mad men too real

I'll admit it I absolutely love AMC's Mad Men. It's just dirty. (Raw and buck, as Mia Michaels from SYTYCD is wont to spew.) But the gritty qualities are disguised ever so delicately by it's oh-so-frikkin-perfect for HD spic and span art direction. Yum, it's like doing the tasting menu at George. You want each segment of the program to come with its own glass of wine. It's eerie how the AMC people manage to keep it simultaneously viscous and crunchy. Oh how one does need to thoroughly masticate each episode. Slowly. Savour the dialogue. Sample the cigarettes. Swish the scotch. There's no throwing it down your neck, Battersby. You have to take your time. They make you take your time. And I love that. I'm impressed. I'm also mortified. Mad Men is just too accurate. It's too real. Things are being said. Things are being shown. Civilians can't handle the truth about our back-stage shenanigans and hoot-nannys and debacles and strangeways here we come! What goes on should back there should be on a NTK basis for anyone with tender ears and innocent eyes. We must protect the innocents. We cannot let them see us for what we are:

Human.

What I like is that everyone is portrayed as horribly and fallibly human. That's right, even though the characters are shady and despicable some of the time, each and every last one of them is still human. That's why it's eerie. It's not the truths being told that freak me out. It's the fact that I can see why each and every one of those beeyaches has done what they've done and that puts me in a place where I need to re-evaluate my own methods by which I process the politics engrained in agency culture. Or couture. Hoax couture. (I won't take credit for that play on woids...it used to be and maybe still is a shop down in the fashion district. However, I will take credit for applying it as a descriptor for the kind of agency depicted on Mad Men.) Back to the future:

Mister Marshall Mcluhan was correct. So was Anthony Burgess. There are two writers who were correct. They didn't even know they were writing about the same thing - Narrowcasting and Subculture. Narrowcasting is really podcasting but even better because it's roots are in the grass. And that's the basis of any subculture, right? Here's a stream of consciousness equasion that may mean nothing to you but something to someone, which is what qualifies this as a REAL BLOG. (Little thoughts typed into text boxes and expanded and expounded upon grow up to be REAL BLOGS. They don't need to be truthful. Pinochhio wasn't truthful. So there.)

Ahem. Podcasting=narrowcasting=mcluhan was right=mad men is such a specific thing isn't it? And it is too real. That means it's appealing to 1. ad folk 2. people who like too real 3. people who like Grace Kelly and if you don't watch the show you don't know what I mean.

But what does it have to do with Burgess? The language born from subculture. That's what I say. Because podcasting is narrowcasting and if you're not a webnerati you don't understand any of the language around podcasting and you are just SOOL because all this stuff is TGTBT anyway. Does your gulliver hurt? Exactly.