Curb Your Enthusiasm 

I am not sure whether it’s the result of being in business with more important urgencies or a shortening attention span due to watching social media, but I have been finding it difficult to read one book and watch one movie per week, which is something I’ve been doing quite easily since I began writing Early to Rise 24 years ago.

My list of movies and series to watch keeps getting longer, but the opportunities to find 60 to 120 minutes to scratch one of them off my list are becoming rarer.

Knowing that my return trip from Tokyo to Delray Beach was going to be 28 hours in total, I figured I could put a serious dent in my reading/ watching deficit. But that didn’t happen. Instead, I spent most of my time reading essays and articles online, making notes about them, and writing briefs for this blog. Feeling like I had failed myself (and you), I forced myself to watch two things that I hoped would be worth recommending.

One was a 45-minute artsy film made by a Japanese film student, which I thought was pretty good if you don’t mind movies where very little happens. But I wasn’t sure if I could recommend it to my readers, knowing that the great majority of them would not be able to find it (it was on the Japanese Airlines channel) and that those who did would probably be bored by it.

Then, I watched the first episode of the 12th season of Curb Your Enthusiasm – and that I can recommend strongly and without hesitation. It was very funny. At several points, laughing-out-loud-on-a-plane funny.

You don’t need me to tell you anything about it, plot-wise. If you know Curb Your Enthusiasm, you know that, like Seinfeld, which was also produced and co-written by Larry David, it is about nothing much at all. Every episode is a day in the life of Larry David, a miserable, self-centered, obsessive-compulsive, endlessly kvetching Jewish guy in Hollywood. In this episode, he is paid to attend a party and mingle with the crowd, which, of course, he cannot do successfully, however hard he tries.

I found the episode refreshingly funny in a very obnoxious American way – a bracing welcome home to the USA.