Live binding eliminates the need for these explicit model references a great deal, but I have found that it not always sufficient, which makes for rather verbose event handlers ( assign $(el).data('model') to var).
Instead I have split my controllers in an thin 'index' and a fat 'show' controller.
in my index EJS, I instantiatiate the controllers like this:
<% list(models, function(model) { %>
<li <%= (el)-> new ShowController(el, model) %> ></li>
<% } %>
This cleans up the code quite a bit, since the controllers always have a reference to their model as an instance var.