Posts Tagged ‘Mad Men’
“Well, I hate to break it to you, but there is no big lie. There is no system. The universe is indifferent”*…
Did you ever notice that almost every Mad Men episode ends with Don Draper staring blankly?
On the occasion of tomorrow’s series finale, the exquisite Tumbler, “Don Draper Staring Blankly.”
* Don Draper
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As we get in touch with our motivations, we might recall that it was on this date in 1988, 24 years after the first Surgeon General’s report enumerating the dangers of smoking, that then-SG C. Everett Koop, delivered the second installment: a report that declared nicotine to be addictive in ways similar to heroin and cocaine.
B-ing all that they can B…
As the emphasis at American Movie Classics has slid every more completely from “Classics” to “American,” viewers have had to take consolation in channel originals like Mad Men and (the less-well-known, but arguably even better) Breaking Bad…
Now, as though in penance, AMC has fielded “BMC”– “B-Movie Classics“– a web site on which one can stream the best of the worst…
Bikinis! Monsters! Motorcycles! Welcome to BMC, your new go-to site for B-movies by the likes of John Carpenter (Dark Star) and Roger Corman (Saga of the Viking Women). Now online and in full screen, watch unsung classics like Asylum by Psycho screenwriter Robert Block or Corridors of Blood with the inimitable Christopher Lee. Want to see international icons before they made it big? Check out Raquel Welch in A Swingin’ Summer or kung fu king Sonny Chiba in Terror Beneath the Sea. Looking for the unexpected? How about The Ruthless Four, a spaghetti Western starring Klaus Kinski.
Now updated with even more B-movies featuring femmes fatales (The Cat Girl), jungle adventures (Curse of the Voodoo) and talking ventriloquist’s dummies (Devil Doll). Whatever your B-movie taste, BMC has got you covered.
(As a special treat, check out Carnival of Souls— a B-Movie that transcends…)
As we salt our popcorn, we might recall that it was on this date in 1593 that the Vatican opened the seven-year trial Italian philosopher, mathematician and astronomer Giordano Bruno– whose championing of heliocentrism and an infinite universe landed him in the dock. Bruno’s theory went beyond the Copernican model in identifying the sun as just one of an infinite number of independently-moving heavenly bodies; indeed, he was the first person (Western person, anyway) to have understood the universe as a continuum in which the stars one sees at night are identical in nature to the Sun… Not a view comfortable to the Orthodoxy. Bruno was convicted of heresy in 1600, and burned at the stake. All of his works were placed on the Index Librorum Prohibitorum in 1603.
Nostalgia: careful what you wish….
As Mad Men continues its ascendency in the zeitgeist, Retrocomedy provides some context: “The 15 Creepiest Vintage Ads Of All Time“… from murder and suicide to eerie babies and demented clowns, it’s all here! (Thanks to reader RS for the tip.)
As we turn the page, we might consider the (admittedly radical) alternative as we wish the most Transcendental of birthdays to Henry David Thoreau, born on this date in 1817.
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