When I was watching the Golden Globes last year, I eagerly anticipated the Best Actor in a TV Series - Drama category. I had tuned in pretty much just for this moment: to see Mad Men's Jon Hamm get up there and make an acceptance speech. After gorging myself on two season's worth of the delicious Mad Men in record time, I was 100% sure that he was a shoe-in to win.

Surprise! The Golden Globe went to Gabriel Byrne for In Treatment.


From that moment on, I knew I had to check out In Treatment...I mean, if you can beat Jon Hamm's tortured, pefectly reined in depiction of Don Draper as far as acting goes...somethin's up.

In Treatment Season 1 is finally out on DVD and I've been watching it here and there for the past few weeks. The reason I've been moving so slowly on it is there's a whole lotta show...as in, one half hour, five nights a week...9 discs worth of show! Is that some kind of record or something?

Anyway, the show is great. I have to say though, if you don't enjoy slow moving character studies, this is not the show for you. It's simply about a therapist and his patients, one patient per half hour episode, five nights a week, with the fifth night reserved for Paul (Byrne)'s own session with the fabulous Dianne Weist as Gina, his therapist.

What's so good about this show to me is that it is all about details and slow reveals. You might think a show that is this seemingly simplistic would be dull as tombs, but for me at least, there is great pleasure in the writing and the layers to each character that slip off weekly like the skin of an onion. I applaud its creator, writers and directors for working so deftly and interestingly within such spareness.

So, after having a good gander, do I think the Emmy is deserved? Well, yes, because the show really allows Byrne to act subtly, to keep a great deal of emotion boiling just below the surface -- moments are registered much more in his expression than verbally, and that takes en pointe skill and precision, particularly to keep such a conceptionally bare show interesting. He also is the only actor who is in every single episode of this epically produced series, so he's got a whole lot of material to get through and does so with ease. But do I think he should have won over Jon Hamm's tour de force as Don Draper...? Nah. I think Hamm's performance is one of my favorites in TV history. But both Mad Men and In Treatment are finely acted, worthwhile and compelling television.

I know I am a little slow to get to this. I had been avoiding all the press about this show up till now (cause I knew I would get to the DVDs eventually and didn't want to ruin it) so it is all new to me still, and if for some reason you have not caught on either, it's about time. The show, as everyone knows by now, is about an ad agency in the early 60s, but it's more about the internal lives of each of the employees, centering around shadowy alpha male Don Draper (Jon Hamm). The sets, styling and camera shots are extraordinary, very filmic.

It's a visual feast as well as an intellectual one. The show's storylines are juicy and complex -- all those nice, satisfying layers that the best writing adds to characters. It's amazing and intriguing to watch each one's veneer shatter, to see the underbelly and reality of the early 60s in America. I can't recommend this show more highly!

And for once can say I like a show that's not trash! I can respect myself in the morning! What a relief.

I know I am not alone in this. Check out what Brad had to say about it here, and BillyJam here. I just couldn't resist adding my own excitement to the bunch. Oh yeah, and they just won a slew of Emmys too...I guess I really am the last person to catch on!

The ever-recommended DVD sections in each Amoeba Music location are the kind of places where time can stand still as you lose track of everything else around you and get lost in the sea of video/DVD delights in front of you. You can spend hours just digging in row upon row of a wide variety of movies and TV shows and music videos and concerts of every genre imaginable. 

For proof, check out the current Top Sellers Movie charts for each of the three Amoeba stores (Berkeley, San Francisco, Hollywood), where you will also notice a real diversity of content on each of the Top 25 charts. The five DVDs listed from each store below are drawn mostly from these current Top 25's but also include some additional current hot sellers at Amoeba.

Amoeba Hollywood: 5 DVD Picks

  Girl On The Bridge
  Control (Joy Division)
  Mad Men: Season 1
  Spaced: The Complete Series
  Cocaine Cowboys

"The French movie Girl On The Bridge is doing really well right now," said Rigo at the Hollywood Amoeba of the movie La Fille Sur Le Pont (Girl On The Bridge). Check out a scene from the film below. This three minute clip is from the film's knife throwing scene and is set to the moving score of Marianne Faithfull's "Who Will Take My Dreams Away." Another music themed movie doing well with a clip below is last year's big screen biopic on Joy Division's late lead singer, Ian Curtis.

I've been letting my Movies We (I) Like blog languish for far too long, so before I get to my Batman critique, I'm adding not one, but two entries to it with in the next couple of days. I'm going to try to add one a week from here on out (we'll see how well that goes). Anyway, until they appear, I won't keep you in suspense: the first pick is the pretty darn good Mad Men (which is a TV show, not a movie, but it's better shot than most movies) and the other is the surprisingly thoughtful and balanced Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music (a documentary about the current Christian rock scene).


Beginning its second season today, Mad Men is about a third-tier agency on Madison Avenue in the early sixties, a time of radical (well, pseudo-radical) change in the world of selling stuff. The first season is set in 1960, following the recent appearance of the famous Volkswagen ads by the Doyle Dane Bernbach agency. William Bernbach was a critic of advertising as a science, instead using it to convey emotions and deep-seated connotations to sell a product. His ads sold you an image of yourself, rather than a laundry list of the product's qualities that were supposed to appeal to you. The approach proved highly successful, and it's why we have the Super-Bowl commercials we do today.

There's a scene in the final episode of the first season where head adman Don Draper sells a campaign for a new slide projector to clients by using snapshots of his own family. So moving is his pitch that one of the other admen, who's currently undergoing some marital woes, has to leave the room lest he be seen crying. Ironically underscoring this heartwarming moment is the whole season where Don has been shown in the company of two mistresses. Advertising is an art that says less about itself or its creators than it does about the intended audience. It's art that's meant to be entirely consumable by being designed with the audience, not artist, in mind. If it's not understood by the target demographic, then it fails as art. That's why it's questionable to even call it art. It's not intended to offer resistance, only acceptance. Any resistance that it offers is purely manufactured, meant to play into a collective mind that wants to see itself as an uncollected group of free-thinking individuals. That Bernbach and others following him could and can walk that line -- selling individualism as a collective commodity -- is the evil brilliance of late-20th century advertising. 

I was thinking of Bernbach's movement and that scene from Mad Men while watching Why Should The Devil Have All The Good Music, named after the song from Larry Norman. Norman serves as the inspirational spirit for the film, promoting God while still managing to make music that could exist on its own terms. I don't know about the rest of his stuff, but that song's pretty catchy. I love country songs about Jesus, hillbilly sacred harp, classic Gospel, old Southern and Negro spirituals, et al., but the closest I ever came to being inspired by so-called contemporary Christian was dropping acid at a Stryper show (someone had to do it, and therein lay my inspiration). When a womanizing boozer like Kris Kristofferson asks "why me, Lord," one gets the sense of some struggle going on between his beliefs and his actions.  That sort of struggle gives the song an air of authenticity. But when Michael Sweet and his band sing they're "soldiers under God's command," one gets the message that this is metal being sanitized for the easily contaminated. Little has changed since when they were on top.

Most of the bands featured in Heather Whinna and Vickie Hunter's documentary sound like particular secular bands, just with special lyrics. The ones escaping this marketing pigeonholing tend to do so by sounding so generic that they can't be ascribed a particularized label. That strategy was employed by Stryper during the metal heyday, obtaining secular acceptance by sounding blandly like the genre, rather than the Christian-Iron Maiden or -Van Halen. 

The fundamental problem with Christian rock is that, rather than build on an authentically religious tradition of struggle, it's made to serve two masters: mass culture and fundamentalism. It fails both because it has no soul, no aesthetic inner life, being entirely outwardly directed. Like a modern ad, it tells you no more than what you already bring to the table. On the one hand, it's designed to appeal to the "secular audience" (i.e., the largely Christian audience in the U.S. -- if the census is any indication -- that aren't Christian enough for the extremists). Here the connotation is that Evangelicals are just like you (evidently just as bland as you), and after conversion you can keep on liking the same stuff that you liked in your heathen days. This message is doomed to fail, I suspect, because it's saying there is no essential change in who you are when coming over to their side, so why bother? On the other hand, the music is designed to appeal to the "Christian audience" (i.e., those teens raised with a severe pop cultural immune-deficiency order) who really like music, but live in fear of its not serving God, only itself -- in a word, idolatry. By giving the fundamentalist youth what they want, the ability to rock, while only reinforcing their cultural seclusion, the music is depleted of its potential aesthetic-objective vitality, instead serving as agitprop. In making rock music easily consumable, the dialectic between beliefs and the world is cut short. The religiously conservative audience doesn't have to struggle with popular art any more, because it's now being made with only one message in mind: buy Christian. With the Christian rock scene, the religion has become just as much of a commodity as the music that it copies, easily consumable in one's leisure time.

There have been so many new albums out in the last couple months, and we have some really exciting things to look forward to as well -- new albums from Ratatat and Beck next week, and a new box set from Yaz next week as well, which I will most likely be talking about. Yaz is also playing in Los Angeles next week and you know that I will of course be there. I have never seen them before and I am sure that this will be my only chance. There is also this new album next week from Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine and Patti Smith! I am very curious. Not exactly two people that I would expect to work together, but I love them both! Should be interesting. July 22nd is the date that the Dead Can Dance reissues finally come out. It breaks my heart a little bit that those albums have not been in print for a little while. I imagine some young kid coming into the store, trying to explore the world of Dead Can Dance and only finding the greatest hits sort of collection. Luckily, we have the used CDs in the meantime. I can't imagine my life without these Dead Can Dance albums and am happy to know they will soon be joining us again in record store land. There is a new Faint album on August 5th as well as the solo debut from Conor Oberst from Bright Eyes, but this week there is really nothing out in the land of music. At least nothing for me. There are new albums from G-Unit, J*Davey, Alkaline Trio, Deltron 3030, and Earlimart, but they are not exactly the albums that get me excited. It has been a while since there has been a week like this, but I guess it is bound to happen every once in a while, so I am forced to move my attention to DVDs-- and there is one excellent TV show out on DVD this week that I absolutely love. If you have not seen Mad Men yet, now is the time!