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Live Blogging Mad Men: By the Waters of Babylon

Started by tomwatson · 11 months ago

I like television with episode titles. Titles give support to the themes of specific shows within larger story arcs. They can be very straightforward, like “Evan” of Miami Vice, or more editorial, like % ... Continue reading »

68 comments

  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    I'm pretty sure it's a New York Dolls reference - though I've been known to be wrong.
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Come to think of it, one of the secretaries bears a striking resemblance to Sylvain Sylvain.
    reply
  • M.A. Peel

    1 year ago

    Yeah, and don't forget Steve Martin: "born in Arizona, moved to Babylona, King Tut"
    reply
  • Dan Leo

    1 year ago

    Your resident Proustian is here, in my pongee pajamas and armed with my opium pipe and and a bottle of Haig & Haig. Let it rip.
    reply
  • steverino

    1 year ago

    "Last time on" is the best part - edits the show down to essentials.
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Wait a minute - he lives in Ossining and is reading the Poughkeepsie Journal? That's crazy insane, got no brain. Who did the research on this thing...
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  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    So Don/Dick was born in the 1900s to some kind of prairie Mennonite sect? Wow, Lynchian.
    reply
  • steverino

    1 year ago

    Cringe...yawn...not sure which - any suggestions?
    reply
  • steverino

    1 year ago

    Wait - getting interesting....
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Ah, back to the office at last!
    reply
  • M.A. Peel

    1 year ago

    Guys, I leave the urine joke in your capable hands.
    reply
  • steverino

    1 year ago

    Nice
    reply
  • James Wolcott

    1 year ago

    Office pleasantries have never seemed so...ominous.
    reply
  • steverino

    1 year ago

    M.A. I leave the pearl necklace joke in YOUR capable hands.
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    So that's the "taboo" office romance?! I thought it was part of the job description at Sterling Cooper....
    reply
  • James Wolcott

    1 year ago

    The brainstorming sessions here always end in a light, unresolved drizzle.
    reply
  • M.A. Peel

    1 year ago

    Tom, I agree. Now Don and Larry Tate's underage daughter--that's a taboo
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  • M.A. Peel

    1 year ago

    Steverino--touche.
    reply
  • Dan Leo

    1 year ago

    I just can't believe Don's shallow dumb wife graduated from Bryn Mawr.

    Don's gotta get it on with Miss Menken before his wife bores his ass to death.
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    And Jim, the psychotic scion has the best ideas...
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  • Jim Tourtelott

    1 year ago

    What's Don going to do--get advice from the hot Jewess from three weeks ago on how to sell Israel?
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  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Whao - the shiksa slut! Now that's a taboo romance, eh? Good lord....
    reply
  • M.A. Peel

    1 year ago

    This chicken is not happy with these morons right now
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  • James Wolcott

    1 year ago

    Could they make their points any more heavy-handedly?
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  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    What an incredibly clumsy cultural lesson
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  • James Wolcott

    1 year ago

    That lipstick demo was so weirdly staged and more condescending than what you'd see in a Hollywood film circa 1960--the leering wolf talk was editorial overkill.
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  • James Wolcott

    1 year ago

    The guy receiving the "basket of kisses" bears a remarkable resemblance to the late Willie Morris.
    reply
  • M.A. Peel

    1 year ago

    Did men really call women chicken in that sweeping way? Tomatoes I've heard, but chicken is too much.

    Was brainstorming a new thing back then?
    reply
  • James Wolcott

    1 year ago

    "It was like watching a dog play the piano"--jeezus cripes.
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  • Dan Leo

    1 year ago

    Peggy's gonna be running that joint in a year's time. Go girl!
    reply
  • blue girl

    1 year ago

    Was "bucket" really a better word than "basket"?

    I think not!
    reply
  • Jim Tourtelott

    1 year ago

    He does, but Morris was not a douchebag.
    reply
  • blue girl

    1 year ago

    “It was like watching a dog play the piano”–jeezus cripes

    Second that.
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  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Oh come on - like a dog playing the piano. This is ridiculous - way, way over-the-top depiction. S&C; is like a sexist concentration camp. It's 1960 for crissakes - Eleanor Roosevelt was alive. Women are writers, members of congress, cabinet secretaries, doctors, lawyers.
    reply
  • blue girl

    1 year ago

    I *loved* the way they were depicted going after the lipstick. Like a bunch of fish to crumbs.

    Blech.
    reply
  • steverino

    1 year ago

    oy gevalt...all the hackneyed yiddishisms
    reply
  • M.A. Peel

    1 year ago

    Blue Girl, you Mad Woman you.
    reply
  • Jim Tourtelott

    1 year ago

    Eleanor Roosevelt, to these guys, was an elderly pinko dyke.

    Still, it's hard to believe any collection of college-educated men could have been quite so uniformly and belligerently stupid.
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Let's just say that my grandmother, born in 1895, gone these 20 years, would be offended...
    reply
  • steverino

    1 year ago

    tip of the ol' fedora to marshall mcluhan, there...shame he didn't pop out the way he did in annie hall..
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    He also published that quote in 1964.
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  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Fun fact that destroys this series - J. Walter Thompson hired its first female vice president in 1940 - creative women were all over hte agencies in the 50s and 60s. Not at the very top, but most definitely outside the secretarial pool.
    reply
  • James Wolcott

    1 year ago

    A beatnik dive! If only Audrey Hepburn would burst forth in praise of Empathicalism!
    reply
  • Jim Tourtelott

    1 year ago

    Sweet Jesus. What is the beatnik for--equal opportunity cliche?
    reply
  • M.A. Peel

    1 year ago

    This is becoming very Sorkin here
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    This looks like the same beatnik dive Goober Pyle visited over in Mount Pilot.
    reply
  • Jim Tourtelott

    1 year ago

    M.A,, you're exactly right. That montage to metaphoric music was pure Studio 60.
    reply
  • James Wolcott

    1 year ago

    It would sure be nice if they could pull together some of these story strands into something resembling tension and ignition--didn't Matthew Weiner learn anything from his time on The Sopranos. There's nothing simmering under these scenes.
    reply
  • blue girl

    1 year ago

    creative women were all over hte agencies in the 50s and 60s. Not at the very top, but most definitely outside the secretarial pool.
    Some were at the top.

    Don't be fooled.
    reply
  • Jim Tourtelott

    1 year ago

    Actually, these are the same beatniks Jethro wanted to join when his career as a double-nought spy didn't work out. As you may remember, when Granny told them about morning chores, one of them said, "You mean it gets to be 6 o'clock twice?"
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    Good one, blue girl!

    This feels like Planet of the Apes, and the woman are the humans.
    reply
  • M.A. Peel

    1 year ago

    Tom, hahahaha!

    Never has a writer/producer done so little with so much potential. Oh, wait, that's the Sorkin school of tv.
    reply
  • Tom Watson

    1 year ago

    I'm pretty sure it's the same beatniks Joe Friday and Bill Gannon busted in '67.
    reply
  • Jim Tourtelott

    1 year ago

    Lois Wyse wouldn't have done well with these guys. Or at least The I Don't Want to Go to Bed Book for Boys wouldn't.
    reply
  • blue girl

    1 year ago

    As far as soap opera's go, it's picking up a little steam, I guess. But, that's all it is -- a really pretty, well propped soap opera with an advertising backdrop.
    reply
  • blue girl

    1 year ago

    Lois Wyse wouldn’t have done well with these guys.

    I have a feeling she would've kicked their butts.
    reply
  • David Halsted

    1 year ago

    Don, Don -- you ran away from your family, created a new identity, fought in the war, made it to the top of the advertising game, you have a beautiful wife and an artsy mistress who wears black underwear --
    How did you become such a boring stick-in-the-mud?
    Maybe one of the other Mad Men will turn out to be with the CIA and dose Don's scotch with LSD...but that's probably hoping for too much.
    reply
  • Jim Tourtelott

    1 year ago

    BG--

    Of course she would. She came up with one of the best remembered campaigns of the last forty years, and these clowns' top idea man thought "O Little Town of Bethlehem" was a flash of genius.
    reply
  • Fatherflot

    1 year ago

    Tom:

    Isn't the "dog playing the piano reference" a rather lame update on Samuel Johnson's quote about lady preachers?

    [to Boswell] "Sir, a woman's preaching is like a dog's walking on his hinder legs. It is not done well; but you are surprized to find it done at all."
    reply
  • Fatherflot

    1 year ago

    I turned to my wife tonight and said that my favorite character is the German research department lady. She was in the first episode, but I don't recall seeing her again until this ep. She's got a welcome kinky-bitchy vibe and the actress can act, unlike most of the rest of the chickens. The tension between her and the red-breasted battleship in the lipstick scene was about all the juice this episode had.
    reply
  • Pussy Pumps Fiona

    1 month ago

    My hubby feels the same. He's so turned on by the kinky, bitchy German research department lady. I have that character in mind when I surprise him on our anniversary with a kinky role play. I'm so excited with how he would react to it!
    reply
  • cgeye

    1 year ago

    Within the next two years, we'll see regional stagings of MACBETH, using this design palate. If I were a director, I'd be capturing screen shots now, and asking my artistic director to make lunch dates with those actors, and see what could happen with a hiatus.

    Because the secretarial pool, where the witches emerge? With Salvatore as Hecate? Oh, I'm feeling it -- or, is it the antihistamines....
    reply
  • cgeye

    1 year ago

    Um, palette.
    reply
  • Karen

    1 year ago

    fatherflot, yes--I think that was a Dr. Johnson allusion, which is why it initially made me laugh out loud for the first time in the series. But then I thought about it being said, in all seriousness, in 1960, and it just pissed me off.

    For those of you not watching the show with Closed Captions, you're missing a surreal treat. Not only are our captioneers members of the "would of, should of, could of" school, but they thought those caviar blinis were "caviar balinese" and that Don was threatening to abandon his wife on an "ice flow." But my FAVORITE part was when someone (Don?) toasted by saying "L'chaim" and the captions informed us that he was "[speaking Jewish]".

    I have to think Weiner must be behind these as well.
    reply
  • M.A.Peel

    1 year ago

    Karen, what a riot.
    reply
  • Kristin

    1 year ago

    The "like watching a dog play the piano line" was just painful. As was much of the episode. Hey, is it set in 1960? I'm just asking, because the director really isn't making a poing of it every three seconds or anything.

    You might enjoy this week's irreverent and wicked "Attention Deficit Theatre" recap of "Mad Men" here:

    http://www.unboundedition.com/content/view/2165...
    reply
  • blue girl

    1 year ago

    Loved the wicked Mad Men recap, Kristin.
    reply
  • Male Enhancement

    1 month ago

    @Fatherflotam. I am also a fan of that German research department lady. My fovorite female of the series.
    reply
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