Structure, Seinfeld, and Play

E for "Effort"

2011-11-15T01:52:00.000-08:00

As far as I'm concerned the book is complete. Having said that, this blog does not represent its most edited form. I have finally addressed the most recent season of Curb Your Enthusiasm, no less on the evening of the broadcast of its conclusion. The book begins with a lament on not being able to witness the show's players in the natural process of creation, and ends with the show's players "in the natural process of creation." Since I have begun writing this book Seinfeld is no longer rebroadcast every weeknight at 6:30 on the local Fox affiliate as it has been since I began watching it there 14 years ago—the American version of the Office has supplanted it; there has been a Seinfeld "reunion" in a season of Curb Your Enthusiasm that broadcast much of what I wished to explicate; I have graduated from college and moved back into my parents' house; I have watched almost every episode of Cheers for the first—and several a second or third—time, and I have lost the desire, or the ability, to watch an episode of Seinfeld; I have discussed the situation comedy with more seriousness and at greater length than I imagined possible; and everything I wish to say has been addressed in some level of clarity, for even a brick wall is, at some level, transparent.

The posts appear in reverse chronological order in the categories at right. I still continue to post thoughts in "Seinfeld-vein Criticism," from time to time; but the blog is in essence complete.

Desperadi

2011-02-28T18:04:00.000-08:00

The first context in which I came to know the Eagles' song "Desperado" was not at all fair to the classic seventies anti-ballad, a song that gave title to their 1973 album of the same name. In "The Checks" Elaine dates a man who needs a personal moment in any situation where the song comes on. They are sitting in a car at the end of a date on the verge of a tender moment when "Desperado" emerges from the radio; Elaine tries to say something and he interrupts her and stares off transfixed. When she tries to share his love of the song he refuses to. She instead decides to make hers what is possibly the stupidest hit the Eagles ever had: "Witchy Woman." The joke here, while very clever, is quite simple: a man, by the intent listening of a song manages to miss its meaning entirely; by falling under the spell of a song that declares "you better let somebody love you," he fails to let somebody love him; and Elaine, by taking an Eagles song as hers to get even with her "Desperado" becomes a "Witchy Woman" with "raven hair and ruby lips." The songs become defined by their listeners; by taking mediocre, sentimental poetry seriously they require more of the very advice initially received. Consequently for the first twenty years of my life I had no respect for the song beyond its potential as a punchline, until I encountered a cover version of the song on a CD my friend lent to me.

The Langley School Music Project was recordings from a Canadian Education experiment that introduced elementary students to the playing and singing of pop songs. In the version of "Desperado" a girl who sounds nine years old belts the song out alone over the teacher's piano. 1970s bizarre utopian ideas are refracted through some indescribable Eagles crystal, and the song suddenly meant something more to me than just irony.

To get at this meaning, how the character of the singer is re-done by the re-doing of the song, it would be productive to look at what the song means in its original recording by the Eagles. At this point in rock and roll and alternative country an established artist coming out of the sixties was either making a change and embracing the smoother, less confrontational sound of the seventies epitomized by the Eagles—Paul McCartney, Neil Diamond, Fleetwood Mac—or he was cartoonishly sticking to the rebellious, youthful image he had embodied for a decade—the Rolling Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin—or he had grown up and remained an artist—John Lennon, the Kinks. Or he was dead. It could very easily be read as a patronizing message, or even an intervention, to Townes Van Zandt or Gram Parsons to say

Now it seems to me some fine things

Have been laid upon your table

But you only want the ones you can't get.

"Desperado," advises Don Henley, "you ain't gettin' younger," so you better grow up. However, if sung by a third grader, an entirely different meaning comes out of it: a precocious little girl who has seen too many movies is singing across the playground to the nine-year-old object of her affection—a little boy who is still convinced that girls have cooties and would rather throw mud balls at them and climb fences and wrestle and skateboard. "These things that are pleasin' you / Can hurt you somehow." She watches day after day, singing, "Why don't you come to your senses? / You've been out riding fences for so long now." At any age—10, 20, 50, 60—someone can tell you to go to the next stage, to claim "your pain and your hunger are driving you home."

At the age of 23 I began to write a book about Seinfeld and to love Linda Ronstadt and the "Desperado" became me, being called by 27-year-old Ronstadt to "come down from my fences," the heights of my outlandish youth, and "open the gate," return home, and prepare my own adult life. This version came out right after the Eagles', and the complexity was not much deeper.

The last re-do, though, I encountered last, and was recorded thirty years later, showing the song was not a fad or a cliché, but a classic. If anything at this point it would be unhip to cover the song, but Johnny Cash gives it new weight, new dignity, and expands the meaning again. This is the man who was the Desperado his whole life—he has been there, he was asked "Ain't it funny how the feeling goes away?" and the man in black laughed. The song becomes a discussion of the ironies of freedom.

Don't you draw the queen of diamonds

She'll beat you if she's able

The queen of hearts is always your best bet

First we see someone advised to choose the card he draws, as though this were literally possible. The card game is a metaphor for life, but then a metaphor for life—"your best bet"—is used back on the card game metaphor. Choice and acceptance become confused once you choose to accept the lack of choice. The symbols of his liberty become the very things that bind and destroy him.

Freedom, Oh freedom

That's just some people talking

Your prison is walking through this world alone.

When you look back on your life and you realize you never had anyone else there can be no re-do. "You better let somebody love you before it's too late."

Exit Through the Gift Shop

2010-06-29T20:39:00.000-07:00

You don’t have to go to college, drag ’round a portfolio, mail off transparencies to snooty galleries or sleep with someone powerful. All you need now is a few ideas and a broadband connection. This is the first time the essentially bourgeois world of art has belonged to the people. We need to make it count.

—Banksy

A month or so ago I learned that Exit Through the Gift Shop, a film purportedly by Banksy, the infamous "street artist," would be coming to the movie theater at which I worked. A movie poster did not tip me off, as would typically happen; I was simply informed by a fellow employee. Typically, by the time a movie has made its run, two or three posters are left in its wake and divvied up to whichever employee wants them, or they are kept in a big box upstairs and, when the unwanted collection becomes too unwieldy, are thrown away. Not until the arrival of the film itself did we receive a poster, and I hold no expectation of adding it to my collection of prized two-dimensional objects. At first I was disappointed by this: why should the paranoid control of his work and its resting place disallow little ol' me the satisfaction of taking home a poster I actually want? However, I realize, it is the ultimate concern of those who work illegally and, by consequence, anonymously in the great public spaces of society: what I do will not last and therefore I may decide precisely where it will cease it to be, and know that no one may possess it. I ultimately realized that under no circumstances would I have gotten this poster; someone further within the theater's inner circle would have had first dibs, or even the owner could have made a call from Malibu, framed it, and sold it for thousands of dollars. Perhaps Banksy's instructions are to burn the poster in the Custom House Plaza at the midnight moment of the end of the film's run. I don't know and I haven't asked my boss. All I do know is that the movie and its maker have unorthodox views on the economics and tied-up meaning of art and its objects, and, that, the other day, when I finally saw the movie, I had a better understanding of both the poster business, and the legacy of this turn of the millennium "street art" phenomenon as depicted in the movie.

What I mean by putting "street art" in quotes is that it seems fundamentally misunderstanding of the movement to define its work as distinct from typically-conceived art, which one rarely refers to as "museum art." Installing a work, for example, in Disneyland or on the Palestinian side of Israel's gigantic wall, has very little to do with any literal street; Thunder Mountain for example is surrounded by walkways, roller coasters, then the parking lot, and then the parking lots of hotels; the idea of "wall" as the Israelis have conceived it is the precise antithesis to the free flow of life that a street embodies. For the purposes of referring to a certain phenomenon, which Banksy refers to humbly and with a certain irony as vandalism, I use the two words; the quotes refer to a reluctance to remove the film's spirit, and the spirit of the pieces it documents, from from a tradition that has less to do the popular understanding of graffiti, and more to do with the 1920s avant-garde, Marcel Duchamp, and the anti-bourgeois spirit of Dadaism: a closing protest to the horrors of the 20th century.

The day I decided to see the movie, it started at 4:50, 7:00, and 9:15, and I worked at six until the theater was close at 10:30 or so. I saw the first hour before I worked and calculated I would need to see 15 minutes of the next showing to bridge the gap between the beginning and the end that I would watch at 10:30. I therefore saw, before work, in the first sitting, Thierry Guetta's fondness of video-taping and his inundation in the world of "street art," his befriending of Banksy, and his attempt at making a film about the street art movement; in the second sitting, during my break, I saw Guetta—now "Mr. Brainwash," himself a "street artist"—prepare a show in Los Angeles while Banksy re-edited the material into a more coherent film; and after work I saw the incredible success of the talentless (in terms of artistic craft) Mr. Brainwash (MBW)'s premier event of works that were hardly conceived by him, mere appropriations of works that are themselves appropriations, and literally were not produced by him, but made by a team of young artists trained in the arts of sculpture, painting, stenciling, etc. I departed into the evening at about 11 or so with the people to whom I had sold tickets and popcorn, with "Tonight the Streets Are Ours" joyously echoing in my head, and an eye suddenly trained to spot locations suitable for vandalism.

The movie manages to create, by the end, a feeling of coherence, of a funny story that has successfully been told; however, it is a film of ideas, where people become their philosophies and these ideas thus interact as people do; and, since it is a film with two filmmakers, and these filmmakers are the two main characters, the very creation and purpose of the film becomes, beyond literally being about the making of the film, the struggle between two theoretical oppositional ideas interacting as living entities; once the story is re-examined as such the film becomes contradictory and confounding. What is so interesting is that Banksy seems to relish this supposed ambiguity when he should in stead be relishing the brilliant satiric difference he has made between himself and a commercially successful artist, justifying himself as superior to the bourgeois hypocrisy of selling street art; so, whenever Banksy is guilty of this very act, he manages it with a self-consciousness, he is exonerated by irony; his patrons are the butts of his joke. To let himself get away with that would be the true crime; and Banksy intends not to get caught, and through this feeling of uncertainty, he intends to escape suspicion entirely.

Once the movie peaks with the ironic success of MBW's million-dollar success, it becomes a montage of critics and artists that were interviewed for the film trying to create meaning out of what, in the narrative created by the film (considered by many as a constructed hoax), became a big joke. And most aptly a friend of Banksy decries, "I don't know who the joke's on. I don't even really know if there is a joke." Banksy and his film editors want us left with a sense of ambiguity, and indeed many left theorizing the unrealities "documented" by the film, though beneath this supposed misdirection there is very clear thesis purported by the story: art is ephemeral and should work against all attempts at its capture. Thierry Guetta enters the museum of street art in its notorious peak at the turn of the millennium, pays his visit, and departs with commercial profit, not enlightened inspiration, on his mind. His art is the equivalent to mugs with Starry Night sprayed on them: he internalized the oeuvre of the greats and figured out a way to sell it to the masses. May we all delight in the irony as we hear an Englishman croon, "These lights in our hearts tell no lies."

This is too easy, however. Banksy is not the hero of the film; with his technologically modulated voice and shadowed face, his unrelenting insistence upon the ideology of "street art," and the place of power in which he places himself within, what we must remember is, his own movie—considering the overall aesthetic of our supposedly favored protagonist—Banksy comes off more as a Darth Vader with the lovable Thierry cast as the naive, up-and-coming Luke Skywalker.

Exit through the Gift Shop

The Empire Strikes Back

In this analogy, learning to use the force and remaining humble and respectful of one's Jedi powers is essential to one's artistic credibility—commercial success is the Dark Side, an unwise thirst for power. By episode four—our introduction to Luke Skywalker—the Jedi are nearly extinct; and the tradition of Dada, the understanding of its practice, is nearly as dead as the men with whom it is associated. As Banksy would have us see it, Thierry abandoned the ideals of the movement by never wanting to show the process, the essence, of the artists—he just wanted to meet famous people—and he fully proves his dissent from his initial hopeful self, as Anakin became Darth Vader, by becoming Mr. Brainwash, an absurdly successful joke, who—like Anakin, by wanting too much too soon, without wanting to hone his understanding of the force—becomes evil. Mr. Brainwash physically is different from Thierry in that, due to an accident in the installation of his show, he is in a wheelchair for the last third of the film; Anakin analagously transforms after becoming deformed in a volcano. The disturbing, frenetic minute that became Thierry's edit of the film gives us a view into the epic mental chaos that defined the intellectual monster he was to become.

But were Thierry's intentions really so impure? Does prematurely lusting for power and perversely succeeding destroy his credibility? Are we really to believe this lovable buffoon is the film's implied villain? I think the film's tagline, "the world's first street art disaster movie," brings us closer to the truth: that Banksy—by agreeing to let Thierry film him making his work, by making him a literal accomplice in his acts of vandalism, by believing that Thierry's film would document and vindicate the movement, by the very act of making the film and thus proving his superior power—shares the role of the villain; though Banksy, like the more conniving, hip-to-irony Spy, is victorious.

—Antonio Prohías

Credit

2010-05-28T00:35:00.000-07:00

I wanted to share a thought I wanted to get credit for in a potential google search:

Which is more absurd, "Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger," or "former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger"?

( "Which is more absurd, Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, or former Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger"? )

The Problem with Avatar(s)

2010-01-30T01:14:00.000-08:00

Last night I finally convinced myself that seeing Avatar was the best way to spend nearly three hours of my life. I was horribly wrong. The movie turned out to be more reprehensible than I imagined possible, and managed to insult me personally on a variety of levels; though, most directly, it was an undeviating attack on my intelligence. I found myself trapped in a self-reflexive hell as a hyper-critical version of myself, lost somewhere within the layers of the movie that were projecting back from the three-dimensional screen, my own avatar patronizing a primitively conceived reality, one that, though initially considered a ridiculous other, became familiar, beautiful and ultimately more real than what I knew to be real before, yada yada yada.

The problem with the movie’s rendering of the avatar adventures of its characters is that there is no self-awareness of or respect for the irony in being someone else while remaining who you were to begin with. The only sense of the main character’s motivation for inhabiting this avatar self—his cinematic essence that drives every choice he makes—is that he is frustrated that he cannot walk. This gives Cameron license to bypass the insane quandaries that an intelligent movie would give a serious discussion in at least a few of the million moments of the movie—now that he can use his legs he gets so excited he sprints out of the hospital room in his new avatar self. There still remains more than two hours of the movie and the protagonist has become actualized. In the traditions of the B movie and pulp science fiction, we are now expected to take a man seriously who is occupying the body of a ten-foot blue alien from the planet Pandora as he rides in a helicopter with a gigantic machine gun, next to an equally blue and ten-foot tall Sigourney Weaver who is basically treating the situation as though it were a semester abroad trip taken with her Anthropology students to a country not inhabited by white people.

However, the modes of the B movie have long become acknowledged clichés and the movie instead makes itself “relevant” by appropriating the B-movie tradition of our present era: reality TV, and, more specifically, its early-90s ground-breaker The Real World, its idiot kid brother Road Rules, and, of course, Survivor. The superficiality of Jake Sully’s self-analysis is best represented by the hackneyed device by which it receives some pathetic treatment: a video diary that the avatar project requires him to do, one that would look exactly like the sidebars of Real World 54: Pandora. Avatar, like the project it documents, must pretend that its characters have something interesting to say as a mere formality, even though our main character only achieves any worthwhile thought when he manages to voice a trite oversimplification that the audience has already realized James Cameron was trying to get across in his paper thin analogies. The constant challenges and the documentation of the immediate moment is what makes reality television so appealing: we can pretend that the full story—why the fuck are we here?—can be reduced to petty bickering and an incredible celebration of the short-sighted.

Not to see oneself when everyone else does is the vulnerable position of television stars, and no case is more poignant than that of the reality TV contestant/star, who seems to have no sense of how ridiculous he becomes rendered by his participation in the charade, or, worse, the delight in the I’m-not-here-to-make-friends mindset. The case with Jake Sully is that he is so happy just to be walking around that he doesn’t see how fucking weird it is to be a giant blue alien, learning the ways of the other giant blue aliens, falling in love with a giant blue alien, and, ultimately, that he is in an incredibly racist, painfully obvious analogy for the history of American imperialism.

This treatment of character is entirely antithetical to aesthetic of 1990s iconic works of art, whether it be an album by Nirvana, Seinfeld, or Forrest Gump: irony, by 1994, became an essential character trait to survive the sarcasm of television: Norm Peterson and Frasier Crane kicked Sam and Diane out of the bar, or rather Frasier moved to Seattle to look after his dad and became the subject of his own sitcom; Homer Simpson destroyed the image of the father; and Kevin Costner did not realize that his movies were really cheesy and that Brian Adams was a gigantic joke, just as Cameron seemed to miss the message about Celine Dion. It’s only appropriate that Cameron has combined Dances With Wolves (Costner at his unaware best), The Lion King (Disney movies remained a last bastion for sincerity), and Terminator (his own humorless contribution to the era). Irony is the pretentious Manhattanite buzzkill on the genuine attempt to create real American meaning. If Jon Stewart really had the answer, after all, he would stop telling jokes, wouldn’t he?

My only consolation in this out-of-body experience was that I remained myself amid this foray into my Avatar self: I was sitting next to my friend Alexandra who shared with me shudders and giggles at the film’s bad taste. Unlike Jake Sully we had personalities at the beginning of the movie, and we fought to maintain them. We could take off our glasses and see that it was just a normal movie with blurry parts that played cheap visual tricks on us when we put the glasses on. If the movie refuses to present us with layers—that is of meaning, not animation—it instead asks its intelligent audience member to insert her own personality into the experience, not far from how the characters of the ‘90s classic attack on the B movie Myster Science Theater 3000 manage to maintain their sanity through hour after hour of cinematic kitsch. Although it was perhaps not my finest moment when I went to the bathroom and picked a one-third-eaten bag of popcorn out of the trash can, it still implicated my personality.

One’s capacity to exist in a different reality is the question of both Seinfeld and Avatar, and the relationship between those two realities is essentially the same in each: Seinfeld discusses what it means to act out joke versions of people’s lives; Seinfeld, of course, acts out a joke version of his own life, making his persona on camera a veritable avatar in the Pandora of pop culture. The difference can be found in the layers of irony in the show, its insane fabric of jokes, the ridicule of its very production and existence. There is no self-aware perspective in Avatar, neither on the part of the ego-maniacal, daft protagonist or its main character on the other side of the camera. At least in reality television the producers are acknowledged artless sleazes, whereas James Cameron thinks he has made a very important movie, and so does the Hollywood Foreign Press; and so did the Academy Awards when he spent three hours sinking a big boat with an unmanageable amount of clichés. The humility of his acceptance speech at the Golden Globes—though more restrained than “I’m the king of the world!”—shows us just how afraid Cameron is of insulting us with unoriginal ideas: “Avatar asks us to see that everything is connected, all human beings to each other, and us to the Earth. And if you have to go four and a half light years to another, made-up planet to appreciate this miracle of the world that we have right here, well, you know what, that's the wonder of cinema right there, that's the magic.” And indeed he’s right: I would even go so far as to wish that I had never gone at all.

C for "Coffee"

2009-11-23T01:52:00.001-08:00

In the last episode of season seven of Curb Your Enthusiasm Larry David has an argument with Mocha Joe about the nature of a favor. Mocha Joe believes a task performed for Larry merited a tip due to the nature of their relationship whereas Larry believed it to be a simple favor between friends. To actualize his claim Larry agrees to pick up some coffee beans on the other side of town, and, when traffic prevents him from arriving in time to pick up the beans, Larry feels his effort fulfilled his obligation, that trying was enough. This disagreement on the practicality of semantics is classic Curb Your Enthusiasm. However, this episode is the climax of the Seinfeld reunion plot of the season, and Larry’s perception is compromised with his counterpart in the reunion, Jerry Seinfeld; when the argument ensues the next day on the set, Jerry happens to be present and meanders into the conversation.

Jerry sides with Mocha Joe, that he needs coffee beans, not someone driving around for him. The audience, or at least myself, tends to side with Larry in such arguments, though this privilege has grown highly unstable in the most recent season, most uncomfortably in “The Black Swan” in which Larry is cast as a heartless and murderous mobster silencing the dissent of his closest friends through appeals to their own self preservation. However, in this particular quarrel we have the other side of the argument privileged through the “icon” Jerry Seinfeld, who can now drown out the “no-con” Larry. Larry storms off shouting the childish cliché “E for effort” to which Mocha Joe replies “F for favor” and Jerry contributes in pure comic perfection “C for coffee.”

The essence that each creator brings to both Seinfeld and this season, or at least the episodes with Seinfeld, comes into clear view in this interchange: Mocha Joe is the substance of an episode—the discussion of the nature of a “favor”— this is, indeed, the only one in which we see him; Larry/George is the emotional, self-righteous appeal to process—“effort” as a valued product; Jerry is the indifferent, ironic commentary that favors bourgeois logic—the currency is “coffee,” which Larry does not produce. That Larry has millions of dollars, is on HBO, and has the critical clout to claim smugly to himself that he was the genius behind Seinfeld makes him everything that George is not; unemployment is a privilege, not a bane; NBC is a joke, not a humiliation; disagreement is the fault of everyone else. But in the presence of Seinfeld, and Seinfeld, Larry is demoted to the status of George all of a sudden. He is employed; we can only assume NBC is once again his boss; and Larry has perversely cast his ex-wife as George’s ex-wife, and written their reunion, in an effort to reunite himself with her, thus needing the help of others. As it turns out, when Jason Alexander quits when Larry changes the ending, he insists that he, Larry, play George, and the cast refuses—though we see a sublime rehearsal of what it would look like had Larry performed George—and Larry is demoted even further, not even allowed to be George.

Mocha Joe is the episode—both the guest star of this episode and a representative of the archetypical episode—and Jerry and Larry are the opposing interpretations of the episode: for Jerry it is coffee, the physical commodity that stands in for process; for Larry it is process which, in the aesthetic ideal, does not end in any product and may not be represented in any product. In, “The Pilot” episode of Seinfeld, what is essentially Jerry’s show, Jerry warms up the crowd before the taping and discusses what Jerry is in the exact words that he may describe the successful produced show he is, thus reaching a moment in which the process reaches a product. However, he is cut off by Crazy Joe Devola who leaps from the crowding shouting Sic semper tyrannis, and it cuts to commercial. In Larry’s show Jerry interrupts Larry’s conversation—the epitome of the preoccupation with process (dealing with the man who sells coffee on the set of a show) over product (the show being produced on the set)—and interrupts his ideal. Thus always to tyrants.

Homer, The Simpsons

2009-10-13T18:54:00.000-07:00

It is quite ironic that the patriarch of The Simpsons is named Homer, for his presence, and the content of the show as a whole, is seemingly everything that epic poetry is not. Heroism, leadership, and large-scale, mythical action is what inspires people to tell a story and re-tell and embellish it, make its heroes braver and their actions bigger. As a kid, however, I reveled in recapping the previous evening's Simpsons re-run with my best friend Nick Ward every day at school, thus returning Homer to the realm from the textual to the oral. The stupidity, or often simple hubris, of Homer made him mythical without setting the story at sea, at war, or in a political power grab.

The sitcom occupies the boundary between these two worlds; it contains the written tradition in its scripted nature, in its ability to describe the personal, telling the stories of individuals and households, the everyman that Homer exemplifies; but it also contains the oral tradition in its debts to stand-up comedy in its improvisational, performative nature, and the larger aims of telling the great story of humanity, and to mythologize the everyday. Seinfeld especially has passed down an oral tradition not unlike the way Grecian orators did thousands of years ago. The best moments of the show are moments of storytelling. "The sea was angry that day, my friends," George begins his account of his moment as "The Marine Biologist" in the episode of the same name, "like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli." It is an epic simile that begins an epic account of a regular man's inability to be a hero, to inhabit the world of the epic. And when somebody repeats that, quotes Seinfeld, as generations will continue to do, this is what they mean: to continue to seek glory and fail is glorious; to fail to be a hero is heroic.

The question of Homer's identity also speaks to the authorship of Seinfeld. Was Homer a collective of storytellers or just a way of describing the way stories developed through generations of oral tradition? Similarly Seinfeld (Jerry), or Homer (Simpson), is just a mouthpiece for dozens of writers and performers that created the tapestry of the stories and their telling. When orality is blended with literacy, as when the Odyssey was first written down or when a planning meeting became a script, authorship becomes slippery; it becomes a metaphor for the creation of the story.

But back to "the Marine Biologist": in Seinfeld little action occurs, beyond the occasional sight gag. It is more a series of scenes in which the characters trade stories, itself an analogy for the scripting of the show. So, George is walking on the beach with a woman who believes he is a marine biologist. He is telling her about it: storytelling, as it is all made up, improvised on the spot, coming from the frustrated imaginative realms of his consciousness that have always wanted to be what he is not. And when they reach the crowd and the actual action is to occur it cuts to the coffee shop and we receive it in story form. "The sea was angry that day, my friends." The audience is tripled; we watch as George captivates his three friends, as we see so many times, the four taking turns, switching the roles of orator/audience into all different possible combinations, and we hear the studio audience, mixed with the laugh track, leaving us triply captivated, yet triply removed from the actual "event."

The difference between the written and the spoken concerned Derrida for the former is considered a representation of the latter. The speaker is present whereas is the writer is absent. In the same way someone might romanticize having seen Jerry Seinfeld do his act live in the eighties, that it was a more authentic experience than watching his show; or he might even aggrandize having watched him on Letterman, not even live, but still in the moment of his comedic rise. Derrida would argue that this logocentrism, always going back to the origin, retreating to find the real, misses the point, and that what the scripted show, the written, more complex achievements, has just as much value as a bygone performance. Things may be accomplished in writing, misspellings, for example, that may not be put into words. Seinfeld, however, goes a step further. It creates concepts, though based in a written script, that cannot be written, making the play doubly complex. When George approaches the crowd it seems a whale is dying in the surf, and it is Larry David's voice that shouts "Is anyone here a marine biologist?" The depth of this choice goes beyond writing. The informed Seinfeld viewer knows that George is based upon the very man, also the executive producer, who has challenged him, called the bluff that he knows is false, though David himself is not visible; he is hidden for the sake of the verisimilitude.

"The Wink" devotes an entire show to a deconstructed binary that exists extra-linguistically; it is not in the spoken or the written but in the physical, the performative. A wink creates meaning when it answers a question or proposes lasciviousness; but it can also qualify a verbal request or the sincere recommendation of a fellow employee, "Morgan, He's doing a great job (wink)." When Wilhelm, George's boss, says, "I understand," he really means he mis-understands that Morgan is screwing up. And another wink ensures that Morgan screws up, reinforcing the unintended irony bestowed by the first: when Kramer offers to take an envelope signed by some of the Yankees organization to his buddy Stubbs with a memorabilia store, George says, "Yeah, like I'm gonna risk my job with the New York Yankees to make a few extra bucks," and he winks, and it seems he is, as Kramer ends up taking the envelope and selling it with the card inside. And a wink creates innuendo when, in front of his wife, George tells him to enjoy his "massage (wink)," a mathematical attachment to the word, to the wink power or multiplied to the power of your imagination.

The spoken can be just as tricky to comprehend when pulp has caused you involuntarily to contradict yourself. "Yes" and "no" exist simultaneously, the difference existing, like the pulp, in the eye of the beholder. And like the grapefruit pulp the uncertainty, the undecidability stings, "Boy, it stings."

Perhaps that is what the sitcom is, a the briefly epic poem of a winking orator. "A funny thing happened to me on the way here," with a wink, becomes the Odyssey.

The Joke/Reality Chart

2009-10-01T22:40:00.000-07:00

So the great affair is over but whoever would have guessed

it would leave us all so vacant and so deeply unimpressed

It's like our visit to the moon or to that other star

I guess you go for nothing if you really want to go that far.

—Leonard Cohen,

"Death of a Ladies' Man"

Towards the beginning of my writing I hoped to instigate a dialogue with the outside world concerning my thoughts on Seinfeld—the show would be the slightly awry button and I would be Jerry positing to the world that it was too high and the conversation would begin. It only seemed appropriate to discuss a show that exists entirely in social dialogue in a manner that was not an entirely insulated monological ranting; though if I was to hole myself up in my parents’ house and explicate my approach to the show alone with my written words that was all I would get.

One night while watching Taxi Driver by myself I composed an email that would bring in these outside voices:

In an effort to make my study more objective I am asking amateur experts such as yourself to give me somewhat scientific analysis of the course of the series of Seinfeld. I am asking you to rate what I consider to be the best to examples of every season under a specific criterion I will outline. If you consider another episode that exemplifies the season better, list it and rate it in the same way. The scale is 1 to 10; 1 means the episode is entirely sincere, realist in that it attempts to refer to the outside world and to tell some lesson concerning it, unaware of the fact that it is a situation comedy—in short, it accomplishes the initial concept of the show to illustrate how Jerry Seinfeld comes up with his material in a near documentary-like fashion; 10 means the episode is entirely insincere, surreal in that it attempts to refer solely to the world of the situation comedy and make a joke about it, aware that it is a situation comedy—in short that it is a show dedicated to the illustration of the absurdity of considering a situation comedy as a moralizing force that has anything to do with reality. A five would be the perfect non-joke/joke middle point. Feel free to send any questions or clarifications to andrews@lclark.edu and to forward this to any other amateur experts you know. In the reply use the numbering system I have given you and put your rating next to it.

I then included a list of 18 episodes with a short synopsis, or none at all if its title was sufficiently indicative in describing what transpires.[1] I set up an excel file to document the results, and waited.

The idea was not as sincere as simply wanting to bring in outside perspectives. One night a month earlier, while staying with my friend Kimberly in Portland, I had composed some notes for my upcoming big project which included a chart that represented what I, at the time, considered a breakthrough: as the show “progresses” it becomes more of a joke to itself. To the best of my recollection the chart went like this:

I don’t recall the content of the rest of the notes but I recall the thinking behind the joke/reality chart very clearly: the initial premise of the show became enveloped in ever-expanding circles of irony that, by the show’s end, squeezed any remaining sincerity out of its premise. This is what I wanted my excel chart to reinforce with the objectivity that outside opinions would provide me.

As it turned out I received two replies: one from my friend Mac who wrote predominantly on another subject and, as an after thought, responded with numbers that wholly contradicted my theory; and one from Kimberly who contradicted the entire premise:

Andrew;  

I fear a number of things pertaining to this study, first of all, that it would seem to test my powers for retention and accurate placement of my favorite Seinfeld moments, as, while I am familiar with all stated episodes, there are some of them rather distant in my memory. Also, I have a hard time even imagining rating something on the scale you have presented, because it seems insane. It also ignores the fact that while Seinfeld is indeed an "ironic” response to the sitcom format, it is one. You can only do something ironically so far, and then you end up simply doing it really well. So the joke is really that it's not even a joke, in that sense. And I also cling to my earlier stated opinions that Seinfeld's resonance comes from the exaggeration of reality and the analysis of coincidence, providing narrative viewpoint on caricature versions of daily life that is perceived as familiar to the viewer, when really it's quite distant . . . and that's why it's funny . . . My final fear comes in that I don't understand 1. Your hypothesis 2. Your intent in proposing said hypothesis.  As such, I cannot reply until my questions are answered. Screw the scientific method! I also cannot give appropriate time to the query now because I have to go to school soon.  

Love, Kimberly 

After my reply[2] I gave up this tack and came the grips with the inevitable difference between my book and their sitcom.

[1] 1. “The Seinfeld Chronicles”—A woman Jerry met when he was doing stand-up in Michigan wants to stay with him, but he is unsure what the significance of this is.

2. “The Stock Tip”—Jerry and George put money on a stock and it loses money; and then Jerry goes to Vermont.

3. “The Revenge”—George tries to unquit and gets fired and asks Elaine to slip his boss a Mickey; Jerry loses money in a laundromat and Kramer puts cement in a machine.

4. “The Chinese Restaurant”

5. “The Alternate Side”—George moves cars and everyone says “These pretzels are making me thirsty.”

6. “The Boyfriend, part 1”—Keith Hernandez, Baseball Spit Story, Vandelay Industries, etc.

7. “The Pitch”—Jerry and George conceive and a pitch a show about “nothing.”

8. “The Contest”

9. “The Marine Biologist”

10. “The Opposite”—George decides to do the opposite of every instinct he has.

11. “The Big Salad”—Elaine’s request for a big salad ends George’s relationship; Jerry dates a girl rejected by Newman; Kramer causes the murder of Pinkus the drycleaner.

12. “The Switch”—George helps Jerry figure out how to date his girlfriend’s roommate.

13. “The Gum”—Lloyd Braun has gum and is into Elaine.

14. “The Invitations”—George kills Susans.

15. “The Bizarro Jerry”—Elaine makes new friends that are completely different, yet not so different, from her friends.

16. “The Summer of George”—George is a slob; Kramer is a seat-filler.

17. “The Slicer”

18. “The Finale”

[2] Kimberly, 

I appreciate your thoughts, but will not tell you my hypothesis. I would also like to argue that my scale is not insane, but actually includes your opinions of the show. So, concerning coincidence and exaggeration of reality: a 1 would be a believable exaggeration of reality (in many cases resulting from incidents in Larry David's life) or coincidences that ring true with the viewer; whereas a 10 would be an unbelievable exaggeration of reality or coincidences that seem surreal or absurd. That the show "provid[es] narrative viewpoint on caricature versions of daily life that is perceived as familiar to the viewer, when really it's quite distant" is certainly essential to Seinfeld. Though what interests me is the extent to which this varies, for I contend it is in no way constant.  Being at once perfectly familiar and distant as you describe would be the show at its best, i.e. a five, where it is neither entirely reality nor caricature. I hope this clarifies.  Thanks for your prompt reply. My hypothesis is on the piece of paper in your garage, which I would still like for you to scan and send to me, if you are interested. 

Love, Andrew 

Essays To Write

2009-09-29T19:47:00.001-07:00

To do list, composed Monday night, September 28, 2009.

Feast of Burden

2009-09-27T23:35:00.000-07:00

Jaymee,

I am writing this firstly in email form which I will then put into the Seinfeld blog under the guise that the penultimate episode, "The Puerto Rican Day Parade," is Feast of Lanterns through a convex lens, and that this episode, the only one excluded from syndication, is as of yet mentioned in the study. It was not syndicated due to controversy (Kramer stamps out a burning Puerto Rican flag, and the parade is not respected but actually resented for its inconveniences) and therefore I do not know it nearly as well as the rest of the ouvre, placing it more in my imagination, its significance further into my own experience. So, in honor of white people stepping in front of the celebration of other people's heritages and my aloof comprehension of these phenomena, I think our story fits somewhere in the vein of the Seinfeld criticism.

Anyhow, here goes the typing!

First of Lanterns

I had always known about the Feast of Lanterns celebration the way someone who knows nothing about hockey knows who the local hockey team is. I grew up 15 miles east of Pacific Grove and it was never an event my parents felt inspired to take me to as a child or my peers encouraged me to attend as an adolescent. After I returned to the Monterey area upon graduating from college I found myself suddenly actively thinking about the Feast of Lanterns for the first time when it was brought up by a colleague of my father's at a dinner party at my parents' house. The dinner was in honor of half a dozen Fulbright students from all corners of the world; and in this context of cross-cultural excitement and understanding, the premise, described by a man married to a Chinese woman, struck me as absurdly distasteful, irresponsible, and insensitive. Unfortunately, I would have to wait a year to see for myself, for it was asked "Did anyone go?" and no one had.

So when July came around this year, I was ready to investigate and decide if this small-town community event was centered around and named for a ceremony that was simply a little naive and insensitive, or something that was more severely racially ignorant. My friend Jaymee dove right in with me when I told her what I was doing that weekend. When I saw Jaymee the last Saturday of July she was fresh off a bout of internet research, and we excitedly discussed in downtown Monterey before riding our bikes over. "Andrew! The Chinese were invited to the first Feast of Lanterns and they came! The year before the village burned and they were run out of town!" We stopped at the mural on the bike path that describes the history of P.G. In describing the Chinese fishing village's destruction it concludes that the population "disappeared from the area." Jaymee explained to me the concept of "yellowface," which I understood in concept from Breakfast at Tiffany's and the Charlie Chan movies, and that it outlasted blackface in film by decades. Feast of Lanterns queens and princesses stopped mimicking asian features with make-up in the 1980s.

We arrived at Lover's Point to find a mass of people on the beach and around the park enjoying picnics and taking in a rock and roll cover band on the concrete stage above the water. Jaymee had to go home and I was to meet my family to see the last Harry Potter movie before returning for the main events—the crowning ceremony, Legend of the Blue Willow, and the fireworks—so I limited myself to one interview.

I talked to a man who wrote an occult detective novel that took place in Pacific Grove. He explained to me the occult nature of the town. "There's a lot of strange things in Pacific Grove," he began, explaining that his novel thus functioned as historical fiction, and he cited an obelisk by the rocks of Lover's Point and a gargoyle built by Clark Ashton Smith, a friend of H.P. Lovecraft, that points to it, and a wall beneath it with a matching obelisk. "Now if the world has chakras—and it does in metaphysical societies—Pacific Grove is the healing chakra. And the exact point, the center, of this fibonacci spinning of energy is emanating from that particular point out there at that obelisk. A lot of people wind up in Pacific Grove never thinking they're going to stay. Everything opens up—they get the job, they get the apartment, it's perfect: they're here. And over 89% are going to say they're in some kind of healing—healing a relationship, physical healing: something. It's very, very strange."

And he explained the Feast of Lanterns to me. "Think of it as an open, private party. The town had its own little holiday. It used to be that there were all these crafts people, and artists, dancers, writers—filled up P.G. It was super cheap; the sardines went away; the town's worth nothing. You could rent an apartment for sixty bucks, so great for artists: low overhead. So the festival had all these crafts booths and people and the talent show, etc. etc. So at the end of the festival when the fireworks went off you'd go up to maybe fifty or sixty open parties. It was a community, everybody knew everybody. 1982: the chamber said 'Why don't we advertise it; could be good for business.' 40,000 people showed up. Insanity. And nobody realized because the parties were still open. So a friend Michele looked up and she had 200 people in a 600 square-foot house, and she said she was lucky she had a mattress to sleep on when it was over, all these strangers." As a band covered Michelle Branch's duet with Carlos Santana, "The Game of Love," he put the festival in context, compared with "what they say it is."

"After the sardines went away and the town was nothing, before they could sell it as a tourist joint or valuable coastal lands, it was just, sort of, a ghost town. And this little kept going on and turned into a wonderful private holiday which anyone could attend." I also first heard of Elmarie H. Dyke, the woman who revived the festival fifty years after it had initially began. The lifelong mission of "Mrs. Pacific Grove" was to keep Pacific Grove a dry town until 1969, which, of course, it no longer is, though the town still cannot boast a bar; and after she died the Feast almost went with her. "They were thinking, 'it's an old festival thing, nobody likes it, it's a pain, why do it?' But it wasn't let go. People had badges saying 'We want fireworks.' They said we'll do it but there won't be any fireworks. Well, it was put out that there would be bottlerockets on a rubber raft out there," gesturing past the point, "so the coast guard was cruising looking for the famed rubber boat. Unbeknownst to them that was to keep them busy because, actually, all of the bottlerockets were down on the beach with hundreds of people. And at the end of the play when everyone stood up, all the rockets went off. You just couldn't identify who did it." I thanked him for the information, gathered that the myth would occur at eight, and the fireworks at nine, I walked up the hill as the band played a flawless cover of "the Sultans of Swing."

Then I went to the movie theater and met my parents and my brother who was visiting from Seattle and we saw Harry Potter and had dinner at Mando's. They were not interested in staying for the show, so I walked down to the water by myself.

Many houses around downtown P.G. are adorned with colorful Chinese paper lanterns in July and many businesses stock and display them in their windows. As I walked down toward the bay and the music got louder it seemed like more houses displayed a greater number of lanterns. The music sounded like Gloria Estefan and when I turned the corner I saw a group of girls doing a Caribbean-style dance on the platform across the water. As I circulated among the crowd considering interview options the genre and the dance changed from Mexican to hip-hop to Florence and the Machine's ubiquitous 2011 hit.

I talked to volunteer security guards, parents of princesses selling Feast of Lanterns cookbooks and pageant histories, representatives of the Paper Wing Theater Company from whom I bought a coffee, a police officer to whom I used to sell coffee, and finally Jaymee arrived and we considered from where we should take in the Legend of the Blue Willow.

We took some pictures, she ran into a friend, who we asked for a quick thought--"I'm glad theater is valued in some way,--and as we settled across the water from the stage the coronation began. After the coronation was a dance to a Chinese pop song. The girls were wearing Japanese kimonos and waved fans. The next dance was arabic, still with kimonos and fans. I recognized my neighbors and we compared impressions of first respective Feasts. "It's a really unique example of small-town community," she said. "It was much more stylized than I expected," he said. Jaymee and I came clean about our amateur sociological study and they revealed they were both, in fact, anthropologists. He, a professor at NPS, explained that he came down the hill partly because a student introduced it to him as, what he thought was a reconciliation or some kind of acknowledgment of the Japanese internment during World War Two. It seemed the event was multi-cultural only in that it was misunderstood to be representative of many different cultures. The vagueness of the weekend's significations made it potentially about everything. This is California, after all. We owe our heritage to dozens of sources, and our '90s Republican governor Pete Wilson acknowledged Monterey's diversity and internationalism by declaring it the Language Capital of the World. It would only make sense that a group of teenage dancers take us through the cultures of the world through its music and movements, that a bellydancer instructor and her students bring us from Egypt to India, and that high school girls wear Chinese dresses and are accompanied by Queen Topaz’s father in a cap that dangles a dark braid from its back, and that this group parade down the stairs and onto the stage to re-enact an English legend first propagated to sell British-made porcelain with the Blue Willow pattern in the late 18th century. Of the the pattern one critic wrote, "It is at best an imitation or distillation, at worst a distortion of Chinese culture," ( http://www.nyu.edu/projects/mediamosaic/madeinchina/pdf/Portanova.pdf). Or as our announcer, a combination of Ed McMahon and the narrator of a nature documentary, tells us, "no one knows who first told the story of the Blue Willow plate." And, though very unlikely, "possibly it was some Chinese storyteller who began spinning the story of Chang and his love for the beautiful Koong-se."

If this all did relate to the cultural tapestry of the town, and its history and people were celebrated, then it very well could be explained on some level. However, there is no explanation. The only reference to the past, the only acknowledgment and celebration of history and culture, is to the play and the Feast of Lanterns itself, the history of celebrating some undefined obscure history, and that the lovers flee the evil Mandarin and turn into monarchs, of course, because it is Pacific Grove, California—Butterfly Town, U.S.A. The monarchs and tourists are historically the area's only celebrated migrants.

Jaymee and I walked around as the fireworks went off to record the ambience and take one last look before heading back to her apartment to meet my brother. As we walked up the hill away from the water we saw hip-looking young men park and walk in the other direction with musical equipment. We were later invited to what turned out to be a concert in the living room of the bellydance instructor’s house. An impromptu all-welcome rock show in a living room in P.G. There really was something special about Feast Night. To continue the trip back to the Bohemian '70s in Pacific Grove we took advantage of Rolling Rock throwback return to cans and bought a 12-pack. Someone else had the same idea, it was the cheapest, and many of the other young, hip white people were also throwing back the throwbacks.

II.

Feast of Returns

California, here I come
Right back where I started from
Where bowers of flowers
Bloom in the spring
Each morning, at dawning
Birdies sing and everything
A sun-kissed miss said, "Don't be late"
That's why I can hardly wait
Open up that Golden Gate
California, here I come

I began a new job at a seafood restaurant, in Pacific Grove interestingly enough, right as I was processing the experience. As I was researching how the Pacific Improvement Company evicted the fisherman families of China Point 1905 partly in reaction to the odor of their squid-drying methods, I learned that Monterey squid is not really local—it is shipped to China for processing and then shipped back, less sustainable than simply purchasing squid caught in Asia. I saw the green lights of the squid boats at night in a new context when I read that the Chinese were pressured out of the daytime fishing industry, and instead of forcing the issue they simply adorned lanterns to their boats and fished for squid at nighttime. And, as worded by a history of Cannery Row in Monterey, just down the coast from China Point, “Pacific Grove’s ‘Feast of Lanterns’ is an ironic tribute to the torches and pitchwood fires used from the Chinese sampans to attract the curious squid to their waiting seines.” And I learned that the Chinese attended the first Feast of Lanterns in 1905, the last summer they were to spend in P.G., and, with the exception of ceremonies in 1935 and 1938, the event didn’t take place annually until 1958.

Even the free local periodical—the Pacific Grove Hometown Bulletin—acknowledged there was something off about the relationship between ethnic tensions that came to a head in 1905-1906 and “lantern week,” referring to an exhibit in the Pacific Grove Natural History Museum—”To its credit, the museum also debuted without irony a scale model of the 70-home Pacific Grove Chinese village razed by fire in 1905 [sic], the feast’s inaugural year.” The celebration of a racist mockery of a people in the moment they were being run out of town as a cultural tribute is ironic. But to display the account of this is unironic? What “to its credit” means is as strange as declaring that the exhibit was “debuted without irony.” It’s as though the museum spoke enough truth that the face-painting didn’t seem frivolous and insensitive, but not enough truth to create a contradiction between the levity of the family-friendly afternoon and the weight of the unjust history.

This was the August 17th edition and shared a recap written by someone who, like me, was sharing his “First Timer Impressions.” I also managed to visit the Natural History Museum, but for a different reason. Jaymee told me that she remembered a “Walk for Remembrance” in May, to commemorate the destruction of the village on May 16, 1906. She said it was led by a descendant of the village and had begun at the museum. So we decided to begin there as well during my Saturday break between answering the phone and returning messages in the afternoon and returning to the restaurant for the dinner shift. The woman there recalled, vaguely, the event, but told us they would have a better idea at the Heritage Museum which happened to be open from one to four only on Saturdays. And not only that there was the aforementioned installation up about the village and its demise. Not since Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall have clues lined up so readily for a curious couple.

The exhibit was very well done with a scaled construction of the village by Michael E. Croft. And the text that accompanied the visual went further than most we’d seen to address the ambiguity of agency that comes with a fire. It is never people who destroyed the village, it is the avatar of their hate: a fire. Like most accounts it didn’t make a judgment about the origin of the fire—"In May 1906, a fire broke out in the village and despite firefighter’s efforts, the village burned to the ground”—though it did give historical context to allow us to doubt the innocence of the break out of the fire:

At this time, “Chinatowns” in cities across the state burned down in fires, often started by arson. The Chinese could not take legal action in most cases, because the state congress even passed laws preventing citizenship rights to people of Chinese descent, even if they were born here.

Why can’t we have such a candid understanding of the Feast of Lanterns? If we had that perhaps we could have a candid discussion of how these two narratives relate. Instead we act like because the whole population moved half a mile away into Monterey the story ends in Pacific Grove, it “disappeared” as the mural informs us.

So we probed further for answers, walked up the hill to the old gray barn that is the Heritage Museum and were welcomed by the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” emitting from a player piano. A woman sat there pumping her feet up and down, rocking back and forth happily with the music. When the scroll reached its end she got up and greeted and invited us to take in all of the historical knick-knacks the place had to offer. She offered for us to have a look around and to try the player piano; Jaymee wandered around the old maps and books and artifacts, and I chose the "California, Here I Come" scroll and pedalled out the tune.

Afterwards we explained what we were looking for and the woman knew exactly the event we described. She shuffled through old copies of the Heritage Society of Pacific Grove Newsletter (Dedicated to Maintaining the Beauty and Individuality of Pacific Grove) and found the May 2011 edition whose cover showed Gerry Low-Sabado and the Monterey Bay Lion Dance Team on the recreation trail with Hopkins Marine Station behind them, the old site of the village. Inside was an article describing the event: an address by Mayor Carmelita Garcia, Gerry Low-Sabado, the direct descendent who helped organize the event, a reception, and a walk to Hopkins led by the Monterey Bay Lion Dance Team and their two spectacular lions. The city, its natural history museum, Heritage Society, the dance team, the National Coalition Building Institute, and even the ACLU collaborated to make this happen.

The article even foreshadowed an "Historical Context Statement" that the city was scheduled to release to acknowledge and honor the contributions of the Chinese population. The synopsis of their exit from the town was actually one of the most sympathetic yet: "Sadly, at a time when a state-wide anti-Chinese immigration movement was underway, the village was forced out of existence by a fire and eviction, and the villagers dispersed." Pairing "eviction," whose causation stems from human action, with "fire" implies most reasonably that people started the fire that drove them from town. And I was reading this in the Heritage Society newsletter? The woman was so thorough in answering our questions she even found a roll of film developed from May and gave me two prints of the traditional Chinese dance outside the museum with the two lions that preceded the walk. I was dumbfounded and charmed. How can this be so out in the open, existing so thoroughly on the surface alongside an annual tradition that tranforms the predominantly white town into a faux Chinese village?

Jaymee and I left contented and went to a coffee shop to discuss before I went to work. There was a contact telephone number at the end of the article that I called, assuming it was some kind of historical organization that on a Saturday would give me a recording or a quick account of the event or a website. After three rings a woman answered the phone, "Hello?" I explained where I found the phone number and what I was interested in and she said she was Gerry Low, and this was her phone number. They had just included her personal phone number at the base of the article for those who wanted "more information."

With a few interruptions we talked for more than and an hour and I frantically scribbled notes all over my training check list, and in the margins of both copies of the newsletter we were given. When she asked my impressions of the Feast of Lanterns she seemed genuinely curious, and she was deeply moved that I had taken such an interest in her family history. She said it was interesting that I found it not undifferent from a beauty pagaent, as that was exactly how it began. Her biggest complaint was not in the mess of stereotypes that compose the event, the unwieldy, ambiguous myth that arises; it was much more simple: the crowd is encouraged to boo a Chinese person. The man who represents what is Chinese (literally named "the Mandarin"), who insists on the traditional arranged marriage, is shouted down by hundreds of white spectators. The problem is not just that he wears a fake ponytail and dresses up in Chinese clothes, it is that his character acts as a kind of catharsis for racism. Gerry explained that her great-grandfather was born from a match that was made in 1881, that it was a tradition that remained acceptable through the time that the Chinese occupied the village. "When you bring the community together," she said, children, tourists, the whole town, "you are teaching them to villanize chinese people." This was also part of my complaint: an incredible opportunity to share knowledge and cultural understanding with a large group of people, and to instill these values in children, is wasted. The exact opposite is accomplished: misunderstanding cultural difference, mocking the heritages of others, and instilling this value in children.

Eventually the conversation turned to her family and the village her great-great-grandparents inhabited. When she told me her great grandmother was Quock Mui it blew my mind. The famed polyglot symbol of Cannery Row's multiculturalism, "Spanish Mary," her great granddaughter had just answered my phone call, and she was excited to talk to me. I pass by her house every day where a sign with her picture alerts the passerby to the richness of her history, the contribution of her life to Monterey. Of course she would have descendents, but I thought if I ever met them it would be the way I would see Thomas Steinbeck signing books at the Steinbeck Festival or something, not simply having a conversation about the history of the Peninsula.

Eventually we came to the fire. What conclusions did she hold; where did someone whose family was directly devastated turn the ambiguities into judgments? She shared that it was documented that the village's hoses were cut; the newspapers carried editorials in the days after that condemned the white christians for cheering the events and looting the salvaged belongings from the sidewalks when residents went back for another armful of possessions. Even knowing this Gerry insisted that it did not matter what happened then, how the fire started, but how we behaved now, what we value now, what we model for children now. And what we are doing now is putting on negative Chinese stereotypes and, as a community, booing them.

I told her I looked forward to meeting her if I didn't have to work the evening of the Historic Context Statement, and if I did my friend Jaymee would attend.

III.

The Historic Context Statement

found here:

http://www.ci.pg.ca.us/HCS_Public_Draft_Part_2_6-29-11.pdf

I was once told a story at Bottles in Bins, the liquor store at the bottom of David Avenue, on the Monterey side of the border with P.G. The old owners and their mob connections effected a change in the city boundary so that their store would be in Monterey and they would be allowed to sell alcohol. It didn't seem crazy, but it did seem like a story that would naturally develop over decades in any store that bordered a town that was dry into the second half of the 20th century and to this day did not have a bar. However, when Jaymee and I looked at the map of Pacific Grove, in the years of its construction (1903-1926), the border was indeed Irving, one block further into Monterey; at some point Monterey annexed an entire block of PG; and further, this meant that I lived in what was historically Pacific Grove; the old border puts me squarely in a different town. And this, of course, also included my neighbors. The community that the Feast of Lanterns was for was our community. In 1903 Theodore Roosevelt visited our humble town.

IV.

By Light of Lanterns

On Saturday, October 22 the Monterey Public Library and Gerry Low-Sabado were hosting a screening of a film made by CSUMB students, By Light of Lanterns. Months before Gerry had mentioned that it was fortuitous that I was composing a piece on this subject because she was coordinating these events this weekend. It seemed especially appropriate that the site of much of my research and typing was the very spot of the weekend's first event. I pitched the story to the Weekly a few weeks before, but received no reply, so I made it downtown anyway, still filling out the story for myself, and walked through the lobby and its computers and the youth reading room past the bathroom into the community room.

Gerry was wearing a bright red ornate cheongsam and smiling and circulating among the dozen people who had already arrived. Two tables were set up at the back, one with Sandy Lymon's China Gold, which I have gathered is the quintessential scholarly work on the Chinese in Monterey; and the other had a representative from CSUMB selling copies of the DVD of the short student-made documentary.

I had failed to follow up with Gerry after that first phone call two months ago, and Jaymee was forced to watch her speech on TV in the hallway of city council chambers, and I wasn't ready to interrupt and introduce myself yet. So I sat in one of the cushion-topped grey folding chairs, five rows back, with a feeling of anticipation mixed with the vague dissatisfaction of being inside on a gorgeous Saturday afternoon, especially after such a fogged-out, cold summer. I quickly realized that the forty-something librarian in charge of the event was the youngest person here. The women two rows in front of me were talking about the famous Jerry that was in town the weekend before. One had seen Seinfeld's 100-dollar-a-seat act and was recalling the charm by which he commented on "the simplest little things," like bathrooms. "Why don't the doors go all the way to the ground? What's up with that?" An older Chinese man came in with two girls who must have been his grandchildren. Now I was closest in age with an 11 year old.

The next day's event was a walking tour of Cannery Row led by Gerry. From what I had heard it was sold out, but I heard the librarian at the front of the room mention that people could just come. I intercepted her as she walked to the back room and asked if there was room on the tour. "You didn't hear it from me," she said, but it was a public place and they couldn't really prevent people from being outside with them. I sat back down happily. The day before I had called the library to reserve a spot, well two, but Jaymee couldn't make it, for the free film screening, as I was advised by the newspaper. The librarian on the other end had no idea what I was talking about and after a few explanations she reluctantly took down my name. There were no more spots for the more coveted free walking tour that began at the Intercontinental, where a luncheon with author Lisa See and book signing were to precede it. Problem solved.

Gerry and the librarian mingled for a few more minutes before introducing the library—California's first!—and the event to a warm round of applause. Gerry desired to share a few words and bring some context to the documentary, how she, in her fifties, became interested in and aware of her family's history with the help of these college students who went searching for what was left of the Chinese's legacy on the Monterey Peninsula. Then the film was to begin. The librarian struggled as the DVD loaded to find the full screen option on the laptop. The sound was very off and I quickly realized that the set-up was simply to have the sound come from the laptop's tiny speakers. I was horribly embarrassed as I watched several older volunteers pop up to lend a hand and the librarian ran out of the room to find speakers.

It seems that the cards are always stacked against substance. Jerry Seinfeld gets the stage in the lavish, velvet-curtained, sold-out Golden State Theater with the best sound a show could have, and talks about nothing. Geraldine Low-Sabado gets a glorified box with folding chairs and an old laptop plugged into a projector in the front of the room, and gets to the heart of the way racial hatred can destroy identity, the way entire generations have lost the very story of themselves.

Gerry handled the mini crisis with the sweet charm with which she addresses any situation. She consulted the tableful of items she brought and decided upon a plastic-sleeved typed letter that she revealed to be written by Thomas Steinbeck, the son of a famous local author. He apparently had written a historic novella on the very subject of this piece and the film and the walking tour called In the Shadow of the Cypress. How was it that I was learning this now?

Prognosis Negative Capability

2009-08-29T02:28:00.001-07:00

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on

—John Keats,
“Ode on a Grecian Urn”

This is insincere merely by being in English. I can’t express myself earnestly in English. That’s why this story is only half the story: the half defined by dissection, description, and, of course, joking. But that’s only half that story as well, its own superficial outward definition; it misses the capacity of the insincere to express a purity, to eschew the teleological obsession in cataloguing Love, Values, and Truth and, instead, find love, value, and truths in the disruption of such (re)presentations, the complication of such simple definitions. Seinfeld expresses this love as insincerely and with as much unrelenting irony as possible: while it “convinces” us—or was it just because I was a naïve child when I first entered its world?—of its bleak realism, its accurate representation of the cynical and sarcastic outlook of the cosmopolitan 90s ethos, it simultaneously underlines every element of its production, the extent to which it is contrived, and its difference from the reality it supposedly claims to describe.

What I above expressed as “a purity,” in describing the opposite of one’s statement within one’s statement without privileging one or the other, becomes especially evident at moments in Seinfeld in which a single scene, idea, line, juxtaposition or casting choice can stand for two precisely opposite propositions, what John Keats famously described as “Negative Capability” in a letter to his brothers. He describes an unfortunate dinner and the thoughts in his mind after a “disquisition” he had with a friend upon leaving the engagement:

several things dovetailed in my mind, & at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.

Nothing describes Seinfeld’s ascription to the tradition of Shakespeare and Keats better than the episode that ends the season that began with Jerry and George’s foray into writing, the veritable transcription of the words of these Grecian epic poets, the encapsulation of a mythologized form of an oral culture. “The Pilot,” the two-part episode that tells the story of the production and broadcast of the first and only episode of Jerry, the show pitched by George and Jerry as “about nothing,” exemplifies this transcendental tension that, properly considered, expresses what cannot be anything other than a spiritually exuberant soul at the heart of the show and its creators, or, as Keats put it, a “sense of Beauty [that] overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration.”

Showing the process of how strange it is to make a sitcom from one’s own life masquerades as reinforcing the sincere expression of insincerity, that Seinfeld successfully and unproblematically expresses what it’s like to be Jerry Seinfeld starring in an eponymous sitcom and Larry David producing in the background, while actually tearing down the illusion that the infinitely deferred essence, the essence infinitely different from the words used to describe it—the life of Jerry Seinfeld and his friends—is a television show. A reoccurring joke appears in this episode that functions as a perfect symbol for this tension: George has convinced himself that he cannot be happy, that if the show succeeds God will strike him dead; moments before Jerry is performed and filmed for the first time he calls the doctor for the results of a test on a discoloration on his lip; he is told the results were “negative” and is crushed and begins to freak out because he thinks the news is bad—“negative”—and that he has cancer, not that it is not cancer—i.e. “negative.” David wrote a screenplay in the ‘80s that was never produced called Prognosis Negative; it is also the name of a film which figures prominently in an early storyline; the movie is terrible. This makes what is a simple joke—the double meaning of “double”—an indecidable paradox of conflicting meanings: the essential binary (positive/negative) is called into question and for a moment George lives in a world where “yes” means “no” and vice versa; the absurd neuroses of George suddenly prefigure the episode’s ultimate irony that the show is not picked up—the very show we thought we were watching is not produced: George’s feeling that his success would signify his death again reverses positive with negative: a positive test for cancer would represent the positive outcome for the show: his death would signify his success; instead the result is not just negative: it is a black hole of ecriture in which George is, negatively, diagnosed as positive for a neurotic hypochondriac in the moment he is, positively, diagnosed as negative for skin cancer, an eventuality no one really took seriously. Prognosis Negative represents the negative potential of Jerry: while Seinfeld describes its doppelganger’s failure simultaneous with its own success, Prognosis Negative is produced and widely released in Seinfeld when it was never produced in real life. [1]

What is ultimately at work here is a discussion between the written and the spoken, words in a book and words on a stage, what is conceived in solitude by a lonely genius and what is developed through conversation by a charismatic luminary, what is revised by word processors and erasers and what improves by groans and heckles, whether Jerry’s ultimate contribution comes from a made-up mythical world in which he pretends to interact in earnest or whether Jerry’s significance is the keen observation that transcends all context.
When I told her, in my simple, direct Spanish that I was writing a book she asked me what it was about. I said it was about the process of understanding something. This answer seemed to satisfy her and I didn’t want to talk about it any more either.

[1] “The Outing” provides us with a similarly brilliant symbol for the unity of perfect opposites in a two-line phone given to Jerry for his birthday by Kramer: It does not privilege Jerry to control two distinct dialogues; he thinks he has on hold a woman reporter, previously convinced of his and George’s homosexuality, he tells George that she will not imply in her article that they are a gay couple, joking that they had “fooled her”; however, Kramer’s gift allows the other caller to hear the other conversation and Jerry’s joke, in a context he hadn’t anticipated, means the opposite of his ironic intent: and that they are indeed gay; she hangs up and decides to “play up that angle of the story”; “The Wink” very succinctly provides George with the problem of winking his eye, that early in the episode was breached by grapefruit pulp, at a moment that would undermine what he sincerely was trying to say and expressing the exact opposite.

The Pitch and the Ticket

2009-08-24T22:13:00.000-07:00

Fig. 1 (See "And 'The Pitch'..." and "Jerry, George and Kramer Pitch Things to NBC") This map illustrates how the episodes' structure puts in parallel several concepts: 1. That Kramer's vomiting on Susan is the third in a series of opinions on Jerry's television show; 2. That Jerry and George's collaborative pitch to the executives of NBC is akin to Newman and Kramer's phony testimony to the judge (that Newman was speeding because he needed to stop Kramer from killing himself because he never became a banker), and vice versa; 3. That the showed pitched to NBC would, if the authorities could be duped, be "about nothing," (as described to the executives in scene six at the end of the first cycle) but has storylines and likable characters as a necessary compromise (as described to the executives in scene sixteen at the end of the second cycle). And that the coffeeshop is a black hole that consumes all the storylines into its infinite nothing.

The Chapter of My Life About Seinfeld

2009-08-22T19:37:00.000-07:00

In the weeks before I left I intended on writing a good deal of the book’s conclusion on the two and a half day bus ride to Madison, Wisconsin, to have the urgency and movement of the story’s end be in conversation with the advance of the Greyhound, the progress of the American story reinforced by the story’s progress through America. It seemed perfect: I was taking the trip of the project’s origin in reverse, and ending up where I was, only on the other side—one year later, the next summer, I was going again to visit Brendan in the Midwest, though a few states away from his hometown the location and moment of his completion of college, his last summer credit; and from there I was going to Chicago to fly to the Dominican Republic to the girl I had abandoned a year before; and then in the moment it all made sense, after I returned again, understood how all of my frustrated ambitions, fractured hopes and ironic endeavors could hold each other up, I would take the two and half day bus trip back to California and I would describe it in my notebook and the lessons would be learned, the epiphanies revealed, the chapter of my life about Seinfeld closed.

As it turned out I wrote nothing. I deferred, as I had in the initial conception of these hypothetical writings, to the future, the tranquility in which these emotions might be recollected—that is—to this present moment. But nothing became clear, nothing was solved; all that occurred was the reassertion of every piece of the paradox, and the expenditure of every dollar I earned in the spring. And that is why nothing was written on the Greyhound. All I could do was stare out the window at the western half of the United States and wonder if the snacks I spent my last ten dollars on would last me until Salinas, California, and if I could ever move on to the next chapter of my life, or if this was it, already penned—my story to be forever reworked.

Call Me a Marine Biologist

2009-08-15T00:55:00.000-07:00

“Mr Kramer, let me tell you a story. In nineteen-seventy-nine I ticketed a brown Dodge Diplomat for parking in a Church zone. That fine was never paid, and since then that scofflaw has piled up more parking tickets than anyone in New York City. For sixteen years I pursued him, only to see him give me the slip, time and time again. I never got a clean look at his face, but he's become my ‘white whale.’ Mr. Kramer, that day was yesterday! But thanks to you, I don't know if I'll ever get that chance again!”

—Cop with eyepatch to Kramer, “The Scofflaw”

The botched Kenny Kramer interview put me in a week long depression, and suddenly everything contributed to this hopelessness to the book about Seinfeld. What was once a brilliant insight—George Costanza is Ishmael—ready to be transcribed into an essay entitled “Call me a marine biologist”[1] became the perfect illustration of my grasp on reality. My contributions to Wikipedia concerning the show were deleted: The Merchant of Venice entry was once again too important to note the reference of a situation comedy to its most famous speech, and my most recent qualification to the show’s main article, that dubiously cited my own blog, of the notion that Seinfeld “is arguably consistent with the philosophy of nihilism,” amending that some view it, not as nihilist but, as a deconstructionist critique of the superficiality of network television and, on another level, on univocal meaning. I also finished reading Confederacy of Dunces for the first time and was quite disconcerted to the parallels between myself, my residence with my parents, and my literary project with that of Ignatius J. Reilly, his burdening of his mother, and his, in progress, epic reworking of Boethius. I was a fat, delusional, hypocritical, unemployed affliction on my mother, suspended in idealistic clueless adolescence, convinced of my own genius, at least when I was reading the book and cringing to myself.

This translated to all out despair one afternoon when I got out of the shower after working in the front yard of my parents’ house all day, heard the phone ring, hurried to pick it up in a towel, and sat in the front room of the house, still in the towel, and talked to my friend Ian—a white truck drove up to the house and I could see a woman in the passenger seat scowling at the mounds of dirt that were our front yard, and then her husband got out and walked toward the front door, and rang the bell. In a panic, thinking he had already seen me in the front room, I told Ian I had to go answer the door and went, in the towel, to chat with this fellow who had something to say to our house and it’s residents.

He asked for my father, I obviously did not strike him as a home owner, even the fact that I lived there seemed strange to him, though I regretted to inform him that he was out of town. I soon picked up that he was not a friend of my father but rather of the type who don’t let their wives drive, left them in the car, and asked to speak to the man of the house, and that he was of the home owners’ association. I asked if it was about the front yard and he said to me throwing his hands up, as though seeking my sympathy in the absurdity of the situation, “what’s, ha ha, the deal.” I explained that I was in a towel and that my father would be back within the week, closed the door, called Ian back and cursed the fascists among whom I lived.

To be fair we had taken out our magnolia tree over a year before to put the tree out of its misery and worked slowly on landscaping the rooty and dirty wasteland ourselves instead of hiring Mexicans to do it for us in a week. And worst of all, in that time, black people had rented the house next to us, another domino in the end of our neighborhood, begun by our unkempt yard. Whatever one’s perspective is on the situation, in that moment this republican misogynist who intruded on my pleasant phone conversation was questioning my very essence: “What’s, ha ha, the deal,” for I was the one who worked in the yard all day, and there I was practically naked in front of him, and it didn’t help that that tree was the veritable pen by which I began this book one year before, that I oscillated between this ludicrous project in the front yard and this one inside the house. Well, I didn’t know what the fucking deal was, I didn’t know what the fuck I was doing inside or outside the house. All I knew was that wikipedia didn’t think what I was doing was of value, the neighbors were dubious, Kenny Kramer not only doubted my book but didn’t understand a word I said, and I was all alone with the biggest skeptic of myself in existence: me.

I was happy to be leaving the house within the week. And I didn’t need Myrna to rescue me: unlike Ignatius Reilly I was not afraid of the Greyhound.

[1] “your insular city of the Manhattoes”; and while a failure in the 19^th century’s understanding of whales made Ishmael uncertain of whale classification, it is George’s nostalgia for the anachronistic that causes him to refer to mammal as a fish; both are great storytellers, and George’s finest moment came in his account of his moment as a marine biologist, beginning, “the sea was angry that day like an old man trying to send back soup in a deli”; each receives this narrative capacity from his detachment from the professional world; each is at the bottom of the ladder, with the least investment in the task at hand because, symbolized by whale as spiritual, other-worldly ambition; George is not a Marine Biologist, though he is passionate about being one, while Ishmael is a whaler though far from officially being one: his passion for talking about it gives him the title; Costanza is constantly in these “certain queer times and occasions,” while they are only occasional to Ishmael—

A ‘90s World Whose Defining Boundaries Have Been Deformed by Electric Signal

2009-08-15T00:11:00.000-07:00

I have overdosed on television, I am unresponsive and cyanotic, revive me in your shower of gelid light and walk me through your piazza which is made of elegant slabs of time.

—Mark Leyner, My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist

Seinfeld is ashamed of being television. It resides in that New Yorker mindset that David Foster Wallace describes in “E Unibus Pluram”—“weary contempt for television as a creative product and cultural force, combined with beady-eyed fascination about the actual behind-the-glass mechanics of making that product and projecting that force.” This contemptible fascination emerges in a multitude of forms through the series whether it is a secret love of Melrose Place—that Jerry goes so far as to deny on a polygraph machine to maintain what he considers to be his dignity that would be compromised by openly enjoying the show—or openly mocking the process of creating a television show:

Jerry: “So you're saying, I go in to NBC, and tell them I got this idea for a show about nothing.”

George: “We go into NBC.”

Jerry: “We? Since when are you a writer?”

George: “Writer. We're talking about a sitcom.”

* * *

Jerry’s mom: “Since when is George a writer.”

Jerry: “What writer? It’s a sitcom!”

Wallace warns of the monster of television’s appropriation of meta-fiction’s sophisticated ironies, the challenging literary approaches of John Barth, Donald Barthelme and other avant-garde authors of the ‘60s have been co-opted by mainstream consumer culture: “the reason why this irreverent postmodern approach fails to help the new Imagists transfigure TV is simply that TV has beaten the new Imagists to the punch. The fact is that for at least ten years now, television has been ingeniously absorbing, homogenizing, and re-presenting the very same cynical postmodern aesthetic that was once the best alternative to the appeal of Low, over-easy, mass-marketed narrative.” It is not just that television has co-opted what was once radical, he argues: what was radical is indebted to television—

For Metafiction, in its ascendant and most important phases, was really nothing more than a single-order expansion of its own great theoretical nemesis, Realism: if Realism called it like it saw it, Metafiction simply called it as it saw itself seeing itself see it. This high-cultural postmodern genre, in other words, was deeply informed by the emergence of television and the metastasis of self-conscious watching. And (I claim) American fiction remains deeply informed by television ... especially those strains of fiction with roots in postmodernism, which even at its rebellious Metafictional zenith was less a "response to" televisual culture than a kind of abiding-in-TV. Even back then, the borders were starting to come down.

What Wallace describes at the moment Seinfeld was in its initial production the necessity for Seinfeld, though Infinite Jest was that which Wallace ultimately decided to provide us. It is not Mark Leyner and his superficial television-mirroring prose that shall undermine television’s hold on American culture and aesthetics and free us to once again be free-thinking individuals: it is a television that ironizes irony, jokes about joking, makes fun of making fun of television, is ashamed to describe the shame of watching and creating television programming, a show that presents on one level the most popular comedy to ever appear on television, yet, on another level, challenges us with the most explicit—though often infinitely subtle—critique of network television’s mediocrity, proclaiming that because it is on network television it is mediocre though because it is able to say this on network television it is genius, and because American literature has collapsed under its own pretensions and snobbishness about television that television has replaced it, and that that is incredibly hilarious.

The Unspoken Thing

2009-08-14T23:43:00.000-07:00

Where does it go? I don’t think man has ever been there. We’re under cosmic control and have been for a long, long time, and each time it builds, it’s bigger, and it’s stronger. And then you find out…about Cosmo, and you discover he’s running the show…

—Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test

I had always imagined Kenny Kramer as a kind of Neal Cassady: rendered by his good buddy as a free-thinking, eccentric madman—as Kerouac famously related his adventures with Cassady through the fictionalized selves of Dean Moriarty in On the Road and Cody Pomeray in The Dharma Bums—a man with too much life in him to stop and write it down like his more introspective counterpart, with a philosophy too open-ended to define it in any single static published story, whose essence can only be translated into a word that defers to the vastness of everything: Cosmo.

That Kenny Kramer went on to drive a bus after his alter-ego took the country’s television sets by storm is an incredible coincidence. Kramer begins the coincidence, his first name yet to be revealed to us, that it is Cosmo and not Kenny, with a road trip by his own car that breaks down, by hitch-hiking with, first, a trucker, then, on the back of a motorcycle, and, finally, in the back of a van, in a parody of the drugged-out communal trip of hippie youths that latch on to his experience, hoping to adopt him as a Ken Kesey/Charles Manson leader, across the country, from the New York to L.A., though it is a two-minute montage on primetime television that catalogues this journey on the road and not two hundred pages of spontaneous prose. Regardless, “The Trip,” and Seinfeld’s myth-making on the whole, create a legend just as On the Road created an idea of Neal Cassady, the real-life friend and inspiration for the beat generation, and both Kramer and Cassady ran with this notion that they wrote for themselves, as mixed with the versions of themselves that were written for them, and they both did it in the same way: they drove a bus.

Cassady became the same larger than life inspiration for the author of the next generation’s counterculture: Ken Kesey, a man who by 1965 had taken so much acid and was so beyond the level on which the previous authors functioned that he had decided that writing was an anachronism, that the new narrative was to be lived. Cassady drove the insanely colored bus of the stoned out-of-their-gourds Merry Pranksters across the country and finally brought Kesey and Kerouac together in—where else—Manhattan; Kramer started his own “Reality Tour” of the New York reality that provided the basis for what would become Seinfeld, an approach that goes furthur than making infinitely self-referential jokes about the ironic creation of a show that presupposes its own fiction while describing the truth of its own origin, by showing those on the bus what that truth is, not writing it and enveloping it in fictions and jokes, revealing the real Kramer, that which gives Seinfeld and David access to Cosmo. And then you find out…about Cosmo, and you discover he’s running the show…

Needless to say, when Kenny Kramer finally responded to an email months after I sent it—and had forgotten about it—and did not answer my questions but, instead, gave me his phone number telling me to call any time, I felt on the verge of finding out…about Cosmo. I prepared questions, I asked people for a week about how I could go about recording it, and I waited nervously for the courage to make this call, the presumptuousness to put words to the unspoken thing that connected the world of Kenny Kramer to that of Cosmo Kramer. Finally, I put my mother’s computer next to the speakerphone base and prepared the Garageband program to record it, went to the other room with the handset, and made the call.

I first got a recording of his home answering machine telling me the number of his cell phone; I then got hold of Mr. Kramer who, after recovering from a moment of confusion about who the hell I was, told me to call his house number an hour later. I looked over the notes I had prepared, paced the house, called Brendan, and waited.

When I finally called and everything was in place, the conversation went very badly. From my initial inability to improvise a response to “What makes your book different from every other book about Seinfeld?” things did not turn out as I had anticipated. I was nervous talking to someone whom I considered a legend; I felt false describing what are, essentially, just great jokes in terse academic terms; and he rattled off stock anecdotes that he has been telling on his bus for over ten years, not in the least answering my questions—and who was I to interrupt and contradict a legend?—Are George and Kramer, based on stand-up comedians, stand-up comedians in philosophy, if not in profession? No. Are the presences of Kenny Kramer and Larry David in the background of the episodes causing trouble in Jerry’s neat world? “Well, yeah, Jerry has a very neat world. Jerry in real life is a very fastidious person…There is such a thing as Alternate Side of the Street Parking…” Can you see a sort of formula by which to describe the difference between Seinfeld and the reality that created? “The formula is Larry. I mean Larry came up with something that really hadn’t been done on television before where you have four characters and each has their own little story and adventure going, you know, running concurrent to each other…” How would you compare the relationship between Cosmo Kramer and Jerry with that of Kenny Kramer and Larry? “Cosmo’s relationship with Jerry is really more like that of my relationship with Larry…”

Everything I thought about Seinfeld, every insight I had come to hold dear, every attempt I had made to put into words the mechanisms of the show’s self-reflective layers, the previous year of my life was gibberish to the one man I thought would understand me. Perhaps this was my punishment for attempting to put the Unspoken Thing into words, for writing the story of the death of writing, for betraying the faith in Cosmo, getting off the bus for the purpose of describing it, for emulating Tom Wolfe, an author whom I frankly consider to be a jackass.

The End

2009-06-28T15:37:00.001-07:00

One of the great clichés of the situation comedy is its desperate final attempts to make its mark, or simply regain a portion of its once larger audience, by including gimmicks, having protagonists unexpectedly, or finally, consummate the deep love that’s always been right in front of them, or in some way compromise the integrity of the show in order to regain relevance, what has become known as “jumping the shark” due to a later episode of Happy Days in which the Fonz, on a visit to Hollywood, water-skiing and wearing his leather jacket, jumps over a shark. For example, Family Matters—which began and ended the same years as Seinfeld—had brought in Steve Urkel, the Winslow’s dorky neighbor played by the comically talented Jaleel White, partway through its first season and he slowly took the focus of the Winslow Family Matters. And by its eighth season 3J (the streetwise orphan taken in by the Winslow’s) had been introduced along with two additional characters played by White: Stefan Urquelle (Steve Urkel’s smooth alter-ego) and Myrtle Urkel (Urkel’s cousin). And, by the ninth and final season, which earned the show’s worst ratings, the actress playing Harriette Winslow had left and been replaced, the show was picked up by CBS and left ABC’s TGIF line-up, and Original Gangster Dawg (O.G.D.), again played by White, entered the Winslow’s universe.

This is one way a situation comedy can go out. However, Seinfeld managed to go off with the audience wanting more, as any good showman would do, whether it’s Sinatra, a sit com, or a smart ass at an office meeting who makes a well-received comment, as Jerry advises George at the coffeeshop five weeks before the series ends:

George, “I lost them. I can usually come up with one good comment during a meeting but by the end it's buried under a pile of gaffs and bad puns.”  

Jerry, “Showmanship, George. When you hit that high note, you say goodnight and walk off.” 

George, “I can't just leave.”  

Jerry, “That's the way they do it in Vegas.”

The final two seasons are informed by this cliché, and, like the rest of the series, manages to comment on this phenomenon as a self-aware discussion of the show’s descent from it’s peak (Larry David has already left the veritable Vegas stage), at the very moment it is making more money than it ever has while, at the same time, resorting to a more gimmicky and surreal style.

In the beginning of the series the show existed in a more literal and less allegorical sense than it did in the last two seasons. This approach lasted up until its characters pitched and created Jerry. Up to this point attacks on artists and intellectuals are limited to quips made by the characters against them; and the more subtle jabs only reach as far as stand-up comedians and writers of sitcoms. Everything changes, however, when the pilot episode of their show airs for the entire world to see, even though no more episodes are made—Jerry and George, along with the content of their lives, are both a part of the entertainment business and ostracized from it, and by the end there is absolutely no separation of the characters and any level of celebrity: Kramer is Merv Griffin; George is giving a show in Vegas during an office meeting; Jerry is a big shot Hollywood director bootlegging movies with a handheld camera; and on and on.

The show jumps jumping the shark by knowing and subverting how shows fail. By abandoning its realism it admits to its own decline, but by admitting to its own decline it maintains the glory that it never really lost.

(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace, Love, and Understanding

2009-06-28T15:27:00.001-07:00

If I were to choose my least favorite Seinfeld episode it would be “The Heart Attack.” It’s not that I dislike it or that it’s not better than most of what’s on TV—it just misses the accomplishment of your average Seinfeld episode for the reason that it successfully manages to satirize in a traditional sense: identify an object as ridiculous and reveal it as such in a straight-forward, stable mode of narrative that we don’t find elsewhere in the show. Each character is solidly cast in an identifiable role, and Jerry’s commenting, aloof perspective is privileged. At the coffeeshop George convinces himself he is having a heart-attack. Elaine is concerned but Jerry just realizes that his hypochondriac friend watched “Coronary Country” on TV the night before, but they go to the hospital anyway. It turns out George was fine except that his tonsils grew back and needed to be removed again.

Jerry’s preoccupation in the episode is deciphering a note he wrote the night before cataloguing a moment in the middle of the night when he woke up to find a man screaming in a B-movie, and as such asks any new character who enters the story what they think the piece of paper says. Elaine meets George’s doctor and, beginning the series’ joke that women want to marry doctors, flirts with him and then goes out with him. Kramer asserts his membership in the institutionalized counter-culture by insisting that George see a natural healer because hospitals are big business and want you to be sick so they can make more money. George, infamously cheap, decides to avoid the surgery and overnight stay in the hospital for the double-digit homeopathic consultation.

In the end, however, George pays more than he would have for the initial surgery because the concoction that Kramer’s healer gives him turns him literally and comically blue. The show further degenerates into gimmick and slap-stick cliché when the paramedics get into a fight on the way to the hospital resulting in an accident that further frustrates George’s health woes. It’s not far from the end of Annie Hall, which ruins what is an otherwise first-rate film: the parody of Los Angeles new-age absurdity alienates a subculture from Woody Allen’s straight worldview just as homeopathic healing is alienated from the straight perspective of George and Jerry. However, Allen and Seinfeld are at their best when no one’s approach is privileged, everyone is ridiculous and we are left unsure if the medical establishment is better than the natural healer, or if the fellow in the full plastic suit is a pretentious idiot who has lost his mind since he arrived in L.A., in short, if anyone can be correct either in asserting or negating the assertion or negation of someone else.

Seinfeld, unlike Woody Allen’s films, is not against 1960s bohemianism. In fact its representation in Kramer often survives better than the straight lifestyles of the other three. What is under attack is the way mainstream society appropriates and degenerates anything that may at one point have been worthwhile by claiming to understand it. When Elvis Costello asks “What’s so funny about peace, love, and understanding?” a rhetorical reading is assumed, but it is much more interesting as a literal question: how has the establishment made a mockery out of compassion? This is in a sense the history of mankind: important figures telling us what’s so wonderful ‘bout peace, love, and understanding, and other people perverting it in the process of passing down the message. “Writing is the seedbed of irony,” in the words of Walter Ong, “and the longer the writing (and print) tradition endures, the heavier the ironic growth becomes.” Jesus’s words become the New Testament, whose use and interpretation becomes more ironic the longer people take the Bible to be the word of God as it drifts further and further away from its erroneous creation as such—peace, love, and understanding become funnier and funnier.

The same may be said of the ‘60s: the establishment adopts its canon—John Lennon, some Bob Dylan, etc., whatever suits the unified conception of what the era meant—and suddenly in 1970 John Lennon can’t say anything because what John Lennon stands for has already been decided. The Beatles were bigger than Jesus because they, in that moment, were creating their legacy, had a voice in it, before it could be completely defined by those who wanted to create an idealized idea of them, before two millennia of irony made their essence a joke. However, the increasingly hyperactive literacy, and consequent irony, of the end of the 20^th century made the Beatles as big of joke as Jesus by the 1990s. This is why Seinfeld declared itself to be nothing from the start: so that anyone who attempted retroactively to make it into something, to describe it as a pinpointable unified idea, could not be considered as anything other than a complete idiot.

It's Not a Lie If You Believe It

2009-06-28T13:57:00.001-07:00

That Elaine refers to herself as a “beard” in the episode of the same name illustrates perfectly how each of the four characters falsify a fourth of the show: as Elaine pretends to be the date of a gay man for the benefit of his boss, George wears a toupee, as though the cover-up was just turned ninety degrees, ninety more with Jerry’s rouse, and Kramer falsifying the last plane. What lies underneath all this false hair are four simple facts: Elaine is attracted to a gay man, George is bald, Jerry watches Melrose Place, and Kramer is not a criminal. Two are forcefully revealed, each with a ripping motion: Elaine rips off George’s toupee and throws it out the window, disgusted with the narcissistic, arrogant person it had revealed by covering up; and Jerry rips off the sensors of the lie detector that detected that he watches Melrose Place. And so each comes to terms with who he is, and it ends with all four watching Melrose Place, with George’s scalp proudly displayed. In the words of George, “when she threw that toupee out the window, it was the best thing that ever happened to me. I feel like my old self again: totally inadequate, completely insecure, paranoid, neurotic, it's a pleasure.”

The truth with Kramer and Elaine is not so simple. Kramer’s role as a beard comes with his recruitment to stand in a police line-up, to pretend to have been picked up as a suspect. The previous ending is whimsically subverted when a homeless man spites Kramer by picking him out of the line-up, to which he responds in panic, “Me?!” Pretending, it seems, can lead, at least for the purposes of the joke, to being. And this is Elaine’s hope: that she can convert her pretend heterosexual date to an actual one. This doesn’t work in the end, though a sincere effort is made by both parties. The explanation is not that he’s gay, oddly enough—it’s that Elaine doesn’t have enough experience with “the equipment,” and that her male competitors have “access” to it all of the time and she thus has no chance at bringing him to her side. “That’s why they lose so few players,” says Jerry.

But what kind of explanation is this? In the nineties was everyone bisexual, simply choosing one side or the other? Is the gay/straight binary an invention that has nothing to do with the deconstructed world at the end of the 20^th century? If a man receives a massage from another man and “it moves” does that mean his heterosexuality falls to pieces? Is it a lie if you believe it?

First Base Coach

2009-06-03T22:09:00.001-07:00

No real world phenomenon enters the Seinfeld universe with as much consistency as baseball. The fallout of “The Pony Remark” is so significant because it jeopardizes Jerry’s softball game; Elaine’s attempted “conversion” of a homosexual is likened to luring a star second baseman away from his team; Elaine dates retired first-baseman Keith Hernandez and the two make double-entendres about rounding bases; Kramer sees Joe Dimaggio eating donuts and says that he dunks his donut in his coffee with the same concentration that he devoted to his hitting; and of course George gets a job with the Yankees which, in a sense, institutionalizes the baseball reference.

The reality of a baseball game is very important to that of Seinfeld and its critique of American consciousness—and not just because of the often religious reverence often held for the game and its players. That there are rules to everything, that someone must win and someone must lose, and that it all exists with an audience consisting of fans and enemies, with commentary and with coaching, is the conceit of Seinfeld, and the actuality of baseball. Keith Hernandez’s appearance in the show highlights the parallel between Jerry, the stand-up comedian, with the ball player as they are both fans of each other and both admire and wish they could do what the other does. George is one level removed from the action—he wishes at one point to be an announcer, he eventually works in the front office of the Yankees, and he is constantly coaching Jerry, whether by providing arbitrary rules, advising in a lie (“remember: it’s not a lie if you believe it”), providing him with an idea for his sitcom, concocting a scheme by which Jerry can break-up with his girlfriend in order to date her roommate, or being Jerry’s assistant in dating a demanding woman.

“The Understudy” literalizes this metaphor when Jerry and George’s softball team plays against that of Rochelle, Rochelle: The Musical. Bette Midler plays the title character of the play and Jerry is dating her understudy who bursts into tears at moments that seem unacceptable to Jerry, such as at the end of Beaches, a problem which he brings to the attention of George—“It was Beaches for god’s sake.” When her hot dog falls out of its bun onto the ground before the baseball game and she starts bawling we see the line between baseball and the absurdity of Seinfeld disappear: to the side Jerry rolls his eyes as George motions for him to comfort her about her fallen hot dog, which he eventually does. George is further removed from the field and looks like a third base coach, still wearing the uniform but not athletic enough to be in the game; Jerry, who was a star in the first game of “the Pony Remark,” fits the part of the ballplayer and joins the understudy wearing the uniform of the opposing team as she laments the tragedy of the hot dog a little closer to the third base line, a spot more ambiguously between the baseball diamond and the outside world.

Baseball players have no free will. A signal comes from the dugout through a series of signs to the pitcher. Under this guidance he hurls the ball to the batter. He tries to hit it, or, if the opposing dugout decides, bunt, or if it’s no good, take as a ball. The coach tells the players where to stand, and they only react to what happens. The runners don’t choose: they follow base-running directions. The cliché that romance is baseball, that sexual progress is akin to rounding the bases, is subject to this determinism in Seinfeld’s rendering of it—the characters live in a superficial world devoid of real choice. The understudy delivers her absurd emotion and Jerry can either engage and try to make it to first and open the possibility of scoring (women just “play defense” in the words of Elaine). Or he can fail to comfort her, strike out, and be sent back to the dugout. Or, as Jerry does so many times, he could just walk away from the game and wait to see who’s pitching the next game. George decides for him, sagely keeping his player’s batting average up, and Jerry goes in to comfort her.

The world is more complicated than this and there exists no set of rules to describe every possible occurrence. It’s an adolescent fantasy that love can be like baseball, that sex is a home run, that there are clear-cut winners and losers, that choice may be deferred to those more experienced and more removed from the situation, that one keeps his girl at an emotional distance of 60 feet 6 inches, and that there’s always another at bat coming up, and another game after that, and that little difference exists between one and the next. Marriage destroys this fantasy—a serious commitment would compromise the recreational, transitory nature of the relationship. When George gets tired of the adolescent game and wishes to remove himself from it and become a man he proposes to Susan who eventually accepts. The episode ends with George already longing for the easy, superficial life he just gave up and sitting up in bed with Susan. Jerry calls and tells him to watch the baseball game but Susan wants to watch Mad About You, the sentimental sitcom about newlyweds working together through their problems, talking to each other and not receiving tips from the coaches on their teams. George is miserable, trying to join the real world while being locked in the superficial Seinfeld reality that recurs day after day with its 18 70 second half innings, that unfailingly will never end in a tie.

Moses Was a Picker

2009-06-01T23:23:00.000-07:00

Today I found myself in the wikipedia entry for the Merchant of Venice for some superficial fact-checking and was curious to see if the "references" section had "the Pick"'s brilliant parody of Shylock's final speech. It did not, although the reference is catalogued in the "Trivia" section of the page for "the Pick." This did not seem fair that Shakespeare is good enough for Seinfeld but that Seinfeld is not good enough for Shakespeare. The situation is rectified as long as the collaborative authorities let it stand:

"The Pick" episode of the sitcom Seinfeld parodies the antisemitism of the play with an extended joke that Moses picked his nose, making it inherent in jewishness. When Jerry is persecuted for picking his nose he parodies Shylock's speech with a plea to a crowd "If we pick, do we not bleed?"

This appropriation of the infamous moment of Shakespeare's most unsettling comedy is by no means a straightforward joke, a humorous collision of high and low culture, changing the beautiful plea "if you prick us do we not bleed?" into a discussion of nose-picking. Shylock's presence in the play deconstructs its existence as a straight-forward comedy. His tragic end unsettles the marriages that make up the otherwise typical happy ending, and the antisemitism of the characters makes us doubt whether we want them to live happily ever after. "The Pick" creates the parallel between jewishness and nose-picking when George justifies picking when Jerry's (anglo) girlfriend thinks she "caught [him] in a pick"

Jerry, "Is that so unforgivable? Is that like breaking a commandment? Did God say to Moses thou shalt not pick?"

George, "I guarantee you that Moses was a picker. You wander through the desert for forty years with that dry air. Are you telling me you're not going to have occasion to clean house a little bit."

However, everything ends badly in Seinfeld—Elaine's relationship ends because the guy she's seeing doesn't want to be with someone whose nipple was exposed on her Christmas card (a failed attempt to reach out and be accepted by anglo culture), and Jerry's ends because of the pick. It is not simply that Jerry's jewishness leads to his persecution in an anglo comedic context: the entire show is a compromise between jewish tragedy and anglo comedy. While the situation comedy began in the firmly WASP tradition of Father Knows Best and Leave it to Beaver and Seinfeld places a jewish comedian in this context, the show deconstructs its tradition at every turn, it foils the happy, clean ending, the lesson with which the initial folly provides us. If we read the Merchant of Venice as Seinfeld wants us to this cycle of folly, punishment, redemption falls apart because Shylock receives no redemption and the merchants receive no punishment for their humiliation of Shylock.

Those who judge and have the authority to provide the lessons, the fathers as the early suburban sitcom, are worse than those who have erred. Jerry's girlfriend is shallow, superficial, and ashamed of Jerry's jewishness, as symbolized by his supposed pick, and the man who stops calling Elaine is revealed more crassly than she ever was:

I did not bare myself deliberately, but I tell you, I wish now that I had! Because it is not me that has been exposed, but you! For I have seen the nipple on your soul!

Ain’t it funny how the feeling goes away?

2009-05-21T00:25:00.001-07:00

I remember a photo of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David—I think I saw it in Rolling Stone—sitting at their desks. I don’t know if it was staged or if it was a candid rendering of their work space, but the desks were facing each other and surrounded by, on Jerry’s side, Mets pennants and memorabilia, and, on Larry’s, Yankees paraphernalia, each wearing the respective team’s cap, or something to that effect. I’ve searched the internet for this picture with no luck, but the image has stayed with me.

At my parent’s house, in the front room, there is a game table with an insert that has a chess board on one side and backgammon on the other, with the chess side set up, and all of the pieces out. Since I’ve adopted the table to write, the once-set-up game has retreated further and further from where I set up the laptop that my mom’s elementary school has lent to her, and which she hasn’t needed since she bought herself another one for Christmas. The increasing notes and stacks of books referenced indiscriminately down pawns and knights in an ever-degenerating game. The table faces my father’s adjoining study that is separated by a somewhat see-through screen that my mom bought to keep his mess out of view. His desk in turn faces me and always reminds me of that photo.

This arrangement necessitates that we listen to the same thing: if I’m listening to the stereo in the front of the house he can’t very well listen to the jazz program on KUSP in the other room. One night I was listening to the Don’t Cry Now Linda Ronstadt album that I found at the dump, wanting to listen to her version of “Desperado” to better understand why it’s so funny that Elaine’s boyfriend can’t share his song with her, and that the song is about a “desperado” whose “prison is walking through this world all alone” and who “better let somebody love [him] before it’s too late.” However, when I went to flip the record my father objected to listening to anymore Linda Ronstadt, and insisted that we listen to Benny Goodman. Needless to say I was not very happy to quit what I was doing and shift to white people jazz from the ‘30s.

It did not dawn on me that I should let go of my personal stake in a song, stop ridin’ fences, and join in my father’s musical enthusiasm, appreciating that he’s making an effort to share something with me—in short, let somebody love me—but this Desperado did not come to his senses. I went back to reading Seinfeld: Master of its Domain and, while we listened to Benny Goodman’s performance at Carnegie Hall, I thought about listening to Linda Ronstadt. When the CD was over we chatted about its merits and my Dad insisted that tomorrow we listen to the second CD—the songs with the whole band—when we could play it louder.

The concert in 1937 was apparently the first time that a jazz band played in Carnegie Hall and was an incredible event. It was recorded by a single microphone and two copies were made: one for the Library of Congress and another that was forgotten until it was found by Benny Goodman’s daughter in 1950. When we got to the 15 minute version of “Sing, Sing, Sing” my dad told me that in 1988, for the fiftieth anniversary of the concert, KUSP had a show in which they played the whole concert with all of their jazz DJs discussing the tracks, and that when they got to “Sing, Sing, Sing” they played it three times. He also said that after the concert that night the band went on to play more shows, each being a kind of contest, and won them all.

My parents had a party a few days ago so I had to move my things out of the front room. The computer is on my bed and my father is asleep.

The Hyena

2009-05-18T20:01:00.000-07:00

There are certain queer times and occasions in this strange mixed affair we call life when a man takes this whole universe for a vast practical joke, though the wit thereof he but dimly discerns, and more than suspects that the joke is at nobody's expense but his own. However, nothing dispirits, and nothing seems worth while disputing. He bolts down all events, all creeds, and beliefs, and persuasions, all hard things visible and invisible, never mind how knobby; as an ostrich of potent digestion gobbles down bullets and gun flints. And as for small difficulties and worryings, prospects of sudden disaster, peril of life and limb; all these, and death itself, seem to him only sly, good-natured hits, and jolly punches in the side bestowed by the unseen and unaccountable old joker. That odd sort of wayward mood I am speaking of, comes over a man only in some time of extreme tribulation; it comes in the very midst of his earnestness, so that what just before might have seemed to him a thing most momentous, now seems but a part of the general joke. There is nothing like the perils of whaling to breed this free and easy sort of genial, desperado philosophy; and with it I now regarded this whole voyage of the Pequod, and the great White Whale its object.

“Queequeg,” said I, when they had dragged me, the last man, to the deck, and I was still shaking myself in my jacket to fling off the water; “Queequeg, my fine friend, does this sort of thing often happen?” Without much emotion, though soaked through just like me, he gave me to understand that such things did often happen.

“Mr. Stubb,” said I, turning to that worthy, who, buttoned up in his oil-jacket, was now calmly smoking his pipe in the rain; “Mr. Stubb, I think I have heard you say that of all whalemen you ever met, our chief mate, Mr. Starbuck, is by far the most careful and prudent. I suppose then, that going plump on a flying whale with your sail set in a foggy squall is the height of a whaleman's discretion?”

“Certain. I've lowered for whales from a leaking ship in a gale off Cape Horn.”

“Mr. Flask,” said I, turning to little King-Post, who was standing close by; “you are experienced in these things, and I am not. Will you tell me whether it is an unalterable law in this fishery, Mr. Flask, for an oarsman to break his own back pulling himself back-foremost into death's jaws?”

“Can't you twist that smaller?” said Flask. “Yes, that's the law. I should like to see a boat's crew backing water up to a whale face foremost. Ha, ha! the whale would give them squint for squint, mind that!”

Here then, from three impartial witnesses, I had a deliberate statement of the entire case. Considering, therefore, that squalls and capsizings in the water and consequent bivouacks on the deep, were matters of common occurrence in this kind of life; considering that at the superlatively critical instant of going on to the whale I must resign my life into the hands of him who steered the boat—oftentimes a fellow who at that very moment is in his impetuousness upon the point of scuttling the craft with his own frantic stampings; considering that the particular disaster to our own particular boat was chiefly to be imputed to Starbuck's driving on to his whale almost in the teeth of a squall, and considering that Starbuck, notwithstanding, was famous for his great heedfulness in the fishery; considering that I belonged to this uncommonly prudent Starbuck's boat; and finally considering in what a devil's chase I was implicated, touching the White Whale: taking all things together, I say, I thought I might as well go below and make a rough draft of my will. "Queequeg," said I, "come along, you shall be my lawyer, executor, and legatee."

It may seem strange that of all men sailors should be tinkering at their last wills and testaments, but there are no people in the world more fond of that diversion. This was the fourth time in my nautical life that I had done the same thing. After the ceremony was concluded upon the present occasion, I felt all the easier; a stone was rolled away from my heart. Besides, all the days I should now live would be as good as the days that Lazarus lived after his resurrection; a supplementary clean gain of so many months or weeks as the case might be. I survived myself; my death and burial were locked up in my chest. I looked round me tranquilly and contentedly, like a quiet ghost with a clean conscience sitting inside the bars of a snug family vault.

Now then, thought I, unconsciously rolling up the sleeves of my frock, here goes a cool, collected dive at death and destruction, and the devil fetch the hindmost .

The Différance that David Makes

2009-05-18T19:50:00.000-07:00

…the final section on Seinfeld, despite your obvious fondness for it, is an excrescence that should be lopped off and replaced with a true conclusion.

— Will Pritchard, concerning “Derrida, de Man and the Dunciad: The Scriblerian Deconstruction of Economic Logocentrism”

I have often endeavoured to establish a friendship among all men of genius, and would fain have it done. They are seldom above three or four contemporaries, and, if they could be united, would drive the world before them.

—Jonathon Swift to Alexander Pope
September 20, 1723

In 1989 when Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld worked as stand-up comedians, one was considered successful based on his or her presence on television. This tradition began with the comedian Andy Griffith’s fictional role in the 1960s; by the 1980s comedians had begun to play “themselves,” such as Rosanne Barr in Rosanne; and Bill Cosby’s rise to the top in the situation comedy The Cosby Show epitomized the path of a successful comedian. In other words, the “powerful intermediary” that booksellers were in the beginning of the 18^th century is what network television became at the end of the 20^th. Economic logocentrism is even more widespread in television as a show must prove to be immediately popular–that is to say sufficiently profitable—to even be allowed to be fully presented to the public, that is to have one’s presence fully broadcasted. An unknown comedian gets a break by turning their identity into a five-minute monologue for The Tonight Show. It is in this atmosphere that David and Seinfeld were allowed to produce Seinfeld, a situation comedy that masquerades as another clichéd dramatization of a celebrity living in “the real world.”

Seinfeld, like Pope’s poisoning and Dunciad, is construed in (at least) two forms which cannot be completely differentiated from one another: the implied production of the show that puts it on television, and the fictionalized version—Jerry—that the protagonists, “Jerry Seinfeld” and George Costanza, try to produce. Because the comedian-gets-sitcom motif was so tired, dull, and economically logocentric this doubled the presentation of their story, and the differences and similarities between them, and allows the show to satirize the production industry and the mode of the situation comedy itself. The moment that Seinfeld and David present their “show about nothing,” i.e. Seinfeld, is Pope’s real-life poisoning of Curll—they accept “the bag of sack” that they assume to be to their benefit—and the moment that “Seinfeld” and Costanza pitch their “show about nothing,” i.e. Jerry, is the “Account” of it. From there the two are set free to make countless jokes against network television in its prime slots with the consent of NBC, not because the network understood the satiric levels of the show but, because it made them money.

To what extent Seinfeld is “Seinfeld” and what extent David is Costanza is under constant revision in the show, for we assume, at the beginning, that Seinfeld is “Seinfeld,” and that Costanza is a fictional, joking addition, like Scriblerus. However, as more heavily annotated editions come out we see that David is Costanza more than Seinfeld is “Seinfeld,” for example in the DVDs and their “Notes about Nothing” that describe the real-life material from which David got his ideas. His later overtly-autobiographical show Curb Your Enthusiasm further demonstrates how much Seinfeld was a satire on David for making Seinfeld, most notably in a scene between David and the actor who played Costanza in which the latter claims his character on Seinfeld could not be considered a respectable, decent human being, and the former looks very uncomfortable by the significance of what is said. Seinfeld exists with the Dunciad Variorum as “the most unreliable language in terms of which man names and transforms himself,” and we can never know to what extent the presence of Costanza in one work inscribes the absence of its author, how inscribed Pope is in Scriblerus, or how justified any attack is, be it in print, on television, or with poison.

The Différance that Poison Makes

2009-05-18T19:25:00.000-07:00

When one publisher, Edmund Curll, greedily published and erroneously ascribed a certain collection of poems to Pope, poems that could have compromised him legally above all other considerations, he responded well beyond what George might have done: he poisoned him and then wrote about it in the “Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison,” as “publish’d by an Eye Witness.”[1]

That he called it an “Account” can be read in a variety of ways here: its meaning as “narration” or “relation” of an incident, as it would mean most obviously in this context, arrives last to the English language; “Account” as a “reckoning of money received and paid” has a longer presence in the language and cannot be neglected; and of course it describes Curll “answering for conduct,” in the sense that an “account” is one’s judgment and punishment.[2] In this word we can see the relation between the story within the work, the story of the money made off that work, and the story of who is right and who is wrong.

The work begins with what is, in once sense, a celebration of Pope’s subversion of the power of publishers, and, in another, a self-abasing lamentation of the “horrid and barbarous revenge” upon the person of this publisher: “History furnishes us with Examples of many Satyrical Authors who have fallen Sacrifices to Revenge, but not of any Booksellers that I know of, except the unfortunate Subject of the following Papers." A tone of mock-chastisement, with Curll as “the unfortunate Subject,” exists concurrently with a laudatory presentation of Pope committing a justified revenge. The meaning of “account” as judgment is complicated considering that Pope receives no punishment and it is more an “account”—or narration—of the “account”—or punishment—of Curll for a crime that precedes the revenge. The ironic condemnation of Pope by himself makes it a mock-“account,” a feigned reprimand of someone instituting a very real reprimand.

The reason for revenge against Curll is that he ascribed the Court Poems to either “a Lady of Quality, Mr. Pope, or Mr. Gay." This act may surely be considered one worthy of retaliation as Curll describes, while under the influence of the poison, how, “if [he] survives this, [he] will be revenged on” the man who ascribed the printing of the poems to him by “reprint[ing] these very Poems in his Name.” Ascribing acts to those who did not commit them is malicious; while at the same time committing a malicious act and ascribing it to oneself—“Mr. Pope”—seems more acceptable in a print world concerned with literature instead of money.

The complexity of Pope’s work goes beyond the division between his attacking self and the one that describes him–the “Eye Witness”—in the third person as a “Person of bright Parts … carry’d away by the Instigations of the Devil”: it lies in the ambiguity between which of these Popes asserts the presence of his true meaning. He could have poisoned Curll as the simple act of revenge it is purported to be, and then written about it to further articulate and publicize the humiliation. However, what is more likely, Pope always intended to write about it and thus he published the incident twice, however untraditional the first satiric attack might have been. Indeed he goes to a bookseller with an idea and its physical representation, though it is poison as opposed to a draft; the greedy bookseller accepts anything given to him, though it is a “Glass of sack” opposed to the envelop of a manuscript; this then multiplies greatly in the possession of the bookseller as he reproduces it for the public, though it is vomit and not books that he bestows upon the world. Pope, however, would argue this final difference to be “delusive” as well considering much of what Curll published. As a bookseller he did not merely discard Pope’s creation into he the toilet; instead he distributed it in his “strange Fancy to run a Vomiting all over the House.”

Pope understood that a disagreement with a bookseller needs to take place extratextually for him to be able to subvert the control of this “powerful intermediary” who is in charge of the presentation of his work to the public, or, in the case of the “Court Poems,” what is not his work. It was this very understanding that led him to conceive the Dunciad in the way he did: that it would be a poison to the economically logocentric, disguised by what they love to consume: books filled with the controversy the public loves to consume so much. the Dunciad is the poison in Curll and the a in différance, and, it incites him to throw up his “Compleat Key to the Dunciad,” in the year of its publication and the Curliad, following the Variorum edition. It defers Pope's intention and forces us to search through vomit it to find it. Yet Curll seems wholly unaware that the poison of Pope’s design lingers within him and forces him to spew self-damning nonsense.

[1] Pope, Alexander. “Full and True Account of a Horrid and Barbarous Revenge by Poison On the Body of Mr. Edmund Curll, Bookseller; With a faithful copy of his Last Will and Testament,” and “A Further Account.” The Prose Works of Alexander Pope, Vol. I. Norman Ault, ed. Oxford: Blackwell, 1936. 257-266, 275-285.

[2] “Account.” The Oxford English Dictionary. 2^nd Ed. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989.

The Dunciad

2009-05-18T19:17:00.000-07:00

To graduate that fall I needed to take a seminar class on a certain topic. My choice was between Emily Dickinson and a class called “Authors and Scribblers of the 18^th Century.” I chose the latter, though I never really liked Alexander Pope or Jonathon Swift, figuring it would prove to be less restrictive than devoting myself to Emily Dickinson, and that it would have a discussion of writing and what makes someone more than a mere scribbler, and that I should know something of classical satire if I was seriously to conceive a work on Seinfeld. What ultimately happened was that I had my entire thinking on Seinfeld framed by what became my final paper for the class, with Alexander Pope as the 18^th-century Larry David disgusted with the disintegrating print culture, and his Dunciad Variorum as Seinfeld, the work of, for, and against the vapidity and commercialism of the endless, dull stories that were flowing from the presses to the sellers to the public, or, in the case of Seinfeld, from Hollywood to the living rooms of this fine country.

David’s stand-up career has been mythologized as that of an unpredictable parade of confrontations and one-minute performances ended in disgust after an audience member ordered a drink as he was trying to tell a joke. His art was one defined by receiving no respect: one responded to by hecklers in noisy bars who attack at signs of weakness and failing self-confidence, defined by years and years of poverty and obscurity, and characterized by self-abasement and self-destruction, joking that you’re just a stand-up comedian—you’re not writing Ulysses, you’re not singing with USA for Africa, you’re not Al Pacino. You might have been cool in the sixties or seventies when you were listened to on records like rock stars, if you were Richard Pryor or Jerry Lewis or George Carlin, but by the eighties, in part thanks to Andy Kaufman, you had to make fun of stand-up comedy, expand beyond it, appear in movies, star in movies, make sitcoms, to be a stand-up comedian. In spite of all this Larry David would replace the microphone on the stand and leave the room, standing-up for his profession, unwilling to bestow these assholes with his genius.

Alexander Pope was also somewhat curmudgeonly with his two-liners and was horrified that his audience had so many other alternatives with whom to replace him, with whom he shared the shelves and shared the title “author”; that, in 1820, with a sudden spread of literacy, a printing boom in London, and the loosening of rules in both poetic form and content, he was surrounded by hacks. And not only were no talent amateurs making a joke of his profession, greedy publishers, the “powerful intermediaries”[1] that stood between the author and his publication, were making a killing from this very joke. They re-presented the works of well-known authors with their own criticisms and interpretations—many responses to Pope were very colorful in their depiction of Pope’s impotence and malformity—and they tainted literature with the words and ambitions of those hungry for money, not truth. But Pope’s relationship to these publishers, like that of Seinfeld and David to NBC, while it was repugnant to his “artistic integrity,” as George put it, was entirely necessary.

The 1729 second Variorum edition of the Dunciad reapropriates the criticisms of and responses to the Dunciad and through the invented editor Martinus Scriblerus (Latin for “Martin the Scribbler) tells the story of the dunciad of idiots that have the nerve to publish their insights on a work they feel doesn’t merit consideration because of the ghastly way it makes fun of them. This story begins and ends the work and occurs simultaneously, indeed at the very bottom of every page, with the first Dunciad, which at times only fits two lines on a page full of notes and criticisms, most written by Pope’s invented Scriblerus, a form of the work that invited critics and publishers to respond and contribute even more to this already comically annotated poem, continuing the story of the misguided who want to prove their interpretations right and make money off that correctness in pathetic condition of economic logocentrism.

Pope succeeded in creating a book that has no boundaries. Part of the power of the printed book is that it is bounded: it is separate from its readers. As I read I create meaning in collaboration with the inked marks on the page. But there is a myth of the book that tells me (deceivingly) that these marks are a boundary I cannot cross: I am on the outside of their meaning, and they are on the inside. And they are fixed, forever. Transgression of this magic boundary is only allowed to textual editors, who rather thrillingly have in their control the right to alter the fixed text. All of this is deconstructed in The Dunciad. The distinction between author and editor is mocked and subverted; the process of annotation, which attempts to control and specify meaning, is made impossible.[2]

This synthesis of the ever-evolving critical apparatus with the work of literature itself, that is the once-unadorned heroic couplets of the first edition of the Dunciad, acts as an effective deconstruction of the priority of the anterior creation of the work—or the sign of its origin—to the posterior criticism of it—the sign of that sign.

The Dunciad Variorum does not simply present a tension between the poem and its notes, it also presents one between Pope and the invented Scriblerus, and the extent to which their identities are inscribed in other identities complicates the distinction between them. It must be taken as an ironic comment on presence that in a work edited by Scriblerus—a fake person—we have the mystery “solved” of what persons in real life are attacked by having their names given in full. Initially, in the 1728 edition, as one 20^th century editor put it, “the protagonists of this epic are not fixed individuals, but blank signifiers, whose referents were to be, as the (un)editor of the 1728 edition says, 'clapp'd in as they rose, fresh and fresh, and chang'd from day to day’.”[3] However, the Variorum, categorized by its obsession to annotate, asserts “that obscurities are in principle resolvable, and words, especially names, have a specific, fixed, and discoverable reference,” though they were originally intended to be “chang’d from day to day,” making “the business of editorial annotation absurd.” And, with the passage of time and the accumulation of attacks against the Dunciad, “Pope's mocking notes, in successive editions, add to the creative chaos, and further cast doubt on the whole business of annotation.”

Scriblerus’s presence is, in a sense, like purposely inserting spelling mistakes into a work in the way Derrida misspells the French word for difference with an a, providing it with something “silent, secret, and discreet as a tomb,” and allowing it to “bypass the order of apprehension,” for the “full understanding of the work” is at a non-existent end of deconstructed understanding.[4] Indeed, questions of spelling enter frequently into Scriblerus’s commentary. He even makes the decision to spell “Theobold” phonetically—that is, incorrectly—as “Tibbald.” He agrees with Theobold’s “preservation of this very Letter e,” with which Shakespear(e) and the Dunc(e)iad—and différence—should properly be spelled; though he ultimately chose to “follow the Manuscript, and print it without any E at all.”[5] The over-annotation has undone the very thing it attempted: in solving the phonetic mystery of “Theobold” as “Tibbald” he becomes different from the real-life figure that the Variorum is supposed to pinpoint him as.

[1] McLaverty, James. "The Mode of Existence of Literary Works of Art: the Case of the Dunciad Variorum." Pope. Hammond, B., ed. London: Longman, 1996, pp. 220-32.

[2] Davis, Tom, page 344 “The Epic of Bibliography: Alexander Pope and Textual Criticism.” Text: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Textual Studies, 9 (1996), pp. 342-52.

[3] Ibid

[4] Derrida, Jacques, page 120. “Différance.” Critical Theory Since 1965. Hazard Adams, ed. Tallahassee: Florida State University Press, 1986. 120-136.

[5] Pope, Alexander. The Dunciad Variorum. The Poems of Alexander Pope, vol. III. Rumbold, Valerie, ed. London: Pearson, 2007. 113-366.

Structure, Seinfeld, and Play

2009-05-12T23:02:00.002-07:00

This is the first entry actually composed on the blog, all previous entries began in a Word Document I have been working on for the last five or so months. I have put them in this semi-published form today for a variety of reasons: for other Seinfeld scholars who may want to know to what extent Paul de Man's "Semiology and Rhetoric" has been discussed in connection to situation comedies beyond All in the Family or to provide something for other such google searches that might lead to nothing; to receive thoughts from anyone willing to lend them; and to inspire me to finish sections of the work that have been neglected, and to begin those that have yet to even be put into words; and who knows why the hell else.

The Burning

2009-05-12T23:02:00.001-07:00

I began today as I do most days: turning on an episode of Seinfeld I have recorded from the night before and then preparing and drinking coffee while watching it. Today it was “The Wait Out” from the last episodes of the seventh season. Kramer gets arrested after a series of events that began with him wanting to wear jeans again to assert that he is not getting old, that he has “the body of a taught pre-teen Swedish boy.” I then devoted my day to writing an excess of 1,200 words concerning the first two minutes of “the Contest.” I asked my dad if he had any thoughts on the joke that precedes George’s entrance, that terrorists do the laundry of their hostages occasionally, and he told me the story of the husband of an old colleague that had been taken hostage by Hezbollah in the seventies, was given clothes to wear in the local style—light, white cotton material—that were periodically washed by the captors. This made me entirely rethink the joke. It now seemed very callous to me. At a later stage in the essay I called my friend Kimberly at one point to ask her for her password at her account at our school because mine expired since I graduated. I wanted to look up “masturbation” in the Oxford English Dictionary to see what kind of history it had in figurative use. She refused to give me her password, though, as she used the same one for everything. The idea made her very uncomfortable. She agreed to email me the entry the next time she was at a computer. I was miffed but amused by this. I went for a walk with my mother and the dog at one point and decided to try on a pair of jeans that haven’t fit for a year or so, yet that I haven’t tried since I have recently adopted a healthier lifestyle. The fit was uncomfortable but I insisted the rest of the day that I was working them in a little. At one point I became distracted by Jason Alexander’s early career. I decided to read the entire plot summary of his first movie, The Burning, in which an alcoholic camp employee is maimed by a camper prank and returns to exact revenge, to see if the 9^th-season episode of the same name was some sort of joke on it. I was unable to draw any such connections. When looking for scenes featuring Alexander on You Tube I was only able to find the trailer and “the infamous raft massacre scene.” This did, however, lead me to a lot of incredible commercials he made in the ‘80s. He did a sort of Music Man sales pitch to a group of people on the street that gets bigger and bigger for a new McDonald’s product that separated the burger and allowed the patty to stay hot and the lettuce and tomato to stay crisp. There was another great advertisement for Miller Lite in which Yogi Berra sits at a bar with a crowd around him, and Alexander right behind him, and speaks nonsense on behalf of the product, causing everyone to look increasingly confused, with Alexander’s consternation as the most visible in the shot. Eventually the email came from Kimberly and I learned that the first known use of figurative masturbation was by Byron in discussion of Keats’s poetry, that “such writing was the stuff of mental masturbation.” I finished my thoughts on the subject, watched the 10:30 Fox broadcast of “The Invitations,” did not find it very funny,[1] went to bed, masturbated, and fell asleep.

[1] However, while the George plotline has grown more disgusting than ever with this viewing, I appreciated for the first time the doubling of Jerry’s revelation, as vocalized to Kramer, concerning his own situation, that results from the doubling of himself in meeting Jeannie Steinman: “Now I know what I've been looking for all these years: myself! I've been waiting for me to come along, and now I 've swept myself off my feet!” which, by the end of the episode, becomes: “I think I may have made a big mistake. All of a sudden it hit me, I realized what the problem is: I can't be with someone like me—I hate myself! If anything I need to get the exact opposite of me. It's too much—it's too Much! I can't take it—I can't take it!”

The First Two Seasons of "McCauley"/The Summer of Ribs

2009-05-12T23:00:00.001-07:00

Andrew,  

Andrew, Andrew, Andrew. Read your chapter regards “The Last Two Seasons of Seinfeld.” There are two errors that I would like to point out right off the bat: “the school may be referred to as ‘T Town’ because its center occupies what would otherwise be T street.” No one refers to the school as “T Town,” but rather the neighborhood that exists on T Street, west of 27th. It's kind of a shitty part of town. But BJ's dad lived there at one point. And here's some information I found on the internet about it: “In the 1940s, Lincoln bankers began redlining in Lincoln, in an attempt to restrict blacks to a neighborhood called ‘T-Town’.” So T-Town has a history.  

Also: “I still have not seen Sour Grapes as it has not been released on DVD, and movie rental stores have severely depleted VHS collections these days.” If I'm not mistaken, when I saw Sour Grapes, I saw it on DVD. So I think it has had a DVD release.  

One interesting thought I had about the last two seasons is that the persona of Kramer is explicitly defined by Jerry's becoming of Kramer in the Kenny Rogers episode. Or at least, in that episode, the Kramerian persona is so boldly underlined, as if the viewer was too dense to understand what traits made Kramer. I think that is illustrative of the heavy-handedness of the last couple of seasons. However, I find it interesting that Jerry becomes Kramer, not in the episode in which he gets Kramer's blood (a half pint of Kramer) but in the episode when he's forced to sleep in Kramer's bed.  

With the interpretation that the writers, during the last two seasons, were finally doing what they wanted to do, unrestrained by Larry David, it seems that these writers were just useful idiots that Larry David kept around who had none of his sense of subtlety or restraint. As if the whole time they were working on the show with David, they never got it. Or maybe they understood that once David was away, the public would understand why the show was different (i.e. because David was gone) and thus new they could just “have fun” and it didn't need to be “about anything” like it was during the David era. Or at least it didn't need to be about the same things. I mean, to an extent, who didn't want Jerry to turn into Kramer? I think one of the most significant aspects of the last two seasons is how much characters who were formerly side characters come to prominence: Newman, Puddy, Peterman. It was like, now that David is gone, we can let actors that we love put on a show, and develop these characters more. I mean, Puddy was a character that they actually brought back.  

That's all for now. My life is crazy. I'll follow up with an e-mail “about me.”  

Love, Brendan

The American Ulysses

2009-05-12T22:58:00.000-07:00

For the first few shows of Seinfeld we were still figuring it out. And then one day Larry and I took a walk up Fryman Canyon which was a very oxygenated walk, it was really steep, we were really huffing and puffing but we were getting a lot of air to our brains, and suddenly we were talking about a story and suddenly it became a stream of consciousness, like a James Joyce, thing, like “this could happen, this could happen, this could happen, this could happen.” And suddenly the form of the show kind of emerged from this conversation.

—Larry Charles in conversation

Anything that is felt, and that is felt deeply or deeply enough or even that gives amusement, is material for art. We don’t have to take a conventional subject like Greek drama, which could speak only of gods, or medieval painting, which was largely devoted to Christian mythology. We can use anything, anything at all.

—William Carlos Williams

I am become a name.

—Alfred Tennyson, “Ulysses”

American poetry defines itself, in the terms of Emerson and William Carlos Williams, as distinct from the English tradition. Our subject matter, therefore, need be not be the same as it is to the Europeans. And the same goes for that which we pastiche, our inspirations and references are to what is ours, not that which has been inherited from centuries ago on the other side of the world: our Ulysses therefore would not be based in the Odyssey—it is Superman, the North American epic, which our distinct epic of pastiche would reference: our Ulysses is not The Wasteland, that “great catastrophe to our letters” as Williams put it, that “gave the poem back to the academics,” and signified the defection of Eliot from American literature to that of Europe—our great work would come later, once the canon has been established, and indeed exists in a form as Seinfeld.

In the great American pastiche—whether is be Paterson or Seinfeld—stories from the Bible are not referenced; they first must pass through America’s great book, Moby Dick. And, in the case of Seinfeld, it is not the novel that reconstructs the epic poem so as to cast everyday characters in the place of Grecian heroes—it is the situation comedy that reconstructs the, similarly serial, comic book, casting its everymen in place of Superman. Stuffy old-world scholarship is thrown out; the writers don’t devote themselves to reworking the storylines of the reference work in the way that Ulysses has each chapter correspond to each book of the Odyssey. Rather it is the character of Superman, a myth who transcends the texts devoted to him—comic books, television episodes, radio broadcasts, movies—that plays a role within the show and casts a shadow over it, a benevolent and unconditionally American shadow.

The Americanness of Seinfeld cannot be overstated, that is, the extent to which its humor depends upon American idioms, objects, and, of course, television. The show answers the call that Emerson put out 150 years earlier for “the poet” who, “with sufficient plainness or sufficient profoundness,” manages to “address ourselves to life,” and to “chaunt our own times and social circumstances.” In other words there is no distinctly American artistic creation to mirror our distinctly American civilization—“no genius in America, with tyrannous eye, which knew the value of incomparable materials, and saw, in the barbarism and materialism of the times, another carnival of the same gods whose picture he so much admires in Homer” (Emerson 338).

William Carlos Williams approached the same question in the next century and advocated a split from English poetic forms, whose traditions and constraints muddled with the new and invigorating possibilities of the American Idiom, which he saw as “characterized by certain differences from the language used among cultured Englishmen, being completely free from all influences which can be summed up as having to do with ‘the Establishment’” (Wagner 101). For Williams, there is a very real connection between the tradition, “the Establishment,” and the impediment of expression. “The conventions of speech and the conventions of art, of the poetic line,” as an interviewed Williams said, “carry over the restricting formulations of that language. They even modify the thought of the language” (Wagner 25).

Seinfeld gives very unflattering depictions of pretentiousness, usually involving affectations of faux-English accents and putting on high-culture airs, and even worse are those who are explicitly English: Jerry’s alcoholic seatmate whose dog Farfel Jerry must look after; the rich dupes who find genius in Kramer’s portrait and invite him over to dinner for further study; Elaine dates, first in “The Soup” “a real bounder”—who says things like “Where I come from, we don't say ‘What?’ It's proper to say ‘Pardon?’”—and then an Englishman with a ponytail—“Come on: Ponytail. Get real,” as Jerry puts it—who unironically flourishes in the affectations of Manhattan (working in a high-end clothing store), and sincerely enjoys J. Peterman, (saying to Elaine, “I especially enjoy the catalogue, those fanciful narratives really take me away”); Mr. Pitt is vaguely English, but wholly a lampoon of upper class airs, eating a Snickers bar with a knife and fork, and generally being slightly removed from American culture, using his assistant Elaine as an intermediary with the common world; Jerry dates a closet organizer, a decidedly unnecessary upscale luxury, who is a virgin, or, in other words, disconnected from the current of cultural understanding that involves the unclothed, undignified, impure, and unrestricted, which, is what separates English poetic tradition from that Williams’ liberated American Idiom expansion of acceptable material.

Joyce, of course, an Irishman, was also concerned with disrupting English arrogance and decorum, and expanding the conception of what is acceptable material for literature, causing a decade long ban of Ulysses in the United Kingdom and the United States. The “obscene” elements of the book were simply descriptions of what would normally go unsaid: what are considered personal, undiscussed experiences that occur, for the most part, in the bathroom; though, to me, the depiction of Stephen and Leopold peeing outside is the most beautiful moment in the book.

The avant-garde looked to Rabelais and the carnivalesque, and arose from the bathroom when Duchamp, at the same time Joyce was writing Ulysses, signed a urinal—making “R. Mutt” an important precedent for George Costanza, the name signed by Larry David on his receptacle—, called it Fountain and entered it into an exhibit, only to have it rejected; and from Piero Manzoni’s 1961 90 cans of Merda d’ Artista, each with 30 grams of his own shit sold at the going rate of gold, to Archie Bunker’s infamous off-screen-yet-audible flush, to Andres Serrano’s photo of Jesus crucified in a glass of his own piss, to Chris Ofili’s use of shit in The Holy Virgin Mary, the incorporation of what we all experience in the bathroom has bestowed works with a taboo realism and a minimalist attack on artistic pretensions and bourgeois austerity. If we put certain people on a pedestal—literally in the case of the Fountain reproductions—in museums, in libraries, and on TV, everything he creates should merit our attention; and, at the same time, if an artist produces shit just like the rest of us then we shouldn’t take anything he does that seriously. Or if one knows where to find the best bathroom wherever you are in Manhattan, as George Costanza has figured out—in other words, has perfected defecation to an art—he deserves the Turner Prize.

Like scatology and masturbation the use of autobiography is essential to both Ulysses and Seinfeld, as in any epic made intimate. One could say that Joyce places his didactic, intellectual self in Stephen Dedalus—his already established alter ego in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man—and his more visceral, personal, and metaphorical self in Harold Bloom; and that Larry David places his successful, likable self in Jerry, who in turn is the infallible Superman side, and his more truthful, offensive self in George, the more human and frustrated Clark Kent. But, of course, this ignores the fact that his co-creator plays himself and is much more obviously behind the creation of his own character. The nature of Seinfeld’s multi-authorship reverses the typical mode of autobiographical interpretations of a work: the principle question is not which character has the author favored with his sincere sensibilities; it becomes which author has imbued himself with the dynamic between Jerry and George and extended to Elaine and Kramer, and with the nature of a serial show, the authorship can change from episode to episode or even line to line.

The allusion within the patronym of Joyce’s alter ego complicates the potential definition of its user: is Stephen Daedelus named for the great inventor and creator of Greek mythology, which would highlight the capacity for narrative creation and imaginative innovention? Or is he son of Dad Daedelus—Simon, the father who is crucial to the Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man,[1]—which would highlight the arrogance in proclaiming your writing to be as grandiose as wings that could liberate one to fly to her freedom? When Icarus soars too high with the wings constructed by his father, and ignores his warning that they will melt if he flies higher than he needs to, he loses it all. Whether Joyce is the father or the son oscillates through the novel, if the “hawklike man flying above the waves” is in fact just a boy whose presumption of his capability makes him less capable than he ever was.

The last season episode “the Blood” aligns George with the arrogant son of Greek mythology Icarus—having botched a relationship in an attempt to incorporate food and television into the couple’s sexual routine, George explains that he “[f]lew too close to the sun on wings of pastrami.” Jerry scoffs at George’s presumption, saying sarcastically, “Yeah: that’s what you did.” It is at this moment that the epic winds down. Larry David had already left the show at this point, yet George remains as the memory of the man who created him in his image, but, like the aging Ulysses that has long return to Ithaca in Tennyson’s poem, he has “become a name,” become defined by a myth that is larger than a single person could be; George’s being is no longer traveling through epic levels of ambiguity and layers of irony, as Odysseus once had the adventure of all adventures; he has become a cartoonish hedonist whose depth is sarcasm deep: “Yeah, that’s what you did.” David’s rigorous attention to detail, to the undecidable joke, has faded away, leaving “an idle king,” one who is not on a voyage somewhere between Daedelus and Icarus, between Leopold and Stephen, George and Jerry, George and Larry, and Seinfeld and David and every other person who wrote for, acted in, or somehow contributed to the show—but has instead become a name: Costanza.

[1] A title which invites questions about the work of fiction’s relation to its author similar to the titling of a situation comedy and its main character with the last name of its star and (co-) creator

Our Grotesque Penchant for Being Human

2009-05-12T22:57:00.001-07:00

I noticed the bathroom’s one stall was locked. As I was peeing at the urinal I heard a rustling, a soft moan issuing from the stall, and then a flush, a cough, and the opening and closing of the door. A man was staring at his face in the mirror above the left sink when I approached and washed my hands to his right. I looked at him and he continued to ponder himself in the mirror, working over his hands methodically in the running water. He began a monologue that seemed to be to himself: “Fate and its omnipotent sense of humor presents itself at your worst moments when our grotesque penchant for being human prostrates us as punchlines against the comic storyline of societal values. ‘Because it’s there,’ sums up the essential pattern of causation that relegates us to inevitable vileness: the only reasonable conclusion is that civilization is absolute lunacy, and that the paths we take in place of the straight and narrow can only be judged as obscene by our developed, civilized consciences.” He shook his hands in the sink and left me wondering if it was possible that someone just pinpointed George Costanza as a determinist hero. I suppose if you get an audience to laugh at the irony of the human condition, the positions in which we find ourselves, you create a population of accomplices that exonerate you by their understanding. Moments before I was too taken aback by the honesty I just encountered to be to have been outraged. We don’t need to place people in courtrooms to dissect the pathology of our demented geniuses if we just let them unremittingly spin their justifications.

How They Write in the Bizarro World

2009-05-12T22:56:00.001-07:00

2008 had a very strange feeling about it, and its two perpendicular infinity symbols made me doubt whether it could actually end. But of course it had to, and toward the celebration of that event I went to visit my friend Andrew in Santa Cruz. I brought my copy of Jean-Paul Sartre’s autobiography The Words and my notebook in which I had my various strands of notes on Seinfeld. I brought the book because I was interested in re-reading it and analyzing my adolescent decision to become a writer, a decision heavily influenced by Sartre’s discussion and justification of the profession. I got through the first few pages on the bus from Salinas to Watsonville but decided I would rather listen to the radio and look at the fields as we passed by them and the sunset beyond. Andrew wasn’t finished with work until eight, so I sojourned in Watsonville a little, where I’d never really spent any time, before getting on my connecting bus to Santa Cruz. I walked around the downtown a little and got a pair of pants at the Goodwill, as my first preparation for the new year, and then got on my bus.

The route took me inland to places I had never seen before, further distracting me from The Words and the bus arrived downtown an hour after its departure, which I found extraordinary considering the trip would have taken ten minutes on the highway. I later learned to seek out the “Express” bus for the trip back to bypass rural Santa Cruz County. The radio signal went in and out the whole time, necessitating a very proactive finger on the dial, and an incredibly varied listening experience. Arriving in South Santa Cruz a radio program finally came in clear. Its theme was the passing of the year. It told some lame jokes and then put on a condescending skit in which a know-it-all explains to Caesar why our modern calendar is needed to accommodate the 365 and one-quarter days it takes for the Earth to rotate around the sun. Eventually I realized it wasn’t a bad show, it was simply intended for children.

Upon arriving downtown I went through the back of the bookstore to use the bathroom. The atmosphere of heavy anticipation met me when I came out the front. The sidewalks of the downtown street were filled with people and there were murmurs of a parade, which made sense considering it was far too early to celebrate the passing of midnight. I walked the length of the strip, received a complimentary Bad Boys Bail Bonds shirt from an impromptu promotion next to a large black van, bought a coffee at the other end to wait for the parade to come by, and watched the lively, homemade procession. It suddenly seemed that, in spite of the simulation of my entire life in a third-world country in a four month priod, my entrance into the adult world, the ten year anniversary of the end of Seinfeld and my ineffable task of writing a self-referential study of it, it being a leap-year, the election of a black president, insane gas prices, global economic collapse, the replacement of Fidel Castro as Cuba’s president, the continued existence of George Bush’s never-ending presidency, and those perpendicular infinity symbols, maybe 2008 could end just like all of the others. It should be noted, however, that a leap second was to extend the year, though not significantly.

In this spirit of renewal I walked toward Andrew’s house to meet him. I stopped along the way and bought a bottle of whiskey, and, by the time I got to his house decided to walk around a little more, as I still had almost an hour before he’d be home. I passed by a grocery store, decided to buy beer, then realized I didn’t want to walk around with it, and continued on, deferring the undertaking. Thirty minutes later I went back at the store, but was denied entrance as they were closing early due to the nature of the evening. I walked back down the hill to the Chevron station, disappointed that I was prevented from supporting the mom and pop store by the mom and pop store. I was further disappointed by the terrible selection and inflated prices, and somewhat relieved when I wasn’t allowed to buy the beer, due to a store policy that would not accept American passports, although international ones were OK. I went back another three blocks to where I bought the whiskey, where mom and pop literally were working, along with their three children, and then walked back up the hill to Andrew’s house. It was there I learned that he was kept late because the store was so busy, and that he was going to a party at his girlfriend’s house at the other side of town. It was decided that I would walk in that direction and he would meet me part way. So, after leaving my new pants and my Walkman, I walked again past the Chevron and the mom and pop liquor store with my bag full of The Words, whiskey, beer, Seinfeld notes and my Bail Bonds shirt.

My last remembrance of the bag was placing it down next to the sofa of the house and taking out its liquid contents. Whether I left it there when we all left to another party at around 11:30, or I took it with me and left it at that party, or lost it somewhere along the way, is impossible to say. Neither house could locate it the next day and I could think of no other explanation for where it went. I went back to Salinas on January 2^nd wearing my new pants, with my old ones in a plastic bag with my Walkman. I decided that I should not question my decision to be a writer and just let it be.

A few days later “The Watch” came on TV in which George is in the process of negotiating a better deal with NBC, because the offer is such an insult compared to the salary that the network gives Ted Danson. It ends with him weasling his way into Russell-the-executive’s apartment and begging him to pick the show, ultimately accepting less money than he initially refused. He shows up at Jerry’s apartment where Jerry and his parents are very excited to hear that George and the network reached an agreement, especially as it implied that George got a better offer:

Jerry: “So what'd we get?”

George: “Eight thousand dollars.”

Jerry: “Beautiful!”  

George, ashamed: “That's for the two of us.”  

Helen: “Four thousand apiece?”  

Jerry: “Let me see if I understand this. In other words, you held out  for—less money. ”

George: “I was wrong, you were right.”  

Jerry: “You know, the basic idea of negotiation, as I understand it, is to get your price to go up.”  

George: “You're smart, I'm dumb.”  

Jerry: “You know, this is how they negotiate in the bizarro world.”

I couldn’t help but consider my project with a certain irony, and was glad that I didn’t have to answer to any collaborator, nor to his parents.

The 10th anniversary of the finale of Seinfeld

2009-05-12T22:55:00.000-07:00

Upon returning to the United States popular culture alerted me to the 10^th anniversary of the finale of Seinfeld. A poll was given to editors at TV Guide that asked whether or not the show was still funny ten years later; half said yes; half said no. There was no reunion show or other such major acknowledgment by any of its creators. One writer for Newsweek called its pacing “forced and formulaic,” questioned if Jerry could “be a worse actor,” and that “after a while, it all has started to sound like a whole lotta yadda yadda yadda.” Another writer for Newsweek said the show endured so strongly, not just because the four principle members of the cast ranked among best of television history but also, because “no sitcom in the history of television has featured a more talented or memorable bunch of second, third and fourth bananas than Seinfeld.”

It became increasingly clear to me that I needed to explicate why the show endures because it is purposely “forced and formulaic” and “a whole lot of yadda yadda yadda,” and that Jerry’s markedly poor acting was a perfect blank canvas against which the most memorable bunch of first, second, third and fourth bananas in the history of television could paint their masterpieces.

Man and Superman

2009-05-12T22:45:00.001-07:00

My friend Riley’s favorite joke in the show is Jerry’s preoccupation with Superman, the discrepancy between the man of steel’s daily life-saving and the comedian’s vapid detail-obsessing. “The Race” puts this juxtaposition to the forefront of the episode in that he dates a woman named Lois, and delights in this fact, as highlighted in the episode’s opening dialogue:

JERRY: Ready to go, Lois?

LOIS: You really like to say my name? Don't you?

JERRY: Excuse me, Lois. Stand back, Lois. Jimmy's in trouble, Lois.

Jerry’s insinuation that he is Superman, not only stems simply from his address of a woman as “Lois” but also, as they are in a normal office in the daytime, plays with the irony that one would never assume Clark Kent to be Superman, just as they would never assume Jerry to be. The extent to which Jerry is assumed not to be super is the premise of episode: he won a race in high school by accidentally getting a head start that only George noticed, and thus his speed becomes mythical, mostly because he is assumed to be so ordinary.

The joke reaches perfection moments later when her boss—Duncan Meyer who came in second place in this race—tells her she has to stay late, and she asks Jerry, “Would you be able to come all the way downtown again in rush hour to pick me up?” and he replies, “Well, I'd have to be Superman to do that, Lois.” We accept the hyperbole as it seems an everyday figure of speech, and the rest follows logically, as we assume he will be able to come all the way back, especially considering the pride his friends and he constantly take in knowing the best routes in New York. His joke thus proves him to be Superman. He is not a super comedian, but rather by way of being a comedian, or more exactly the jokes provided him by the writers (who include Jerry Seinfeld), he is Superman, an important distinction discussed by George and Jerry in another episode: whether he would have, among all his other superpowers, a “super sense of humor.” It doesn’t matter what’s literal when she asks, “So you were the fastest kid in school?” because the myth exists, and thus he acknowledges the fact with more figurative language—“Faster than a speeding bullet, Lois,” that even in its original context we imagine to be hyperbole, or at least taken on faith. Again he proves he is Superman by having the entire discussion exist on a figurative level.

The mere presence of Duncan Meyer in the plot structure maintains this figurative role for Jerry—he provides the role of the nemesis that passes in and out the serial narrative, in the line of New men, car thieves, odor, etc. and sets up an immediate struggle between them by his role as Lois’s tyrannical boss (“He owns the means of production!”) who insists upon using this power, like a villain holding a damsel in distress, to once again challenge Jerry. But how is maintaining a false start as a true one the same as standing up for liberty and justice? After lying to Lois about the race he justified it by saying she might tell her boss in the event of a bad break up—“I want him to go to his grave never being certain I got that head start.” Jerry thus acts for the sake of ambiguity, the preservation of a beautiful lie. He is Captain Comedian, the Crusader of Not-Knowing, and nothing will stand in the way of his legacy.

To further this charade the escape from the literal takes the pragmatic shift away from linguistic redirection to outright lying thanks to a classic Costanzian scheme, continuing in the genre with the introduction of a sidekick into the motif: that Jerry, Lois, and Duncan Meyer will have lunch at Monk’s and he will come in and “pretend [he hasn't] seen [Jerry] since High School,” and “back up the story.” This is to be the ultimate proof of Jerry’s super speed to Lois, and will be accomplished by having the entire conversation, not just Jerry’s hyperbole, be ironic. The essential relationship is turned on its head: the familiarity between Jerry and George, for the benefit of Lois and Duncan Meyer, does not exist; however, for the viewer, that familiarity is only accentuated by the jokes they make to each other within this long-time-reunion context, George making fun of Jerry’s “did you ever notice” brand of humor, and Jerry retaliating with “you really went bald there, didn’t you.” It’s like seeing Batman and Robin work together to get out of a jam: a thing of beauty. Duncan Meyer still does not believe him, in spite of “impartial” George’s assurances, and they, in the end, agree to race. This is of course inevitable, any Seinfeld title must refer to two things, and this episode is no different: its drama comes from the race in high school and its resolution occurs in the race in the present moment.

But how can Jerry translate his superhuman qualities from the figurative to the actual in order to maintain his twenty-year old fiction? The show’s climactic answer reveals that there exists no distinction between the figurative and “the actual”—instead a precarious chimera of verisimilitude is constructed with this “difference” before the final joke eradicates any such commentary on “the actual.” Whether it’s George pulling out Kramer’s golf ball out of a whale at the end of “the Marine Biologist,” or, in Elaine’s concurrent plotline in “the Race,” accidentally getting her communist boyfriend banned, “blacklisted,” from the very restaurant where his father eat cheaply when he was blacklisted in the McCarthy era—Seinfeld warms us up with twenty minutes of could-be reality to lure us into thinking we are not in the bowling pot of nonsense that the show has become by the time we reach the last two. Whereas Jerry wields the joking capacity to align himself with Superman at the beginning, it is the joking wielded by the show’s writers and Jerry’s situation at the episode’s end that holds him there, and it feels perfectly feasible that Kramer’s car backfires a moment earlier than the starting gun, giving him the same head start and the same impossible victory, allowing the myth of his speed to live on, forcing Duncan Meyer “to go to his grave never being certain [he] got that head start.”

What is remarkable in this discussion of the mythical and the actual is that two seasons earlier in “the Implant” Jerry was broken up with by a woman played by Teri Hatcher because of his attempt to prove that her breasts were fake, that implants were the head start that create the myth of their size. At the end, she catches on to his scheme (Elaine, who insisted they weren’t real, “fell” on her in the sauna to feel them) and leaves him saying “They’re real, and they’re spectacular.” Less than seven months later her new show premiered: Lois and Clark: the New Adventures of Superman, in which she played Lois Lane. In the week of December 11, 1994 a viewer could have watched Lois and Clark on Sunday, “the Race” that Wednesday and a rerun of last season’s “the Implant” at any point in the week and be very confused where these characters and people—Lois Lane, Clark Kent, Jerry Seinfeld, Superman, Teri Hatcher, Jerry Seinfeld, Dean Cain (Lois and Clark’s Clark)—end or begin. All we know is that Jerry cannot be with the real Lois because he is not the real Superman just as he did not really win the race, he cannot accept Teri Hatcher’s physique to be real, and is not even the real Jerry Seinfeld; everything in the Seinfeld universe is Clark Kent and Superman at once in an inseparable whole, Lois Lane and Teri Hatcher amalgamated, and whether this juxtaposition in the week of December 11, 1994 was intended we will never know, that is why Jerry is the Superman of Undecidability: we must go to our grave “never being certain.”

It is interesting to note that Jerry is conceived of as an idealized idea of Superman when what’s at stake is his own ego and proving his speed. However, in “the Café” when it comes to actually helping another person Jerry succeeds in becoming the Superman of the joke with which he ends the episode:

It's tough to do a good deed. Just look at your professional good deed doers. Your lone rangers, your superman, your Batman, your Spiderman, your Elasticman. They are all wearing disguises, masks over their faces. Secret identities. Don't want people to know who they are. It's too much aggravation. “Superman, thanks for saving my life, but did you have to come through my wall? I'm renting here, I've got a security deposit. What am I supposed to do?”

This is a man who will break your door down to stop a thief from taking a dollar from you and think he’s doing you a great favor; and this is Jerry is “the Café.” He begins his campaign of good from his apartment looking out the window at a struggling business at street level, like a soaring crusader for good searching for a wrong to right, and proclaims to his sidekick George, “This is amazing, I haven't seen one guy going in to that restaurant since it opened. Poor guy… His family is probably in Pakistan waiting him to send back money. This is horrible.” He continues to observe, now with binoculars, with the help of his other sidekick Elaine, discussing the failures of the place before finally making his heroic, grandiose move: going in and eating something. He orders, compliments the place, is told by the restauranteur that he is “a very kind man,” and considers this idea for a moment: “Very kind. I am a kind man. Who else would do something like this? Nobody. Nobody thinks about people like I do. All right, snap out of it you stupid jerk. You're eating a turkey sandwich. What do want, a Nobel price?”

But this is only a warm-up; his omnipotent forethought is his true gift for the struggling Café: he suggests the Pakistani fellow serve Pakistani food rather than a having rigatoni, tacos, and moussaka share a menu with pork and beans, to which it is rhetorically asked, “You see everything, don’t you?” which Jerry doesn’t make great efforts to deny.

A week or so passes and Jerry returns to check in on the life he saved. However, it turns out the change did not improve business at all, rather more debt was amassed in the renovation making things even worse. Such is the occasional ugly side to doing good deeds.

Masturbation, noun

2009-05-12T22:39:00.001-07:00

1. The stimulation, usually by hand, of one's genitals for sexual pleasure; the action or practice of masturbating oneself or (less commonly) another person; an instance of this.  1603 J. FLORIO tr. Montaigne Ess. II. xii. 340 Diogenes in sight of all, exercising his Maisterbation, bredde a longing desire..in the by-standers. 1706 E. BAYNARD in J. Floyer Hist. of Cold Bathing (ed. 2) II. 68 That cursed School wickedness of Masturbation, (res fæda dictu) by which many a young Gentleman has been for ever undone. 1724 B. MANDEVILLE Modest Def. Publick Stews 30 There are three Ways by which lewd young Men destroy their natural Vigour..: First, By Manufriction, alias Masturbation. 1766 A. HUME tr. S. A. D. Tissot Onanism iii. 23 He gave himself up to masturbation, which he repeated every day. 1827 Aegis of Life (ed. 18) II. vi. 99 Previous to his death he confessed that masturbation was the cause. 1842 Boston Med. & Surg. Jrnl. 14 Sept. 106 She acknowledged..that she was taught the practice of masturbation at the age of 11 years, while at boarding school. 1924 J. RIVIERE et al. tr. Freud Coll. Papers I. 90 Neurasthenics whose potency has already been seriously diminished by masturbation. 1974 Daily Tel. 3 Oct. 3/3 For the £15 massage with masturbation the girls received £3 commission. 1990 Cosmopolitan (U.K. ed.) Jan. 55/1 Using masturbation to climax is the way some women find their own way to the peak. 

2. fig.  1820 BYRON Let. 9 Nov. (1977) VII. 225 Mr. Keats..appears to me what I have already said;such writing is a sort of mental masturbationhe is always fggg his Imagination. 1951 R. CAMPBELL Light on Dark Horse xxiii. 346 The liberaloid mentality that they had acquired from reading the masturbations of..Rousseau. 1990 New Eng. Monthly Mar. 30/1 We've got more important things to do than get bogged down in an intellectual masturbation and debating society. 

“The Contest”

2009-05-12T22:28:00.000-07:00

Why seek to scale Mount Everest,

Queen of the Air,

Why strive to crown that cruel crest

And deathward dare?

Said Mallory of dauntless quest

‘Because it's there.’

—Robert William Service

This episode is touted as a classic for its masterful ability to discuss the taboo on Prime Time network television, and the language it uses to circumvent explicitly describing these taboos. What makes it particularly important, however, is the way it highlights George’s contribution to the show, and, through analogy, the contribution of Larry David, who won the Primetime Emmy Award for Outstanding Writing in a Comedy Series for this episode, and how it does this with the exact manner of brilliant circumvention. The episode begins in what may almost be considered a parody of a Seinfeld scene: Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer sit at Monk’s coffee shop. Jerry brings up an absurd premise to begin a joke that would not be an unusual bit for his stand-up. Elaine and Kramer provide additional riffs.

Jerry: Let me ask you a question. You're a hostage, captured by terrorists—

Elaine: Who, me?

Jerry: You, anybody—whatever. You're in the little room, you're chained to the floor, you're there for a long time … do you think they would ever consider doing the laundry?

Elaine: They have to: it's in the Geneva Convention.

Kramer: You! Take off your socks, your pants, your underwear. We're doing the wash. C'mon! Take it off, take it off!

This is the show purified: Jerry Seinfeld is a stand-up comedian who comes up with his material in the real world, in the company of his friends. Elaine makes a smart aleck remark to Jerry’s use of the hypothetical “you,” and brings in her more politically-aware sense by whimsically invoking international law. And Kramer translates this premise into the middle-eastern terrorist persona that Jerry himself wouldn’t be able to pull off. By turning a stand-up bit into a short interchange in a situation comedy, this joke in the same amount of time accomplishes three punchlines in three different styles: it is funny that Jerry thinks about laundry in this situation—because he is so notoriously “neat,” and so hopefully disconnected from the suffering of humanity—and the joke works, in this sense, because it makes fun of Jerry; Elaine in turn validates the joke and implicates herself with the premise that doing laundry is in the Geneva conventions, while furthering the absurdity by invoking a rule of law that terrorists would not acknowledge to begin with, further making fun of Jerry, and now herself as well, by the means he has opened up; and Kramer tops it off with a bit of dialogue that plays with the irony that to demand violently that a hostage strip is the humane thing to do. The characters thus all laugh at this joke that they have created as a transition that seals off this beginning from the rest of the episode, as though it were the stand-up routine that used to begin and end each episode of the earlier seasons.

It makes sense that this opening was intended for the pilot episode of the show, as the “Notes About Nothing” of the Season 4 DVD tell us, when the premise was to give the audience a view of a comedian going through his day. Larry David has deftly appropriated this simplified notion of what the show supposedly is so as to dramaticize how unsettled this simplicity really is, and how his very contributions—the real life “contest” in which he participated, his decision to write an episode about it, and the askewly autobiographical character George, which, at this moment have all yet to enter the episode—unsettle the show and thus make it what it is. That the show insists upon getting weirder is apparent in this appropriation: once the show began with Jerry’s stand-up to demonstrate how the show itself was interesting, and now it in turn begins with what the show is at its most basic, to demonstrate how it is more interesting than that.

George enters Monk’s as Kramer gives his terrorist-on-laundry-day impression and sits down as the self-congratulatory laughter dies out and he receives greetings from his three co-stars. He is silent, initiating a “What’s the matter” from Jerry, which receives more discomfort and silence and a total of 12 seconds after his entrance, which is, in Seinfeld, an eternity, until the usually verbose George says anything. And with his first line the episode effectually begins, as it would have in an earlier episode after a transition from the stand-up performance to an audience to the dramaticized dialogue of the show itself. And, thematically, the transition is the same: it goes from Jerry discussing what is beyond his life—his rarely autobiographical observations on the universally everyday foibles—to all of the characters commenting on their own personal problems, in this case the fact that George “was caught” by his mother and now “she’s in traction.” Elaine, in particular, bursts into laughter at this fact—although the entire studio audience and table is laughing at George—inciting George to reply in one of the funniest lines of the scene, “It's not funny, Elaine.”

We now have a juxtaposition of conversations: the first in which a potentially serious question—do terrorists wash the clothes of their hostages?—is meant as a joke and not very funny; and the second in which an intentionally serious anecdote—that George’s mother “caught him,” fell down, and injured herself forcing George to take her to the hospital—is hilarious. Of course it is not clear-cut irony, that Jerry’s attempt at a joke is not at all funny and that George’s attempt at confiding in is friends is not at all serious—there is an ambiguity dependent upon one’s sense of humor. However, it may be said that what George did is put on a parallel with the conversation, or with what Jerry did before the conversation, that is, think about terrorism and laundry—simply put: it is all masturbation. Jerry could follow through, if he were serious, and do some research and find out that the very act of holding a hostage goes against the Geneva Conventions; or he could study past kidnapping stories to read all of the accounts of the day-to-day treatment of the hostages, which would reveal the laundering practices, or lack thereof, of the captors; but no, like Onan he pulls out before he accomplishes what he supposedly set out to do, spilling the seed of his thoughts on to the table at Monk’s coffee shop, along with Elaine and Kramer who further the nonsense into the public circle jerk that it is. At this point George enters, catching them in the exact act in which his mother caught him committing.

His explanation to his mother—“Because it’s there!”—could merely be an absurd appropriation of George Leigh Mallory’s explanation of why he wanted to climb mount Everest. However, this question lies in the ambiguity of the fate of Mallory’s final attempt at Everest: it remains ridiculous to compare the activity of George (Costanza, not Mallory) to scaling to the highest point of the world, if indeed Mallory did that before falling and freezing to death; however, as there is no certainty concerning his success, it is feasible to akin coitus interuptus to working vigorously toward a climax, yet ultimately not to continue and instead depositing one’s DNA to the ground to the effect of nothing. That it is not known for certain only makes the joke that much more dynamic, and, in the spirit of the show, smugly negates the difference between reaching the peak and dying on the way back, and simply dying in the process.

It is important to note the parallel between the act discussed in this episode and the idea of writing, producing and broadcasting Seinfeld, which becomes quite ironic when George’s mother sarcastically ridicules George with what seems a ludicrous image of him masturbating in front of a gigantic audience: “Too bad you can't do that for a living. You'd be very successful at it. You could sell out Madison Square Garden. Thousands of people could watch you! You could be a big star!” What then is the difference between what Larry David “do[es] for a living” and jerking off to a packed audience at Madison Square Garden? The answer lies in the difference between the two pitches made to NBC and how that juxtaposition mirrors that of Jerry, Elaine, and Kramer’s torture joke with the remainder of the episode: the first is a show with no storyline, just its characters joking at the coffeeshop, and the second concedes storylines because, as George notes in the second conciliatory meeting, “otherwise it’s just masturbation.”

George enters the coffeeshop and, by inciting the abandonment of literal masturbation in his friends, again inspired by money in the form of a bet, incites the episode’s abandonment of masturbation, that is for as long the writers can maintain sovereignty over their baser impulses. “The Contest” puts this tension into allegory: the characters want to be able to spend their time making off-kilter remarks about ponies, impersonate the hypothetical voice of a girlfriend’s stomach, feign homosexuality without being taken seriously, in short, make jokes to their hearts content without any real world consequence; but they live in “the real world” and must keep these desires in check; much as the writers live in a world where they must produce a situation comedy, something to which everyday people must be to identify, with a storyline and consequences for an anarchistic sensibility that conceives of the world as a joke. In the end everyone loses this perverse contest and wins in the exquisiteness of the process, or, as George reveals he did in the final episode, cheats.

In her essay “They Laughed Unhappily Ever After” Barbara Ching notes that the frequent reference to masturbation unveils not only a perpetual adolescence in the characters but also, as seen in “The Gymnast”’s disappointment in Jerry’s virility—“the laughter he provokes leads to nothing but a one-night stand,” as one may describe an un-picked-up pilot episode—the show should never have been produced: “In theory, he is incapable of forming a series; in practice, of course, we watched it.”

Instant Krama’s Gonna Get You, Gonna Knock You Right in the Head

2009-05-12T22:24:00.001-07:00

In "the Pitch" Newman invokes the concept of Karma to Kramer—after which Jerry says, “Karma, Krama’?”—because Kramer has swindled Newman for a helmet in exchange for a faulty radar detector which fails to save Newman a speeding ticket. This is ironic because Jerry warned Kramer that the radar detector was worth significantly more than the helmet, but Newman would not allow Kramer to “renege” after hearing this advice, thus Newman had already put the bad Karma ball in his own court. Luckily Kramer is wearing this helmet when Crazy Joe Devola kicks him in the head.

The Last Two Seasons of Seinfeld

2009-05-12T22:23:00.001-07:00

In June of 2008 I took a train to Nebraska to visit Brendan. I took a bus from Salinas to Oakland at 3 in the morning one night, and then a commuter train to Sacramento, and boarded the California Zephyr by late morning. As we left the station, after the conductor gave his brief speech, an older couple announced their presence: as historical enthusiasts they board the train in Sacramento, travel to Reno, and narrate the important sites in gold country that the train passes. Because I intermittently listened to the walkman I had brough I only remember Donner Pass being pointed out, the location of the stranded party that resorted to cannibalism.

At a certain point in Nevada I started writing a story about a narrator who entered into a restroom in which a man is masturbating in the stall. I realized I was ignoring what it was I wanted to be doing and abandoned the story. I instead began taking the first notes, drawing up the first charts, and composing the logical proofs for the book I had of late decided to take up. I decided I would begin one such proof with the moment in Derrida when the interviewer asks him about Seinfeld and he dismisses it, and I would then add the deconstructionist idea that one must reinscribe one half of a binary (Seinfeld is not deconstruction) with its opposite (Seinfeld is deconstruction), in order to deconstruct each erroneous extreme. If the trip was to be productive toward the end of the book I needed some tangible point from which the dialogues with Brendan could begin, although these notes ultimately never really played a part in the ensuing conversations.

I arrived two and a half days into the journey at 5:30 in downtown Lincoln. I called from the train station’s pay phone and Brendan told me to meet him at the Mill coffee shop on T Street, and to ask the stationmaster how to get there. However, he was occupied helping people with their luggage and I figured the streets went alphabetically and I could manage, and so I set off and smoked a spliff in celebration of my arrival. I walked three blocks to S Street when downtown Lincoln ended and yielded to a combination of freeway and train tracks. It looked as though on the other side of the freeway there would be room for T street, so I crossed and saw Memorial Stadium, a very exciting thing to happen upon at quarter to six in the morning, and found where T street should be (between S and U), which was the walking entrance to the campus of the University of Nebraska. I decided to turn back around and return to the train station to ask the stationmaster, as I should have the first time, where the Mill Coffeeshop was. Ten minutes later, as I approached, I saw Brendan coming towards me. It was then revealed that he said the Mill was on P Street one block away, that it was closed, and that T street disappears into the school and reappears on the other side in a part of Lincoln referred to as “T Town.”

The first thing I said to his mother when we stopped at his house after breakfast at the Village Inn was a joke about taking Brendan back to California to marry him, as our courts had just legalized same-sex marriage, what I thought a very topical and humorous remark. It seems however that it was actually a poorly-chosen joke and that Brendan suspects that his mom suspects that we are a gay couple. He once saw her look strangely at a picture on his computer’s desktop that included me, one moment among others in which he’s caught her noting “evidence.” And, of course, we’re thin, single, and neat. That I came to visit for a week and opened with a joke about marrying her son did not help things.

Brendan took a week off from his job at State Farm Insurance, where, that summer, his dad and brother were also working. We had a grand ol’ time seeing the Lincoln sights, watching a marathon of the teen soap-opera Degrassi, seeing the final of the College World Series thanks to tickets provided by Brendan’s dad (the game marked the end of the miraculous underdog story of the Fresno State Bulldogs against the Georgia Bull Dogs, an underdog story with which we were unfamiliar at the time, mostly thinking it was funny that the Bulldogs beat the Bulldogs, that the Bulldogs lost to the Bulldogs), seeing fireflies on evening walks and bunny rabbits on daytime ones, going bowling, arguing with locals, forming a band called Lennon/Lenin (that hypothesizes musical history if John Lennon never collaborated with McCartney but rather with Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, or if Lenin joined up with Lennon to form the skiffle group the Bolsheviks instead of participating in the Russian Revolution), visiting Brendan’s love interest who works at a burrito place, eating burritos, and conversing.

The most important stride made in our joint Seinfeld thinking concerned the character of the last two seasons of the series; what it meant to keep going after Larry David left the show to make his movie Sour Grapes. We decided that the remaining writing staff—Larry Charles had also already left for Mad About You by this time—were left interpreting the first seven seasons of Seinfeld. The last two, then, were what the came up with: interpretations of what was more subtly at work in the series. Elements that were obliquely present became spelled out for the viewer, while others were neglected in the interpretation because the show, properly studied cannot produce a univocal interpretation. In short, as we saw it, nuance became gimmick.

Jerry may be interpreted as a neat-freak who breaks up with women in an endless of parade of women for silly reasons and otherwise does not have any troubles, instead making smart-aleck remarks about his friends’ problems—so this is the simplified rendering of him in the last two seasons; Kramer is defined by the eccentric objects that bring him into unexpected situations—a meat slicer, a competent cock-fighting chicken, the set from the Merv Griffin Show, a one-mile stretch of the Arthur Burghardt Expressway that he has adopted, a job as a seat-filler at the Tony Awards—rendering him as more cartoonish than he ever was (we also learn he has been on strike from a bagel shop for 12 years, partly explaining his unemployment); Elaine is partly wrapped up in work and partly in her boyfriend, and neither vary much in the end as J. Peterman of the J. Peterman catalogue makes up much of the Elaine storylines, and David Puddy, the mechanic, overwhelms the social side; and George, the incomprehensible rendering of Larry David, becomes a lazy, stupid, and immature rage-aholic who is obsessed with food, sex, and television—when once one side of the viewer might have sympathized with an absurd Costanzian aspiration—“I always wanted to pretend I was an arquitect” (“The Marine Biologist”)—now it is simply pathetic and ridiculous for his epic dream to be “the Summer of George” in which he intends to read “a whole book,” or to maintain his Frogger score on a machine in the pizza place that was his and Jerry’s high school hangout that’s now going out of business.

The show itself literally becomes an explicitly staged mockery of television, when it always kind of had been, when Kramer turns his apartment into the Merv Griffin Show and interacts with his friends as its host, having them sit next to Jim Fowler who has brought a hawk and asks “where are the cameras?” “The Bizarro Jerry” literalizes the show’s constant self-mockery by having Elaine enter a “bizarro” world that perfectly parodies the show. George argues his suffering easily rivals that of an Andrea Doria survivor, providing a review and interpretation of older episodes. “The Blood” literalizes the way that one character’s reality blends and informs another’s by having Jerry filled with “a half a pint of Kramer.” However, it’s interesting that it is from the outside in, sleeping in the other’s bed, that causes Jerry to become Kramer—again simplifying the character by having someone who is not even an actor be “Kramer”—and vice versa when the two switch apartments in “the Roasted Chicken.” And most notably the Seinfeld reputation for inventing catch-phrases is adopted as what seems a function of the show, providing us with countless new phrases.

Brendan has a friend that argues that the last two seasons provide a “greater amount of play” than was ever allowed under the guidance of Larry David who insisted that the show’s absurdity be based in realism, which is certainly evident in these more unconventional and surreal episodes. And in retrospect it seems the logical next step in the show’s self-mockery that it turns its former methods into hyperactive parodies of themselves. It was the summer of 2008, though, we were in Lincoln, Nebraska and anything seemed possible. At the end of the ten days Brendan drove me to the bus station at the edge of town where he waited with me for a few minutes. I asked him about Sour Grapes. He said that, though it is not very good, it was an interesting choice for Larry David, to leave an incredibly successful show that was making him millions of dollars to make a mediocre movie about a man who wins a lot of money in Atlantic City and becomes unpleasant as a result. He was interested in what I would think about it and encouraged me to find it. He left in the car that State Farm gave him so he could go to flooded Waterloo, Iowa for 12 hour days of sorting out insurance claims of the locals who had been struck by disaster, and I went back west. I still have not seen Sour Grapes as it is not on Netflix, and movie rental stores have severely depleted VHS collections these days.

Jerry, George, and Kramer Pitch Things to NBC

2009-05-12T22:21:00.000-07:00

From this decision about the show’s content—that “it’s about nothing”—we again go into Jerry’s apartment where he is again in mid-conversation with Kramer who insists that he be allowed to play Kramer because—he is Kramer. The audience could not know at that moment that Larry David’s neighbor Kenny Kramer insisted the same thing, which David would later reveal either simply because it’s true or because it makes the scene even funnier. Newman’s entrance again ends the conversation, and the now doubled sequence moves on, for the premise to be presented to an authority higher than the quirky, unemployed neighbor: NBC, which is still, of course, essential to our viewing of Seinfeld, though less apparent in syndication. They sit in the waiting room where George has a freak-out (“They’re men with jobs, Jerry!”), Jerry accidentally sets in motion Crazy Joe Devola’s entrance into the Kramer/Newman subplot, though he can’t call to warn Kramer as they are summoned in at that moment and Jerry mockingly reassures George as they walk into the president’s office.

Jerry is friendly and conciliatory, but George insists on taking over the conversation, lies about an “off-off-Broadway” play he wrote (or an “off off-Broadway” play) called La Cocina, and becomes first smug as he “sums about the show in one word—nothing” and then again to the president’s “nothing?”—“nothing.” The meeting takes a turn here and Jerry tries to concede, “well, maybe in philosophy—but even nothing is something.” Then George insists that it is about nothing, and is resolute that it is to contain no stories. Finally, he turns self-righteous, like he’s some sort of visionary who will save television from mediocrity:

Look: if you want to just keep on doing the same old thing, then maybe this idea is not for you. I, for one, am not going to compromise my artistic integrity. And I'll tell you something else—this is the show and we're not going to change it.

And they are back at the coffee shop for the sequence to begin again, and Jerry to play the pharmacist who knows exactly what’s wrong with George:

What were you thinking? What was going on in your mind? Artistic integrity? Where did you come up with that? You're not artistic and you have no integrity. You know you really need some help. A regular psychiatrist couldn't even help you. You need to go to like Vienna or something. You know what I mean? You need to get involved at the University level. Like where Freud studied and have all those people looking at you and checking up on you. That's the kind of help you need. Not the once a week for eighty bucks. No. You need a team. A team of psychiatrists working round the clock thinking about you, having conferences, observing you, like the way they did with the Elephant Man. That's what I'm talking about because that's the only way you're going to get better.

The power is back with Jerry here: he is the celebrity who is approached by big wigs at NBC; George is the layman who needs to walk away while Jerry talks business.

In the sequence Jerry’s apartment has been a sort of reflection of what is decided in the outside world, where Kramer contributes his opinion: the first time he suggests that Jerry manage a circus, the second time he insists that he play himself, the third time, in perfect reflection and escalation of what just occurred—George’s disembowelment of their professional chances and Jerry’s evisceration of his frustrations upon George—Kramer vomits on Susan, the NBC executive George brings up to Jerry’s apartment. As gross as it may seem, this literal evisceration is an evocative metaphor for the unabashed reality that Jerry and George, with the aid of Kramer, wish to bring to NBC: it is not just air that comes out of their mouths—they want to bring substance to the network, however crass and unpleasant substance may initially seem. Kramer, the spokesman of the other three when they can’t mustard the honesty, vomits on Susan, the representative of that organization to which they wish to bring the essence of themselves and their reality. And what causes Kramer to vomit?—old milk. Like the stale and rancid family values of Father Knows Best, Kramer takes in the tradition of the situation comedy, has it sit for an uncomfortable moment, and then reproduces, as George has just done, with Jerry apologizing for him, for the benefit of the NBC network executive, in turn forcing George to apologize for Kramer.

The show becomes this dialogue: the simultaneous rejection by the network of the show and by the show of the network. The two represent the show in the second meeting as a formulaic and absurd show, with the premise that a man with no car insurance is decreed by a judge to be Jerry's butler. Seinfeld is never this episode, though an early episode when Jerry is forced to care for a drunkard's dog comes close. Rather this second meeting represents the compromise that the network mandates of Jerry and his co-creator. They either get away with doing an episode that consists entirely of waiting for a table at a chinese restaurant, or they get away with making fun of the network for not letting them.

The network head asks in disbelief in that first meeting, "You read on the show?" and Seinfeld reacts by not only taking all reading out of the plot (episodes like "the Library" about George and Jerry's high school liaison with Henry Miller's Tropics of Cancer and Capricorn, along with other casual references to the fact that these are somewhat intellectual, literate characters disappear after this moment), the characters become entirely hostile to reading, besides for Kramer, always the exception, who reads an entire manuscript in Jerry's apartment which is in the process of being fumigated when Elaine, who was supposed to read to get a job, couldn't manage to read it; an entire episode is devoted to George's inability to read Breakfast at Tiffany's at the behest of his girlfriend, and subsequent difficulty finding a copy of it at any video rental store in New York. America doesn't want Diane Chambers from Cheers, so they give us a cast of Sam Malones who were never baseball players, but rather were once thinkers, but have since retired out of necessity because they have found themselves on network television.

The Gold Standard of Infinity

2009-05-12T22:19:00.001-07:00

I wanted to begin with an appropriately misremembered quote—“Why can’t I take pictures of the stars,” which was inexactly followed by, “You can’t take pictures of the best things,” which were both said so unpresumptuously that I had to curb this romantic insanity with, “Damn it, Phuong! Stop spouting truth!”

The honeymoon, however, is over. I have reached my adolescence. Me dí cuenta. I never used that phrase before this weekend when I heard it so many times and that began saying it so many times because it seemed everybody suddenly realized. I realized that my worst/best fears will always come true: I have been staying in a little house in the same bed as Ian situated on a little bay that opens up into a larger bay that becomes la bahía de Samaná, a near perfect rectangle. I remember when I discovered the relationship between self-relexivity and irony: Michael and I decided our party was a party-themed party after Ian showed up with party snacks and I placed them in a bowl on the table. I also insisted that the carpet be rolled up at every materialization of dancing and rolled back upon its dissipation. It became very clear at that point.

In this instance it became mind-muddlingly clear. I explained to Ian how Larry David and Jerry Seinfeld wrote the show but only Jerry played himself just as George pitches and writes the show with Jerry but is played by an actor. Jerry thus becomes the gold standard in the land of infinity. It began though when I explained that my mother gave me all of these pills for potential migraines for the trip because I might potentially have one. “Are migraines contagious?” Jessica asked me. “No, gentic,” I said, initiating the “Oh…” that differentiates the overarching trip, the one bookended by my biological mother dropping me off and picking me up from the airport, from its microcosm, the three day/two night academic sojourn in the all-inclusive resort away from the house of my host mother. I explained to Ian that, the way I see things, bays within bays within bays will always lead to irony because, while everything in the larger bay is in the smallest bay, it cannot be adequately described if it was the bay of the universe over which we looked and into which we swam. Comparison rife with truth is the most false thing imaginable. But of course there is always Jerry: the song heard once in the microcosm is the song heard two-dozen times in reality, for the microcosm must be seen as extraordinary, or seen as a microcosm for being extraordinary and a standard by which reality—though it is never “ordinary”—may be interpreted. And the song played and the conversation went: “Before I loved every song because I couldn’t tell them apart—I was just excited to hear them. But now I know them better. And I know that I don’t like this one.” “I know what you mean. Now that we can distinguish, this one isn’t good.” “Is this the end of the honeymoon period?” “It’s like those habits that you love so much, the quirks, because you’re infatuated to the extent that you can’t differentiate the part from the whole. But as the marriage goes on it becomes it becomes that fucking thing you can’t stand.” “So the honeymoon’s over.” “And in a place where someone would have their honeymoon.” I tried to explain to Ian that everything about a microcosm, while being asserted as poignant truth about the reality, is a joke—an absurd declaration that the part can stand for the whole and that a truth can be unequivocally true—because everything is a waterslide to infinity, and it doesn’t matter where you get on it, as the ocean is fed by the bay, and the bay within that, and the snow at the top of Mount Everest, the sewage from cruise ships and the tears spent on the inability to conclude.

And “The Pitch…”

2009-05-12T22:17:00.000-07:00

“I think I can sum up the show for you with one word: Nothing.”

—George Costanza, “The Pitch”

“It is my position that the male fear and anxiety central to Seinfeld collapses the commonly held idea, promoted by the show itself, that it is about nothing.”

—Joanna L. Di Mattia,

“Male Anxiety and the Buddy System on Seinfeld”

“I contend that it’s not a show about nothing. It’s a show about food.”

—Sara Lewis Dunne,

“Seinfood: Purity, Danger, and Food Codes on Seinfeld.”

“Seinfeld then is not so much a show about nothing as a show that advocates nothing.”

—David Marc,

“Seinfeld: A Show (Almost) About Nothing”

“…within the events of the actual sitcom, the network never approves a show about nothing. But what makes Seinfeld so compelling is its charting of the space between the two abstractions of nothing and something.”

—Barbara Ching,

“They Laughed Unhappily Ever After

Seinfeld and the Sitcom Encounter with Nothingness”

"Seinfeld is not a show about nothing; it is a show about everything."

—Tim Delaney,

The Sociology of Seinfeld

The infamous concept broached by George of a “show about nothing” is just one idea in the midst of a progression that ensues after two network executives approach Jerry about developing a series after he gets off stage at a comedy club. The declaration, however, is important in beginning to define the show, considering how the progression of ideas was going up until that breakthrough.

George, in his indifference to the process of conceiving a sitcom, has an idea immediately after Jerry is propositioned in the nightclub to prove how easy it would be to make a show: “You coach a gymnastics team in high school. And you're married. And your son’s not interested in gymnastics, and you're pushing him into gymnastics.” It’s hard to say now, over fifteen years later, to what extent it seemed inevitable that Jerry and George would pitch what is essentially the very show that they are in, because it is hard to separate Seinfeld from that. For this reason I don’t know how heavily the dramatic irony is inherently present—because it thoroughly overwhelms the scene in retrospect—in seeing these asinine television clichés coming from two men who will undoubtedly pitch their very lives as the show, or if there exists a stable way of understanding the irony of George’s gymnastics coach premise.

At any rate, he moves on to a premise in which Jerry “runs an antique store, and gets involved with people’s lives.” Jerry, with his smug, objective approach insists that being a pharmacist would more readily lend to getting involved in peoples lives “because a pharmacist knows what's wrong with everybody that comes in.” The idea of stand-up-comedian-as-pharmacist already came up in opening monologue of “The Nose Job” in which Jerry, two and a half feet above his audience mocks pharmacists who “have to be two and a half feet above everyone else—what the hell is he (Jerry/the pharmacist) doing that he can’t be down there on the floor with you and me?” Look out, everybody, I’m working with pills and jokes here. And in “The Diplomat’s Club” of the 6^th season Elaine’s boss Mr. Pitt literally mistakes Jerry for a pharmacist, one that has come down from his 2.5-foot stage because he puts a pen behind his ear and re-stocks a display that Kramer has knocked over. Jerry directs him to antihistamines that could potentially be fatal mixed with his heart medication.

The next scene is in Jerry’s apartment where Kramer is already putting in his two cents: “And you're the manager of the circus.” It is as though a situation comedy premise were the line “These pretzels are making me thirsty,” a single line of blank verse through which each character expresses their essence, that Kramer has to deliver in the Woody Allen movie from “The Alternate Side” the previous season: Kramer is the quirky bohemian who passively pursues acting and is trying to nail his single sentence of dialogue, thus bringing the matter of interpretation to the other three; Elaine scrunches her face to emphasize the annoyance of it, “These PRET-zels are-makin’-me THIRST-y”; Jerry says it as an unnuanced stand-up observation, “These PRETZELS are MAK-in’ ME THIRST-y,” inciting Kramer to denounce the delivery of both Jerry the man and Seinfeld the sitcom actor: “No, see, that’s no good. See, you don’t know how to act”; and George brings it back to the storyline by nearly shouting in an expression of the rage that the troubles of the episode have caused him: “THESE PRETZELS!…(deep gasp)…ARE MAKING ME THIRSTY!”

And as such we have an indication of the psychology, not just personality, of each character in deciding what profession Jerry should be. George is somewhat of a romantic, but wholly cheap, and thus places the show in an antique store; Jerry is clinical and unfeeling, but wants to bring objective certainty into the world, so he is a pharmacist; Kramer is zany, so Jerry manages a circus; Elaine, sadly, did not figure into the initial idea of the show and was brought in at the request of the network to make up for its lack of femininity, and so she appropriately is in Europe with her boyfriend. Then Newman’s entrance ends the conversation and brings in the secondary plot.

This same sequence—Jerry and George discussing the possibility of the show in a public place, then Jerry telling Kramer about it, then Newman interrupting the conversation—occurs again, but begins with Jerry and George in the coffee shop—a much more typical setting than the comedy club—this time aligning them with the perfect circle that the show is, and thus providing George with his epiphany after they briefly riff on the concept of salsa:

George: “See, this should be a show. This is the show.”   

Jerry: “What?”

George: “This. Just talking.”

Jerry, sarcastically: “Yeah, right.”   

George: “I'm really serious. I think that's a good idea.”   

Jerry: “Just talking? Well what's the show about?”  

George: “It's about nothing.”  

Jerry: “No story?”  

George: “No forget the story.”   

Jerry: “You've got to have a story.”   

George: “Who says you gotta have a story? Remember when we were waiting for that table in that Chinese restaurant that time? That could be a TV show.”

Jerry: “And who is on the show? Who are the characters?”  

George: “I could be a character. ”

Jerry: “You?”  

George: “Yeah. You could base a character on me.”  

Jerry: “So, on the show, there's a character named George Costanza?”  

George: “Yeah. There's something wrong with that? I'm a character. People are always saying to me, ‘You know you're a quite a character.’”  

Jerry: “And who else is on the show?”  

George: “Elaine could be a character. Kramer—”

Jerry: “Now he's a character… So everybody I know is a character on the show. ”

George: “Right.”  

Jerry: “And it's about nothing?”  

George: “Absolutely nothing.”

The writers here have opened up a means to display the most insanely self-referential material to be broadcast in a situation comedy, allowing the show to discuss itself in a way that still manages to remain realistic.

For example, that George brings up “waiting for that table in that Chinese restaurant that time” as an episode exemplifies this duality, as it is something that occurred to the characters within the Seinfeld reality, and “a TV show,” that is “The Chinese Restaurant” episode, a landmark episode in the Seinfeld project to create minimalist storylines. It is especially ironic that they declare that the situation comedy starring Jerry Seinfeld playing himself will be about nothing and have no story at the very moment Seinfeld—the situation comedy starring Jerry Seinfeld playing himself—begins to have storylines that go beyond a single episode, or even, in the case of the production of their pilot, the entire fourth season, a significant departure from “The Chinese Restaurant,” “The Parking Garage,” and “The Dinner Party” which are defined by the frustration of an event—respectively, being seated at Chinese restaurant, finding where the car is parked, and arriving at a party with a bottle of wine and a chocolate babka; at the end of each episode the event finally does occur although its fruition in each is completely ironic: “Seinfeld, four!” is announced the moment after they leave; when they finally find the car Elaine’s goldfish have died and Kramer, who has the keys, is still looking for his air conditioner, and when they find him the car does not start, which is especially ironic because the car was scripted to drive off in the end, though, in reality, could not start, inciting the cast to laugh; they arrive at the party, hopelessly late, hand over the wine and cinnamon babka, and leave.

On and Off “the Wagon”

2009-05-12T22:13:00.000-07:00

Jerry, “He's a recovering alcoholic.”

George, “Really?”

Jerry, “Yeah. He's been off the wagon for two years.”

George, “‘Off the wagon’?”

Jerry, “I think it's off the wagon.”

George, “I think it's ‘on the wagon.’”

…

Elaine, “Dick? He can't drink. He's an alcoholic. I told you to hold it.”

Jerry, “I didn't know you meant hold it, I thought you meant hold it.

Elaine, “One drink like that and he could fall right off the wagon.”

George, “Told you.”

Non-half-assed commentary

2009-05-12T22:12:00.000-07:00

Date: Sun, 17 Feb 2008 17:57:47 -0800

From: Andrew Shaw-Kitch

To: Brendan McCauley

Subject: Non-half-assed commentary

Brendan,

When I think of commentary I think of you. Yesterday I watched Seinfeld for the first time in a long time and it was great. It was the episode when:

1) Kramer loses all of Jerry's shoes and forces a mom and pop store to abandon its 48-year-old shoe repair business 

2) George buys John Voight's Le Baron (and Jon Voight bites Kramer) 

3) Jerry is not invited to Tim Watley's party but goes and knocks a statue into Woody the Woodpecker 

4) Elaine wins Mr. Pitt the opportunity to, with the common man, hold the Woody the Woodpecker float.  

I very much appreciated your commentary, as I know very little about photography, other than it interests me very personally. On Friday a girl in our program said, with no inflection to illustrate its romantic significance, "I can never photograph the stars," after attempting to do so. This of course is an essential metaphor for a lot of things. I think your own words speak a lot to your best photographs. What comes immediately to mind is the inexplicable mystery of your friends' XBox-obsessed faces and the fact that the narrative is not in the photo, it occurs where they are looking (i.e. the video game in the opposite direction). How are the photos these days? I assume well if you think so astutely about the medium. I request attachments for old and new times’ sake. 

Last night, in the bathroom of our room in the all-inclusive resort—a room that I shared with our old friend Ian, which had a single bed that I shared with our old fiend Ian—I found a shaving kit and decided to shave off my beard. However, I only got part way when I realized I would need scissors or else the task would require an excess of 1,000 strokes, for which I didn't think the cheap razor, nor I, had the patience. So upon returning today I have done just that, with the help of my scissors, leaving my moustache, and no one knows yet. I anticipate my mother's reaction. I don't know if you're familiar with the concept of an all-inclusive resort, because I wasn't until I experienced it, though I had heard the term before: at any given time you can order any alcoholic beverage you want. You are on the beach and you want a Piña Colada: you ask for one, you get it and you pay nothing. You are eating your dinner (a buffet with a myriad of ridiculous choices) and a waitress asks you if want you want anything to drink and you say champagne, AND YOU ARE THEN DRINKING CHAMPAGNE! You are swimming in one of the five pools and you want a beer and so you swim to the poolside bar and receive a beer! You go to get coffee after dinner and you have fifteen varieties of alcoholic coffees available. The bar closes at eleven where you've been drinking Cuba Libres (Coke and Rum) and you are directed to the resort’s club to drink more for free.  Considering the mentality of my drinking career, that financial issues are the only thing stopping me from drinking all the time, I didn't know exactly how to handle this, as I did all of these things quite unhypothetically (save the pool/beer scenario that I experienced vicariously through an anecdote of Ian’s) and thus the beer-zarre nonsense reality I was dealing with became even more ridiculous: Lewis & Clark College has sent me on a program that took me to a resort for three days and two nights with the educational value of whale watching Saturday morning and visiting Barrio Wilmore[1]. The most striking effect of course was an inside study of how fucked-up the Dominican tourist industry is and how decadent rich people are in the midst of some of the worst poverty in the northwestern hemisphere: they had security guards with shotguns at the end of the beach that was toward the town to keep the Dominicans off the private beach. And I can't handle how my life is always so predetermined to be so goddamn ironic: the most wretched thing I've experienced the whole time I’ve been here was spent under the guise of the most pleasurable things: "the honeymoon period" of culture shock ended in the place where people are supposed to have their honeymoons: I watched Seinfeld in a foreign country, etc.  I'm sorry for spouting so much, but sometimes one needs to share their moustache and the circumstances that led to it.  

Love, Andrew

[1]. 1) This is a footnote to explain that Friday afternoon we visited a neighborhood settled by freed American slaves from Philadelphia in the 1820s who were offered lots of land by Haiti (then occupiers of the whole island) instead of returning to Liberia. In the 1960s, however, the Dominican government tore down the neighborhod to make way for tourism and so only a few English speaking African-Americans remain, one of whom made us cookies, ginger ale and johnnycakes and told us stories.

Death of a Latex Salesman

2009-05-12T22:10:00.000-07:00

In “the Subway” Jerry tells George not to “whistle on the elevator,” explaining that “that's what Willie Loman told Biff before his interview, in Death of a Salesman.” This makes certain sense, that George, of late struggling with employment, receives the advice that American literature’s Salesman gave to American literature’s Unemployed Son—except that Jerry’s life may be symbolized by this image of an outsider whistling in an elevator full of businessmen, and that Willy’s advice is contradicted later when his boss relishes in the whistling abilities of his family, a moment when the audience begins to seriously doubt Willy Loman. All the same, George resents being compared to the “biggest loser of American literature.” To me Biff is the hero of the play, and his father is the bigger loser, and I think many people would agree. It is Biff’s passion for sincerity and authenticity—a direct reaction against his father’s delusions and dishonesty—that forces his family to own up to their tragic condition, and it his father’s dishonesty that destroys Biff’s chances at a successful life. He is the Greek prophet in 1950s Brooklyn warning an oblivious Oedipus that, continuing as he is, without questioning his abundant pride, he is doomed to fall. And of course Willy Loman never sheds this pride nor owns up to the fallibility of his delusions. He loses his grasp on reality through his failing memory and sight, and dies.

George does not go to the interview as Biff does, and wait around all day like a putz, and then steal a pen to assert his independence—though he might have in a different context—he decides instead to flirt with an attractive well-dressed woman and pretend, with the help of the suit he put on for the interview, that he is a successful investor. Suddenly he is Willy Loman, climbing toward the American dream on a mountain of bullshit, and seducing a woman—and himself—with the false notion that he is a successful businessman. However with one final turn of irony it seems he is bullshitting a bullshitter: her con is to flirt with successful-looking men on the subway, convince them she is overtaken by their charm, take them to a room, and let them think the handcuffs she’s using to affix them to the bed are a sexual prop before taking all of their money and leaving them handcuffed. But of course George is full of shit, not money, leading her to explain the true state of affairs to our poor hero who has been handcuffed in his underwear: “I wasted my whole morning with you for eight dollars?” So, in restitution, she takes his suit, and George is back to the naked sincerity of Biff Loman, once again given a rotten hand, to which he is painfully honest in owning up: “No wait, you can't just leave me here! Will I see you again?”

Jerry, on the other hand/subway, awakes to find a man next to him who is naked, skipping all the nonsense that George went through, and they end up going to Coney Island together and having a grand ol’ time.

The other casting of George as Biff comes in one of my favorite episodes: “The Boyfriend,” the merits of which could never be adequately described, and the first part of which I paraphrased in June 2003 as what I considered to be an incredibly important avant-garde short story, a consideration I rethought in July 2003. George needs to prove he has been searching for a job, though he hasn’t, in order to continue receiving unemployment checks. This is why we love George Costanza: he invents “Vadaley Industries,” a company that manufactures and sells latex, says that they are considering him as a latex salesman, and gives Jerry’s phone number so that he can corroborate the existence of this enterprise; Willy Loman lied about being demoted to a salesman only paid by commission—George Costanza lied about being interviewed about the possibility of being a salesman. When the always-honest Kramer answers the phone, and ruins the lie, George tumbles, literally, to the honesty of Biff for a moment (again exposed with his pants around his ankles).

He still does not actually try to get a job interview, because, like Willy he has too much pride to be under the thumb of someone he doesn’t respect, and, like Biff, is too much of a dreamer to be stuck in the rat race: this time (Part two of “The Boyfriend”) he notices a photo of his caseworker’s markedly unattractive daughter and finagles a date with her, thus flattering the mother into extending his benefits. He is not being paid for nothing, as is the case with the typically unemployed, he is being paid for concocting Costanzian schemes to avoid doing real work, one of the show’s many metaphors for its own production.

Now, however, he finds himself in the situation of dating a girl he does not like in the least—which is bad enough—but who, in the end, breaks up with him because he’s “like Biff Loman”—“no job” and “no prospects.” George has failed horribly again and has lost his unemployment in the process, in addition to his already pilfered suit—not to mention the eight dollars. He is by no means whistling in the elevator. On the contrary he tries to convince the businessmen that he seriously wants to make it in the world, he is withholding the whistle, diverting it with his tongue into his cheek, and the result is hilarious to everyone except him, because every time, in the end, the high-talking salesman dies tragically leaving only Biff Loman, ruined by the bullshit of his dishonest counterpart and exposed as the low man that he is.

Cosmos, noun

2009-05-12T22:06:00.000-07:00

1. The world or universe as an ordered and harmonious system.  

1650 BULWER Anthropomet. xv. 149 As the greater World is called Cosmus from the beauty thereof.

1848 tr. Humboldt's Cosmos (Bohn) I. 53 In this work I use the word Cosmos..[as] the assemblage of all things in heaven and earth, the universality of created things, constituting the perceptible world.

1865 GROTE Plato I. i. 12 The Pythagoreans conceived the Kosmos, or the universe, as one single system, generated out of numbers.

1869 PHILLIPS Vesuv. xii. 324 A complete history of volcanos should…be in harmony with the general history of the cosmos.

1874 BLACKIE Self Cult. 11 Were it not for the indwelling reason the world would be a chaos and not a cosmos.  b. transf. An ordered and harmonious system (of ideas, existences, etc.), e.g. that which constitutes the sum-total of ‘experience’.  

1882 T. H. GREEN Proleg. Ethics §145 Sensations which do not amount to perceptions, make no lodgment in the cosmos of our experience, add nothing to our knowledge.

1885 CLODD Myths & Dr. II. iii. 155 The confusion which reigns in his [man's] cosmos extends to his notion of what is in the mind and what is out of it. 

2. Order, harmony: the opposite of chaos.  

1858 CARLYLE Fredk. Gt. II. i, Hail, brave Henry..still visible as a valiant Son of Cosmos and Son of Heaven.

1872 W. MINTO Eng. Prose Lit. I. iii. 187 Work, the panacea which alone brings order out of confusion, cosmos out of chaos.   

3. A plant of the genus of Compositæ so named, native to tropical America, species of which, bearing rose, scarlet, and purple single dahlia-like blossoms, are cultivated as hardy annuals and perennials.  

1911 C. HARRIS Eve's Second Husband xiv. 278 You have that muslin with the purple cosmos flowers in it.

1920 United Free Ch. Miss. Rec. Dec. 226/2 Patches of white and magenta flowers called Cosmos. 1922 Glasgow Herald 25 Jan. 8 The pale delicacy of great beds of cosmos.

4. More than one Cosmo Kramer