Game of Thrones Season 3 Episode 5

If you were wondering what was happening with, Theon, this was not the episode for you. Then again, let's be honest, not even George R.R. Martin seems to care what's happening with Theon. The episode begins, like all great episodes of television with a sword fight. Oh yeah, and one of the swords is on fire because it has blood all over it. It's kind of like my childhood imagination come to life, which is, as I've said before, one of the great pleasures of GOT. Now, once could question Arya's obsession with wanting to see Sandor dead. However, I wanted him to be alive and her death lust is making me like her a bit less. Strangely, after the fight, the bastard blacksmith decides to stay on with the Brotherhood. He gives a speech about wanting to find a home and not serve a master, which is a speech that has been given roughly 500 times in the history of television. Though cliche, what makes it interesting is that his new home is full of men who can apparently be reanimated after dying. I remember reading a passage that said if people didn't like magic, they would be sorely disappointed by the remaining seasons. I'm not disappointed, but I could have used a little bit less of Lord of Light after the Melisandre debacle from season two, but I suppose I'll just have to get used to it.

Is anyone else missing the ice zombies? The very first episode begins with the White Walkers carving some people up and beheading rangers, but now it seems that they've moved on to arranging horse bodies to look like crop circles. It's fair to wonder if they aren't trying to get alien help, or, if they remain gone another episode or two, whether they've gone agrarian. Because it's easier to grow some vegetables than to hew a man with an axe. I think. I've never hewed anyone with an axe.

In lieu of ice zombies we got to see what all the fuss was about with Jon Snow and Gwen from Downton Abbey. She strips down and reminds him how people keep warm in the snow. However, he first lets her know that he actually just wanted to see how many words she could type per minute. This quickly ends when he discovers sex. It's happened to the best of us, my friend. Strangely, Gwen then goes all crazy girlfriend on him saying that she never wants to leave their cave of love and Jon lovingly kisses her, but he's actually saying, shi-, shi-, shi- over and over again and wondering where he left his pants. Also, apparently no OP north of the wall, which, I guess it's just one of those things that savages don't do.

We finally get a scene of Tyrion engaging with Lady Tyrell though it ends disappointingly quickly. I'm picturing some Varus and Littlefinger like dialogue eventually emerging between these two characters.

We get the continually touching saga of Jamie continued as he reveals the exact circumstances of his king slaying act. As it turns out, the king wanted to burn everyone and Jamie was just helping everyone out by putting a sword in his back. And it's entirely believable that Ned Stark wouldn't believe him, that he would refer first to honor. Jamie appears to be this season's Tyrion, the character who begins to shift as more of his traits are revealed. Although, he did still push Bran the oversized child out the window.

The honor of the Stark's, except when it comes to sleeping with random women or taking them as your wife, continues to cause problems as Robb ignores the advice of his small council and beheads one of his banner men, causing him to lose nearly half his army. I mean, I know that beheading is fun, but sometimes you have to keep your head in those situations...I'll stop punning before I get started, but let it be known, I could go on for hours. Now, all Robb needs to do is win back his other banner men, lord (something) who's daughter he promised to marry. If you're like me you're expecting a combination of Big Love and Craster's house of horrors. I think the show would benefit from some of the levity that would come about from Robb having two wives. Who tends the wounds now? Who fees the wolves? Who fails to talk him out of ill-fated beheadings? I'd watch that show.

We get a brief window into the life of Stannis, discovering that he apparently has a daughter, who he's locked up in a cell due to some skin deformity. It's pretty much the plot of Les Mis from that point on, with the little girl singing Castle in the Clouds and Stannis telling her that he locked one of her only friends away in the dungeon, because, hey, putting you in a tower wasn't enough.

The last bit of news from GOT is that the Lannister's are going to be married off in short order, Tyrion to Lord Stark's oldest, and stupidest daughter and the Queen regnent to Loras Tyrell. Neither of them seems particularly pleased about the match their father has arranged, but he's not exactly the type to brook disagreement. I for one am pleased as the Queen regent seems like she wouldn't make any husband happy and Loras isn't exactly interested in making his wife happy, so, a great marriage on both sides. The marriage between Tyrion and Sansa is a bit more troubling since he's already in love, and she's about to be kidnapped by Littlefinger and put in bondage, but love, especially love in GOT, can overcome all obstacles. Now let me get back to beheading someone with this fire sword.

Blackberries

I threw away so many things after graduate school, certain that I had moved on. Sometimes, late at night, I’ll spend forty minutes trying to find things I’d written in the past, to see if there is anything to glean from them. But they were written by a stranger and in a landfill somewhere, filled with marginalia from people I used to know. It is fortuitous, I suppose, to have our words buried like that together. I do not think I could give them any greater honor than to be decomposing together, locked in the same argument for years.

I worked in the garden for seven hours on Saturday. I did not work in the garden for seven hour on Saturday. Sometimes, I would come inside and sip a cool glass of water. Or, I would be outside, pulling miniscule weeds, and I would wonder if I had drank enough water, if I was feeling light headed, if and when I’d get a sunburn, and I would go inside and drink a glass of water and stare at the computer for a few minutes until I remembered that it was more pleasurable to be in the garden than on the computer. I would go back outside and pull the miniscule weeds and feel pleased at all the sunshine.

I spent a good deal of time in the garden. Some of the time I drove to stores like Home Depot or Ace and bought mulch, and gardening gloves, and gravel, and I carried them around and felt hail and still relatively young and happy to be outside in the sunshine lifting bags and picking weeds and wondering if the weeds were in the bag of mulch, or whether they were naturally occurring and then wondering if it really mattered whether the weeds were in the mulch or in the ground underneath the mulch previously, because either way I was still going to have to pull them. The question mostly has to do with justice.

Many of the flowers from last year are now in bloom. The hydrangea lived, as did some cone flowers, irises, blue ice plants, etc. There is a small stretch of slightly sloping bark where I planted two dead sticks on the ground. I purchased them at Home Depot for eight dollars each, and I read the directions and then planted them. They had pictures of blackberries on the side of the box, and so I paid eight dollars for them. However, what they appeared to be that day, and what they still appear to be, is two dead sticks that someone picked up off their lawn and put in a box with a picture of blackberries on it. Sometimes, when I don’t remember the exact planting, I’ll convince myself that the dead sticks are turning themselves towards the sunlight. Then, I will look at them and realize that the two dead sticks have not moved all, because they are two dead sticks, and I will feel foolish, and wonder why I ever try anything at all. Why I even bother getting up to take a shower, and later, when there are blackberries growing from those two dead sticks I will think of this moment when I doubted them, and I imagine they will taste twice as sweet. Though that is unlikely given that they are dead.

Interpolation:

This is what life does. It lets you walk up to
the store to buy breakfast and the paper, on a
stiff knee. It lets you choose the way you have
your eggs, your coffee. Then it sits a fisherman
down beside you at the counter who says, Last night,
... the channel was full of starfish. And you wonder,
is this a message, finally, or just another day?

(Eleanor Lerman, 1952 - )

Is life a series of interpolations interrupted by continuity? Or is life a continuous narrative interrupted by interpolations? When I was a child we gathered blackberries in our backyard from an overgrown bush that dropped their plumpest and juiciest bits into our yard. I can still remember the succulence of them as we ate them during late summer evenings, the taste so piercing that you could see how one might leave a garden for a bite of such things. I miss them so much. Every blackberry I’ve  had since we left that house has been a phantom, a shade, a blackberry in name only.

Earlier tonight, for no apparent reason, the word quotient appeared, as if out of thin air. And yet, I could not remember what quotient meant. Something to do with addition and then tangent was there too. I was thinking then about lines or angles, or the relationship between lines. And then I stopped wondering about lines and angles thinking now of all the other things that have passed through my mind and have now been lost or buried by the years.

By John Berger

What reconciles me to my own death more than anything else is the image of a place: a place where your bones and mine are buried, thrown, uncovered, together. They are strewn there pell-mell. One of your ribs leans against my skull. A metecarpal of my left hand lies inside your pelvis. (Against my broken ribs, your breast like a flower.) The hundred bones of our feet are scattered like gravel. It is strange that this image of our proximity, concerning as it does mere phosphate of calcium, should bestow a sense of peace. Yet it does. With you I can imagine a place where to be phosphate of calcium is enough.

I want, I want, I want, I want. Every time I start writing something I’m tempted to start with, I want. And yet, I know this is a superficial want, a desire incapable of being fulfilled, and yet I want still. What I want now is for those dead sticks to turn into blackberry bushes. I want them to turn into vines that reach up into the vault of the sky. I want to climb them after midnight, to sit amongst the stars and read poems to all that dead light. You see, wanting is a terrible thing as this is unlikely to happen. Instead, I should want them to remain as dead sticks, soldiering on, occasionally fooling me after a brisk wind into thinking they are turning toward the son.

Interpolation:

This song. The line that I love is about frozen strawberries, which are not blackberries. But I am willing to forgive them this indiscretion for the feeling of symbiosis that it brings me to hear of frozen strawberries and think of plums in the icebox and blackberries in the yard.

Fridays

Certain languorous afternoons can seem as if they last an eternity. It seems as though all of your conversations are fragments, pieces of an incomplete puzzle. If I say to someone that my plant does not look well, I’m not even sure if the plant doesn’t look well, or if it looks reasonably well given the circumstances, or whether it is dead, or whether I mean that it lacks sunlight or water, when what I really mean to say is that the plant lacks a certain will to live, that the water and the lights are fine, but it feels strange to tell someone that you blame it on the plant. I’ve been told that only human beings take their own life, but you haven’t seen this plant.

This is not what I meant to say. I meant for this to be about continuity, linearity and change. I meant to tell you about the third side of an isosceles triangle, how beautiful it is that we know that third side. What strange two words those are, to know. What could they possibly mean?

That isn’t what I meant to write either. It is as though I spend my days sitting down to a painting, splashing shades of purple in a corner, as if drawing a sunset or a sunrise, or hills in the distance, but I can never quite tell what I intended, because I have moved on so quickly to the next easel, where my colors have been arrayed for a moment. I’m speaking of stillness.

I am restless by nature, given to fits of intense thinking that leave me wandering through the afternoon light, feeling as if I’m floating past a sea of faces. And I can’t help but think how strange is that there is so much distance between us, these people and I. When I’m writing fiction, my characters are always troubled by all the untold stories of that sea of faces. In life, I realize, I am troubled more by the fact that they don’t know me. This is a gross sort of thought, not surprising, given our own cultural obsession with fame.

I don’t mean to confuse things though I am often confused, which makes it difficult to avoid. I think, or think I think, the construction of thought sometimes confuse me. Like, I can’t think “bee buzzle diggle” because it is nonsense. When I think bee, I think of its slight hum, and a screen porch that it bangs into listlessly, or one of those slow motion camera shots that captures a bee, strangely arachnid looking in close angles, pollinating a flower. What I meant to say is that I want to be known, though this is a kind of impossibility as I always seem on the verge of change, and what I want on a Tuesday morning at nine may not be what I want on Saturday at 3.

Most of this is silly. I meant for this to be  an essay about distraction, about the need for stillness. I’m not a curmudgeon. In fact, I’m an adherent, but as I walked around in the warm air I was jealous of the people sitting on benches, or stone steps, talking with one another in postures suggestive of long and attentive listening. I imagined a bottle of wine to improve the scene, but I left everything else in place, the sun lazy on the steps, trees bending slightly in the slight breeze. Tomorrow morning I’m going to rise early. I’ll wake before everyone and devote myself to silence. But you see, I am so tired that I’ll probably sleep til noon. 

Review: Moonrise Kingdom

I’m getting olderI have had two separate surgeries, one on my elbow and one on my knee, and two other that I’m putting off. I’ve grown up and as time has passed my interests have shifted from G.I. Joe and the Disney afternoon to The Atlantic and Mad Men. Things change; it’s a constant in life and art, which is why I’m a bit confused by the new critical darling by Wes Anderson, Moonrise Kingdom. I fear that Anderson, like Peter Pan, is no longer growing up.

The biggest disappointment of Anderson’s new movie, Moonrise Kingdom, hereafter, MK, is that its central thematic element is that now old Anderson cliché of teenage naivete making adult wisdom or experience appear foolish by comparison.  While charming at first, Anderson’s well is running a bit dry. For starters, anyone who has gone through adolescence knows that the naivete, which Anderson often couches as a certain purity or innocence, is really a mask for inexperience, or, to be blunt, outright stupidity. Anderson has developed a tic of equating that innocence with some sort of transcendence. And though it often provides comedic fodder, in this, Anderson’s seventh film, I’d like to get the sense that he is also growing up. As good old Corinthians puts it: When I was a child, I talked like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child. When I became a man, I put childish ways behind me. I won’t be as strict as Corinthians, I grew up loving Adam Sandler movies, but I think that Anderson sells himself, and thus the viewer, a bit short in MK.  The layered complexity of his earlier films, Royal Tenenbaums especially, is depressingly absent, or at the very least a mere ghost, rather than flesh and blood in MK.

The movie is not, despite my above caveats, disappointing or without moments of genuine humor. The characters, scout master played by Ed Norton, Bill Murray as an aging attorney, Bruce Willis as the one cop in town, are all quirky and interesting enough to keep the movie afloat, though the real stars of the movie are the two teenagers, Sam and Lily, who fall in love and run away together. The falling in love is understated, as it always is in Anderson, and tinged with an innocence that makes his movies unique and often infuriating. William Shakespeare, nearly six hundred years ago, wrote about teenage love in a more transgressive way. But that passionate sort of love is not what Anderson is interested in. No. What Anderson is most interested in in MK is Wes Anderson, or at least the idea of Wes Anderson that has grown up around his oeuvre. This is a problem. Because it turns out that Wes Anderson directing a movie exactly as Wes Anderson would do it based on his previous work, is not nearly as interesting as Wes Anderson approaching new and interesting material, or re-plumbing the depths of death or depression in his own unique way. MK skims along the surface, and the audience rides along behind the boat, blithely waving to the driver that he is going the perfect speed to keep everything just fine.

I should probably have started this essay by saying that I’m an unabashed Wes Anderson fan. In preparation for watching MK, I re-watched The Royal Tenenbaums, hereafter, RT, and confirmed that it was a dark, funny, sad, and intriguing movie worth watching with people you love, especially those with the same blood, once every few years. The people in RT are stranger than us, more neurotic or addicted, but in them we recognize ourselves, not in a trite manner, what we recognize is the brokenness of spirit that is preached about in the Gospels, or that a person feels when watching the night fade to blue in solitude, and we realize that it is the ones we love, as in RT, that hold the ends of the strings that bind us together.

The essential strangeness of Tenenbaums, the quirkiness that pervades all Anderson’s movies is more charming in this earlier iteration, precisely because it’s novel, like the first glance shared with a beautiful woman across a room. By now we’ve been dating Anderson for a few years, the bloom is off the rose, and we’d like to hear what other stories he has to tell. We’ve seen the overhead shots, the random cataloguing of items by a narrator, had characters boiled down to their few overriding proclivities, felt the keenness of the teenage naivete that we’ve all left behind with varying degrees of sadness. And now, like in all relationships, we want more.

What Moonrise Kingdom lacks is any indication that Mr. Anderson is growing in wisdom or depth as he ages. The essential key to the RT comes in the last third of the movie when Royal’s cancer is exposed as fraudulent, Richie attempts suicide, and Royal’s eventual trip back into the good graces of the family after saving Chas’ children from an out of control car driven by a drug addled Owen Wilson. In short, shit happens: the sort of shit that hangs narrative together. In RT, the quirkiness, the benign sort of innocence exuded by characters or the narration, becomes more poignant as its reflected through the prism of their terrifically complex and sad lives. If Anderson has a second great theme, and one that I’m more intuiting than I feel grabbing expressly from his movies—it is the satire of our essential natures, our willingness to forgo all to behave as the children we once were, and always will be. In this viewing Anderson is less a funny director and more of a social satirist. We’re not talking Voltaire here, but perhaps this is as close as we’ll get to a modern equivalent that people actually watch. Ultimately there is a sort of pleasure that’s weirdly disconcerting in recognizing ourselves in the futile lives of Anderson’s characters.

Moonrise Kindgom lacks the punch of RT, because it almost assiduously avoids the heavy themes of depression, divorce, drug addiction that wind up making watching RT, and still finding it pleasant and funny, like being guided expertly through a series of rapids with a blindfold on. You’re not sure how it happened, but you’re impressed nonetheless. It is a wonder that so much carefree laughter and intense caring can be almost paradoxically wedded as they are in RT.  Moonrise Kingdom dispenses with these adult themes in favor of Anderson’s more lasting theme of adolescent naivete teaching adults the values that they’ve lost. This theme which shone brightly in Rushmore is well worn in by the time we see MK. The problem is that the adolescent problems really do wind up seeming innocuous in the grander scope of things. Therefore, the laughter which comes unbidden in RT, is of a canned sort in MK, a force of effort. The film lacks a certain effervescent quality of humor. The audience does not leave the theater wondering about the fate of the child lovers, or their families, but rather, with a vague sense of having been slightly amused.

The movie is not a failure by any means. Ed Norton plays a bewildered and good spirited scout master with aplomb. Bruce Willis as a good hearted cop is a strange and fun turn for people of my age, who grew up watching him say yippe kiyo kiya mother fucker to the Russian terrorists in Die Hard. It is clear that Willis, at least in this movie, has mellowed with time, though I’d like to believe he could still storm an office building. Bill Murray is his usual excellent and depressed self. The two children in the movie, Sam and Lily, do a good job playing the roles they are asked to play. So why does this well acted, quintessentially Anderson movie feel so empty at its core?

The plot turns on a young boy and girl, who are twelve or thirteen, falling in love and planning to run away together into the wilderness. The boy turns out to be an orphan, the girl, a mini version of Gwyneth Paltrow from RT. A large search party is sent out to find them comprised of the quiet cop Willis, the bemused scout master Norton, and a band of angry boy-scout brethren. The group of scouts is brief comedic fodder, carrying rocks and sticks to catch Sam, played by Jared Gilman, who has resigned from their ranks.  The chase is set against the shy courtship between the two teens. This is no Twilight, though we do have an awkward and unnecessary feeling up scene. These teens have just left childhood behind and have miles to go before they become adults. The courtship is awkward in the way that all Anderson courtships are awkward, which serves as a reminder that the teenage years are strange, and probably better left behind.  

And perhaps that’s the trick that Wes Anderson is now pulling: he’s making movies for kids and getting adults to watch them. Perhaps he has lost interest in the themes of RT, or even of wanderlust and life crises that are a part of Dar Jeeling Limited. Perhaps he’s been making the same movie over and over again since Rushmore, and it’s only now that I’m seeing it. This is a movie about being a teenager. It’s not particularly interested in adults, except as foils for the teenagers. And I suppose that’s why the movie is so damn depressing to watch as an adult, because being a teenager is very much about trying to figure out how to be an adult, and simultaneously looking to them for queues and somehow trying to despise and emulate them all at once. It’s about trying to find some way of looking longingly at a girl without her noticing, singing along to some crappy song and feeling the carpet fibers under your back more intently than you’ve been touched, holding hands and feeling your heart flutter, or borrowing a room to have sex for the first time. It’s about the overwhelming sexual feelings that arise when you see a woman coupled with the warnings of your health professor about pregnancy and AIDS. It is less about certainty, except as an act, than about exploring, as a child does, walking from room to room in search of something that will never be found. And, to take this inherent complexity, and boil it down as MK does, is just too damn simple, and it makes the movie seem inconsequential, a thing to be laughed at and quickly forgotten.  

The love between Sam and Lily, though it’s important to them, is just not all that important to a viewer watching it as an adult. Perhaps if I viewed if I was able to find the right prism, it might make more sense. I feel I’m being asked to understand their love as transcendent in the sense that it is real and fierce, making a mockery of the lack of seriousness that adults often give in their relationships, and simultaneously, sweet. While I can see both points, they come up seeming rather hollow in this movie, which is more interested in the perfection of quirk than heart.

 And, for that matter, being thirteen was nothing like that. And then one begins to doubt all of the Anderson oeuvre, begins to think that all of his movies have only been about being thirteen, and that they aren’t about critiquing our culture, our essential  me centric society, or softening the blow of aging, but of just perpetually being a child in need of love. And then, perhaps it is a story, like the story of our own creation, or a God who demands the sacrifice of an only son, that we must tell ourselves again and again.  And perhaps there is something profound in Anderson’s need to tell us that story again and again. But if I had to wager a guess I’d say that he’s just run out of steam.

In the end Moonrise Kingdom is not so much a failure as a failure to adhere to an earlier higher standard. Is it fair to ask Wes Anderson for more? Compared to the majority of the summer fare,  Avengers included, Moonrise Kingdom is an interesting film. It does not rely on special effects or tired story lines to draw in an audience, rather, the appeal is the strangeness. And even if that’s become a tic, it’s still uniquely Andersonian. And yet, to quote the King James edition from Luke: For unto whomsoever much is given, of him shall be much required. I think it’s fair to say that Anderson set a very high bar with RT, and it is now his job to attempt to clear it. Moonrise Kingdom feels less like an attempt, because I’ll grant that many artists fail, than a veering off at the last second as though he’d gotten his steps wrong. I can forgive a failure. I cannot forgive the lack of an attempt.

Moonrise is a pale reflection of the idea of Wes Anderson that’s arisen over the years. I realize that our very small society of those interested in the arts now values actors and directors for their ability to adapt, to change with time, and that that is concept is only a fairly recent development in cinema and literature. Nobody wanted Sherlock Holmes to suddenly become a wizard, or Clark Gable to not be handsome and charming. They played certain roles and that was familiar. But, as I age, and filmmaker’s and artists along with me, I’d like to imagine that they are changing as well, seeing the world in new ways, continuing to see the major themes of death, loss, and love in new and changing lights. I want to imagine that if they sat upon a shoreline for an entire day that they’d notice a change in the quality of the light, late summer’s eve, the blue or the attenuated quality, not report back that the light lay on the water all day. I think Wes Anderson is capable of making a better film, and I hope that in the future he sees fit to try. 

Game of Thrones Season 3 Episode 4: Is that a coffee table or a dungeon?

I was going to write about the problem with sex on game of thrones, how trivial the show makes it, framed entirely as a contract between prostitutes and lusty men or taboo, between brothers and sisters. I believe I read a review that called the treatment of sex, adolescent. I don't know why I'm going on so long though, because you can't really complain about the treatment of sex or its ungracefulness handling in an episode with dragons. You have to talk about the dragons. I mean, these guys are blowing their whole CGI budget. It would be a disservice not to mention them.

That's not where the episode starts though. It begins with Jamie Lannister riding through the woods with his right hanging from his cloak. He just needs someone with a good sewing needle. Barring that, he starts to slide into depression and is moderately saved by Briane reminding him to stop acting like a woman. Sexist. Briane cites the moment that Jamie interceded to save her, and exhorts him to seek revenge. And, as the odd saga of Jamie Lannister goes on, it's hard not to want him to get some revenge. Here is the guy who shoved Bran out a window and slaughtered the men of House Stark in the streets. And yet, perhaps because he's clever, and we'd all like to perceive ourselves as clever, or perhaps because he's grown such an awesome playoff beard for the home stretch I find myself rooting for him. It might just be that the stakes are rather low for good characters on GOT. The good ones, well, nominally good ones like Sansa Stark seem to have their heads stuffed by feathers as opposed to brains.

Watching this episode felt like reading one of those scare articles in The Atlantic, women are taking over the world. Except, in GOT, they kind of are. Margerery spend the better part of the episode gently guiding Geoffrey from being a despicable monster, into a despicable monster who gets waved at by crowds of people. She then neatly slides towards Sansa Stark, setting her family up as the natural successors if Robb Stark is stopped. If there is a person winning at the GOT in this season, it is Margery and her electric mother, who is quickly rivaling Tyrion and Jamie as being possessed of the brightest wit on the show.

Meanwhile, dragons. Even though I knew that Daenrys spoke Valyrian, she had too, it would have been silly if she couldn't. It was still a happy surprise to see her speak back to the man who has been calling her a b9tch for two episodes and then have him burned to a crisp, followed by a good old city sacking by her new army. Of course, as her army of ass kicking soldiers and dragons marches out of the city gates I've really no earthly clue how close they are to the Seven Kingdoms. I'm hoping that they are still a bit away, because I'm not quite sure who will stand up to them. It's been quite a ride for Daenyrs from the first season, and this episode felt like a culmination, a crowning of sorts. And I don't know if they meant it to feel this way or not but her march and victory now seem inevitable, barring some sort of scurvy outbreak as they cross the Narrow Sea. Buy limes, you'll thank me later.

The saga of Theon also took a nasty and Kafka esque turn, as the man who saved him turned out to be taking him back to the torture chamber. I'm not sure what is going on here. And it seems clear to me that Theon is going to have to play a more major role in the narrative to come, or why go to all the trouble of telling this bizarre story when much more interesting action is taking place, or not taking place, because his story is being given screen time. Either that or these guys really do love, Kafka, which, who doesn't? I should also point out that we did get one nice emotional moment of Theon admitting that his father died at King's Landing. That's all we wanted you to say, buddy. Now just let me put this railroad tie into your foot...

Am I the only one who misses any episode when we can't watch Jon Snow walk about with his amazing flowing hair? I mean, I can miss Rob and Talisa for an episode, but I can't remember the last time we didn't get to see that hair. Disappointing. I understand that he's sort of in a weird place, does he or does he not betray the Night's Watch, though that just got a lot less complicated, and he's in the presence of giants, which, small CGI budget, so, yeah, less flowing hair than we'd all like.

The Night's Watch stages a bit of a rebellion that has been in the offing for weeks. It's unclear why everyone is deferential to Crostor. He does sleep with all of his daughters, sacrifices the boys, and spends the rest of the time complaining that twenty armed men are all pigs. He seems like he should have had a sword sticking out of him about five episodes ago. And yet, the Lord Commander defends him, and it better come out that he had some good reason or I'm kind of on the side of the guys who had a stab off. Interestingly, I think GOT did a nice job of having the one traitor stand out as a mean SOB right from the start in Season one. It's not really a surprise that he stabs Mormont in the back, nor will it be a surprise when Jon Snow uses his hair to whip him into submission a few episodes from now.

The journey of Arya Stark continues, where the rabble carries her and the blacksmith and the Hound into a cave for questioning. During this conversation we learn that the ragtag group supports the red ladies Lord of Light. She's been mercifully absent for much of the season, and I wasn't happy to hear more about the Lord of Light. It appears we'll be reaching the end of the Hound's run on the show as he's been selected to fight the leader or the troupe, and I'll be sad to see him go. I think that he is one of the more interesting characters on the show, with a good backstory, a shi- time in make up every day and a crazed half brother.

We also hear the tale of Lord Varus' unfortunate incident and subsequently discover that he's been keeping the man who did it to him captive for a number of years, which, yeah, you do your thing. There is nothing creepier than keeping some random person captive for years and years. Except, like, how often does he feed him. Does he have to get someone to help when he goes out of town on king's business? Can he afford the extra food cost? I think you'd get tired of keeping someone captive in your coffee table. At least I would, and I hardly think they'd appreciate it if you let them out to enjoy the vacation with you.

While this episode lacked the damn near majestic pacing of episode three, the continued character development was stronger. The roles of Margerery, her mother, and Daenyrs are more defined, and we get to see the continued growth of Jamie. It's probably the second strongest episode of the season thus far, plus, dragons burning things. 

Reworking the classics: fun, cheap date Washington DC date ideas

I wrote this post a year or so ago on an MSN Monday, extolling the virtues of 26 fun and cheap date ideas. However, I'm realizing that I probably missed the boat in not making the dates all Washington, DC specific. I'm an expert on Washington, D.C. So, MSN Mondays, redux: caveat (Let's not make them all cheap. Where is the fun in life you can't throw around a little bit of money?)

1) Go to the wax museum. Halfway through the date, pretend like you're going to the bathroom, sneak away and have a team of people convert you into a wax statue. After fifteen minutes, when she thinks you've just left her, spring to life from the life size wax statue of Ulysses S. Grant that you've been impersonating for the last ten minutes. She'll have a good laugh or kill you or whatever. Everyone had a good time.

2) Go to the cherry blossoms. Don't be an idiot and do it in April. Go the cherry blossoms in October. You're a talented individual, describe for him how beautiful and picturesque it will be on a certain day in April. Explain to him how it would be possible to frame the Jefferson Memorial in just such a way. Tell him to use his imagination. If this doesn't work, get one of those cute paddle boats.

3) The Lincoln Memorial-Take her to the Lincoln Memorial, recite the entire Gettysburg address in a period piece costume. To make it authentic, start growing the beard months in advance of asking the girl out. If it fails, deliver the speech anyway. At the conclusion of the speech execute a jig on your way down the stairs. It's okay to break your leg if it doesn't look like things are going your way.

4) Go to the National Zoo. You're going to see a lot of children at the zoo, which is probably going to ruin your date. It's up to you to save it. Sneak into the Elephant house, will that thing ever be done? amirite? Come out riding on one of the giraffes. Can you ride a giraffe? If you want this date to go well, you'll figure it out.

5) Go to a Washington Nationals game. Spend the whole game reciting statistics from the back of baseball cards, if she complains, tell her that she just doesn't understand the game.Also, the baseball cards should be home made and the stats and lines drawn without the assistance of a ruler.

6) Head down to Georgetown and do some shopping, haggle over a pair of jeans in diesel. Ask whether they were ethically sourced. Ask if the jeans were made in the DC metro area. Insist that you're willing to pay the full price if you can meet the person who did the stitching Ask them for a shot. Practice your old English dance moves in the store. Do that cute thing where the people hold hands and look at each other and then move on to the next partner but continue talking with one another. Due to the lack of partners, use the clothes racks as the in between partners, briefly discuss how you think the date is going with at least two of them.

7) Go the Natural History Museum and meticulously change all of the signs on the rocks to more accurately reflect your perception of world history. Change every billion to a thousand, (in less it's over 6, and every million to one hundred) If you're asked to stop, refer to the first amendment. Bonus points for riding the right whale in the new oceans exhibit. Riding the elephant is passe.

8) Go on a date to Dave and Buster's. Pretend like you don't care who wins and that its' all fun and games. However, make sure you never lose. If you do, act like nothing is wrong but pretty much sabotage the rest of the date. That way you're not pretending to be someone you're not.

9) Take him to the Washington Monument. When you get there, insist that you're not at the Washington monument, that you'd always heard that it was bigger. Go around asking everyone around the monument if they know where the Washington monument is. If they ignore you, get irate. If they point to the monument, say, "no, the big one." You will impress him with your ability to talk to strangers.

10) Drive over to Roosevelt Island and reenact the plot of the short story, "The most Dangerous Game," but with blanks. If he hasn't read the story, explain to him the rules based on the movie with the exact same plot starring Ice Cube. If he doesn't know who Ice Cube is, it's probably best to just end the date and go eat ice cream.

11) Go to the national portrait gallery. Insist during the majority of the date that you could paint stuff that was even better. Bring your easel. Sit down in front of one of the paintings and try to emulate the art. When you're painting, speak quietly, talk about how it's important to not miss any of the details. When you finish, and it's terrible, tell her that you just didn't feel inspired by the light. Alternatively, if the guard chases you out, claim that most geniuses are not appreciated in their time like Van Gough or Einstein.

12) Take him to the botanic gardens during the trains exhibit. Insist that inside the miniature model trains are real people with hopes and dreams. If he laughs, tell him that you never joke. Spend the rest of the date whispering to the people on the model trains as they come by about what a jerk you're out on a date with.

13) Take her to the white house Christmas tree lighting. Bring your own homemade angel. Talk to various employees about the possibility of putting your very own angel at the top of the tree. You should have a picture of her pasted on as the head of the angel, which she will find flattering.

14) Take him to the White House. If he asks why you're not actually touring the white house, give him that spiel about how the tour is terrible now, how you can't even get into the Lincoln bedroom. If he says it would still be cool just to be in the White House, it's probably best to call it a night.

15) Take her to the ice skating rink down on the mall in Mid-June. Put your skates on and spend the next few minutes flailing around on the cement telling her that fun is what you make of it. After you've fallen and are bleeding profusely from your knee see if she's good at First Aid, critique her bandaging skills even as she saves your life.

16) Take him to the National Aquarium. No matter what happens, do not acknowledge that you are not at the good aquarium in Baltimore. Keep telling him how awesome it is to have such a close look at Manta Rays. Point to some crummy exhibit and tell him that you can't believe that sharks never blink. "Isn't that crazy?" Alternatively: wear your wetsuit to the exhibit. When he turns his back for a minute, jump into the exhibit, maybe bring a spear gun or something to spice it up.

17) Take her to the National Arboretum. Spend the whole day finding alternative sentences that allow you to say, "ArBOREtum." Laugh maniacally ever time. Ask attendants which one of the druids set up the pillars in the ArBOREtum. If the worker fails to laugh, explain to them why it's funny emphasize the bore part.

18) Go out in Adams Morgan at one o'clock on a Tuesday. Go to one of those places that turns into a club at night but make sure that they know you're ready to party early. Start pushing tables out of the way while executing one lesson's worth of salsa moves.

19) Take him on a date. Tell him it will be a surprise. Get on the metro at Glenmont and ride it all the way to the end of the line. Keep telling him that the surprise is at the next stop. At the end, when you've done nothing, tell him that life is sometimes like that and that it can't be all rainbows and butterflies for sh0t sake.

20) Invite her to the Air and Space Museum. Dress like a world war 2 fighter pilot and spend the day asking her for quarters, so you can ride in the planes.

21) Take the train from one part of the city to another. Reflect, as you stare out at the strings of lights, on the nature of existence, how insignificant you are even in the minute scheme of things. Think on how strange it is that that the world will always be almost entirely made up of strangers, about who’s lives and disappointments, romances and cheap dreams, hair colors and midnight food runs or phone calls, lovers and spouses, you’ll not know at all. As you walk between the streetlights, thinking in the corridors of darkness about the strangeness of so much absence, keep your eyes open, avoid the silvery rope of smoke lifting from an ashed cigarette. Imagine that you are meeting someone here, just beyond the next light, just around the corner, or the block. Don’t tell them everything at once. Give it time, this untethering of yourself, this binding to them. Start by saying hello. Do not be afraid to begin. We all begin as strangers

In the evening

I don’t know what to make of a particular day. Whether it would be best to lay it on a table, dissect its finer parts, in a strange search for meaning, or whether it would be in my best interest to see it less as a particular day than as yet another puzzle piece in an impossibly large mosaic that winds up being a picture of me.

I think what I’m getting at is that I don’t have a proclivity for gratitude. It was gratitude that the philosopher Epicurus held as the chief virtues, an ability to appreciate when we’ve got it good. This axiom presents problems when applied liberally to your average human being. You see, in short, I find a great many things satisfying, but only in a vague sense, as if something deeper was lying beneath. And, it was as if I am a child again, knowing that if I just keep digging I’ll discover a dinosaur bone, just one more shovelful will change everything.

I think it’s reasonable to argue that it is this same dissatisfaction, which has probably lead man to do things like build the Tower of Babel, walk on the moon (allegedly), and invent a monetary system that rewards people for taking risks on bad home mortgages. I mean, we do things, not always good things, but we do things. Would a great society of contented folks ever leave the garden?

Was today a good day? What makes for a good day, anyway? What sort of value judgments are inherent in that sort of question? Certainly the answer can’t be static. Well, I suppose for a Stoic it would be. Let’s discount the Stoics. I mean, on a certain day, say, a funeral, it would be a good day if you cried. Most days it’s probably good to laugh frequently, but you really can’t apply a particular rubric without losing something. And yet, if we’re to find out what constitutes a “good day,” some sort of system needs to be applied.

It’s too close to midnight to come up with anything definitive for now. Let’s try anecdotal: I walked into the room and peered down into the crib. Julian smiled up at me. I released his legs from the green blanket and watched him stretch out his limbs, this sweet and scaly little buddy. I open the window so the two of us can greet the morning. He smiles.  

Game of Thrones Episode 3/Boston

Game of Thrones Season 3 Episode 3

Can I get a medic? Yeah, the one from Star Wars? That guy. What’s this I hear? He was a machine? Well, what the hell are we supposed to do with this stray hand?

There lies a beast in every man, put a sword in his hand and you’ll see it,” (not a verbatim quote).

 The other day as I was driving to an event with S and the little ones, someone honked at me as I waited at a stop sign, I had stopped because the oncoming traffic was supposed to be through, but the person was just kind of sitting there. Anyhow, I was waiting for them to follow appropriate traffic laws, and I finally gave up and went. The person behind me, always an SUV, roared through the intersection as well. And I did what any sane person would do. I prevented them from passing me by occupying both lanes. Eventually I settled into the right lane to let them pass. However, they did that awesome thing where you drive slow as your passing to get in some extra yelling or gesturing. Just as I was about to pull up and oblige, I remembered that I had two small children in the back seat and slowed down to fifteen to let them drive off into the day. S said that that was precisely what she didn’t like about cars, how they could make people feel anonymous. She said, you wouldn’t do that to a person on the street. Something about the anonymity makes you feel like it’s okay. It is not okay.

144 people were injured and 3, including an eight year old, were killed in a bombing today.

I haven’t punched anyone since the third grade. It was the last time I felt comfortable swinging my fist at someone else’s face. Since then, I’ve grappled a few times, not in decades now. Did I learn to be a decent human being? Is it taught? Ingrained?

The Judeo-Christian ethic, still at least a part of the western tradition, teaches that our natures are basically sinful. Sure it’s possible to reconfigure ourselves through a spiritual connection or journey, but that’s because the roots are rotten without it.

In secular terms, we’re on some kind of crazy journey from being apes to being, parts of the singularity? Better? Somewhat decent? Basically the same but with better or more equitable laws to govern ourselves? If we’re descended from apes then it’s likely that we’re still going to experience those feelings of wanting to dominate within a social sphere, make our presence felt. It certainly was not something I’d call the angel of my better nature that coursed through me as I pulled closer to the SUV.

Do we take pleasure in other’s pain? Solace? Hope? What is it that motivates us, to violence? Perhaps you love peace more than I do. If so, forgive the inclusion. Is peace something you cultivate externally or internally? I realize that the answer is always complex and therefore both, where do we start? Is the answer global secularism, mass conversion to a pacifist religion, more time spent in meditation?

What is it about anonymity that makes things seem okay that wouldn’t be otherwise? I realize that it’s gauche, or passé to talk about something like YouTube comments or message boards, that’s not where most people are, but what is it about not being seen that makes us think our actions are okay. Lord knows if you put me alone in a room with a wallet I’m much more likely to steal it than if it falls out of a person’s pocket in a room full of people. (I’m not saying that I’d steal it. I’m just asking whether you are the same person when no one is watching. I could be better).

There has been a quote floating around on the Internet about watching all the images of people attempting to help, which yes, does restore a bit of my faith in humanity. Why was it shaken? Did I ever have a great deal of faith in humanity? Do I know enough about the world, global inequality, gender equity, to speak with any authority about humanity writ large? What is my level of faith in humanity?

“It brings me great comfort to look out at the world and realize that even with all the wars going on, in the majority of the world, nothing is happening at all.” (Not verbatim either).

Writing brings me a kind of solace. I believe I described it the other day as a bulwark. And I’m certain we’ll read stories, hear narratives of places or people that are now gone, we might be uplifted or moved to tears. Right now I can only think of compassion, of how damn hard it must be for the people whose lives changed today in an instant. It is sad. It must be hard. Pray. Give blood. Help. Weep.  Be the hands. Watch, or picture the silvery rain falling on dark water. Why? A wonderful question without answers. 

Can you move on from a tragedy to write about a television show? Well, I’ve already quoted it twice with what seemed like salient points. The end of this particular episode was about as dark as things get. Strangely, the opening of the episode was slow, with a nice sense of comedic timing mixed with action. The opening set of Caitlyn’s father floating away, the archer unable to light the bier, was pretty priceless. What is death anyway? Is it funny? Shameful? A celebration of someone’s life? It’s a lot of things. In this case, it was an archer, who also turns out to be a bumbling solider, shooting fiery arrows inaccurately. It was as strange kind of beautiful. After the scene we meet Robb’s menacing uncle, and hear of the failings in properly cornering the mountain, which is too nice of a nickname to have killed off early.

The second scene, also expertly played, is at the king’s council, Tyrion slowly dragging his chair around to face his father acts as a wonderful illustration to Robb’s point that Tywin is feeling patient. What Tywin is not feeling patient about is the location of his son, Jamie, about which, more later. Tyrion is given the gig of master of coin, which though he complains about, actually seems like a nice move for him. It’s good to see him back being useful, traveling over to the whorehouse etc.

The third scene continues the slow paced theme, getting Arya Stark back on the road with the Brotherhood, though they do say goodbye to a compatriot, the heftier fellow who agrees to bake bread instead. And again, a wonderful comedic moment, “Try not to get stabbed.” (Pause)  “Try not to burn your fingers,” said without a hint of malice. Both funny and brilliant, because the rest of the world has been depicted as so violent, you know there is a good chance that Arya and the blacksmith will be stabbed.

The show moves briefly to River Run where Caitlyn continues to mourn her two living sons. Granted she doesn’t know, but that’s because she’s always wrong about everything. We also get a nice scene of Robb’s wife, caring for the wounded, sweet girl. And yet, you can see how the war has started to change her as well as she lightly jokes about Robb turning into a wolf and eating them alive. Now, the rather bleak end of the episode appears to have been foreshadowed throughout, hidden beneath a thin veneer of humor.

We check in briefly with Jon Snow, long enough to make sure that he’s still willing to be a traitor, or die. The main issue I have right now is that the romance between him and Gwen the typist from Downton Abbey has fizzled considerably. Somebody needs to remind them how people keep warm on dark, cold nights.

From there we take a brief break back to chez many wife, for the old man to regale the surviving night watchman with tales of his time in Utah. I jest. Naturally another baby boy is born who will probably not be given away to the white walkers if the old man sees what’s coming.

We watch Stannis and the red woman going through a break up, where she appears to be promising him that she’ll sleep with someone else. Always a nice thing to hear before a long journey, I suppose at least he doesn’t have to wonder what will happen. “Your fires burn low, my king.” I’m guessing they didn’t have Viagra back then.

How much is a dragon worth? Apparently a dragon is worth eight thousand soldiers. But, isn’t Daenyrs giving away one of her children? How much is a child worth? If it had claws and wings, roughly eight thousand soldiers. I’ve got no idea whether she’s getting jilted or not. If the dragon will stay, or whether this will eventually bite or rather burn her in the as-. I feel like she’s trading baseball cards as a fourth grader, we won’t know until the new Beckett monthly comes out whether she got ripped off.

We keep being reminded that winter is coming, but it doesn’t feel that way as Theon gallops his way through the beautiful mountain range. Oh wait, here comes some guys with a mace, two bow and arrows and the same desire that made Deliverance one of the few movies that I’ve turned off. Sure they get shot chalk full of arrows, but it’s a scary moment, made longer by his waiting and sucking air.

The last scene keeps the darkness alive. Though, interestingly, we see the growth that Jamie Lannister has experienced as he’s traveled on the road. He barters to keep Breanne of Tarth from being taken advantage of by a bevy of soldiers. And, if we’ve learned one thing from GOT, it’s that no good deed goes unpunished. Jamie is eventually rewarded for his kindness by a surprise chopping off of his hand, which, as surprises go, is somewhere below Ned’s surprise beheading but not quite what I was expecting. The winter is coming. Things are dark. Keep the swords away from the men. 

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 6

Mad Men Episode Season 5 Episode Six

This is the LSD episode. I mean, to call it anything else would be doing a disservice to the rather wonderful portion of the episode that takes place in the head of Roger Sterling after partaking of some LSD courtesy of Timothy Leary. It is in this addled state, damn near Homer Simpson style, that Roger finally is able to admit that he no longer loves his beautiful young wife, or never really loved her at all.  Roger has other “insights” that Don points out are not entirely LSD inspired, like the fact that other people, even when they are in the same room with you, can very often be miles away in their mind. In fact, the scene reminds of the essay by Zadie Smith in the New York Review of Books, in which she recounts the few times that she has experienced, “joy,” one being on a London dance floor under the influence of something. The trip, for Roger, turns out to be an awakening of sorts. His wife says, “I thought you married the younger woman because I got old. Now I realize it’s because you got old.” After his evening, Roger splits with his wife, and starts to try and become an actual cog in the business of SCDP again.

Of course, I’ve no earthly clue what it is like to trip on LSD. Maybe the episode gave a terrible representation. Maybe it’s like seeing the flying monkeys from the Wizard of Oz. Nor am I particularly familiar with the Timothy Leary side of things. Apparently these people were trying to expand their minds, and not in the drug addled sense that we see it repeated now.

Meanwhile, Peggy embarks on one last attempt at the Heinz pitch by trying to shove it down the throat of the customer, which results in her removal from the campaign. Peggy, apparently shooting off down the Pete and Don track allows the frustration of the failed pitch to carry her through a tail spin of a day. She has a classic Don outing, starting with drinks, leaving work early, going to a movie, spending some qt with a random guy in the movie theater. The strange part is though Peggy’s day bears a strong resemblance to Don’s, it’s the initial failure which sets her apart. Peggy has witness Don occasionally shoving an ad campaign down a customer’s throat, rather successfully. It is this move, witnessed firsthand that she seeks to emulate when shouting at the customer. And  yet, lest we forget that Peggy is the only real female copywriter, her aggressiveness makes the customer, clearly uncomfortable. He hasn’t wanted a woman working on his job from the beginning, and so whether the campaign was every good or not is almost immaterial; he was always going to be dissatisfied. Peggy’s strange day is also symbolic or representative of the strange dark parts that lie beneath many of these characters. It is Peggy, generally sweet Peggy, who had sex with Pete in the first season on a whim and got pregnant after the act. Peggy is more of a binge drinker in this sense, someone who occasionally goes off the rails but does so rather spectacularly.

The last piece of the episode is the continued evolution of the relationship between Megan and Don. He takes her away on a trip, leaving work early and upsetting her in the process. The sad part about the episode is how in love Don is with, Megan, how he keeps smiling through her obvious discomfort, so certain that everything is going to be wonderful because he loves her. This episode may have marked the end of the honeymoon, and I’ll be interested to see what comes next. Megan starts a fight in the restaurant at their hotel, shoving a whole bowl of ice cream down her mouth as if she were a child, which, in some ways, she is. It is her impetuous and spontaneous nature that attracts Don so deeply, and yet, this is the first episode where the rougher edges of that personality come into play.

Like any newly married couple, the first real fight always turns out to be a doozy, a betrayal of the love that you’ve created, when you suddenly realize the walls are made of glass rather than stone. Many of life’s dream narratives are shattered, but they seem to happen slowly, whereas that first real fight arrives in an instant. Don winds up driving away from Megan, and she hitches a ride back to their place without him knowing. Don spends the night waiting for her, calls her parents, does everything he can think of to find her, wondering if she is dead, before finally driving home. On that drive, compliments to the writer, he remembers the drive back from Disney World he’d taken with Megan a year or so earlier, the two of them in the fresh bloom of love, a knowing smile passing between the two of them as the kids sleep in the back of the car. This novelistic move is so damn good that I just want to point it out again. It’s rare that television is able to achieve that sort of juxtaposition with such grace.

Don eventually tracks down Megan at the house, after wildly chasing after her. And, panting on the floor, she tells him that every fight diminishes what they have, which is both true and indicative of their difference in ages and perceptions. They leave for work the next morning, reunited, appearing as strong as ever, and yet the fissures of problems to come are now lying just beneath the surface. The largest of which is pointed out in the final scene by a rarely lucid Burt Cooper. Cooper, sitting in the board room by himself tells Don that it is time to leave his love vacation. And you can see Don being defensive as it is simultaneously dawning on him that he isn’t doing a particularly good job running his department. If Don had any hope of remaining above the fray it seems obvious that work could no longer be his god, he’d have to take his pleasures elsewhere. It is the single minded competitiveness that makes him so successful in advertising that also drives his personal life off the cliff. It was good knowing good Don while it lasted.

And let's link one last time to me and my little man, taking a nice picture together before we did some amazing couch dancing to this tune. 

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 5

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 5

“Buy a bigger house and live in the suburbs”

Whenever we hear this song by Tracy Chapman, S launches into a diatribe about how she really dislikes Tracy Chapman. No one in the family knows why. It’s one of those inexplicable things like volcanos erupting or people thinking up a game like curling. The fifth episode of Mad Men is about, Pete Campbell, who has moved out the burbs with his wife and new child to live the dream. The same dream that Don Draper was living with his wife, Betty, now divorced, in season one of Mad Men.

Pete has always been a bizarre dopppleganger of Don’s. Like Don, he is extremely driven to succeed in business, he’s ruthless and careless with women. It was clear in the first season, right from the start that a part of Don’s dislike for Pete was based on how much Pete cared about rising in the ranks of Sterling-Cooper. However, retelling the sad story of, Don, through the eyes of, Pete Campbell, does change some things.

For one, Pete is obsequious. Where Don has always been charming with women and overpoweringly opinionated and successful in business using his creative vision to bludgeon clients, Pete has always been slyly wheedling in the background, trying to convince everyone to like him. Not in a charming way, but in the sort of way that makes everyone feel uncomfortable because they know they are being had, that the person Pete really wants to please is himself, and that underneath every compliment is a man who is, in short, pretty much an a-hole, which no amount of posturing can hide. Why is it that we dislike people who are trying so desperately hard to be liked?

The episode takes its original shape around a dinner party thrown by the Campbells in which the Draper’s play a starring role. The dislike for Pete is always practically dripping off Don, he notes that he wishes Pete could close the deal as well as his wife, who quasi cons he and Megan into coming over. The dinner party goes off without a hitch. The interesting part of the evening is the transformation that takes place in Don. He winds up fixing a sink and actually conversing with the people at the table as if they were friends, rather than subordinates. This season continues to be Don’s discovery of life through the vehicle of his wife. He is finding out that he likes people, noting that Megan likes everyone.

Of course, there lies in wait the very real possibility that Don doesn’t particularly like being happy, or at least not in the conventional manner. It’s interesting to watch, to see if we’ll be convinced that the Leopard can changes his spots. Can someone live for twenty years as one person and wake up as someone else one morning? Perhaps. Perhaps not. More likely it will be something in between. It’s certainly relevant to ask whether everyone craves happiness. Perhaps Don, perhaps many people are not happiness after all, but something else, contentment, dominion. Certainly these parts of our personality are always in play, occasionally warring with one another in a fight to guide our thoughts and our dreams.

Despite the fact that this episode is basically the Pete Campbell episode, Ken Cosgrove also plays an important role. Ken has a steady and happy marriage that remains largely off screen. He is in the process of working on a collection of short stories that are going to be published by a good press in New York. Ie, outlier here, he seems to be happy.  (Before I move on to talk about the implications of Ken’s writing, it’s of note to discuss why Ken and his wife remain off screen so much. S complained that the show was basically about infidelity, unhappiness etc. I asked whether it would be an “interesting” show if the people were sitting around discussing their work day over a game of backgammon. She demurred after a while, conceding that perhaps watching scenes of blissful people pouring one another coffee and reading the morning news wouldn’t be as interesting. I don’t particularly know why that is true? I suppose we are social creatures and like to gather our social queues from other’s experiences. And yet, if you’ve lived long enough to see the various “happy” marriages and lives that people have carved out for themselves there is not a lot of universality. Sure, certain characteristics like not being an absolute ja-k-ss are probably applicable, but the way that two people find a way to make a life work together is invariably their own, and count me as a person who isn’t particularly interested in watching someone butter toast. ((This whole thing is hard to do, and maybe that’s some of the pleasure of Downton Abbey at its best. Forget all the intrigue and lying and death. The show is at its purest when they are debating the placement of a fork and making it drama)).

Ken’s writing winds up being a sore subject at work. Roger asks him to stop writing and Ken gives his assent, noting that it probably wasn’t going anywhere anyway. (Classic writer response. Also, true). Ken winds up writing under a new pen name by the end of the episode, dissecting the strange and lonely life of Pete Campbell in a short story, talking about the pernicious allure of the suburbs. I won’t comment on the proclivity of writers to write about other writers, particularly in a glorified fashion, except to say that Ken Cosgrove is much too happy to be a believable writer.

Pete spends the latter portion of the episode trying to seduce a young woman in his driver’s education class, only to be eventually outdone by a young handsome man named handsome. After failing with the young girl, Pete, Roger and Don head out with a new potential client who indicates that he’d be inclined to have more fun than he’d had on a previous outing with Lane. Naturally, they head off to a whorehouse where Roger, Pete, and the potential client sample what the house to offer. The camera only follows Pete, who demands that his accompanying woman assume the correct personality before he’s willing to partake. It is this strange need for control, something almost evil that seems to lie under Pete’s every move and motive. The same behavior, when watched through the lens of Don should be no less morally reprehensible, and yet, it certainly doesn’t feel that way.

Don and Pete ride home in the cab together, affirming the strange duality between the two. Don chastises Pete, claiming that when you have it good it’s not worth screwing up. Pete accuses Don of pulling his pants up to the world because he’s still in the honeymoon phase. Pete, as start and odd companion to Don, stands out in this episode’s final scene, saying to Don, “I have nothing.” Of course, Pete has a nice house in the suburbs, a child, a wife, and yet, something is missing. The dream that he was seeking or thought he wanted turned out to be a mirage. That’s in large part why he seems to want to continue to pursue other women, to temporarily alleviate the feeling of emptiness, of nothingness that hangs around his neck like a millstone. This is not just the internal dialogue of Pete, but of Paul, of every piece of writing that castigates the vapidity of the “American Dream.” The vapidity is not the American Dream, it is not living in the suburbs, or the city, having the right set of clothes or car, the vapidity is to think that your dreams and hopes and desires can ever be satiated. 

Of course, Pete's final moment of failure comes when the old British man in the office, Lane, challenges him to a boxing match and beats him up. It's one of those strange scenes where you're rooting at first for Lane not to just get beat up, and then when you realize he's going to win, you are both happy and simultaneously kind of sad of the further confirmation of Pete's essential weaseliness. He could be a Dickens villain. 

Meager Offerings

When I think of trains, I think of you. I think of your purple fingernails tapping the window and the tip of your tongue worrying the left side of your mouth. The countryside is slipping past—cows, heather, bails of golden bay, celadon skies, trees shaped like the backs of bent pilgrims, everything verdant—as we glide over the rails.  I locked eyes with you before I sat down and pulled a book from my bag, something by Mann that I couldn’t focus on because I had already been caught in the thick headlights of your gaze.

Game Of Thrones Season 3 Episode 2

Game of Thrones Season 3 Episode 2

Well, the second episode of Game of Thrones came and went, and it was a bit akin to opening the pages of a pop up book to say hello to everyone. Hey, remember all these other people who weren’t in the first episode, let’s check in and see what’s going on with them in the dark dank woods. I think at this point it’s fair to say that either George R.R. Martin needs to kill off half the cast for the sake of the television viewers, or the HBO writers need to have a giant tournament where half the characters are killed off. I’m kidding. Slightly. I know last week that I said I wasn’t worried, but here I am, worrying. How are they going to be able to get enough time to move this many storylines along? They don’t have 1000 pages. I’m serious though, it means that the moments that we spend with characters have to do a lot of work.  We need to see their development as human beings, how the war or the events are shaping them, and we also need to see them in a sword fight or hunting with dragons or wolves or something. It’s going to be quite a task.

The highlight of the show was the coming out party for Margerery. She’s pretty much a safe bet to one day ride Geoffrey’s corpse down the throne room on her way to snatching the crown. After duping Sansa, does anyone like Sansa? It was nice to have Tyrion talk about how attractive he thought she was, but honestly, does anyone? I guess Littlefinger does, but really he’s pining after her mother. Anyhow, I can forgive the Judasing in the first season, but I can’t forgive how stupid she is. If GOT has taught any of us anything, it’s that you have to be smart. Sansa blurts out that Geoffry is a monster to the mother of Margerery and Sir Lauris, a matriarch who rivals Tyrion in sense of humor and disgust for everyone else, one of my favorite additions to the episode, which in turn allows Margerery to exploit this information by titillating Geoffrey with tales of killing things while he watches. I mean, obviously that’s going to be a huge turn on for that guy.

A fair portion of the episode focuses on Bran, who, woops, grew up a hell of a lot in the week since we’ve left him. In fact, he appears to be about four inches taller and his voice has now dropped several octaves. I suppose this is one problem with having child actors. To no one’s surprise, because Martin stole the idea from Robert Jordan, it turns out that Bran is a warg, or someone who can inhabit the bodies of animals, which, come to think of it, everyone stole this idea from The Beastmaster. (Beastmaster is amazing, we should all get together and watch it sometime, internet).  Anyhow, Bran is captured by another Warg child, who has apparently been hunting for him for a long time. I think this part was added in because the plot wasn’t complicated enough.

Who are you rooting for in GOT? It’s nihilistic attitude towards just about everything, complicates one’s rooting alliances. Yes, ultimately we’re rooting for people who aren’t flesh eating ice zombies, but who is the best among them. I’d cast my vote with Arya and Jon Snow, mainly because they don’t have armies at their back, which always makes people easier to like. But I’m willing to buy Daenerys or Rob Stark if you’re selling.

Speaking of complicated plot twists, young Theon is being held captive, by Lord only knows who, I thought he went off with his fellow countrymen, and the men are using his feet to try and drive screws into the ground, apparently not realizing that Ikea furniture is easier to put together when you don’t try and shove the bolts through human flesh. I think they might have misunderstood the picture where it encourages you to be sure and put it together with a friend. I expected the hooded person driving nails through is foot to be his sister. I was disappointed when it wasn’t, just because it would make all the people who have actually read the books rage about how miscast that actress is. I love nothing more than the television series departing from the book in order to enrage readers. Mind you, if I’d read the books I’d be saying the same thing.

We get one more heartwarming story from Caitlyn Stark, about how she prayed for the death of Jon Snow when he was a wee babe. Has anyone taken a harder fall than Lady Stark? Of course, eventually she prayed that he not die, and when her prayers were answered, she took advantage of it by calling him a bastard a few hundred times. I think by the end of the show we’re going to discover that she was the one who convinced Geoffrey to cut off her husband’s head.

We didn’t have any dragons this episode. It’s nice to save on your CGI budget every now and again. Even The Hobbit didn’t show its dragon, and they have movie money.

We spent a brief period of time with Jon Snow, admiring the wonderfully bleak scenery of Iceland. I don’t remember that anything else happened. But hey, how about that Iceland?

We took a brief peak at Rob Stark, long enough to witness him attending his grandfather’s funeral, which earns him an upbraiding from one of his bannermen. The bannermen points out that the war was lost when Rob got married. I don’t necessarily agree, but these are the sorts of folks who consider having your hand gnawed off by a wolf to be in good fun, so perhaps he’s got a point. Marriage has made Rob soft, otherwise he’d have gone all the way to the heart of the Seven Kingdoms and killed Geoffrey, or gotten killed, or whatever.

Let us not forget the brief scene of Tyrion and his lusty house maid. In which we all see Peter Dinkelage, in retrospect, suggesting that Tyrion not be so badly wounded as it means an extra hour or two in makeup on any given day. Of course, the meetings between Shea and Tyrion are shot through with the reality that his father probably will end up killing her at some point, which generally ends a successful relationship.

We also continued the adventure of Breanne, the world’s tallest female knight, gamboling through the countryside with the wise cracking Jamie Lannister. Jamie had a couple of gems, including one about the late Lord Renley. On a serious note, Jamie points out that a tinker that they meet on the King’s road could possibly give them up, and suggests to Breanne that she should kill him. She refuses, and, of course, the beggar reports them to the authorities. If any lesson is to be learned from GOT it’s that you can’t be nice. You must be ruthless, and kill local tinkers, refuse to get married, and have one’s hand gnawed on by a wolf. The morality of the show continues to be at odds with a traditional hero’s journey, as characters who constantly make the “true” choice are often punished if it isn’t the right one. It’s a bit hopeless. However, I’m sure they can all agree that anything is better than being eaten by an ice zombie. Or at least let’s hope so. 

Mad Men Season 5 Episode 4

Mad Men Season 5 episode 4

What is Mad Men or any show about? I’m generally not one for boiling things down in such way. In general, television shows, good or bad, are primarily about the relationships between people. Procedurals are less bound by this convention, reliant as they are on action and suspense, less about the characters than about solving a mystery and bringing justice etc. However, at heart, they still need to have interesting characters and relationships in order to be worth watching. Plenty of television shows aren’t worth watching.

I don’t know what Mad Men is about. That’s a pretty crappy way to answer a question that you’ve posed. But I suppose if I’m to follow my own logic then the show is about people. And I suppose the show’s real meaning or what it’s about are then found in what the characters are dealing with. Friends is a show about finding someone to marry and having some laughs with friends. Seinfeld is a show about friendship and narcissism. Grey’s Anatomy is a show about helping people/seeing their anatomy. The fourth episode of Mad Men starts to offer some clues as to what at least this season will be about: death.

It’s familiar ground, death, certainly not the road less traveled. Though paradoxically it’s a road that nobody gets to travel down twice to tell us whether the evening wear is formal or business casual, the dinners light and airy or comprised of worms and mud. Various cultures and epochs of time have resulted in different postulations as to what exactly happens at that moment. Most have settled on the theory that the flapping of a butterfly’s wings in Papa New Guineau results in a funeral in western Texas, but the results haven’t been confirmed.

The episode is also about, Don, and Don’s propensity for sleeping around during his previous marriage. And therefore, it is about fear. The fear motif is introduced via the murder of eight nursing students in Chicago, and, in particular, the story of the one woman who survived when the murderer lost count. It’s strange how the mind of everyone turned to the one survivor rather than the slain, but that is what everyone pretty much does, which makes sense, the fear, and fear of death is the element that the living can grab onto. To be dead is merely to be dead. As Oscar Wilde said, “We die only once, but for such a very long time.”

The fear generated by this actual historical event in the lives of the characters on Mad Men was expertly employed during this episode. It is Don and Megan’s fear, made explicit by her verbally, that he will wind up running around on her. Don, sick as a dog, denies this but is haunted by his subconscious. He imagines that an old flame follows him home and seduces him. The confusing, and expertly played part of this scenario is that the viewer is roughly 75 percent sure that they are watching a fever dream, however, the other 25 percent is like, “wait, is that crazy lady really at his house?” The tension between the real and the imagined is heightened when Don strangles her to death after they sleep together. For me, even mostly suspecting that the scene was not real, it was one of the most stressful moments on Mad Men that I’d ever watched. The murder would have been a moral failing on the order that would have made liking Don Draper, which many of us do, damn near impossible. As he frantically tries to shove the body under the bed my heart was beating intensely fast. Did Mad Men just jump the shark? No. It didn’t. Because once you have a murder you spend the rest of the season/show talking and worrying about that murder. The characters all become caricatures revolving around a plot point rather than dynamically fleshed our realities. However, by shoving the body under the bed we get not only a reenactment of the Chicago murders, we also are introduced into Don’s raging battle with his sub-conscious mind in an incredibly visceral way. On the surface, he seems happy, but can he trust that happiness? Can he trust himself? Expertly played.

The sub plots also revolved around varying kinds of fear. Sally, unmoored from the wonderful parenting of Betty Draper is taken care of by her step-grandmother, who turns out to make Betty wind up looking like mother of the year. By the end of the evening, the grandmother has described her father kicking her across the room for no reason as good parenting, told Sally the details about the murders in Chicago, sits in a chair wielding a meat cleaver and gives Sally a sleeping pill to send her off into the night, where she too, like Don’s old girlfriend, ends up underneath the couch. The grandmother and Sally, so at odds throughout the episode are united in their fear.

The episode also deals with the various parental failings. Betty is described as letting Sally watch television all day during the summer. Don is the absentee father, who disapproves but isn’t around to change anything. The grandmother’s father booted her across the room for no reason to teach her about the world, and the grandmother is passing out meat cleavers and sleeping pills. I don’t think anyone has a subscription to Parenting Magazine on this show.

The other sub plot revolves around Peggy taking Don’s new secretary, Dawn, home to sleep on her couch. Dawn’s brother is afraid for her to ride home on the subway because of the riots and the muders. Thus, once again the murders in Chicago are the backdrop for character development. Peggy winds up spending the evening awkwardly trying to bond with Dawn, who is clearly uncomfortable, and pretty much spoils the whole gesture of saying, “we’re both different in that office,” by locking eyes with her over her purse before going to bed.

The other major plot deals with the return of Joan’s husband, Greg. The whole return is aided by Joan’s carping mother taking the baby away, so the two of them can have some quality time having sex/having Greg tell her that he’s signed up to head back to Vietnam for another year. This eventually winds up in the dissolution of their marriage, with Joan pointing out that he’s never been a good man, which is pretty much true from what the viewer has been shown. And yet, it’s hard not to feel that Greg is in a tough position. He has been cast as a bit of a wayward person who has finally found his calling in the army. And, he’s on the front lines of a war watching young men die in battle. It’s easy to see why he might feel pulled between country and home. However, as Joan pointed out, he has always kind of been a jerk.

This episode, more than any other, was about death. It was about fear. It was about the variety of ways that people try to combat fear. It’s compelling and strange to watch everyone flail around with meat cleavers or sub-conscious ex-lovers. It felt like a very good episode because it felt so familiar. I remember sitting with a baseball bat in my living room on many an afternoon convinced that someone else was in the house because of a small noise that I’d heard. We human beings are strange. This episode did a good job capturing that.