Can it be this sad design/ Could be the very same

1: Scene from “The Wheel,” first season finale of "Mad Men"

Don

What is the benefit of that thing?

Harry

Uh… it sells projectors to people who already have them?

Don

Yeah. The wheel. Stacks. You store your slides in it and it’s ready to go.

Harry

I took pictures for the paper at Wisconsin; the machinery is definitely part of the fun. It’s mechanical.

Don

What’d you take pictures of?

Harry

Girls, mostly. You could go up, and ask them their names afterward, like you were going to put it in the paper. And some other stuff. Artsy-craftsy stuff. They gave me hell about it.

Don

Artsy, like what, like: relfection of a tree in a pond?

Harry

Uh, worse. I did a whole series that was just handprints on glass. You know the way it fogs up around your heat? Take it off, take a picture.

Don

Black and white, I suppose.

Harry

Of course. I was always fascinated by the cave paintings at Lascaux. They’re, like, seventeen-thousand years old. And then bison get all the attention, but they are also all of these handprints, tiny by today’s standards, with paint blown all around them.

Don

Signature of the artist.

Harry

But I thought it was like someone reaching through the stone, right to us: I was here.

Don bobs his head, falling asleep.

Harry

Are you okay?

Don

That’ll be all.

2: From “First Impressions” by Judith Thurman
June 23, 2008 issue of the New Yorker

“Peoples who practice shamanism believe in a tiered cosmos: an upper world (the heavens); an underworld; and the mortal world. When Clottes joined forces with Lewis-Williams, he had come to believe that cave painting largely represents the experiences of shamans or initiates on a vision quest to the underworld, where spirits gathered. The caves served as a gateway, and their walls were considered porous. Where the artists or their entourage left handprints, they were palping a living rock in the hopes of reaching or summoning a force beyond it. They typically incorporated the rock’s contours and fissures into the outlines of their drawings—as a horn, a hump, or a haunch—so that a frieze becomes a bas-relief. But, in doing so, they were also locating the dwelling place of an animal from their visions, and bodying it forth.”


3: Chorus of “The Caves of Altamira” by Steely Dan



Before the fall
when they wrote it on the wall
when there wasn’t even any Hollywood
They heard the call
and they wrote it on the wall
for you and me, and we undersood