Crafty; On Creativity, Patience and Courage

I do some of my best thinking while brushing my teeth, though too often all my clever thoughts have gone the way of my toothpaste by the time I get to my computer. But tonight I at least remember the subject of my getting ready for bed musings; writers writing about the difficulty of writing. Nobody chooses to be a writer; it's the hardest work you can possibly do, painstakingly slow, tedious, thankless, and the pay sucks. John Grisham once wrote this op-ed for the Times, and it just might be the best thing I've ever read of his, but it's still not that good.  In case you don't feel like reading the article, Mr. Grisham's closing line sums it up nicely; "Writing’s still the most difficult job I’ve ever had — but it’s worth it."

And it's true. Writing is nearly impossible. Sometimes I read an essay or chapter I wrote once upon a time and cringe at the sight of my own voice (see what I did there?). Sometimes, though not too often, I'm actually impressed with myself. But at least writing is relatively private work. You can write and think and write some more, then think and read and revise, until the work is polished enough to show to anyone who can stand you. Asking someone to read a chapter or short story or, god forbid a novel is not like asking her to look at one of your paintings or photographs. Reading an unpublished manuscript, essay, or even blog post requires a commitment of time and precious brain energy. As difficult as it is to write something readable, convincing someone to read it is even harder. And as a friend of many writers I appreciate anyone that gives their time and consideration to read raw material.

You know what's really difficult? Acting. I once wrote a profile about a fascinating drama coach in New York City. My research included reading up on various acting techniques such as Meisner Stanislavsky, and Uta Hagen, as well as observing classes and following the coach around town to watch her work with famous people on film sets. I used to pray that she wouldn't tap me to participate in any of the acting exercises and improvisations she had her brave students do. No way was I getting up there in front of strangers and baring my soul while pretending to be someone else. And then one day she got me, she actually peer pressured me into an improv, which I must admit I rather enjoyed even though I totally sucked. Untangling my resulting jumble of information and experience and arranging it into a readable essay taught me that acting is a lot like writing, only no one can see the silly faces a writer makes as she works. Any writer could benefit from a taking few acting classes because a good teacher will force you to dig deeper, work harder, think and take risks, until you find that strand of truth and translate it to the page. Or the stage.

My answer to the question How Has Shakespeare Changed Your Life?

We all struggle with personal transformations and face changes beyond our control. Shakespeare's characters do this on a grand scale. In many ways they're just like us, men and women struggling to live according to the rules and expectations of their society – only in iambic pentameter. Shakespeare based the limitations of his characters on his observations of human frailty. 

Change is inevitable. Sometimes I welcome it, but not often. In fact, my default reaction to life's inevitable and difficult transitions has always been to run away, play it safe. Mine is a normal, even universal reaction to change and conflict. Shakespeare understood this, and while I've never had to face the life and death circumstances of Ophelia and Desdemona, or the romantic and economic conflicts of Beatrice and Portia, I relate to their predicaments on many levels. The choices each character makes in dealing with her conflicts and obstacles separate the comedies from the tragedies. Beatrice changed and fell in love; Ophelia refused to change and lost her mind.

Conflicts are the stuff of compelling drama and timeless comedy. They're also a basic fact of life.  Studying Shakespeare has taught me about emotional flexibility; in the face of inevitable change and conflict I can either bend like Beatrice, or break like Ophelia.

 I wrote a bio for Theo's website about 4 years ago. Since then he has traveled and performed all over the world and cut two new albums. A few months ago he asked me to write a new bio for the liner notes of his next CD, which will be released sometime this summer.  This past Friday night I went to see his band, The Afrosonic Quintet, play at the Blue Note here in New York City. The show was scheduled for 12:30 AM but didn't start until after 1, way past my bedtime. But once these guys started playing I lost all sense of time.  If you ever have the opportunity, go see them play live. Meanwhile, here's a link to the last album, In The Tradition. 

https://itunes.apple.com/us/album/in-the-tradition/id304988955 

Jazzman Take My Blues Away

Theo Croker’s distinctive sound defies classification. His innate talent is a gift from his grandfather, the legendary Doc Cheatham, but his music is entirely his own. Cultivated from deep jazz roots that he nurtured with years of study and practice, it is a unique blend of jazz, hip-hop, R&B and pop influences. Theo’s newest project, entitled Afrosonic and produced by the celebrated singer Dee-Dee Bridgewater for her label DDB Records, is the result of Theo’s relentless search for originality.

Theo Croker was born on July 18, 1985, in the small town of Leesburg, Florida, the second son of William Henry Croker, a civil rights activist, high school principal and farmer, and Alicia Cheatham, a guidance counselor. As a young boy Theo loved to listen to his grandfather’s records, and when he was about ten years old he picked up his older brother’s horn and started to play. That same year his parents drove the boys to Sarasota to watch their grandfather play live at the Van Wezel Performing Arts Hall, an experience that would shape Theo’s future. After that he would sit in his room for hours, learning new notes by listening to and playing along with his grandfather’s records. “He had a very appealing sound, the strength behind it was always a melody," Theo says. “I noticed that I could fit in with what I was hearing harmonically.” 

When his grandfather died in June 1997, Theo was invited to participate with Wynton Marsalis, Clark Terry, Warren Vache, Benny Powell, Al Grey, Jon Faddis, and countless others in a memorial concert at St. Peter’s Church in Midtown Manhattan. Wearing his grandfather’s trademark fedora, Theo sat in the old master’s chair and played On Broadway, mesmerizing the audience with his resemblance to his grandfather, both musical and physical. “I was only eleven years old, but the way the music touched people and the way it made me feel was enough to set me for life. I knew it was what I wanted to do.”

Two years later he joined veteran trombonists Al Grey and Benny Powell at the New Orleans Jazz Festival, where they asked him to sit in on a set in the Preservation Hall Jazz Tent. “Al Grey asked what song I wanted to play and I said C-Jam Blues. I didn't know how to improvise. I would usually just play the melody and that's it. After I played it Benny told me that I called the song so I had to solo, meaning improvise alone. I told him I didn’t know how to solo, and he said,  ‘Now you’re about to learn. Start playing.’ That was my first time soloing, on stage at the New Orleans jazz & Heritage festival. He showed me scales and chords to practice after that. Al Grey and Benny Powell really nurtured me after Doc died. They took a sincere interest in my development. I was just a kid.” 

At sixteen Theo left home to attend The Douglas Anderson School of the Arts in Jacksonville, Florida, where his talent and drive attracted attention both in school and with local audiences. After seeing one of Theo’s solo performances, the director of the Ritz Theatre, a former black movie house transformed into a museum with a performance space, commissioned him to compose music for and lead a seventeen-piece band, eventually becoming the theater’s first Artist In Residence. Meanwhile he stayed in contact with the musicians he’d met at Doc Cheatham’s memorial service five years earlier. Wynton Marsalis, who had been particularly moved by Theo’s performance there, invited him to study with him in New York over school breaks and encouraged him to move there after high school. Donald Byrd, the virtuoso jazz trumpeter and pioneer in jazz education, drew Theo to college in Ohio.

            The Oberlin College Conservatory’s jazz studies faculty includes active composers and performers like Donald Byrd, the renowned trumpet player and academic ethnomusicology pioneer. Gary Bartz, Robin Eubanks, Billy Hart, Wendell Logan, Marcus Belgrave, and Dan Wall, among many others, have taught there. Theo had first heard about the school when The Oberlin Jazz Septet performed at his high school during his junior year. “That’s when I got interested, cause they blew me away. Then my father took me to visit and we saw Dr. Donald Byrd in concert. He was a huge fan.” Bill Croker passed away in February 2004, but he did see his son’s first performance at Oberlin on October 20, 2003.

            When he began his conservatory studies in the fall of that year, Theo met pianist Sullivan Fortner and drummer Kassa Overall, musicians who shared his interests in musical experimentations. They quickly became close friends, and continue to perform together years after they graduated. Theo received the Presser Music Foundation Award in the spring of 2006 and used the proceeds to finance his debut album, The Fundamentals, for which he composed and arranged every song. Recorded over the summer over 2006, it features fellow Oberlin students Sullivan Fortner and bass player Chris Mees, and received wide critical acclaim.

            During spring break the previous year, Theo met Roy Hargrove at a jam session at Cleo’s in New York. Hargrove, impressed with the younger trumpeter’s abilities, invited him to his house the next day. “When he asked about the horn I was playing I told him it was on loan as I had recently broken my own beyond repair.” Hargrove let Theo try a few of his instruments, including a rare and expensive Martin Committee trumpet. “When I played the Martin he was like ‘yes, that one! Play that one.’ So a few months later I did and still do.”

            Theo booked his first international gig as a headliner at Shanghai’s House of Blues and Jazz, bringing the Theo Croker Quintet to play with him six nights a week from September 2007 through February 2008, when he returned to New York to record his second CD, In The Tradition. That album featured Tootie Heath on drums, Benny Powell on trombone, Sullivan Fortner on piano, and Joe Sanders on bass. After another stint freelancing in China Theo booked five shows at the Rubin Museum of Arts’ Harlem In The Himalayas series with Jimmy Cob, Winard Harper, Benny Powell, Billy Hart, and Wycilff Gordon.

            In the fall of 2008 Theo made Shanghai his base. He worked with various bands playing salsa, fusion/rock, and blues, in clubs all over China. In 2009 he formed the Theo Croker Sextet, with four other American musicians based in Shanghai. In November 2009 the quintet was hired as the house band for Asia Uncut Star Network, a late night TV show modeled on the Tonight Show, with Theo as bandleader and in-house composer.

            He stayed with Asia Uncut until April 2010. The following month Dee Dee Bridgewater, who had met Theo the previous year when he played in her band at the Shanghai Jazz Festival, came to China on a ten-day jazz education tour with Herbie Hancock. When the tour came to Shanghai, she invited Theo to her concert at the World Expo Entertainment Hall, and later that night joined him onstage at his gig at JZ Club. The next day she asked him to lunch to discuss possible future collaborations.

            Having recently launched her own label she was looking for a fresh act to sign. “She didn’t want another traditional jazz record, but something crossover or eclectic,” Theo remembers. He had just started the Afrosonic Orchestra project, an ever-changing collective of international musicians based in Shanghai. The group explores Afro- influenced music such as Hip-Hop, R&B, Afro-Beat, and Jazz.  “It’s a concept,” Theo explains, “not a genre. The goal is to blur the line between all genres with fresh interpretations, adaptations, and original compositions, in many ways it exemplifies the new vibrancy of 21st century popular music. The concept appealed to Ms. Bridgewater, who invited Theo Croker to be the first artist to sign with DDB Productions.

            Theo immediately started making demos, refining the Afrosonic concept. In July he met the singer China Moses, Dee Dee Bridgewater’s daughter at the Strasbourg Jass Festival in France. Ms. Moses joined the Afrosonic Orchestra at the JZ Jazz Festival in Shanghai that October, and again at the Blues to Bop Festival in Lugano, Switzerland in September 2011, where they appeared as the headliner. That performance marked the group’s European debut.

            Using original material primarily sourced from the Afrosonic Orchestra repertoire, Theo recorded the album Afrosonic at Avatar Studios in New York City on April 21-24, 2011. Produced by Ms. Bridgewater, the album features Dee Dee Bridgewater, Roy Hargrove and China Moses on vocals, Steffon Harris on vibes, Karriem Riggins on drums, Dave Gilmore on guitar, Sullivan Fortner on piano, and Michael Bowie on bass.     

            Theo marked another milestone in his career in July 2010 when he became the first Artist in Residence at Shanghai’s famous Peace Hotel Jazz Bar, the oldest and longest running music club in China. The Theo Croker Quintet played to a packed and enthusiastic crowd every Tuesday through Saturday night until his residency ended in April 2013. As one popular travel blogger wrote, “I have never been a big fan of jazz, but the Theo Croker Quartet just might have made a convert out of me. I would definitely enjoy spending another evening soaking up their cool vibes. These guys totally rock.”

            DDB Productions will release Afrophysicist, Theo’s third and most eclectic album, in the summer of 2013.

Finding The Source

When the fridge broke about a month ago much of its contents were placed on the windowsill behind the microwave, atop a rickety steel tube-wire rack thingy that is the home of various cookie sheets, cutting boards, roasting pans, and maybe a toaster. One of those items from the fridge was a freshly roasted chicken, all sliced up and ready to eat. At least I think that's what it was.

The smell started to permeate the kitchen about a week ago. I thought it was Dakota, my best friend, the otherwise fastidious if slightly pudgy Portuguese Water Dog. Sometimes, when her hair gets too long (she's one of those wonder-dogs with hair, not fur, who doesn't shed and supposedly keeps herself impeccably clean) she has a tendency to pee irresponsibly and wee errant streams of wee dribble onto her fluffy hind legs. Yesterday I finally got around to giving her a bath. She was soooo dirty, a strange sort of foamy greasy dirt floated in the fetid bathwater, so I washed her three times for good measure. And then I blow dried her – an ambitious undertaking – and she smelled lovely.

We went out last night, attended for the second night in a row our daughter's high school production of "Ragtime."  I cried at both performances.While I don't quite love the musical, I did love the novel and think I liked the movie, (it was what, almost 30 years ago?) and the kids put on one helluva a show.  The clean dog stayed home and I came home a few minutes past midnight to an even stinkier kitchen.

In the den, on the far side of the apartment from the kitchen, I drank a beer and tried to watch the Altman movie I'd bought a few weeks ago, "The Long Goodbye." Early 70's, Eliot Gould as Raymond Chandler's famous fast talking alter ego Phillip Marlowe, what could be bad? I needed to start getting back into the LA state of mind so I can get back to work on my novel (Part II is set in Chandleresque mid-century SoCal) and I never saw an Altman film I didn't at least appreciate. Until last night. What a piece of shit. Ever wonder why Eliot Gould disappeared into obscurity, or at least into a footnote in the life of Babs Streisand? Watch this movie; it explains everything about the Gould question.

This morning the smell was still there, only, of course, worse. The entire house was vacuumed and the kitchen floor, sink, stovetop and counters scrubbed like a scene from Gattica. I got on my knees and smelled the kitchen rug. The smell was definitely somewhere in the kitchen, but not in the rug. I sniffed and sniffed, like the dog that neither of my dogs are interested in being, the trail hound. Then I looked at the scary wire cart thing by the window. So much grimy dust, thick as topsoil on a landfill, and just as stinky. Had to empty it out to move it, decided to sweep and scrub the floor behind and beneath it. And there is was. A tupperware container, the plastic sarcophagus of a roasted chicken, once delicious, now merely a congealed mass of decaying roasted flesh, dripping its decomposing entrails artfully down masonry wall and across quarry tile floor, perfuming the stale kitchen air with its own fetid message: "I was a chicken, then I was your dinner, now I'm your worst olfactory nightmare. Peace be with you, oh family of wasteful, forgetful carnivores. And the next time the aroma of fresh roasted free-range poultry sets the saliva flowing in your mouth, remember me."    

A Book Review

I wrote this one many months ago and it was finally published today, in the November issue of PIF Magazine, the country's oldest continuously running online literary journal. I'm particularly fond of this review because the novel, a medical thriller (not my favorite genre) was written by a friend and I expected it to bore me.

Here's the link: http://www.pifmagazine.com/2010/11/first-do-no-harm/
Here it is copied and pasted:

First, Do No Harm

Reviewed By Adrienne Friedberg

Published November 1st, 2010

---

Knife Music, the title of David Carnoy’s debut novel, refers to the soundtrack surgeons choose to accompany their own performance in the operating room. This medical thriller opens like a scene from one of the better episodes of ER. A paramedic calls in the particulars of a motor vehicle accident to the trauma center at Parkview Hospital in Menlo Park, California; a 16-year-old girl with apparent head, neck, chest and abdominal injuries is awake at the scene. Four minutes later Ted Cogan, the on-call trauma surgeon, greets the victim as she’s being wheeled into the OR and assesses the situation. Her racing pulse and low blood pressure suggest internal injuries, possibly the rupture of a vital organ. Then, with the amusing if predictable swagger of the ruggedly handsome and smugly charming, Cogan does what he’s been trained to do and saves her life.

Carnoy takes us through the procedure step by step, with a cinematographer’s eye for detail; preliminary X-rays, recitation of blood counts and vital signs, the location of the latex glove dispenser, the look of the girl’s eyes over her oxygen mask as the head nurse cuts away blood-soaked jeans, mock turtleneck, bra and panties to reveal muscular legs, flat stomach and the various cuts, bruises and scratches on her legs and torso. The paramedics’ paperwork shows that her name is Kristen. Zealous interns chime in with questions designed to assess her mental state, and the patient groans in pain. The surgeon controls the scene like its writer controls the story, with the easy confidence of a crack technician who knows his way around the human body as well as the psyche.

Cogan is tall, with the boyish good looks of a Gen-X movie star that are only enhanced by the lack of sleep that comes with his job. He has the grace of a natural athlete (he pitched for Yale), a quick wit, and genuine compassion for his patients. Carnoy bathes him in a bright Northern California light, showcasing his strengths but also revealing his blemishes. He’s a bit of a womanizer, somewhat lonely but also commitment phobic, and a more than a little arrogant. Still, he’s eminently likable.

When Kristin is found dead six months later hanging from the shower-head in her own bathroom, Hank Madden, a homicide detective that even defense attorneys think of as a decent guy, is assigned to the case. Madden walks with a limp, the result of childhood polio, one of the last recorded cases. He achieved his rank through hard work and dedication, allowing himself no self-pity. Like Cogan, Madden is smart and likable. Under different circumstances the two men would have liked each other. Then again, Madden has an innate distrust of doctors; all those childhood visits left some horrific scars.

Kristen had been a popular, well-adjusted kid, not a typical suicide. But a few months after her accident her grades started slipping; she was moody in more than the normal teenage way. Her worried mother had snooped around Kristen’s room and found her journal, in which Kristen had written about being with Dr. Cogan around the same time her behavior had started changing. After a prolonged fight with her parents in which she insisted she wasn’t raped, that she had done as she pleased, Kristen, a movie buff, watched “An Officer and a Gentleman,” one of her favorites, for the last time. The note she left said only, “I will not be a victim.”

“Kristen didn’t feel like a victim,” her best friend later tells Cogan. “But everybody wanted to make her one.”

The journal and a CD-R labeled “Knife Music” that Madden finds on Kristen’s desk are enough evidence for him to start investigating the man who saved her life in the opening scene. As Cogan’s lawyer, an ex-lover, explains, “There’s something called foreseeable harm. You may not have intended to cause her to commit suicide, but by sleeping with an underage girl, the law says you knowingly inflicted an emotional injury.” If the prosecution can prove that injury led to her suicide, Cogan could end up with a manslaughter charge, two to five years in prison, and the loss of his medical license.

Knife Music is part medical thriller and part police procedural, and it certainly has all the gut-level suspense of a detective story. But this is no ordinary thriller. In the tradition of Richard Price or Dennis Lehane, Carnoy digs so deeply into the past experiences that have led to the motivations, secret or subconscious thoughts of each of his main characters that you almost feel guilty for eavesdropping. He has a remarkable ear for dialogue; in a line or two or maybe a single phrase of age-appropriate lingo he conjures a character’s history and emotional baggage, masterfully rendering the rhythms and inflections of speech, cadence, tone, and cultural dialect. Cogan and his doctor friends play tennis at the club and chat about wives, children, and sex; Stanford frat boys at the cleverly named “Rejection House” (it used to be the admissions building) plan parties and try to get laid; cops drink diet coke or beer and talk about cop stuff; sixteen-year old girls gossip and bicker like sixteen-year-old girls. Movies and popular music are the common language of all these characters; images from iconic films of the past three decades appear throughout the narrative as reminders of who we are and who we’ve been. The people in this story are so human, so fleshed out, that one can’t help but recognize them.

Tying together all the elements of this excellent literary thriller is the author’s cinematic sense of pacing. The novel covers a period of about ten months and is written in the present tense, except for the intermittent flashbacks that supply back-story. Carnoy zips backwards and forwards through the immediate and distant past with remarkable ease, giving the reader an easy-to-follow time-line in the form of a police log date stamp at the opening of each scene. Along the way he manages to reveal just enough of the hidden depths of his characters’ hearts to keep his reader turning the pages.

Knife Music
By David Carnoy
352 pp. Overlook
$24.95

The Women, from Puberty to Grave.

Season 4, episode 9, The Beautiful Girls. 

Oh My God.

Matthew Weiner is a) in touch with his feminine side, b) had an incredible mother, c) has a phenomenal wife, or d) really appreciates women. Of course, his co-writer Dahvi Waller probably had something to do with this episode being a masterpiece.  I propose that the superior quality of Mad Men, the series in general and this episode in particular, has a lot to do with the fact that, unlike so may other television shows, seven of its nine writers are women.  I read that in this article from the Wall Street Journal so it has to be true:  http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052970204908604574332284143366134.html
 


Did anyone catch the brilliant transition to the opening shot of the show? The familiar  opening title and credit sequence; the silhouette of what appears to be the back of Don Draper standing at the entrance of his office, the black shoes and briefcase, the office again as it falls to pieces, then shadow Don free-falls down the side of the sky-scraper, past the image of an Olympus-sized blond in a red spaghetti-strap dress, her shoulders bare, her lips and nails as red as her dress, then his falling body floats down the path of a pair of shapely thighs as another giant smiling blond looks on in the background, and suddenly shadow Don is in control, sitting in profile at his desk looking all he-man and confident. We've seen this sequence countless times, but after this episode it has a whole new meaning. All those female lips and shoulders, the thighs, and the foot that flirts with the free-falling man in Don Draper's suit, these are powerful symbols. Sex sells products, that's no mystery. But women are now making themselves matter, claiming their place in Don's life as well as in society.

Notice the opening shot of the real, live-action Don sitting in his chair in the exact same position as his two-dimensional doppelganger?  He's on the phone, telling whoever is on the other end that he wants what he wants when he wants it.

Next thing you know a woman is groaning in ecstasy off camera, and we hear a crash. The crash was Don, who knocked over a lamp. The groaning was Dr. Faye in the expert hands of Don, enjoying that orgasm our mothers could never dare talk about with us in the same house, even though they all had Masters and Johnson's book on their nightstand, or somewhere in the bedroom. Faye is a liberated woman; she has a PhD and orgasms, God bless her. No children though, but that was her choice. She couldn't possibly have it all.

Anyway, she comes, Don goes, and leaves her in his drab Waverly Place apartment with his only set of keys.

Peggy, that budding vixen, finds Mr. Right again, at PJ Clarkes of all places. But this beau has a social conscience. Civil rights and the plight of the "negro" matter to him, and he thinks Peggy is a kindred spirit. Is she or isn't she? Her firm represents known bigots, macho Bostonians who deal auto parts but refuse to employ blacks and are thus enduring an annoying civil rights boycott. Peggy was unaware of these issues because she doesn't read the Voice. But she does care, she just cares more about her career. If she could force her way in to an all boys network then surely the negroes can do the same thing, she argues. New suitor laughs that one off; sure, he says, let's have a civil rights movement for women. Hello Betty Friedan? The Feminist Mystique had been published two years earlier, in 1963, and ignited the Women's Movement, but apparently Peggy's intellectual hottie doesn't read girl stuff.

Sally Draper runs away from home, asserting herself to her father, being alternately stoic, silent, contrite, adorable, helpful (mmm, french toast with rum), charming, and heartwrenchingly honest. She hates her mother (so do I), loves her father (so do I, but for totally different reasons), and insists that he love her back. You go Sally! Even though I fear your chutzpah will ultimately get you to the exact same place as your mother – chain smoking in the suburbs. But for a few wonderful hours Sally forced her father to be, well, a father. She's as tough as her mother but not yet as cold and heartless.  The way she hugged the too-beautiful-for-words secretary broke my heart. How about that, a beautiful woman (in a menial position) who genuinely loves children?


How about Miss Blankenship? She was one of the most amusing characters ever on a drama series. Oh but I am going to miss her. Why did they have to kill her off so early in the season?  It is still early in the season, isn't it?  She was Burt Cooper's Joan back in the day. Her wit must have been sexy back then, until it morphed into lonely-old-lady cynicism. At least we know she got laid a lot in her youth. "She died like she lived, surrounded by the people she answered phones for," Roger tells Joan. Ouch. "She was born in a barn in 1898 and died in a skyscraper," Burt Cooper's says later. "She was an astronaut." Then he has the old gal's corpse respectfully carted off the swanky Frank Campbell Funeral Home on the Upper East Side (the same facility that will later prepare and display the body of Jacqui O). Burt's impromptu epitaph is, to borrow a classic ad tagline, priceless.

So, have we covered all the meaningful stages of a woman's life, the Gail Sheehey Passages? Little girl wants daddy. Young professional woman fighting her way in and up the corporate jungle jim wants love, enlightenment,  and excitement, but is made aware of her unwitting support for unjust social corporate practices.  Joan, married to a handsome jerk of a doctor who raped her on the floor of her office before they got married then joined the Army without consulting her and is finally shipped off to Vietnam (good riddance, I say, I don't care how cute you were when you sewed up her kitchen knife wound), is alone, and cranky.  Like Dr. Faye, Joan needs to get laid. Betty, divorced and rashly remarried, is a bitter bitch. "It's not going to be okay," Sally says when a woman who could be her mother but isn't gives her the physical affection she so desperately needs. Sally is right; when it comes to her cold hard mother, it is not going to be okay.

The final shot of The Women arranging themselves in the elevator like dots on a di, equidistant and completely independent of one another, was downright theatrical. That image will remain etched in my imagination for a long, long time.

I predict that in the near future Women's Studies and History departments in colleges all over the country will be teaching Mad Men, just as Harvard is now teaching The Wire.

Reading the Between the lines of Mad Men.

There has been a lot of press about the show's historical accuracy. The New York Times has a blog devoted to the show, that's where I learned that the producers hired Westchester County's official historian to verify all the details, including the arrangement of chairs at the meetings of the Town Council of Ossining. The Wall Street Journal recently ran this piece about the stubborn perfectionism about the costume designer: /http://magazine.wsj.com/hunter/the-partnership/threads-of-the-story/.  I've read dozens of other articles, all fascinating, many just reinforcing my own theories about the subtext, literary and historical value of the series. 


One theme that fascinates me is the onset of multiculturalism in New York City. Bigotry is still rife among the characters, of course. This past week's episode centered around the Cassius Clay/Sonny Liston fight. Harry sells tickets to the closed-circuit screening of the fight, and since he got the tickets gratis his colleagues accuse him of acting like a Jew. Don Draper's delightful secretary, Miss Blankenship – one of the best additions to the show I have to say – says that if she wanted to watch two negroes fight she'd throw a dollar bill onto the sidewalk.

But in other, less obvious ways, the characters' intolerance is softening. Peter Campbell, the youngest member of the new agency Sterling Cooper Draper Price, has been cursing a lot recently. When his wife told him she was pregnant he said "Jesus Mary and Joseph." A few episodes later he responded to some  unpleasant news by saying, "Judas H Priest."  Both exclamations seemed odd coming from a character like Peter.  He's the quintessential Manhattan WASP, prep school and Dartmouth grad. In one of the earlier seasons someone mentioned that his mother was a Van Cortland... or maybe a Dykman, one of the landed 17th century Dutch families whose names are on so many uptown streets and Bronx parks. The name Campbell is Scottish, maybe Presbyterian, like George H Bush, the kinder and gentler Protestants.
 
Peter likes to think he gets the people he's selling products to. New York was, and still is, a very Catholic town; everyone curses, we all pick up our neighbors' more colorful phrases.  Pete's unguarded expressions sound like they come from a working class Catholic, not a Park Avenue WASP.  My take is the writers are showing us, bit by bit, ethnic expression by ethnic expression, the cultural hodgepodge (that a Dutch word?) that is New York City.  Peter's language, his use of the vernacular, is a  reflection of his surroundings, not of his conscious mind. If he were being guarded he never would have said it.

Peter, like his wife Trudy and so many other characters on the show, changed - or evolved or grew up - right before our eyes on the Kennedy assassination episode. Don and Roger changed then too because they were about to lose their absolute grip on absolute power. Season 4 takes place in 1965. The country is changing, and, consciously or not (though probably not), Peter is changing with it. He's making his own way, doing whatever it takes to succeed, holding his own with Roger Sterling, his overtly racist boss. In a subplot of the show's first season, a Jewish department store heiress approaches Sterling Cooper, a WASP agency, partly because she wanted WASP customers. That season took place in 1960. Little by little, with subtle and sometimes blatant story lines, the writers of this show are showing us the many ways the country was changing.  Harry Crane has slipped a few Yiddish words in this season. He's the firm's media buyer, and when he came back from a business trip to LA he used the word bupkes, Yiddish for nothing. It was a throw away line, but some of us more astute viewers (read New York Jews) picked it up. He used another Yiddish word, goniff, in a subsequent episode, referring to the media sales guys at CBS in NYC.  This change in his character's attitude and vocabulary is the writers' acknowledgement to the growing power of the media and the many Jews who work it, as well as the WASP elite's gradual acceptance of Jews in society (to an extent) and business. 

I don't think the writers have made any mistakes.  The show this season, especially with less January Jones, is just about perfect.