About

The story begins:

In February of 2008 the fellow students of my exchange program and I were bussed to an all-inclusive resort just outside of Samaná in the Dominican Republic (described in this email written upon returning to Santiago where I was studying).   In the hotel room that I shared with my friend Ian, I watched two episodes of Seinfeld that were on cable and I realized for the first time that George Costanza stood in for Larry David, that Jerry Seinfeld, one co-creator, plays himself, and that Jason Alexander plays an alter-ego of Larry David, the other co-creator and executive producer—both balding, bespectacled, neurotic, and co-creators of a sit com with Jerry Seinfeld, one in reality and one within the show's reality.  I watched the episodes' airing live, so to speak, from 1995, at the age of nine, and in syndication nearly every weeknight at seven o'clock on KCBA Fox 35.  Although I missed the original airing of the first 5 seasons, I figured that at a certain point I had seen every episode, but I missed the original airing of the show-within-the-show storylines.  My viewings of the last four seasons, therefore, weren't informed by these incredibly self-referential seasons—I saw them afterwards, but I never put it together for some reason.  I watched the quasi-documentary Curb Your Enthusiasm when it premiered on HBO and watched every episode of the show that became of that.  In ninth grade I wrote an essay on Jerry Seinfeld as rendered by Kathleen Tracy in The Entire Domain.  I saw Seinfeld's documentary Comedian with my dad at the Golden State Theater in Monterey when it came out, and I considered myself somewhat of an authority on the ouvre of Jerry Seinfeld and Larry David.  But how could this obvious fact, essential to the dynamics, meaning and success of the show have eluded me until this fateful dominican viewing?  I suppose network television isn't designed to instigate deep intellectual thought about levels of representation, the slipperiness of identity, the relationship between lived experience and the creation of fiction, whether any experience is really real or if any fiction is really false.  But Seinfeld did require this of its viewers—it just let them get away with utter satisfaction in the storylines, the dialogue and the catch phrases that came out of it, which is understandable.  The episodes are fast-paced, intelligent and original, and it's easy to flatter yourself for following along and getting it, even if you don't appreciate the larger commentaries on itself, sitcoms in general, and consumer culture as a whole.

I was inspired by this revelation set on the northeastern extremity of Hispañola, the island that began European interaction with the Americas, to become a genuine authority on Seinfeld and, upon my return, I watched the show all summer and began a critical dialogue of the show with my friend Brendan.  May 14th marked the 10th anniversary of the finale episode and the significance 10 years out was up for debate, and people were getting it wrong.  Television critics don't read Derrida, and I became increasingly convinced that Larry David did, or at least he naturally intuited the precepts of deconstruction through a highly developed cosmic sense of humor.   

I ordered a copy of David Foster Wallace's A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again so I could read "E. Unibus Pluram: Television and U.S. Fiction." When I wrote my thesis in the fall in my last semester of school I managed to work the show into my thinking about the Variorum edition of Alexander Pope's The Dunciad.  I thought both works managed to subvert the corrupt structures of their publication, and to make themselves about that subversion.  And I finished the paper, perhaps regrettably, actually addressing Seinfeld.

My last semester's room and board back in Portland was afforded by my position as a Campus Living Advisor and when I graduated I had to move back into my parents' house.  I read Master of Its Domain, a fine collection of essays on the show.  I read a poor sociological analysis of the show that, while book length, failed to elucidate anything profound about Seinfeld or sociology.  I re-read Paul de Man's "Semiology and Rhetoric" for its analysis of All in the Family.  I conducted an interview with Kenny Kramer who asked me "so what makes your book so different from all the other books about Seinfeld?" I watched the show all the time and I wrote lots of essays about it.  In May I started this blog and named it for Jacques Derrida's "Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences."  The seventh season of Curb Your Enthusiasm aired September to November and centered on a Seinfeld reunion.  Also Larry David was in a Woody Allen movie.

I saw Avatar at the beginning of the next year and decided I was done writing about Seinfeld.  On April 2nd I gave a powerpoint presentation entitled "Art as getting paid to masturbate" about "The Contest" episode. And I continued to post writing about works, moments or ideas that reflect the aesthetic of Seinfeld, that is both a sort of slippery, self-referential joke, yet also an uncanny and poignant characterization of '90s american cosmopolitan culture.

For those of you not familiar with the show, and I suppose there must be somebody, Seinfeld is a situation comedy of nine seasons that aired from 1989 to 1998.  It stars Jerry Seinfeld as “himself,” a stand-up comedian who lives in Manhattan and does not star in his own sitcom.  At this period of Seinfeld’s real life he lived in Los Angeles and wrote, produced and starred in his own sit com, doing little to no actual stand-up comedy, besides what filmed as "actual stand-up comedy" for the show. 

Jason Alexander plays George Costanza who briefly holds various jobs (bra salesman, for example), is largely unemployed (for two incredible episodes he's employed as unemployment), and conceives of and creates a failed sit-com with Jerry called Jerry.  Larry David briefly held various jobs in the ‘70s and ‘80s (bra salesman, for example) and then co-created Seinfeld with Seinfeld and became executive producer and played half a dozen very minor roles until he quit the series after its seventh season, staying on to play the back of George Steinbrenner’s head. 

Julia Louis-Dreyfus worked with Larry David on Saturday Night Live in the ‘80s until he was fired for being difficult and not writing popular sketches, and plays the part of Elaine Benes which, while very much a character of her own creation, mirrors comedian and writer for Seinfeld Carol Liefer’s role in Seinfeld’s real life, and Larry David’s one-time girlfriend Monica Yates, daughter of Richard Yates who wrote Revolutionary Road and can be seen in Elaine's father, alcoholic writer, Alton Benes in "The Jacket."  

Michael Richards, who worked with Larry David on Fridays another failed sketch show of the ‘80s (if you consider SNL to have been a failure in the ‘80s) and plays Kramer, based on David’s real neighbor in New York, Kenny Kramer, who I spoke to on the phone in the summer of 2009.

At a certain point when the parallels between the show and reality are weighed out, one begins to see as great amount of play occur between reality and its simulation in the show as actually occurs in the dynamics of an episode and its storylines, jokes, and pastiches.  Jerry Seinfeld “is” Jerry Seinfeld, but the character also frequently stands in for Larry David.  George Costanza is a hybrid of Jason Alexander's impersonation of Woody Allen (at the beginning) and Larry David (as the show progresses), the writing of the writers, production of the producers, and the vision of Larry David's alter ego who often acts out real-life situations in which David was once placed (again—bra salesman).  Elaine Benes and Kramer are wild cards that complicate this essential dynamic and complete the aesthetic with femininity and masculinity, respectively, and, both of them, physical comedy and quirkiness.   Doubling pervades every aspect of the show's production—at every turn that something happens, something else happens, its opposite, its replication, or something unexpectedly parallel.  Jerry Seinfeld doubled gives us Jerry and George AND Seinfeld and David, which doubles to the four-person cast. 

Beyond these four characters the show plays with the televisual simulation of reality in a variety of ways.  Actors reappear in later episodes as different characters.  Larry David appears and reappears as unexpected characters (originally voicing Newman in his first off-screen “appearance” in the show), like the obligatory Hitchcock cameo.  Kramer fails to hold a part in a Woody Allen movie and the writer/director/actor decides to no longer film in New York, passing the torch of his tradition to these Los Angeles-based New Yorkers, each reciting a line from the film to make it official.  Larry David leaves the show to write and produce Sour Grapes, an unfortunate moralizing film from 1998, in which he plays the artless producer of a sitcom comically identical to Friends.  Michael Richards, as Kramer makes an appearance in Mad About You—or, rather, Paul Reiser as Paul Buckman appears in the Seinfeld reality when we learn he has been letting Kramer stay in his apartment for free since he moved in with Helen Hunt years before when they became mad about each other.  A character named Alec Burg is created to honor and poke fun at the phonemic ecstasy of the name of one of the show’s writers Alec Burg.  In one two-part episode Kramer goes to LA to make it in Hollywood and Jerry and George follow him, even though they are all already there having made it in Hollywood.  All this and endless pastiches of The Merchant of VeniceDeath of a Salesman, the Zapruder film, etc. is at play seamlessly within the verisimilitude of the show.  This is what the creators/characters/writers/actors mean when they say it’s a show about nothing—it is a show that does nothing, tries nothing, beyond pointing at itself pointing at itself.  It is not nihilist, as its critics purport, it is a declaration that primetime network programming cannot create anything other than vapid, commercial kitsch that can never signify anything meaningful beyond its ability to hold you in your seat during the commercial breaks.  And that is not nothing.  That is something.

People who watch television won’t get the Shakespeare reference in “The Pick” when Jerry says, “if we pick do we not bleed,” because they don’t read Shakespeare—they watch television.  They may think it is funny and groundbreaking that a storyline revolves around nose-picking, or they may think it is appalling and inappropriate—either "getting" the joke or not.  Either way you have grown up and lived your life consuming cookie-cutter TV dinner media fit for american audiences, and you don’t know that certain Canterbury Tales are bawdier than the most transgressive thing to be aired on network television by the early nineties, because, chances are, if you don’t read Shakespeare you don’t read Chaucer, because, again, you watch TV.  But those who get the references don’t like to watch TV, they view it snobbishly or ironically and get a meta-joke.   They watch HBO, where Seinfeld performed and buried all of his Seinfeld-era material in his I’m Telling You for the Last TIme special, and Larry David produced the Curb Your Enthusiasm special and the series of the same name that followed.  They watch PBS, as does Jerry who volunteers in "The Pledge Drive" as a celebrity phone answerer.  They watch TV as a guilty pleasure, as all four characters secretly watch Melrose Place and keep it from each other in "The Beard."

In “Avant-garde and Kitsch” Clement Greenberg describes the process of the mass media’s kitsch culture being “turned out mechanically” and simplifying and popularizing avant-garde modes.  “True” culture exists outside these populist distribution methods (TV, The Saturday Evening Post, etc.), and the masses consume this retrograde and easily accessible media (John Steinbeck books, Tin Pan Alley songs, etc.).  Money, popularity, and accessibility are held in opposition to culture, originality, and art.   “Capitalism in decline finds that whatever of quality it is still capable of producing becomes almost invariably a threat to its own existence,” Greenberg concludes.  Seinfeld is that variant.  It is avant-garde, contradictory and difficult art, slipped unnoticed into the “gigantic apparition” of the kitsch machine, it is the aforementioned “quality” that threatens the existence of capitalism.  “But Jerry, he owns the means of production!” Lois pleads in “The Race.” Jerry is a kitsch Superman bent on taking art back for the people, and Seinfeld is his avant-garde vehicle, his red cape, if you like. The show takes on capitalism, complacent art, and mass culture, including its own network and its own premise, at all turns, and it was wildly successful.  It sucked american viewership into its Thursday 9pm black hole and when it disappeared so did viewership.  The data points of blank human faces reappeared opposite hours of atrocious reality TV and three nights of Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and those, like myself, who left network television with Seinfeld and never returned, seek out the avant-garde deconstruction of the next kitsch stranglehold on american attention.   The avant-garde of today “imitate[s] the disciplines and processes of art and literature themselves...avant-garde culture is the imitation of imitating.”  The antiquated modes no longer have hold of our attention, they do not enter our living rooms uninvited and insult our intelligences.  We have the freedom to choose whatever we care to consume, and I have one show to thank for lifting the wooly static from my eyes—180 episodes watched over and over again, and two years of my life devoted to describing its achievements.  


I also watched the Simpsons a lot as a child.  I’m sure that has something to do with it, too.


The sport of bocce

I once wrote a poem on a postcard every day for a year

Occasionally I contribute to a blog about culture in the Pacific Northwest.

I once researched and wrote a treatise on racist appropriation in Pacific Grove, California.

If I was immune to shame I might have bought the domain legalweedsmoker.com and begun reviewing the effect of different strains of marijuana on creativity—but this is instead the work of an anonymous hero.

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