More ruminating:
About six years ago, I posted a piece called Westie Wonk on my website – about how in adopting Betsy from the Pound, I had accidentally joined a club. A club in which I can be approached by a total stranger and asked, “Is that a Westie? I’ve got a Westie too! Aren’t they great?”
“In England, art was much less likely to be mentioned in polite society than sexual perversions or methods of torture; the word ‘elitist’ could be spat out with the same confident contempt as ‘coward’ at a court martial. It seemed as if prejudice could not be banished without driving some other topic, once freely discussed, or even admired, into a shameful exile…
I suppose what made Mad Men work was that it brought 21st Century eyes to the sixties. And many details are so dead on. The smoking, the drinking—now in season 6 the ridiculous whorish makeup and stiff hair and crotch-skimming miniskirts. The women look insane. Mutant. Impossibly girlish. The womanly styles of the earlier years were so much more attractive, I think.