Do I wake or sleep?

The Groovy Murders--when Mad Men's premiere skipped over the Summer of Love but ended up in a dingy Village building, I immediately thought of the Groovy Murders (aka the hangover after the Summer of Love). Oh, such an awful story--I first heard about this during a documentary on TV (PBS?) about the Summer of Love and they talked about how very quickly the Haight turned from this idyllic hippie sanctuary into way-too-crowded, smelly and unsafe. How quickly the Summer of Love soured (in a matter of weeks, really)--and one example was the Groovy Murders. Linda especially stayed with me because she had such a WASPy privileged background--she even rode, for God's sake! Just another kid trying to figure things out and was murdered by a couple of "drifters." Awful and very sad.

Mad Men namechecked Ozymandias OMG HOW MUCH DO I LOVE THIS SHOW!!!  *And* I loved Stan's riposte--"you should read the rest of that poem"!  Didn't like Stan last season but he's awesome now.

Peyton List has got to be one of the most beautiful women on the planet.  She is rocking the shit out of those '60s fashions.

Are we ever going to learn more about Dawn?  If the show is partly a vector for the '60s--hello, Dawn is black!  The civil rights movement was a huge part of what made the era.  Let's hear her story already.

I'm really not a fan of Ginsberg.  He was way rude to Don.

Love Betty and I'm glad we saw her again.  Her story is so moving to me.

Episode was GREAT this past Sunday. I knew the case they were referring to, although I didn't know much about it other than he killed a bunch of nurses. Just another inadequate man who takes it out on women but let's not talk about the fact that serial and mass murders overwhelmingly target women--can't start a conversation, we might actually want to change the status quo! But what a way to tie in all that misogyny--especially creepy how it actually gets commercialized here (when Ginsberg sells the "Stalking Cinderella" ad campaign). Grandma is another victim-blamer--yes, Pauline, those nurses ASKED to be raped and murdered! Disgusting but her attitude is sadly all too prevalent. Some women refuse to confront the fact that they are just as vulnerable--in order to feel safer, they twist it so that the victim *must* have had some kind of agency. They said the same sort of things about poor Elizabeth Short (the Black Dahlia)--she "was seeking death" or she was a prostitute. All nonsense. Also disturbing and sad (and again, still prevalent) was the leering at the crime scene photos. Allow the murdered some dignity, for God's sake. I feel the same way about rubberneckers on the highway--someone's death is not your entertainment.

Peggy ruminating on her "masculine" tendencies was interesting in light of the (later debunked) speculation that Speck had an extra Y chromosome, and supposedly this was associated with extra-aggressive males. Is rape and murder of women part of what it means to be male? When Joan threw out Greg, she specifically referenced his lack of manhood *and* hearkened back to the rape in the office.

GREAT episode. Kind of wish they had addressed the Kitty Genovese rape and murder last season--that had as much of an impact (especially locally) as did the nurses' murders (although the Genovese murder was in March of '64 and S4 started later than that). But the Genovese case was HUGE and better known than the nurses' murders. Can't wait to see how Weiner & Company play out the continuing devolution of NYC and the US (in terms of crime) in the late '60s. It's gonna be a long time before things get better. (I would LOVE for this show to address the blackout and the looting in Bushwick but the show isn't supposed to go that far into the future.)

Last night I went over to Tesse's for our weekly Mad Men date. Okay, Matthew Weiner? You need to stop writing Betty as misogyny-bait. I get tired of Betty doing something to her kids that is going to provoke a torrid flood of shitty comments about how horrible she is. I know, I know--the only good female characters in MM are Peggy and Joan. The quotient has been filled and all the others are: narcissistic bitches (Betty) (that's a direct quotation, BTW); stalkers (Suzanne Farrell), boring, superior and anachronistic (Dr. Faye Miller), stupid whores who should've known better than to expect the slightest consideration after getting boinked by the boss (Allison)...I know I should just accept the conventional fan wisdom but I don't. All of these characters are real and dimensional--there are perhaps one or two unredeemably bad characters in my opinion on the show--Lee garner, Jr. (God, what a great villain, "puddid awn, Roguh!") and Duck, and even Duck has redeeming qualities, they're just not enough in my eyes. (I loathe--LOATHE--Duck because of what he did to Chauncey. I hate Duck more than I hate Joan's husband.) Betty is not a narcissistic bitch--she's a woman emerging from an extremely damaged and damaging marriage where her husband undermined her every chance he got. (And not because he's a horrible person but because Don is also damaged.)

And as I keep pointing out, things were different back then. Parents disciplined differently. Other people's parents even disciplined differently (season 1, when the neighbor smacks the kid who's not his who's running through the house at Sally's birthday party). Getting smacked in the face WAS a severe punishment but yes, it was done. As I posted on Facebook, I was smacked in the face by an aunt at a much younger age than Sally (I was about 5-6), and harder, and no one did anything about it--and that was in the '70s. (And my aunt was MUCH more physically imposing than Betty, she was at least three times my size, a very tall, athletic woman.) It may also be a WASP thing--as a cultural generalization, they're not particularly touchy-feely and they do discipline physically. I was also spanked, as were my brothers, and not just with the hand, I got the paddle. We also had our mouths washed out with soap. I have mixed feelings about all of this: for one thing, I gave my aunt a very wide berth after that and never forgot what she did. And I don't think parents should spank with objects (like a paddle or a belt). But I do think spanking on the butt, with a hand, is fine. (It goes without saying I obviously don't think other parents should have the right to physically discipline a child who's not theirs. On the other hand, feel free to step in and scold the child, if they need it--it takes a village.) Honestly I do not see the harm in that--the butt has a lot of fat which is why it's painful but doesn't do any damage. And I don't think I was scarred for life by having my mouth washed out either. I remember my parents (by that I mean my dad and stepmother) asking me after I became an adult about being spanked--I said of course I hated it. "So...?" "So I tried not to misbehave after that!" They both laughed.

ANYWAY. My point is that I really do see Don as being just as bad a parent in his own way--yes, he is more easy-going but he can be, because he is there less. Obviously he's there less now because of the divorce, but even before, during the marriage, he was:

*working all the time and skipping Thanksgiving (season 1)
*skipping out on his daughter's birthday party to go get drunk
*leaving family events to go hook up with Bobbie Barrett (the country club event)
*drunk-driving with Bobbie Barrett in the middle of the night
*flitting off to California for a month
*leaving the house so he can spend the night with his DAUGHTER'S TEACHER.

Even in this episode he had a date when the kids were there, and later on he admitted he had mixed feelings about being around them. Betty even tried to point this out to him in Season 2, how much more time she spends with them than he does, when she was getting frustrated with Bobby's behavior and said "you're not with them all day like I am." No, you're not, Don. And apparently you don't want to be any more than Betty does. Maybe if you were, you'd have as short a fuse as she does. It's very easy to be the Good Parent when you're never there--you have less time in which to make a mistake. And it's to Betty's credit that even after her horrible experiences with a psychiatrist in Season 1, she was able to listen to Henry's advice and see about getting one for Sally.

But can I ask, why was everyone SO upset about Sally's Adventures in Hair-Styling? Kids do that. Not only did I cut my little brother's hair (he had big fat blond curls all over his head, like Freddie Bobbsey and hated them. So I obligingly cut them off for him.) I also did the same thing to myself when I was in the 8th grade, cut my own bangs. (This is one time where my urgency to ACT did not pay off--huge mistake.) Either time, nobody punished me. Kids do this sort of thing.

Tesse and I were shocked at Roger's behavior toward the Honda executives but then I started thinking about it--if Roger really did fight in the Pacific theater during WWII, I think his hatred is more understandable. Yes, what Joan said is absolutely right--you fought to make the world a better place and now it is. Absolutely. But sometimes you can't let go of things so quickly. The Pacific theater was brutal. Read about the Bataan Death March sometime, it was horrible. Really, just heart-breaking, they would just behead weak prisoners, or any kind of prisoner, for no reason. Incredibly depressing. There's other stuff as well, like the Rape of Nanking.. It's absolutely to Japan's credit that they rejected their brutal militarism after the war (even to the point that the Japanese Constitution now prohibits war) but someone like Roger may not be able to let go of those feelings so easily. Anyway, I think he's entitled to them.

I've seen this one several times now but it never fails to make me laugh. "Smoke and drink constantly."



Love this show, can't wait!