Ginsburg, Seinfeld, Suzanne Vega (plus Tom and St. John)

Flashback to 10 years ago… May 14, 1998… a lifetime ago in New York City…

That was the night of the last Seinfeld episode, a sitcom I had never seen at that time, even though my friend Eamon swore I would dig it. (I belatedly saw a few episodes and… yada, yada, yada… was hooked.)

Anyway, that spring evening my girlfriend Maryam and I strolled from her place on West End Ave over to the Cathedral of St. John the Divine to attend a tribute to Allen Ginsberg, who had died sometime earlier. It was a massive event, with musical performances by Patti Smith, Phillip Glass and others.

Maryam and I only became aware of the sitcom finale as we passed a group of Seinfeld fans gathered around Tom’s Restaurant, on 112th & Broadway. The diner, we learned, was used for the exterior shots for the diner frequented by the Seinfeld characters in the show, although it was actually filmed in California.

In this account of the Ginsburg tribute, Livia Sian Llewellyn refers to the Seinfeld fever in NYC that evening. And she reminds me of the Seinfeld mockery provided at the Ginsburg tribute by Danny Schecter (whom I knew vaguely from my days as a “South African musician”, when I wrote a free press-inspired anthem, Keep the Dream in Focus, for a benefit I co-produced at the Knitting Factory for his PBS show South Africa Now):

Danny Schechter broke the taboo, and uttered the name that had been in the backs of all our minds. Schechter gave an angry and hilarious speech about the ineptitude of the media, their attention to the Show About Nothing, while doing little more in the way of coverage for the tribute than a small blurb in the Times, which listed the date as May 15, instead of the 14th. He read a Seinfeld/Ginsberg comparison list, noting the differences between the non-realities of a show about New York, filmed in Los Angeles, and a man who spent much of his life living in and writing about this city. Seinfeld was about nothing, he said, Ginsberg was and is about everything.

Now, fast forward to 2008… Lo and behold, today I learn from Popwatch.com that that UWS ‘Seinfeld diner’ is the same “Tom’s Diner” referred to in Suzanne Vega’s classic song by that name. Who knew?!… (Probably everyone else?)

Vega described the genesis of the song in a blog entry the other day:

I wrote it in the spring of 1982… When I was at Barnard College in Manhattan, I used to go to Tom’s Restaurant for coffee, and after I graduated I also ate there before going to work. It was then a cheap, greasy place on 112th and Broadway, and it still is, in spite of its celebrity… And yes, it is the same one they use in the Seinfeld credits — the neon sign that says “RESTAURANT.”

Via: Popwatch.com

Photo credit: jarhead

© 2008 NutsInNY.com

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