Faves: Let's Hear it For the Boy

Welcome to The Enthusiast, a newsletter for those who fall in love with everything and everyone. Every week(ish) I send love notes about the people, places and things I'm loving right now, from the latest pop culture to random esoteric ephemera–all personally vetted and highly recommended by yours truly.

My husband's birthday was yesterday, so here are some things he’s introduced me to over the last 15+ years we’ve been together that have become absolute faves or must-haves for me.

Curb Your Enthusiasm

I had never heard of Larry David when I first met my now-husband, and I had only ever seen a handful of Seinfeld episodes at that. Curb Your Enthusiasm had already been on HBO for several seasons by the time we met, and he had them all on DVD, the sign of a true fan in pre-streaming times. We watched all of them together and have seen every season since, because it is truly a ridiculous, laugh-til-you-cry show in its peak form. Nothing is sacred on Curb, including Hollywood, the entertainment industry and above all, creator & star Larry David himself.

The premise is deceptively simple: TV Larry is an unabashedly bad person, but not in a violent or evil way—he’s just a grumpy asshole who finds random stuff to complain about and is frequently foisted by his own petard (and then some). His misadventures grow exceedingly stupid as every tiny thing escalates into truly cosmic comeuppances for his behavior. Season 12 has seen him ordering from the breakfast menu during lunch hours, eavesdropping on private golf lessons and through thin therapist office walls, and scrambling to replace a racist lawn jockey at an Atlanta Airbnb. I’m still hoping for a re-enactment of David cussing out Alan Dershowitz at Martha’s Vineyard a few years ago, but that might actually have been funnier than the show could ever make it.

Curb Your Enthusiasm built an absurd parallel reality where TV Larry's frenemy TV Ted Danson is married to TV Larry’s ex-wife Cheryl and gleefully antagonizes TV Larry whenever possible. Some celebs play "themselves" on the show: the late Richard Lewis, Wanda Sykes, Michael J. Fox, the Seinfeld cast, and dozens more across cameos and seasonal arcs. Sienna Miller and Lori Laughlin are the most recent celebs to play skewed versions of themselves this season, and they’re  surprisingly great, which seems to be the case with everyone who comes into the Larry David universe. Curb also introduced me to the marvelous Susie Essman and JB Smoove, as well as another late comedy great, Bob Einstein as Marty Funkhouser (Vince Vaughn has since picked up the Funkhouser name and legacy as Marty’s name-dropping nephew Freddy). Most recently, Tracey Ullman played TV Larry’s latest psychotic love interest, the most obnoxious recovering alcoholic Boomer alive, councilwoman Irma Kostroski. 

Basically, Curb Your Enthusiasm is probably your favorite comedian’s long-running sitcom, and your favorite actor has probably appeared on it at least once. I don’t know if a complete n00b should dive right in with the current season, but even with all the callbacks and inside jokes, it’s still delivering all the absurdist discomfort and razor-sharp satire you can handle. 

Stopping for Sit-Down Meals While Traveling

When my family went on vacations during my youth, efficiency was the name of the game. My dad wanted to get to his well-deserved and probably much-needed vacation time as soon as possible, with maybe 1 or 2 stops in case of dire hunger pangs or extreme bladder duress. He was always pleased at the excellent time we made that got him to the beach with minimal lollygagging from the rest of us chickens. It wasn’t until I took a road trip with my husband (then boyfriend) to visit his grandparents that he popped the most important question in our relationship (no, not that one): “Where should we stop to eat?”

I couldn’t even process the question. “Whatever's on the way,” I replied, steeling myself. “Fast food, close to the interstate, I can do whatever.” He shook his head.
“No, I mean, you should find a restaurant where we can stop and have breakfast.” Again, I couldn’t grok it.
“You mean, like, stop and get out of the car?”
“Yes.”
“And sit down and eat, there?! In the restaurant?!?”
“Yes!”

I’d never done such a thing in my life, dear readers, and now I can’t ride in a car for more than three hours without a leisurely pit stop meal. We try to find independent spots instead of chains, which has led us to some amazing finds (a cafe in St. Louis that had the absolute best blue corn & buckwheat pancakes I’ve had in my life) as well as some duds (a tiny coffee shop outside Detroit that had decent quiche…and that was it), but usually it’s something new and different to try, a little appetizer for the rest of the trip to come, or one step closer to home at the on the return trip.

It’s just really nice to get out of the car, stretch our legs, have some good coffee and a satisfying hot plate of food instead of a sad smushed breakfast sandwich with plastic cheese that’s only 20% melted. It took me a while, several years even, to get out of that speed & efficiency mindset around vacations and road trips, and I’m here to tell you: try it! You'll like it!

Metric

We are exceptionally blessed to be a couple with pretty similar tastes in many things, but there are a few areas where we diverge. He eats up some early French Nouveau cinema (I fell asleep twice trying to watch The 400 Blows) while I’m more of a New French Extreme erotic feminist art film kinda gal. He thrives on vaguely depressing minor-key post punk while I need rowdy indie dance-punk or straight-up techno pop to get into my vibe. Somewhere in between those two extremes is Metric, a band I would have probably never heard had he not played their seminal (and still my favorite) 2009 album Fantasies for me.

Metric are an extremely talented Canadian indie group fronted by vocalist Emily Haines, whose voice is a pleasant blend of over-enunciated smartass and breathy self-aware sexy baby that wouldn’t work nearly as well if it were one or the other. They were on my radar in the Aughts before we started dating as a long-time BUST and NYLON subscriber, but they never came up organically for me in the era before algorithms and I didn't feel like finding them on Kazaa/BearShare/Limewire (tell me you’re a Millennial without saying you’re a Millennial). They're of the Broken Social Scene/Stars musical universe, and they came up regularly on shuffle in his car; Fantasies turned out to be a straight listen from the opener “Help I’m Alive” to the closer and one of my all-time favorite songs “Stadium Love.” 

Their subsequent albums have been hella solid and we saw them on tour for their 2015 album Pagans in Vegas and no surprise: they were great! It’s somewhat strange to think about a band that’s been putting out excellent albums for two decades with no flops, no break-ups, no creative slump, no scandals, no social media snafus, no major obstacles keeping them from being grown & sexy and consistently extremely good at what they do. They feel even more like an anomaly in our current solo-icon era where bands have kind of fallen by the wayside (Twenty One Pilots are the only true band-band on the Billboard Hot 100 at the moment, at #64). My husband has played a key role in exposing me to music I missed while bopping to Top 40 Pop and R&B as a kid—The Smiths (before Morissey really started sucking as a person), post-80’s Depeche Mode, a select few XTC tracks, Aimee Mann’s non-Magnolia oeuvre—but Metric continue to be a mainstay with every new album.

Robocop

Listen, much as I love a good action movie AND over-the-top schlocky satire, chances are slim to none that I ever would have watched Paul Verhoeven’s seminal 1987 hit Robocop even once, let alone at least once a year like we do now. And babes, that would have been a travesty because Robocop is a legitimately great movie. Yes, it’s ridiculously violent, but the social satire and incredible practical effects more than make up for it, as do the performances of what can only be described as a truly perfect cast.

Unlike the majority of police-focused movies of the 80’s and 90’s, Robocop is not blatant copaganda in service to the incarceration industrial complex; it’s more focused on the extreme corporate corruption of privatization and the dangers of unchecked technology for the sake of profitability and authoritarian control (imagine that!). It wrestles with concept of the soul, of being turned into a machine that “is only following orders” against your will, and the corrosion mass media can cause in communities weakened by trickle-down economics. And it’s really, really fucking funny.

Much of the comic relief comes from the bad guys, as is usually the case, but the various villains of Robocop are in rare form. First we have the smarmy corporate goons of Omni Consumer Products, which literally owns the Detroit police, led by smug executive shitheel Dick Jones (Ronny Cox) and his coked-out yuppie underling Bob Morton (peak Miguel Ferrer). These abject assholes have zero qualms about creating fascist technology to achieve their nefarious commercial development goals, and Robocop is just the latest development in that scheme.

Then we have Clarence Boddicker (Kurtwood Smith in the literal role of a lifetime) and his ragtag gang of psychotics, played by a true murderer’s row of character actors including pre-ER Paul McCrane and pre-Twin Peaks Ray Wise cutting alllllllll the way loose as they lay waste to Detroit. They’re blowing up gas stations, managing an entire warehouse of drug production, packing uzis like pocket knives, turning cops into Swiss cheese, and having a far too much fun doing so. 

Robocop himself (a stoic and pouty-lipped Peter Weller) is a cipher for the audience. Everyone calls Murphy a “good cop,” a stand-up guy, but we don’t see this goodness action before he gets mowed down by Boddicker’s boys. Murphy may be the hero, but for me, his partner—the tough, wise-cracking bubblegum-snapping Lewis (Nancy Allen)–is the heart of the movie. Their partnership feels revolutionary, especially for the 80’s, because they do have chemistry, but it's purely platonic and professional–no sexual or romantic overtones. They respect and appreciate each other, even after Murphy is absorbed into the Robocop apparatus. Lewis recognizes Murphy's mannerisms and helps him remember his beloved family and restore his humanity as his pesky subconscious mind wakes back up. Allen is great in fluffy short-haired, soft-butch drag that isn’t explicitly queer-coded (but comes close) and rarely in civvies that might detract from her dedication.

In fact, the only characters who weaponize Lewis's gender are the bad guys—Robocop features Verhoeven’s first co-ed locker room scene, which immediately establishes the officers' camaraderie and grounds us in a future where gender constructs don't stand in the way of getting the job done. Compare the locker room to OCP’s sterile boardroom where a few women are present but mostly silent observers, and it creates a stark dichotomy of how these places operate. Most of the women characters outside the OCP/Police framework are either victims (“Madam, you have suffered an emotional shock.”) or horny sluts (“Bitches, leave!”), so it’s not like Robocop is a groundbreaking work of gender deconstruction, but it’s just one layer of many that kept the film from being a cookie-cutter summer action flick and has cemented its legacy as an all-time action sci-fi classic for the past four decades.

One Last Thing: A Few Good Kens

• Speaking of sweet, sensitive hotties helping dismantle toxic masculinity, if you haven’t watched Ryan Gosling’s instantly iconic performance of “I’m Just Ken” at the 2024 Oscars, you should do so immediately:

• Jude Doyle has a great new piece up in honor of Marshawn Lynch in Bottoms as a true queer/feminist ally, and it sums everything I loved about Lynch up pretty much perfectly.
• If you're already in love with the most sincere handsome man alive Josh Segarra on Abbott Elementary, go back and watch him in his fullest glory as Lance on The Other Two. In fact, just go watch The Other Two on general principle, it's one of the best comedies of the last decade!
• Our favorite A24 auteur Ari Aster just started shooting his next film Eddington (allegedly a Western?!), which features unrepentant internet zaddy Pedro Pascal and newly-minted Oscar-winner Emma Stone. I'm still not fully recovered from Beau is Afraid, but I can't wait to see what kind of fresh new hell Aster is going to explore next.
• Absurdist comedian and frequent drag-actor Cole Escola (formerly of At Home with Amy Sedaris and the short-lived Difficult People) is playing Mary Todd Lincoln 0ff-Broadway and it sounds like everything I've ever wanted. Take it on tour, Cole!

That's it for this edition of The Enthusiast! Thank you for reading and if you're not already subscribed, you should sign up (it's free!). Be sure confirm via email link to receive each post directly in your Inbox. If you're already a fan, forward this newsletter along to a friend and spread the love!

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Am I not hot when I'm in my feelings?
LKH