 Curb Your Enthusiasm star and Seinfeld cocreator and coexecutive producer Larry David on what his mother expected of him: “Her dream was for me to work in the post office and deliver mail,” he says. “I thought, You know, maybe she’s right; it’s not such a bad job. But I didn’t take the test. One day, you know, I was funny, and somebody said, ‘You should be a comedian.’ So here I am.”
A Tale of
Two Larrys
Larry David and the other Larry David are back for the sixth season of HBO’s Curb Your Enthusiasm.
By Ken Parish Perkins
When Larry David, our favorite narcissistic neurotic, finished the fifth season of the deliciously amusing Curb Your Enthusiasm, he left HBO without saying whether he would return for a sixth encounter. David went to his office in Santa Monica, and HBO waited for his decision. He sat at his desk, twiddled a pencil, made a few notes and a call, took a sip of water, and noticed, in a mere 12 minutes, that he was bored. “I went, Jeez, I don’t have anything to do,” David recalls. “And I thought, This is very uncomfortable. I better do another season.”
Four Things You Don’t Know about the Young Indiana Jones
1 Given that he was traveling the world in the early 1900s, the teenage Indiana Jones would have traveled slowly to many of his adventures by steamship. Fittingly, the 1990s George Lucas television series, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, has taken more than a decade to reach DVD. In part, that’s because Lucas wanted to upgrade the series by remastering the soundtracks and the 16 mm film. Those tasks continue, and the 44-episode series is being released in three volumes, the first of which is out this month.
2 Many states adopted compulsory school-attendance laws before the turn of the last century. So we have no idea how a young Indy could have been traveling the world instead of doing his book learning. Lucas is making up for that, though. His intention is to have the DVD series used as an educational and entertainment tool. David Schneider, a former 60 Minutes producer who now works for Lucasfilm, has spent the past several years creating documentaries on the historical figures and places featured in the series. Those documentaries will accompany each volume of the DVD releases.
3 Before he was Bond, Daniel Craig connected with Sean Connery by appearing in an episode of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles. Unlike Connery’s character, Indiana Jones’s older father in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Craig’s character was not related to Indy. But like Connery, Craig — 25 at the time of his 1993 appearance — had a mustache. Ick.
4 While not an instance of six degrees of Kevin Bacon, this connection is worth mentioning: Catherine Zeta-Jones, Connery’s costar from 1999’s Entrapment, also appeared in the Young Indiana Jones episode with Craig. It’s very interesting that the episode with Zeta-Jones and Craig was, like much of the series, partly shot in an exotic location. (Producers visited some 35 different countries, even though the series didn’t even last two full seasons.) But what’s more interesting is that during her appearance, Zeta-Jones does a belly dance.
|
|
If that sounds like it would be a perfectly prickly dilemma for the character David plays on his show, good — it should. Now that Curb is in its sixth season, it has become even harder to figure out where TV Larry David ends and real Larry David begins.
From the start, Curb Your Enthusiasm was set up to be a slightly fictionalized version of David’s real life in Los Angeles. While real David is the misanthropic rich genius who was behind Seinfeld and who now makes his HBO show because he feels like it, TV David is a semiretired sitcom legend zipping around town in his Toyota Prius, trying to find something useful to do.
The big difference between the two, of course, is that real David can be cordial if he wants to — or has to — whereas TV David manages to annoy or infuriate everyone he comes in contact with. Whether inviting a sex offender to a seder or adopting a racist dog, David’s always doing something — something that only gets worse the more he talks. “I love the guy who’s on the show,” says David about his TV character. “He says things I’m thinking and feeling, and he doesn’t have to behave in a way that society really wants everybody to behave. I wish I could be that way in my life.”
On Location
Even if most television shows are filmed there, not all are set in Los Angeles … or New York or Las Vegas. Take these three shows that premiere this month, for example.
THE SHOW: Life Is Wild, the CW
THE SETTING: A game reserve, South Africa
THE PREMISE: A New York City father decides his family needs to find togetherness. But instead of choosing to spend Sunday afternoons in Central Park, he opts to move everyone to South Africa, where he can put his veterinary expertise and Brady Bunch–style lecturing skills to work.
THE ADVANTAGE: It is cheaper to film in South Africa (where the series is actually shot) than in Los Angeles. Plus, lion cubs — so cute!
THE SHOW: Women’s Murder Club, ABC
THE SETTING: San Francisco
THE PREMISE: A James Patterson novel series comes to life. Angie Harmon stars as a homicide detective who pals around with a group of women — including an assistant DA, a medical examiner, and a reporter — having brunch, drinking wine, and solving crimes.
THE ADVANTAGE: Set in San Francisco, this show will remind you of Charmed, except without the sisters, the magic book, and the trampy outfits.
THE SHOW: Viva Laughlin, CBS
THE SETTING: Laughlin, Nevada
THE PREMISE: Based on a British show called Viva Blackpool, this series follows one man’s attempt to run a casino in the Vegas-lite world of Laughlin. Hugh Jackman serves as executive producer and makes regular appearances. And there are song-and-dance numbers interspersed throughout each episode. Yes, really.
THE ADVANTAGE: Set in Laughlin, this show will remind you of CSI, except with Hugh Jackman instead of Gil Grissom and without the magic acts and the trampy outfits.
|
|
Maybe the rest of us feel the same way. David specializes in cringe television, amazingly making us root for characters who are self-absorbed and argumentative. Seinfeld and Curb Your Enthusiasm share that quality. And although Curb doesn’t have the same pop-culture omnipresence as Seinfeld did, it’s just as good. Fans of this acerbic series, as was the case with Seinfeld devotees, exchange jokes and plotlines from weekly episodes the same way some people would trade cards.
What appeals to fans but appalls others is how typical TV sentimentality is stripped from the language and mood of David’s work. TV David would see no shame in that approach, of course, and real David doesn’t either. “I’m getting closer to him [TV David] every day,” David says.
Nowadays, the two Davids are most like each other in their contempt for the workings of Hollywood. Curb
Before the two Davids merge into one, will we get a seventh season? David isn’t sure. Filming has wrapped, and the season finale, which will air in November, was “written as a could-be-the-last-show ending or might-not-be-the-last-show ending,” David says. “We’ll just see when I get back to my desk if I want to do it again.”
skewers the TV and film industries’ hypocrisies, but it doesn’t name names — yet. “I can get away with that,” David says, “because there’s a very fine line between TV Larry and me.”
Men Behaving Nicely. And Not.
This month brings us some of the worst good guys in television history.
“Men,” says Dylan McDermott on ABC’s new show Big Shots, “we’re the new women.” Or so the network of Desperate Housewives, with its overbearing, overdramatic female leads, would have us believe. Two of ABC’s newest shows — Big Shots, which premiered late last month, and Carpoolers, which premiered October 2 — are focused on groups of men who share their feelings. Constantly. And with each other.
On Big Shots, one character goes to couples’ therapy with his wife and also attends therapy sessions with his mistress. On Carpoolers, a show that’s exactly what it sounds like, a group of guys who carpool and chat incessantly, a character named Gracen (played by Fred Goss) cries during the morning commute. Out loud. While singing Air Supply’s “All Out of Love.”
Actually, he doesn’t so much cry as sob. The song reminds him of when he first became a man, so to speak. In TV seasons past, his friends would’ve mocked him for this. Instead, the other carpoolers simply nod knowingly and sing along in support.
It’s nothing new for men on TV to be hapless dolts; there are a number of them on CBS sitcoms from earlier in this decade. Take King of Queens, for instance. But to be crying chumps? This is what our tele-men have come to?
Maybe not. Also joining this month’s morass of males is a former member of Jackass, the, according to USA Network, “indomitable Steve-O — a member of a dying breed of live-life-to-the-max daredevils who is disgusted with the alarming number of [wimpified] men” in America. This includes, we assume, Dylan McDermott.
In Dr. Steve-O, Steve-O himself travels the country at the request of girlfriends, wives, and others who are fed up with their male pals’ wimpy behavior. To cure them, Steve-O prescribes a series of dares. (That’s a scary thought when you recall that Steve-O once had his posterior pierced together for a TV stunt.)
Is Dr. Steve-O ridiculous? Sure. Is it needed, given the other new men on TV this month? Well, that just depends on how you feel about Air Supply.
|
La Canción Remains the Same
Language is no barrier to appreciating Federico Aubele’s Panamericana. By Joseph Guinto
If you don’t know, and you probably don’t, there’s an American singer named Richard Cheese who puts a “loungey” spin on foul-mouthed rock and rap music. His albums are satire — or something.
I first heard Cheese’s music being played at a bar in Buenos Aires, where the smarmy joke was obvious to me but totally lost on the Spanish-speaking bartender and, apparently, on all the other locals there as well. No one blinked when Cheese belted out Snoop Dogg’s “Gin and Juice,” with its, um, adult themes, as if he were Frank Sinatra singing “Luck Be a Lady.”
“He does covers,” the bartender explained, showing me Cheese’s album The Sunny Side of the Moon: The Best of Richard Cheese. Well, that’s partly true — he does do covers. But a native English speaker would know that there’s more to it.
That’s not so with Federico Aubele’s new album, Panamericana, and therein lies the problem: It’s entirely in Spanish. Sure, it sounds like Aubele, a Buenos Aires native, is singing about love and loss and the other kinds of sentimental subjects that usually make up the kind of easy-listening album he has created, but, for all I know, Aubele could actually be mocking me in his lyrics. Or mocking you. Or mocking everyone who doesn’t speak Spanish.
That’s troubling, given that Aubele’s album — a follow-up to his debut, Gran Hotel Buenos Aires — is so catchy. Blending tango and bolero and dub and pop in an innovative, sultry mix, Panamericana is a veritable soundtrack of today’s upbeat Buenos Aires. It’s the kind of album that’s perfect for listening to with friendly company and a good bottle of wine. You find yourself humming along and eventually even blurting out a couple of words, whether you understand them or not.
But there is good news: The album’s sound accurately mirrors what the lyrics are saying. “The album is about missing anything that gives you that home feeling,” Aubele tells me when I meet him in Washington, D.C., which is his U.S. home base and where his label, Eighteenth Street Lounge Music, is. “I was missing Buenos Aires when I wrote the songs. I was born there, and I grew up there, but it wasn’t until I left that I realized how great the city is.
“There’s also love on the album. I was breaking up with my girlfriend when I wrote many of these songs.”
Ah. Good news. Well, not for Aubele. But, still, it’s good that the album is, as it sounds, about love, loss, and Buenos Aires, and not about gin and juice and mockery. And if it seems weird that you can get those sentiments just from the intonation, the sexy rhythms, and the spacey electronic sounds buzzing by in the background, well, that doesn’t seem so weird to Aubele. “When I was a kid growing up in Buenos Aires, I was listening to early Beatles and early Rolling Stones songs,” he says, his wild mop of curly hair bouncing from the top of his tall, lanky frame. “I couldn’t understand most of the words, but I listened to them anyway. It becomes just a musical experience that way. The energy and the emotion of the music still transmits.”
To get the music to transmit to his audience — he guesses that about 60 percent of the people he plays for in U.S. venues don’t speak Spanish — Aubele has put a new focus on his songwriting, something he wasn’t as concerned about when producing his dub-influenced debut. As a result, Panamericana — with its male-female duets, its tango touches, and its deep, electronic-influenced beats — drips with emotion. “If you don’t understand the lyrics, then the song structure has to be better to make you interested,” Aubele says. “You have to have the riff. You have to have vocals that sound nice. You have to have nice guitar sounds. You have to have good beats. All that is what makes you listen. All of that might come in through a different door than the lyrics do, but it still comes in, and you get it.”
KT, Take Two
You heard her music in The Devil Wears Prada and on American Idol. Now, Edinburgh’s KT Tunstall is back with a new album. By Mikael Wood
Scottish singer-songwriter KT Tunstall’s debut album, Eye to the Telescope, was a surprise success, propelled by a breezy folk-pop tune called “Suddenly I See,” which showed up on big and small screens across the United States. including in The Devil Wears Prada, So You Think You Can Dance, Ugly Betty, and Grey’s Anatomy. Another of her songs got some key TV time, too: Katharine McPhee sang “Black Horse and the Cherry Tree” on last season’s American Idol.
But Tunstall had to figure out how to follow up on that success — which is what you call a good problem to have. Her solution: The harder-edged Drastic Fantastic, a new album, which is now out in stores and on which Tunstall has turned up the volume on the rootsy sound that charmed Hollywood.
Suddenly she sees Oompa-Loompas traveling around the world. “When other people buy one of your songs, you essentially give it away,” Tunstall says. “I don’t have kids, but it must be a fairly similar experience, where you create this thing, but once it’s out in the world, you really don’t own it anymore. I feel like I’ve created all these little Oompa-Loompas, and now they’re touring the world. I keep getting postcards from them, going, ‘Guess what? I’m in a Meryl Streep film!’ ”
Drastic Fantastic is darker, but it’s still no “Smelly Cat.” “The thing I was really afraid of on the first record was being Phoebe from Friends — a girl with a guitar, singing about being dumped. I didn’t really relate to that [mentality]. Eye to the Telescope was a deliberate attempt to stay away from that. But now I can go back to more contemplative, slightly darker feelings in my songs.”
She reflects on the first album’s success, and scissors. “Not to say I was curbed creatively on the first album, but there are certainly things I might have done differently had I been left to my own devices. On this album, I absolutely felt free to try anything out. It’s basically been like finding a pair of massive metal cutters in a cupboard and cutting the fences down.”
Drastic Fantastic is good, but your grandma might not think so. “I remember with the first album, when I did signings and stuff, people would come up and say, ‘Can you sign this for my grandmother?’ And I’d always be like, ‘That’s wicked!’ I’m really flattered that older people like it. On this album — maybe not so many grandmothers will like it. I’m all right with that.”
Three
to Tango
Want to mix Panamericana’s Argentina-influenced tunes with something in English? Put it on a playlist with the following three titles, which share some of the album’s musical attributes.
Francis Albert Sinatra & Antonio Carlos Jobib
Frank Sinatra and Antonio Jobim
This is Aubele’s favorite Sinatra album, and although the lyrics are not entirely in English (Jobim sings in Portuguese), this bossa nova classic is one of Sinatra’s prettiest works. The 1967 recording captures him in a contemplative mood, far from the wild, swinging Rat Pack. And if there’s a better version of “The Girl from Ipanema,” we’d like to hear it.
Secrets of the Beehive
David Sylvian
David Sylvian is either a progressive rocker who turned to jazz or a jazz artist who dabbled in rock — or maybe he’s both. In any case, the British singer-songwriter now makes top-notch ambient music that is influenced equally by rock and jazz. Aubele cites Sylvian as one of his major influences.
Scientist Dubs Culture
into a Parallel Universe
Scientist
If the album’s name alone isn’t enough to make you want it, maybe track titles like “Spacetime Continuum” and “Beam Me Up Dubby” will help. The songs capture the best of dub, the big-beat reggae sound that pops up throughout Aubele’s Pan-
americana.
|
|
|
 
Dylan Down Under
A new book takes us behind the scenes and into the basement with Bob and the Band. By Bob Mehr
By early 1967, Bob Dylan’s controversial turn from acoustic folk to electric rock, along with the epochal world tours of 1965 and 1966, had left him damaged, dazed, and ravaged by drugs. So Dylan retreated to his new family home near Woodstock, New York, and under the guise of his mysterious and now infamous motorcycle accident, he disappeared from public view. In Woodstock, with an ensemble of backing musicians known as the Band, Dylan began a series of informal recording sessions. The songs would eventually leak out to the public and come to be known collectively as the Basement Tapes, the most famous bootleg in history.
Four decades (and an official, if somewhat incomplete, release in 1975) later, author Sid Griffin shows us why the myths about and the magic of those recordings endure. In Million Dollar Bash: Bob Dylan, the Band, and the Basement Tapes, Griffin notes that Dylan’s work was — as always — revolutionary. It portended a return from the outrageous excesses of the psychedelic era, presaged the country-rock and Americana movements, and influenced everyone in the pop world, from the Beatles on down. Combining historical material and interviews with longtime Dylan confidants, Griffin, himself a noted songwriter as well as the leader of both the Long Ryders and Coal Porters, has created a true fan’s delight and a remarkable road map to these historic recordings.
|
Worth Your Money
New CDs, DVDs, and movies you should check out
HEAR IT: LeAnn Rimes, Family
BRINGING THE TWANG BACK: LeAnn Rimes has called her new album “countrier” than anything else she’s done lately. Countrier? Um, okay. While Family is definitely not as country as Rimes’s old-school, ballad-filled debut, Blue, it is a lot, yeah, countrier than This Woman and her other recent crossover attempts.
| HEAR IT: R.E.M., R.E.M. Live
LUCK FROM THE IRISH: Inexplicably, R.E.M. has never released a live-concert CD or DVD until now. Filmed in 2005 in Dublin, Ireland, where the group has also been recording its next studio effort, R.E.M. Live offers 22 songs and more than 100 minutes of old and new music — plus Michael Stipe’s head-shaving secrets. Not really.
| HEAR IT: Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings,
100 Days, 100 Nights
A BAND GROWS IN BUSHWICK:
The Dap-Kings own a studio (an all-analog facility in Brooklyn) and
distribute their music on a self-owned label, Daptone Records. That may
be why their soul and funk ring so true — well, that and Sharon Jones’s
captivating voice, which can sink to Captain Nemo depths and is in
constant demand from various artists, from Rufus Wainwright to They
Might Be Giants | SEE IT (BIG SCREEN): The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D
THAT PUMPKIN IS COMING RIGHT AT US:
Are you ready to see, perhaps, Huckleberry Hound in three dimensions?
You’d better be. Because if the digital reworking of Tim Burton’s The Nightmare Before Christmas 3-D
is successful at the box office — and judging by its stunning looks, it
may well be — then it won’t be long before other two-dimensional works
of animation get a third side. As Huckleberry might say, “Golly!” | | SEE IT (BIG SCREEN): Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
AND THE ENVELOPE, PLEASE … The five main actors — Philip Seymour Hoffman, Ethan Hawke, Marisa Tomei, Albert Finney, and Rosemary Harris — and director Sidney Lumet have a combined 16 Oscar nominations, including two wins. So bring a pen and make your Oscar predictions as you follow this movie’s twisting plot involving family betrayal, robbery, and adultery. Sorry, Seymour, but our money is on Finney in a supporting role. | SEE IT (BIG SCREEN): My Kid Could Paint That
YOU CALL THAT ART? If a four-year-old kid can paint like modern-art master Wassily Kandinsky, does that mean the kid is a genius, or does it just make Kandinsky and other modern-art artists laughable? That’s roughly the highbrow query that director Amir Bar-Lev started with when making this documentary. And when he began to question whether little Marla Olmstead had, in fact, painted her works at all — well, that’s when things really got interesting.
| SEE IT (DVD): 28 Weeks Later
BE AFRAID: London is swell and all, but if you were to take away the traffic and the sky-high real estate prices, you’d really have something. That’s just what it’s like for the London inhabitants in 28 Weeks Later. Unfortunately for them, this quieter, gentler London is the result of a zombie outbreak. (See 28 Days Later for details.) But the zombies are now contained. Or … are … they? | SEE IT (DVD): Warner Home Video Directors Series: Stanley Kubrick
BE VERY AFRAID: The mere idea of having A Clockwork Orange, Eyes Wide Shut, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Full Metal Jacket, and The Shining in one place — in one box — creeps us out. Of course, the presence of Stanley Kubrick: A Life in Pictures, a documentary about the legendary director of the aforementioned films, in that box, is somewhat calming. But we suggest that you keep the movies separate, lest Jack Torrance, Private Pyle, Alex de Large, HAL 9000, and a naked Tom Cruise conspire against you. | |
|
Truth and Fiction
Radio’s Ira Glass brings together some of his favorite writers in a new compendium.
The king is dead. More specifically, the old king of literary nonfiction — a form that incorporates fictional-writing techniques such as dramatic arc, scene setting, and extended dialogue to flavor books about true occurrences — is dead. That king would be Truman Capote, whose In Cold Blood, an account of a murder in rural Kansas, is often called the first nonfiction novel. Now, 42 years after In Cold Blood was first published and 23 years after Capote’s death, Ira Glass of Chicago Public Radio’s This American Life is declaring, “Long live the new kings!” In a new compendium, Glass brings together 14 top current writers of literary nonfiction. The collection does not include works from the most visible living progenitor of literary nonfiction, the dapper Tom Wolfe, but it does include works from several familiar writers. The most recognizable are probably Michael Lewis, Malcolm Gladwell, Susan Orlean, and Mark Bowden. Others whom followers of literary nonfiction — or, at least, voracious readers of magazines — may recognize are: Jack Hitt, Lawrence Weschler, Bill Buford, Chuck Klosterman, David Foster Wallace, Lee Sandlin, Coco Henson Scales, Dan Savage, Michael Pollan, and James McManus. Though their subjects vary widely, all these writers, says Glass, have something in common, qualities he feels This American Life also shares. Glass styles himself as a radio journalist who tells stories by “filtering his interviews and impressions through a distinctive literary imagination, an eccentric intelligence, and a sympathetic heart.” He believes that those practicing literary nonfiction well are those who think about the bigger implications of the facts they gather. “When I’m researching a story and the real-life situation starts to turn into allegory, I feel incredibly lucky and do everything in my power to expand that part of the story,” Glass says in his introduction to the compendium. “Everything suddenly stands for something so much bigger.” That’s the prism through which Glass evaluated the writers in this book. They are all, he says, writers who share their feelings and thoughts within the text rather than mindlessly excising themselves from the story as some journalistic conventions would have them do.
By the way, Glass dislikes the term literary nonfiction. He thinks it is pretentious. He says he’s unsure what to call the true stories in his collection, but he is certain that they serve as a beacon in what he sees as a golden age of lousy journalism. He is certainly right about that. — Steve Weinberg
|
|
|
|
|
|
|