Seinfeld

Seinfeld is a great show. My favorite episodes on Seinfeld involve George and Jerry sitting around trying to write their screenplay; Jerry and Elaine (and the others) talking about sex; scenes sitting around talking in the coffeeshop and elsewhere; et cetera et cetera. Favorite Kramer episodes include "Moviephone" and "Kramer gets a Job at the Advertising Agency".

My favorite George episodes involve George dealing with a bee in front of some corporate snack bar, as he tries to start "The Summer of George"; his resolute and successful professionalism at the Yankees, Kruger Industrial Smoothing and especially at the place where he sits and organizes the "Penske file"; and his loyalty to Jerry and the group. I especially love the episode where he and Jerry sit in the coffee place talking about the "roomate situation" and then they stay up till the next morning trying to figure out a solution to the problem; anytime the show starts looking like a French new wave movie is very good.

Favorite Elaine episodes involve her trying to earn money dealing with Mr Pitt, J Peterman and Pendant Publishing. Her wardrobe, her modernity, her ability to ignore distracting conversational cues and continue with salient, sociable content; her sense of privacy played against her sense of revealing commentary. Seinfeld presented the character of Elaine Benes as a very positive role model: dealing with life problems like rent and work; dealing with sex and relationship problems; and looking very professional and pleased throughout.

Favorite Jerry episodes involve Jerry establishing the apartment and the group as good places to be; his efforts to be successful as an entertainer; and especially the way he sets the tone for interaction between the people of the show by sharing what he's got.

The show is so international; so many different people are represented, w/o stiffness or ignorance. The scene where Ping gets on the phone with China, talking to the guy at the hair cream company, is my favorite, as is the character of his lawyer.

Tonight's episode involves the John Cheever letters and Jerry and George sitting around trying to write their television project.

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Jay Leno

Tonight Jay is talking about science, sulfur hexaflouride?, a gas that is transparent and so dense that aluminum foil floats on it; this is the kind of programming that leads to some future science show or shows that people will watch to find out what goes on at work, making it easy to look for andfind a job; machine tools, chip making, furniture, automotive, et cetera. I'm sure no one wants to hear how China produces more engineers per capita per year than the US, yet science is what puts money in everyone's pocket. Another great Leno science moment was when he had the two guys on who built the spaceship themselves, and traveled to outer space. They were engineers in the Southwest of the US, and they set a record for altitude using a handmade airplane; Jay had them on the week after they set the record. The ship looked like the space shuttle or a jet and it took off from the ground and flew up to 100 kilometers and above.

When Family Matters had Urkel matriculating to MIT, that was one of my all-time favorite television moments. Urkel never seemed happier than when he was sitting in his dorm room with his friends/roomates, studying. My favorite time away at school was always at finals when all the dining room tables were pushed together to form a study area, making it very easy to learn the material, write papers and pass our courses, in our normal sociable, energetic cooperative setting. It seemed to save study time as well. "Why don't we finish this and get some beer" is a good context for success.

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Friends

Friends is a very good show; it presents some young people living in very reasonably portrayed, modern lifestyles. The apartments were a little big for New York, but that's just so there would be enough space to make a good show. Jennifer Aniston, who is Telly Savalas' goddaughter, who waited tables for a living while studying acting, became so very popular, and then seemed to get interested in Brad Pitt. He's a great guy, with lots of Hollywood smarts, but it seemed to make more sense when she started seeing Vince Vaughn, a person who is more complimentary to the Friends oeuvre.

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The Simpsons

Maybe some people don't know a lot about heavy metal; I do, I love the Adult Swim show about Dethklok, which is produced by alumnae of the Conan O'Brien show. I sometimes think, while watching the show, that their manager/accountant/representative is a film roman communication of Conan O'Brien, whose show's format and environment doesn't allow for as much metal as is presented on Adult Swim. At any rate, Simpsons is so very popular with people who have to go to work, and whose parents take money seriously. One could go on about how removed from the mundane one can get during the first 5 minutes of a Simpsons episode. I found a site in NZ with over 50 forum pages of reminiscence and commentary about people's favorite Simpsons moments; I read all 50 pages, which took over 2 hours as they were long-form forum pages. "Flunk Me? Flunk you!" If I were the producers of The Simpsons I would sort of hold my breath like I had 3 of a kind and just keep on producing on into the future, ad infinitum.

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Saturday Night Live

During the 90s and up until a few years ago, when they started shifting to a Dischord Records-friendly typographical format, the show, which is one of our most important engines of social change, suffered from what seemed to be some kind of mild, unhealthy Confucian medical wind. Tina Fey, who seemed born to be the lead writer of SNL, moved away to 30 Rock, which is very good, she is able to function so well as a prime time producer with her years of experience at SNL. 30 Rock's episode where Tracy Morgan tells Tina at the end of the show that he "edited a literary magazine at school", where the premise of the show was that Tina couln't figure out if Tracy was illiterate, won me over completely, rolling away the stone of diffidence and overly critical thought. I have always thought Tina was an important leader; Weekend Update is very vinegary, when I saw the way the movie Mean Girls handled trouble, with Tina's editorial stamp, was when I was really won over to Tina's ways of doing things.

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Kids in the Hall

This show is so good, one hopes that Lorne will be able to produce more material as he goes on.

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The Office

The Office is very good, one assumes that our national business productivity is rising like the crime rate dropped when Bill Clinton was elected, The Office clears out unhealthy work influences in a clever way, a way that produces energy. Versions of the show are produced in Britain, the US, France, Germany and French Canada; I have just received two seasons of the British version in the mail. Who's Camus, Anyway? is a 2004 Japanese movie about film school that reminded me of The Office.

The Office has a Wikpedia page detailing a comparison between the different international verisons of the shows, it is interesting and helpful to the viewer. I suppose the greatest compliment I could give to The Office is that when the salesman (Dwight Schrute's foil) is working and or talking with the receptionist, I develop a lot of confidence in our national (and global) economy. That's a good compliment. It's a bit puzzling to put two and two together with watching the BBC show produced by Ricky Gervais; since I have set so much store by the American version, I am learning a lot about Britain. I suppose sooner rather than later the German and French-language versions will be available at Netflix w/subtitles.

Other elements of The Office that inspire confidence are Toby (Malcolm in the UK) and, in the US version, when Ryan is explaining economics to Michael and when Ryan is sitting in the car with Michael during the fire at the office.

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The Daily Show and The Late Show

Here in "the large area outside of New York City", one may as well be slightly worried about Stewart and Letterman's complete lack of understanding of the concept of the antithetical.

Antitheticality has to do with Aesop's Fable about the summer sun and the winter wind - they made a bet to see who could make a guy take off his winter coat. Of course, the winter wind tried and tried, and the man just held on more tightly to his coat. The summer sun went next and a minute later the coat was over the guy's shoulder. This can't be news to the reader.

Jon Stewart is a good poker player, or so I have read, and sometimes I hold my breath a little bit if I have a potential winning hand - to me, this is the essence of playing poker. At the poker table, if one feels happy at some turn of the game, it might be a reward in advance for not winning a hand - a happy loser makes for a safe, enjoyable game of poker - the game would have been outlawed a long time ago if people got P.O.D. when a winning hand...didn't. One would think that a good poker player would have a grip on the concept of feeling antithetically happy before losing a hand.

Over and over again, demos are laughing when they win and crying when they lose. How can this be? These political commentators and interested parties emphasize and stress the seriousness of the election. How serious can it be? If it was so serious, then why, time after time, do demos blast the nerds and lose like McGovern? Or Gore?

Not everyone is a Soprano. One watches the show and is amazed when some actor on the show makes the front page of the New York Post for shooting an off-duty policeman while out late at night buying coke and partying. Wouldn't working on this show make one more aware of the dangers of this lifestyle, instead of making one less aware? Is Jersey Pride that intoxicating?

Maybe it is.

Metropolitan people who are deeply concerned with the future of northern South America are known to sometimes exude a value system that is involved with riding the crest of the wave as relates to the cocaine industry. This is an industry that involves factory workers spending hundreds of dollars a month on coke, beer, et cetera. It is an industry that involves working people being too hung over to do the crossword puzzle. Britain and the US have by far the greatest national debts. This is a debt to China, Japan, Germany and others. Are we going to tell them to get the money from Peru, Venezuela and Columbia?

Governor Deval Patrick of Massachusetts and Senator Barack Obama of Illinois are kind of similar politically. Both are democrats. It seems to me that republican Fred Thompson of Tennessee and of NBC's Law and Order is waiting to catch the election if demo flagships like The Late Show and The Daily Show keep blowing cold wind on "the 297 million American people who aren't watching the show every night". As a Massachusetts citizen, I will say that electing Obama is the most important thing this country can do. As a blogging netizen, I can say that running the fine line between serving coffee to and running the risk of offending "Jets fans" is the most important thing that I can do.

We've all got problems. As Phish once said, "Bag it, tag it, sell it to the butcher in the store" and try to spend some time "Away from the numbers" (as per The Jam). Maybe the presence of overheated hosts on nighttime tv is an indication that there is something good going on in the country. Something new and difficult. Maybe there is a new Bochco show in the works. One can only hope. Maybe liberalization and sanguinity are linked, instead of liberalization and release; when a liberal is in office, it's time for liberals to go to work. If liberals lose an election, then it's time to "rebuild the team".

Like SNL, The Late Show and The Daily Show are important vehicles of social change. TV people will tell you repeatedly that their job is difficult; perhaps as difficult as writing this blog.

As far as being overheated is concerned, medical-emotional heat is confusing in the first place. One tries to be hippocratic about such things. Reading the New York Post, one is amused by the crazy headlines. One gets bored and starts checking through and realizes that every single headline in the paper is written to be crazy and funny. Is life really that funny?

One thing Yankees fans will never understand, is how difficult it is to beat New York, it's as though the lack of common sense translates into athletic ability. I suppose when the salary cap is instituted, the Yanks will join the Knicks and Rangers and the Florida Marlins will get going again.

Definitely.