John’s Blog

I wasn’t too excited about the first couple of episodes of Mad Men this season, but finally caught up this weekend, and I’m really, really, really liking it a lot. I think what’s really grown on me is how much of what happens on the show isn’t on camera — it’s implied, or happens in the characters’ heads. There’s a ton that the team isn’t making explicit, isn’t doing some sort of corny exposition of, isn’t condescending to viewers. As a result, I think it’s really capturing a lot of what it’s like to live in our own, modern world.

In the show, this season especially, you can see most of the main characters struggling to figure out who they are, and who they think they should be — or need to be — in a world that’s changing in ways that they don’t quite understand yet. (Some backstory for folks who haven’t been watching: this season is set in 1962 and centers around a second tier Madison Avenue advertising firm — and some of the characters are just beginning to see glimmers that the future is going to be pretty different than what’s come before.)

And so there’s a lot of characters posing as something; trying out lives they think they should be living, but not always with great success. It’s a sadder show this season, seems to me, but I think there’s something incredibly modern about each of the characters as they try to make sense of the changes around them, as they try to read (and draw) maps of the world, as they try to figure out which way is home.

Anyway, I was pretty blown away by the last 2 episodes — great season so far.

New web trilogy called Dr. Horrible by Joss Whedon. Awesome, awesome, awesome. Go watch Act 1 right now — will only take you 14 minutes. But makes me miss Buffy & Firefly…

I’ve long been meaning to watch Helvetica, a documentary about fonts, design, and modernism more generally, but also about the specifics of a typeface that many consider a culmination of that line of design thinking, since it so perfectly represents the modernist ideal.

So I finally did, and man, what a beautiful movie. I loved it — couldn’t have been any better in my book. It even had a surprise ending! (No, I’m serious! A movie about modernist type ended by mentioning the new MySpace aesthetic — I was talking about that idea to someone just the other day.)

Among other observations, one is that once you watch this movie, you’ll notice that Helvetica is used for everything around us. I noticed that while I was watching the movie, I was eating food with Helvetica lettering used on the package, the United Airlines material all used it, including the seats, the book next to me was lettered in it on the cover, it’s default for a bunch of my display on my Mac, and of course is all around the UI on my iPhone. It’s just about ubiquitous.

And it’s sort of incredible in its neutrality and versatility — you can use it in almost any context because of that neutrality.

Finally, though, as you watch you just have to appreciate the letterforms themselves. It’s a really monumental piece of work — this typeface that does so much of our hard work in typography but is also so expressive. And I’ve never really looked at the way that the letters in words set in Helvetica bold really, really hold together in an incredibly stable way. It’s hard to imagine a single thing being different about the type.

Beautiful, beautiful movie, and very highly recommended.

[also watched Juno on the flight out, and thought that was a great movie, too, in a completely & utterly different way]

Well, that’s it for The Wire — best show on television. Last night’s finale was great, I thought — gave a bunch of closure, a bunch of provocative ideas, and, more than anything else, a sense that it’s a new day, but the same old stuff is going to happen.  It’s been hard to watch the series without despairing about the prevalence of corruption — so many of our institutions are so broken. This last season was probably the weakest of the 5 seasons — but I’ll take bad episodes of The Wire over just about anything else on TV. So many memorable characters, so much wonderful dialog, and so many clear and compelling messages.

I’m impatient to see what David Simon and Ed Burns come with next, not to mention actor/director Clark Johnson, who always seems to be involved with my favorite shows — especially his direction, and the unbelievable cast of other writers who include Dennis Lehand and George Pelecanos. But I’m not optimistic that they’ll be able to do something like this again — not in a Sorkin/Studio 60 sorta way — but in the sense that The Wire seems to be a singular achievement. No doubt.