Yesterday I was explaining the premise of Curb Your Enthusiasm to somebody, and today I watched a bunch of clips on YouTube. The thing that Larry does best is end his seasons with a serious kicker–it’s the punchline for the uber-joke that was being told for the last couple of months. Like, what about that third season?? Or the sixth season (which I still haven’t seen, but have heard enough about to feel like I had)??!! And then, through watching clips, I came across this LD-Marty Scorsese stuff. And it’s funny. It’s a great sendup of gangster movies. But it doesn’t look at all like Scorsese shot it. Then I thought about how HBO shows tend to look cheap. They’re written wonderfully, and with terrific acting and directing, but most of them look like they’re shot with a camcorder in a basement. A couple exceptions are Flight of the Conchords and especially Sopranos. (And I know there are others, but I’m not about to do the kind of research that it takes to write something well! So deal with it!!)

Maybe this low-budget style makes it easier to pay great actors, and allow great writers to take as long as they want to come up with something. And maybe it’s essential to the improvisational, or live performance, quality of Curb and Tenacious D. Anyhow, once streaming HBO exists officially, all I’ll do anymore is watch it.

OK! I’m crazy for The Wire! That’s Avon Barksdale (Wood Harris) and Stringer Bell (Idris Elba), the drug lords. I just finished season three on DVD, and the Avon-Stringer thing was soooo Shakespearian! Intrigue! Double dealing! Family and blood brothers and war and power! Whoah.

I don’t know if you noticed, but I’m trying a fake silkscreen thing. Do you like it? Is it too subtle? I’ve often said that I think this kind of stuff is disingenuous, or just a trick, but seeing is believing, you know? I think it kinda works. I don’t know. Most of my jobs are tiny and printed on newsprint, so I don’t think they need any extra muddying. But maybe the times I get internet jobs, jobs on actual good paper and/or in actual sizes bigger than two inches, they could use a little futzing… In other words, this may well appear again some other time.

I’ve kept meaning to do a Stephen Colbert-style celebratory post with confetti and balloons on this subject for quite a while now, and my previous entry reminded me to do it. Please, consider the following (from the VH1 website):

Now, please dig this incredibly prescient comic from late in aught-six:

This was inevitable, of course. After the bell bottoms of the late Nineties gave way to the Eighties revival which was replaced by early Nineties grunge and hip hop cool, where else could we look for semi-ironic cultural inspiration but our own goddamn decade?? And so we have. Bless you, VH1. I can’t wait until cargo pants are back in style this fall.

Here she is, in all her Liz Lemmon glory, scarfin down some Sabor de Soledad off-brand Mexican cheese puffs.