Nothing captures this sense of duality, of the West Side of Los Angeles as paradise and ruin, better than the work of another émigré writer, Larry David.
The Manhattan-set NBC series “Seinfeld,” which made David wealthy enough to live in these areas, famously captured: other The west side is a land of impossibly spacious one-bedrooms, tacky diners, and strivers driven by forms of merry madness. Its successor, “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” currently nearing the end of its 12th and final season, stars David (as “Larry David”), who navigates the Westside of L.A. to a nervous New York It is depicted as the destination of aspirations, a heaven of green and blond hair. A hell of a Rivian weirdo who seems to have lost wood, square footage, and a vital connection to the world.
I know this too. Because I, too, have an exile in David's neck of the (well maintained) woods. I walk or drive by “curb” locations every day. I've been to the “Ugly Section” restaurant, and I've also attended dinner with Larry's party a block away from his fake Tuscan castle. The show's sharpest take on the Westside vibe may be more spiritual than physical, but in a city that's often clichéd, “Curve” is also admirably accurate in its geography. are doing. By now, David's series has spent almost a quarter-century building one of his greatest L.A. stories, and he blends brilliantly into this environment, a realm of tremendous ease and constant irritation. I'm here.
IIn Los Angeles, neighborhoods north of Interstate 10 (effectively the historic Red Line) can be defined by their relationship to Hollywood. The farther west you go, the more money residents tend to make from the relationship. Aspiring young people flock to the hip Northeast, writers frolic on Silver Lake and Los Angeles, and actors climb the Hollywood hills. But Westside belongs to the producer, the owner of the Tesla Model S, and the whole deal.
Larry's realm is even more specific. The Curve His Belt is a crescent-shaped belt that stretches from northern Brentwood and Santa Monica through canyons along the Pacific Coast of the Palisades. In the “curve” there are palm trees, but its main vegetation is more diverse and rich. A bent coral tree with bright red flowers, a fig tree divided into trimmed florets, a bougainvillea, and a bird of paradise. The houses are equally ornate and eclectic, if not necessarily pleasing to the eye.
At the beginning of the series, Larry and his wife Cheryl (Cheryl Hines) live in what looks like a giant hobbit lair. Soon they move into a huge palace. His manager Jeff (Jeff Garlin) has traded the metastatic Cape Cod for an ultra-modern metal box. “LA is a great architectural city,” says Antoine Wilson, a novelist and longtime Westsider. “Yet the homes these characters live in reflect a strange kind of tastelessness and conformity.”
This sense of ersatz style — eclecticism flattened into pastiche — pervades many of the real-life locations featured on the show. The faux-Tudor façade of his Brentwood, Italian luxury spot Amici collides with the Connecticut barn décor of his Country Mart (shopping mall) in New York's Brentwood. A style pizzeria whose owner is the son of a “Godfather” actor, a cozy Palisades Village (another shopping mall) that only resembles an Apple Store hamlet, and a vaguely neo-Victorian mansion called Victoria. There is a restaurant called N. All very different, yet exactly the same.
Larry is not a cog in this machine. Instead, throw sand into the gears. In “Curves”, he is shown off by causing a nuisance at a dinner party (“Do you respect trees?”) and berating a “pig hoodie” along the aisles of a Curve Belt retail store. expresses one's individuality. In doing so, he punctures the surface of Westside comfort. He reminded Wilson of The Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde's classic study of pranksters as literary engines.
But beyond his own inconvenience, what is Larry really leaning against? First, it's an alien culture, where the candor and frenzy of New York have been replaced with arcane rules and empty politeness.
No setting exemplifies this contrast more than the golf club, the setting for several episodes this season. (It is closely modeled after David's own Riviera His Country Club.) In episode 3, Larry teaches his golf lesson for Oscar-winning deaf actor Troy his golf club. eavesdrop on. Armed with this lesson, Larry immediately hit the ball toward the fairway, hitting Troy directly on the backside. Larry waved quietly, hoping Troy wouldn't hear the “Fore!”
The usual commotion ensues, followed by an argument. To make up for it, Larry offers Troy a free meal through her Postmates. A pro golfer who had just had his lessons stolen scoffed, “'I'm so sorry' – and you're offering him Postmates?!” Larry broke some (literally) unspoken rules. His way out of this etiquette conundrum was to expose his testicles to fend off the club's irate owner.
Sure, the setting is rare, but “Curve” is a hit because his cathartic rebellion is infectious and universal. It's safe to say that every human being on the planet, Westsider or not, has wanted to rally at some point. There were times when he wanted to take offense at the slightest slight that reflected the existential crisis of living among other humans.
This happens a lot in Santa Monica. Not long after bingeing on Season 7, I narrowly avoided being pinched by a Maserati SUV in the Whole Foods parking lot. All I needed in the store was corn on the cob. But the produce manager was engrossed in a long conversation with a shopper who was sharing his expert opinion on apples. This amateur fruit vendor was blocking my access to the produce store, so I had to drive the cart half way around the vegetables to get in the way, but there was no corn on the cob. I learned that. As I tried to cross to buy chicken breasts, I was once again blocked by the apple expert's cart and left alone in the aisle while I shared my wisdom with the butcher. I had no choice but to push it aside.
was I What about Larry? This is a good question. Because in the curve belt, everyone is someone else's rally. “It's like a red zone outside the Brentwood Country Mart ice cream shop,” Wilson said. “People will park in red zones. 'Wait a minute.' I'm not like that. that Some kind of person; this is the slight exception I'm looking for. ”
This ouroboros of privilege is one of the things Santa Monica-based memoirist and screenwriter Dan Marshall likes most about “The Curve.” Marshall notes that at first you think, “Larry is the victim of everyone else's insanity, right?” But then he starts to realize, “Oh, everyone else is a victim of Larry's madness.” And it's like, 'Oh, everyone's just a victim of everyone's madness.' ”
○In “Curb,” madness manifests itself in outlandish ways. Larry wears women's panties to hide his friend's affair, hires a sex worker to take advantage of the carpool lane, and opens Latte Larry's just to piss off the neighborhood coffee business. In a real curve belt, the madness is just below the surface, but not buried very deep.
I met Marshall on Montana Avenue. It's a retail district with some great stores, as well as a ketamine clinic, a watch store, and a store that only sells balloons. Suffice it to say, Suzy's latest work on the show, Caught as a Kaftan, is spot on. “Rich people are bored,” Marshall explains. Would you like to start a balloon shop? It will give you something. At one point before you moved here, he had three balloon stores in Montana. There are too many balloon shops. ”
In this world, a malicious store seems like a reasonable proposition. I don't care about malice – at least that's the spirit.
And it's a spirit we can all understand. The frictionless wealth that allows Larry to indulge in such petty whims may make him feel hard to empathize with, but the urges unleashed by his privilege and his boredom make him strange. A kind of ordinary person. Certainly a fish out of water. He is also a cynical individualist who rebels against society's constraints, for better or for worse. In other words, Americans around 2024.
To close the loop on art imitating life, Curve kicked off its final season this winter with two Latte Rally pop-up shops on the Westside. On his third and final day of promotion, his TikTok user named RyanTheLeader shared a “Curb”-worthy story. He waited for Latte Rally's in a line with a sign that read “No Chatting or Cutting,” a nod to the etiquette violations that derail rallies. Unsurprisingly, a woman cut in line to speak to the group in front of Ryan.He let it go, but after 2 minutes she A friend did the same.
“I couldn't take it anymore,” he recalled on TikTok. “I needed to be Larry David,” he told the crowd. Are we going to support this? ” No one objected, but eventually the barista forced her in by hand. “The moral of the story is that you lose,” he says. He certainly told great stories, but he now hates many strangers he will never meet again. Another day in heaven and hell.