me that is tremendously interested in the element of reinventing one’s self, in creating an identity from scratch and riding that identity for all it is worth no matter what kind of lies rise up, no matter how much fiction you have to create in order to shield your true self from the world when it seems like the stakes have gotten too high. However, last night’s episode, “Chinese Wall,” focused on the other theme that has always kept me interested in the show; that being the dynamics of the work world and how those dynamics and rules run over into one’s personal world.  This subject matter has of course been covered extensively over the history of the show and as recently and expertly as in Episode 7 of this season, “The Suitcase.”

Where “The Suitcase” focused only on Don and Peggy’s relationship with each other in the office and how that could potentially extend in some respects outside the office in a realm of unique (non-sexual) intimacy, “Chinese Wall” spread its scope to the varying members of SCDP and how the lines between work and personal/pleasure have been blurred over time and how they have continued to remain blurred.

At work we always struggle to give that personal side of ourselves to those we work with.  We want to appear amiable and make jokes like we would with out friends in our personal or “real” lives. Sometimes these people that we work with will become our friends and perhaps lifelong friends at that.  We work with them in the office and we spend time with them outside of the office.  The key is that both parties can remember what is involved with business and what is personal.  This understanding is what allows each side to reveal increasingly personal details, which is what friendships, at least good ones, are usually formed on.  However, we also want to achieve, we want to do better in our jobs to move forward with out careers; or, at the very least, we want to remain employed in order to avoid hardship.  This sort of movement will often require that we keep ourselves obscured from those that we work with so that they are left to wonder about who we really are and what we are really like, because we can’t care that much about this job, we can’t be that focused on it.  We don’t want anyone to know the secrets of our lives, or even the personal details because there is no guarantee that these people that we work with could use it in some way to gain leverage.  This is a place of work and at some fundamental level, your co-workers must be kept at bay.

Further, there are those instances when we work with someone that we are attracted to.  How is it possible to deny that attraction, whether it is physical or otherwise?  Would it be possible to pursue that kind of intimacy while working in a close environment, where one relies on the other in order to get work done?; where both sides have to continue on with their jobs, while knowing the secrets of the other, the motions and sounds each make in the heat of the dark.  Again, this hinges on an ability to keep business and personal separate, otherwise the passion that lies between two people can very easily become confused and perverted into an emotion that was not initially born out of the attraction.

In any event, work is a complicated place where we often create a second identity for ourselves that either keeps us removed, ties us to our co-workers in a semblance of unity or attempts to navigate the worlds of the personal and business, sometimes in a chaotic manner.

“Chinese Wall” exhibited how all members of SCDP have interacted with the world of business and the world of the personal.  The entire episode is framed around the birth of Pete Cambell’s daughter as well as the panic around the entire SCDP staff learning that Lucky Strike/American Tobacco has taken their account elsewhere.  There are countless episodes of business running over into the lives of those at the agency, including the start of the episode where Cosgrove’s dinner with his wife and his in-laws is interrupted by a friend from another agency informing him that Lucky Strike/American Tobacco has moved to said rival agency, which leads Cosgrove to plunge into the business world, alerting Pete at the hospital, who immediately alerts Don who is on a date with Faye Miller, a character and relationship that perfectly personifies the volatile mixture that business and pleasure can be.

The episode presents a variety of stances on the issue of the value of the business live versus that of the personal life and how those two virtues can be balanced.  Pete’s father-in-law explains that a job is just a job and that it is the people at home who matter: your wife and children.  Faye tells Don that she knows the difference between their relationship and the work that is done at the office.  Pete, Don, Cosgrove and Bert Cooper attend the funeral of a fellow ad man who his colleagues explain was devoted to his job but also to his wife and kids.  However, as the work stories are relayed it appears that the man was more devoted to his job than he ever was to his wife or children.  Don and Pete look on taking in what should be a cautionary tale. However, what they each take from the scene is left ambiguous.  Pete is also approached by Ted Chaough earlier in the episode with an offer to come to his firm.  With SCDP perhaps facing collapse without Lucky Strike, Pete has to weigh the options of providing for his wife and new child against pursuing the passion for work that led to the initial formation of SCDP.

The pivotal scenes of the episode (if you can even narrow them down) are the scenes involving Roger and Joan, Roger and Jane, Don and Megan, and Don and Faye.  Roger goes to Joan’s apartment because of the guilt he feels at not telling his colleagues at SCDP sooner about Lucky Strike dropping them.  He looks to Joan for solace as she has always been there.  She wants to talk business, the state of the company and why Roger didn’t tell anyone sooner, while all Roger wants to do his sleep with her to escape his troubles. Joan identifies that their romantic relationship would only be another problem and not a solution.  It is their business relationship that matters, that is two people who can professionally share things with each other. Joan puts a stop to the romance, which was originally born out of their office interactions and hidden passion.  Later,  Roger feeling defeated is at home with Jane, whom he married out of an affair created in the office and she shows him copies of his memoir that have arrived at their home.  Roger signs a copy for Jane, writing, “To my loving wife, Jane.”  This statement lacks any intimacy and is something that any author would write in a book as a matter of business.  Roger has never truly taken his work seriously. He has only used the office as a means of meeting women and continuing on a lavish lifestyle and he is left lonely and wanting.  The woman he thinks he loves he can’t commit to or maturely articulate his feelings for and the woman he is married to he feels nothing for.

Don on the other hand knows full well the terrible effects of mixing his personal life with business.  Don has always kept himself distant from everyone at work, even Roger (“you’re so damn mysterious”) but let his guard down earlier this season when he slept with Alison.  Yet, in this episode he makes two mistakes.  The first is asking Faye to help him get clients based on the information she receives from her clients as a consultant. Faye is rightly insulted that Don sees her as another part of his business, but as he tells her, SCDP is “all he has.”  Don later makes another mistake in sleeping with Megan when she comes to help him late at night. Megan shows an interest in the work at the company and even states that she wants to do what Don or Peggy does someday. Don is impressed by this as well as Megan’s aggressive moves to take care of him. There is a certain confidence that Megan takes on in this episode that seems to be inherent in all of Don’s lovers – it is a mixture of tenderness and firmness that is certainly a matronly trait.  It is hard to know what to make of the ultimate scene with Don and Megan.  Megan tells him she won’t be running crying from his office and tells him that their sleeping together has nothing to do with work, even though they are at the office and she has explained her interest in advertising.  How does one separate the two as Megan seems to suggest she can?  After this, Don returns home to find Faye at his apartment. Faye tells him that she got him a meeting with Heinz. Don feels ashamed that she used her connections to get him a meeting, but Faye explains that she wanted to do it. Faye is now accepting that their relationship can merge so closely that what is most important is what matters to the health of their relationship and that is keeping SCDP afloat, because that is what Don’s life is and that is what makes him happy.  This gesture certainly raises questions this about this new level of intimacy and posturing between Don and Faye going forward and how Don is going to either embrace or shun it. They are sharing more than one secret now, while Don is now keeping another from her.

Peggy is the only one who seems to be able to balance her work and pleasure.  She decides to sleep with Abe and appears to be falling for him or at least giving into the initial excitement of a romance.  At the same time, she is able to show Stan what is business and what is personal when she turns down his advances and then nails the Playtex meeting by using details from her personal life in her pitch – much like Don used to effortlessly do.

There is not right or wrong answer as to the balance of business and personal.  It is all about your situation, the people you are involved with, the weight that you can carry.  However, there will always be a line between those two worlds and the way you conduct yourself and view that line will say a lot about what kind of person you are and what you are capable of in a variety of ways – another prime example of how me must decide when to share and when to conceal.

Two more episodes left.

Calling Your Bluff

A couple of quick notes about the blog before I lay down my review of last night’s Mad Men episode, “Hands and Knees.” 

First, you will notice a new section at the top of the blog, entitled “Puddles of My Mad Men” (because it is of course my show).  This is where you can find all of my Season 4 recaps in one place as well as a somewhat brief recap I did of Season 3 last fall.  So, please enjoy all of that because it really is quite stellar writing.

Second, the blog will be back in full swing starting next Monday, October 4, 2010.  I have a couple of great things lined up for you all.  There are some surprises and new additions, some entertaining and inane podcasts, extreme amounts of vanity as well as a long-term plan whose wheels are in motion, which could not only alter the face of this blog but the face of the planet in general.  These are the things you come to this blog for, so, again, my Puddlers, please just sit back and enjoy this ride your on, which is called Puddles of Myself aka my fictionalized and embellished life, which is what we like to call the truth.

*****

I’m not sure that I would ever make a good critic.  I enjoy the things that I enjoy almost too much and can’t speak about them without great amounts of praise, while simultaneously feeling the need to make the person I am speaking to or arguing against feel foolish for having the opinion of the object in question.  You could call this the Michael Jordan syndrome and it is usually the sign of a bad critic – although the trait does make the best basketball player, athlete and competitor of all time.  A good critic will stick to his opinions, will investigate an object, will allow for various view points, expand on them and entertain them and ultimately resolve that there is probably not one specific way to view an object but you should take his word that perhaps his view may be the most revealing.  Now, this all sounds fairly dry, but the thing about criticism is that when it is good it is written with a passion that belies its distance, but also strengthens it.  This is almost true of good fiction, except distance is essential and cannot be compromised as much as in criticism.

All of this being said, I enjoyed last night’s episode of Mad Men, which was entitled “Hands and Knees.”  It was not the best episode of the season or the series by far, but it did put pressure on the final three episodes.  This is not a pressure to deliver on expectations, but rather a dramatic pressure.  So much of this season has been focused on Don’s fall and his search for some way out, that an episode like “Hands and Knees” almost becomes essential in order to point the narrative towards its climax.  This would explain the fact that much of the criticism of last night’s episode is about how it felt like a soap opera, or to be more eloquent, that the action was not true to life, that the instances that all occurred in the span of time conveyed in last night’s episode would not all have occurred in the same span of time.  Now, this very well may be true, but the tool of dramatic irony – on full display in the conference room scene and the Betty Draper interview scene – have been used for centuries.  The conference scene was a perfect example of dramatic irony. Here you have a scene where pivotal characters in the show and in the agency are in the same room together, each one coming from a different vantage point; vantage points that each contain their own secrets and pieces of knowledge.  We as the audience are left to cringe at what we know and about what isn’t being revealed, every piece of acting becomes magnified because of the knowledge that the character has in relation to the knowledge that other characters don’t have, but we as the audience have – we make the scene even more dramatic than it inherently is.  So, perhaps the paperwork slipup that leads Don to sweat out G-Men hunting him down would not have actually happened in the same week as SCDP losing the Lucky Strike and perhaps Joan would not have found out she was pregnant at the same time that Lane Pryce has a clash with his visiting father – these are not things we can actually determine and they are maybe fruitless to critique and as Lee Garner Jr. says to Roger, “There’s nothing you can do.  Nothing you could do.  That’s just the way it is.”

This episode was obviously about the secrets that the characters must conceal just as the entire show is about the secret that Don conceals, which is an extreme, dramatic (in the best sense) example of the secrets we all conceal.  I wrote an ill-advised, amateurish novel during my senior year of college about friends who meet up during their last year of college only to realize how much each of them as changed and at the secrets that they each conceal from each other and have concealed.  I didn’t intend for the focus to be on the secrets, but my writing teacher, Steven Milhauser, informed me that that was where the drama lay, in the concealment of information. “All of your characters are friends,” he said to me, “yet they all conceal information from each other. And it seems that much of their relationship with each other has been based on concealed information.”  Since this novel was somewhat autobiographical (my influences being Joyce, Proust, Wolfe and Kerouac) I began to question the secrecy of my own life, and how much I kept from other people and from the world, which is to say that I kept a lot. I decided that no matter how honest I decided to be about myself and about the world in general, how much I would live honestly, that I would always be a concealer of information – this I because we are all concealers of information, our being, is always pointing to something else, pointing to an information or pieces of information that we contain, whether about ourselves, a topic, a romance, or another person.

Mad Men is about a “successful” man who is handsome but who conceals his identity from his wife and children, from his colleagues and from most of his lovers. This is a show about people who hide information about pregnancies, about whose children they have fathered, about having children, about whom they have slept with, about whom they have been raped by, about whom are gay.  What I enjoy about the show is about how these characters all attempt to continue to live their lives amid all this untruth, because sometimes to continue on in this world you have to lie about things, you have to lie to yourself.  Now, obviously, we always want to avoid the lying - we never want to lie so much to ourselves that we end up forgetting who we actually are.  In the end, lies will always catch up to us as they continue to do for Don.  We have to sacrifice great portions of ourselves in order to keep the lies afloat.  We can clearly see how much Don has suffered at his lies, what he has lost.  In the boardroom, we see the slight twinge of regret on his face when Roger lays into Pete for “losing” the North American Aviation account.  We see how much Joan has lost by lying about her affair with Roger, about having multiple abortions in order to cover up her affairs.  She has held a place for romance with a man who is tremendously quick with his wit and his postures of romance but who doesn’t recognize which tragedy Joan is talking about when she speaks to him after she has gone to perhaps have an abortion.  We see how much Lane has suffered and will suffer unless he goes back to London to see his family. He has perhaps been living a lie as an American and as a lover to his black girlfriend.  It is interesting to note that Pete comments to Trudy about how people who are liars get through life while the good people must suffer, even though he still carries the lie of his affair with Peggy and the fathering of the child she gave away.  Pete seems to want to come out of this situation, out of the boardroom as someone who is clean, but who really has hands that are as dirty as anyones. And, of course, Roger must lie about the Lucky Strike/American Tobacco account and its fate, only putting off what seems inevitable.  Although, we knew Lucky Strike was going to go this season one way or another.

All this being said, why then does the truth seem to pale in comparison to lies?  Don seems to be less attracted or to shy away from telling Faye the truth.  We want people to see the personas that we put up and not who we really are, but then we feel isolated when we realize how distant we are from them when we don’t tell the truth.  The truth is always more painful, which has been well documented, but it will save us in the end where the lies will destroy us.  Willie Stark in All The King’s Men said that “the end of man is to know.”  We always seem to want to know the truth but when we do, we hope for the lie, because the truth can’t be what it seems – it isn’t what we bargained for.  Then, how do we live honestly? How do we look for the truth? How do we accept the truth, when it is the lie that protects us, when it is the lie that pleases our eye?  These are questions I can’t answer for you in a review of Mad Men.  All I know is that once Don reveals his identity to Faye at the end of the episode, he first notices Megan, his new secretary, who apologizes to him for the paperwork issue and tells him that everything worked out.  Is that a lie that Don wants?  Or is it just a reminder of how thin the web of lies we all live in can be, that one slip of paperwork by a secretary can ruin even the longest-running and most concealed of secrets.  What does that say about us in general and the secrets that we keep from each other?  Perhaps as Lee Garner Jr. says, “There is nothing you can do.  Nothing you could do. That’s just the way it is.”

There’s one secret I won’t keep: Joan is still pregnant.

Three more episodes left.

It's a Woman's World

I once wrote on this blog that women were taking over my life. I suppose that I am not really qualified to make that statement and it would seem rather pathetic to say that again after watching an episode of Mad Men, but this blog has never shied away from seeming pathetic, as that comes with all the raging glory and epiphany of life anyway.  So, last night, for an hour, women did take over my life.

“The Beautiful Girls” was a truly fascinating entry into the Mad Men series.  I can’t remember any of the other seasons presenting a truly challenging episode from week to week. Obviously, I love the show and think it is TV of the highest level and has exhibited this in each season, but after every episode this year I have asked myself, “Well, how the hell am I going to make sense of this one?” And maybe its because this episode was about women - and it seems like it will be my (and many other men’s) ongoing journey in life to try to understand them – but this episode left me really puzzled on how to draw some meaning out of it.

Many of the other reviews I have read have clearly focused on the different ways that Dr. Miller, Joan and Peggy represent the women of the time.  All three have different levels of commitment to their careers and all are in danger of dying in the office like Ms. Blankenship did during the episode.  Joan is a woman who’s career is forced to take center stage because her husband has become a failure and is forced to go to Vietnam because of his career decision, a decision he didn’t consult her for.  Roger is the one person she is close to and he is her co-worker/superior.  Peggy is clearly very career driven but also feels the social pressure of finding someone to love before she becomes too old, as Trudy painfully reminded her in “The Suitcase.” She is very open-minded and accepting of the changes that are occuring in the world, whether in the business world or the larger realm of world news and civilization.  However, she encounters men like Abe who claim to be open-minded and part of the youth culture, but who still don’t take into account the rights of women and how their roles are in many ways just as segregated and looked down upon as those of minorities, especially black people at the time. So she seems to have her choice of a man like Duck who is failure of epic proportions and belongs to a different generation; she has a naïve boyfriend like Mark who wants her to be a feminine ideal of a virgin who loves her family; and now she has a guy like Abe who wants her to be open-minded to new ideas, but to still go and make him a drink and tell him how smart he is with his writing.  Dr. Miller is another career woman who has been even more successful than Peggy. She is as devoted to her job as Don is, which has left her without the ability to cook as we found out in her phone conversation last week, as well as without children or any skills with them as her interactions with Sally proved this week. Yet, in two different moments of crisis Don puts her on the spot to try and handle Sally, because that is what Betty would do; that is what the woman should do because she is a woman and is supposed to be good at those kind of things.

Now, these are all fine observations and they are certainly in the episode.  Each of the women get their chance to exhibit their frustrations and this is all nicely framed by the death of Mrs. Blankenship in the middle of the work day.  All the women in the office cry as they have lost one of their own (and of course because it is upsetting), but it esepcially hits home for Joan as she is somewhat of a glorified, younger Mrs. Blankenship (Roger even kids her about this before they are mugged) and her life very well could pass her by in the office.  I think all the women realize this in the episode in one way or another, as well as how much the men in their lives need them in some way, but can’t fully give them credit or the respect they deserve, which leads to that last shot of Dr. Miller, Peggy and Joan standing in the elevator looking completely worn out and desperate for some kind of answer or happiness.

What really gets us to that shot though, is a question that Peggy’s lesbian friend Joyce asks her when she’s in Peggy’s office.  That question is,“Are you angry or love sick?” to which Peggy responds, “I don’t know.”  That is the emotion that all three of these women are going through.  That are all feeling something profound.  They don’t know whether to be angry at the men in their lives or to feel that impalpable sensation, bordering on melancholy that we call love-sickness, which is truly just a feeling of “wanting.”  These women all want something but it does not fall under the category of “love-sickness.”  Each of them has a right to be mad at the men in their life. Joan can certainly be angry at Greg for the life he has given her, for raping her and taking advantage of her and for overall not treating her as a partner, which is perfectly exemplified by him making the decision to enlist in the army without even consulting her – news that surprises Roger when he and Joan have dinner.  Joan can also be upset at Roger for pushing her to comprimise her morals and vision of herself as a married woman.  She tells Roger that she doesn’t regret them having sex after they were robbed, but that she’s married. Roger prods her about still feeling something and Joan can only close the door.  Is she feeling love-sick for a possible true romance with Roger at the end of the episode?  Probably not, she is probably just frustrated that her own husband may be killed in Vietnam and that he didn’t respect her and that she can only find solace at work, where the closest person to her still holds delusional visions of romance.

Dr. Miller can certainly be upset at Don for putting her on the spot, even if he didn’t mean to test her skills with children.  Don’s behavior with Faye and in this episode throughout shows how much men at the time and even now will always need women. When Mrs. Blankenship dies, Don doesn’t know what to do, he just wants to go back into the meeting.  However, Joan needs the strength of a man to life Mrs. Blankenship’s body.  When Sally needs to be taken home, Don has to have Faye do it.  When Sally throws a tantrum, Don expects Faye to know how to handle it, but she doesn’t.  That doesn’t mean there is anything wrong with Faye, that is just a skill she didn’t develop – she made her decisions in life and shouldn’t be blamed for them.  Now, it will always be alright for men to rely on women, just as it should always be alright for women to rely on men, what it comes down to is what we expect out of each other.  We should not expect things out of one or the other based merely on gender (although biology does factor in in some part), but on who we are as humans and what we have experienced.  Now whether or not Don could have stumbled across that thought after Dr. Miller leaves his office and he sips her drink, is up in the air – but that would certainly be a step forward in the formation of their relationship.

Peggy of course is constantly wanting.  She wants success; she wants to be married; she wants her baby back in some way. She is the one who expresses that she doesn’t know how she feels so naturally her story truly exemplifies that sentiment.  She is frustrated that her drive leaves her from just being able to accept being a woman and caretaker, but she is also angry that the men in her life can never seem to appreciate her for who she really is – the only person that seemed to be able to in his own strange way was Pete, but she could never be with him if she wanted to be the person she wanted to be.  So, Peggy is left love-sick for a romance or relationship that will have to force her to question her ambition or to continue to forge ahead to find that person who can fit into her life, can appreciate her drive and ambition.

And of course, there is the daughter of another generation in Sally. Sally who is desperately in love with Don, but already knows how to speak her own mind.  She has seen her mother get what she wants in the past and knows how to work Don into giving her pizza and bring her to the zoo for a  morning trip that lasts well into the afternoon.  Sally takes on so many different postures of a woman in this episode that it is truly fascinating.  She wakes up and makes Don breakfast with her hair tangled like a lover or a wife; she tells him she needs to see him like a mistress; she tells him how much she loves him like an adoring daughter;  she mutters “oh” like a jilted admirer when he tells her she will be seeing Faye again; and she throws a tantrum like the child she actually is when she realizes that she can take on so many postures, but she can’t control her own situation – it is up to the adults, it is up to the man in her life, which will never be Henry, but always Don. 

There is a lot to be said of how Sally loves Don and how Don tries to convey his love for her but never truly can.  He strokes her hair aside and kisses her on the forehead, but when she starts expressing her deep desire to leave home he can only tell her to go to sleep.  This all leads to Sally falling in the hallway and Meghan picking her up and hugging her. The posture and embrace come so naturally for Meghan that it is almost jarring.  This is not to suggest that she is the woman Sally needs or that Don needs, but she just throws into relief how much Sally is missing that pure connection and love in her life.  In the past Don has shown her a great deal of affection, but we never get that moving moment like Don and Bobby had in “Gypsy and the Hobo” when Don wakes Bobby up in the middle of the night to hug him and tell him that he’ll “never lie” to him.  We are far removed from that era of the Drapers and Sally is missing that kind of attention and love, certainly from Betty, but especially from Don who she loves to a degree that is so great that it could be some form of  love-sickness, which leads to her anger.  Sally tells Meghan at the end that its not going to be alright.  And perhaps as all these women ride down the elevator at the end of the episode, struggling with the heat of anger or love-sickness, containing intelligence and strength in each of their own ways, that is the question we have to ask each of them and ourselves for the women in our lives: Is it going to be alright?

Four more episodes left.

Suitcase for Summer

When I take a spur of the moment vacation to remote parts of Vermont and Maine, the bonus that all you Puddlers receive is an extra-special, double episode review of Mad Men.  I will make up for a week of silence by combining reviews of the episodes, “The Suitcase” and “The Summer Man.” In a way, I am glad to be writing about both of these episodes at the same time as they showcase the two different sides of Mad Men episode delivery as well as serve as key back-to-back statements on the state of Don Draper at the current moment in time.  I, like most people, was completely on edge to see how Don Draper would follow up on the personal revelations and experiences he went through with Peggy in “The Suitcase” in “The Summer Man,” so I suppose its only fitting that I get to write about his cathartic night as well as the immediate (for Mad Men) aftermath.

“The Suitcase” has already been widely regarded as the best episode in Mad Men history.  This is funny to me, because many of the early episodes of this season seemed to stake that claim.  However, “The Suitcase” was a coup in so many ways that it was impossible to say that any other episode of the show even came remotely close to the storytelling, drama, precision and overall excellence of that episode.  Much has already been written about this episode and I was so engrossed by it that I read the more Mad Men commentary about “The Suitcase” than I did about any other episode.  I did this mainly because it had such a profound effect on me when I finally was able to watch it that I wanted to make sure that I didn’t completely copy what other people had written about it.  Yet, it remains difficult not to mention the main themes and touchstones of the episode.

Clearly, the relationship between Don and Peggy has been one of the centers of the show.  It’s hard to discount many of the important character relationships and interactions on Mad Men, but over time, we have seen just how vital and important the relationship between Peggy and Don is to the overall themes of the show as a whole.  Their first key interaction comes in the pilot episode where Peggy, after being cajoled by her co-workers into thinking that it is duty to sleep with Don since she is his secretary, grabs Don’s hand in a gesture leading towards sexuality.  Don responds by telling her that he is her boss and not her boyfriend, firmly establishing his rules in relation to his secretaries as well as how Mad Men plays with the work and home environments; who you are at work and who you are at home are drastically different identities and often the politics and the language of that work identity can seep into the identity of who you are outside of work – that is, business can seem personal.  Peggy and Don have navigated these waters before, mainly throughout Season 3 and most notably in “Shut the Door, Have a Seat.”  In that episode Don must confront the fact that he has not been fair to Peggy because he views her as an extension of himself and quite literally, what should have been about business and the quality of ideas that another person was bringing him, became personal to Don as he related Peggy with any shortcomings or frustrations he had with himself. In the end of his conversation with Peggy, he states that he will spend the rest of his life trying to get her to join his new firm because he acknowledges the similarity they share in perhaps my favorite line in the entire show:
“There are people out there who buy things. People like you and me. Then something happened. Something terrible. And the way that they saw themselves... is gone. And nobody understands that. But you do. And that's very valuable.”

That is, it was my favorite line and moment until “The Suitcase.”  As Season 4 has gone on and Don has become drunker and drunker, he has fallen back into the pattern of lashing out at Peggy. However, the change this season has been that that Peggy now feels the confidence to talk back to Don and correct him as she did over the mistake he made with Danny’s tag-line in “Waldorf Stories.”  In “The Suitcase,” Don is on Peggy’s back for a new campaign for Samsonite suitcases.  Don is clearly still drinking very much at work and at the end of the work day before the Clay vs. Liston fight, which happens to be Peggy’s birthday, he calls her into his office to go over the work she has done for Samsonite.  After shooting down all of Peggy’s ideas, he makes her stay late to stand up her fiancée, which eventually leads to Mark breaking up with her over the phone.

This brings us to the big confrontation when Peggy expresses her anger at Don for not giving her credit for the Glo-Coat ad she believes she was responsible for.  Peggy’s confrontation leads to this exchange:

Don: That’s the way this works.  I give you money, you give me ideas.
Peggy: But you never say, thank you.
Don: That’s what the money’s for!

This is perhaps the quintessential statement about work, which is to say that it’s the quintessential statement about Mad Men.  Young, ambitious people want it all when they start working, not realizing that they are actually working for someone else.  We come from years of school where there is no real “boss,” we work for ourselves and to achieve the grades that we deserve.  When you work, there is a boss who gives you money for the work you do – you work and spend your time to make someone else look good; that’s their job, that’s what they get for the time they have put in over the years.  It’s a hierarchy that people often forget and it may seem antiquated and can be exploited at times, but that’s what happens to all hierarchies in the hands of the wrong people, but that’s the way it works.

Now, bosses can obviously show appreciation, but Don has a history of not “valuing” relationships as Roger once said.  Here, Don shows that he does value relationships as he did in “Shut the Door, Have a Seat.”  He shows Peggy how he values her, how they actually value each other through the night that they spend together in the office, at the diner, in the bar and at the office again.  They exchange intimate details, sometimes directly, sometimes skirting around the subject such as how their fathers died, where they came from, and relationship issues.  They even hint at how much they actually know about each other by referencing Don sleeping with Alison and Peggy giving away her baby. “People do things, right?” Don says to Peggy.  It’s like a strange Leopold Bloom and Stephen Dedalus moment for the two characters.  They are like souls who connect on this specific day and allow themselves to open up. It turns out that there is a bit of a cosmic significance as we find out that Anna Draper has died in California, leaving Don feeling very much “alone” (I personally didn’t mind the ghost of Anna appearing as a hazy middle of the nigh image, but I know some people did). Don realizes that he isn’t alone as Peggy comes over, places her hand gently on his back in some mystic moment of healing, and tells him that Anna wasn’t the only person that really knew him.  The episode ends (now famously) with Don holding Peggy’ hand over a new ad campaign idea.  Peggy looks at him once, her hair tousled from sleeping in the office, her skin pure and clear and soft and looks absolutely beautiful in the morning light, the most beautiful that she ever has on the show.  She looks at him once with her piercing green eyes, then once more, almost muttering, “I know,” before asking Don if he wants to leave the door open, to which Don responds that he does.

On that note, the viewer wants to know if Don’s life will be more open, if he will stick to what seems to be a new approach to life.  In “The Suitcase” Don saw a drunken Duck stumbling around the office and could almost see where he was heading in many ways.  Peggy also asks him at once point how much longer he can keep up his drinking. As “The Summer Man” begins, the viewer is greeted with a shot of Don swimming at a pool club.  He becomes exhausted after one lap and we get a voice over narration, which is Don keeping a diary.  Don is trying to get himself organized and into shape.  He admits he has a drinking problem and soon, in a rare licensing moment, “Satisfaction” is playing as Don surveys the streets of New York and takes a pull of cigarette, thinking about how he can smell corn and summer before confidently walking to the office.

Where “The Suitcase” was classic Mad Men, putting two characters in a pressurized situation with pointed dialogue and thorough references to the history of the two characters and the show as a whole, “The Summer Man” is experimental.  There is the voice over, the beginning story telling is slightly disjointed, we hear “Satisfaction,” there are camera tricks played when Don takes a drink at work and feels himself removed from the world.  This is meant to jar the viewer.  Don is making a change, and when we make changes, often we need something drastic or out of our comfort zone to do it, Don admits as much when he confesses to feeling like a little girl writing his journal.  And Don is slowly grabbing the world around him and learning how to place himself in it.

It is a complicated episode that has a lot to do with feeling satisfied.  Does Betty feel satisfied in her new life? She has thought so, until she sees Don on a date with Bethany and can barely breathe. She is so angry at him that it takes Francine telling her how much she has to realize that she should be satisfied with her new marriage, with her children, with all that she has.  However, we leave Betty at the end of this episode, looking longingly at Don and perhaps she is still not satisfied.  Is Henry satisfied? He has the beautiful wife he wanted, much like Don did, however he is slowly realizing that she is a child and that perhaps she still loves Don in some way.  He even says that they may have rushed into their marriage.  In many ways, Henry isn’t satisfied with himself or the position he is in as he makes a weak power play in having Don remove his things from their home on the day before Gene’s birthday.  He does not feel confident and wants to keep Don away.  Can he feel satisfied with his little act of mowing the lawn while stacking Don’s boxes on the curb without acknowledging him?

Joan and Peggy are also looking for satisfaction.  Joan is receiving less and less respect in the office, perhaps less than she even had at Sterling Cooper.  The rules of the world are changing and Joan can’t use her sexuality to get things done behind the scenes.  She has a legitimate office position and the young guys at the firm don’t respect her. But, they don’t respect women at all, as Joey plainly points out when he tells Peggy he doesn’t like working with women because they have no sense of humor.  Peggy isn’t satisfied with this as an apology from Joey or a justification for his actions towards Joan and the pornographic picture he drew of her and Layne.  So, Peggy fires him after she receives encouragement from Don who seems to be keeping up his new approach to treating her right after their night together.  However, Joan is not satisfied with this result as it only perpetuates the polarizing views that men had of women either being objects or humorless bitches.  Joan overall is the least satisfied character.  Her husband is leaving, she has no one to connect to at work and her overall vision of the world seems to have failed her.  She is definitely in a tight corner.

Don, however, receives satisfaction in a couple of ways.  Bethany pleasures him after their date in the back of the cab and he is able to get the date with Dr. Miller that he is looking for. Dr. Miller is even willing to go home with him.  However, Don instead of reaching for “what should satisfy him” is trying to figure out what actually satisfies him and very often that can mean not sleeping with someone if you have the chance; not doing something just because you can, but because you actually want to.  Dr. Miller, whose talent is being able to read people and anticipate what they want or what they will do (much like Don) is surprised by this, which only furthers the theme of the show that she and Don have vocalized of “what I want and what is expected of me.” This theory is being actualized and shown to us in many different interactions and ways this season and if Don and Dr. Miller continue the relationship that may be starting between them, we will obviously see this idea pushed even further and further forward.

There is a lot coming in the next few episodes.  I have not even mentioned how Don seems slightly behind trends like Joe Namath and Muhammad Ali as cultural icons and pitchmen, how Pete seems to still be forward thinking, how Roger’s memoirs are becoming a symbol for how disconnected and lost he is, how Peggy is going to figure out to gain the respect she wants now that she has cleared the air with Don and cemented a huge part of her identity.  And what will become of Betty Draper?  With a slight of hand, Weiner suddenly made her a very interesting character again this week. This season has not disappointed and I think will be the most rewarding yet, and if not, it will at least make us try to see who really knows us – and maybe think about how valuable that is.