I Am Reading/Watching/Listening No. 12
In which Jason Alexander's backstage 'Seinfeld' stories are a soothing balm.
For those of you who are new to Artlandia, on Sunday nights I post this snapshot of some of the best stuff I watched, read and listened to over the previous week. I go for the best mix of material that I personally found interesting, useful, and/or entertaining and that I think some of you might also enjoy.
Here’s this week’s list.
Oral History: Jason Alexander talks Seinfeld, acting and humor
As with a lot of television, I came late to Seinfeld, probably about the time it moved to syndication and you could knock out one every night. I enjoyed it overall. It was fresh, unique and irreverent in a way that hadn’t been done before. I particularly enjoyed the character of George Costanza, who—it is now understood—based on Seinfeld creator Larry David, and brilliantly played by Jason Alexander.
A few years ago, Alexander sat down for an interview about the Seinfeld experience with the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences, and you can find them broken into neat, topical sections on YouTube: The origin of George, what Alexander’s favorite line was, what a week’s production was like, advice for young actors, why he threatened to quit early in the run, etc.
Alexander, who is nothing like the character he played, is an engaging story-teller. Every anecdote is rich with insight into the craft of acting and television production, and he’s also very funny. The story about how George’s fiance, Susan Ross, came to be killed off is hilarious, although one can see how Heidi Swedberg, the actor who played Susan, might not think so. I was also fascinated to hear his explanation of why the late Jerry Stiller (who played George’s father) delivered his lines in a staccato fashion—to great comedic effect.
Anyway … I went down the rabbit hole of Jason Alexander interviews last week, and then discovered a much deeper hole: His interview is one of hundreds with more than 800 television pioneers—actors, producers, journalists, choreographers, etc., all made available free on the website for The Interviews: An Oral History of Television.
Friends, this is a gold mine. Here, you’ll find names like Mary Tyler Moore, Fess Parker, Alan Alda, Walter Cronkite, Norman Lear, Fred Rogers, Sherwood Schwartz, Dick Van Dyke, Carol Burnett, Betty White, Chris Carter, along with a lot of people you’ve probably never heard about. And suddenly I found myself sucked into stories told by Paul Michael Glasser, the Starsky of the late 70s cop show Starsky & Hutch, even though I never actually watched the show. It’s a terrific resource, highly recommended. Much more interesting than cat videos.
Books: All ‘Dune,’ all the time
I’ve previously indicated that I was going to weigh in on Dune, but the honest truth is that the fictional universe created by Frank Herbert—and now finally realized visually with great success by Canadian filmmaker Denis Villeneuve—is so complex and dense that I haven’t decided what I want to say about it. I’m well into my third reading of the first book while also consulting The Spice Must Flow, by Ryan Britt, The Science of Dune, edited by Kevin R. Grazier and Joycean scholar Bob R. Bogle’s monumental analysis Frank Herbert: The Works.
Book Review: ‘A Great Disorder,’ by Richard Slotkin
Sunday’s New York Times Book Review featured a sadly too-short review of a new book by the cultural critic and historian Richard Slotkin: A Great Disorder: National Myth and the Battle for America. Even as I baby-step my way through Jill Lepore’s massive history of the United States, I’m considering adding this one to the read-this-year list. Slotkin is the author of a enormous but relatively unknown trilogy on U.S. history, one that sits intimidatingly on my shelves largely unread but occasionally consulted. The trilogy consists of:
Regeneration Through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600-1860
The Fatal Environment: The Myth of the Frontier in the Age of Industrialization 1800-1890
Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth Century America
Reviewing his new book in the Times, Nicole Hemmer summarizes that trilogy:
“Across three books of U.S. history … Slotkin argued that Americans repeatedly turned to what he called the ‘myth of the frontier,’ a notion that reinvention could be achieved only through the white supremacist violence of Indigenous displacement and fatal shootouts. The results were environmental degradation and capitalist exploitation. An American iconography developed. The idea of the cowboy, the wilderness explorer and the fertile but deadly frontier landscape consumed the white American imagination …”
In his new book, Slotkin looks at the present state of political polarization through the lens of “competing national mythologies” and walks his 500+ page analysis all the way up to the Jan. 6 assault on the U.S. Capitol.
Slotkin’s work on American history and mythology illustrates an absolutely essential point that I think we forget: The absolute primacy of story. Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind author and historian Yuval Noah Harari made this point a while back on some podcast, using the current conflagration in the Middle East as an example: The conflict between Israel and Gaza is not, ultimately, over resources. There is (he said) enough food, water and land for literally everyone who lives there. They’re fighting because each side clings to a story about themselves, stories that contain both truth and fiction and stories within stories, overlapping with other stories—mythology, in other words. The human cost of those stories over the last five months, including the Oct. 7 assault on Israeli civilians by Hamas fighters, approaches 35,000 people—the vast majority of whom are Palestinians, and those on top of the thousands more that are being starved to death. The same prowess and consequence of story, I’d add, can also be seen in Putin’s assault on Ukraine.
These are scenarios where “just” stories doesn’t work. Story matters.
Article: ‘25 Years Later, We’re All Trapped in the Matrix
This may be paywalled, but you also might get a few freebies at the Wall Street Journal, I’m not sure how that works. Anyway, good piece by Meir Soloveichik on how the film was basically prophetic: “… In a strange way,” the author writes, “the film has become more relevant today than it was in 1999. With the rise of the smartphone and social media, genuine human interaction has dropped precipitously. Today many people, like (the traitorous character) Cypher, would rather spend their time in the imaginary realms offered by technology than engage in a genuine relationship with other human beings.”
Substack: Kathryn Vercillo’s ‘Create Me Free’
Every week, I discover a couple new Substack newsletters that illustrate just how high the quality on this platform can be. In her newsletter Create Me Free, San Francisco artist and author Kathryn Vercillo writes about “the complex relationship between art and mental health, not just art as therapy, but also the myriad ways mental health symptoms impact artistic process, content, medium, and productivity.” A fascinating topic, and Vercillo has clearly put a lot of time and thought into working on it. Highly recommended.
Coolest thing I saw this week
I was driving through town the other afternoon and I saw a young woman walking along the sidewalk, her attention fixated not on her cell phone, but a paperback. She was reading a book. I smiled the rest of the way home.