A brilliant ad. Robert Carlyle tells the story of Johnnie Walker. Apparently a single shot, a single take. And shot with one of the RedOne cameras.
A brilliant ad. Robert Carlyle tells the story of Johnnie Walker. Apparently a single shot, a single take. And shot with one of the RedOne cameras.
Since the summer of 2007, when Mad Men premiered on the cable station AMC, the world it purports to depict—a lushly reimagined Madison Avenue in the 1960s, where sleekly suited, chain-smoking, hard-drinking advertising executives dream up ingeniously intuitive campaigns for cigarettes and bras and airlines while effortlessly bedding beautiful young women or whisking their Grace Kelly–lookalike wives off to business trips in Rome—has itself become the object of a kind of madness. I’m not even referring to the critical reception both in the US and abroad, which has been delirious: a recent and not atypical reference in the Times of London called it “one of the … best television series of all time,” and the show has repeatedly won the Emmy, the Golden Globe, the Screen Actors Guild Award, the Writers Guild of America Award, and the Producers Guild of America Award for Best Drama Series. (A number of its cast members have been nominated in the various acting categories as well.) Rather, the way in which Mad Men has seemingly percolated into every corner of the popular culture—the children’s show Sesame Street has introduced a Mad Men parody, toned down, naturally, for its tender viewers—suggests that its appeal goes far beyond what dramatic satisfactions it might afford.
At first glance, this appeal seems to have a lot to do with the show’s much-discussed visual style—the crisp midcentury coolness of dress and decor. The clothing retailer Banana Republic, in partnership with the show’s creators, devised a nationwide window display campaign evoking the show’s distinctive 1960s look, and now offers a style guide to help consumers look more like the show’s characters. A nail polish company now offers a Mad Men–inspired line of colors; the toy maker Mattel has released dolls based on some of the show’s characters. Most intriguingly, to my mind, Brooks Brothers has partnered with the series’s costume designer to produce a limited edition Mad Men suit—which is, in turn, based on a Brooks Brothers design of the 1960s.
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There is nothing quite like the heat of your first summer in New York. The asphalt feels spongy underfoot. The avenues shimmer in the haze. The Union Jack handkerchief your mother insisted you pack—whoever heard of a hankie in New York!—proves no match for the sweat pooling in your eyebrows and running between your shoulder-blades. As you hop from one cloud of air conditioning to the next, peeling the shirt from your back, you feel like an animal that has chosen the wrong element in which to exist: a frog in flight, a bird underwater, an Englishman abroad. Your Union Jack hankie will double nicely as a flag of surrender.
Now it’s one of the things I most love about life in New York—along with the arctic winters, during which the city seems almost to travel back in time, the cars and roads disappearing beneath an even white blanket until there is little in your line of sight that would look out of place in a daguerreotype. You get your money’s worth with the seasons in New York. So unlike London with its single grey mono-season, interrupted by a few days of sun and a few more days of rain.
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From More Intelligent Life, a publication by The Economist, three articles by three writers, all called 7 Wonders. What a lovely idea — get three well-travelled writers to pick their favourite spots.
Colin Thubron, Henning Mankell and Alex Ross were all asked to pick a city, a work of art, a journey, a hotel, a beach, a building and a view.
Marvellous.
]]>And it looks really, really ugly.
You also don’t need underlining. Manual typewriters couldn’t do boldface and italics. They couldn’t resize or change fonts. A computer lets you do all that and more, and your average word processing program is pretty close to a true desktop publishing environment, at least to the extent it allows for far more complex formatting than was ever possible before.
GLIDING into Susan Hitzig and Ken Yaffe’s apartment, in a doorman building off Central Park West, Barbara Reich did not waste time ogling the obvious: the sleek kitchen, the view of the American Museum of Natural History, the sophisticated living room bearing no trace of the couple’s three children. Instead, Ms. Reich peered into a closet, where she found mismatched hangers and decreed, “This is wrong.”
Ms. Reich zoned in on a pile of books and games on the floor: “There’s no reason we should have a stack of stuff like this.” Then she got to work.
A puzzle with a missing piece? Garbage. A half-assembled Playmobil boat? Likewise. A drawer full of wooden blocks? Gone. Birthday party favors were subject to the 24-hour rule: “You let them play with it for 24 hours, then it’s garbage.” A checkers set was a recent gift from a relative, but had only black pieces. “She won’t love you any less,” Ms. Reich said as she tossed it. Then there were the notebooks, now touching artifacts, filled with the earliest handwriting of the couple’s 8-year-old son, Lucas. “Everybody’s going to learn how to read and write,” Ms. Reich said. “You don’t need the evidence.”
]]>LADY BRACKNELL, that unbending arbiter of social correctness, would surely not approve of Brian Bedford, who portrays her in his new production of “The Importance of Being Earnest” at the American Airlines Theater.
It’s not just that Mr. Bedford, born to an English postal worker and an Irish factory weaver in a Yorkshire market town, grew up far from anywhere Lady Bracknell might consider a fashionable address. Her Ladyship, you see, likes people to fit snugly into categories, and Mr. Bedford is quite unclassifiable.
]]>PARSONS, Kan. — An unlikely pilgrimage is under way to Dwayne’s Photo, a small family business that has through luck and persistence become the last processor in the world of Kodachrome, the first successful color film and still the most beloved.
That celebrated 75-year run from mainstream to niche photography is scheduled to come to an end on Thursday when the last processing machine is shut down here to be sold for scrap.
]]>MUMBAI, INDIA — At Ashiesh Shah’s housewarming party in November, amid clinking champagne flutes, one of his friends joked that his apartment is actually an art gallery in disguise. Looking at the sculpture of a two-foot-long baby made of material from a spinnaker by the Canadian artist Max Streicher suspended above the staircase, any guest to his home might agree.
]]>HOW much spending money should you set aside for a weekend in New York City that includes taking in some theater, museums and experimental film, dining out at restaurants for every meal and having a few beers, too?
Does $100 sound reasonable?
Perhaps not, but it should. Manhattan may seem like the most expensive place in America — you could make $10,000 disappear in a weekend if you really wanted — but it can also be cheap. Even with just $100, you can paint the town red without going into the red.
]]>In London you can enjoy scones with jam and clotted cream in a genteel tearoom; in Paris, macarons on the Champs-Élysées; in Vienna, take your pick of tortes (Dobos, Sacher or linzer?) in some gilded grand cafe. But in Stockholm?
The boom in Scandinavian crime writing has done nothing to dispel the image of the Swedes as a rather dour people whose cuisine is dominated by the infamous trio of herring, meatballs and crispbread. In reality, Swedes are among the world’s most keen and discerning coffee drinkers. They also have a sweet tooth. One of the first Swedish words any new visitor learns is fika, which means a coffee break, usually enjoyed with a little cake or pastry, much like the British term elevenses but with no time restriction.
]]>For nearly 60 years the portrait of a baby-faced Philip IV by Velázquez hung in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s European paintings galleries, a stunning example of the only 110 or so known canvases by that 17th-century Spanish master. Majestic in size, it was rare in its depiction of a young, uncertain monarch and was the earliest known portrait of Philip by Velázquez, who, as the king’s court painter, went on to record his image for decades.
]]>WHAT is the winter solstice, and why bother to celebrate it, as so many people around the world will tomorrow? The word “solstice” derives from the Latin sol (meaning sun) and statum (stand still), and reflects what we see on the first days of summer and winter when, at dawn for two or three days, the sun seems to linger for several minutes in its passage across the sky, before beginning to double back.
Indeed, “turnings of the sun” is an old phrase, used by both Hesiod and Homer. The novelist Alan Furst has one of his characters nicely observe, “the day the sun is said to pause. … Pleasing, that idea. … As though the universe stopped for a moment to reflect, took a day off from work. One could sense it, time slowing down.”
]]>In “Indian History from above and below”, Advani delivers two academic parodies (published by Kaloo for Men), swiping—and wiping—virtually all academic writing in the field of Indian history.
“Walking over Woods on an Idle Evening, or, When a Tiger Becomes a Lie-On” is another spoof in which, incredibly, Tiger Woods meets Narendra Modi.
Read on for extracts from the first.
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by
Rukun Advani
KAALOO FOR MEN
Note on the Parodies and their Author
THE PARODIES
These parodies on Indian history-writing have been universally condemned, making them compulsory reading for all who wish to be seen as well read, as well as for those who wish to understand how Indian history is now written. It is also meant as a career guide for budding historians in India, all of whom—like all Indians generally—wish to migrate to the USA in order to make a vast fortune there by perfecting the art of writing unhyphenated postcolonial criticaltheoretic marxistfeminist subalternstudies histoires of revolting peasants and other such texts that are believed to inhabit the thirdworld. Dollar $alaries for such historians are now upward of $ 100 million per annum, and rising—in proportion with the degree of incomprehensibility achieved. These parodies are the most lucid demonstration available of how to achieve that nirvanic state of academic bliss known as ‘the Incomprehensible Sublime in the Ivy League’.
THE AUTHOR
Rukun Advani, the author of this symphonic masterpiece of world literature, has been compared, always unfavourably, with Rabelais, Swift, P.G. Wodehouse, Groucho Marx, Karl Marx, and Professor Lavatri Lavatory Spewhack. Dumbstruck by lack of appreciation, he wallows daily in a slough of narcissistic despond, his tears of sorrow contributing considerably and on a daily basis to the above slough. He is married with one dog, Biscoot. She is the only being in the whole world who really loves him. This keeps him going.
Dedication
These parodies are dedicated to
All Bengali intellectuals
and others whose dollar salaries
have risen with the help of
obscurity and jargon
The two parodies that follow are inspired, respectfully, by Indian historians and Bengali intellectuals, these being more or less the same thing. Writers within this singular category take themselves, as well as the profound thoughts they spout, very seriously. When such people come, they come in torrents. Their seminal outpourings are generally verbal on account of India’s preference for the oral tradition, and, being unfailingly delivered in Bengali (mostly to each other), can be happily ignored as passing verbiage. But fortunately for the profit margins of academic publishers, and less so for unacademic editors, Indian academics and Bengali intellectuals also desire dissemination. They translate their native profundities and paradigms into a clogged, colonial, unfluid flow, full of blocking French noms and plumes and footnotes, e.g.:
Derrida; ibid.; see my recent essay on the modes and moods of Foucault in JPS, III.iii, 3-333; on Lacan, see Lacan, On Lacan; Barthes, How many times a day do you have one in summer?; idem., Do you really? See also differentiated peasantry and undifferentiated peasantry in Exercises for Revolting Peasants, ed. Ranajitda and Gayatridi (Boston: Hardwords University Press, 1969); and for a feminist, though partially anthropologized, hermeneutic-critical discourse on the postcolonial subversive dimensions of the undifferentiated middle peasant in Midnapore district in June 1959, see the provocative controversy between Ranajitda and Amiyada in Gayatridi, ed., Gendered, Gendered, 0h Most Gendered: Epistemology and the Male Menopause in Bengal between June 1959 and July 1959 (Ranikhet: Kaaloo for Men, forty years later).
If the two parodies that follow seem rather full of sewage, it is only because they derive from what flows into a publisher’s pipelines. I start from below and work my way up to the top, i.e. first peasants and subalterns in ‘History from Below’, then elites and intellectuals in ‘History from (Over) the Top’. If this prioritization seems merely a coprological epiphenomenon of the privileging of subalterns and peasants over elites and intellectuals in the current historiography, historiography is obviously to blame. I am grateful to all the friends who have been tickled pink by the ensuing scatology. As one of them, himself a Bengali intellectual, put it, coprophilia is a concealed academic passion. I exempt none of my friends—many of them Bengali academics, and others resigned to the hegemonic Bengalification of Indian academia—from responsibility for the rubbish that follows. All are equally imbricated. If I stop receiving academic manuscripts, I alone cannot possibly be blamed.
An earlier version of ‘History from Below’ appeared in The Statesman many years ago. Widespread condemnation of this by puritan sections of the bhadralok inspired the second parody. Rampant photocopying of both has now forced me to publish and be damned.
In their preoccupation with the ordinary and palatable forms of popular culture, historians of the peasantry have hitherto neglected any proper exploration of an important arena of subaltern existence, namely the history of belching, wind-breaking, and defecation. A strategic intervention within this crucial space therefore seems imperative in order to complete the existing studies of subordination. To name these functions in this specific order—belching, farting, shitting—is in itself to posit a sociological hierarchy, which might more properly be designated a bourgeois hierarchy of disgust with what Marx, in one of his most derisively Derridesque derivations, termed ‘The Asiatic Commode of Production’, and what Ranajit Dumont-Strauss has called the Alimentary Aspects of Everyday Digestion. We will not here consider an important secondary peasant function, namely sweating, because:
(a) this area has already been explored adequately in two recent essays: see ‘Faces and Faeces: Peasant Expressions During Evacuation’, IESHR, Fall Issue, 1988, pp. 1-109; and ‘The Crap Trap: Peasants and Acute Constipation’, idem, pp. 110-209;
(b) because our present concern is not with India’s toiling millions, but with its toileting millions;
(c) because we are not within the confines of this paper concerned with the private space of sweat, but more properly with the more airy public domain within which these most important primary functions are ritually and symbolically, not to mention literally, performed.
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