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"content": "\u003cp>A fierce spirit ahead of her Victorian time, vacillating between love, sex and business in choosing a partner to run the farm she refuses to see go under, \u003cem>Far From the Madding Crowd\u003c/em>‘s Bathsheba Everdene is also a woman for the ages and therefore amenable to endless re-imagining, up to and including Katniss Everdeen. All in white and gamboling through green meadows with adorable lambs and a very hot Alan Bates, Julie Christie made an unforgettable Bathsheba in John Schlesinger’s 1967 steamed-up adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 pastoral novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was probably a smart move on Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s part to draw a line under the intense Christie and cast an actress as different from her as chalk is from cheese in his handsome, slightly inert new adaptation of Hardy’s novel. I’m just not persuaded that the accomplished Carey Mulligan was the right choice to play a tragic heroine undone by gusting carnal passion. Mulligan’s controlled minimalism was exactly right for the enervated Daisy in \u003cem>The Great Gatsby\u003c/em>, but she’s not built to play a woman perpetually on the verge. Christie’s Bathsheba was lush and lusty and walking wounded, an open book of a woman. Pert, contained and cerebral, Mulligan cedes not an inch to the animal nature that allows the otherwise sophisticated Bathsheba to bloom in rural life. Mulligan’s Bathsheba looks and sounds like a Chelsea girl let loose among yokels, even when she rolls up her sleeves and gets down in the sheep dip with her manager, the hunk (Belgian actor Matthias Schoenarts).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though lacking the requisite Dorset twang, Schoenarts, last seen lugging Marion Cotillard on his back in \u003cem>Rust and Bone\u003c/em>, makes a decent Gabriel, with a welcome side of bedroom eyes. Gabriel and Bathsheba share a rabid work ethic and a Hardy-esque love of the land, but being of the yokel class, Gabriel can’t compete as spouse material with gentleman farmer William Boldwood (Michael Sheen). And neither man is a match for Sergeant Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge), a Wickham-ish rascal who shows up like a bad penny wherever there’s ale on tap and money to be made without working. A few swishes of the attractively uniformed soldier’s sword around her braid, and Bathsheba’s a goner, even once she learns that the rat is otherwise engaged to Juno Temple.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As shot by Charlotte Bruuson Christenson, \u003cem>Far From the Madding Crowd\u003c/em> has a ravishing feel for the windswept beauty and unpredictable weather of England’s West Country. But Vinterberg, who made \u003cem>The Celebration\u003c/em> and \u003cem>The Hunt\u003c/em>, is also a compulsive underliner who sends a whole flock of sheep over a cliff and treats himself to a Freudian abundance of scything, swording and knife-sharpening among males of varying degrees of alpha, while off to the side the women go into more decorous rue-and-regret mode. There’s too much exposition in David Nicholls’ script, and while it’s possible that many moviegoers today have never read Hardy, the story pretty much tells itself without Bathsheba’s coquettish admonition — “I’m too independent for you” — to one of her suitors. Trust me, he noticed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Far From the Madding Crowd\u003c/em> is a melodrama; we’re meant to lose ourselves in its extravagances. Yet for all its lavish visuals, the movie feels emotionally attenuated. It doesn’t help that the most fully realized man in the trio chasing Bathsheba is Boldwood, intelligently played by Sheen as a dull, conventional man undone by a brief, profoundly uncharacteristic burst of passion. As for Mulligan, she’s too nerveless and composed, too much in charge of herself to play a woman driven mad by the confining mores of her time, and by romantic choices whose parameters have been set in the world of men. Given her circumstances Bathsheba has always seemed to me a fully tragic figure in search of an opera. So it’s not Vinterberg’s fault, or Mulligan’s, that in every incarnation from Hardy onward, the poor woman merits nothing grander than a tacked-on happy ending.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>A fierce spirit ahead of her Victorian time, vacillating between love, sex and business in choosing a partner to run the farm she refuses to see go under, \u003cem>Far From the Madding Crowd\u003c/em>‘s Bathsheba Everdene is also a woman for the ages and therefore amenable to endless re-imagining, up to and including Katniss Everdeen. All in white and gamboling through green meadows with adorable lambs and a very hot Alan Bates, Julie Christie made an unforgettable Bathsheba in John Schlesinger’s 1967 steamed-up adaptation of Thomas Hardy’s 1874 pastoral novel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It was probably a smart move on Danish director Thomas Vinterberg’s part to draw a line under the intense Christie and cast an actress as different from her as chalk is from cheese in his handsome, slightly inert new adaptation of Hardy’s novel. I’m just not persuaded that the accomplished Carey Mulligan was the right choice to play a tragic heroine undone by gusting carnal passion. Mulligan’s controlled minimalism was exactly right for the enervated Daisy in \u003cem>The Great Gatsby\u003c/em>, but she’s not built to play a woman perpetually on the verge. Christie’s Bathsheba was lush and lusty and walking wounded, an open book of a woman. Pert, contained and cerebral, Mulligan cedes not an inch to the animal nature that allows the otherwise sophisticated Bathsheba to bloom in rural life. Mulligan’s Bathsheba looks and sounds like a Chelsea girl let loose among yokels, even when she rolls up her sleeves and gets down in the sheep dip with her manager, the hunk (Belgian actor Matthias Schoenarts).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Though lacking the requisite Dorset twang, Schoenarts, last seen lugging Marion Cotillard on his back in \u003cem>Rust and Bone\u003c/em>, makes a decent Gabriel, with a welcome side of bedroom eyes. Gabriel and Bathsheba share a rabid work ethic and a Hardy-esque love of the land, but being of the yokel class, Gabriel can’t compete as spouse material with gentleman farmer William Boldwood (Michael Sheen). And neither man is a match for Sergeant Francis Troy (Tom Sturridge), a Wickham-ish rascal who shows up like a bad penny wherever there’s ale on tap and money to be made without working. A few swishes of the attractively uniformed soldier’s sword around her braid, and Bathsheba’s a goner, even once she learns that the rat is otherwise engaged to Juno Temple.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As shot by Charlotte Bruuson Christenson, \u003cem>Far From the Madding Crowd\u003c/em> has a ravishing feel for the windswept beauty and unpredictable weather of England’s West Country. But Vinterberg, who made \u003cem>The Celebration\u003c/em> and \u003cem>The Hunt\u003c/em>, is also a compulsive underliner who sends a whole flock of sheep over a cliff and treats himself to a Freudian abundance of scything, swording and knife-sharpening among males of varying degrees of alpha, while off to the side the women go into more decorous rue-and-regret mode. There’s too much exposition in David Nicholls’ script, and while it’s possible that many moviegoers today have never read Hardy, the story pretty much tells itself without Bathsheba’s coquettish admonition — “I’m too independent for you” — to one of her suitors. Trust me, he noticed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Far From the Madding Crowd\u003c/em> is a melodrama; we’re meant to lose ourselves in its extravagances. Yet for all its lavish visuals, the movie feels emotionally attenuated. It doesn’t help that the most fully realized man in the trio chasing Bathsheba is Boldwood, intelligently played by Sheen as a dull, conventional man undone by a brief, profoundly uncharacteristic burst of passion. As for Mulligan, she’s too nerveless and composed, too much in charge of herself to play a woman driven mad by the confining mores of her time, and by romantic choices whose parameters have been set in the world of men. Given her circumstances Bathsheba has always seemed to me a fully tragic figure in search of an opera. So it’s not Vinterberg’s fault, or Mulligan’s, that in every incarnation from Hardy onward, the poor woman merits nothing grander than a tacked-on happy ending.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The Marvel Cinematic Universe whirrs along with \u003cem>Avengers: Age Of Ultron,\u003c/em> which is a true sequel to 2012’s \u003cem>The Avengers\u003c/em> but also a reward of sorts for making it through the four smaller superhero flicks released in the interim. This is the social contract comic book fans have signed now, as Marvel Studios ends Phase 2 of its grand experiment. Put up with a steady stream of what we should start calling Marvelettes, each in itself the size of a traditional studio tentpole, and every few years you’ll reap an even grander, star-studded megalodon of heroism so awesome it threatens the end of the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But just because there’s a grand plan at work doesn’t mean it’s working. \u003cem>Age Of Ultron\u003c/em> feels like it should be firing on all cylinders. It reunites the colorful cabal of Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye with their one true leader, beloved sci-fi writer-director Joss Whedon. Over 140 minutes, it allows ample downtime for quips galore: There’s the bit where everyone takes turns trying to lift Thor’s Nordic-god hammer, and the running gag where Cap, who was flash-frozen in 1942, inadvertently reveals his more prudish sensibilities. It introduces at least four new faces from the comics, with cameos from the film franchise’s vaults. And it deals in transparent themes of evolution: the forward progress of humanity, of the evil it creates, and, ultimately, of the sort of heroism that must stop it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And yet, the film lacks the giddiness of \u003cem>Guardians Of The Galaxy,\u003c/em> the stylistic touches of \u003cem>Captain America: The Winter Soldier,\u003c/em> the (relatively) deep introspection of \u003cem>Iron Man 3\u003c/em>. It is, in short, more disposable than the mere mortal blockbusters it was designed to outpace. This should defy Marvel Studios mathematics. How can a movie with \u003cem>more \u003c/em>stuff than its predecessors be \u003cem>less\u003c/em> fun?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What was so engaging about the first \u003cem>Avengers\u003c/em> movie, much more than the world-saving, was the thrill of seeing all these distinct personalities enter one another’s orbits for the first time. They could have killed each other; instead, they figured out how to work together, \u003cem>Dirty Dozen\u003c/em>-style. But all that tension is a nonissue for the sequel, which begins with six conflict-free good guys conducting a harmonious, impeccably choreographed raid on a Hydra stronghold. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr. in helmet-vision) shoots death rays at the advancing hordes as Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) picks them off from afar with his bow. Thor (Chris Hemsworth in full hammy pomposity) and Cap (Chris Evans) pull a combination hammer-shield maneuver that brings the house down. Even Hulk (Mark Ruffalo when un-greened) seems in control of himself. Later, Black Widow (Scarlett Johanssson, still clad in impractical cleavage-baring leather) will sooth him back to normal, with hints of a superromance in the air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is the purest state of the Avengers, the status the first film took its entire length to build toward, and it doesn’t look much different from an \u003cem>Expendables\u003c/em> or \u003cem>Fast & Furious\u003c/em> movie. As fun as the action is, it drives home the inescapable point that this dynamic team must remain composed of static, increasingly stale characters. Whedon might be thematically pressuring them to evolve, but they can’t, for fear of jeopardizing the never-ending Marvel movie mission. So instead, they must push and pull as a single unit, crowding the screen, with every Thor one-liner and every assurance that Hawkeye has value perfectly calibrated for group effect. Someone, anyone, please drive the Avengers apart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You there, the snarky sentient virus with the body of a rejected Iron Man prototype and the voice of James Spader. What’s your name? Ultron? You’ll do for now. Born out of a failed attempt by Tony Stark/Iron Man to create an automated peacekeeping robot by cross-breeding his own computer program with an alien element, Ultron instead makes the philosophical leap to conclude that true world peace will lie only in the Avengers’ destruction. He lives in the cloud and is at his creepiest when inhabiting a half-formed metal shell that can stumble and gesture like a zombie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ultron does briefly succeed in sowing doubt among our heroes, but only with a little help from the mind-control powers of genetically modified Eastern European refugee Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen, flipping her brainwashed/brainwasher dynamic from \u003cem>Martha Marcy May Marlene\u003c/em>). She tricks several Avengers into seeing visions of their greatest fears, leading to the film’s best — and most Whedonesque — sequences: Cap’s flashbacks to WWII pastels, Black Widow’s icy KGB training. It also sets up a great battle between Iron Man and a possessed Hulk, who flails like a slippery, muscle-clad eel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But we never really sense that a wedge is being driven between any of the Avengers. Instead of taking on the conflict, they just absorb it, turning Wanda (aka Scarlet Witch) to the light midway through and adding two more good guys in the process. Their ranks are so crowded, they’ll soon be able to fill a Comic-Con by themselves. Why care about any one of them anymore?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Age Of Ultron\u003c/em> has a globe-spanning storyline and entire cities being lifted into the air, yet it feels rudimentary, perfunctory. Next year the MCU’s two most ideologically opposed good guys, Cap and Stark, will mount separate factions in \u003cem>Captain America: Civil War\u003c/em>. The award for reaching Phase 3, apparently, will be character development.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "\u003cem>Avengers: Age Of Ultron \u003c/em>continues the march of the Marvel Cinematic Universe toward more and more and more of everything. But that's not the same thing as making the movies better.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The Marvel Cinematic Universe whirrs along with \u003cem>Avengers: Age Of Ultron,\u003c/em> which is a true sequel to 2012’s \u003cem>The Avengers\u003c/em> but also a reward of sorts for making it through the four smaller superhero flicks released in the interim. This is the social contract comic book fans have signed now, as Marvel Studios ends Phase 2 of its grand experiment. Put up with a steady stream of what we should start calling Marvelettes, each in itself the size of a traditional studio tentpole, and every few years you’ll reap an even grander, star-studded megalodon of heroism so awesome it threatens the end of the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But just because there’s a grand plan at work doesn’t mean it’s working. \u003cem>Age Of Ultron\u003c/em> feels like it should be firing on all cylinders. It reunites the colorful cabal of Iron Man, Captain America, Thor, Hulk, Black Widow, and Hawkeye with their one true leader, beloved sci-fi writer-director Joss Whedon. Over 140 minutes, it allows ample downtime for quips galore: There’s the bit where everyone takes turns trying to lift Thor’s Nordic-god hammer, and the running gag where Cap, who was flash-frozen in 1942, inadvertently reveals his more prudish sensibilities. It introduces at least four new faces from the comics, with cameos from the film franchise’s vaults. And it deals in transparent themes of evolution: the forward progress of humanity, of the evil it creates, and, ultimately, of the sort of heroism that must stop it.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>And yet, the film lacks the giddiness of \u003cem>Guardians Of The Galaxy,\u003c/em> the stylistic touches of \u003cem>Captain America: The Winter Soldier,\u003c/em> the (relatively) deep introspection of \u003cem>Iron Man 3\u003c/em>. It is, in short, more disposable than the mere mortal blockbusters it was designed to outpace. This should defy Marvel Studios mathematics. How can a movie with \u003cem>more \u003c/em>stuff than its predecessors be \u003cem>less\u003c/em> fun?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What was so engaging about the first \u003cem>Avengers\u003c/em> movie, much more than the world-saving, was the thrill of seeing all these distinct personalities enter one another’s orbits for the first time. They could have killed each other; instead, they figured out how to work together, \u003cem>Dirty Dozen\u003c/em>-style. But all that tension is a nonissue for the sequel, which begins with six conflict-free good guys conducting a harmonious, impeccably choreographed raid on a Hydra stronghold. Iron Man (Robert Downey Jr. in helmet-vision) shoots death rays at the advancing hordes as Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) picks them off from afar with his bow. Thor (Chris Hemsworth in full hammy pomposity) and Cap (Chris Evans) pull a combination hammer-shield maneuver that brings the house down. Even Hulk (Mark Ruffalo when un-greened) seems in control of himself. Later, Black Widow (Scarlett Johanssson, still clad in impractical cleavage-baring leather) will sooth him back to normal, with hints of a superromance in the air.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is the purest state of the Avengers, the status the first film took its entire length to build toward, and it doesn’t look much different from an \u003cem>Expendables\u003c/em> or \u003cem>Fast & Furious\u003c/em> movie. As fun as the action is, it drives home the inescapable point that this dynamic team must remain composed of static, increasingly stale characters. Whedon might be thematically pressuring them to evolve, but they can’t, for fear of jeopardizing the never-ending Marvel movie mission. So instead, they must push and pull as a single unit, crowding the screen, with every Thor one-liner and every assurance that Hawkeye has value perfectly calibrated for group effect. Someone, anyone, please drive the Avengers apart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>You there, the snarky sentient virus with the body of a rejected Iron Man prototype and the voice of James Spader. What’s your name? Ultron? You’ll do for now. Born out of a failed attempt by Tony Stark/Iron Man to create an automated peacekeeping robot by cross-breeding his own computer program with an alien element, Ultron instead makes the philosophical leap to conclude that true world peace will lie only in the Avengers’ destruction. He lives in the cloud and is at his creepiest when inhabiting a half-formed metal shell that can stumble and gesture like a zombie.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ultron does briefly succeed in sowing doubt among our heroes, but only with a little help from the mind-control powers of genetically modified Eastern European refugee Wanda Maximoff (Elizabeth Olsen, flipping her brainwashed/brainwasher dynamic from \u003cem>Martha Marcy May Marlene\u003c/em>). She tricks several Avengers into seeing visions of their greatest fears, leading to the film’s best — and most Whedonesque — sequences: Cap’s flashbacks to WWII pastels, Black Widow’s icy KGB training. It also sets up a great battle between Iron Man and a possessed Hulk, who flails like a slippery, muscle-clad eel.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But we never really sense that a wedge is being driven between any of the Avengers. Instead of taking on the conflict, they just absorb it, turning Wanda (aka Scarlet Witch) to the light midway through and adding two more good guys in the process. Their ranks are so crowded, they’ll soon be able to fill a Comic-Con by themselves. Why care about any one of them anymore?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Age Of Ultron\u003c/em> has a globe-spanning storyline and entire cities being lifted into the air, yet it feels rudimentary, perfunctory. Next year the MCU’s two most ideologically opposed good guys, Cap and Stark, will mount separate factions in \u003cem>Captain America: Civil War\u003c/em>. The award for reaching Phase 3, apparently, will be character development.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "Waka Flocka Flame Is Hiring",
"headTitle": "Waka Flocka Flame Is Hiring | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>They say you can’t overestimate the power of a good handshake. If that’s the case, my job interview with Waka Flocka Flame was doomed from the start.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I went in for the sort of greeting I’m familiar with -– a clasp that pivots up into a grip and pulls in for a hug — but it unexpectedly continued. He raised our wrists to shoulder level, pointed his fingers out, locked them with mine … but by that point I was long since lost. He looked at me and smiled sympathetically. First impressions, I thought, resigned, are everything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Months ago, I saw the VIP package deal for the New York City stop on Waka Flocka Flame’s current tour: $75 to get backstage, a photo and a personal resume review. Now I was spending a couple hours watching my prospective employer feed everyone competing for the position — scores of qualified candidates — into a blender of impossibly high expectations. He not only had each applicant’s resume read aloud to them, he made them demonstrate their skills on the spot, against the clock. He scrutinized each submission: Was it structured soundly? Was it pleasing to the eye? Was it functional, did it pack a punch? Most importantly: Could it get him and all his friends really high?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Waka Flocka Flame is hiring a professional blunt roller, and he is not f—ing around.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Flocka became one of the biggest rappers in the world in 2010 with the release of \u003cem>Flockaveli\u003c/em>, an album of monstrous, anthemic beats and endlessly-quotable lyrics. “I rap hook to hook,” \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FHT82_HA9w\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">he said in 2012\u003c/a>. “If I don’t feel it, I can’t talk about it.” You could extend this sentiment to almost everything he does; he wants to connect person-to-person just as much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is why Flocka isn’t using a headhunter. He’s willing to review hundreds of resumes himself and eventually pay $50,000 a year to someone tasked with following him everywhere and producing the perfect blunt on command. The fans in the line that coiled through the basement of New York City’s Webster Hall hours before his sold-out show are there for the story, yes, but they also want a job that honors their particular expertise. Don’t we all?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Waka Flocka Flame has been trying to hire for the position since September, 2014. It was a year before that, when he was on the road in Europe for six months, that he realized he needed professional assistance. “How polished is it if you wake up in the morning, you’ve got like five rolled, with breakfast right there?” he asks me. “I can’t see nothing more beautiful except waking up next to your wife and your daughter.” The job, as he imagines it, will require travel and flexibility. “I don’t smoke a lot no more every day,” he said, three joints splayed out before him. “I might not smoke a blunt for two days, three days. But then one day you might run through 100 blunts. You might end up rolling up a quarter pound. I’m talking about finger cramps.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A demanding gig, no doubt. But worth it if you consider the spoils. The salary, the free weed and the prestige of having out-twisted the competition to be America’s foremost weed craftsman aside, let’s say you’re one of these humble stoners. Years of smoking under your belt. Deceptions on deceptions on deceptions, plus some white lies, hiding your habit from your family, your employer, society. And all the while, alone and in private gatherings with friends or at concerts, you hone your craft. And now, thanks to an enterprising rapper, champion of your cause, you might emerge from the shadows. Validation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in the end, it’s all about the blunt. In its platonic form it’s as long and wide as a man’s middle finger, but conical and smooth. Tightly packed and sturdy enough to bounce when thrown on a table without splitting and spilling its guts. This skill, galvanized in the pressure cooker of illicit fetish, is what Flocka is looking for. “Everybody thinks I’m playing,” he told me between applicants. “But I’m so serious.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10605893\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/20150420_npr_flocka_pvy_03592_wide-08aee49caf433bb05cdb07e27916926919112c09.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/20150420_npr_flocka_pvy_03592_wide-08aee49caf433bb05cdb07e27916926919112c09-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Waka Flocka Fame amid the crowd at Webster Hall in New York City on April 20. (Polina Yamshchikov for NPR)\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10605893\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/20150420_npr_flocka_pvy_03592_wide-08aee49caf433bb05cdb07e27916926919112c09-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/20150420_npr_flocka_pvy_03592_wide-08aee49caf433bb05cdb07e27916926919112c09-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/20150420_npr_flocka_pvy_03592_wide-08aee49caf433bb05cdb07e27916926919112c09-960x540.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/20150420_npr_flocka_pvy_03592_wide-08aee49caf433bb05cdb07e27916926919112c09.jpg 989w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Waka Flocka Fame amid the crowd at Webster Hall in New York City on April 20. (Polina Yamshchikov for NPR)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>If there ever were a time to find this talent, it was that night: 4/20, the pothead’s Christmas. Maybe they were in that very room. After some \u003ca href=\"http://www.rollingstone.com/music/videos/waka-flocka-flame-for-president-watch-his-exclusive-campaign-video-20150420\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">very presidential\u003c/a> grip-and-grabs, Flocka, along with his two openers, Azizi Gibson and Ben G, took his place behind a desk to find out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They sit three across like \u003cem>American Idol\u003c/em> judges to receive their first applicant, a skinny kid named Cody Watson. He came prepared. With a gold watch on his wrist, he opens a three-ring binder to begin a business school pitch comp-level presentation. First, the products. He presents three breeds: “studio,” “squad,” and “stage,” fine-tuned in weight, mixture and roll to suit each circumstance. It’s as close as you can get to “try-before-you-buy” without actually toking up. He displays some certification he got in California. The judges are impressed and take his number down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The next guy is less concerned with politesse. He didn’t bring a resume, but he isn’t empty-handed. He whips out rolling papers and a bag of weed and starts rolling. The idea might be ballsy, but he’s not. His hands are shaking, sweat filming his forehead. Flocka imagines a scenario to put him in the pressure cooker. “There’s a $10 million deal on the line,” he says. “Can you perform?” How the blunt helps in that scenario is unclear, but irrelevant: the kid is quivering so badly that ground up weed is spilling on the interview desk. He finally wraps up a conical joint, with the clock ticking to zero. Flocka examines it. “It’s a little lumpy,” he says, dismissing him. “We’re gonna call you ‘Shakes.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Next up is JP. He’s only got one tape on his phone, Flocka’s new mixtape, \u003cem>Salute Me or Shoot Me V\u003c/em>. He whips out a pathetically small joint. “This guy won’t get his left ear high,” Ben G scoffs, signaling the hook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Candidates file in quickly and are dispatched just as fast. One shows up without weed, even though he claims he’s been rolling since he was 10. He’s denied, but hands Flocka a free pair of Capri-cut sweatpants, which may have been his original intent, before walking out. The next, in skintight weed leaf jeans, offers a tiny blunt, which is derisively deemed a “mosquito head” and swiftly rejected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another guy named Cody shows up. He is empty-handed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t really roll blunts, but I can learn,” he Hail Marys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He gets a long stare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You like playing Xbox?” Waka Flocka asks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Um, yeah, I play …”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Play Xbox, don’t play me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His look of bafflement irritates Waka. He’s been very clear. This is not a joke. “Can you handle drinking every night? Smoking blunts? If you wake up hungover, you’re fired!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another candidate claims she was frisked at the door. “If you can’t smuggle dope into the building, how will you conceal it from the police?” Amateurs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now he has getting pulled over on his mind. “We’re all on the bus, we’ve got three ounces of weed. What do we do?” Flocka grills Nikita and Scott, artisans who made it to a second round of questioning. “Throw it out the window?” Nikita offers. Flocka covers his face. “Not the best answer.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The line dwindles as Flocka cheerfully obliges pictures and handshakes from those not interviewing, autographs paraphernalia and vetoes joints extracted from socks and bras. An older Irish woman asks him to sign some posters. A Cameroonian man blesses him with a shaman’s stick and passes forward a travel guide to his country. Flocka must be five joints deep now, but he’s still kissing babies, as it were.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The room finally clears, there’s just one applicant left.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Having watched Waka Flocka Flame’s rigorous gauntlet leave only a few standing, I don’t like my chances. I’ve got sweaty palms. Most of my experience with weed is secondhand. Worse, I’ve never rolled a blunt before. What am I doing here?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Flocka looks at me. “We’ve got a resume,” he calls to Azizi and Ben G. The panel recites my cover letter. “You were the first person to bring a recommendation letter,” Flocka says. “But you’re not the first person to show up without a blunt. All of this has nothing to do with rolling marijuana.” “So that’s a no?” I ask, as if I didn’t know the answer. “I think you’re overqualified for the position,” he notifies me, kindly. Another rejection on the road to perfection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Flocka took the stage as I drowned my disappointment in a beer. The audience broke into a moshpit almost immediately. Bras flew onstage. His bouncers were throwing water bottles to the throng, and he made it three — maybe four — songs into his set before diving in with the crowd. On the balcony fans squeeze against the banister, and I watch through their phone screens as Flocka bounds into the pit in front of the stage and throws his body onto his people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s there with a blunt in his mouth as they lift him up, higher and higher, over the barrier. He’s there, in the crowd now, tossed through strangers that turn to him like iron filings to a magnet. He’s there, among his people, closer to them than to the show itself. They look to him, and he looks back. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Waka+Flocka+Flame+Is+Hiring&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "The rapper isn't using a headhunter. He's interviewing applicants for the position of fulltime blunt roller himself.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>They say you can’t overestimate the power of a good handshake. If that’s the case, my job interview with Waka Flocka Flame was doomed from the start.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>I went in for the sort of greeting I’m familiar with -– a clasp that pivots up into a grip and pulls in for a hug — but it unexpectedly continued. He raised our wrists to shoulder level, pointed his fingers out, locked them with mine … but by that point I was long since lost. He looked at me and smiled sympathetically. First impressions, I thought, resigned, are everything.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Months ago, I saw the VIP package deal for the New York City stop on Waka Flocka Flame’s current tour: $75 to get backstage, a photo and a personal resume review. Now I was spending a couple hours watching my prospective employer feed everyone competing for the position — scores of qualified candidates — into a blender of impossibly high expectations. He not only had each applicant’s resume read aloud to them, he made them demonstrate their skills on the spot, against the clock. He scrutinized each submission: Was it structured soundly? Was it pleasing to the eye? Was it functional, did it pack a punch? Most importantly: Could it get him and all his friends really high?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Waka Flocka Flame is hiring a professional blunt roller, and he is not f—ing around.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Flocka became one of the biggest rappers in the world in 2010 with the release of \u003cem>Flockaveli\u003c/em>, an album of monstrous, anthemic beats and endlessly-quotable lyrics. “I rap hook to hook,” \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FHT82_HA9w\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">he said in 2012\u003c/a>. “If I don’t feel it, I can’t talk about it.” You could extend this sentiment to almost everything he does; he wants to connect person-to-person just as much.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This is why Flocka isn’t using a headhunter. He’s willing to review hundreds of resumes himself and eventually pay $50,000 a year to someone tasked with following him everywhere and producing the perfect blunt on command. The fans in the line that coiled through the basement of New York City’s Webster Hall hours before his sold-out show are there for the story, yes, but they also want a job that honors their particular expertise. Don’t we all?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Waka Flocka Flame has been trying to hire for the position since September, 2014. It was a year before that, when he was on the road in Europe for six months, that he realized he needed professional assistance. “How polished is it if you wake up in the morning, you’ve got like five rolled, with breakfast right there?” he asks me. “I can’t see nothing more beautiful except waking up next to your wife and your daughter.” The job, as he imagines it, will require travel and flexibility. “I don’t smoke a lot no more every day,” he said, three joints splayed out before him. “I might not smoke a blunt for two days, three days. But then one day you might run through 100 blunts. You might end up rolling up a quarter pound. I’m talking about finger cramps.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A demanding gig, no doubt. But worth it if you consider the spoils. The salary, the free weed and the prestige of having out-twisted the competition to be America’s foremost weed craftsman aside, let’s say you’re one of these humble stoners. Years of smoking under your belt. Deceptions on deceptions on deceptions, plus some white lies, hiding your habit from your family, your employer, society. And all the while, alone and in private gatherings with friends or at concerts, you hone your craft. And now, thanks to an enterprising rapper, champion of your cause, you might emerge from the shadows. Validation.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But in the end, it’s all about the blunt. In its platonic form it’s as long and wide as a man’s middle finger, but conical and smooth. Tightly packed and sturdy enough to bounce when thrown on a table without splitting and spilling its guts. This skill, galvanized in the pressure cooker of illicit fetish, is what Flocka is looking for. “Everybody thinks I’m playing,” he told me between applicants. “But I’m so serious.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cfigure id=\"attachment_10605893\" class=\"wp-caption aligncenter\" style=\"max-width: 800px\">\u003ca href=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/20150420_npr_flocka_pvy_03592_wide-08aee49caf433bb05cdb07e27916926919112c09.jpg\">\u003cimg loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://ww2.kqed.org/arts/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/20150420_npr_flocka_pvy_03592_wide-08aee49caf433bb05cdb07e27916926919112c09-800x450.jpg\" alt=\"Waka Flocka Fame amid the crowd at Webster Hall in New York City on April 20. (Polina Yamshchikov for NPR)\" width=\"800\" height=\"450\" class=\"size-medium wp-image-10605893\" srcset=\"https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/20150420_npr_flocka_pvy_03592_wide-08aee49caf433bb05cdb07e27916926919112c09-800x450.jpg 800w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/20150420_npr_flocka_pvy_03592_wide-08aee49caf433bb05cdb07e27916926919112c09-400x225.jpg 400w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/20150420_npr_flocka_pvy_03592_wide-08aee49caf433bb05cdb07e27916926919112c09-960x540.jpg 960w, https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/2/2015/04/20150420_npr_flocka_pvy_03592_wide-08aee49caf433bb05cdb07e27916926919112c09.jpg 989w\" sizes=\"(max-width: 800px) 100vw, 800px\">\u003c/a>\u003cfigcaption class=\"wp-caption-text\">Waka Flocka Fame amid the crowd at Webster Hall in New York City on April 20. (Polina Yamshchikov for NPR)\u003c/figcaption>\u003c/figure>\n\u003cp>If there ever were a time to find this talent, it was that night: 4/20, the pothead’s Christmas. Maybe they were in that very room. After some \u003ca href=\"http://www.rollingstone.com/music/videos/waka-flocka-flame-for-president-watch-his-exclusive-campaign-video-20150420\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">very presidential\u003c/a> grip-and-grabs, Flocka, along with his two openers, Azizi Gibson and Ben G, took his place behind a desk to find out.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>They sit three across like \u003cem>American Idol\u003c/em> judges to receive their first applicant, a skinny kid named Cody Watson. He came prepared. With a gold watch on his wrist, he opens a three-ring binder to begin a business school pitch comp-level presentation. First, the products. He presents three breeds: “studio,” “squad,” and “stage,” fine-tuned in weight, mixture and roll to suit each circumstance. It’s as close as you can get to “try-before-you-buy” without actually toking up. He displays some certification he got in California. The judges are impressed and take his number down.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The next guy is less concerned with politesse. He didn’t bring a resume, but he isn’t empty-handed. He whips out rolling papers and a bag of weed and starts rolling. The idea might be ballsy, but he’s not. His hands are shaking, sweat filming his forehead. Flocka imagines a scenario to put him in the pressure cooker. “There’s a $10 million deal on the line,” he says. “Can you perform?” How the blunt helps in that scenario is unclear, but irrelevant: the kid is quivering so badly that ground up weed is spilling on the interview desk. He finally wraps up a conical joint, with the clock ticking to zero. Flocka examines it. “It’s a little lumpy,” he says, dismissing him. “We’re gonna call you ‘Shakes.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Next up is JP. He’s only got one tape on his phone, Flocka’s new mixtape, \u003cem>Salute Me or Shoot Me V\u003c/em>. He whips out a pathetically small joint. “This guy won’t get his left ear high,” Ben G scoffs, signaling the hook.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Candidates file in quickly and are dispatched just as fast. One shows up without weed, even though he claims he’s been rolling since he was 10. He’s denied, but hands Flocka a free pair of Capri-cut sweatpants, which may have been his original intent, before walking out. The next, in skintight weed leaf jeans, offers a tiny blunt, which is derisively deemed a “mosquito head” and swiftly rejected.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another guy named Cody shows up. He is empty-handed.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I don’t really roll blunts, but I can learn,” he Hail Marys.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He gets a long stare.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“You like playing Xbox?” Waka Flocka asks.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Um, yeah, I play …”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Play Xbox, don’t play me.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>His look of bafflement irritates Waka. He’s been very clear. This is not a joke. “Can you handle drinking every night? Smoking blunts? If you wake up hungover, you’re fired!”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Another candidate claims she was frisked at the door. “If you can’t smuggle dope into the building, how will you conceal it from the police?” Amateurs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now he has getting pulled over on his mind. “We’re all on the bus, we’ve got three ounces of weed. What do we do?” Flocka grills Nikita and Scott, artisans who made it to a second round of questioning. “Throw it out the window?” Nikita offers. Flocka covers his face. “Not the best answer.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The line dwindles as Flocka cheerfully obliges pictures and handshakes from those not interviewing, autographs paraphernalia and vetoes joints extracted from socks and bras. An older Irish woman asks him to sign some posters. A Cameroonian man blesses him with a shaman’s stick and passes forward a travel guide to his country. Flocka must be five joints deep now, but he’s still kissing babies, as it were.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The room finally clears, there’s just one applicant left.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Me.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Having watched Waka Flocka Flame’s rigorous gauntlet leave only a few standing, I don’t like my chances. I’ve got sweaty palms. Most of my experience with weed is secondhand. Worse, I’ve never rolled a blunt before. What am I doing here?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Flocka looks at me. “We’ve got a resume,” he calls to Azizi and Ben G. The panel recites my cover letter. “You were the first person to bring a recommendation letter,” Flocka says. “But you’re not the first person to show up without a blunt. All of this has nothing to do with rolling marijuana.” “So that’s a no?” I ask, as if I didn’t know the answer. “I think you’re overqualified for the position,” he notifies me, kindly. Another rejection on the road to perfection.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Flocka took the stage as I drowned my disappointment in a beer. The audience broke into a moshpit almost immediately. Bras flew onstage. His bouncers were throwing water bottles to the throng, and he made it three — maybe four — songs into his set before diving in with the crowd. On the balcony fans squeeze against the banister, and I watch through their phone screens as Flocka bounds into the pit in front of the stage and throws his body onto his people.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>He’s there with a blunt in his mouth as they lift him up, higher and higher, over the barrier. He’s there, in the crowd now, tossed through strangers that turn to him like iron filings to a magnet. He’s there, among his people, closer to them than to the show itself. They look to him, and he looks back. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Waka+Flocka+Flame+Is+Hiring&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Human beings are storytellers. This basic, constant instinct is evident throughout history — from creation narratives told around the night’s fire to Greek playwrights to the first novels to the flickering images of early motion pictures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What has changed, though, is \u003cem>how we tell stories\u003c/em>. Each of our technologies, from the printing press to celluloid film, has opened up revolutionary new possibilities that have fundamentally altered the way stories can be told. That revolutionary role of technology is at work again now, and it’s why we should be paying attention to video games.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, video games.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To convince you of this claim, I would like to present my “Exhibit A” for “Why Video Games Matter”: A truly remarkable piece of work called \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/10091838/The-Last-of-Us-interview-with-Neil-Druckmann-and-Ashley-Johnson.html\">The Last of Us\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, let’s get a few things out of the way first. I am relatively new to gaming, having begun just five years ago. That is when I finally relented and bought my then-15-year-old son a PS3. So, if you are a long-time gamer, you will likely find these musings old news. Feel free to complain in the comments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The point is that, for many folks, “video game” still doesn’t conjure up anything considered worthwhile. For them, it’s all mindless first-person shooters and endless virtual carnage. So, if you think, “Video games, ugh!,” then I want just a few minutes of your time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One last thing: There are spoilers up ahead. Big ones. I am basically going to tell you how the story of \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> ends to illustrate why video games can be so revolutionary. If you want to play the game at some point, you might want to stop right here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, what’s the big deal?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> belongs to a time-honored story genre. It’s a post-apocalypse narrative. The story begins in the present with the outbreak of a pandemic that destroys the minds of the “infected” — turning them into violent zombies. We then jump ahead to 20 years later, after the weight of the pandemic has left the nation in ruins. Just a handful of cities are left maintaining protected quarantine zones. These are run by a military (all that’s left of the government) that has imposed a much-hated martial law.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, it sounds familiar — and I am sure you think you’ve seen and heard it all before. After all, when it comes to the zombie apocalypse, there’s the film \u003ca href=\"http://28dayslater.wikia.com/wiki/28_Days_Later_(film)\">28 Days Later\u003c/a>, the book and movie \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/World-War-Oral-History-Zombie/dp/0307346617\">World War Z\u003c/a> and, of course, the much discussed graphic novel and TV show \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_(comic_book)\">The Walking Dead\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, as I said, what’s the big deal?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> is a video game, it can do something utterly remarkable that other storytelling forms can’t. The brilliance of this game is the way it takes the tropes of the standard post-apocalypse narrative and both unpacks them in new ways and hijacks them for its own ends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> tells is the journey, both real and metaphorical, of Joel and Ellie. Joel is a weary but survival-hardened, 49-year-old, black-market smuggler. We first meet him in our present as the chaos of the infection is just starting. The game begins with his daughter dying in his arms after being shot by a soldier. Ellie is a teenage girl, born after the infection has destroyed society, who ends up placed in Joel’s charge. Her recently discovered immunity to the infection offers a last hope that a vaccine might still be possible. Joel, and his partner-in-crime Tess, are given the task of getting Ellie across the nation’s broken landscape to the last laboratory of the Fireflies, a group that opposes martial law and still believes a cure is possible. After Tess dies at the beginning of their journey to the Firefly lab, the main arc of the narrative begins following Joel as he comes to terms with the presence of this girl, so much like his daughter, in his life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Using that relationship’s evolution to animate the actual cross-country trek from Boston to Salt Lake City allows \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> to do something with the classic post-apocalyptic narrative that other stories haven’t. While there are lots of battles with zombies and humans alike, it’s the emotional tone of the game that stands out. \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em>, more than anything else, is overwhelmingly sad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Cormac McCarthy’s \u003cem>The Road\u003c/em>, which the game is often compared to, the world of \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> seems irreparably broken. Over and over again, in subtle ways only a game can allow, we are forced to face this fog of grief. A penetrating book or movie would have its own language for revealing that sadness, but what \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> does is exploit the mechanics of gaming in a way that makes us explore that emotional landscape firsthand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many games ask you to find and collect stuff as you progress through the story (money, new weapons, etc). But in \u003cem>The Last of Us,\u003c/em> the breakdown of society means \u003cem>you have to\u003c/em> scavenge. But it also means you spend a lot of time moving through empty neighborhoods and empty houses. You wander through bedrooms and living rooms full of the things people left. These familiar yet fallen spaces are rendered with a beauty that becomes transportive. The spare cords of \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfA5UqEU_80\">Gustavo Santaolalla’s score\u003c/a> also holds the game’s sober tone (he was composer who did the haunting music for \u003cem>Brokeback Mountain\u003c/em>). Thus along with the usual gameplay (which can be pretty violent and scary), there also comes this remarkable and unexpected meditation on loss at scale we usually can’t touch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the most stunning feature of this game is its ending. As the game progresses, Ellie becomes a full-fledged partner in the battle for survival (for one whole segment the player controls Ellie after Joel is almost killed). As the story unfolds, Joel slowly seems to find a place for his grief. His bond with Ellie seems to bring a kind of awakening and peace to this man who has done terrible things. Finally finding the Fireflies, it seems that, yes, Ellie does hold the key to a cure. Perhaps there can be redemption for humanity. But, then, we discover that the price for extracting this cure is Ellie’s death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s here that the usual tropes \u003cem>should\u003c/em> kick in. At first Joel rejects Ellie’s fate and fights desperately to take her back from the Fireflies. As we navigate through the final battle, we are shown, in various ways, that there is really no choice. The tragedy of Ellie’s death is the only means to save the rest of us. And we also know, having spend so much time with Ellie (I was in the game for 37 hours total) that — more than anyone else — she would have understood and been willing to make the sacrifice. Thus, we expect that ending and we expect Joel to finally understand, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, the game makes us kill the doctors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the harrowing crescendo, this character who we thought was a hero, (making us, as players, the heroes, too), turns out to be a monster. The game forces us to become the agent though which Joel violently destroys the only hope left for the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s in this way that \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> illustrates something truly radical that’s inherent to the technologies of video-game storytelling. The game convinces us that, as players, Joel’s story is our story. Instead, we find that we never really understood this man. We never understood the toll his survival had taken on him. We could not see how deeply his grief had destroyed his humanity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As I played through these last few moments, I was stunned. For all the books and movies and TV shows and plays I have seen, here was a something truly new, truly novel. I was being shown something that only recently became possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, I am not so much of a fan-boy to miss the fact that \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> still lives in an often male-dominated video game universe — replete with the usual virtual mayhem. And there is enough of this mayhem to keep \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> from truly being a portal to a bright, new world where everyone games in the same way that everyone watches TV. But, by brilliantly co-opting the new mechanics of video game story telling for its own ends, \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> does illuminate the contours of what that world may look like.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a self-described “evangelist of science.” You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/AdamFrankAuthor\">Facebook\u003c/a> and Twitter:\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/adamfrank4\">@adamfrank4\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Why+Video+Games+Matter&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Human beings are storytellers. This basic, constant instinct is evident throughout history — from creation narratives told around the night’s fire to Greek playwrights to the first novels to the flickering images of early motion pictures.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What has changed, though, is \u003cem>how we tell stories\u003c/em>. Each of our technologies, from the printing press to celluloid film, has opened up revolutionary new possibilities that have fundamentally altered the way stories can be told. That revolutionary role of technology is at work again now, and it’s why we should be paying attention to video games.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, video games.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To convince you of this claim, I would like to present my “Exhibit A” for “Why Video Games Matter”: A truly remarkable piece of work called \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://www.telegraph.co.uk/technology/video-games/10091838/The-Last-of-Us-interview-with-Neil-Druckmann-and-Ashley-Johnson.html\">The Last of Us\u003c/a>.\u003c/em>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But, let’s get a few things out of the way first. I am relatively new to gaming, having begun just five years ago. That is when I finally relented and bought my then-15-year-old son a PS3. So, if you are a long-time gamer, you will likely find these musings old news. Feel free to complain in the comments.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The point is that, for many folks, “video game” still doesn’t conjure up anything considered worthwhile. For them, it’s all mindless first-person shooters and endless virtual carnage. So, if you think, “Video games, ugh!,” then I want just a few minutes of your time.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One last thing: There are spoilers up ahead. Big ones. I am basically going to tell you how the story of \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> ends to illustrate why video games can be so revolutionary. If you want to play the game at some point, you might want to stop right here.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, what’s the big deal?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> belongs to a time-honored story genre. It’s a post-apocalypse narrative. The story begins in the present with the outbreak of a pandemic that destroys the minds of the “infected” — turning them into violent zombies. We then jump ahead to 20 years later, after the weight of the pandemic has left the nation in ruins. Just a handful of cities are left maintaining protected quarantine zones. These are run by a military (all that’s left of the government) that has imposed a much-hated martial law.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yes, it sounds familiar — and I am sure you think you’ve seen and heard it all before. After all, when it comes to the zombie apocalypse, there’s the film \u003ca href=\"http://28dayslater.wikia.com/wiki/28_Days_Later_(film)\">28 Days Later\u003c/a>, the book and movie \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/World-War-Oral-History-Zombie/dp/0307346617\">World War Z\u003c/a> and, of course, the much discussed graphic novel and TV show \u003ca href=\"http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Walking_Dead_(comic_book)\">The Walking Dead\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So, as I said, what’s the big deal?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Because \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> is a video game, it can do something utterly remarkable that other storytelling forms can’t. The brilliance of this game is the way it takes the tropes of the standard post-apocalypse narrative and both unpacks them in new ways and hijacks them for its own ends.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The story \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> tells is the journey, both real and metaphorical, of Joel and Ellie. Joel is a weary but survival-hardened, 49-year-old, black-market smuggler. We first meet him in our present as the chaos of the infection is just starting. The game begins with his daughter dying in his arms after being shot by a soldier. Ellie is a teenage girl, born after the infection has destroyed society, who ends up placed in Joel’s charge. Her recently discovered immunity to the infection offers a last hope that a vaccine might still be possible. Joel, and his partner-in-crime Tess, are given the task of getting Ellie across the nation’s broken landscape to the last laboratory of the Fireflies, a group that opposes martial law and still believes a cure is possible. After Tess dies at the beginning of their journey to the Firefly lab, the main arc of the narrative begins following Joel as he comes to terms with the presence of this girl, so much like his daughter, in his life.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Using that relationship’s evolution to animate the actual cross-country trek from Boston to Salt Lake City allows \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> to do something with the classic post-apocalyptic narrative that other stories haven’t. While there are lots of battles with zombies and humans alike, it’s the emotional tone of the game that stands out. \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em>, more than anything else, is overwhelmingly sad.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Like Cormac McCarthy’s \u003cem>The Road\u003c/em>, which the game is often compared to, the world of \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> seems irreparably broken. Over and over again, in subtle ways only a game can allow, we are forced to face this fog of grief. A penetrating book or movie would have its own language for revealing that sadness, but what \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> does is exploit the mechanics of gaming in a way that makes us explore that emotional landscape firsthand.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many games ask you to find and collect stuff as you progress through the story (money, new weapons, etc). But in \u003cem>The Last of Us,\u003c/em> the breakdown of society means \u003cem>you have to\u003c/em> scavenge. But it also means you spend a lot of time moving through empty neighborhoods and empty houses. You wander through bedrooms and living rooms full of the things people left. These familiar yet fallen spaces are rendered with a beauty that becomes transportive. The spare cords of \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pfA5UqEU_80\">Gustavo Santaolalla’s score\u003c/a> also holds the game’s sober tone (he was composer who did the haunting music for \u003cem>Brokeback Mountain\u003c/em>). Thus along with the usual gameplay (which can be pretty violent and scary), there also comes this remarkable and unexpected meditation on loss at scale we usually can’t touch.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>But the most stunning feature of this game is its ending. As the game progresses, Ellie becomes a full-fledged partner in the battle for survival (for one whole segment the player controls Ellie after Joel is almost killed). As the story unfolds, Joel slowly seems to find a place for his grief. His bond with Ellie seems to bring a kind of awakening and peace to this man who has done terrible things. Finally finding the Fireflies, it seems that, yes, Ellie does hold the key to a cure. Perhaps there can be redemption for humanity. But, then, we discover that the price for extracting this cure is Ellie’s death.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s here that the usual tropes \u003cem>should\u003c/em> kick in. At first Joel rejects Ellie’s fate and fights desperately to take her back from the Fireflies. As we navigate through the final battle, we are shown, in various ways, that there is really no choice. The tragedy of Ellie’s death is the only means to save the rest of us. And we also know, having spend so much time with Ellie (I was in the game for 37 hours total) that — more than anyone else — she would have understood and been willing to make the sacrifice. Thus, we expect that ending and we expect Joel to finally understand, too.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Instead, the game makes us kill the doctors.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In the harrowing crescendo, this character who we thought was a hero, (making us, as players, the heroes, too), turns out to be a monster. The game forces us to become the agent though which Joel violently destroys the only hope left for the world.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It’s in this way that \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> illustrates something truly radical that’s inherent to the technologies of video-game storytelling. The game convinces us that, as players, Joel’s story is our story. Instead, we find that we never really understood this man. We never understood the toll his survival had taken on him. We could not see how deeply his grief had destroyed his humanity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As I played through these last few moments, I was stunned. For all the books and movies and TV shows and plays I have seen, here was a something truly new, truly novel. I was being shown something that only recently became possible.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now, I am not so much of a fan-boy to miss the fact that \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> still lives in an often male-dominated video game universe — replete with the usual virtual mayhem. And there is enough of this mayhem to keep \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> from truly being a portal to a bright, new world where everyone games in the same way that everyone watches TV. But, by brilliantly co-opting the new mechanics of video game story telling for its own ends, \u003cem>The Last of Us\u003c/em> does illuminate the contours of what that world may look like.\u003c/p>\n\u003chr>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Adam Frank is a co-founder of the 13.7 blog, an astrophysics professor at the University of Rochester, a book author and a self-described “evangelist of science.” You can keep up with more of what Adam is thinking on \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://www.facebook.com/AdamFrankAuthor\">Facebook\u003c/a> and Twitter:\u003cem> \u003c/em>\u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/adamfrank4\">@adamfrank4\u003c/a>. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Why+Video+Games+Matter&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Six writers have withdrawn from the PEN American Center’s annual gala on May 5 in protest against the free-speech organization’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.pen.org/2015-pen-goodale-freedom-expression-courage-award\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">decision\u003c/a> to give the French satirical magazine \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em> its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The writers who have withdrawn from the event are Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em> \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/nyregion/six-pen-members-decline-gala-after-award-for-charlie-hebdo.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reports\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In its decision to honor \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em>, PEN America cited the satirical publication’s “dauntlessness in the face of one of the most noxious assaults on expression in recent memory.” An attack on Jan. 7 by Islamist militants on the magazine and its staff killed 12 people, including some of its top cartoonists and editors. In a statement, PEN added:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\n\u003cp>“The day after the attack, the surviving staff of \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em> magazine vowed to continue publication, releasing their next edition on time with a print run expanded from 40,000 to over eight million under the mantra ‘All is Forgiven,’ donating all proceeds to the families of the victims. The \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em> attacks dealt a blow to the bedrock principle that no act of expression, no matter how provocative or offensive, can justify violence.”\u003c/p>\n\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em> had long pilloried political and religious figures, but it was the publication’s depiction of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad that had drawn intense scrutiny — as well as death threats from militant groups. Many Muslims consider any depiction of their prophet — even positive ones — to be offensive. Critics of the magazine say \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em> was being deliberately provocative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kushner, in an email to the \u003cem>Times\u003c/em>, said she was withdrawing from the May 5 PEN gala because she was uncomfortable with \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em>‘s “cultural intolerance” and promotion of “a kind of forced secular view.” Those views, the \u003cem>Times\u003c/em> added, were echoed by the other writers who pulled out of the event.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carey told the \u003cem>Times\u003c/em> that PEN, in its decision, was going beyond its role of protecting freedom of expression.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?” he said in an email to the newspaper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Novelist Salman Rushdie, a past president of PEN who spent years in hiding because of a fatwa over his novel \u003cem>The Satanic Verses\u003c/em>, criticized the writers for pulling out, saying while Carey and Ondaatje were old friends of his, they are “horribly wrong.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a statement Sunday, PEN said: “We do not believe that any of us must endorse the content of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons in order to affirm the importance of the medium of satire, or to applaud the staff’s bravery in holding fast to those values in the face of life and death threats.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It added:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\n\u003cp>“We recognize that these issues are complex, and that there are good faith differences of opinion within our community. At PEN, we never shy away from controversy nor demand uniformity of opinion across our ranks. We will be sorry not to see those who have opted out of the gala, but we respect them for their convictions.”\u003c/p>\n\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The award for \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em> will be accepted by the publication’s film critic and essayist Jean-Baptiste Thoret, who had arrived to work late on the day of the attack. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=6+Novelists+Withdraw+From+Event+Honoring+%27Charlie+Hebdo%27+For+Free+Speech&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Six writers have withdrawn from the PEN American Center’s annual gala on May 5 in protest against the free-speech organization’s \u003ca href=\"http://www.pen.org/2015-pen-goodale-freedom-expression-courage-award\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">decision\u003c/a> to give the French satirical magazine \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em> its annual Freedom of Expression Courage Award.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The writers who have withdrawn from the event are Peter Carey, Michael Ondaatje, Francine Prose, Teju Cole, Rachel Kushner and Taiye Selasi, \u003cem>The New York Times\u003c/em> \u003ca href=\"http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/27/nyregion/six-pen-members-decline-gala-after-award-for-charlie-hebdo.html?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">reports\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In its decision to honor \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em>, PEN America cited the satirical publication’s “dauntlessness in the face of one of the most noxious assaults on expression in recent memory.” An attack on Jan. 7 by Islamist militants on the magazine and its staff killed 12 people, including some of its top cartoonists and editors. In a statement, PEN added:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\n\u003cp>“The day after the attack, the surviving staff of \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em> magazine vowed to continue publication, releasing their next edition on time with a print run expanded from 40,000 to over eight million under the mantra ‘All is Forgiven,’ donating all proceeds to the families of the victims. The \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em> attacks dealt a blow to the bedrock principle that no act of expression, no matter how provocative or offensive, can justify violence.”\u003c/p>\n\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em> had long pilloried political and religious figures, but it was the publication’s depiction of Islam’s Prophet Muhammad that had drawn intense scrutiny — as well as death threats from militant groups. Many Muslims consider any depiction of their prophet — even positive ones — to be offensive. Critics of the magazine say \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em> was being deliberately provocative.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kushner, in an email to the \u003cem>Times\u003c/em>, said she was withdrawing from the May 5 PEN gala because she was uncomfortable with \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em>‘s “cultural intolerance” and promotion of “a kind of forced secular view.” Those views, the \u003cem>Times\u003c/em> added, were echoed by the other writers who pulled out of the event.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Carey told the \u003cem>Times\u003c/em> that PEN, in its decision, was going beyond its role of protecting freedom of expression.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“A hideous crime was committed, but was it a freedom-of-speech issue for PEN America to be self-righteous about?” he said in an email to the newspaper.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Novelist Salman Rushdie, a past president of PEN who spent years in hiding because of a fatwa over his novel \u003cem>The Satanic Verses\u003c/em>, criticized the writers for pulling out, saying while Carey and Ondaatje were old friends of his, they are “horribly wrong.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In a statement Sunday, PEN said: “We do not believe that any of us must endorse the content of Charlie Hebdo’s cartoons in order to affirm the importance of the medium of satire, or to applaud the staff’s bravery in holding fast to those values in the face of life and death threats.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It added:\u003c/p>\n\u003cblockquote>\n\u003cp>“We recognize that these issues are complex, and that there are good faith differences of opinion within our community. At PEN, we never shy away from controversy nor demand uniformity of opinion across our ranks. We will be sorry not to see those who have opted out of the gala, but we respect them for their convictions.”\u003c/p>\n\u003c/blockquote>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The award for \u003cem>Charlie Hebdo\u003c/em> will be accepted by the publication’s film critic and essayist Jean-Baptiste Thoret, who had arrived to work late on the day of the attack. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=6+Novelists+Withdraw+From+Event+Honoring+%27Charlie+Hebdo%27+For+Free+Speech&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The latest British movie to play the imitation game, \u003cem>Ex Machina,\u003c/em> is the directorial debut of novelist-screenwriter Alex Garland. This time, the stakes are higher than the Nazi conquest of Europe. The talky sci-fi puzzler turns on nothing less than the potential displacement of humans by artificially intelligent cyborgs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then again, maybe the film is just another riff on the battle of the sexes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The movie’s title abbreviates \u003cem>deus ex machina\u003c/em>, Latin for “god from a machine.” (It’s a reference to ancient Greek plays where a god character materialized at the end to put everything right.) In Garland’s scenario, the god is Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the tech prodigy who launched and controls Bluebook, a fictional mashup of Google, Facebook and a nongovernmental NSA.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The machine is Ava (Alicia Vikander), devised by Nathan much the way another startup founder invented Eve. Ava sports a synthetic frame that’s mostly see-through, but covered and curvy in all the right places. She has sex appeal, but does she have consciousness?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Determining that is the assignment of the third main character, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a Bluebook coder. If Nathan is approximately a god and Ava transparently a goddess, Caleb is the patsy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most sweeping assertion of Ava’s importance comes from the bushy-bearded Nathan, who has summoned Caleb to a remote house/research lab nestled in a Nordic wilderness. Nathan seems to live entirely alone in this prison-like abode, which may explain why he’s a little batty and often drunk. Eventually, though, he introduces an unspeaking, geisha-like servant, Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Is she an android, too? Don’t overthink your answer.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nathan asks Caleb to conduct a Turing test on Ava to determine if she has achieved true intelligence. Of course, the original Turing interrogation involved a computer that’s hidden from the questioner, not an alluring replicant who openly flirts with him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To his credit, Garland addresses the implausibility of his scenario and allows Nathan to explain why he mated AI with erotic robotics. There’s much debate of individual versus collective identity, and of thought versus instinct. The writer, whose previous scripts include \u003cem>Sunshine\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Never Let Me Go\u003c/em>, even includes a brief lecture on Jackson Pollock — a moment that announces the film’s Europeanness as surely as its minimalist look and abundant female nudity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since \u003cem>Ex Machina\u003c/em> consists mostly of dialogues between Caleb and Ava or Nathan, it has plenty of time to discuss the narrative options. There are only three: 1) Ava has been cunningly programmed to appear capable of thought. 2) She is actually thinking, and is also sincerely fond of Caleb. 3) She’s a conniving liar, which would mean she really is smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>None of these possibilities is likely to lead to a startling payoff, but the movie is reasonably diverting until its predictable (and predictably misogynistic) outcome. Isaac offers an intense and literally pumped-up variation on his customary role as the super-confident, highly motivated outsider. The waifish Gleeson flickers believably between arrogance and self-doubt. As a creature who may be either puppet or puppetmaster, Vikander is suitably elusive and fascinating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, the movie is less a drama than an exercise in style. It relies heavily on the epic Norwegian exteriors, the willowy actresses — both Vikander and Mizuno are former ballerinas — and Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s buzzing, skittering score. For all its chatter about intelligence, \u003cem>Ex Machina\u003c/em> is better at being than thinking.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The latest British movie to play the imitation game, \u003cem>Ex Machina,\u003c/em> is the directorial debut of novelist-screenwriter Alex Garland. This time, the stakes are higher than the Nazi conquest of Europe. The talky sci-fi puzzler turns on nothing less than the potential displacement of humans by artificially intelligent cyborgs.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Then again, maybe the film is just another riff on the battle of the sexes.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The movie’s title abbreviates \u003cem>deus ex machina\u003c/em>, Latin for “god from a machine.” (It’s a reference to ancient Greek plays where a god character materialized at the end to put everything right.) In Garland’s scenario, the god is Nathan (Oscar Isaac), the tech prodigy who launched and controls Bluebook, a fictional mashup of Google, Facebook and a nongovernmental NSA.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The machine is Ava (Alicia Vikander), devised by Nathan much the way another startup founder invented Eve. Ava sports a synthetic frame that’s mostly see-through, but covered and curvy in all the right places. She has sex appeal, but does she have consciousness?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Determining that is the assignment of the third main character, Caleb (Domhnall Gleeson), a Bluebook coder. If Nathan is approximately a god and Ava transparently a goddess, Caleb is the patsy.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The most sweeping assertion of Ava’s importance comes from the bushy-bearded Nathan, who has summoned Caleb to a remote house/research lab nestled in a Nordic wilderness. Nathan seems to live entirely alone in this prison-like abode, which may explain why he’s a little batty and often drunk. Eventually, though, he introduces an unspeaking, geisha-like servant, Kyoko (Sonoya Mizuno).\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>(Is she an android, too? Don’t overthink your answer.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Nathan asks Caleb to conduct a Turing test on Ava to determine if she has achieved true intelligence. Of course, the original Turing interrogation involved a computer that’s hidden from the questioner, not an alluring replicant who openly flirts with him.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>To his credit, Garland addresses the implausibility of his scenario and allows Nathan to explain why he mated AI with erotic robotics. There’s much debate of individual versus collective identity, and of thought versus instinct. The writer, whose previous scripts include \u003cem>Sunshine\u003c/em> and \u003cem>Never Let Me Go\u003c/em>, even includes a brief lecture on Jackson Pollock — a moment that announces the film’s Europeanness as surely as its minimalist look and abundant female nudity.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Since \u003cem>Ex Machina\u003c/em> consists mostly of dialogues between Caleb and Ava or Nathan, it has plenty of time to discuss the narrative options. There are only three: 1) Ava has been cunningly programmed to appear capable of thought. 2) She is actually thinking, and is also sincerely fond of Caleb. 3) She’s a conniving liar, which would mean she really is smart.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>None of these possibilities is likely to lead to a startling payoff, but the movie is reasonably diverting until its predictable (and predictably misogynistic) outcome. Isaac offers an intense and literally pumped-up variation on his customary role as the super-confident, highly motivated outsider. The waifish Gleeson flickers believably between arrogance and self-doubt. As a creature who may be either puppet or puppetmaster, Vikander is suitably elusive and fascinating.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Still, the movie is less a drama than an exercise in style. It relies heavily on the epic Norwegian exteriors, the willowy actresses — both Vikander and Mizuno are former ballerinas — and Ben Salisbury and Geoff Barrow’s buzzing, skittering score. For all its chatter about intelligence, \u003cem>Ex Machina\u003c/em> is better at being than thinking.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>What scares teenagers?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The question has haunted horror movie producers ever since scaring teenagers became its own cottage industry, and the answer usually involves finding them where they live. Decades ago, the idea of psycho killers infiltrating suburbs (\u003cem>Halloween\u003c/em>), dreams (\u003cem>A Nightmare On Elm Street\u003c/em>), summer camps (\u003cem>Friday The 13th\u003c/em>), or video stores (\u003cem>Scream\u003c/em>) was enough to send jaded adolescents over the edge. So it was inevitable a new shocker, in this case the MTV film \u003cem>Unfriended\u003c/em>, would find today’s teens where they live: the Internet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Set entirely on a desktop, with characters only visible via webcam, the film takes 82 minutes of real time to deliver its simple premise: It’s the anniversary of a high-school girl’s suicide. Six of her classmates are hanging out on a group Skype chat, each sequestered in their own house, their parents nowhere to be found. But there’s an unknown figure on the call, represented by that spooky blue ghost Skype profile. The deceased, named Laura, is haunting their social media as one part virus, one part \u003ca href=\"http://www.onthemedia.org/story/managing-monster/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Slender Man\u003c/a>, and one part I Know What You Did Last Summer. She sends taunting messages from her own Facebook account, commandeers the Spotify playlists, and forces the kids to play the ultimate form of torture, Never Have I Ever. Insult her or try to hang up on her call, and she compels you to commit real-life suicide with a speed that would put Uber to shame. Call it the \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/tags/260268002/internet-of-things\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Internet of spooky things\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Unfriended\u003c/em>, which was originally titled \u003cem>Cybernatural\u003c/em>, isn’t the first film to take place entirely over the Internet. Some previous tech horror, including the Elijah Wood-starring \u003cem>Open Windows\u003c/em>, already popped that bubble. But it is the first to so accurately depict the way today’s youth piece together their online lives. The girl whose desktop we are peering at is Blaire (Shelley Hennig), whose life unfolds onscreen—a digital collage as character sketch. By peering at her Facebook page, YouTube videos, and browsing history, we know she’s a hard partier with a goober boyfriend (Moses Jacob Storm), a checkered history with Laura, and a \u003cem>Teen Wolf\u003c/em> obsessive (Hennig’s recurring role on the show might explain that one). The efficient exposition is entirely composed of a LiveLeak video and half a YouTube clip. It’s supremely goofy and not scary in the slightest, but the movie is speaking the right language.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Made for a dirt-cheap $1 million, the film gets by with built-in laptop webcams, terrible sound, and “buffering” at all effects-heavy moments. Of course the digitized lo-fi look is unpleasant on a big screen, but no more so than the \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2012/03/01/147503590/project-x-one-party-every-parents-nightmare\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> found footage trend\u003c/a> has been for the past several years. Having to follow the measured pace of chat forums does force the filmmakers into some degree of patience, though they can’t escape the horror-film curse of cheap gotcha moments and idiotic, needless gore. But give credit where credit is due: The film was shot in a single take. Your move, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2014/10/17/356461767/birdman-tracks-a-comeback-in-seemingly-one-long-take\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Birdman\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In between the silliness, director Levan Gabriadze and writer Nelson Greaves manage a message about the dangers of cyberbullying that’s like a less preachy version of the 2011 documentary \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2012/03/29/149629170/bully-a-provocative-and-essential-documentary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Bully\u003c/a>\u003c/em>. Not the ghost-glitch business (a disappearing “Unfriend” button on Facebook isn’t that spooky), but rather the more subtle touches: the way the friends spread gossip about one of their own mere seconds before she joins their group chat, the uploading of compromising media without permission, and the casual nastiness of that common “kill yourself” refrain supposedly only meant as “a joke.” By immersing us so thoroughly in this world, Gabriadze has made it easy to understand why words that only exist online can hurt so deep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A communication system built by today’s best and brightest minds has become a swamp of callous and evil behavior. That’s what should really keep teens up at night. That, and the fear of going outside.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>What scares teenagers?\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The question has haunted horror movie producers ever since scaring teenagers became its own cottage industry, and the answer usually involves finding them where they live. Decades ago, the idea of psycho killers infiltrating suburbs (\u003cem>Halloween\u003c/em>), dreams (\u003cem>A Nightmare On Elm Street\u003c/em>), summer camps (\u003cem>Friday The 13th\u003c/em>), or video stores (\u003cem>Scream\u003c/em>) was enough to send jaded adolescents over the edge. So it was inevitable a new shocker, in this case the MTV film \u003cem>Unfriended\u003c/em>, would find today’s teens where they live: the Internet.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Set entirely on a desktop, with characters only visible via webcam, the film takes 82 minutes of real time to deliver its simple premise: It’s the anniversary of a high-school girl’s suicide. Six of her classmates are hanging out on a group Skype chat, each sequestered in their own house, their parents nowhere to be found. But there’s an unknown figure on the call, represented by that spooky blue ghost Skype profile. The deceased, named Laura, is haunting their social media as one part virus, one part \u003ca href=\"http://www.onthemedia.org/story/managing-monster/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Slender Man\u003c/a>, and one part I Know What You Did Last Summer. She sends taunting messages from her own Facebook account, commandeers the Spotify playlists, and forces the kids to play the ultimate form of torture, Never Have I Ever. Insult her or try to hang up on her call, and she compels you to commit real-life suicide with a speed that would put Uber to shame. Call it the \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/tags/260268002/internet-of-things\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Internet of spooky things\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Unfriended\u003c/em>, which was originally titled \u003cem>Cybernatural\u003c/em>, isn’t the first film to take place entirely over the Internet. Some previous tech horror, including the Elijah Wood-starring \u003cem>Open Windows\u003c/em>, already popped that bubble. But it is the first to so accurately depict the way today’s youth piece together their online lives. The girl whose desktop we are peering at is Blaire (Shelley Hennig), whose life unfolds onscreen—a digital collage as character sketch. By peering at her Facebook page, YouTube videos, and browsing history, we know she’s a hard partier with a goober boyfriend (Moses Jacob Storm), a checkered history with Laura, and a \u003cem>Teen Wolf\u003c/em> obsessive (Hennig’s recurring role on the show might explain that one). The efficient exposition is entirely composed of a LiveLeak video and half a YouTube clip. It’s supremely goofy and not scary in the slightest, but the movie is speaking the right language.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Made for a dirt-cheap $1 million, the film gets by with built-in laptop webcams, terrible sound, and “buffering” at all effects-heavy moments. Of course the digitized lo-fi look is unpleasant on a big screen, but no more so than the \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2012/03/01/147503590/project-x-one-party-every-parents-nightmare\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> found footage trend\u003c/a> has been for the past several years. Having to follow the measured pace of chat forums does force the filmmakers into some degree of patience, though they can’t escape the horror-film curse of cheap gotcha moments and idiotic, needless gore. But give credit where credit is due: The film was shot in a single take. Your move, \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2014/10/17/356461767/birdman-tracks-a-comeback-in-seemingly-one-long-take\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Birdman\u003c/a>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In between the silliness, director Levan Gabriadze and writer Nelson Greaves manage a message about the dangers of cyberbullying that’s like a less preachy version of the 2011 documentary \u003cem>\u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/2012/03/29/149629170/bully-a-provocative-and-essential-documentary\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\"> Bully\u003c/a>\u003c/em>. Not the ghost-glitch business (a disappearing “Unfriend” button on Facebook isn’t that spooky), but rather the more subtle touches: the way the friends spread gossip about one of their own mere seconds before she joins their group chat, the uploading of compromising media without permission, and the casual nastiness of that common “kill yourself” refrain supposedly only meant as “a joke.” By immersing us so thoroughly in this world, Gabriadze has made it easy to understand why words that only exist online can hurt so deep.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A communication system built by today’s best and brightest minds has become a swamp of callous and evil behavior. That’s what should really keep teens up at night. That, and the fear of going outside.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>Soul singer \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15406033/percy-sledge\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Percy Sledge\u003c/a> epitomized Southern soul in ballads like “When A Man Loves A Woman,” which became a massive international hit when it came out in 1966. Sledge died Tuesday morning of natural causes in East Baton Rouge, La. He was 74.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, Sledge told the audience about having been born in tiny Leighton, Ala., in 1940, and about growing up working in the cotton fields.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[I was] 10 years old, singing my songs in the fields, picking and chopping cotton. And my boss man tells me one day, he said, ‘Perce?’ He said, ‘That voice that you use comin’ out of your throat, the whole world is gonna hear one day.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Later, as a hospital orderly, Sledge continued singing for his patients, who made the same prediction. On weekends, he sang with a group called the Esquires Combo. One night in 1966, he was performing at an Elks Club, where DJ and record producer Quinn Ivy happened to be in the audience. Sledge \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3930799\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told NPR in 2004\u003c/a> that he hummed a melody for Ivy, who told him to go home and turn it into a song.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So I went home and stayed home for two or three weeks,” Sledge said, “and came back and he asked me, he said, ‘Percy, have you come up with any lyrics on “Why’d You Leave Me Baby”?’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I said, ‘No, Quinn, you know how it is, when a man loves a woman, he can’t think anyway.’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So he said, ‘That’s it. If you could write lyrics around that title, I think you’d have a smash.’ And that’s how it began.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EYb84BDMbi0\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sledge recorded his song in 1966 at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, giving songwriting credit to his organist and bassist. The song shot to the top of the pop and R&B charts and, over the years, became an iconic soul anthem. “When A Man Loves A Woman” has been used in countless film soundtracks and commercials, inspired a film by the same name and earned Michael Bolton a Grammy for his cover years later. It was Sledge’s most well-known song. But he did have others, like 1968’s “Take Time To Know Her,” which put him in the Top 20 again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sledge’s ballads had a lot of country music in them. It was the kind of music he’d heard growing up, and he mixed it with blues and soul.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Guys like me and \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/14951033/ray-charles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ray Charles\u003c/a>, when we was coming up through our days, country music and soul music was just a very thin line between the two,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sledge continued to make albums, and was performing until just a few years ago — always including his signature song. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Percy+Sledge+Had+A+Voice+The+Whole+World+Heard&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Soul singer \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15406033/percy-sledge\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Percy Sledge\u003c/a> epitomized Southern soul in ballads like “When A Man Loves A Woman,” which became a massive international hit when it came out in 1966. Sledge died Tuesday morning of natural causes in East Baton Rouge, La. He was 74.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>When he was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 2005, Sledge told the audience about having been born in tiny Leighton, Ala., in 1940, and about growing up working in the cotton fields.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“[I was] 10 years old, singing my songs in the fields, picking and chopping cotton. And my boss man tells me one day, he said, ‘Perce?’ He said, ‘That voice that you use comin’ out of your throat, the whole world is gonna hear one day.’ ”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Later, as a hospital orderly, Sledge continued singing for his patients, who made the same prediction. On weekends, he sang with a group called the Esquires Combo. One night in 1966, he was performing at an Elks Club, where DJ and record producer Quinn Ivy happened to be in the audience. Sledge \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=3930799\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">told NPR in 2004\u003c/a> that he hummed a melody for Ivy, who told him to go home and turn it into a song.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So I went home and stayed home for two or three weeks,” Sledge said, “and came back and he asked me, he said, ‘Percy, have you come up with any lyrics on “Why’d You Leave Me Baby”?’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“I said, ‘No, Quinn, you know how it is, when a man loves a woman, he can’t think anyway.’\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“So he said, ‘That’s it. If you could write lyrics around that title, I think you’d have a smash.’ And that’s how it began.”\u003c/p>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutube'>\n \u003cspan class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__embedYoutubeInside'>\n \u003ciframe\n loading='lazy'\n class='utils-parseShortcode-shortcodes-__youtubeShortcode__youtubePlayer'\n type='text/html'\n src='//www.youtube.com/embed/EYb84BDMbi0'\n title='//www.youtube.com/embed/EYb84BDMbi0'\n allowfullscreen='true'\n style='border:0;'>\u003c/iframe>\n \u003c/span>\n \u003c/span>\u003c/p>\u003cp>\u003cp>Sledge recorded his song in 1966 at the Muscle Shoals Sound Studio, giving songwriting credit to his organist and bassist. The song shot to the top of the pop and R&B charts and, over the years, became an iconic soul anthem. “When A Man Loves A Woman” has been used in countless film soundtracks and commercials, inspired a film by the same name and earned Michael Bolton a Grammy for his cover years later. It was Sledge’s most well-known song. But he did have others, like 1968’s “Take Time To Know Her,” which put him in the Top 20 again.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sledge’s ballads had a lot of country music in them. It was the kind of music he’d heard growing up, and he mixed it with blues and soul.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“Guys like me and \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/14951033/ray-charles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Ray Charles\u003c/a>, when we was coming up through our days, country music and soul music was just a very thin line between the two,” he said.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Sledge continued to make albums, and was performing until just a few years ago — always including his signature song. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=Percy+Sledge+Had+A+Voice+The+Whole+World+Heard&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>The Australian crime caper \u003cem>Kill Me Three Times\u003c/em> feels like a throwback to the country’s “Ozploitation” genre films of the 1970s: bloody, low-budget romps through the commonwealth’s seedier side. But in its half-hearted attempt to weave a tricky narrative structure, the film also has shades of the mid-’90s \u003cem>Pulp Fiction \u003c/em>knockoffs that soured the landscape of bloody, low-budget romps. Director Kriv Stenders (\u003cem>Red Dog\u003c/em>) and first-time screenwriter James McFarland have divided their tale of murder, infidelity, and insurance fraud into three distinct parts (“Kill Me Once,” “Twice,” etc.). They loop back on each other, so that we first see events unfold without explanation, and later get the context.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This twisty structure is the movie’s hook, though after two decades of similar narrative games in cinema, the gambit feels overly familiar. The danger is that such a device will feel like an artificial means of stretching out a thin story, instead of a mechanism that complements it in a satisfying way (example: Samuel L. Jackson’s concluding speech in \u003cem>Pulp Fiction\u003c/em> resonates more strongly because we already know, chronologically, what happens next). Sadly, \u003cem>Kill Me Three Times\u003c/em> is the former more than the latter case. When all is said and done, the technique feels a bit desperate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The movie’s chief advantage is that it was filmed along the coast of Western Australia, allowing ample opportunities to admire the scenery with its jagged cliffs and lush wilderness. In between, there is the story, which involves a seedy hitman played by cult movie hero Simon Pegg, clad in leather jacket and horseshoe mustache. The hitman lies dying at a beach house in the opening scene, before flashing back to show how he entered the lives of two financially misbehaving dentists (Teresa Palmer and Sullivan Stapleton), an alcoholic rage-prone bar owner (Callan Mulvey), and the bar owner’s wife (Alice Braga) who becomes everyone’s primary target. Some of the interconnections between characters feel superfluous, including the way Braga’s young woman, at a moment of extreme distress, winds up at the dentist’s office in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pegg, who begins the movie as the dispassionate observer and audience surrogate before taking center stage, is fun to watch even when he isn’t given much to work with. He shows off his natural charisma while doing something as simple as playing with cigarettes. (The actor’s Britishness, by the way, is explained by calling him a “tourist,” despite the fact that he heads what appears to be a thriving private-eye business.) Pegg is surrounded by a cast of mostly Aussie ringers, including Palmer and Luke Hemsworth (brother to Chris and Liam), who can’t seem to decide how seriously to take their roles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Kill Me Three Times\u003c/em> has elements that would seem to peg it (no pun intended) as a fun genre exercise, including pitch-black humor, corrupt law enforcement, a love of rural settings, and a desperately bloody climax. But the film isn’t enough fun to recommend on its own terms, with its sloppy construction and so little in the way of stylistic flourishes. The pacing is way off: there’s endless, needless footage of characters getting into cars and driving to new locations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s more, the story itself is frustrating, taking forever to communicate the stakes. That’s part of the film’s design, but without much incentive to follow the mystery, it’s a design that can’t quite work. Without the three-way punch of more panache, more Pegg, and more panoramic views of Australian landscapes, \u003cem>Three Times\u003c/em> stops short of being a killer time.\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "Andrew Lapin says the bloody Australian black comedy wants to be a genre caper, but can't quite hit the right notes.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>The Australian crime caper \u003cem>Kill Me Three Times\u003c/em> feels like a throwback to the country’s “Ozploitation” genre films of the 1970s: bloody, low-budget romps through the commonwealth’s seedier side. But in its half-hearted attempt to weave a tricky narrative structure, the film also has shades of the mid-’90s \u003cem>Pulp Fiction \u003c/em>knockoffs that soured the landscape of bloody, low-budget romps. Director Kriv Stenders (\u003cem>Red Dog\u003c/em>) and first-time screenwriter James McFarland have divided their tale of murder, infidelity, and insurance fraud into three distinct parts (“Kill Me Once,” “Twice,” etc.). They loop back on each other, so that we first see events unfold without explanation, and later get the context.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This twisty structure is the movie’s hook, though after two decades of similar narrative games in cinema, the gambit feels overly familiar. The danger is that such a device will feel like an artificial means of stretching out a thin story, instead of a mechanism that complements it in a satisfying way (example: Samuel L. Jackson’s concluding speech in \u003cem>Pulp Fiction\u003c/em> resonates more strongly because we already know, chronologically, what happens next). Sadly, \u003cem>Kill Me Three Times\u003c/em> is the former more than the latter case. When all is said and done, the technique feels a bit desperate.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The movie’s chief advantage is that it was filmed along the coast of Western Australia, allowing ample opportunities to admire the scenery with its jagged cliffs and lush wilderness. In between, there is the story, which involves a seedy hitman played by cult movie hero Simon Pegg, clad in leather jacket and horseshoe mustache. The hitman lies dying at a beach house in the opening scene, before flashing back to show how he entered the lives of two financially misbehaving dentists (Teresa Palmer and Sullivan Stapleton), an alcoholic rage-prone bar owner (Callan Mulvey), and the bar owner’s wife (Alice Braga) who becomes everyone’s primary target. Some of the interconnections between characters feel superfluous, including the way Braga’s young woman, at a moment of extreme distress, winds up at the dentist’s office in the first place.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Pegg, who begins the movie as the dispassionate observer and audience surrogate before taking center stage, is fun to watch even when he isn’t given much to work with. He shows off his natural charisma while doing something as simple as playing with cigarettes. (The actor’s Britishness, by the way, is explained by calling him a “tourist,” despite the fact that he heads what appears to be a thriving private-eye business.) Pegg is surrounded by a cast of mostly Aussie ringers, including Palmer and Luke Hemsworth (brother to Chris and Liam), who can’t seem to decide how seriously to take their roles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003cem>Kill Me Three Times\u003c/em> has elements that would seem to peg it (no pun intended) as a fun genre exercise, including pitch-black humor, corrupt law enforcement, a love of rural settings, and a desperately bloody climax. But the film isn’t enough fun to recommend on its own terms, with its sloppy construction and so little in the way of stylistic flourishes. The pacing is way off: there’s endless, needless footage of characters getting into cars and driving to new locations.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>What’s more, the story itself is frustrating, taking forever to communicate the stakes. That’s part of the film’s design, but without much incentive to follow the mystery, it’s a design that can’t quite work. Without the three-way punch of more panache, more Pegg, and more panoramic views of Australian landscapes, \u003cem>Three Times\u003c/em> stops short of being a killer time.\u003c/p>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"title": "A (Nearly) Comprehensive Guide to the Music of 'Mad Men'",
"headTitle": "A (Nearly) Comprehensive Guide to the Music of ‘Mad Men’ | KQED",
"content": "\u003cp>Pay a visit to New York City’s Museum of the Moving Image to see its blockbuster show \u003cem>Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men\u003c/em>, and toward the end of the exhibit you will find a lonely kiosk. It’s easy to overlook — by the time you’ve waded through the throngs of museumgoers, and snaked your way through the \u003ca href=\"http://www.wnyc.org/story/how-mad-men-got-its-style/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">lovingly preserved costumes\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://untappedcities.com/2015/03/11/step-onto-set-of-mad-men-in-exhibit-matthew-weiners-mad-men-at-museum-of-moving-image/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">meticulously recreated sets\u003c/a> of Don Draper’s office and Betty Draper’s kitchen, this standee with a screen and two sets of dangling headphones feels like an afterthought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This modest display commemorates the music of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> — touch the screen and pick a song. Show creator Matthew Weiner will tell you why Mr. Acker Bilk’s “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QXiSBeP0jQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Stranger on the Shore\u003c/a>,” a strangely sultry instrumental by a British clarinetist that happened to be \u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em>‘s No. 1 song of 1962, appeared on the show. Twice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Given how much bric-a-brac is packed into the MOMI exhibit, it’s understandable that they couldn’t devote more space to \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s music — but really, this forlorn kiosk should be a surround-sound amphitheater. The music that Weiner has employed over seven seasons of his acclaimed AMC advertising-industry melodrama, which began its final half-season of episodes Sunday night, has been every bit as integral to the show’s thesis about 1960s America as its actors, costumes and production design. Especially if you’re a pop-chart nerd like me, the music of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> has felt smart, iconoclastic and (mostly) right on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In telling the story of the fictional ad agency Sterling Cooper, Weiner has strived to capture the 1960s as they were lived, not the decade many selectively remember — \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUh5bMjfBtE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the hagiographic “Sixties”\u003c/a> from countless documentaries and public-TV pledge drives — and that extends to the songs. \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15193203/bob-dylan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bob Dylan\u003c/a>‘s “The Times They Are a-Changin'” hasn’t appeared once, nor has his “Blowin’ in the Wind.” There’s been no “For What It’s Worth” by the Buffalo Springfield, no “A Change Is Gonna Come” from \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15402012/sam-cooke\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sam Cooke\u003c/a>, nor even the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie.” \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15229570/the-beatles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Beatles\u003c/a> made a (\u003ca href=\"http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/how-mad-men-landed-the-beatles-all-you-need-is-love-and-250000/?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">very expensive\u003c/a>) appearance in one episode, but it had nothing to do with \u003cem>Sgt. Pepper\u003c/em> or the Summer of Love; another time, when the Fabs’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was featured, it was only briefly whistled by lead character Don Draper. You’d think the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” would have been a gimme, since the show is set in the dirty streets of pre–fiscal crisis New York, but nope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Avoiding these great but overused songs would just be contrarianism by Weiner if he weren’t so exacting about the songs he \u003cem>does\u003c/em> include. Though they are unlikely to pop up on oldies radio today, many of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s songs were megasmashes in their day. The fact is, on the radio and the charts, the ’60s was generally a pretty schmaltzy decade, not the nonstop Boomer-rock paradise of repute. (Yes, even the late ’60s.) Pick up any \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/The-Billboard-Book-Number-Hits/dp/0823076776\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em> book\u003c/a> commemorating the \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/08/16/207879695/how-the-hot-100-became-americas-hit-barometer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hot 100\u003c/a> hits of yesteryear, and as you leaf through the ’60s you’ll be presented less with classics by Jimi Hendrix or The Who than by curios like the Singing Nun, The Tornados, Kyu Sakamoto, Paul Mauriat and Jeannie C. Riley. All of these one-hit-wonder acts have been showcased on \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>, alongside a handful of undeniable classics by the Stones, The Beach Boys and Frank Sinatra.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The show’s fans have noticed, and appreciated, Weiner’s attention to musical minutiae — they have crowdsourced \u003ca href=\"http://www.tunefind.com/show/mad-men\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">lists of every detectable song in every episode\u003c/a>. One time, just before the show’s fifth-season premiere, some attentive critics even got Weiner to swap a Dusty Springfield song that was anachronistic to the season’s 1966 timeline by just a few months; \u003ca href=\"http://www.ew.com/article/2012/03/19/mad-men-song-change\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">he changed it\u003c/a> just before the episode aired, thanking the critics and attesting to his “deep appreciation for details.” (You don’t say, Matt.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Below, I’ve collected a bunch of the show’s cleverest song choices since its 2007 premiere and, where applicable, run down some \u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em> chart stats. I’ve stuck to original recordings (so there’s no \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngf2zHq4FEI\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Megan Draper cooing “Zou Bisou Bisou”\u003c/a> here, captivating as that is) and grouped them by theme, to help try to answer to question of why the music in this show is so rewarding. As critic Hanna Rosin astutely \u003ca href=\"http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/tv_club/features/2015/mad_men_season_7_part_2/episode_1/mad_men_season_7_recapped_slate_s_tv_club_dissects_each_new_episode_1.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">notes\u003c/a> this week in \u003cem>Slate\u003c/em>, “Weiner has a genius for making scenes that are stagey and mannered yet nonetheless emotionally affecting, by capturing the small moments.” Indeed, the music of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> is often the stagiest thing about the show, and yet these small musical moments, many under a minute long, consistently pay off with delight and satisfaction — even when the song is as obvious as “Satisfaction.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Hit Instrumentals\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Percy Faith and His Orchestra, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaXzeQoWTko\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Theme from \u003cem>A Summer Place\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>,\u003c/em>” No. 1, 1960 (\u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> season 2, episode 5, “The New Girl”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Tornados, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBYdp84AwuU\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Telstar\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 2, episode 10, “The Inheritance”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Mr. Acker Bilk, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QXiSBeP0jQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Stranger on the Shore\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 2, episode 13, “Meditations in an Emergency” and season 6, episode 11, “Favors”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgcV8PrCLcs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Casino Royale\u003c/a>,” No. 27, 1967 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 5, episode 13, “The Phantom”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTo9-lmZ6oE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Love Is Blue\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 6, episode 5, “The Flood”)\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Sure, the ’60s had Motown, British Invasion, psychedelia — but the pop instrumental was a greater chart presence than many remember. \u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em>‘s No. 1 song of 1960 was Percy Faith’s “Theme from \u003cem>A Summer Place\u003c/em>,” and the aforementioned “Stranger on the Shore” was tops for 1962; both have appeared on \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>. Trumpeter Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass also make a brief appearance — they were the \u003ca href=\"http://soundcheck.wnyc.org/story/315007-was-hit-chris-molanphy-herb-alperts-surprising-success/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">second-biggest album-chart act of the ’60s\u003c/a>, after the Beatles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So while most of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s orchestral soundtrack is provided by the show’s longtime composer \u003ca href=\"http://strongplacemusic.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">David Carbonara\u003c/a>, Weiner has also seeded the show with instrumentals that were the aural wallpaper of their day. In 1962 alone, three instrumentals topped \u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em>‘s Hot 100 — the most ever in a single year — and in season two, set in ’62, two of these songs make appearances: Bilk’s “Stranger on the Shore,” and the short-lived British band the Tornados, with their \u003ca href=\"http://soundcheck.wnyc.org/story/that-was-hit-telstar/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">space-age ode to a communications satellite\u003c/a> “Telstar.” (Oddly, the only ’62 instrumental chart-topper left untouched by Weiner is David Rose’s bawdy “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bLX06yR3wY\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Stripper\u003c/a>.”) “Telstar” is a particularly clever Easter egg, playing at the end of an \u003ca href=\"http://madmen.wikia.com/wiki/The_Inheritance\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode\u003c/a> in which adman Don Draper strong-arms his way into a West Coast aerospace conference.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even as the show enters the politically charged late ’60s, soothing instrumental hits keep on coming — Weiner juxtaposes heavy events with frilly mass culture to depict how America’s \u003ca href=\"http://chnm.gmu.edu/hardhats/silent.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Silent Majority\u003c/a> pacified itself. In the season five \u003ca href=\"http://madmen.wikia.com/wiki/The_Phantom\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">finale\u003c/a>, as Draper visits a local movie palace, Alpert’s suave “Casino Royale” plays over the opening credits of the 1967 James Bond spoof of the same name; its appearance is incidental but also plays wittily off of Draper’s status as the show’s faux-Bond and serial \u003ca href=\"http://www.javasbachelorpad.com/whippedcream.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bachelor\u003c/a>. By 1968 — the year of fiery protest, national tragedy and blues-rock — French orchestra leader Paul Mauriat was atop the charts with his baroque \u003ca href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304200804579163670969242120\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">harpsichord jam\u003c/a> “Love Is Blue.” It’s the closing song of the \u003ca href=\"http://madmen.wikia.com/wiki/The_Flood\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode\u003c/a> dealing with the Martin Luther King Jr., assassination, the same episode that finds Don \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.artinfo.com/spotlight/2013/04/30/%E2%80%9Cmad-men%E2%80%9D-an-obsessive%E2%80%99s-guide-to-cultural-references-season-6-ep-5/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">back at the movies with his son\u003c/a>, taking in \u003cem>Planet of the Apes\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Easy Listening\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Vic Damone, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ4yJM-vquw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">On the Street Where You Live\u003c/a>,” No. 4, 1956 (MM season 1, episode 1, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Jack Jones, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EAELtJgD6A\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lollipops and Roses\u003c/a>,” No. 66, 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 2, episode 3, “The Benefactor”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Brenda Lee, “\u003ca href=\"http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1140a2_brenda-lee-break-it-to-me-gently_music\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Break It to Me Gently\u003c/a>,” No. 4, 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 2, episode 7, “The Gold Violin”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Patti Page, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT2ao0rcxoA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Old Cape Cod\u003c/a>” No. 3, 1957 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 3, “The Good News”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Jim Reeves, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOCCvN8YDuc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Welcome to My World\u003c/a>” No. 2 Country, 1964 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 11, “Chinese Wall”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Blood, Sweat & Tears, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKuqaZ0DQtk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">You’ve Made Me So Very Happy\u003c/a>,” No. 2, 1969 (MM season 7, episode 5, “The Runaways”)\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Central to the premise of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> is that it is told through the eyes of pre–Baby Boomers, for whom the 1960s’ folkways and cultural uprisings come less as shocks than as irritants. The character of Don Draper was born in the 1920s, Roger Sterling in the 1910s; even young copywriter Peggy Olson’s birthdate precedes America’s entry into World War II. While some of the show’s sharpest moments find Draper, at the cusp of his forties, confronted by rock (we’ll get to that Beatles moment in a minute), Weiner also cossets Draper’s generation with songs they might find appealing — and not all of them were, at that point, oldies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scenes involving Don’s first wife Betty are often soundtracked with prerock songs, starting right with \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s premiere episode: As Don returns home to the suburbs after one of his urban assignations to an unaware Betty, the show concludes with a mid-’50s hit by crooner Vic Damone, “On the Street Where You Live” (taken from a musical, \u003cem>My Fair Lady\u003c/em>, that was still commanding Broadway in 1960). Or in season two, after a tense client dinner, Don and Betty drive home with the radio playing the syrupy 1962 ballad “Roses and Lollipops” — bitterly ironic as the alienated Betty weeps. And not all of these easy-listening chestnuts involve the show’s older characters. In season four, as Don gently flirts with (and is rebuffed by) the niece of his California secret-keeper Anna, he dances with the young woman to a Patti Page song that was a hit when he was 30 and she perhaps 12 — reinforcing the yawning generation gap between them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of my favorite musical moments of the entire series came in the first half of this final season, at a party thrown by Don’s second wife Megan in her new L.A. home. It’s the summer of ’69 — the dresses are short, the party guests stoned. And what edgy, street-fightin’ record is spinning on the hi-fi? The blowsy AM-radio staple “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” by Blood Sweat & Tears, a nominal “rock” song with a schmaltz core that spent much of the prior spring parked in the \u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em> Top 10. It is exactly the kind of unhip song that would be playing at a party in 1969 (and exactly the kind of record no other TV show or movie set in the ’60s would have put on its soundtrack). As if knowing the song isn’t quite cool enough for her party, Megan pulls the record off and implores her musician friends to play.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Quirky Smashes\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Bob Newhart, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBMm00P3QT0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Driving Instructor\u003c/a>,” No. 1 album, 1960 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 1, episode 4, “New Amsterdam”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Kyo Sakamoto, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxIxX7mnsso\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sukiyaki\u003c/a>” No. 1, 1963 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 2, episode 2, “Flight 1”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Singing Nun, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n295hjktHD0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dominique\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1963 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 3, episode 10, “The Color Blue”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Nashville Teens, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGuZY6NVXqU\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tobacco Road\u003c/a>,” No. 14, 1964 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 1, “Public Relations”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Petula Clark, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws-dbq0CDtc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I Know a Place\u003c/a>,” No. 3, 1965 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 9, “The Beautiful Girls”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Shirley Ellis, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MJLi5_dyn0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Name Game\u003c/a>,” No. 3, 1964–65 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 13, “Tomorrowland”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Jeannie C. Riley, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOZPBUu7Fro\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Harper Valley P.T.A.\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1968 (MM season 6, episode 10, “A Tale of Two Cities”)\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>In a season one episode, four junior Sterling Cooper admen gather in oily executive Pete Campbell’s office to listen to a comedy album. Not just any album — it’s \u003ca href=\"http://stolendress.com/comedyonvinyl/Episode%202%20-%20Bob%20Newhart%20-%20The%20Button-Down%20Mind/expand-news_1.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, 1960’s top-selling LP and the first comedy disc to win the Grammy for Album of the Year (a feat repeated only one more time by a comedy disc, Vaughn Meader’s Kennedy-spoofing \u003cem>The First Family\u003c/em>). Here again is a side of the ’60s that Weiner unearths and celebrates — the curiosities, the detritus, the cheese, some of it surprisingly enduring. It takes a puckish sense of humor to feature a song by peppy British hitmaker Petula Clark, and then choose not her enduring smash “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx06XNfDvk0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Downtown\u003c/a>” but rather its soundalike followup hit, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws-dbq0CDtc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I Know a Place\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of these quirky hits are strategically placed for period-accurate ambience — and gentle commentary. When Don arrives at the apartment of his season three mistress, schoolteacher Suzanne Farrell, spinning on her turntable is the late-’63 French-language smash “Dominique” by the Singing Nun — a perfect encapsulation, for Don, of her alluring innocence. In season four, Shirley Ellis’s tongue-twisting, banana-fanna-fo-fanning hit “The Name Game” plays on the jukebox of a diner where Don brings his kids. In season six, when the too-old-to-be-hip Sterling Cooper men visit L.A. and attend a house party filled with poseurs and hangers-on, in the background is Jeannie C. Riley’s sassy, poseur-destroying 1968 chart-topper “Harper Valley P.T.A.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TV bloggers did catch one apparent anachronism in the episode that features Kyo Sakamoto’s smash “Sukiyaki.” This \u003ca href=\"http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1230\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mistitled\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://soundcheck.wnyc.org/story/298161-was-hit-many-lives-sukiyaki/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">oft-covered\u003c/a> hit became the only all-Japanese song to top the U.S. charts in 1963. However, it appears in \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s season two premiere, set in the spring of 1962. Leave it to detail-oriented Weiner to find an escape hatch: The song was in fact first released in Japan in 1961, under its original title “Ue o Muite Arukō,” and in the episode, it’s playing as Don breaks up with a client at … a Japanese restaurant, one that could maybe, plausibly have had the record in its original pressing. As the Singing Nun might say, \u003cem>touché\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Deep Cuts\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Peter, Paul & Mary, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE8NSvD7LSE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Early in the Morning\u003c/a>,” No. 1 album, 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 2, episode 8, “A Night to Remember”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Bob Dylan, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL4vZMFYXZk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Don’t Think Twice, Its All Right\u003c/a>,” 1963 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 1, episode 13, “The Wheel”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Roy Orbison, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyK5ew4m6JU\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Shahdaroba\u003c/a>,” 1963 (MM season 3, episode 13, “Shut the Door. Have a Seat.”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Simon & Garfunkel, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIlHdCpY4Kw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bleecker Street\u003c/a>,” 1964 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 7, “The Suitcase”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Crystals, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f20Oz9Yr_So\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)\u003c/a>,” 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 5, episode 4, “Mystery Date”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Beach Boys, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR7_TbMIVnA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times\u003c/a>” 1966 (MM season 5, episode 6, “Far Away Places”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Beatles, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tV0l62RZ80\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tomorrow Never Knows\u003c/a>,” 1966 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 5, episode 8, “Lady Lazarus”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Nancy Sinatra, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9kzLL2zD0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">You Only Live Twice\u003c/a>,” No. 44, 1967 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 5, episode 13, “The Phantom”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY9PY4r83p8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bonnie and Clyde\u003c/a>,” 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 6, episode 4, “To Have and to Hold”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Monkees, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdd5xI9l7Ns\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Porpoise Song (Theme from \u003cem>Head\u003c/em>)\u003c/a>,” No. 62, 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 6, episode 12, “The Quality of Mercy”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Zombies, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI2lTwY0Jx8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">This Will Be Our Year\u003c/a>,” 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 7, episode 2, “A Day’s Work”)\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>It would be nuts for Weiner to avoid totemic ’60s artists fully. Generally, when he has decided to invoke the decade’s folkie bards and pop eminences, he makes his song choices count — at least half the time, he chooses non-hits, invoking everyone from Roy Orbison to The Zombies without the accompanying \u003cem>duh\u003c/em> moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peter, Paul and Mary’s 1962 debut album was a huge seller, but \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> avoids its campfire hits (“If I Had a Hammer,” “Lemon Tree”) for the more definitive opener “Early in the Morning.” Speaking of PPM, they had the hit with “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” not Dylan, but it’s Bob’s version that closes the show’s first season, \u003ca href=\"http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2012/03/tonight-after-nearly-a-year.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">very memorably\u003c/a>. Hall of Fame producer Phil Spector is represented not by the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” or the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” but rather the \u003ca href=\"http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=2790\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">controversial\u003c/a>, radio-banned and brutally ironic Crystals single “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss).” The Beach Boys and the Monkees, each band a prolific hitmaker, are represented by two of their trippiest non-hits. And since “You Only Live Twice” was actually one of Nancy Sinatra’s smaller ’60s hits, the song may now be more associated with Don Draper — how great was \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YocBfe1N598\">that season five finale montage\u003c/a>? — than James Bond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for the Fab Four, Weiner \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.courant.com/roger_catlin_tv_eye/2010/09/mad-men-going-to-the-beatles.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">telegraphed\u003c/a> the Beatles’ influence on the show (Don buying his daughter Sally’s affection with tickets to their 1965 Shea Stadium gig) long before he had the budget to license their music. When he finally did in 2012, he went with an especially heady Lennon cut — “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the closing track on the quite literally pivotal album \u003cem>Revolver\u003c/em> — and has an exasperated, unimpressed Draper lift the needle off the record before the song even finishes. NPR’s own Ann Powers \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/05/08/152287119/mad-mens-beatles-coup-misses-the-mark\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">questioned\u003c/a> Weiner’s use of the song, and whether it would ever have alienated a savvy ad man like Don. But let’s pause and admire Weiner’s chutzpah one more time: You have one quarter-million-dollar budget to devote to licensing one Beatles song — the very act is guaranteed media attention — and you choose one of their thorniest and least radio-friendly (albeit one of their greatest)? Talk about meta: Weiner’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” scene was his own \u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/sophieh/5534736604/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tobacco letter\u003c/a>, an advertisement for its own daring that became more about the show’s influence than about the show’s content. If it wasn’t one of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s best musical moments, it was perhaps the show’s most savvy — Don Draper himself could have dreamed it up.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Iconic Signposts\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Chubby Checker, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHGXwQeUk7M\">The Twist\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1960 and No. 1, 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 1, episode 8, “The Hobo Code”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Rolling Stones, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoxRFOr_sQ0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1965 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 8, “The Summer Man”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Sonny & Cher, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BERd61bDY7k\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I Got You Babe\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1965 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 13, “Tomorrowland”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Dusty Springfield, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR4vE9xL3yk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me\u003c/a>,” No. 4, 1966 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 5, episode 1–2, “A Little Kiss”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Kinks, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3Ei_yoI4c\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">You Really Got Me\u003c/a>,” No. 7, 1964 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 5, episode 11, “The Other Woman”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Big Brother and the Holding Company, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hcxbIln3sc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Piece of My Heart\u003c/a>,” No. 12, 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 6, episode 10, “A Tale of Two Cities”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Judy Collins, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Xm30heHms\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Both Sides Now\u003c/a>” No. 8, 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 6, episode 13, “In Care Of”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Spencer Davis Group, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POCUgBSVENQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I’m a Man\u003c/a>,” No. 10, 1967 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 7, episode 1, “Time Zones”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Waylon Jennings, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPv5NZR_Wtk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line\u003c/a>,” No. 2 Country, 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 7, episode 5, “The Runaways”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Frank Sinatra, “\u003ca href=\"https://vimeo.com/30105597\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">My Way\u003c/a>,” No. 27, 1969 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 7, episode 6, “The Strategy”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Peggy Lee, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That All There Is?\u003c/a>” No. 11, 1969 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 7, episode 8, “Severance”)\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Here’s the other half of the “totemic” category — the dozen or so of times \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> has gone straight for the jugular, choosing songs that were not only huge hits but still clearly read as ’60s iconography. One of the very best came early: flirty Peggy Olson \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJy8pZ5T0kQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">sidling up\u003c/a> to \u003ca href=\"http://petecampbellsbitchface.tumblr.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-faced\u003c/a> Pete Campbell to the strains of the 1960 über-smash “The Twist.” Super-obvious, right? But for those of us with \u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em> mojo, it’s a clever moment — Chubby Checker’s smash hit No. 1 twice (the only Hot 100 hit ever to do so), catching on first with teenagers before finding a toehold with club-going adults and topping the chart all over again. Peggy, \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s ultimate liminal character, is a one-woman representation of both audiences, twisting her arrival into self-assured adulthood. No wonder the petty, controlling Pete doesn’t want to dance with her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Twist” is a rare early–\u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> example of a signpost hit. Most of these expensive-to-license smashes appeared after season four, suggesting Weiner was more hamstrung by his fledgling show’s budget early on than by any deliberate artistic choice. But even over the last few seasons, Weiner has spent his newfound clout on coveted songs just infrequently enough to make their appearance feel indelible rather than inevitable. If you’ve watched the show devotedly, I barely need to detail these killer scenes: Don “Summer Man” Draper \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.pioneerlocal.com/entertainment/madmen-summerman.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">roaming the streets\u003c/a> to the Stones’ “Satisfaction”; Peggy \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i5SpIxx_A4#t=5m1s\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ditching Sterling Cooper\u003c/a> with a sassy smirk to the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”; Pete \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTHg2ApnkO8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">toking up\u003c/a> to the liberating yowl of Janis’s “Piece of My Heart”; Megan \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qfYmNHyX80\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">picking up\u003c/a> Don at LAX in a convertible as Steve Winwood bleats Spencer Davis’s “I’m a Man”; Don and Peggy \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zp3qMGN-8U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">slow-dancing\u003c/a> to Frank’s definitive “My Way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most of these songs are not used \u003ca href=\"http://filmsound.org/terminology/diegetic.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">diegetically\u003c/a> — “My Way” is playing on an on-screen radio, but otherwise it’s debatable whether, say, Peggy is thinking about the Kinks at her moment of freedom. But the fact that these songs were all big hits is essential to these scenes — they define the background of the characters’ lives. If Sunday’s first episode of season 7.2 is any indication, Weiner plans to keep deploying iconic tunes on his way to the exit. Peggy Lee’s immortal late-1969 single “Is That All There Is?” bookended the episode, an \u003ca href=\"http://www.vulture.com/2015/04/is-that-all-there-is-mad-men-peggy-lee.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">inevitable\u003c/a>, none-too-subtle evocation of the exhaustion of the ’60s and the protagonists’ emotional voids, even after getting everything they thought they wanted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For me, though, none of these moments tops the most moving use of music in \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s history, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4uXj5cB_I8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">finale of season six\u003c/a>. Don has just been released by Sterling Cooper for self-immolating during a Hershey pitch, picking the worst possible moment to reveal his unhappy childhood and fraudulent biography to a key client. It’s Thanksgiving Day 1968, and Don picks up his kids — but before driving them to dinner, the confessional and newly unfettered Don brings them to a derelict, abandoned Victorian house now surrounded by projects: the seedy brothel from his childhood. “This,” Don tells the kids, “is where I grew up” — and up pops Judy Collins’s achingly beautiful cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” its \u003ca href=\"http://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=83\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">lyrics\u003c/a> a dreamy fantasia pierced with self-lacerating regret (a Mitchell trademark). It’s the dialogue in Don’s head, in song.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad floatright]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One final detail: The week before Thanksgiving 1968, Collins’s “Both Sides Now” \u003ca href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=vQoEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA1&pg=PA80#v=onepage&q&f=false\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">leapt into the Top 20 on the Hot 100\u003c/a>, on its way to a Top 10 peak just before Christmas. Teenage Sally Draper — or better yet, pubescent Bobby Draper — may well have owned the 45. Like every great musical moment over \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s seven seasons, it’s true to the story, true to the characters and true to life. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+%28Nearly%29+Comprehensive+Guide+To+The+Music+Of+%27Mad+Men%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n",
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"excerpt": "From \"The Twist\" to \"Is That All There Is?,\" the songs that \u003cem>Mad Men \u003c/em>uses to depict the 1960s are perfect — but often unpredictable — representations of the decade's slow evolution.",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003cp>Pay a visit to New York City’s Museum of the Moving Image to see its blockbuster show \u003cem>Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men\u003c/em>, and toward the end of the exhibit you will find a lonely kiosk. It’s easy to overlook — by the time you’ve waded through the throngs of museumgoers, and snaked your way through the \u003ca href=\"http://www.wnyc.org/story/how-mad-men-got-its-style/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">lovingly preserved costumes\u003c/a> and \u003ca href=\"http://untappedcities.com/2015/03/11/step-onto-set-of-mad-men-in-exhibit-matthew-weiners-mad-men-at-museum-of-moving-image/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">meticulously recreated sets\u003c/a> of Don Draper’s office and Betty Draper’s kitchen, this standee with a screen and two sets of dangling headphones feels like an afterthought.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>This modest display commemorates the music of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> — touch the screen and pick a song. Show creator Matthew Weiner will tell you why Mr. Acker Bilk’s “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QXiSBeP0jQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Stranger on the Shore\u003c/a>,” a strangely sultry instrumental by a British clarinetist that happened to be \u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em>‘s No. 1 song of 1962, appeared on the show. Twice.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Given how much bric-a-brac is packed into the MOMI exhibit, it’s understandable that they couldn’t devote more space to \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s music — but really, this forlorn kiosk should be a surround-sound amphitheater. The music that Weiner has employed over seven seasons of his acclaimed AMC advertising-industry melodrama, which began its final half-season of episodes Sunday night, has been every bit as integral to the show’s thesis about 1960s America as its actors, costumes and production design. Especially if you’re a pop-chart nerd like me, the music of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> has felt smart, iconoclastic and (mostly) right on.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>In telling the story of the fictional ad agency Sterling Cooper, Weiner has strived to capture the 1960s as they were lived, not the decade many selectively remember — \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CUh5bMjfBtE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">the hagiographic “Sixties”\u003c/a> from countless documentaries and public-TV pledge drives — and that extends to the songs. \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15193203/bob-dylan\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bob Dylan\u003c/a>‘s “The Times They Are a-Changin'” hasn’t appeared once, nor has his “Blowin’ in the Wind.” There’s been no “For What It’s Worth” by the Buffalo Springfield, no “A Change Is Gonna Come” from \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15402012/sam-cooke\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sam Cooke\u003c/a>, nor even the Kingsmen’s “Louie, Louie.” \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/artists/15229570/the-beatles\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Beatles\u003c/a> made a (\u003ca href=\"http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/05/07/how-mad-men-landed-the-beatles-all-you-need-is-love-and-250000/?_r=0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">very expensive\u003c/a>) appearance in one episode, but it had nothing to do with \u003cem>Sgt. Pepper\u003c/em> or the Summer of Love; another time, when the Fabs’ “I Want to Hold Your Hand” was featured, it was only briefly whistled by lead character Don Draper. You’d think the Lovin’ Spoonful’s “Summer in the City” would have been a gimme, since the show is set in the dirty streets of pre–fiscal crisis New York, but nope.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Avoiding these great but overused songs would just be contrarianism by Weiner if he weren’t so exacting about the songs he \u003cem>does\u003c/em> include. Though they are unlikely to pop up on oldies radio today, many of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s songs were megasmashes in their day. The fact is, on the radio and the charts, the ’60s was generally a pretty schmaltzy decade, not the nonstop Boomer-rock paradise of repute. (Yes, even the late ’60s.) Pick up any \u003ca href=\"http://www.amazon.com/The-Billboard-Book-Number-Hits/dp/0823076776\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em> book\u003c/a> commemorating the \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2013/08/16/207879695/how-the-hot-100-became-americas-hit-barometer\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Hot 100\u003c/a> hits of yesteryear, and as you leaf through the ’60s you’ll be presented less with classics by Jimi Hendrix or The Who than by curios like the Singing Nun, The Tornados, Kyu Sakamoto, Paul Mauriat and Jeannie C. Riley. All of these one-hit-wonder acts have been showcased on \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>, alongside a handful of undeniable classics by the Stones, The Beach Boys and Frank Sinatra.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The show’s fans have noticed, and appreciated, Weiner’s attention to musical minutiae — they have crowdsourced \u003ca href=\"http://www.tunefind.com/show/mad-men\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">lists of every detectable song in every episode\u003c/a>. One time, just before the show’s fifth-season premiere, some attentive critics even got Weiner to swap a Dusty Springfield song that was anachronistic to the season’s 1966 timeline by just a few months; \u003ca href=\"http://www.ew.com/article/2012/03/19/mad-men-song-change\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">he changed it\u003c/a> just before the episode aired, thanking the critics and attesting to his “deep appreciation for details.” (You don’t say, Matt.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Below, I’ve collected a bunch of the show’s cleverest song choices since its 2007 premiere and, where applicable, run down some \u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em> chart stats. I’ve stuck to original recordings (so there’s no \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngf2zHq4FEI\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Megan Draper cooing “Zou Bisou Bisou”\u003c/a> here, captivating as that is) and grouped them by theme, to help try to answer to question of why the music in this show is so rewarding. As critic Hanna Rosin astutely \u003ca href=\"http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/tv_club/features/2015/mad_men_season_7_part_2/episode_1/mad_men_season_7_recapped_slate_s_tv_club_dissects_each_new_episode_1.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">notes\u003c/a> this week in \u003cem>Slate\u003c/em>, “Weiner has a genius for making scenes that are stagey and mannered yet nonetheless emotionally affecting, by capturing the small moments.” Indeed, the music of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> is often the stagiest thing about the show, and yet these small musical moments, many under a minute long, consistently pay off with delight and satisfaction — even when the song is as obvious as “Satisfaction.”\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Hit Instrumentals\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Percy Faith and His Orchestra, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BaXzeQoWTko\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Theme from \u003cem>A Summer Place\u003c/em>\u003c/a>\u003cem>,\u003c/em>” No. 1, 1960 (\u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> season 2, episode 5, “The New Girl”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Tornados, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eBYdp84AwuU\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Telstar\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 2, episode 10, “The Inheritance”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Mr. Acker Bilk, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8QXiSBeP0jQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Stranger on the Shore\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 2, episode 13, “Meditations in an Emergency” and season 6, episode 11, “Favors”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Herb Alpert & The Tijuana Brass, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dgcV8PrCLcs\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Casino Royale\u003c/a>,” No. 27, 1967 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 5, episode 13, “The Phantom”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Paul Mauriat and His Orchestra, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QTo9-lmZ6oE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Love Is Blue\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 6, episode 5, “The Flood”)\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Sure, the ’60s had Motown, British Invasion, psychedelia — but the pop instrumental was a greater chart presence than many remember. \u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em>‘s No. 1 song of 1960 was Percy Faith’s “Theme from \u003cem>A Summer Place\u003c/em>,” and the aforementioned “Stranger on the Shore” was tops for 1962; both have appeared on \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>. Trumpeter Herb Alpert and his Tijuana Brass also make a brief appearance — they were the \u003ca href=\"http://soundcheck.wnyc.org/story/315007-was-hit-chris-molanphy-herb-alperts-surprising-success/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">second-biggest album-chart act of the ’60s\u003c/a>, after the Beatles.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>So while most of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s orchestral soundtrack is provided by the show’s longtime composer \u003ca href=\"http://strongplacemusic.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">David Carbonara\u003c/a>, Weiner has also seeded the show with instrumentals that were the aural wallpaper of their day. In 1962 alone, three instrumentals topped \u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em>‘s Hot 100 — the most ever in a single year — and in season two, set in ’62, two of these songs make appearances: Bilk’s “Stranger on the Shore,” and the short-lived British band the Tornados, with their \u003ca href=\"http://soundcheck.wnyc.org/story/that-was-hit-telstar/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">space-age ode to a communications satellite\u003c/a> “Telstar.” (Oddly, the only ’62 instrumental chart-topper left untouched by Weiner is David Rose’s bawdy “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5bLX06yR3wY\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Stripper\u003c/a>.”) “Telstar” is a particularly clever Easter egg, playing at the end of an \u003ca href=\"http://madmen.wikia.com/wiki/The_Inheritance\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode\u003c/a> in which adman Don Draper strong-arms his way into a West Coast aerospace conference.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Even as the show enters the politically charged late ’60s, soothing instrumental hits keep on coming — Weiner juxtaposes heavy events with frilly mass culture to depict how America’s \u003ca href=\"http://chnm.gmu.edu/hardhats/silent.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Silent Majority\u003c/a> pacified itself. In the season five \u003ca href=\"http://madmen.wikia.com/wiki/The_Phantom\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">finale\u003c/a>, as Draper visits a local movie palace, Alpert’s suave “Casino Royale” plays over the opening credits of the 1967 James Bond spoof of the same name; its appearance is incidental but also plays wittily off of Draper’s status as the show’s faux-Bond and serial \u003ca href=\"http://www.javasbachelorpad.com/whippedcream.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bachelor\u003c/a>. By 1968 — the year of fiery protest, national tragedy and blues-rock — French orchestra leader Paul Mauriat was atop the charts with his baroque \u003ca href=\"http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052702304200804579163670969242120\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">harpsichord jam\u003c/a> “Love Is Blue.” It’s the closing song of the \u003ca href=\"http://madmen.wikia.com/wiki/The_Flood\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">episode\u003c/a> dealing with the Martin Luther King Jr., assassination, the same episode that finds Don \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.artinfo.com/spotlight/2013/04/30/%E2%80%9Cmad-men%E2%80%9D-an-obsessive%E2%80%99s-guide-to-cultural-references-season-6-ep-5/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">back at the movies with his son\u003c/a>, taking in \u003cem>Planet of the Apes\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Easy Listening\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Vic Damone, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dJ4yJM-vquw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">On the Street Where You Live\u003c/a>,” No. 4, 1956 (MM season 1, episode 1, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Jack Jones, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EAELtJgD6A\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Lollipops and Roses\u003c/a>,” No. 66, 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 2, episode 3, “The Benefactor”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Brenda Lee, “\u003ca href=\"http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x1140a2_brenda-lee-break-it-to-me-gently_music\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Break It to Me Gently\u003c/a>,” No. 4, 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 2, episode 7, “The Gold Violin”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Patti Page, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HT2ao0rcxoA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Old Cape Cod\u003c/a>” No. 3, 1957 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 3, “The Good News”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Jim Reeves, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tOCCvN8YDuc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Welcome to My World\u003c/a>” No. 2 Country, 1964 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 11, “Chinese Wall”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Blood, Sweat & Tears, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VKuqaZ0DQtk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">You’ve Made Me So Very Happy\u003c/a>,” No. 2, 1969 (MM season 7, episode 5, “The Runaways”)\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Central to the premise of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> is that it is told through the eyes of pre–Baby Boomers, for whom the 1960s’ folkways and cultural uprisings come less as shocks than as irritants. The character of Don Draper was born in the 1920s, Roger Sterling in the 1910s; even young copywriter Peggy Olson’s birthdate precedes America’s entry into World War II. While some of the show’s sharpest moments find Draper, at the cusp of his forties, confronted by rock (we’ll get to that Beatles moment in a minute), Weiner also cossets Draper’s generation with songs they might find appealing — and not all of them were, at that point, oldies.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Scenes involving Don’s first wife Betty are often soundtracked with prerock songs, starting right with \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s premiere episode: As Don returns home to the suburbs after one of his urban assignations to an unaware Betty, the show concludes with a mid-’50s hit by crooner Vic Damone, “On the Street Where You Live” (taken from a musical, \u003cem>My Fair Lady\u003c/em>, that was still commanding Broadway in 1960). Or in season two, after a tense client dinner, Don and Betty drive home with the radio playing the syrupy 1962 ballad “Roses and Lollipops” — bitterly ironic as the alienated Betty weeps. And not all of these easy-listening chestnuts involve the show’s older characters. In season four, as Don gently flirts with (and is rebuffed by) the niece of his California secret-keeper Anna, he dances with the young woman to a Patti Page song that was a hit when he was 30 and she perhaps 12 — reinforcing the yawning generation gap between them.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One of my favorite musical moments of the entire series came in the first half of this final season, at a party thrown by Don’s second wife Megan in her new L.A. home. It’s the summer of ’69 — the dresses are short, the party guests stoned. And what edgy, street-fightin’ record is spinning on the hi-fi? The blowsy AM-radio staple “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” by Blood Sweat & Tears, a nominal “rock” song with a schmaltz core that spent much of the prior spring parked in the \u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em> Top 10. It is exactly the kind of unhip song that would be playing at a party in 1969 (and exactly the kind of record no other TV show or movie set in the ’60s would have put on its soundtrack). As if knowing the song isn’t quite cool enough for her party, Megan pulls the record off and implores her musician friends to play.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Quirky Smashes\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Bob Newhart, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BBMm00P3QT0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Driving Instructor\u003c/a>,” No. 1 album, 1960 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 1, episode 4, “New Amsterdam”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Kyo Sakamoto, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jxIxX7mnsso\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Sukiyaki\u003c/a>” No. 1, 1963 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 2, episode 2, “Flight 1”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Singing Nun, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n295hjktHD0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Dominique\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1963 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 3, episode 10, “The Color Blue”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Nashville Teens, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eGuZY6NVXqU\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tobacco Road\u003c/a>,” No. 14, 1964 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 1, “Public Relations”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Petula Clark, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws-dbq0CDtc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I Know a Place\u003c/a>,” No. 3, 1965 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 9, “The Beautiful Girls”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Shirley Ellis, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MJLi5_dyn0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">The Name Game\u003c/a>,” No. 3, 1964–65 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 13, “Tomorrowland”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Jeannie C. Riley, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aOZPBUu7Fro\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Harper Valley P.T.A.\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1968 (MM season 6, episode 10, “A Tale of Two Cities”)\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>In a season one episode, four junior Sterling Cooper admen gather in oily executive Pete Campbell’s office to listen to a comedy album. Not just any album — it’s \u003ca href=\"http://stolendress.com/comedyonvinyl/Episode%202%20-%20Bob%20Newhart%20-%20The%20Button-Down%20Mind/expand-news_1.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">\u003cem>The Button-Down Mind of Bob Newhart\u003c/em>\u003c/a>, 1960’s top-selling LP and the first comedy disc to win the Grammy for Album of the Year (a feat repeated only one more time by a comedy disc, Vaughn Meader’s Kennedy-spoofing \u003cem>The First Family\u003c/em>). Here again is a side of the ’60s that Weiner unearths and celebrates — the curiosities, the detritus, the cheese, some of it surprisingly enduring. It takes a puckish sense of humor to feature a song by peppy British hitmaker Petula Clark, and then choose not her enduring smash “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zx06XNfDvk0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Downtown\u003c/a>” but rather its soundalike followup hit, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ws-dbq0CDtc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I Know a Place\u003c/a>.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Many of these quirky hits are strategically placed for period-accurate ambience — and gentle commentary. When Don arrives at the apartment of his season three mistress, schoolteacher Suzanne Farrell, spinning on her turntable is the late-’63 French-language smash “Dominique” by the Singing Nun — a perfect encapsulation, for Don, of her alluring innocence. In season four, Shirley Ellis’s tongue-twisting, banana-fanna-fo-fanning hit “The Name Game” plays on the jukebox of a diner where Don brings his kids. In season six, when the too-old-to-be-hip Sterling Cooper men visit L.A. and attend a house party filled with poseurs and hangers-on, in the background is Jeannie C. Riley’s sassy, poseur-destroying 1968 chart-topper “Harper Valley P.T.A.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>TV bloggers did catch one apparent anachronism in the episode that features Kyo Sakamoto’s smash “Sukiyaki.” This \u003ca href=\"http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=1230\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">mistitled\u003c/a>, \u003ca href=\"http://soundcheck.wnyc.org/story/298161-was-hit-many-lives-sukiyaki/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">oft-covered\u003c/a> hit became the only all-Japanese song to top the U.S. charts in 1963. However, it appears in \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s season two premiere, set in the spring of 1962. Leave it to detail-oriented Weiner to find an escape hatch: The song was in fact first released in Japan in 1961, under its original title “Ue o Muite Arukō,” and in the episode, it’s playing as Don breaks up with a client at … a Japanese restaurant, one that could maybe, plausibly have had the record in its original pressing. As the Singing Nun might say, \u003cem>touché\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Deep Cuts\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Peter, Paul & Mary, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jE8NSvD7LSE\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Early in the Morning\u003c/a>,” No. 1 album, 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 2, episode 8, “A Night to Remember”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Bob Dylan, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UL4vZMFYXZk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Don’t Think Twice, Its All Right\u003c/a>,” 1963 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 1, episode 13, “The Wheel”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Roy Orbison, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DyK5ew4m6JU\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Shahdaroba\u003c/a>,” 1963 (MM season 3, episode 13, “Shut the Door. Have a Seat.”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Simon & Garfunkel, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIlHdCpY4Kw\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bleecker Street\u003c/a>,” 1964 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 7, “The Suitcase”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Crystals, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f20Oz9Yr_So\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss)\u003c/a>,” 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 5, episode 4, “Mystery Date”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Beach Boys, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NR7_TbMIVnA\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I Just Wasn’t Made For These Times\u003c/a>” 1966 (MM season 5, episode 6, “Far Away Places”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Beatles, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5tV0l62RZ80\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Tomorrow Never Knows\u003c/a>,” 1966 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 5, episode 8, “Lady Lazarus”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Nancy Sinatra, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UY9kzLL2zD0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">You Only Live Twice\u003c/a>,” No. 44, 1967 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 5, episode 13, “The Phantom”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Serge Gainsbourg & Brigitte Bardot, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dY9PY4r83p8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Bonnie and Clyde\u003c/a>,” 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 6, episode 4, “To Have and to Hold”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Monkees, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mdd5xI9l7Ns\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Porpoise Song (Theme from \u003cem>Head\u003c/em>)\u003c/a>,” No. 62, 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 6, episode 12, “The Quality of Mercy”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Zombies, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kI2lTwY0Jx8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">This Will Be Our Year\u003c/a>,” 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 7, episode 2, “A Day’s Work”)\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>It would be nuts for Weiner to avoid totemic ’60s artists fully. Generally, when he has decided to invoke the decade’s folkie bards and pop eminences, he makes his song choices count — at least half the time, he chooses non-hits, invoking everyone from Roy Orbison to The Zombies without the accompanying \u003cem>duh\u003c/em> moment.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Peter, Paul and Mary’s 1962 debut album was a huge seller, but \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> avoids its campfire hits (“If I Had a Hammer,” “Lemon Tree”) for the more definitive opener “Early in the Morning.” Speaking of PPM, they had the hit with “Don’t Think Twice, It’s All Right,” not Dylan, but it’s Bob’s version that closes the show’s first season, \u003ca href=\"http://www.pastemagazine.com/blogs/lists/2012/03/tonight-after-nearly-a-year.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">very memorably\u003c/a>. Hall of Fame producer Phil Spector is represented not by the Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” or the Righteous Brothers’ “You’ve Lost That Lovin’ Feeling” but rather the \u003ca href=\"http://www.songfacts.com/detail.php?id=2790\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">controversial\u003c/a>, radio-banned and brutally ironic Crystals single “He Hit Me (It Felt Like a Kiss).” The Beach Boys and the Monkees, each band a prolific hitmaker, are represented by two of their trippiest non-hits. And since “You Only Live Twice” was actually one of Nancy Sinatra’s smaller ’60s hits, the song may now be more associated with Don Draper — how great was \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YocBfe1N598\">that season five finale montage\u003c/a>? — than James Bond.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>As for the Fab Four, Weiner \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.courant.com/roger_catlin_tv_eye/2010/09/mad-men-going-to-the-beatles.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">telegraphed\u003c/a> the Beatles’ influence on the show (Don buying his daughter Sally’s affection with tickets to their 1965 Shea Stadium gig) long before he had the budget to license their music. When he finally did in 2012, he went with an especially heady Lennon cut — “Tomorrow Never Knows,” the closing track on the quite literally pivotal album \u003cem>Revolver\u003c/em> — and has an exasperated, unimpressed Draper lift the needle off the record before the song even finishes. NPR’s own Ann Powers \u003ca href=\"http://www.npr.org/blogs/therecord/2012/05/08/152287119/mad-mens-beatles-coup-misses-the-mark\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">questioned\u003c/a> Weiner’s use of the song, and whether it would ever have alienated a savvy ad man like Don. But let’s pause and admire Weiner’s chutzpah one more time: You have one quarter-million-dollar budget to devote to licensing one Beatles song — the very act is guaranteed media attention — and you choose one of their thorniest and least radio-friendly (albeit one of their greatest)? Talk about meta: Weiner’s “Tomorrow Never Knows” scene was his own \u003ca href=\"https://www.flickr.com/photos/sophieh/5534736604/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">tobacco letter\u003c/a>, an advertisement for its own daring that became more about the show’s influence than about the show’s content. If it wasn’t one of \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s best musical moments, it was perhaps the show’s most savvy — Don Draper himself could have dreamed it up.\u003c/p>\n\u003ch3>\u003cstrong>Iconic Signposts\u003c/strong>\u003c/h3>\n\u003cul>\n\u003cli>Chubby Checker, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pHGXwQeUk7M\">The Twist\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1960 and No. 1, 1962 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 1, episode 8, “The Hobo Code”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Rolling Stones, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HoxRFOr_sQ0\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">(I Can’t Get No) Satisfaction\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1965 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 8, “The Summer Man”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Sonny & Cher, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BERd61bDY7k\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I Got You Babe\u003c/a>,” No. 1, 1965 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 4, episode 13, “Tomorrowland”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Dusty Springfield, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QR4vE9xL3yk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me\u003c/a>,” No. 4, 1966 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 5, episode 1–2, “A Little Kiss”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Kinks, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dk3Ei_yoI4c\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">You Really Got Me\u003c/a>,” No. 7, 1964 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 5, episode 11, “The Other Woman”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Big Brother and the Holding Company, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9hcxbIln3sc\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Piece of My Heart\u003c/a>,” No. 12, 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 6, episode 10, “A Tale of Two Cities”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Judy Collins, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A7Xm30heHms\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Both Sides Now\u003c/a>” No. 8, 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 6, episode 13, “In Care Of”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>The Spencer Davis Group, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=POCUgBSVENQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">I’m a Man\u003c/a>,” No. 10, 1967 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 7, episode 1, “Time Zones”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Waylon Jennings, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CPv5NZR_Wtk\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Only Daddy That’ll Walk the Line\u003c/a>,” No. 2 Country, 1968 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 7, episode 5, “The Runaways”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Frank Sinatra, “\u003ca href=\"https://vimeo.com/30105597\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">My Way\u003c/a>,” No. 27, 1969 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 7, episode 6, “The Strategy”)\u003c/li>\n\u003cli>Peggy Lee, “\u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LCRZZC-DH7M\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">Is That All There Is?\u003c/a>” No. 11, 1969 (\u003cem>MM\u003c/em> season 7, episode 8, “Severance”)\u003c/li>\n\u003c/ul>\n\u003cp>Here’s the other half of the “totemic” category — the dozen or so of times \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> has gone straight for the jugular, choosing songs that were not only huge hits but still clearly read as ’60s iconography. One of the very best came early: flirty Peggy Olson \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NJy8pZ5T0kQ\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">sidling up\u003c/a> to \u003ca href=\"http://petecampbellsbitchface.tumblr.com\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">bitch-faced\u003c/a> Pete Campbell to the strains of the 1960 über-smash “The Twist.” Super-obvious, right? But for those of us with \u003cem>Billboard\u003c/em> mojo, it’s a clever moment — Chubby Checker’s smash hit No. 1 twice (the only Hot 100 hit ever to do so), catching on first with teenagers before finding a toehold with club-going adults and topping the chart all over again. Peggy, \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s ultimate liminal character, is a one-woman representation of both audiences, twisting her arrival into self-assured adulthood. No wonder the petty, controlling Pete doesn’t want to dance with her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>“The Twist” is a rare early–\u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em> example of a signpost hit. Most of these expensive-to-license smashes appeared after season four, suggesting Weiner was more hamstrung by his fledgling show’s budget early on than by any deliberate artistic choice. But even over the last few seasons, Weiner has spent his newfound clout on coveted songs just infrequently enough to make their appearance feel indelible rather than inevitable. If you’ve watched the show devotedly, I barely need to detail these killer scenes: Don “Summer Man” Draper \u003ca href=\"http://blogs.pioneerlocal.com/entertainment/madmen-summerman.jpg\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">roaming the streets\u003c/a> to the Stones’ “Satisfaction”; Peggy \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8i5SpIxx_A4#t=5m1s\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">ditching Sterling Cooper\u003c/a> with a sassy smirk to the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me”; Pete \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jTHg2ApnkO8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">toking up\u003c/a> to the liberating yowl of Janis’s “Piece of My Heart”; Megan \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-qfYmNHyX80\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">picking up\u003c/a> Don at LAX in a convertible as Steve Winwood bleats Spencer Davis’s “I’m a Man”; Don and Peggy \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Zp3qMGN-8U\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">slow-dancing\u003c/a> to Frank’s definitive “My Way.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Most of these songs are not used \u003ca href=\"http://filmsound.org/terminology/diegetic.htm\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">diegetically\u003c/a> — “My Way” is playing on an on-screen radio, but otherwise it’s debatable whether, say, Peggy is thinking about the Kinks at her moment of freedom. But the fact that these songs were all big hits is essential to these scenes — they define the background of the characters’ lives. If Sunday’s first episode of season 7.2 is any indication, Weiner plans to keep deploying iconic tunes on his way to the exit. Peggy Lee’s immortal late-1969 single “Is That All There Is?” bookended the episode, an \u003ca href=\"http://www.vulture.com/2015/04/is-that-all-there-is-mad-men-peggy-lee.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">inevitable\u003c/a>, none-too-subtle evocation of the exhaustion of the ’60s and the protagonists’ emotional voids, even after getting everything they thought they wanted.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For me, though, none of these moments tops the most moving use of music in \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s history, the \u003ca href=\"https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B4uXj5cB_I8\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">finale of season six\u003c/a>. Don has just been released by Sterling Cooper for self-immolating during a Hershey pitch, picking the worst possible moment to reveal his unhappy childhood and fraudulent biography to a key client. It’s Thanksgiving Day 1968, and Don picks up his kids — but before driving them to dinner, the confessional and newly unfettered Don brings them to a derelict, abandoned Victorian house now surrounded by projects: the seedy brothel from his childhood. “This,” Don tells the kids, “is where I grew up” — and up pops Judy Collins’s achingly beautiful cover of Joni Mitchell’s “Both Sides Now,” its \u003ca href=\"http://jonimitchell.com/music/song.cfm?id=83\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">lyrics\u003c/a> a dreamy fantasia pierced with self-lacerating regret (a Mitchell trademark). It’s the dialogue in Don’s head, in song.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\u003c/div>",
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"content": "\u003cdiv class=\"post-body\">\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>One final detail: The week before Thanksgiving 1968, Collins’s “Both Sides Now” \u003ca href=\"http://books.google.com/books?id=vQoEAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA1&pg=PA80#v=onepage&q&f=false\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener\">leapt into the Top 20 on the Hot 100\u003c/a>, on its way to a Top 10 peak just before Christmas. Teenage Sally Draper — or better yet, pubescent Bobby Draper — may well have owned the 45. Like every great musical moment over \u003cem>Mad Men\u003c/em>‘s seven seasons, it’s true to the story, true to the characters and true to life. \u003c/p>\n\u003cdiv class=\"fullattribution\">Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.\u003cimg decoding=\"async\" src=\"http://www.google-analytics.com/__utm.gif?utmac=UA-5828686-4&utmdt=A+%28Nearly%29+Comprehensive+Guide+To+The+Music+Of+%27Mad+Men%27&utme=8(APIKey)9(MDAxOTAwOTE4MDEyMTkxMDAzNjczZDljZA004)\">\u003c/div>\n\n\u003c/div>\u003c/p>",
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"content": "\u003cp>\u003cem>The Salt of the Earth\u003c/em>, a documentary about famed photographer Sebastiao Salgado, ends with tranquil images of his family farm in Brazil, a leafy earthly paradise restored from the ravages of severe drought. That’s where Salgado went to recover from his experiences in war-torn Rwanda, and, perhaps, a life spent bringing back pictures of the self-inflicted horrors of mankind: genocide, drought, famine and the unspeakable suffering they bring to those caught in their wake.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Now 71 years old, the Franco-Brazilian photographer has roamed jungles, deserts, ravaged cities and fiery battle zones, where he used a knack for rapport with his subjects to create in-depth visual essays on how they try to survive under impossible conditions. Until he could bear it no longer, Salgado documented the cumulative miseries of global displacement following civil and foreign wars that devastated nations in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Emaciated refugees lining up for food or trudging past piles of bodies abandoned or shoveled en masse into makeshift pits. Traumatized Bosnian women, children and old men packed into trucks, minus their murdered menfolk. It’s the stuff of the nightly news, but Salgado’s black-and-silvery photographs are also impeccably composed art objects, his signature lowering clouds adding to their melodramatic beauty. In one of his best-known images, thousands of Brazilians from all walks of life scurry half-naked up and down a vast quarry, shoving one another aside as they prospect for gold.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Yet for some, among them the influential late cultural critic Susan Sontag, Salgado’s poetically realized scenes of destruction aestheticize human suffering, and so diminish it. I’m not sure I agree, but that critique deserves at least a mention in the \u003cem>The Salt of the Earth\u003c/em>, which German filmmaker Wim Wenders directed with Salgado’s son, Juliano Ribeiro Salgado. It’s not hard to see why Wenders, who made \u003cem>Paris, Texas\u003c/em> and the swoony \u003cem>Wings of Desire\u003c/em> and is no mean photographer himself, is so taken with Salgado. Wenders, too, is an arty romantic who shoots Salgado’s heroically stately talking head against a black background or super-imposed onto his own images. It looks lovely, yet Wenders’ worshipful account of Salgado the man feels like a tale half told.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The only boy in a brood of eight, Salgado met his wife, Lelia, when both were student activists in the 1960s. When Brazil fell into dictatorship, the couple left for France, where Salgado soon abandoned his plan to become an economist, and with his wife’s support, set up in business as a photographer. Much is made of their idyllic marriage. We’re left wondering what life was like for his son, who’s not much more than a diplomatic presence in the movie, and for Lelia, a shadowy figure for much of the film who was left to care for their two boys (their younger son has Down syndrome) every time her husband vanished for months at a time into an unknown world. Only at the end does Lelia come into her own when she’s credited with an idea to reforest the parched land of the family farm to which Salgado retreated, depleted and “sick in my soul” from bearing witness to Rwanda’s collapse.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>It worked. Salgado’s final, hopeful project, \u003cem>Genesis\u003c/em>, is a photographic tribute to places on Earth where the ecology has remained relatively undisturbed or where destruction had been reversed. In the end, perhaps, the vindication of Salgado’s work lies in the eye of the beholder. When you look at a Salgado image of a dead family piled in the back of a truck you don’t think, “My, what a lovely photo of death!” You are floored by the tragedy. When you look at the family farm, now made over to the public and a gorgeous stretch of waving greenery as far as the eye can see, you see hope for the planet. When Salgado looks, he sees “the whole cycle of my life.”\u003c/p>\n\n",
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"content": "\u003cp>Withdrawn and inarticulate, the heroine of \u003cem>Kumiko, The Treasure Hunter\u003c/em> lives primarily inside her own imagination. And during at least two crucial scenes, this deadpan comedy seems to crawl in there with her.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Director David Zellner’s film (co-written by brother Nathan Zellner) riffs on an urban legend. In 2001, a young Japanese woman was found dead in frigid northern Minnesota. She almost certainly committed suicide, but the story arose that she was searching for the loot buried in the Coen brothers’ \u003cem>Fargo\u003c/em>, which begins with the winking assertion that “this is a true story.”\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Zellners’ movie opens with the same line, glimpsed through the visual noise of a badly decomposed VHS copy of \u003cem>Fargo\u003c/em>. Then the filmmakers rewind to show, allegedly, how Kumiko got the tape: during a sort of Minnesota Jones adventure in a cave.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Cut to workaday life, which is considerably less antic. Kumiko (\u003cem>Pacific Rim\u003c/em>‘s Rinko Kikuchi) is a uniformed OL (office lady) for an imperious boss at a midsize Tokyo company. He says she should be married by now — she’s 29 — which is the same thing her mother insists when Kumiko takes her phone calls. As much as possible, the young woman avoids everyone except her pet rabbit, Bunzo, and the residents of \u003cem>Fargo\u003c/em>.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Kumiko speaks so little, in either Japanese or English, that her character seems partly modeled on the deaf teenager the versatile Kikuchi played in \u003cem>Babel\u003c/em>. The Zellners have even worked a deaf character into their fable.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>[ad fullwidth]\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>The Japanese traveler also recalls the headstrong newcomer played by Eszter Balint in Jim Jarmusch’s \u003cem>Stranger than Paradise\u003c/em>. Both are strangers in strange lands, and each has a moment when she impulsively dumps an item of clothing in the trash. That Jarmusch film and another one, \u003cem>Dead Man\u003c/em>, are closer to the spirit of \u003cem>Kumiko\u003c/em> than anything in the Coen brothers’ filmography. (Werner Herzog fans may think as well of \u003cem>Stroszek\u003c/em>, in which three German eccentrics head for the dark heart of Wisconsin.)\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>For the movie’s first 45 minutes, Kumiko plots her quest. She steals a map of Minnesota from a library and embroiders a treasure map on a piece of fabric. But Kumiko has no hope of reaching Fargo until a corporate credit card falls into her hands. Then she lurches into action, sending Bunzo away — literally — before flying to Minneapolis.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A moment at the airport, showing an airplane in a swirling red mist of de-icing fluid, is unexpectedly lovely. The Zellners don’t find much beauty in back-streets Tokyo, but in Minnesota they put the film’s widescreen format to picturesque use. Kumiko’s north woods visions include a psychedelic nighttime scene, illuminated by only a flashlight, and a new morning of transcendent sunshine.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>A series of bus, taxi and police-car rides move Kumiko across a snowy landscape for which her little-red-riding-hood jacket is clearly inadequate. Several good-natured locals offer assistance, although they’re as clueless as the naif they’re trying to help. For some translation help, a small-town sheriff played by the director takes the Japanese woman to a Chinese restaurant.\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>\u003c/p>\n\u003cp>Ultimately, though, this journey must conclude alone. And exactly how it ends will likely divide viewers. Is the story, and its heroine’s fate, a fairy tale or a delusion? If the former, the movie is as sweet as a Disney-inspired anime. If the latter, \u003cem>Kumiko\u003c/em> is deeply sad. \u003c/p>\n\n",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/global-news-podcast/id135067274?mt=2",
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"rss": "https://podcasts.files.bbci.co.uk/p02nq0gn.rss"
}
},
"californiareport": {
"id": "californiareport",
"title": "The California Report",
"tagline": "California, day by day",
"info": "KQED’s statewide radio news program providing daily coverage of issues, trends and public policy decisions.",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-California-Report-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareport",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 8
},
"link": "/californiareport",
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"amazon": "https://music.amazon.com/podcasts/26099305-72af-4542-9dde-ac1807fe36d5/kqed-s-the-california-report",
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}
},
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"id": "californiareportmagazine",
"title": "The California Report Magazine",
"tagline": "Your state, your stories",
"info": "Every week, The California Report Magazine takes you on a road trip for the ears: to visit the places and meet the people who make California unique. The in-depth storytelling podcast from the California Report.",
"airtime": "FRI 4:30pm-5pm, 6:30pm-7pm, 11pm-11:30pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-California-Report-Magazine-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/californiareportmagazine",
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"order": 10
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM3NjkwNjk1OTAz",
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}
},
"city-arts": {
"id": "city-arts",
"title": "City Arts & Lectures",
"info": "A one-hour radio program to hear celebrated writers, artists and thinkers address contemporary ideas and values, often discussing the creative process. Please note: tapes or transcripts are not available",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/05/cityartsandlecture-300x300.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.cityarts.net/",
"airtime": "SUN 1pm-2pm, TUE 10pm, WED 1am",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "City Arts & Lectures"
},
"link": "https://www.cityarts.net",
"subscribe": {
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"rss": "https://www.cityarts.net/feed/"
}
},
"closealltabs": {
"id": "closealltabs",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/closealltabs",
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"order": 1
},
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"title": "Code Switch / Life Kit",
"info": "\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em>, which listeners will hear in the first part of the hour, has fearless and much-needed conversations about race. Hosted by journalists of color, the show tackles the subject of race head-on, exploring how it impacts every part of society — from politics and pop culture to history, sports and more.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em>, which will be in the second part of the hour, guides you through spaces and feelings no one prepares you for — from finances to mental health, from workplace microaggressions to imposter syndrome, from relationships to parenting. The show features experts with real world experience and shares their knowledge. Because everyone needs a little help being human.\u003cbr />\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510312/codeswitch\">\u003cem>Code Switch\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />\u003ca href=\"https://www.npr.org/lifekit\">\u003cem>Life Kit\u003c/em> offical site and podcast\u003c/a>\u003cbr />",
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"meta": {
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"id": "commonwealth-club",
"title": "Commonwealth Club of California Podcast",
"info": "The Commonwealth Club of California is the nation's oldest and largest public affairs forum. As a non-partisan forum, The Club brings to the public airwaves diverse viewpoints on important topics. The Club's weekly radio broadcast - the oldest in the U.S., dating back to 1924 - is carried across the nation on public radio stations and is now podcasting. Our website archive features audio of our recent programs, as well as selected speeches from our long and distinguished history. This podcast feed is usually updated twice a week and is always un-edited.",
"airtime": "THU 10pm, FRI 1am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Commonwealth-Club-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
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"meta": {
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"source": "Commonwealth Club of California"
},
"link": "/radio/program/commonwealth-club",
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cDovL3d3dy5jb21tb253ZWFsdGhjbHViLm9yZy9hdWRpby9wb2RjYXN0L3dlZWtseS54bWw",
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}
},
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"id": "forum",
"title": "Forum",
"tagline": "The conversation starts here",
"info": "KQED’s live call-in program discussing local, state, national and international issues, as well as in-depth interviews.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 9am-11am, 10pm-11pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Forum-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED Forum with Mina Kim and Alexis Madrigal",
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"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 9
},
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM5NTU3MzgxNjMz",
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"id": "freakonomics-radio",
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"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/freakonomicsRadio.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://freakonomics.com/",
"airtime": "SUN 1am-2am, SAT 3pm-4pm",
"meta": {
"site": "radio",
"source": "WNYC"
},
"link": "/radio/program/freakonomics-radio",
"subscribe": {
"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/4s8b",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/freakonomics-radio/id354668519",
"tuneIn": "https://tunein.com/podcasts/WNYC-Podcasts/Freakonomics-Radio-p272293/",
"rss": "https://feeds.feedburner.com/freakonomicsradio"
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},
"fresh-air": {
"id": "fresh-air",
"title": "Fresh Air",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=214089682&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/381444908/podcast.xml"
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"here-and-now": {
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"info": "A live production of NPR and WBUR Boston, in collaboration with stations across the country, Here & Now reflects the fluid world of news as it's happening in the middle of the day, with timely, in-depth news, interviews and conversation. Hosted by Robin Young, Jeremy Hobson and Tonya Mosley.",
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},
"hidden-brain": {
"id": "hidden-brain",
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"info": "Shankar Vedantam uses science and storytelling to reveal the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior, shape our choices and direct our relationships.",
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"airtime": "SUN 7pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "NPR"
},
"link": "/radio/program/hidden-brain",
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},
"how-i-built-this": {
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"title": "How I Built This with Guy Raz",
"info": "Guy Raz dives into the stories behind some of the world's best known companies. How I Built This weaves a narrative journey about innovators, entrepreneurs and idealists—and the movements they built.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/news/wp-content/uploads/sites/10/2018/05/howIBuiltThis.png",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/podcasts/510313/how-i-built-this",
"airtime": "SUN 7:30pm-8pm",
"meta": {
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"source": "npr"
},
"link": "/radio/program/how-i-built-this",
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"npr": "https://rpb3r.app.goo.gl/3zxy",
"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/how-i-built-this-with-guy-raz/id1150510297?mt=2",
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},
"hyphenacion": {
"id": "hyphenacion",
"title": "Hyphenación",
"tagline": "Where conversation and cultura meet",
"info": "What kind of no sabo word is Hyphenación? For us, it’s about living within a hyphenation. Like being a third-gen Mexican-American from the Texas border now living that Bay Area Chicano life. Like Xorje! Each week we bring together a couple of hyphenated Latinos to talk all about personal life choices: family, careers, relationships, belonging … everything is on the table. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Hyphenacion_FinalAssets_PodcastTile.png",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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"order": 15
},
"link": "/podcasts/hyphenacion",
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},
"jerrybrown": {
"id": "jerrybrown",
"title": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown",
"tagline": "Lessons from a lifetime in politics",
"info": "The Political Mind of Jerry Brown brings listeners the wisdom of the former Governor, Mayor, and presidential candidate. Scott Shafer interviewed Brown for more than 40 hours, covering the former governor's life and half-century in the political game – and Brown has some lessons he'd like to share. ",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/The-Political-Mind-of-Jerry-Brown-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
"meta": {
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"order": 18
},
"link": "/podcasts/jerrybrown",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/id1492194549",
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}
},
"latino-usa": {
"id": "latino-usa",
"title": "Latino USA",
"airtime": "MON 1am-2am, SUN 6pm-7pm",
"info": "Latino USA, the radio journal of news and culture, is the only national, English-language radio program produced from a Latino perspective.",
"imageSrc": "https://ww2.kqed.org/radio/wp-content/uploads/sites/50/2018/04/latinoUsa.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "http://latinousa.org/",
"meta": {
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},
"link": "/radio/program/latino-usa",
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"apple": "https://itunes.apple.com/WebObjects/MZStore.woa/wa/viewPodcast?s=143441&mt=2&id=79681317&at=11l79Y&ct=nprdirectory",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510016/podcast.xml"
}
},
"marketplace": {
"id": "marketplace",
"title": "Marketplace",
"info": "Our flagship program, helmed by Kai Ryssdal, examines what the day in money delivered, through stories, conversations, newsworthy numbers and more. Updated Monday through Friday at about 3:30 p.m. PT.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 4pm-4:30pm, MON-WED 6:30pm-7pm",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Marketplace-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.marketplace.org/",
"meta": {
"site": "news",
"source": "American Public Media"
},
"link": "/radio/program/marketplace",
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"rss": "https://feeds.publicradio.org/public_feeds/marketplace-pm/rss/rss"
}
},
"masters-of-scale": {
"id": "masters-of-scale",
"title": "Masters of Scale",
"info": "Masters of Scale is an original podcast in which LinkedIn co-founder and Greylock Partner Reid Hoffman sets out to describe and prove theories that explain how great entrepreneurs take their companies from zero to a gazillion in ingenious fashion.",
"airtime": "Every other Wednesday June 12 through October 16 at 8pm (repeats Thursdays at 2am)",
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"officialWebsiteLink": "https://mastersofscale.com/",
"meta": {
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"source": "WaitWhat"
},
"link": "/radio/program/masters-of-scale",
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"apple": "http://mastersofscale.app.link/",
"rss": "https://rss.art19.com/masters-of-scale"
}
},
"mindshift": {
"id": "mindshift",
"title": "MindShift",
"tagline": "A podcast about the future of learning and how we raise our kids",
"info": "The MindShift podcast explores the innovations in education that are shaping how kids learn. Hosts Ki Sung and Katrina Schwartz introduce listeners to educators, researchers, parents and students who are developing effective ways to improve how kids learn. We cover topics like how fed-up administrators are developing surprising tactics to deal with classroom disruptions; how listening to podcasts are helping kids develop reading skills; the consequences of overparenting; and why interdisciplinary learning can engage students on all ends of the traditional achievement spectrum. This podcast is part of the MindShift education site, a division of KQED News. KQED is an NPR/PBS member station based in San Francisco. You can also visit the MindShift website for episodes and supplemental blog posts or tweet us \u003ca href=\"https://twitter.com/MindShiftKQED\">@MindShiftKQED\u003c/a> or visit us at \u003ca href=\"/mindshift\">MindShift.KQED.org\u003c/a>",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Mindshift-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "KQED MindShift: How We Will Learn",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/mindshift/",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 12
},
"link": "/podcasts/mindshift",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5tZWdhcGhvbmUuZm0vS1FJTkM1NzY0NjAwNDI5",
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}
},
"morning-edition": {
"id": "morning-edition",
"title": "Morning Edition",
"info": "\u003cem>Morning Edition\u003c/em> takes listeners around the country and the world with multi-faceted stories and commentaries every weekday. Hosts Steve Inskeep, David Greene and Rachel Martin bring you the latest breaking news and features to prepare you for the day.",
"airtime": "MON-FRI 3am-9am",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Morning-Edition-Podcast-Tile-360x360-1.jpg",
"officialWebsiteLink": "https://www.npr.org/programs/morning-edition/",
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"link": "/radio/program/morning-edition"
},
"onourwatch": {
"id": "onourwatch",
"title": "On Our Watch",
"tagline": "Deeply-reported investigative journalism",
"info": "For decades, the process for how police police themselves has been inconsistent – if not opaque. In some states, like California, these proceedings were completely hidden. After a new police transparency law unsealed scores of internal affairs files, our reporters set out to examine these cases and the shadow world of police discipline. On Our Watch brings listeners into the rooms where officers are questioned and witnesses are interrogated to find out who this system is really protecting. Is it the officers, or the public they've sworn to serve?",
"imageSrc": "https://cdn.kqed.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/On-Our-Watch-Podcast-Tile-703x703-1.jpg",
"imageAlt": "On Our Watch from NPR and KQED",
"officialWebsiteLink": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"meta": {
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"source": "kqed",
"order": 11
},
"link": "/podcasts/onourwatch",
"subscribe": {
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"google": "https://podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0cHM6Ly9mZWVkcy5ucHIub3JnLzUxMDM2MC9wb2RjYXN0LnhtbD9zYz1nb29nbGVwb2RjYXN0cw",
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"rss": "https://feeds.npr.org/510360/podcast.xml"
}
},
"on-the-media": {
"id": "on-the-media",
"title": "On The Media",
"info": "Our weekly podcast explores how the media 'sausage' is made, casts an incisive eye on fluctuations in the marketplace of ideas, and examines threats to the freedom of information and expression in America and abroad. For one hour a week, the show tries to lift the veil from the process of \"making media,\" especially news media, because it's through that lens that we see the world and the world sees us",
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"info": "One of public radio's most dynamic voices, Sam Sanders helped launch The NPR Politics Podcast and hosted NPR's hit show It's Been A Minute. Now, the award-winning host returns with something brand new, The Sam Sanders Show. Every week, Sam Sanders and friends dig into the culture that shapes our lives: what's driving the biggest trends, how artists really think, and even the memes you can't stop scrolling past. Sam is beloved for his way of unpacking the world and bringing you up close to fresh currents and engaging conversations. The Sam Sanders Show is smart, funny and always a good time.",
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